DANTE & THE UNORTHODOX
The Aesthetics of Transgression
James Miller, editor
DANTE & THE UNORTHODOX The Aesthetics of Transgression
DANTE & THE UNORTHODOX The Aesthetics of Transgression
Edited by James Miller
This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Dante & the unorthodox : the aesthetics of transgression / edited by James Miller. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-88920-457-8 1. Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321. Divina commedia. 2. Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321—Religion. 3. Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Christianity in literature. I. Miller, James L., 1951– II. Title: Dante and the unorthodox. PQ4416.D35 2005
851’.1
C2005-900089-9
© 2005 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5 www.wlupress.wlu.ca Cover by P.J. Woodland. Cover image: Michelangelo. Last Judgment (1535–1541). Detail: Minos with demons. Sistine Chapel, Vatican. By permission of the Direzione dei Musei, Stato della Città del Vaticano. Interior design by Catharine Bonas-Taylor. Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.
Printed in Canada No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
Dedication
In memoriam Franco Romano Calaresu 1931–1996
I n October 1990 a small group of colleagues from the University of Western Ontario set about reading the Commedia together, gathering once a fortnight during term at the house of professors John Thorp and Bonnie MacLachlan, and proceeding at the stately pace of one canto per meeting. The members of this group, which came to be called the Circolo Dantesco di London, represented many disciplines in the University: English, German, philosophy, classics, music, chemistry, physiology. Curiously no Italianist took part. The group was united not by professional interest in Italian literature but by curiosity about, and love of, Dante’s great work. The endeavour lasted seven years, and for most of this time, surprisingly, the circle was unbroken. For its hundredth and final meeting, the group opened outward to include participants in the Dante & the Unorthodox conference held at Western in April 1997. Many of the essays in this present volume were germinated at that conference. Although the conference and the final meeting were an occasion of joy for the Circolo, our mood was also tinged with sadness because one of the original members did not make it to the end. Franco Calaresu, professor of physiology, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, distinguished researcher and teacher, a fount of wit and fun, the constitutionally irreverent soul of the Circolo, died suddenly in the summer of 1996. We missed his promised paper on Dante’s unorthodox physiology—what fun that would have been!—but, much more than that, we missed him. We miss him still. It is fitting that this volume should be dedicated to his memory. — Ausonio Marras, University of Western Ontario, London, Canada
The Circolo Dantesco di London Damjana Bratuz, Franco Calaresu, Angela Esterhammer, Richard Green, Beata Gundert, Bonnie MacLachlan, Ausonio Marras, James Miller, John Stracuzza, John Thorp, Pat Warnhof
La bellezza ch’io vidi si trasmoda non pur di là da noi, ma certo io credo che solo il suo fattor tutta la goda. —Paradiso 30.19–21
Contents
Acknowledgments
......................................
Introduction: Retheologizing Dante James Miller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
........................
PART I—Trapassar Dante’s Limbo: At the Margins of Orthodoxy Amilcare A. Iannucci . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Saving Virgil Ed King . . . . . Sacrificing Virgil Mira Gerhard .
ix 1
................
63
........................................
83
........................................
107
PART II—Trasmutar Dido Alighieri: Gender Inversion in the Francesca Episode Carolynn Lund-Mead . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fuming Accidie: The Sin of Dante’s Gurglers John Thorp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
.....
121
.................
151
Heresy and Politics in Inferno 10 Guido Pugliese . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Original Skin: Nudity and Obscenity in Dante’s Inferno Mark Feltham and James Miller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anti-Dante: Bataille in the Ninth Bolgia James Miller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
vii
........
170
........
182
........
207
viii
CONTENTS
PART III—Trasumanar Rainbow Bodies: The Erotics of Diversity in Dante’s Catholicism James Miller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dante/Fante: Embryology in Purgatory and Paradise Jennifer Fraser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Cyprian Redeemed: Venereal Influence in Paradiso Bonnie MacLachlan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PART IV—Traslatar “Dantescan Light”: Ezra Pound and Eccentric Dante Scholars Leon Surette . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ezra Pound in the Earthly Paradise Matthew Reynolds . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
249 290 310
...
327
........................
346
PART V—Tralucere Dante and Cinema: Film across a Chasm Bart Testa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
367 “Moving Visual Thinking”: Dante, Brakhage, and the Works of Energeia R. Bruce Elder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 394 Driftworks, Pulseworks, Lightworks: The Letter to Dr. Henderson R. Bruce Elder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 450 ................
PART VI—Trasmodar Calling Dante: An Exhibition of Sculptures, Drawings, and Installations Andrew Pawlowski and Zbigniew Pospieszynski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 489 Curatorial Essay: Prophet of the Paragone James Miller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 490 Calling Dante: Notes on the Artists James Miller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 505 Calling Dante: A Portfolio of Words and Images Andrew Pawlowski and Zbigniew Pospieszynski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 509 Calling Dante: From Dante on the Steps of Immortality Andrew Pawlowski . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 517 Notes on Contributors Index
...................................
531
.................................................
535
Acknowledgments
So many guides and spirits have kept me on track in the long journey towards publication of this volume that I must try to compress an oltraggio of thanks within the duri margini of a few paragraphs. Fortunately my gratitude can be succinctly expressed—and spiritually expanded—in accordance with Dante’s fourfold method of allegoresis. Helping me at every turn on the literal level of the manuscript has been the exuberantly progressive team at Wilfrid Laurier University Press: director Brian Henderson; acquisitions editor Jacqueline Larson; copy editor Beth McAuley; website and marketing coordinator Leslie Macredie; publicist Clare Hitchens; designer and typesetter Catharine Bonas-Taylor; and the ne plus ultra of managing editors, Carroll Klein. Special thanks to Steven Botterill for his eleventh-hour corrections of the page proofs and for his Bernard-like encouragement of the project because of (not in spite of) its transgressive directions. At the typological level, where multiple life-stories converge on the “road of our life,” I owe more than I can say to my many students in the Dante Cycle. Remarkable for daring to read the Poem through their lives and their lives through the Poem are Jennifer Venn, John Teal, Rick McNeil, Darren David, Sandra Bialystok, Brooke Murray, Michelle Witen, Clarissa Bégin, Kevin Hehir, Jody McNabb, Alyson Ford, Claire Heslop, Joanna Goldenberg, Scott Befford, Mira Gerhard, David Gemeinhardt, Adam Segal, Josh Hundert, Davin Tikkala, Paula Karger, Amber Riaz, Elizabeth Bohnert, Victoria Kushelnyk, Andrea Rector, Mikel Delmas, Bryn Collier, Daniela Simunac, Meighan Wark, Christel Dahlberg, Vesna Pavlovic, Sean Mulligan, Kristin Moriah, Ian Dahlman, Jennifer Vatcher, Vanessa Simmons, Joanna Schreyer, Ed “Bullocks” King, Tracey Paris, and my own personal St. Lucy, Karen Jones. A festive hug (cf. Purg. 26.33) to you all.
ix
x
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
At the tropological level my wayward soul has been uplifted by the luminous conviviality of the Circolo Dantesco di London and fortified by the morale-boosting martinis of my UWO friends and colleagues Elias Polizoes, Ana Batista, Sandra Parmegiani, C7alin Mih7ailescu, Kelly Olson, David Lamari, and Ninian and Cécile Mellamphy. From Dean Kathleen Okruhlik came the impeto for the Dante conference in 1997, and from Acting Dean Angela Esterhammer flowed generous support in the form of a grant from the J.A. Smallman fund in 2004. Without this grant, the volume would have had few visuals. For the cover image I am indebted to Francesco Buranelli at the Vatican Museums, and to the Papal Nuncio for Canada, Msgr. Luigi Ventura, who kindly put me in touch with him. For the Raphael images, I depended on the benevolent efficiency of John Benicewicz and Tim McCarthy at Art Resource/Scala Archives. Wayne Brereton, Charlie Egleston, and Ken Milner took the mystery out of “300dpi” for me. To my constellation of friends in Toronto and New York—Amilcare Iannucci, Danuta and Andrew Pawlowski, Richard and Sonia Carty, Zak and Ewa Pospieszynski, Bruce and Kathy Elder, David Gates, Brian Van Dommele, Claude Edwin Thériault, and Kevin McBean—a toast: cheers for keeping my faith in the volume alive through many a rough patch. And for my three fratelli, Domenico Racco, Julian Roberts, and John Curtin, a pledge: I shall meet you at Rocca Maggiore before the end of the road. At the anagogic level I have been guided by two souls in the Hereafter and three souls in the Here and Now. Jeremy Maule and Stan Brakhage, the bread of the angels for you. To my daughter Alice, who at the age of five read the Inferno with me and drew a picture for every canto, I am grateful for your divinely comic charity towards paternal eccentricities. To my partner John Stracuzza, who adds vigorous faith to my faltering hope, thanks for rejoicing with me when I lost the straight way. I owe you a trip to Italy—that’s a promise. And finally, for embodying Dante’s ideal of the compagnevole animale, I am thankful to my golden retriever Manfred, who, like his namesake on the Holy Mountain, is “biondo…e bello e di gentile aspetto.”
Introduction Retheologizing Dante James Miller Da quinci innanzi il mio veder fu maggio che ’l parlar mostra, ch’a tal vista cede, e cede la memoria a tanto oltraggio. —Paradiso 33.55–71
T
he Dantean keyword for this volume is oltraggio. Mere “abundance” doesn’t capture its meaning. Nor does “superabundance,” which stumbles towards it abstractly in a thudding divinity-school way. Since Dante uses it with the ecstatically redundant qualifier tanto, it must signify a limitless plenitude “so great”—as if there were degrees of greatness in such things—that it trumpets the defeat of all his theological attempts at definition and suspends him in a rhetorical hush on the far side of hyperbole. With oltraggio he struggles nevertheless to express the unboundedness of his final vision. Through this word he impels us into a doctrinally explosive moment, which he claims he experienced quite unexpectedly while directing his eyes at the Divine Light: “Thenceforward my vision was greater / than speech can show, which fails at such a sight, / and memory yields to so great…” So great a what? What oltraggio could be so great that even its greatness cannot be remembered? St. Anselm’s memorable definition of God as “that than which nothing greater can be thought” is not much help at this point, if it ever was, for its purpose was to aid ordinary human minds struggling at a great distance from God to understand the uniqueness of divine existence.2 That’s not Dante’s problem in the Empyrean. His is no ordinary human mind, as he repeatedly reminds us. He has already shown us all the great stars
1
2
INTRODUCTION
of Catholic theology in the Heaven of the Sun—Anselm among them— revolving ego-centripetally around his own divinely inspired genius, his “mind intent on one” [mia mente unita] (Par. 10.63). The conceptual struggle to define divine existence is so far behind him in the Empyrean that he has no need of the Ontological Argument to “prove” the existence of God. Any theologian may have difficulty conceiving God as an idea, of course, but an eyewitness on the threshold of revelation must face the extra challenge of recalling and reporting God as an experience. With oltraggio Dante expresses the apparent failure of his memory and his speech to recapture the “what” of that liminal moment. His fallback to speechless wonder is playfully ironic: what the ineffability topos is meant to signal here is, as usual, the very opposite of what it literally means. How carefully and covertly he has trained us through nearly a hundred cantos of unsurpassable rhetorical virtuosity to read the temporary “failure” of his words as a cue for the imminent triumph of speech over silence—the ecstatic silence that paradoxically gives rise to the inexhaustible “effability” of the Sacred Poem! The ineffability topos impels us to believe that if there is a way back to the sacred surplus of his final experience, it must lie through his miraculous expression of a fantasy of self-authorizing orthodoxy projected through the unorthodox revelations of the Commedia. In contrast to Dante, St. Paul is quite reluctant to entertain such a fantasy. “I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven,” he humbly recalls about himself (2 Cor. 12:2).3 Though this rapture is certainly recollected in the oltraggio moment, Dante has broken the Apostle’s mystical record by a long shot. He has risen seven heavens higher, no less. He has made it all the way to the top. As soon as he enters the Empyrean from the Primum Mobile, he experiences a supernatural increase in his range of vision along with a staggering intensification of his visual acuity, and we are meant to interpret these perceptual signs as proof that his mystical experience is already far greater than its Pauline precedent. He assures us matter-of-factly that his eyes soon got used to the hyperbolic depth of field in the Tenth Heaven (Par. 30.118–19). To see the Beyond as the Blessed see it has long been a perfectly predictable goal of Christian mystics approaching God along the via negativa, and once Dante discovered he had achieved it with a little help from Beatrice, his soul was duly dazzled by the beauty of the Rose. But this preliminary breakthrough into eternity did not cause a “heavenquake.”4 It did not rock the foundations of Catholic orthodoxy. It was not an oltraggio.
INTRODUCTION
3
To see the Beyond as God sees it—beyond the Beyond—would be to exceed what any mystical theologian had ever seen or known on the far side of unknowing. Now that would be something to sing about, something truly over the top, especially for a poet definitely not in holy orders who strategically addressed the laity as well as the clergy. What more audacious step could be taken towards the very origin of the Sacred than a leap over the ultimate event-horizon separating humanity from divinity, a sacrilegious move more shocking than David’s dance before the Ark, a trajectory of flaming impropriety guaranteed to explode the statute of limitations imposed on fallen humanity by the dogmatic guardians of the Faith? It is just such an experience that Dante claims for himself as he nakedly transgresses all religious bounds, passing strangely beyond belief and disbelief, in the final moment of his regressus ad Deum. The usual rendering of oltraggio in English as “excess” conveys something of the poet’s anagogic leap into the otherness of the Trinity, though the translation inevitably conveys a hint of opprobrium, which is utterly absent from the original. Dante has another word for “excess” in a morally shameful sense—dismisura—which he associates with the pride of the Florentines whose new wealth has encouraged immoderation or “lack of measure” in the old Aristotelian ethical sense (Inf. 16.74). From a moral standpoint, even if you are not grounded in Aristotelian ethics, excess sounds like a rather embarrassing state to be in when you’ve just lost your mind. Yet oltraggio is clearly not to be confused with dismisura. Since the pilgrim at the end of his journey is gazing towards the immemorial origin of all things, including his own words, a clue to the significance of oltraggio might be found by looking back at its etymology. The original sense of its Latin ancestor is vaguely directional: the preposition ultra (beyond) plus the neuter adjectival suffix -aticum (pertaining to) formed a noun meaning something like “a state or condition discovered when we step out of bounds or cross over traditional limits.” The English cognate for oltraggio is “outrage,” a medieval borrowing from French where it still denotes the socially suspicious condition of being extravagant, outlandish, exaggerated, outré. To English ears “outrage” inevitably sounds like a compound of “out” and “rage,” even though the “r” in it actually belongs with the “out” derived from ultra, while the suffix “-age” is the French reduction of the Latin -aticum (cf. the Italian reduction -aggio).5 Thanks to this creative misconstruing, which affected the semantic development of the word in English, its dominant meaning today is “excessive anger” or “anything that provokes intensely hostile feelings.” Perhaps Dante comes close to the English notion of “outrage”
4
INTRODUCTION
in the phrase fare oltraggio (to do wrong) which he uses with pointed reference to himself on the Cornice of the Envious. Dante-pilgrim seems to step over the bounds of common courtesy by proceeding on his way “seeing others,” namely the blind penitents, while “not being seen” himself [andando, fare oltraggio, / veggendo altrui, non essendo veduto] (Purg. 13.73–4)—as if he were taking advantage of their blindness to spy on them. Given the strongly immoral connotations of “outrage” in English, translators have wisely avoided it as a rendering of Dante’s delicate use of oltraggio as a courtesy term. Even “wrong” might be a bit too strong in this context. What Dante-poet fears he’ll be perceived as having committed here amounts to little more than a faux pas. Social propriety, however, is far from his thoughts at the oltraggio moment in the final canto. With so much failing him (his memory, his speech, his very capacity to know) at the culmination of his ascent, we may easily be tempted to perceive his out-of-bounds experience in the modern English sense of “maddeningly preposterous” or “critically infuriating” or even “blatantly heretical.” It would be so especially to a devout Catholic reader trying to understand the unorthodox genesis of the Commedia. Though the poet insists that the experience of oltraggio is intensely passionate, comparable to the imprinting of strong emotions on the mind during a fugitive dream— Qual è colüi che sognando vede, che dopo ’l sogno la passione impressa rimane, e l’altro a la mente non riede… [As is he who dreaming sees, and after the dream the passion remains imprinted and the rest returns not to the mind…] (Par. 33.58–60)
—we may be sure that no wave of unconscious rage carries him out of his depths here, or out of his poem. Quite the reverse: he is perfectly conscious of being joyful in excess of any mortal measure of joy. He is even beyond the classically appreciable ecstasies of furor poeticus. What we are called upon to imagine in the unclassical dimensions of this dreamlike state is not a mystical altitude or latitude, measures which might help us to determine where we’re heading, but a disorienting new “beyonditude,” in which ancient philosophical dualisms (like Pythagoras’s opposition of Limit and Unlimited) and traditional theological distinctions (like Anselm’s necessary versus contingent existence) are left far behind. After nearly seven centuries of commentary in which the teachings of the Church have been read into the poem at every turn, why do we still feel the need for “retheologizing” Dante at the oltraggio moment? Is it
INTRODUCTION
5
because we feel the frustrating failure of theological discourse itself to chart the final boundaries of the poem but still refuse to believe that the poem itself “retheologizes” the Beyond? Dante’s oltraggio pushes us into an unchartable domain of ever-expanding theological possibilities where knowledge runs out, and memory trails off, and language (at least temporarily) breaks down, but immediate experience of the newness of life goes on and on. Since he is claiming for himself an experience not merely comparable to but miraculously identical with the Creator’s amorous delight in the beauty of Creation, we cannot turn to any Catholic authority in the Heaven of the Wise for clear terms or clever arguments that can furnish us with conclusive understandings of his vision. Rather, he demands a startling reinvention of true Belief, of orthodoxy at its source, before the Church down below can even begin to assess his unorthodox revelation about the genesis of the poem up above. What we yearn for at the speculatively expansive moment of oltraggio is not a new series of theological glosses, then, but the audacious transformation of theology into an aesthetics of transgression. CREDENZA
In keeping with the spirit of oltraggio, the project of this volume is to discover just how far Dante was willing to push his faith beyond the doctrinal limits of the Catholic Church, and why his theological impulse to expand his belief is aesthetically important for the Commedia. One of his key words for faith, credenza, is especially pertinent to this project because it implies a restless impulse to judge the social value of beliefs and to test the strength of a culture’s confidence in prevailing belief systems by comparison with rejected religions and philosophies. It is the term favoured by St. Peter himself, who uses it in the Heaven of the Fixed Stars during his examination of Dante’s faith [a la credenza tua s’offerse: “it was offered to your belief”] (Par. 24.123). Even Virgil, despite his lack of “the true faith” [la vera credenza] (Purg. 22.77), uses the word at a crucial testing moment. Noticing Dante’s reluctance to believe that the flames of Mount Purgatory will do him no harm, the Roman poet suggests that the pilgrim hold the hem of his garment in the fire and “find out for [him]self” [fatti far credenza] (Purg. 27.29–30). In Dante’s universe you don’t simply “have” faith. You make it. All the motions in the universe impel you to test it out creatively and to create it in the testing—far credenza—which in turn validates your testimony of its universality, its true “catholicism.” In modern Italian, as in modern English, “credenza” has come to mean a side table where various foods are placed so that they may be
6
INTRODUCTION
sampled before being served. This is not Dante’s meaning, of course, but it suggests an allegorical image for the Commedia by recalling the banqueting table of the Convivio (1.1.10–13) where he spread out all his philosophical knowledge for the reader to sample.6 In the Sacred Poem his beliefs expand beyond the limited classical fare on his earlier philosophical menu. His banquet is now spread out upon “the table of love” [la mensa d’amor] (Purg. 13.27), a credenza for the sacramental “bread of angels” [pan de li angeli] (Par. 2.11). The “outraging” pressures of Dante’s expansive new faith bear upon all traditional systems of belief, including the Roman Catholicism of his youth and the Roman philosophy of his political heyday and early exile. Sustained by an anagogic fantasy of his own orthodoxy, he is determined to make belief through makebelieve. It is a potentially heretical strategy, and his transgressive reliance on the imagination as well as the intellect to far credenza in the reader will become an issue of major concern among the earliest commentators on the poem. Dante studies takes its start, not surprisingly, from a defence of his orthodoxy. Reflecting on the outrageousness of his mission to recreate his church and his world in the image of his poem, I have labelled each of the six parts of Dante & the Unorthodox with an Italian infinitive drawn from the rich vocabulary of transgression and transcendence in the Commedia. Each infinitive is a compound of the prefix tra- or its variant tras-, from the Latin preposition trans signifying “over” or “across,” plus a root verb denoting a crossover movement or a crucial change of state. Part 1 (Trapassar) “steps over” the threshold separating the living from the dead by following Dante into the Inferno to reflect on his initial encounters with the Unorthodox. Part 2 (Trasmutar) examines how the Damned “change over” from one shape to another to reveal the moral and psychosexual effects of their unorthodoxy. Part 3 (Trasumanar) follows Dante’s struggle “to pass beyond the human” by considering Purgatory and Paradise as controversial zones where the prevailing orthodoxy of the Roman Church is both sustained and challenged by the souls in God’s favour. Though theological source-studies of trasumanar have been done by Singleton, Freccero, and, most recently, Botterill,7 the transgressive implications of this most famous of Dante’s tra- verbs have yet to be considered. Since the poet audaciously invented trasumanar to express the newness of his own unique experience in entering into all ten spheres of Paradise, it might well mean more than the traditional anagogic gloss suggests (i.e., “divinization of fallen human nature during beatification”).
INTRODUCTION
7
Why construe it only as a synonym for various Latin theological terms relating to mystical experiences recorded in the Bible? Its significance must exceed the meaning of St. Paul’s being “caught up,” for instance, since the Apostle only experienced the mysteries of the third heaven. Reflecting on Dante’s Ovidian as well as Bernardian fascination with the visionary presence of “our image” [la nostra effige] (Par. 33.131) in the second circle of the Trinity, I suggest in part 3 that trasumanar might also mean the “carrying over of the human into the divine”—a distinctively cosmopoetic as well as incarnational transgression of the pagan ontological divide between humanity and divinity. Part 4 (Traslatar) “translates” Dante both literally and figuratively by considering how the resonance of the Sacred Poem “carries across” the language barrier between Italian and English and across the centuries between the medieval and modern periods. Just as the spirits in the Heavenly Eagle look back to David, “the singer of the Holy Ghost, who bore the ark about from town to town” [il cantor de lo Spirito Santo, / che l’arca traslatò di villa in villa] (Par. 20.38–9), so the authors in part 4 look back to Ezra Pound, the singer of The Cantos, who bore “Dantescan Light” from town to town in America and Europe during his long unorthodox career. Dante and Pound combine their influences in part 5 (Tralucere), which “projects light across” the chasm between the verbal and visual arts to reveal the impact of the Commedia and The Cantos on filmmaking in the second half of the twentieth century. Implicit in Dante’s luminous journey through Paradise is an aesthetic adaptation to the divine delight in spilling over or bursting through all measures of beauty and wisdom. In light of this, part 6 (Trasmodar) “exceeds the limits” of text by passing entirely into the domain of the visual arts to contemplate the Dantean origins of the interarts rivalry in post-medieval aesthetics. The six parts, and the contents within each part, are arranged in chronological order. Part 1 contains three essays on the First Circle of Hell and its inhabitants. In the first essay, Amilcare A. Iannucci explores a range of theological reactions to Dante’s strikingly original treatment of Limbo (from Latin limbus, meaning “margin”) and shows how the poet’s critical response to thirteenth-century scholastic decisions about the afterlife of noble pagans and unbaptized infants ironically reveals the “marginality” of his own orthodoxy. In the second essay, Ed King considers why the damnation of Virgil continues to provoke debate over his posthumous potential to be saved, a controversial issue which has long perplexed readers concerned with the efficacy of prayer. Can the good will of readers who pray for Virgil’s salvation move Heaven to har-
8
INTRODUCTION
row his lost soul, to carry it over the great divide between despair and joy as Dante himself is moved heavenwards by the prayerful intercessions of Mary, Lucy, and Beatrice? Countering King’s argument that the poet provides us with strong—if unorthodox—theological grounds for hoping that Virgil might eventually be saved, Mira Gerhard in the third essay considers the significance of sacrifice in Virgil’s tragedìa (Inf. 20.113) to suggest why Dante’s guide must be sacrificed to ensure the supremacy of the Commedia over its classical sources. Passing beyond Limbo, Dante and Virgil must confront the metamorphoses of the ignoble majority of the Damned. Some appear like birds whirled in a stormy blast; others resemble cattle in a herd bound for slaughter; still others recall wet otters or knotted snakes or flitting fireflies or fish with their scales removed. How do these degrading changes in shape and behaviour relate to the loss of Faith among “the lost people” [la perduta gente] (Inf. 3.3)? How does the obscenity of their transformations contribute to the making of Dante’s credenza? The five essays in part 2 all deal with the obscenity of infernal alteration by exploring Dante’s unorthodox approaches to the border between the human and the inhuman. Mapped onto this ontological divide are essentialist oppositions crucial to the definition of the Sacred in Catholic culture, including binaries based on gender (man/woman), rationality (man/beast), mortality (man/god), morality (man/demon), and sexuality (man/sodomite). According to Carolynn Lund-Mead, Dante audaciously transgresses the gender divide in the Francesca episode by identifying himself with Virgil’s Dido. Francesca’s corresponding inversion of masculine and feminine roles in her parodic confession scene anticipates the androgyny of Beatrice, and more shockingly, of God. The transmutation of depressed souls into a gurgling chorus in the marsh of the Fifth Circle prompts John Thorp to investigate the orthodoxy of a long-buried aspect of Dante’s moral theology, his murky association of anger with “accidie.” Is this merging of sins as idiosyncratic as it first appears? While Catholic orthodoxy retained the Greek philosophical distinction between mortality and immortality, it strongly resisted any doctrinal tendency to turn that distinction into a dichotomy. One such tendency, traditionally associated with pagan Epicureanism, led to the heresy of mortalism—a rejection of the fundamental doctrine of the immortality of the human soul. In the third essay of part 2, Guido Pugliese explores Dante’s theological and political reaction to the extreme secularism which can result from blind adherence to this heresy. Rather than condemning
INTRODUCTION
9
it directly with Augustinian zeal, the poet ironically reflects on its strong appeal to his fellow Florentines, and by extension, to himself, through his encounter with two Epicureans of his father’s generation, Farinata and Cavalcante. Intellectually and politically “fathered” by these doomed figures, he comes to reject his youthful affiliation with their worldly outlook by meditating on the disastrous consequences of culturally fashionable unorthodoxy for their beloved Florence. Though Catholicism locates the Sacred in the miraculous fusion of humanity and divinity, it also strictly observes the moral divide between the human and the demonic. Sacrilege is the rejection of this observance. In the fourth essay of part 2, Mark Feltham and I consider the outrageous nudity of the Damned as a sign of the desecration of the Divine Image throughout the Inferno. If the Damned had simply been stripped of their worldly trappings, the humiliating exposure of their skin might have been punishment enough for their pride. But for the Sodomites, the Suicides, the Spendthrifts, and the Traitors, mere stripping is not enough. They must have their skin removed as well—by fire or thorns or fangs—in an excessive exercise of punitive zeal that unsettles any traditional Catholic reading of Dante’s theodicy. To Feltham’s analysis of the hyper-Ovidian outrages done to the infernal body, I have contributed some observations about the Bataillean significance of the homoerotic shape-shifting in the Eighth Circle. My subsequent reflections on Bataille as an interpretive guide to the sadistic fascinations of Lower Hell focus on the sacrificial image of exposed viscera, of insides brought outside. Why does Dante gaze so fixedly, so erotically, at Mohammed’s appalling wound? Why does the sacrilegious violation of the Prophet’s masculinity heighten the pilgrim’s awareness of the sacred operations of Divine Love? Part 3 follows the pilgrim’s route of passing beyond human limits through three essays on the erotics of salvation in Purgatorio and Paradiso. My essay on Dante’s (still) highly unorthodox response to sexual diversity links Statius’s lecture on what goes on in the human womb to the purgation of same-sex lovers on the Cornice of the Lustful and to the homoerotic replay of the Francesca episode in the Heaven of Venus. What would St. Paul have made of Dante’s distinctly un-Pauline encounter with the flaming soul of Charles Martel? Jennifer Fraser’s essay on the poetics of the Dantean body also takes off for Paradise from the womb. By reading the evolutionary sequence of life forms replicated by the human embryo (plant, sea sponge, animal, human) as a prophetic code for image patterns in the Heaven of the Sun, she establishes a semiotic connection between the two most significant events in Dante’s creative
10
INTRODUCTION
life: the moment of divine spiration when his infant soul received the rational capacity for language in utero; and the moment of divine inspiration when his adult soul received the fantastic imprint of the poem in caelo. Paradise as mediated to Dante through Beatrice’s desire is not a cool ascetic stillness but an exuberant love-dance heated up by the planet Venus, whose erotic influences on the poem, as Bonnie MacLachlan shows in her essay, may be traced back through various Latin sources to the rites of bisexual initiation and cosmic engendering associated in Greek antiquity with the Cyprian goddess Aphrodite. As the source of the Cyprian’s ardent androgyny, the Creator does not simply love Creation in the Commedia. He/She is ravishingly in love with it. True to the spirit of oltraggio, the heavenly kingdom suffers “violence from fervent love” [vïolenza pate / da caldo amore] (Par. 20.94–5) even more violently than Dido did at the hands of Aeneas, or Proserpina in the embrace of Hades, or Ganymede under the wings of Jove. Part 4 leaps from the fourteenth to the twentieth century to consider the intimate connection between two modern versions of unorthodoxy: aesthetic and political. Looking back to a small group of eccentric Dantists from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who wrote against the grand Catholicizing current of the commentary tradition by perversely endeavouring to expose the poet’s heretical leanings, Leon Surette reveals how their now largely forgotten line of scholarship exerted a direct influence on the aesthetic development of Ezra Pound and thereby contributed to the rupturing emergence of modernist poetics. Pound’s Dante would certainly have surprised the New England Unitarians and Transcendentalists who helped to found the Dante Society in 1881. He was not a Catholic or even a Christian anymore but a pagan mystagogue whose poetry provided initiatory access to a cult of erotic ecstasy passed down to him from the Troubadours and the Albigensians, who had somehow preserved it, in spite of Christianity, through “half memories of Hellenistic mysteries.”8 According to Matthew Reynolds, whose essay focuses on the intertextual relation between the Commedia and The Cantos, Pound associated Dante with unorthodoxy in two distinct ways. Politically he rejoiced in Dante’s relentless attacks on the economic system of his day, with its simoniacal popes and avaricious emperors and rapacious usurers. Aesthetically he responded to the liberating dynamics of Dante’s love-driven universe, which, despite the strictness of Catholic sexual morality, transfigured Cunizza from a famous wanton into an amorous saint. In the first essay of part 5, Bart Testa reflects on the “chasm” of cultural history separating Dante from three filmmakers—Michelangelo
INTRODUCTION
11
Antonioni, Stan Brakhage, and R. Bruce Elder—who have looked back for inspiration through the darkness of modernity to the remote yet still luminous world of the Commedia. Opening with the infernal prospect of an industrial wasteland, Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso struggles to give birth to a purgatorial vision of modern Italian life. Brakhage’s The Dante Quartet, by contrast, moves swiftly through hellish chaos and purgatorial fire towards a brief electrifying glimpse of heaven. While Brakhage’s experimental film runs for six intensely modernist minutes, Elder’s cycle The Book of All the Dead expands its pulsating flow of images over more than forty mesmerizing postmodern hours—a creative excess to rival the oltraggio of the Sacred Poem.9 These films, Testa concludes, do not modernize the Sacred Poem or even attempt to envision Dante crossing the abyss of time to us. By inviting comparison with the Commedia, they each draw attention to their remoteness from the Poet’s totalizing vision—just as the final lines in The Cantos express Pound’s poignant yet predictable failure to envision Paradise. Pound looms large in the second and third essays of part 5. In Elder’s magisterial study of Brakhage’s The Dante Quartet, Pound’s unorthodox reading of the Commedia as a pagan love poem is recalled as an influence on the open form poetics of Robert Duncan and Charles Olson. By mediating Dante to Brakhage through Pound, these two mid-century American poets also passed on their dynamic understanding of the Sacred Poem as an ever-renewing, open-ended quest for vision—an understanding opposed to the traditional Catholic perception of its encyclopedic completeness as a versified summa. Just as Brakhage responded to the Dantean vision-quest as a sign of the amorous actualization of God’s creative impetus or energeia, so Elder, in turn, interprets the inwardness of Brakhage’s film as a sign of his aesthetic desire to release energeia back into the world through the capacity of film as an art of moving pictures to imitate the dynamics of visual thinking. Part 5 concludes with a letter Elder wrote in 1991 responding to an inquiry about the relation of The Cantos to his own immensely “energetic” film-cycle. Though he was still making films for The Book of All the Dead when the letter was written, he provides his correspondent with an interpretive guide to the cycle as a whole along with an impassioned defence of his transcendent goal as a filmmaker. His “great ambition” is to leave Pound behind him in the purgatorial suspension of modernity, just as Dante put Virgil behind him on the threshold of Paradise. Part 6 pushes the reception-history of Dante even further away from verbum towards pure visio in the domain of contemporary art. Two Polish-
12
INTRODUCTION
Canadian artists, Andrew Pawlowski and Zbigniew Pospieszynski, express their skeptical reactions to Dante’s allegory of political reform and personal redemption in a portfolio of twelve images from their 1995 exhibition Calling Dante, which included sculptures, bookworks, drawings, and installations. Following the portfolio are three excerpts from an allegorical drama written by Pawlowski as a literary accompaniment for their visual fantasia on Dantean themes. In this hallucinatory text, the shade of Dante is mysteriously conjured up in the Umbrian town of Gubbio and brought to trial for his sexual and political transgressions. Speaking in his own defence, the poet proudly traces his unorthodox influence along the line of eccentric Dante scholars to the infamous “Danteum,” a modernist building planned (but never constructed) as the centre of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party. In a curatorial essay written for the exhibition and reproduced here as an introduction to both the play and the artworks, I place the two artists within the vortex of aesthetic debates and creative controversies stirred up since the mid-fourteenth century when the poet’s first illuminators set out to render and rival his visions pictorially. Thus, in its dialectical structure, the volume implicitly maps the contested border between orthodoxy and unorthodoxy onto the immense fracturing “chasm” between the verbal and visual arts known in Italian aesthetics as the Paragone.10 CREDITS
This volume took shape in three different social contexts—a convivio, a conference, and a class. Initial momentum came from a twice-monthly gathering of colleagues to read the Commedia from beginning to end at the house of professors John Thorp and Bonnie MacLachlan, whose tireless hospitality sustained the Circolo Dantesco di London from 1990 to 1997. Their credenza (in the modern sense) was always laden with delicious olives, fresh bread, exquisite dolci, and epicurean wines for sampling after the translation and discussion of each session’s canto. Recollections of the lively dialogues that took place around their table helped me in turn to build up credenza (in the medieval sense) in the idea of the volume as a means of broadening the circle of our Dantean conviviality. On April 10–12, 1997, the Circolo marked the completion of its reading project with a conference, for which I suggested the title “Dante & the Unorthodox.” Professor Thorp and I were the principal organizers of this event, though the whole Circolo was behind us from the start. Eleven of the seventeen contributors to the volume, including four of the original eleven members of the Circolo, presented versions of their work at
INTRODUCTION
13
the conference. Thanks to generous grants from The University of Western Ontario’s Faculty of Arts and Humanities and Toronto’s Istituto Italiano di Cultura, we were able to invite two keynote speakers from outside the Circolo: Professor Amilcare Iannucci from the University of Toronto and Professor Matthew Reynolds from Oxford University. Two other contributors to the volume, Carolynn Lund-Mead and Professor Leon Surette, were also present at the conference, though they had not been asked to present papers—an oversight on my part here corrected. After the final paper, all the participants were invited to the London Regional Art and Historical Museums for a celebratory feast at which Professor Ausonio Marras honoured the memory of the late Professor Franco Calaresu, a founding member of the Circolo, by reciting the final canto of Paradiso. The third social context to which the volume owes its dialectical energy is the cycle of undergraduate Dante seminars I have been teaching since 1992 for the comparative literature and culture program in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Western. While the name of the conference provided me with the main title for the volume, its Bataillean subtitle The Aesthetics of Transgression reflects the passionate interest of my students over the years in every aspect of Dante’s provocative engagement with religion and sexuality. Credit is due them collectively for asking impertinent questions about the orthodoxy of Dante’s treatment of everyone from Brunetto and Mohammed in Hell to Cunizza and Ripheus in Heaven. I have been blessed with undergraduate students who have been “outraged” by Dante in every sense of the term. Their creative perturbation in response to his idiosyncratic recreation of Catholicism and their sense of wonder at discovering his prophetic relevance to theological controversies and cultural issues of our own day have led to at least one bona fide miracle: the paradisial expansion of an undergraduate seminar from an official three hours to an unofficial duration of four, five, six, seven, and sometimes even eight hours. The transgressive energy of this oltraggio springs from the poem itself, I’m convinced, and it has left us on more than one occasion with our heads spinning. Three of my students have channelled this celestial momentum into essays for the volume. In various ways, all the contributors to Dante & the Unorthodox strike hard at obdurate critical resistance to the cultural pressure of the poet’s unprecedented expansion of orthodoxy as a horizon of worldwide social reform. Taking a cue from his representation of St. Dominic as a “mighty teacher” [gran dottor] (Par. 12.85) whose coming, like Christ’s, thoroughly shook up Rome’s settled old ideas about religion and politics, I have
14
INTRODUCTION
constructed the volume out of essays which, though divergent in approach and argument, surprisingly converge in representing the poet as a teacher frequently at odds with official exponents of Catholic Truth. The collocation of “Dante” with “Unorthodox” in the title may be taken in several different ways. As a provocative signpost in the contiguous fields of intellectual and doctrinal history, the title most obviously refers to the poet’s self-defensive preoccupation with the contested border between officially sanctioned beliefs and personally attested revelations. It also points to his emotional engagement—ranging from horrified disgust to hallowing empathy—with the individuals or groups whom the Church has historically exiled to the transgressive side of the faithfrontier. Critical attention throughout the volume is accordingly focused on the poet’s response to particular doctrines traditionally and currently condemned by the vigilant weeders of the Catholic Garden. The Platonic belief in ensouled star gods, the Epicurean rejection of an eternal afterlife, and the Ovidian naturalization of same-sex desire are three such “weeds” from the pagan tradition that often cropped up as heresies in the harvest of Christian apology. While certain recondite heresies such as the Photinian denial of the divine origin of Christ conspicuously threatened the Trinitarian foundations of credal Catholicism, many rejected beliefs, like the dualistic cosmology and ecclesiology of Catharism, sprang up darkly from the grassroots of popular religious fantasy. How does Dante deal with the bewildering variety of such doctrines? Does he simply pull them all up at their roots and hurl them beyond the Roman pale? Or does he make creative use of at least some of them, radically “retheologizing” them through their very dubiousness into the allegorical design of the Commedia? What, in turn, do the Unorthodox make of Dante? That question, too, is explicitly raised by Dante & the Unorthodox, and provocative answers to it are to be found in the works of heretical artists, eccentric visionaries, political subversives, feminist critics, and queer theorists who have been inspired and disturbed by the poet’s oltraggio. Their intellectual and emotional engagement with the poet’s freewheeling expansions of Catholicism has resulted in a complex countercultural tradition of critical and artistic reworkings of the Commedia. Blake’s decidedly Dionysian (and quite un-Catholic) take on the dancing Sodomites in his illustration to Inferno 16 certainly belongs to this tradition, as does the recent meteor shower of “detheologizing” books and articles on Dante bearing defiantly impious titles like The Undivine Comedy and “Sodomy and Resurrection.”11 How and why such readings clash with critical “orthodoxies”
INTRODUCTION
15
established by authoritative Dantists such as Singleton are questions strategically implicated in the title of the volume. Aesthetics is constantly at play with politics in the volume, and the critical result is a superimposing (in effect, another mapping) of Dante’s faith-frontier onto the erotically volatile border between taboo and transgression. As exuberantly charted by Georges Bataille in the most unorthodox of modern French treatises on love, L’Erotisme (1957), the border between a culture’s unwritten rules of life-sustaining conduct and an individual’s unspeakable impetus towards death is persistently challenged, resisted, stretched to the breaking point, and breached by an anguished desire welling up in every impassioned lover’s heart for lost or unattainable beauty.12 Taboo requires transgression to assert the sacredness of things, including its own repressive laws. Transgression, in turn, requires taboo to give ritual meaning and aesthetic form to its otherwise senseless and ugly violence. Bataille’s illustrious failure to preserve the sacred aura of érotisme à coeur from profane modernism through a political analysis of violence haunts contemporary readers of the Commedia— as several essays in this volume attest—because it contrasts so sharply with Dante’s extraordinary aesthetic success in exalting his heart’s desire, Beatrice, to the mystical status of an inviolable agent of universal religious and political reform under the law-bound régime of a Divine Emperor. On a first reading, the Commedia may appear to be primarily an agonized apology for the politics of taboo. Virgil himself encourages such a view of the poem in his muffled protest against the Emperor who excludes him from the Heavenly Rome because he was “rebellious to His Law” [ribellante a la sua legge] (Inf. 1.125). With Beatrice’s coming, however, such an Old Roman reading yields—erotically, as Bataille would predict—to an ecstatic apology for the aesthetics of transgression. The invincible beauty of the Sacred, as recovered in Beatrice’s eyes, finally “imparadises” Dante’s mind [’mparadisa la mia mente] (Par. 28.3) by expanding and enrapturing it with the prospect of a New Roman orthodoxy through which all faithful lovers, not just celibate lovers of the Catholic faith, may be saved from the tyranny of ugliness that is the Inferno. A kind of “terrible beauty” is born when Beatrice bursts on the scene, amid the Church’s solemn parading of scriptural law, with her gender-reversing epithet echoing throughout the Edenic locus of primordial taboo (Benedictus qui venis: Purg. 30.19); yet however terrible it might appear to the anti-erotic gaze of the Church militant here on earth, her heavenly beauty is neither the destructive power cursed by misogynist preachers in the Middle Ages nor the savage force hailed by twentieth-
16
INTRODUCTION
century poets in their elegies on political rebellion. Neither an apocalyptic crisis nor a romantic catastrophe is provoked by her mirroring eyes. What they immediately reflect is the dynamic model of a new civilization, a new sacralizing interplay between taboo and transgression. To read allegory from the atheistic viewpoint of Bataille is inevitably to transgress the theological bounds of traditional fourfold interpretation by dispensing with aesthetic principles metaphysically dependent on God. In their place emerges a set of radically humanistic principles upon which I base my understanding of the aesthetics of transgression: 1. 2. 3. 4.
5.
6.
7. 8.
9.
10.
Excess is beautiful.13 The beautiful is utterly irrational. As a vision of excess, beauty fuses binaries into paradox. A work is beautiful if it generates a backward-forward movement or impeto analogous to the unsettling motion towards and away from the brink of death. The “impetuously” transgressive work is beautiful because its synthesis of the attractive and the repulsive recalls the Sacred as experienced in religious ritual. Beauty presupposes the presence of a barrier or impedimento, the surface of which establishes the rule of taboo and incites the rebellion of transgression. Spiritual visions of beauty arise from the spectacle of primordial physical agony. Suffering must be witnessed to become beautiful, for then it simultaneously reveals our yearning for death or “continuity” and our anguish over individual self-consciousness or “discontinuity.” Aesthetic pleasure transcends the nostalgic fetishization of maternal space, which paradoxically excludes and produces the ugly, the abject, the excremental. As continuity is sublime, discontinuity is ridiculous.14
Though the Sacred Poem remains intensely sacred in light of these Bataillean principles, it also becomes very “undivine” compared with the anagogic comedy glossed in accordance with medieval theology. To some extent, then, Bataille encourages an anthropological reading of the Commedia as a site of spectacular agony. On the three lower levels of reading— the anagogic level simply disappears from a Bataillean analysis—a strong sense of the Sacred is still conveyed to us as witnesses of Dante’s creative martyrdom even if we are far from believing in his God.
INTRODUCTION
17
The visionary beauty streaming from Beatrice as the model for Dante’s new world order is prophetically Bataillean in so far as it recreates a sense of the Sacred in its spectators through oltraggio. “How sweet it is to gaze long upon the object of desire,” observed Bataille in a mood bordering on Dantean ardour, “to live on in our desire, instead of dying by going the whole way, by yielding to the excessive violence of desire! We know that possession of the object we are afire for is out of the question.”15 It is certainly out of the question for Dante as he gazes on Beatrice’s face in the Stellatum. The capacity of her beauty to exceed all measure provokes this matter-of-fact comment from him, a gloss which under other circumstances would seem like an Icarus flight of fantastic hyperbole: La bellezza ch’io vidi si trasmoda non pur di là da noi, ma certo io credo che solo il suo fattor tutta la goda. [The beauty I beheld transcends measure not only beyond our reach, but I truly believe that He alone who made it can enjoy it all.] (Par. 30.19–21)
Any serious student of Plato can set about imagining a beauty superior to human standards, and any serene disciple of Pseudo-Dionysius can surpass Plato by imagining a beauty beyond that of the Forms. But it takes an ardent convert to the Church of Beatrice to outdo the Areopagite by claiming to enjoy (if only for an instant) the fullness of the Creator’s own aesthetic experience. Beatrice’s beauty reflects a shockingly divine impetus to recreate in the world of political possibilities not only the stable law-abiding circles of the Stellatum but also, beyond and within these, highlighting their otherworldly symmetry through a wildly creative violation of its rules, the comet trails of individual ingegno. CREDENCE
What gives credence to Dante’s poetic fantasies of orthodoxy? Perhaps we should first ask “who.” While the intellectual luminaries of the Church pause in their amorous carol around Beatrice in the Heaven of the Sun, Dante-pilgrim hears the melodious voice of St. Bonaventure commend the relentless force with which a legendary champion of orthodoxy once struck the theologically fragile Church of the early thirteenth century: e ne li sterpi eretici percosse l’impeto suo, più vivamente quivi dove le resistenze eran più grosse. Di lui si fecer poi diversi rivi
18
INTRODUCTION
onde l’orto catolico si riga, sì che i suoi arbuscelli stan più vivi. [and on the heretical stocks his force struck with most vigor where the resistances were most obstinate. From him there sprang then various streamlets whereby the catholic garden is watered, so that its bushes are more living.] (Par. 12.100–5)
The champion was St. Dominic, and the targets of his impetuous crusade were the Albigensian heretics of southern France. Rather than a brutal human force, a militant intolerance driven by chivalric machismo, Dominic’s zeal for doctrinal rigour is imagined here in purely natural terms. It is like a torrent rushing from a mountain spring down a steep slope—a dreaded but familiar phenomenon in the agricultural regions of the Alps and Apennines. The fierce momentum of the flash flood initially has a destructive impact on the cultivated terrain in the valley below, the vulnerable little orto with its orchards and vineyards; but before long, instead of precipitating an ecological disaster, it serves to improve the condition of the soil and to increase the vitality of the plants. It is a horticultural blessing in disguise. Its initial burst washes away all the unwanted sterpi, the decaying stumps and noxious weeds and unpruned stocks which had previously choked the garden. Then, after dividing into gentle streamlets on flattening ground, the current irrigates the whole terrain so that the surviving bushes become more fruitful—literally, “more living”—than they were before the flood. The humble orto may not yet be a paradiso, but it has been vigorously improved in a paradisial direction. Bonaventure’s Franciscan vision of how a strong reactionary orthodoxy works to produce a radical revival of the Faith is of course a fantasy—a “high fantasy” Dante will insist [alta fantasia] (Par. 33.142)—peculiarly vital to medieval Catholicism. Surely only the pure at heart can still find it persuasive. As a glimpse of paradise through fallen nature, it is also a sweetly prophetic conceit appropriate for the great friar who consolingly conveys it from on high in anticipation of Dante’s ascent to the garden of the Empyrean. No need to be afraid of the fierce current up there. From the viewpoint of the saints, it’s all water from the wellspring of Divine Grace. Sometimes it falls gently like dew. At other times it must strike the earth in a rush. But either way the orto catolico benefits from its power. Beneath the flourishing optimism of this orthodox vision lie the traces of a violent power fantasy with very worldly ramifications, the most obvious being the forceful imposition of a political divide between the Ortho-
INTRODUCTION
19
dox and the Unorthodox. While the unstoppable force that still works through the legend of Dominic may well originate in God’s abiding love for creation, it is the implacable wrath of God that sends it pell-mell into the world of ecclesiastical and imperial politics. Its controversial operations are through institutional purgation and theological conflict, and its direct impact is not on plants but on people. Before the Dominicans can direct their unstoppable force at Beatrice, however, Dante pre-empts their doctrinal critique of the Commedia by unleashing St. Bonaventure on their order. What could be more galling to them than to be rebuked by the great leader of their intellectual rivals, the Franciscans, at the satiric conclusion of a sermon in praise of St. Dominic? According to the Seraphic Doctor, Dominic’s mind was so full of “living virtue,” the prophetic power springing from Divine Knowledge, that he turned his own mother into a prophetess while she was carrying him in her womb (“viva vertute / che, ne la madre, lei fece profeta”) (Par. 12.59–60). Beatrice reverses this gynecological miracle by turning Dante into a prophet while she mothers him through his noetic ascent and returns him to the Womb of Mary, figured in the protective enclosure of the solar carols and ultimately in the enclosed garden of the Empyrean. By linking special prophetic power with ultra-orthodox zeal in his life of Dominic, Bonaventure implicitly challenges the Dominicans to find fault with the special orthodoxy of Beatrice’s prophet who is similarly endowed with “living virtue.” Dante thus mirrors himself in Dominic not only to magnify his own regard for the Truth but also to highlight his fantastic invulnerability to official charges of unorthodoxy levelled at him by a corrupted earthly Magisterium. Even as Dominic’s invincible energy as a champion of the Faith corresponds at a cultural level to the natural flood of life force from the Sun, so Dante’s poetic impetus as a blazoner of Beatrice corresponds in erotic intensity to the intellectual radiance of the most daring of all Dominican apologists, Thomas Aquinas. Following Aquinas’s salutary advice to Dante, we need to “distinguish well” [ben si distingua] (Par. 11.27) if the meaning of all this Dominican mirroring is to make sense as an apologetic strategy for shielding the poet’s special orthodoxy from papal disapproval or inquisitorial attack. As usual with identity analogies in the poem, the momentary similarity between Dominic and Dante gives rise to a meditation on their momentous differences. Where Dominic reduced heresy by vigorously excluding heretics from the hortus conclusus of the Church, Dante expands orthodoxy by drawing the Unorthodox into his poetic restoration of the
20
INTRODUCTION
Catholic Garden. Where the militant friar’s impetus was torrentially violent and destructive, the mystical poet’s force, his Beatricean inspiration, is irresistible in its creative peacefulness, like a breeze blowing springtime through the Dark Wood and lifting downcast spirits upwards to an angelic dawn. Heretics, sodomites, epicureans, schismatics, witches, false prophets—all died unspeakable deaths at the stake under Dominican anathema. Under the spell of Dantean allegory their unorthodox spirits rise again—some still desperately burning, others brightly glowing like molten glass, still others newly ablaze with joy—to speak about their individually impetuous lives, to represent themselves, even at their most wicked, as invaluable to the transhumanization of nostra vita. Challenging the Dominicans to recover their inquisitorial vigour, Bonaventure concludes ironically that they have lost the celebrated zeal for rooting out heresy where it truly lies. For Dante, as for Dominic, heresy lies out in the World. It is a malignant growth, a tangle of social evils, an invasion of noxious weeds throughout the Catholic Garden. It does not primarily abide in books as a system of pernicious errors hidden by mazy theological arguments or hazy allegorical fictions. Intellectual energy alone is not enough to eliminate it. What’s needed to trample it down is impeto—Dante’s dynamic term for relentless force of character, militant righteousness, saintly chutzpah. Dominic had “impetus” in this social sense, and his activist energy is not only commemorated but regenerated by the ring dance of the Wise. The critical impeto behind this volume is bound to be controversial, too, though I would not describe the collective character of our work as vigorously Dominican. None of the authors and artists who have contributed to it is piously inclined to weed out the sterpi eretici from the profusion of theological fantasies reaching for the Sun in the Commedia. The fantasies of orthodoxy at work throughout the poem—the irrigation of the orto catolico being just one of many—are what interest us here in our various considerations of how Dante addresses the social and spiritual condition of the Unorthodox as outcasts like himself. The volume accordingly highlights Dante’s championship of his own orthodoxy, which is easy to confuse with the set of doctrines recognized as orthodox by the medieval papacy since the poet himself does everything in his formidable rhetorical power to encourage just such a confusion. In the current climate of doctrinal aggressiveness promoted by the Vatican through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,16 I would be very surprised indeed if the study of Dante’s orthodoxy from unorthodox perspectives were not a polemically rousing activity at odds with the perpet-
INTRODUCTION
21
uation of ecclesiastical concord and academic consensus. It can hardly be otherwise. As a critical inquiry, it must constantly attend to its inquisitorial opposite—the study of unorthodoxy from orthodox perspectives— which has historically spread more fire than water in the Catholic Garden. The heat generated by the power fantasy of orthodox revivalism arose both literally from the pyres of the heretics and morally from the preaching of their inquisitors. As the recent condemnation of same-sex marriage by Pope John Paul II (who has been joined by authorities from other Christian denominations) has trumpeted to those who have ears to hear,17 there is still much at stake—though perhaps not quite so literally as in Dante’s day—in perpetuating the traditionally deep divide between the Orthodox and the Unorthodox. Catholic orthodoxy, of course, is stable and concordant only in theological fantasy. The history of Christian doctrine in the West reveals how impetuously it has shifted its tone and developed its tenets over the centuries. The contemporary version of Catholic orthodoxy, for instance, differs in many respects from what the faithful crusaded for in the Middle Ages. It is the outcome of a momentous nineteenth-century decision on the part of the Vatican to identify the theological system of Bonaventure’s Dominican rival, Thomas Aquinas, as the intellectual foundation for all the teachings of the Roman Church.18 Dante would probably have approved of this stabilizing centripetal move since his harmonious encounter with Aquinas in the Heaven of the Sun triumphantly identifies his own dubious orthodoxy with the Angelic Doctor’s. Or does this identification work in reverse? Does Dante’s miraculous presence in the Heaven of the Sun “reveal” to us that the most speculative theology of the Schools has been stamped with his own indubitable poetic authority? In either case, the poet is imaginatively unconstrained by the papal guardians of the Faith—despite the lingering cloud of doubt under which a few of the more radically Aristotelian notions in the Summa theologiae had fallen, even in Dominican circles, after the Condemnations of 1277.19 Earlier in the thirteenth century, through the alarming popularity of Catharism and the debacles of the Second Crusade, the leadership of the Catholic Church had become keenly aware that the time-hallowed beliefs at the core of its teachings were not quite as stable or complete or unified or well defined as the Constantinian concepts of orthodoxia (right belief) and its optimistic synonym homologia (agreement) had promised the Church Militant in the fourth century. In theory, orthodoxy ought to be a vision of God’s Invincible Truth gloriously apparent to the eyes of all
22
INTRODUCTION
the faithful. It is certainly that in the Heaven of the Sun—a theological fantasy if ever there was one. In practice, however, orthodoxy has never been a very easy vision for fallen mortals to sustain in a world of embattled wills and conflicting institutional stakes. Whatever may have been angelic about its origins has long ago given way to a gnashing of teeth against the Devil and a ferocious search for the Unorthodox who ironically spring into being through the Church’s own textual animadversions. At ground level, far from the Heaven of the Sun, right belief begins to look more like a shaky political accord hammered out by vituperative ecclesiastical councils. At best it can serve as a pre-emptive declaration of war against fervently imagined enemies menacing the unstable boundaries of the Faith. At worst it is a licence to wring the truth out of the Unorthodox under torture, a mode of persuasion lamentably still practised for the sake of ideological purification. The relentlessly textual impetus of orthodoxy to define and target its opponents, as Dante’s Bonaventure unsentimentally suggests, emerges painfully from their obstinate resistenze. Dante himself encourages the textual study of his political and psychological resistance to unorthodoxy through the allegory of his emotional attraction to it, or more precisely, to the souls it has damned or disconcerted. All along the populous literal level of the Commedia, we find him staging impassioned engagements with heretics, sodomites, pagans, witches, blasphemers, infidels, schismatics, false prophets, excommunicated rebels, and philosophical freethinkers: all the dangerous sorts of people whose opposition to prevailing systems of knowledge, sexuality, language, and authority fired up the zeal of Dominic’s successors. After the establishment of the Papal Inquisition under Dominican control in 1233, the hunt for the Unorthodox was officially on, and not just locally, as it had been in the past, but everywhere under the Catholic sun, perpetually, concertedly. Seventy years later, when the Sacred Poem was taking shape in Dante’s remarkably sacrilegious imagination, the Dominicans had come to pride themselves on serving Rome as the Domini canes (Dogs of the Lord) whose primary mission was to sniff out and hunt down the lurking beasts of false belief. The hunt was a soul-stirring fantasy of ritual extermination they took all too literally because it was a truthful “allegory of the theologians,” after all, and not a false “allegory of the poets.”20 The theologian whose allegories of orthodoxy most deeply influenced the inquisitorial mission of the Dominicans was St. Augustine. “Vulpes insidiosos, maximeque haereticos significant; dolosos, fraudulentes,” he
INTRODUCTION
23
taught them in a particularly snarling passage: “Foxes signify insidious people, most especially heretics—treacherous frauds!”21 When such a fox leaps out of the underbrush and into the chariot of the Church on the summit of Mount Purgatory, however, Dante sees it swiftly dispatched by Beatrice: Poscia vidi avventarsi ne la cuna del trïunfal veiculo una volpe che d’ogne pasto buon parea digiuna; ma, riprendendo lei di laide colpe, la donna mia la volse in tanta futa quanto sofferser l’ossa sanza polpe. [Then I saw leap into the body of the triumphal vehicle a fox that seemed starved of all good nourishment; but my lady, rebuking it for its foul offenses, turned it to such flight as its fleshless bones allowed.] (Purg. 32.118–23)
The ease with which this emaciated specimen of vulpis insidiosus is chased away—shooed off, really, like a pesky varmint, and by a lady, too, who has only to upbraid it for its offensively hungry behaviour for it to hurl itself, skin and bones, off the vehicle of her exalted courtesy—makes the barking heroics of the papal inquisitors, whose relentless fox hunt must go on till the crack of doom, almost risible by comparison. The deflationary irony of this little allegorical scene cannot have been lost on the Dogs of the Lord. A sharp rebuke from Beatrice, and the spectral fox of heresy flees off stage, its fleshless bones identifying it as a wretched cousin of the far more ravenous (and insidiously Roman) she-wolf whom Dante had met in the darker woods at the start of his pilgrimage. A mere allegory of the poets, this? Read as such from a critical Dominican viewpoint, this uniquely Dantean counterfantasy of unorthodoxy seems like a joke from a not-so-divine comedy. Despite its specific historical reference to the defeat of Gnosticism by the Christian apologists of the second and third centuries, Beatrice’s scolding of the ill-mannered fox hardly seems credible—even at the literal level—as a true reflection of the Church’s vigilant and often violent efforts to defend the divine purity of its doctrines. The stagy little scene is obviously a fiction. Its ludicrous effect is to distort the serious facts of ecclesiastical history, the Pre-Nicene period having been especially perilous for the faithful in the absence of a clear (let alone a clearly universal or “catholic”) conception of orthodoxy. The only proper theological response to this low fantasy is to discard it, for the allegory of the theologians demands that truth be rooted in history literaliter.
24
INTRODUCTION
Dante heads this reflexive critique off at the pass with a sly rhetorical manoeuvre: if the fox “attack” seems stagy and fantastic and egregiously unlike what it’s supposed to represent, that’s because it is a show (and nothing more) at the literal level. The episode forms part of a pageant of imaginary metamorphoses, a festive spectacle put on for the pilgrim’s benefit by Beatrice and her cast of beasts, monsters, angels, prophets, saints, and dancing girls. It is meant to be amazing, to make the viewer initially incredulous. Yet an animated sequence of symbolic events such as Beatrice’s parade is perhaps the only context in which the performance of a rhetorical trope from a patristic text—the Augustinian metaphor of heretics as foxes—can seem more than merely textual, which is to say false, and therefore, even to a perfectly sane spectator, surprisingly believable. The fox has struck. The striking effect of Dante’s rhetorical impeto here is to collapse the critical distinction between the allegory of the poets and the allegory of the theologians that he himself had drawn in the Convivio and reconsidered in the Epistle to Cangrande. Throughout the Commedia, Dante poeta perversely refuses to discard the high fantasy of the poets in deference to the conventionally higher reason of the theologians. He serves his own unconventional poetic ends as Dante teologo. His authority as a champion of Catholic orthodoxy is not only theological, then, but poetic. Primarily poetic, he insists in his impetuously self-martyring invocation to Apollo at the start of the third cantica: O buono Appollo, a l’ultimo lavoro fammi del tuo valor sì fatto vaso, come dimandi a dar l’amato alloro. Infino a qui l’un giogo di Parnaso assai mi fu; ma or con amendue m’è uopo intrar ne l’aringo rimaso. Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue sì come quando Marsïa traesti de la vagina de le membre sue. [O good Apollo, for this last labor make me such a vessel of your worth as you require for granting your beloved laurel. Thus far the one peak of Parnassus has sufficed me, but now I have need of both, as I enter the arena that remains. Enter into my breast and breathe there as when you drew Marsyas from the sheath of his limbs.] (Par. 1.13–21)
What could be more rhetorical in a pagan classical sense, more artfully heretical in a medieval Christian context, than this outrageously Marsyan
INTRODUCTION
25
declaration of mystical independence from the Catholic Magisterium? Yet at the literal level of the Parnassian dream—even before we are called upon to make the anagogic translations of pagan myth into Catholic mystery—his self-sacrifice to Apollo (the god of both reason and rhyme) rhetorically impels us to believe in Dante-poet as Dante-theologian, and vice versa. If we wilfully resist or simply fail to feel this impeto as the attentive readers he requires us to be, then the self-inquisitorial project of the Commedia becomes little more than a sophistic exercise designed to stretch the suspension of disbelief on the poetic side to its aesthetic limits, and to extend the trajectory of belief on the theological side beyond its ecclesiastical limits. The Sacred Poem might as well die, collapsing into a heap of “dead poetry” [morta poesì] (Purg. 1.7) if the poet fails to convince us that his visions are both theologically true to the Faith and poetically faithful to the Truth. CREDENTIALS
What then makes us believe, and believe in, the poet of the Sacred Poem? What are Dante’s credentials for being—Dante? A confident answer to the troubling question of Dante’s authority as a poet-theologian was proposed by Raphael in two iconic portraits of the poet worked into the learned design of the frescoes for the Stanza della Segnatura adjoining the Sistine Chapel. In the Disputa del Sacramento (1509), the earlier of the two icons secures for Dante a position among the divinely illuminated theologians at an imaginary convention on the Eucharist gathered around an altar on the earthly plain of the Church Militant. The later portrait, in the adjacent Parnaso (1510–11), exalts him to the ranks of Homer and Virgil as a divinely inspired epic poet whom the Muses have admitted to the summit of Apollo’s sacred mountain. Dante is the only figure to appear in both the Disputa and the Parnaso. His appearance up on the Mountain (visitors to the Stanza must look up above a doorway to see him) hardly comes as a surprise to anyone who recalls the invocation to Apollo at the start of Paradiso. But who would have imagined that he’d be standing so close to a pope (and at eye level to visitors) amid the serenely disputatious company of Ecclesia? Yet there he is, too, pointing his unmistakable nose towards the altar while the Holy Spirit descends with transubstantiating impeto towards the host held up in a golden monstrance. This surprising scene recalls the typological transposition of the Pentecost into the sacramental key of the Eucharist in Dante’s initiatory vision of the Church Triumphant:
26
INTRODUCTION
Come foco di nube si diserra per dilatarsi sì che non vi cape, e fuor di sua natura in giù s’atterra, la mente mia così, tra quelle dape fatta più grande, di sé stessa uscìo, e che si fesse rimembrar non sape. [Even as fire breaks from a cloud, because it dilates so that it has not room there, and contrary to its own nature, falls down to earth, so my mind, becoming greater amid those feasts, issued from itself, and of what it became has no remembrance.] (Par. 23.40–5)
In Raphael’s literary remembrance of what Dante’s mind became in that ecstatic moment when the Celestial Conclave was enjoying communion with the Trinity at its “feasts,” the poet emerges in accordance with Renaissance humanist readings of his poetry as the obvious cross-cultural link between the theological world of Christian intellection and the literary world of pagan imagination. Both worlds are bookish creations, or “discursive formations” as we would say today, but Raphael has presented them as spectacular realities, verba translated into visiones, thus recreating (and in the spirit of the Paragone, brilliantly reversing) Dante’s translation of his visiones into verba. The Disputa visually confirms Dante’s credentials as a vernacular theologian of impeccable orthodoxy. If he were not what he appears to be in the painting, a papally approved mediator between the laity and the learned, he quite simply would not be standing there at the sacramental heart of the Vatican. Pope Julius II, who was Raphael’s patron, would surely not have permitted a heretic to show his face amid such a doctrinally rigorous company. What additional proof is needed to establish the purity of Dante’s faith when a great pope has decided that no trace of heretical irregularity, no taint of vulpine insidiousness, adheres to the poet’s fame? To this implicit argument ex cathedra for Dante’s indisputable “arrival” as a Catholic intellectual of exalted rank, Raphael adds a manifest argument ex auctoritate. He has painted the poet into the most illustrious group of Catholic authors ever assembled in one place at one time—a historically impossible (that is to say, miraculous) event rivalled only by the clockwork assembly of the Wise in Dante’s Heaven of the Sun. If one is truly known by the company one keeps, then the Disputa provides company enough to dispel any doubts that Florence’s most famous outcast is finally part of Rome’s holy team. Directly in front of him looms Julius’s uncle, Pope Sixtus IV, who had composed a scholarly treatise on Christ’s
INTRODUCTION
27
blood in the late fifteenth century. Just beyond this unlikely pair stand the twin stars of scholasticism, Bonaventure and Aquinas, flanking a second majestic pope (probably Innocent III) who looks towards the mitred figures of Ambrose and Augustine seated next to the altar. While the two bishops look away from each other as if they were expressing different points of view on the meaning of the Sacrament, the two popes cast their parallel gazes resolutely ahead towards the ritual focus of their pastoral life, the host. Dante’s less-than-friendly attitude to the popes of his own era may be suggested by his frowning proximity to these splendidly mantled pontiffs, whose triple crowns tilt nonchalantly backwards in the direction of his bristling laurel crown. His gaze, boring a hole through Sixtus’s back, seems to shoot straight across the animated crowd of theologians towards an even more scholarly pope, Gregory I, whom he had once praised as that rarity among intellectuals, an expert willing to laugh at his own mistakes (Par. 28.133–5). Gregory is clearly identified by a copy of his most influential work, the Moralia, lying at his feet. His rapturous face, raised towards the Paraclete, turns out to be a “surprise” portrait of Julius— whose power over the whole scene made him far more than a wish-fulfilling impersonator of ecclesiastical greatness. If Julius’s mind bore the paternal stamp of Gregory’s greatness, which had been conveyed to him textually through his reading of the Moralia, then Gregory’s face could bear the physical features of his Renaissance successor, which were transferred back to him visually through the painting he had not only commissioned but helped to design. It was Julius, in fact, who had determined the intricate theological program of the Disputa for the Stanza that was to house his private library. His controlling agency over (and within) the design of Raphael’s idealized consistory was a self-canonizing move that Dante himself might well have appreciated. As if any further visual evidence of Dante’s orthodoxy were needed, Raphael places the poet directly in front of a large white marble block, which appears to be the foundation stone of a new St. Peter’s, the future seat of the Church Triumphant. Standing in front of the same stone, just behind the poet, is a small dark hooded figure whose face is partly obscured by the busy workmen milling about at the construction site. His Dominican habit, a clue to his identity, must have raised many an eyebrow when the painting was first unveiled. If he is indeed who he appears to be—the renegade preacher Girolamo Savonarola, burnt at the stake a decade before the Disputa was painted—then his brooding presence in the scene reveals the Holy Father’s retroactive power to restore intellectual
28
INTRODUCTION
Raphael, Parnaso (1510–11), Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican. Above the doorway sits Apollo playing a violin. Dante poeta, the eighth figure on Apollo’s left, joins Homer and Virgil (happily harrowed from Limbo) to complete the triad of epic poets on the summit of humanist culture. Photo credit: Scala Archives
Raphael, Disputa del Sacramento (1509), Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican. As the only figure to appear in both Ecclesia’s saintly conclave and Apollo’s laureled company, Dante teologo (mid-crowd, lower right) confirms the Pope’s power to purge Catholic culture of unorthodoxy. Photo credit: Scala Archives
prodigals to the Church’s good graces. And where the redeeming power of orthodoxy resides, so too must the charitable will to welcome even the most controversial souls back into the communion of saints. Dante’s proximity to Savonarola in the painting cannot be accidental. Both were once notorious “problem cases” on the margins of papal tolerance. Both suffered Florentine rejection. Both now enjoy Roman favour.22 The Disputa is yet another fantasy of orthodoxy, of course, but it is such a grand one that it makes the transcendent ideal of doctrinal concord seem altogether immanent, almost down to earth, certainly more bound up with civilized human discourse than Dominic’s violent irrigation of the orto catolico. Not even the bleak ironies of the Reformation, which were to expose the doctrinal and political cracks in the Roman
INTRODUCTION
29
Raphael, Disputa (detail), Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican. The proximity of Dante teologo to the splendidly crowned and mantled figure of Pope Sixtus IV (standing on the first step) is a clear sign that Florence’s most famous outcast has come back to the fold as part of Rome’s holy team. Photo credit: Scala Archives
Raphael, Disputa (detail), Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican. This iconic portrait of Dante, his classical laurels intact amid the crowns and halos of the saints, sustains the Renaissance humanist fantasy of Catholic orthodoxy as a concordant power uniting papal and pagan culture. The moral glower of Dante teologo recalls (even as it replaces) the transfixed erotic gaze of Dante poeta. Photo credit: Scala Archives
foundation of European Christendom only a decade after the painting was completed, have succeeded in darkening Raphael’s imaginary conclave as a vision of what should prevail in the intellectual history of the Church. The colours alone, recently restored to their original transfiguring brilliance for the multitudes of pilgrims drawn to Rome for Pope John Paul II’s Jubilee, are probably enough to sustain the iconic assumption of Dante’s theological purity well into the new millennium. It is an assumption exposed by the contributors to this volume. Though we do not dispute the force of the Disputa to persuade its admirers that the pontifical endorsement of Dante’s faith is a necessary and even sufficient condition for demonstrating its orthodoxy, our critical aim is to call that very demonstration of doctrinal agreement and the historical motivations behind it into question. Inspiring as the Vaticanized vision of the poet’s theological position in the Church may be, it is manifestly at odds with his own demonizing representation of the papal power-base as “a sewer of blood and of stench” [cloaca / del sangue e de la puzza] (Par. 27.25–6). Through Raphael’s splendid art, Julius II effectively appropri-
30
INTRODUCTION
ated Dante’s undeniable popular authority for his own political ends, and for the Vatican’s (then and now), and so we would be naive to assume that these corresponded in every respect to the poet’s immediately controversial objectives, both political and aesthetic, in advancing his own claims for orthodoxy in the Commedia. The poet who famously looked upon himself as allied only to “that Rome whereof Christ is Roman” [quella Roma onde Cristo è romano] (Purg. 32.102), and who blasted “the Vatican and the other chosen parts of Rome” [Vaticano e l’altre parti elette / di Roma] (Par. 9.139–40) for being more intent on poring over glossed Decretals than in meditating on the Gospels, would probably have pulled a much fiercer frown than he does in the Stanza della Segnatura on finding himself reborn as a background eminence—an extra in a crowd scene—posing with various haloed advocates for a distinctly papal fantasy of orthodoxy. Though Raphael’s visual realization of that fantasy does correspond in some details to the textual expression of Dante’s alta fantasia, its very reminiscences of the Commedia should make us aware (and all the more skeptical) of post-medieval Catholic transvaluations of the Sacred Poem and its papally exonerated author. Dante’s influence on Renaissance fantasies of orthodoxy was to surface again at the Vatican in 1541—two decades after Raphael’s death—in another great fresco which, like the Disputa, conversely reveals the influence of Renaissance fantasies of orthodoxy on Dante. Michelangelo’s Last Judgment is a truly “outrageous” work in the Dantean sense. That its writhing masses of nudes were bound to provoke moral outrage, at least among the more pious members of the papal court, is clearly confirmed in the archival and artistic records of its censorship.23 But also confirmed by the orgiastic play of bodies is the impact of Dante’s aesthetics of transgression on Michelangelo’s vision of the Great Doom. From the leering figures of Charon and Minos at the shore of the Underworld, to the artist’s Marsyas-like self-portrait on the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew, to the nude male saints lunging their mouths towards each other for paradisial kisses below the exalted column of Christ’s Flagellation—everywhere the fresco leads the eye, from Earth to Heaven to Hell, there are competitive reminiscences of the Commedia. Like the transgressive design of the Sacred Poem, it is a vision of the afterlife pushed to the aesthetic limit of oltraggio. In contrast to Raphael, whose regard for Dante was distinctly Apollonian in its respect for hierarchical stability, Michelangelo was momentously drawn to the Poet’s Dionysian audacity and excessiveness, and the aesthetic outcome can be seen in the blatant heightening of sacred
INTRODUCTION
31
and sacrilegious eroticism above the Sistine altar compared with the chaste convocations in the Stanza della Segnatura. Even as Dante outOvids Ovid by homoeroticizing the serpentine metamorphoses of the Thieves (Inf. 25.97), so Michelangelo out-Dantes Dante by turning Minos into a devilish version of Midas with the addition of ass’s ears and a serpent instead of a tail. The phallic coda with which the infernal judge girds himself to mark the level of damnation assigned to every soul appearing before him (Inf. 5.11) had been depicted by Luca Signorelli in the Antinferno section of the apocalyptic fresco series completed by 1504 in the Chapel of San Brizio in Orvieto Cathedral.24 There the tail appears just as Dante-pilgrim sees it—as a bestial appendage to the trunk of Minos’s demonic body. In the Sistine Chapel, however, the tail has metamorphosed into a giant serpent comparable to the python-like Satan twisting around the tree in the temptation scene on the Sistine ceiling. Having gained its independence from Minos, the satanically constricting coda functions in Michelangelo’s Inferno not only as an indicator of judgment but also as an instrument of torment for the judge himself. No need for a mere phallic symbol here, for the judge’s penis is now exposed for all to see—including all the popes who have had to see it through the centuries while saying mass at the adjacent altar. So much for Catholic modesty in the morally perilous presence of “the member that man conceals” [lo membro che l’uom cela] (Inf. 25.116): Minos’s member turns out to be a wee nub of a thing, a scandalous sight on a grandiose patriarchal figure entrusted with the enforcement of divine taboo. If Vasari is to be believed, Michelangelo modeled the grimacing features of Minos on those of Pope Paul II’s Master of Ceremonies, Messer Biagio da Cesena, “a person of great propriety,” who, when asked by the pope what he thought of the fresco, “said that it was a very disgraceful thing to have made in so honourable a place all those nude figures showing their nakedness so shamelessly, and that it was a work not for the chapel of a Pope, but for a bagnio or tavern.”25 Perhaps it was Biagio’s priggish jibe about down-market erotic venues that prompted Michelangelo to transgress the bounds of Catholic propriety even further by depicting a common bathhouse pleasure in what the big snake is doing to Minos’s tiny membro. Thanks to the splendid restoration of the fresco for the millennial Jubilee, any Vatican visitor who stands directly in front of Minos is treated to an eyeful of sodomitical bestiality: the snake is vividly performing fellatio on the judge. No wonder he’s grimacing. It must hurt. Think of the fangs. Just when the sacrilegious impeto of this image sinks in, the spectator also discovers the poisonous point of the Dantean allusion. To stand
32
INTRODUCTION
in front of Minos is not only to stand among the Damned, but to stand convicted and exposed for whatever sin has led to your damnation. Since the snake has wrapped his body two times around Minos, the spectator is deviously positioned as one of the Lustful bound for the Second Circle of Hell: an ominous terminus ad quem if you happen to have been staring at the venomous blow-job with any degree of transgressive fascination. Michelangelo’s relentless paragone results in a visual “sting operation,” a strategy of unholy entrapment which implicitly catches the Poet himself and reminds us of all the moments in the Inferno when he dared to cast himself in the role of a transfixed voyeur. Should we read the Sacred Poem, then, if we truly wish to be saved? Or should we gaze instead at the massive Icon of Judgment in which Christ’s titanic power to lift up the Blessed and hurl down the Damned is indistinguishable from the moral zeal of the Counter-Reformation? In the end—the inescapable end of salvation history with which the Last Judgment impetuously conflates the Here and Now of the spectator’s visual field—Michelangelo’s eschatological fantasy of orthodoxy seems to require the displacement rather than the expansion of Dante’s cosmopoetic vision of far credenza. Michelangelo has his own difficult Catholicism to promote through art, and it is not quite Raphael’s, even as Raphael’s is not quite Dante’s. Yet it is this very personal measure of difference that makes the Dantean tradition of intensely creative engagement with the very concept of orthodoxy theologically and politically exciting to many contributors in this volume, and aesthetically fascinating to us all. CREDIBILITY
All the essays in this collection acknowledge the unique character of Dante’s orthodoxy. No traditional credo can serve as his standard in the Wars of Truth, for he leads us to believe that only the Commedia can provide the textual test of his faith along with the extraordinary ritual contexts—baptism in Lethe, confession in Eden, catechism in Gemini, communion in the Rose—where his faithfulness to the Truth can be demonstrated to the truly faithful. What makes his orthodoxy unique from the outset is its Beatricean dispensation. In his erotic conversion from Philosophy back to Beatrice, Dante does not embrace the Faith. Faith embraces him. As a pure embodiment of Beatrice’s power to move his heart and renew his world, the first Theological Virtue appears in the form of a snow-white maiden stepping towards him from the right wheel of the chariot of the Church where she has been dancing with her sisters Hope and Charity. Her rit-
INTRODUCTION
33
ual function is to draw him into the wheeling motion of their angelic carol so that Beatrice may see how many steps her “faithful one” [fedele] (Purg. 31.134) has taken to see his lady. His mission, in turn, is to witness and embrace the new cult of his old innamorata—a personal saint uncanonized by Rome—so that she can convert him through the momentum of her Virtues but also through “proofs physical and metaphysical” [prove / fisice e metafisice] (Par. 24.133–4) to the fantastic vision of a Roman Church recreated in her image. The choral engendering of her church as a sacred dance results in the amorous dynamism, aesthetic impetus, doctrinal flexibility, concordant diversity, and prophetic expansiveness of the Commedia. Once Beatrice has revealed to his admiring gaze the “double dance” of her love and wisdom [doppia danza] (Par. 13.20), the poet can look back on all the doctrinal controversies in church history with a divinely comic eye and perceive his idiosyncratic system of beliefs as both a blessed transcendence and a blatant transgression of the Catholicism marketed to pilgrims during the Jubilee in Rome.26 Is Dante’s orthodoxy ultimately Roman Catholic? He certainly insists that it is, and that is enough to make the question critically relevant to all his readers wherever (or whether) they place themselves on the religious spectrum. Anyone who thinks otherwise, he protests, has either read the Commedia malevolently as a falsification of God’s Word or has failed to read it charitably in accordance with Beatrice’s Faith. At the start of his journey he compares himself with St. Paul, who, near the end of his life, visited St. Peter in Rome as lo Vas d’elezïone, per recarne conforto a quella fede ch’è principio a la via di salvazione. [the Chosen Vessel…that he might bring thence confirmation of that faith which is the beginning of the way of salvation.] (Inf. 2. 28–30)
As such, the new pilgrim promises to bring Peter’s successor not merely a new argument for the Faith but also an eyewitness report of the afterlife to confirm all that Paul had taught the Church to accept as the evidence of things unseen. A tall order indeed. As the first clear articulation of Dante’s doctrinal goal, this promise sounds touchingly naive—like the pious plan of an arrogant layman already out of his theological depth. But as its intellectual and political implications unfold throughout the poem, eventually expanding and resounding across the Stellatum until doubtful allegory gives rise to dazzling apocalypse, it crescendoes into something
34
INTRODUCTION
like a grand metaphysical boast only a holy authority of the first magnitude could fulfill. In the end, the Commedia is circularly designed to confirm faith for Roman Catholic readers, as for all others, only if they first accept Dante’s outrageously simple claim that his poem, by its glorious existence, by the astonishing fact of its conception and the more astonishing fact of its completion, is all the confirmation they’ll ever need that salvation lies at the end of the poet’s via. If Dante had simply lost his way in the Dark Wood, his self-proclaimed orthodoxy would likely have remained beyond question. Like Spenser’s Red Cross Knight in the Wood of Error, he would have wandered off course for a canto or two to test his faith and prove his fidelity beyond a shadow of a doubt. But Dante is not an easily beguiled Spenserian crusader, despite the English habit of reading him that way. He is far too intellectually devious (or, as Spenser would insist, too Catholic) to be rescued from error by the simple faith of Una. All the celestial reasonings of Beatrice, and then some, are required to set him straight. What Dante the pilgrim desperately loses and Dante the poet deviously abandons in the opening lines of the Inferno is the familiar old Gospel allegory of the way. It is Christ’s allegory of himself as “the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6) that falls by the wayside in the famous first tercet. In its place, an initially confusing labyrinth of ways opens up—and then down. Even the apocalyptically clear contrast between Christ’s narrow way and the Devil’s broad thoroughfare loses definition in the panicky obscurity of the selva. Ironically, despite the multiple paths to be trod through the darkness and deceptions of the Fallen World, Dante looks back to the pagan world for a way out and traces through its ruins his own singular path to wisdom—the guided extension of his solitary meanderings in the Dark Wood, which he calls the “deep and savage way” [lo cammino alto e silvestro] (Inf. 2.142). This wildly idiosyncratic way cannot be the same as the route of the “journey of our life” [cammin di nostra vita] (Inf. 1.1), down which we all must go, impelled by time and the stars. Like Dante, we must resolve to digress. The choice is ours to take the poet’s unexpected detour into the depths, to brave the unknown along his unnerving track. Two other ways are mentioned only to be immediately ruled out. The “straight way” [diritta via] (Inf. 1.3) has been unwittingly lost, and the “true way” [verace via] (Inf. 1.12) wilfully abandoned, before the poem even gets going. They exist in its opening lines only as memories. Passage along them, or back to them, is now impossible. By dispensing so quickly with the straight way and the true way, Dante strategically compels us to question
INTRODUCTION
35
his orthodoxy all along his chosen route. For both these untaken routes refer to the same familiar way of salvation: “belief” (doxa) that was “straight” and “true” (orthos). His initiatory waywardness literally commits him—and all who follow his traces by “way” of reading—to an allegory of unorthodoxy more shocking in its satiric twists and more defiant in its prophetic turns than any heresiarch’s confession embalmed in the Latin of the Catholic inquisitors. Though his deep and savage way turns out to be plotted along a single continuous route, the tracing-out of a spiral course through a vast underground labyrinth, it seems at first like a reeling smarrimento down every conceivable path of falsehood.27 Pagan fictions, philosophical errors, heretical sophistries, institutional frauds, false prophecies, and demonic lies lure him on through the worst of his era’s epistemological mazes until he doubts the very possibility of a way out. Not being the Marquis de Sade, he strenuously resists the temptation to revel in sacrilege and “ruin down” [rovinare] (cf. Inf. 1.61) into amorality. Not being Thomas Aquinas, he staggeringly yields to confusion. Yet at every bend in his road, at every crooked crossing, he faces the complex moral and aesthetic consequences of his audacious encounter with the Unorthodox. The choice before him is always appallingly simple. Either he joins the ranks of the Unorthodox forever by abandoning the very concept of true belief, or he finds an aesthetic way through their elaborate deceptions by making a triumphantly orthodox poem out of his immediately transgressive experiences. His apology for Christianity is accordingly vectored along the “hard margins” [duri margini] (Inf. 15.1) between heretical transgression and hallowed truth. By relentlessly exposing the limitations of false belief, he must also on occasion play the divinely inspired prophet and push the official limits of orthodoxy. Yet he is not Paul, as he readily admits, nor was meant to be. He was not even meant to be Paul’s mystical convert, Dionysius the Areopagite, whose spiralling contemplations of the angels provided the Church with a model for correcting the worldly involvements of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Instead, he is a lay poet with a dangerous penchant for philosophizing in the Dominican style—his hope of salvation provoked by a rigorous rationalism that once got even the great Dominicans at the University of Paris in trouble with the guardians of orthodoxy. Despite his humble protestation that his sole aim is to see “St. Peter’s gate” [la porta di san Pietro] (Inf. 1.134), he is well aware of the high stakes in the scholastic game of winning salvation through knowledge first, then love, of God.
36
INTRODUCTION
Why, then, should anyone trust him—a bewildered philosopher who fulminates with dark prophecies in the aftermath of the Condemnations? Why must he go to extravagant rhetorical lengths to prove the orthodoxy of his beliefs? Why does he take pains to establish his credibility as an eyewitness of eternal conditions for which faith alone, in the past, had provided sufficient confirmation? Why does his supposedly orthodox “way of salvation” constantly bring him into contact with the Unorthodox? Why does his politics of transcendence depend upon an aesthetics of transgression? By focusing on metatheological questions of this sort, the authors and artists in the volume inquire into the poet’s faith-claims without becoming inquisitors. Since we have no stake in perpetuating the venerable Catholic traditions of the Index and the Inquisition, our effort from the start has been to assess the orthodoxy of Dante teologo in new contextualist ways that resist the old formalist pressure to ignore the crucial issue of his credibility as a prophet. If we were to locate our project on the map of modern literary debate, it would fall squarely on the contested border between Literature and Belief. That also happens to be where Dante poeta positioned the literal level of his allegory, with the result that even his most doubtful readers inevitably find themselves in the paradoxical position of the marvelling soul “who believes and believes not, saying ‘It is, it is not’” [che crede e non, dicendo “Ella è…non è…”] (Purg. 7.12). There are three traditional ways to resolve this paradox. The first way is to censor the outrageous “It is” of Literature with the outraged “It is not” of Belief. The second is to project the “It is” of Belief—any set of credal truths, for instance—onto Literature even when Literature is plainly declaring “It is not.” And the third is to draw Literature so far away from Belief that their mutual contradictions are no longer deemed significant either to readers or to believers. The first way leads to the censorship of texts and the denunciation of authors on religious grounds; the second to apologetic commentaries on texts and symbolic appropriation of their authors for the sake of doctrinal concord; and the third to aesthetic objectification of the form of the text and critical detachment from the beliefs of the author. None of these ways is taken up in this volume. Our various approaches to Dante all start from the assumption that Belief and Literature are both at odds and at one with each other in his high fantasy of orthodoxy with its counter-fantasies of unorthodoxy. We therefore refuse to anathematize him. We decline to canonize him. And we hesitate to detheologize him.
INTRODUCTION
37
The reactionary impulse to denounce him as unorthodox, to stuff his glowering shade into a glowing coffin in the Circle of the Heretics, is almost as old as the Commedia itself. Within a few years of Dante’s death, a Dominican friar named Guido Vernani published a scathing attack on the doctrinal irregularities and political oracles in the poem.28 As the first inquisitor to blow the whistle on the poet’s rumoured Averroism, Vernani concluded that the Commedia and the Monarchia were both vessels of demonic poison because their author had obstinately clung to an erroneous belief in the sufficiency of human reason to establish truths independent of scriptural authority. In 1328, responding to the good friar’s attack on the philosophical basis of Dante’s radically original vision of the separation of papal and imperial powers, the Bishop of Bologna ordered copies of the Monarchia to be publicly burned. Implicit in this textual auto-da-fé was a symbolic incineration of the poet himself, as if his untimely death from malaria in 1321 was all that prevented the authorities from sending him to the stake after they had realized the full extent of his errors. A censorious eye was inevitably cast on certain troubling passages in the Commedia (e.g., Par. 30.133–8) that appeared to eternalize the historical argument of the Monarchia. Expurgation was the shortterm solution. “The name of Dante finds place also in the expurgatory Index issued, in 1581, in Lisbon,” notes George Putnam in his history of Catholic censorship: “The Commedia is prohibited until it has been officially expurgated, and all copies are ordered to be delivered to the Inquisition for correction.”29 By the sixteenth century, the Monarchia was figuring prominently on the Church’s Index of Prohibited Books, where it would remain a target for censorship until the nineteenth century. In the 1850s, during the papacy of Pius IX, an eccentric Dante scholar named Eugène Aroux (plagiarizing the work of another eccentric Dante scholar, Gabriele Rossetti) unmasked the poet of the Disputa as an undercover heretic whom the Pope himself had a moral and political responsibility to cast out of his library. Anyone venturing to read Aroux’s fanatical exposé Dante hérétique, révolutionnaire et socialiste (1854) will be rewarded with a rich banquet of ironies. Though the self-appointed inquisitor launched his attack with a hypocritical obeisance before the Romantic idol of Dante’s poetic genius, he ended it with a polemical transformation of the great medieval monarchist into a socialist bogeyman. Reading the Commedia as cabalistic propaganda for a volatile mixture of Averroism, Freemasonry, and Albigensian Gnosticism, he was particularly zealous in his denunciations of the poet as a pioneering advocate of “la liberté philosophique”: while intellectual freedom may strike modern readers as
38
INTRODUCTION
an admirable cause to uphold, it would certainly not have appealed to postEnlightenment pontiffs who recalled the philosophical libertinism unleashed during the dark days of the French Revolution. Aroux also condemned Dante on traditional doctrinal grounds for exalting the darkness of natural theology over the light of revealed religion, for advancing “une sorte de panthéisme humanitaire” against orthodox Thomistic teachings.30 Pius certainly needed no reminding that heresy was etymologically defined as a perverse act of hairesis or “choosing” to remain in deadly error. Dante perversely chose to confuse God with the Universe, and so his vision of divine glory permeating the visible heavens at the start of Paradiso must be a heretical anticipation of the neo-pagan strain in Renaissance Humanism. Wishing to expose the Commedia as a popular vehicle for disseminating the scandalous political theses of the Monarchia, Aroux spent the last years of his life producing an annotated index of poetic vocabulary, which could be used by the Pope and his Indexers as a “key” to unlock the heretical symbolism of Dante’s “anti-Catholic Comedy.” Wherever Sodom was named in the poem, for instance, Pius would know that the poet was secretly (and wickedly) referring to Rome.31 In the commentary tradition of the twentieth century, Dante’s bold departures from established doctrine continued to be carefully noted but were now magisterially defended on subtle theological, psychological, or aesthetic grounds. Editors implicitly absolved him of his scandalous reputation and reconciled him with the Church. Apology countered anathema. The volpe was once again “Vaticanized.” The defence of Dante’s orthodoxy on the basis of medieval scholastic authority became the exegetical project of several generations of American editors of the Commedia, reaching its prestigious apogee in the Thomistic glosses of Charles S. Singleton’s Bollingen Series edition. Commenting, for instance, on Virgil’s use of the name “Soddoma” (Inf. 11.50) to signify the second ring of the Seventh Circle where sins of violence against God and Nature are punished, Singleton “proves” Dante’s strict adherence to Catholic sexual morality by citing a passage from the Summa theologiae (2–2.154, a.12) in which Aquinas determines that sins committed against Nature, especially sodomy “whereby the very order of nature is violated,” must also be considered injuries done to God as the Author of Nature.32 So appalling was the vitium contra naturam in the eyes of the Catholic Magisterium—then, as now— that hellfire was the only fitting reward for its perpetrators. Yet when Dante surprisingly encounters a group of Sodomites high up on Mount Purgatory where the way of salvation turns into a “burning road” [cammino acceso] (Purg. 26.28), Singleton literally glosses over
INTRODUCTION
39
the poet’s highly unusual respect for the dignity of same-sex lovers by appealing again to the magisterial authority of the Aquinian distinction between natural and unnatural love. “Heterosexual, and therefore natural” is his reflexively apologetic gloss on the transgendering term “ermafrodito” (Purg. 26.82) used by Dante’s guide, Guido Guinizzelli, to identify the lovers who shout about Pasiphaë and the Bull on the Seventh Cornice. Those who shout about Sodom and Gomorrah, however, are still to be perceived as unnatural, Singleton insists, because they run around the Mountain in the opposite direction to the natural lovers. Never mind that both groups run for the same purpose (to burn off excess lust) towards the same goal (ascent into Paradise). Never mind that contrary motion is built into the dance of Nature at the planetary level. Singleton’s apologetic impulse demands that Dante’s clashing notions of sexual morality be serenely readable at every turn in accordance with the timehonoured Catholic opposition of saints to sodomites—even if sustaining that opposition means ignoring the murkiness of St. Thomas’s arguments about Nature or downplaying Dante’s often contrarious attitude towards scholastic authority. Needless to say, the apologetic rehabilitation of Dante as versified Aquinas has received an implicit nihil obstat from the Vatican because it accords so nicely at a textual level with Raphael’s visual restoration of him to the Church’s favour in the Stanza della Segnatura. What better way to put a positive spin on the poet’s infernal embarrassments to the papacy— let’s not forget that he stuffed simonist popes headfirst down a hellhole in a sacrilegious parody of baptism as anal rape (Inf. 19.73–5)—than by neutralizing his transgressive satires of the Magisterium with salutary quotations from the Summa theologiae? So firmly rooted is contemporary Catholic orthodoxy in an institutionally approved Thomism that earnest readers of Singleton’s Dante might be unsettled to learn that the Summa was not universally acknowledged in the poet’s day as an indisputable authority on doctrine; that certain tricky points of radical Aristotelianism were officially condemned in 1277 by the Bishop of Paris under papal instruction; and that Thomas was outrageously pre-canonized by Dante in Paradiso a full three years before the Angelic Doctor’s official elevation to the sainthood by Pope Sylvester VII in 1323.33 Singleton persists in apologizing for Dante even when the poet’s disagreement with Aquinas is so blatant that it cannot be glossed over with subtle theological distinctions. For instance, when Dante observes the lower half of the Celestial Rose teeming with infants (Par. 32.40–8), his Beatricean revision of the populus Dei effectively “corrects” the Aquinian
40
INTRODUCTION
determination that all blessed souls, regardless of their age at death, are to be resurrected with fully grown adult bodies. After noting this striking divergence from orthodox Catholic teachings, Singleton immediately justifies it on aesthetic and psychological grounds by citing the domestic musings of Charles H. Grandgent: “Dante was influenced certainly by a desire for significant visible contrast and also, we may conjecture, by that love of little children which he has more than once revealed. The sweet conception of an encircling sea of baby faces, all twittering with baby voices, must have charmed him as it charms us.”34 So the poet was not being bad here. He was simply being Italian, which is to say Catholic and therefore “naturally” heterosexual. By expanding the contrastive symmetries of the Empyrean’s aesthetically complicated design, he seems to have succumbed to Italian bambini-worship—as who would not amid a multitude of animated putti! The natural charms of heterosexuality have triumphed at an editorial level over the unnatural bent of the Unorthodox. More difficult to resist than the curb of anathema or the lure of apology is the temptation to avoid these doctrinally committed extremes by displacing theology with aesthetics so that the controversial issue of Dante’s orthodoxy simply fades away into insignificance through intense meditations on purely formal aspects of his poetry. This modern interpretive strategy is particularly tempting for readers of Dante in English because of the pervasive influence of T.S. Eliot, whose formalist approach to the Commedia owes much to the aesthetic dicta of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Benedetto Croce.35 “In reading Dante,” Eliot famously warned the secular consumers of literary classics in 1929, you must enter the world of thirteenth-century Catholicism, which is not the world of modern Catholicism, as his world of physics is not the world of modern physics. You are not called upon to believe what Dante believed, for your belief will not give you a groat’s worth more of understanding and appreciation; but you are called upon more and more to understand it. If you can read poetry as poetry, you will “believe” in Dante’s theology exactly as you believe in the physical reality of his journey; that is, you suspend both belief and disbelief.36
Coleridge’s venerable notion of the “suspension of disbelief”37 is not simply prescribed for the modern reader in this passage. As a rational response to literary fantasy, it is unquestioningly assumed to operate as part of the normal process of interpreting fiction as make-believe: we are encouraged to adhere to the age-old rule of temporary incredulity so that the game of fiction can proceed between author and reader. What’s new here,
INTRODUCTION
41
and newly prescribed, is the suspension of belief. We are instructed to leave our baggage of religious doctrines (whatever they happen to be, if we have any at all) outside Dante’s door if we are to gain even a modest understanding of what’s going on inside his poem. There is to be no cross-cultural interaction of our belief systems with his aggressive faith, no dialectical interplay between medieval and modern Catholicism, no doctrinal clash between Christianity and other religions, and certainly no leakage of Dante’s happy Hereaftering into the harrowing Here and Now. Conceding that Dante could hardly have composed the Commedia with a theological understanding of the Fallen World but without a firm belief in the Divine Plan, Eliot nevertheless insisted with Crocean bravado that readers must make a distinction “between what Dante believes as a poet and what he believed as a man.”38 Note the difference in tense: what the poet makes us believe under the spell of his high fantasy subsists in a perpetual present, the imaginary “It is” of Literature, while whatever he may actually have shored up on the rough coast of Belief when he was alive belonged to the Middle Ages where it was washed away long ago by the tides of intellectual history. Like good moderns, we must not dwell on the past: “It is not.” We must resist the gravity of romantic nostalgia for creeds outworn. We must brace ourselves with the aesthetically progressive thought that the poet’s “private belief becomes a different thing in poetry.”39 What it has become through poetic transmutation is a vital component of something permanently public, a grand artistic design, a self-contained aesthetic unity accessible to anyone who enters imaginatively into it at the literal level—and stays there. Hermeneutical ascent to the anagogic level, where mere doctrines turn into mystical experiences, is not in the cards for the modern reader who must suspend both belief and disbelief and rest secure in the doctrinally carefree state of “poetic assent” beyond the tiresome clash of rival religions and ideologies. With the reassuring dictum “You are not called upon to believe what Dante believed,” Eliot is shielding the modern reader philosophically (and himself psychologically?) from the relentless force of Dante’s indoctrinating rhetoric. Of course no reader has to believe what Dante believed, not even to gain a theological understanding of the poem; but pace Eliot, Dante surely calls upon his reader at every turn in the Commedia to believe what he believes, and to do so in the deepest religious sense, which is not just to imagine what it might be like to believe what he believes but to be utterly persuaded by the force of his visionary convictions. Belief for Dante is absolute in act but relative in potency. While faith is being built up in his wandering soul from canto to canto, its constructive energy
42
INTRODUCTION
dances back and forth dialectically across the divide between pilgrim and poet, lover and beloved, author and reader, believer and doubter; but when doctrinal totality is finally realized at the moment of oltraggio, when the credenza is fully fatta, it is to be accepted with perfect certitude—or not at all. There is no half-belief at the end of Dantean make-believe. The poet’s credibility as a witness is an issue from the very start of his testimony, from the moment he establishes his honesty by confessing that he cannot tell how he wandered into the Dark Wood because he was so full of sleep at the time: “I cannot rightly say how I entered it” [Io non so ben ridir com’ i’ v’intrai] (Inf. 1.10; emphasis added). Thus is the reader’s doubt forestalled with the promise that everything in the narrative, even the gaps, will be plausibly explained. The signal importance of this interpersonal process of trust-building is implicit in his famous command to the reader to “mark the doctrine” [mirate la dottrina] (Inf. 9.62) hidden in his verses as well as in the mantralike rhetoric of lines such as “I believed that he believed that I believed” [Cred’ïo ch’ei credette ch’io credesse] (Inf. 13.25). At the very least, following the back-and-forth vectoring of far credenza, we can conclude that Dante believed that the reader should believe that the pilgrim had come to believe what the poet now commands the reader to believe. Subtle distinctions between Dante’s belief “as a poet” and his belief “as a man” are hard to sustain in the rapid crossfire of his doctrinal transference. Eliot’s early training as a bank clerk occasionally betrays itself in his critical accounting. It shines through his claim that theological understanding of this or that Catholic doctrine only has value for the modern reader of Dante in so far as it enhances enjoyment of the beauties of the verse. In itself any single doctrine (even if it’s still current in the Church) is virtually worthless—like paper money in times of high inflation. Whatever religious beliefs the reader might harbour, cherish, and invest in the glossatorial project of understanding the theological design of the Commedia must be dramatically devalued now—literally cheapened to less than a “groat’s worth”—in order for the poetic riches of the poem to appreciate in cultural value through being appreciated in purely objective formal terms. Countering Eliot’s adherence to the drawing-room ideal of indifference to everything in the poem that is not poetry, I contend that a rigorously modernist suspension of disbelief does not require a suspension of all beliefs—as if the ideal frame of mind for reading Dante were a Zen-like state of discursive transcendence. That is hardly possible for moderns anyway. How can any of us suspend both belief and disbelief, as Eliot would
INTRODUCTION
43
have us do, without wiping out the discursive contents of our minds? Such a state is only possible to attain in Dante’s poetic universe at the moment of oltraggio, but even then the transcendence of theological discourse does not even necessitate the isolation of subsequent literary judgment from religious and aesthetic interest in the problem of orthodoxy, an issue which will always be relevant to a poem in which a doctrinally marginal poet stages his own orthodoxy test and passes it (of course) with flying colours. I am inclined to accept the postmodern truism that aesthetic detachment from the discursive battlefield is an escapist fantasy entertained by the more privileged defenders of modernist aesthetics. Eliot himself was hardly stable in his opinions about sustaining the fantasy of aesthetic detachment. His well-known attraction (and notorious ambivalence) to the Brunetto episode in Inferno 15 suggests that his stance of critical objectivity may have had more to do with the epistemology of the closet than with the eschatology of the cloister. Dante’s unorthodox respect for the Sodomites—especially in Purgatorio 26—may have shaken the foundations of Eliot’s nascent Anglo-Catholicism in the anxiously secular world of the late 1920s. By 1931, in his revisionist essay “Religion and Literature,” he retracts his earlier opinion about the reasonableness of insulating aesthetic enjoyment from religious conviction: “I am convinced that we fail to realize how completely, and yet how irrationally, we separate our literary from our religious judgments. If there could be a complete separation, perhaps it might not matter: but the separation is not, and never can be, complete.”40 This prophetic remark is more in tune with Dantean aesthetics than any of his earlier de haut en bas pronouncements about the irrelevance of religious belief (as distinct from theological understanding, which cashes out as “appreciation”) for the modern reader who rises above the murky cave of dogma to appreciate Dante’s status as the supreme poet of Transcendent Form. That is not how the contributors to the volume appreciate what is still potentially sacred in the “poema sacro”: in contrast to Eliot’s connoisseurial formalism, our contextualist engagement with the unorthodoxy of the Commedia is simultaneously aesthetic, theological, and political. We are not embarrassed by our attraction to the idea that a medieval poem might have some purchase on the modern soul or even on the postmodern soul-shade inhabiting its abject body-construct. Our aesthetic response to Dante’s strategic transgressiveness refuses to be academically sealed off from the creative activism and activist creativity of the Unorthodox of our own times.
44
INTRODUCTION
CREDULITY
That is why we hesitate to follow Teodolinda Barolini’s detheologizing path back to the formal garden of strictly literary “appreciation” where Eliot tried to contain the Sacred Poem by defending its poetic bellezze from the impetuous torrents of belief. Barolini’s strategic privileging of form over content in the 1990s is more honestly self-defensive than Eliot’s was in the 1920s, and certainly more relevant to the attack on “secular humanism” from true believers with little interest in Literature outside the Word of God. To Eliot’s anagogic formalism, which strove to lift the modern reader up to the heights of Transcendent Form, she prefers a typological formalism that excites the postmodern reader with intertextual meditations on the artfulness (and artificiality) of Dante’s narrative patterns. Appreciating the titanic power of Dantean rhetoric, she confronts the poet’s megalomaniacal claim to inspired prophet status with the formidable counter-momentum of postmodern skepticism and urges us to resist what any humanities professor at a secular university would fear most in the tumultuous heyday of the Religious Right: conversion to a cult. “We read the Commedia as Fundamentalists read the Bible,” she warns us with disarming sympathy, as if she too had once been under the spell of an apocalyptic cult leader but had somehow succeeded in deprogramming herself. Presumably Fundamentalists read the Bible in a way that sustains their scary belief system. Instead of gluing their eyes to the literal level from cover to cover, they read in a selectively literal-minded way intended to sustain their political authority in the coming millennium. To make conversion to Dantean Fundamentalism even scarier than the prospect of a born-again emperor in the White House, she portrays the process of indoctrination as insidiously unconscious. We read the Sacred Poem “as though it were true, and the fact that we do this is not connected to our religious beliefs, for on a narrative level, we believe the Commedia without knowing that we do so. The history of the Commedia’s reception offers a sustained demonstration of our narrative credulity, our readerly incapacity to suspend our suspension of disbelief in front of the poet-creator’s masterful deployment of what are essentially techniques of verisimilitude.”41 As an example of our understandable but still deplorable credulity, she cites a theological debate that refuses to go away in Dante studies even after the debaters have been calmly reminded, from the sanely critical standpoint of a deprogrammed non-believer, that they’re arguing passionately over the extratextual destiny of a purely fictional character: Thus, the poet constructs in Vergil [sic] a fictive construct so “real” and compelling that not only do generations of readers wish that he were
INTRODUCTION
45
saved (a legitimate response) but periodically—and less legitimately— the issue is raised by scholars who debate the matter in terms of its theological plausibility rather than the textual reality. Rarely do we think in terms of the narrative exigencies that require Vergil’s damnation or the narrative uses to which he is put as a tool in Dante’s struggle against a severely overdetermined plot. In other words, we discuss Vergil’s salvation as though the issue belonged to the real world, rather than to a text whose narrative powers have generated our concern.42
Debating the fate of this impressive but merely fictional character after he “disappears” from the text (presumably he’s whisked back down to Limbo) is comparable to discussing whether the prophet Elijah actually dies when he’s whooshed up to heaven in God’s chariot. In other words, it’s a non-issue, and we should be severely indifferent to any answers that such discussions generate. Since two of the authors in this volume participate in the very debate dismissed by Barolini, I am prompted here to refute her dismissal of its scholarly legitimacy. The question of Virgil’s salvation (or his borderline potential to be saved) persists among serious readers of the poem because Dante’s shamelessly unorthodox text opens up a wide range of theological possibilities that orthodox Catholicism reflexively condemns as impossible or unthinkable. One such possibility—revealed as excitingly thinkable in Dante’s account of Gregory the Great’s intercession on behalf of the Emperor Trajan (Par. 20.43–8)—is that the benevolent prayers of the faithful may positively affect the pagans in Limbo as well as the penitents in Purgatory. A reader who thinks of this exceptional reprieve as a solid fact outside the poem may indeed be suffering from “narrative credulity”; but the same charge cannot be levelled at one who accepts it as a theological hypothesis worth entertaining in a political effort, say, to challenge the discursively imposed border between Christians and non-Christians. This is the very border dear to the hearts (and crucial to the foreign policy) of the Fundamentalists whose reading assumptions Barolini takes a swipe at in her attack on the hermeneutics of credulity.43 Even as the poet has taken the liberty to imagine the salvation of pagans and sodomites and suicides and prostitutes and excommunicated princes, so too might his readers feel free to imagine it, and if their collective liberty unsettles certitude in the seminary or challenges skepticism in the university, then these hierarchies of right-thinking will just have to deal with an eruption of vernacular theology around a text long appropriated by churches and schools for their own ends. To readers who appre-
46
INTRODUCTION
ciate the power of Dante’s mimetic art to bridge the World and the Text, the contested border between the Orthodox and the Unorthodox continues to extend out from the poem into the historical domain even as the original distinction was drawn into the poem from it. From this synergistic viewpoint, which insists on the contextualist relevance of the poem to contemporary cultural issues, the debate over Virgil’s salvation is justified on both theological and literary grounds as an occasion for sustaining hope in the poet’s activist challenge to all the forces in the “outside world” that lead to the exclusion and suppression of people who deserve neither. If the reception-history of the Commedia ironically demonstrates “our incapacity to suspend our suspension of disbelief,” then we should unbend Barolini’s mind-bending phrase and marvel at the amazing capacity of Dante’s readers to believe in the Text as continually relevant to the World. An array of cultural evidence (such as Raphael’s Disputa) has been gathering through the centuries to confirm belief in Dante’s own prophecy that his poem, as it works in and on the world, will expand in a blaze of creativity beyond its original textual limits. Believing in his text as a tropological stimulus for engagement with the world does not have to mean converting to an apocalyptic cult worthy of tabloid coverage. When Belief denies the textuality of Literature—which Dante never advises his reader to do— it soon reduces theological criticism to absurdity. Barolini’s formalist advice for preventing this reductio is to insist on the strict separation of Belief from Literature, which effectively results in the hypostasization of the reader in a putative “real world” lying beyond the illusory mirror of the text: Standing resolutely outside of the fiction’s mirror games, we can begin to examine the formal structures that manipulate the reader so successfully that even now we are blinded, prevented by the text’s fulfilment of its self-imposed goals from fully appreciating its achievements as artifact. What is needed to get some purchase on this poem is not a “new historicism,” which is an effective tool vis-à-vis texts that have always been read as texts, i.e., as false, but a “new formalism”: a tool that will not run aground on the text’s presentation of itself as true.44
While modern readers in Eliot’s wake would have no difficulty conceiving themselves as hypostatic intelligences existing outside the mirrorworld of language, postmodern readers who have been taught to think of themselves in textual terms (the self as discursive construct, the body as political text, and so on) will find Barolini’s seemingly sensible advice difficult to follow. Though her key term “detheologize” resonates with
INTRODUCTION
47
postmodern verbs like “deconstruct” and “defamiliarize,” the new formalism she proposes for Dante studies is really not that different from New Criticism or its immediate predecessor, Eliot’s modernist aestheticism. However resolutely her new formalism is adopted as an epistemological shield against the supernatural force field of Dante’s rhetoric, it is sure to break down under its own binarizing pressures. The border between World and Text has proved of late to be rather vague and permeable as a conceptual barrier—more so, perhaps, than the earlier border between Belief and Literature. Something outrageous has also happened to the venerable solidity of the World in recent decades: like the once “too too solid flesh” of the body, it has melted under the erosive torrents of discourse analysis and resolved itself into a provisional episteme institutionally constructed and textually authorized. Outside the Text, it seems, is a maze-world of other texts. To detheologize Dante, then, is to risk hermeneutical suicide. The reader who tries to stand “outside” the Text might end up, like poor Pier della Vigna, imprisoned in its thorny ramifications. By refusing to be placed inside the poem as its humbly obedient lettor, Barolini strives to release contemporary readings of the poem “from the author’s grip.”45 To strike a blow for freedom is always exhilarating, and Barolini strikes it by exalting the allegory of the poets over the allegory of the theologians in a proud bid for critical independence and objectivity. But any reader who follows her to the letter is surely stopped short in the spirit on discovering that the intensely subjective stakes in the interpretive process are not separate from but intimately bound up with the theologically liberating project of the poem. Under new formalist influence, the reader’s propulsive desire to understand the poem must yield to an inhibiting fear that the poet is out to take us all in—which sadly reverses the pilgrim’s therapeutic progress from paura to disio in the emotional unfolding of his journey. If Dante’s ultimate goal is to release us from the textual world of allegory into the visionary world of apocalypse, then Barolini’s is to keep us forever at the typological level exposing the text as artifact. We know the text is artificial. Dante reminds of that conspicuous fact repeatedly. Yet Barolini’s charting of his regressus along mythical trajectories (such as the “mad flight” of Ulysses) serve the Cassandra-like function of alerting us to our own fatal credulity, unveiling the poet’s controlling mechanisms as somehow dangerous to our mental health, and exposing the devious ways he shapes our readings as if his purposes, like those of the pagan gods, were aggressively self-serving. Moral reflection on the world of the poem becomes an intertextual recon-
48
INTRODUCTION
naissance mission to reveal the “wellsprings of his mimetic art”46 instead of a contemplative preparation for anagogic escape from the text. Yet the oltraggio moment—textuality transcended—is what Barolini herself ironically desires in her oddly mystical move to essentialize poetic form. We should not be surprised then to discover that her detheologizing regressus leads ad Dantem rather than ad Deum. Suspicious of the allegorical veil as a concealing artifice, she lifts it up to marvel not at the doctrines behind the verses or at the mysteries behind the doctrines but at the “poetic choices” Dante cunningly camouflaged behind the mimetic realism of his text. Her critical quest projects her own peculiarly late romantic text back through his words into the penetralium of his genius, into the psychological origins of his creativity. Since his covert literary intentions become the prime focus of her formalist analysis of the Commedia, his overt theological intentions to reform the world are kept at a distance, glossed only as shaping influences on the text, and deliberately contained in the bitter capsules of medieval doctrine ingested only for the sake of appreciating the sweet new style of his indoctrination techniques. Behind Barolini’s counter-readings of Dante as author of “The Undivine Comedy” lurks a vestige of Blake’s famous suspicion about Milton, namely, that his motives for writing a divine poem were secretly satanic. Dante, of course, got there ahead of both Blake and Barolini. Meeting the Intentional Fallacy head-on in hell, he detheologized his own worst image of himself as a master-liar in the ironically truthful figure of Geryon. If any essay in the volume comes close to detheologizing Dante, it is my “acephalic” reading of Mohammed’s wound (“Anti-Dante: Bataille in the Ninth Bolgia”). By considering the evisceration of the Prophet from the sado-masochistic perspective of Bataille, a perspective informed by the aggressive atheism of Sade and Freud, I may appear to have reduced the Commedia to a poem even less divine than Barolini’s formalism demands. But the acephalic level of reading paradoxically highlights the religious impact of the poem on the reader. Rather than becoming “undivine” or “anti-divine,” the poem remains sacred—retaining the transgressive character of a sacrificial ritual—when its theological excesses are interpreted in light of Bataille’s psychoanalytic philosophy of the erotic quest for continuity. Dante is not detheologized so much as retheologized in the sequence of essays that follow this introduction. While not every contributor to the volume shares my enthusiasm for acephalic readings, we all admire Dante’s intellectual freedom to take strong theological positions—however perilously unorthodox—on the agonizing questions raised by his
INTRODUCTION
49
culture. By conceiving our project as a “retheologizing” of Dante, I only mean to suggest that we have all in our different ways extended his visionary answers outward from his fragmenting culture towards our own parlous times so that the theological clash between “It is” and “It is not” has been creatively renewed in relation to contemporary issues. Some of us have turned to his poem for prophetic affirmation of various modern movements of liberation. Others have found aesthetic challenges in his totalizing view of the Text as the World. Still others have recovered through his poem a sense of the political possibilities inherent in marginality. Our collective bent is to go with the outrageous excess of the poet back into his world, and then forth, recharged, into ours. CREDO
In the Heaven of the Fixed Stars, far above the fiery sepulchres of the Heretics, Dante stages a spectacular confirmation of his orthodoxy. The audience is half the show. Descending from the Empyrean, like celebrities at a glittering premiere, all the saints turn out to witness his examination by St. Peter on the essence of the Catholic faith—a unique event in cosmic as well as ecclesiastical history. The Queen of Heaven herself shows up for the viva voce. As the Stella Maris whose guiding light shines over mariners on the Great Sea of Being, Mary naturally takes the best seat in the house, high above the action, where the sightlines are unobstructed by material things. Papal Rome seems very far away. Compared with the lily-scented auditorium of the Stellatum, the Seat of the Catholic Faith has become a theatre of cruelty where Peter’s own burial ground has been turned into a “sewer of blood and stench” [cloaca / del sangue e de la puzza] (Par. 27.25–6) by a succession of usurping popes. Like Astraea, Faith herself has left the earth to twinkle in the firmament with her sister Virtues as a sign of what no longer burns here below. Before Dante’s examination begins, the Blessed entertain Mary in a surprisingly pagan way. Lighting up the vast rotunda of the firmament they transform themselves into fiery spheres and rotate “upon fixed poles” [sopra fissi poli] (Par. 24.11) like the dancing stars in Plato’s Timaeus (40d). Drawn from this old dialogue are the philosophical program notes for the New Dance—the choral revitalization of Catholic society—which Mary’s Minerva-like emissary Beatrice has taught Dante to envision wisely by reading philosophy in the transfiguring light of her beauty. Though hers is a beauty hard to distinguish from truth, it is certainly not a Platonic Form—not Absolute Beauty in the old male-doctored sense. It is peculiar to her maternal focus. The truth radiating through it is something dawn-
50
INTRODUCTION
ingly new and still enwombed, a secret potency growing to the fullness of life under the cosmic mantle of the Mater Misericordiae. The stars once mistakenly perceived by Timaeus as a chorus of visible gods rise again before the poet’s unclouded eyes as a visionary chorus of lovers. The hot love-light streaming from their heightened but still human souls has literally humanized the cooly rational divinities of the Demiurge’s cosmos. That cosmos, as Beatrice revealed down below on the moon, was a mere myth. Up here, however, the sunburst of the Son dispels all misleading appearances from the starry night. Since the Love that moves the saints and the other stars is supracosmic in origin, the combined radiance of their dance has transhumanized them beyond myth into the visible reality of a dynamic social force. That force, simultaneously amorous and intellectual, enchants its mortal spectator by uniting a new heaven to a new earth before his eyes—“per speculum in aenigmate” no longer.47 Previously the apocalyptic order of beatitude had existed only in poetic fantasy or prophetic dream. A philosophical heresy from a pagan perspective, Beatrice’s reconciliation of Platonic cosmology with Catholic doctrine reverses the orthodox relation between image and paradigm in the classical metaphor of the cosmic dance.48 The chorea beata, an exalted human motion, now provides the eternal aesthetic model for the choreae astrorum, while the once sacred circling of the stars is reduced to a transient spectacle of divine artistic power, a saintly jeu d’esprit, its temporal order no more than a shadowy preface of the everlasting Mary-centred culture of the Catholic Empyrean. No wonder Dante’s mind boggles a bit at the scene. Has any rigorous orthodoxy test been administered in a more artistically freewheeling social sphere? Though the masque-like metamorphosis of Platonic cosmology into a Marian intermezzo would be a hard act to follow—even by celestial standards!—the human stars of the show soon outdo themselves by performing a remarkably unclassical variation of the cosmic dance. When their supernatural momentum exceeds the natural spin of their star forms, they free themselves from the fixed circuits of the old astral chorus and whirl across the firmament, “flaming like comets” [fiammando, volte, a guisa di comete] (Par. 24.12) to mark the momentous novelty of the occasion. Far from simply repeating the clockwork carols of the Wise around Beatrice in the Sun, these higher motions introduce the possibility of idiosyncratic trajectories into the belief system engendered by the circular design of creation. Concordantly stabilized yet daringly varied, the comet solos portend the happy outcome of Dante’s singular trials as a believer.
INTRODUCTION
51
Thus aflame with love, the saints display their joy—their burning interest—in the stabilization of the poet’s philosophically jolted and careening beliefs under Beatrice’s calmly centring Marian influence. Since Peter’s voice breathes forth from the brightest fireball like a comet’s tail, his questioning of Dante’s faith seems to flow directly out from the dance. It is part of a grander performance-in-progress, a verbal extension of the visionary crowning of Mary by the fiery whorls of the Archangel Gabriel (Par. 23.94–6). Charismatically fused in the angelic dance are the two climactic moments in Mary’s life—Annunciation and Coronation—as if these events are being perceived simultaneously from the perspective of the eternal Now. Coronations always announce something big in Dante’s heaven, an auspicious beginning, an unexpected succession, an astonishing turn of events. Re-enacting Gabriel’s annunciatory coronation in the temporal cosmos, Peter whirls three times around Beatrice with a song so divine that no mortal imagination (except, of course, Dante’s) can recreate it. In effect the Arch-Pope triple-crowns her, and for a transgressive instant, as the glowing helix of his logos-trail floats around her head, she plays the fantastic role of papal successor—the first female pontiff in a hitherto unthinkable reordering of Ecclesia as a Marian matriarchy. As a woman on the far side of death, Beatrice cannot be pope except in fantasy. Yet the living man who will bear the vision of her genderreversing female power back to earth stands before her ready to be ordained as the high priest of her cult in the disastrously male-driven worlds of Church and Empire. Thanks to her Muse-like intercessions, Dante is now able to see with the amorous eyes of his heart the heretically weedy orto catolico as a gynocentric paradise of roses and lilies. Still facing him is the political and aesthetic challenge of actualizing the potential of her imaginary papacy through the reforming energies of his poetry, a divine art that will somehow enhance the earthly concord of the faithful by participating in the play of divinely harmonious influences dancing across the Stellatum. At the risk of appearing heretical in the eyes of the World, he must pass the test of worthiness as both Beatrice’s and Peter’s successor in the eyes of Heaven. His special orthodoxy as a prophet-poet must be confirmed by their double-gendered authority. Accordingly the three main questions in the examination—What is Faith? Whence does it come down to you? Why do you view the Scriptures as the Word of God?—are fired at him as if directly impelled by the centrifugal momentum of Peter’s three amorous turns around Beatrice. What might have been a formulaic catechizing or a dull disputation is made to seem like the most exciting performance in the universe, an
52
INTRODUCTION
intellectual pas de deux in which a pair of clashing suitors resolve their potential differences through a ritualized enactment of their love for the same ideally wise lady. From Dante-pilgrim’s standpoint, the examination feels like high drama. The intellectual equivalent of a chivalric duel, it fills him with keen suspense despite the foregone conclusions of the scholastic arguments with which he anxiously “arms” himself [così m’armava io d’ogne ragione] (Par. 24.49). Faith, he fires back, is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen. It rains down upon humanity through the grace of the Holy Spirit. Its Divine origin is proved through the miracles recorded in the Old and New Testaments. That his theological answers prove to be correct is hardly surprising since he has ghost-written the questions himself and set up the whole test for his own benefit. The show in the Stellatum is a blatant apologia designed to “prove” the impeccable orthodoxy of his beliefs by appealing to authorities not even the corrupt inquisitors of the papal regime would dare to question. Imagine the pope refusing to accept St. Peter’s judgment on the matter. Unthinkable! What is surprising, from a purely dramatic standpoint, is the Apostolic Light’s unexpected way of signalling his pleasure at Dante’s graduation summa cum laude: così, benedicendomi cantando, tre volte cinse me, sì com’ io tacqui, l’appostolico lume al cui comando io avea detto: sì nel dir li piacqui! [so, singing benedictions on me, the apostolic light at whose bidding I had spoken encircled me three times when I was silent, I so pleased him by my speech.] (Par. 24.151–4)
Why this reprise of Beatrice’s fantasy coronation? Reciting the right declarations of faith with the right burst of zeal is a holy act expected of the humblest Catholic at any mundane mass; but here, despite its ordinariness, it becomes Dante’s rationale for claiming the extraordinary right to enter into the papal succession through the dance of the Blessed—not as a usurper-on-the-make but as a saint-in-the-making—with his personally canonized patroness beaming smiles at him like Guinevere, still blameless, at a tournament. When the comet-pope crowns him with glory at the end of his ordeal, he can breathe a sigh of relief that this will be the only fire he’ll have to face from the Papal Inquisition. For what inquisitor would dare question the faith of one thus tested, a graduate of the University of the Uni-
INTRODUCTION
53
verse, a champion of Truth who once stood before Mary herself as the new successor Petri? Habemus poetam. Dante’s otherworldly elevation through an amorously begotten faith in Beatrice adds a new dimension to the old concept of orthodoxy formulated by the worldlier Fathers of the fourth century. True belief, as revealed in the Commedia, cannot simply be established through adherence to a set of patristic doctrines miraculously conveyed through the Holy Spirit and authoritatively recorded in Church Latin. It must now be danced out in the service of exalted female powers, starting with Faith herself who reprises her dance beside Beatrice’s chariot as a star whirling in Mary’s firmament. Accordingly, the rigid limits of orthodoxy must now be boldly expanded to embrace the doctrinal revelations of Beatrice to her inspired poet, who alone, by his own account, can invent a new love-language in a poetic style powerful enough to lure the faithful through the old discursive maze of post-Babel confusions. That very expansion, with its implicit appeal to a higher strain of orthodoxy than mortal ears have yet enjoyed, can be detected in the most formulaic test of faith in Christian discourse, the reciting of the creed, which Dante is called upon to perform at the climax of his examination. Here is his amorous spin on Credo in unum deum: Io credo in uno Dio solo ed etterno, che tutto ’l ciel move, non moto, con amore e con disio… [I believe in one God, sole and eternal, who, unmoved, moves all the heavens with love and with desire…] (Par. 24.130–2)
The near-Latin sound of “Io credo in uno Dio” initially masks the immense audacity of the subsequent tercets in this little performative utterance, which has aptly been called “Dante’s Credo” to distinguish it from any of the Church’s: e a tal creder non ho io pur prove fisice e metafisice, ma dalmi anche la verità che quinci piove per Moïsè, per profeti e per salmi, per l’Evangelio e per voi che scriveste poi che l’ardente Spirto vi fé almi; e credo in tre persone etterne, e queste credo una essenza sì una e sì trina, che soffera conguinto ‘sono’ ed ‘este.’ De la profonda condizion divina
54
INTRODUCTION
ch’io tocco mo, la mente mi sigilla più volte l’evangelica dottrina. [and for this belief I have not only proofs physical and metaphysical, but it is given to me also in the truth that rains down hence through Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms, through the Gospel, and through you who wrote when the fiery Spirit had made you holy. And I believe in three Eternal Persons, and these I believe to be one essence, so one and so threefold as to comport at once with are and is. With the profound divine state whereof I now speak, the evangelic doctrine many times sets the seal upon my mind.] (Par. 24.133–44)
Dante imagines many sublime moments of humiliation for himself as an upstart worldling in the Commedia, but this is not one of them. The mystical ego-amplifying ring of this declaration must be heard to be believed. His repeated emphasis on the first person—io (strikingly added to the opening credo) and mi (tolling twice) and finally me (in the sixth tercet, cited below)—has been scrupulously muffled by modern editors intent on reassuring theologically sensitive readers that “Dante’s Credo follows the accepted one in its essentials,” with only a few jangling Aristotelian “touches” added like grace notes to an original score.49 In the wake of such apologetic exegesis no one need ever worry that loose doctrinal cannons will explode on the deck of the poet’s spiritdriven bark, for the odd discords in this formulation of la profonda condizion divina turn out to be merely scholastic echoes of the angelic concord blowing across the Great Sea of Being. But are Dante’s intensely personal alterations of the official creed mere flourishes of rhetoric, so many poetic “accidents” floating over an essentially orthodox mentality in profound agreement with the truths revealed through the Catholic Bible? To suppose so is to ignore the tumultuous history of creeds, to forget that wars have been waged and kingdoms divided over the tiniest changes to the wording of these always highly political articulations of religious truth. As a performance of faith, a ritual demonstration of orthodoxy through a purely declarative act, the felicitous recitation of a creed absolutely demands faithfulness to the linguistic details as well as to the theological gist of its ecclesiastically approved text. In the Roman Church a creed cannot be a statement of a primarily personal faith—a concept deeply alien to Catholic orthodoxy—if it is to function politically as a collective declaration of allegiance to an institutionally prescribed set of beliefs. Dante’s departures from the “accepted” (presumably Nicene) creed are flamboyant, to say the least. First he renders the sacred formulary in his
INTRODUCTION
55
own poetically enhanced vernacular, which has the immediate effect of removing the central tenets of his newly purified Beatricean faith away from the impure political sphere where the Latin of Boniface VIII and his corrupt clergy was spreading the Devil’s confusions throughout the Italian city states. Next he reduces its doctrinal core to epigrammatic summations of monotheism and Trinitarianism, ethereally eliminating all clauses relevant to the specifically temporal concerns of Christology and ecclesiology. Then he amplifies his two main doctrines with scholastic glosses, boldly conflating Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover and Boethius’s Ultimate Desire with St. John’s God of Love—as if philosophical clarifications of the Divine Nature had never caused a serious heresy to arise in the history of Christian doctrine! Finally, rounding off his Credo with an aesthetic manifesto blithely unrelated to the original liturgical text but brilliantly harmonized with the dance in the Stellatum, he declares his personal faith in the divine origin of his poetry: Quest’ è ’l principio, quest’ è la favilla che si dilata in fiamma poi vivace, e come stella in cielo in me scintilla. [This is the beginning, this is the spark which then dilates to a living flame and like a star in heaven shines within me.] (Par. 24.145–7)
This exultant coda on the dilation of his own brilliance is the verbal equivalent of the visionary comet-solos in the dance of the Blessed. It flames forth on its own portentously original track, anticipating not just the starry whirl of his will at the end of the poem but also the momentous expansion of the tiny creative flashpoint of the Credo into the supernova of the Commedia. Not until Iago utters his nihilistic anti-creed in Verdi’s Otello (“I believe in a cruel God”) will an affirmation of personal virtù flare up again in Italian with the pontifical confidence, the flagrantly self-ecclesiological glorification, that shines though every line of Dante’s Credo. Doctrinally, of course, the two declarations of faith are as different as day and night. One proclaims the existence of an essentially good God; the other flatly denies it. One radiates cosmic benevolence; the other ignites mala voglia. One illuminates the principle of orthodoxy; the other explodes it at its metaphysical source. Despite the mutual inadmissibility of their propositions, however, the two credos are oddly similar performances in their staggering exuberance, their sheer excessiveness. No half measures for either performer as they dance out their faiths through their fates: Dante is as immensely committed to his comic vision of transhumanization (“the
56
INTRODUCTION
spark…like a star in heaven shines within me”) as Iago is to his tragic vision of dehumanization (“I feel the primeval slime in me”).50 Both achieve their unorthodox ends with the zeal of true believers. Dante’s Credo is opposed at its aesthetic core to any belief system that extinguishes the fiamma vivace of creativity, however acceptable that system might be to the intellectual leaders of the Church. If an earthly faith constrains the artistic will and reduces the aesthetic sightlines of humanity, then it kills the spirit of all believers who follow it to the letter. The Dantean expansion of spark to flame to star to universe ablaze with creative love must be what Catholic orthodoxy feels like to the Blessed in their galactic dance—aesthetically scintillating, intellectually energizing, charismatically flashing forth and spreading freely across the universe like wildfire. Compared with this paradisial broadening of faith, the clerical reduction of orthodoxy to a set of credal formulas is closer than its defenders might suppose to the claustrophobic coffins of the Heretics smouldering away forever inside the walls of Dis. NOTES 1 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from the Commedia are drawn from the Petrocchi edition as reprinted and slightly revised by Singleton (1970–75). Unless otherwise noted, translations of Dante in this introduction are by Singleton. In citing Dante’s works throughout this volume, I have followed the list of abbreviated titles established by Richard Lansing in The Dante Encyclopedia (2000), ix. For example: Inferno (Inf.); Purgatorio (Purg.); Paradiso (Par.); and Convivio (Conv.). 2 Proslogion, 2. 3 All biblical references are from the Authorized King James Version unless otherwise noted. 4 This neologism is borrowed from Dante’s unlikely successor as a heavenbound prophet, the ex-drag queen Prior Walter in Part Two of Angels in America: see Kushner (1994), 50. On the anagogic implications of the term, see Miller (1997), 71. 5 For etymological information on the morphological and semantic development of “outrage,” I have relied on the Oxford English Dictionary. 6 Dante’s word for “table” in this introductory passage is mensa. Though the food we are to feast upon is philosophical, he describes the table as “blessed” [beata] (Conv. 1.1.10) because those who are invited to dine at the banquet are eager to attain the beata vita or “happy life.” 7 See the gloss on Par. 1.70 in Singleton (1975), 18; Freccero (1986), 209–20; and the extensive discussion of Bernard’s comparable term deificari in chapter 6 of Botterill (1994). 8 Pound (1953), 90. 9 Having spent three days with my Dante students watching The Book of All the Dead at The University of Western Ontario (November 8–10, 2002)—a
INTRODUCTION
10 11
12 13
14
15 16
17
57
marathon screening at which the filmmaker was present in the flesh as well as in the film—I vividly recall the oltraggio “high” (a rapturous fusion of exhilaration and exhaustion) that swept over us all at the conclusion of the last reel. It is the rarest of feelings in contemporary cinema: a truly Dantean expansion of the viewer’s attention span. On the history of the Paragone, see Mitchell (1986), 47–49, 106, 121. For a perversely unorthodox discussion of Blake’s illustration of “Jacopo Rusticucci and His Comrades,” see Miller (2000), 222–23. Critical reaction to the grand American tradition of theological commentary on Dante has been decisively stimulated by Barolini (1992), 3–20. Postmodern subjectivity theory has been applied, with a queer twist, to explicate Dante’s two main metaphors of desire—burning and flying—by Holsinger (1996), 243–74. Further signs, both visual and critical, that the Commedia is prompting more than theological exegesis these days can be found in the collections of contemporary critical essays edited by Cachey (1995) and Iannucci (1997, 2004). On the interplay of taboo and transgression, see Part One, chapters 1–13, of Bataille (1957), and Bataille, trans. Dalwood (1986) 29–146. As a Freudian and an atheist, Bataille conflated “spiritual overflowing” (oltraggio) with “physical immoderation” (dismisura): both kinds of excess were equally transgressive from his psychoanalytic viewpoint. Though Bataille never developed a systematic aesthetic theory, the rudiments of one can be deduced from his meditation on beauty in Erotism, Part One, chapter 12, 140–46. I am indebted to the students in my 1999 graduate seminar on Bataille for helping me to formulate the ten fundamental principles of his aesthetics of transgression. Bataille (1986) 141–42. Emphasis added. On the infamous Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1986), see the justly polemical commentary by Nugent and Gramick (1992), 72: “The letter is inappropriately named because most of the 18 paragraphs betray little pastoral concern. Most of the letter is devoted to stemming the tide of increasing acceptance of same-sex behavior. It seemed to devalue individuals it considered threats to the social fabric and implied that individual bishops have been manipulated in supporting a change in civil statutes. Instead of condemning the perpetrators of violence against lesbian women and gay men, the Vatican letter claimed that increasing violence is understandable.” On July 31, 2003, the Vatican published its far from considerate Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions Between Homosexual Persons. As reported by Kim Lunman in The Globe and Mail for that day (A1, A4): “Prime Minister Jean Chrétien risks burning in hell if he makes same-sex marriage legal in Canada, a Roman Catholic bishop from Alberta warned yesterday…The Vatican’s instructions to Catholic politicians on same-sex marriages, being released today, state: ‘When recognition of homosexual unions is proposed for the first time in a legislative assembly, the Catholic lawmaker has a moral duty to express his opposition clearly and publicly and to vote against it. To vote in favour of a law so harmful to the common good is gravely immoral.’”
58
INTRODUCTION
18 On the contentious emergence of orthodox Christology in the Catholic tradition, see Pelikan (1971), 195–200, 209–10, 239–40, 271–75. On the embattled history of creeds as tests of orthodoxy for the Church Militant, see Kelly (1972), 205–11. On the baneful effect of Aquinas’s doctrine of natural law on Catholic sexual morality, and on Dante’s resistance to it, see Crompton (2003), 187–89, 208–12. 19 See note 33 below. 20 For Dante’s much debated distinction between the “allegory of the poets” and the “allegory of the theologians,” see Conv. 1.4. I have followed the traditional understanding of his distinction, which hinges on the difference between “false” fiction (e.g., the classical myths narrated at literal level of the poets) and “true” history (e.g., the biblical stories narrated at the literal level of the theologians). 21 Enarratio in Psalmum LXXX, verse 14, in Patrologia latina 37, col. 1040. For Hollander’s discussion of the fox of heresy in the commentary tradition, see note on Purg. 32.118–23 in Purgatorio, 679. 22 For the identification of figures in the Disputa, I am indebted to Oberhuber (1999), 90–91; de Campos (1965), 13–15; Becherucci (1969), 91–98; and Cuzin (1983), 111–14. 23 On the censorship history of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, see Steinberg (1975); and De Vecchi and Colalucci (1996), 266–67. 24 On Signorelli’s representation of Minos, see McLellan (1998), 51–54. 25 Vasari (1996), 692. 26 Boniface VIII in his bull Antiquorum habet fidem (February 22, 1300) proclaimed the first Jubilee in the Roman Church. Though Dante had 1300 in mind when he referred to “the year of the Jubilee” [l’anno del giubileo] (Inf. 18.29), the bull also granted a plenary indulgence for pilgrims retroactively to Christmas Day, 1299. The poet is thought to have been a Jubilee pilgrim himself, or at least an eye-witness to the huge crowds of penitents who crossed the Tiber on the Ponte Sant’Angelo en route to St. Peter’s basilica. Having been in Rome for the World Pride festivities in July of 2000, I can attest that the Eternal City was again in high gear, commercially as well as spiritually, during the millennial Jubilee proclaimed by John Paul II. 27 The Inferno proves to be “unicursal” (designed with one pathway) for Dante and Virgil only, not for the Damned en masse who are unable to make any progress through its inextricable design once they have been hurled down by Minos to their proper circles. For a detailed discussion of the inextricability of Dante’s hell, see Doob (1990), 282. For the Damned, the Inferno would appear to be an exitless “multicursal” maze designed to frustrate them at every turn. 28 On Vernani’s condemnation of Dante’s Averroism, see Matteini’s critical edition of the De reprobatione (1958) as well as Cassell (2000), 855. 29 Putnam ([1906] 1967), vol. 1, 200–201. 30 Aroux (1854), 449–50. 31 Aroux (1856), 38. The title page of the Clef sneeringly unmasks the poet as “Pastor of the Albigensian Church in the City of Florence, Affiliated with the Order of the Temple.” On the lists of prohibited books drawn up at the Council of Trent, see Putnam ([1906] 1967), vol. 1, 200–201: “The ground for the
INTRODUCTION
32
33
34
35
36 37
59
condemnation [of Dante’s Monarchia] was undoubtedly the same that, two centuries earlier, had brought the author under the reprobation of John XXII, namely, that Dante had ventured to assert that the authority of the emperor was derived from God and not from God’s vicar on earth. The book had, in 1318, been publicly burned in Lombardy.” On Virgil’s understanding of sodomy as a sin of violence against God and Nature, see the glosses on Inf. 11.48–50 in Singleton (1970), vol. 2, 170–71. For a careful theological analysis of the weaknesses in Aquinas’s argument from Nature from a contemporary gay perspective, which carefully distinguishes the discussion of sodomy in the Summa from the intensely homophobic discourse developed by Aquinas’s scholastic predecessors, see Jordan (1997), 136–58. Contemporary Vatican appeals to Thomas’s authority on the sin of sodomy, often hysterically urgent in tone, are contrasted by Jordan with the originally serene discussion of same-sex desire within the broader context of the sin of luxuria in the treatise “On Temperance,” Summa theologiae 2–2.153–4. See Summa theologiae 2–2.154, a.11–12 for Thomas’s discussion of the “unnatural vice.” For the text of the 219 propositions condemned by Bishop Tempier in 1277, see Pierre Mandonnet (1908), 175–91. Dante’s reputation as a heretic of the Averroist camp has largely been based on his startling inclusion of Siger of Brabant among the souls of the Wise in Par. 10.136–8. A useful summary of the philosophical contents and intellectual repercussions of the Condemnations of 1277 is provided by Harren (1992), 204–11. Approximately forty-four of the propositions have been traced to Siger of Brabant; sixteen to Boethius; and fourteen to anonymous masters of arts at the University of Paris. Only proposition 213 (in Mandonnet’s order) on death as “the greatest terror” has been definitively traced to Aquinas, who made a comment to that effect en passant in his commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. “However, several other propositions do correspond to Aquinas’ views even though it is likely that the source was similar statements by arts masters,” notes Harren (206): “The most generally interesting examples of this category are a series of propositions [42, 43, 110, 116, 142, 146, 147, 187] expressing the theory of individuation by matter and founding all knowledge on sense experience.” Gloss on Par. 32.40–2 in Singleton (1975), vol. 2, 540–41. No less heterodox is Dante’s belief in the unequal distribution of grace among unbaptized infants in Heaven (revealed in their hierarchical positioning within the Rose). According to Botterill (1994) 97–98, “the baptismal doctrine expounded by Bernard in Paradiso xxxii is perceptibly outside the theological mainstream.” For Croce’s polemical dismissal of allegorical readings of the Commedia informed by theological commentary, which he believed distracted the reader from the great moments of intense lyricism in the poem by occluding its aesthetic foundations, see his still controversial treatise La poesia di Dante, first published in 1921. Eight years later Eliot first published his essay “Dante.” Eliot (1932), 243–44. For the original context of this famous phrase, see Biographia Literaria, chapter 14 (1817), where it refers specifically to a quasi-religious aesthetic effect Coleridge hoped to induce through the transference of his shadowy supernat-
60
38 39 40 41 42 43
44 45 46 47 48 49 50
INTRODUCTION ural imaginings to the reader via the striking verisimilitude of his poetry: “In this idea originated the plan of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.” Eliot (1932), 244. Eliot (1932), 244. Eliot (1949), 99. Barolini (1992), 16. Barolini (1992), 16. As the War in Iraq has ironically revealed, the militant champions of this ideological border are quite prepared to cross it militarily despite their loud proclamations that the Christian West is not interested in launching a new crusade against Islam. Barolini (1992), 16. Barolini (1992), 17. Barolini (1992), 17. I Cor. 13:12: “Videmus nunc per speculum in aenigmate: tunc autem facie ad faciem” [For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face…]. On the theological origins of the Catholic vision of the blessed dance and its counterpart in the visible heavens, see Miller (1986), 520–21. See the gloss on Par. 24.130–2 in Singleton (1975), vol. 2, 395. “E sento il fango originario in me”: Otello II.2.10. For the full Italian text of Iago’s Credo, see Boito (1981), 45–46. I have followed Porter in translating “fango” as “slime” rather than “mud.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alighieri, Dante. Convivio. Ed. Piero Cudini. Milan: Garzanti, 1980. ——— Dante: The Banquet. Trans. Christopher Ryan. Stanford French and Italian Studies 61. Saratoga: Anima Libri, 1989. ——— The Divine Comedy. Ed. C.S. Singleton. 6 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–75. ——— The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. 3 vols. New York: Bantam Books, 1982–86. ——— La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. Ed. G. Petrocchi. 4 vols. Milano: Mondadori, 1966–67. ——— Purgatorio. Trans. Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Anselm, St. Monologion and Proslogion. Trans. Thomas Williams. Cambridge: Hackett, 1995. Aquinas, St. Thomas. “On Temperance.” Summa theologiae 2–2.153–54. Ed. Thomas Gilby, O.P. Vol. 43. London: Blackfriars, Eyre and Spottiswoode, McGraw-Hill, 1968.
INTRODUCTION
61
Aroux, Eugène. Dante hérétique, révolutionnaire et socialiste. Paris: Jules Renouard, 1854. ——— Clef de la comédie anti-catholique de Dante Alighieri. Paris: Jules Renouard, 1856; Arktos-Carmagnola, 1981. Augustine, St. Enarrationes in Psalmos. Patrologia latina. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Vol. 35. Paris: Migne, 1845. Barolini, Teodolinda. The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Bataille, Georges. L’Erotisme. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1957. ——— Erotism: Death & Sensuality. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights, 1986. Becherucci, Luisa. “Raphael and Painting.” The Complete Work of Raphael. New York: Harrison House, 1969. 9–198. Boito, Arrigo. Otello (libretto). Trans. Andrew Porter. London: Calder and Riverrun, 1981. Botterill, Steven. Dante and the Mystical Tradition: Bernard of Clairvaux in the Commedia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Cachey, Theodore J., ed. Dante Now: Current Trends in Dante Studies. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995. 263–76. Cassell, Anthony K. “Vernani, Guido, O.P.” The Dante Encyclopedia. Ed. Richard Lansing. New York: Garland, 2000. 855. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. Ed. J. Shawcross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958. Croce, Benedetto. La poesia di Dante. 1921. Reprint, Bari: Laterza and Figli, 1958. Crompton, Louis. Homosexuality & Civilization. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Cuzin, Jean-Pierre. Raphaël: Vie et oeuvre. Fribourg, Switzerland: Office du Livre, 1983. de Campos, D. Redig. Raffaello nelle Stanze. Milan: Aldo Martello, 1965. Doob, Penelope Reed. The Idea of the Labyrinth from Classical Antiquity through the Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990. Eliot, T.S. “Dante.” Selected Essays 1917–1932. London: Faber and Faber, 1932. 223–63. ——— “Religion and Literature.” Essays Ancient and Modern. London: Faber and Faber, 1949. 93–112. Freccero, John. “Introduction to the Paradiso.” The Poetics of Conversion. Ed. Rachel Jacoff. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. 209–20. Harren, Michael. Medieval Thought: The Western Intellectual Tradition from Antiquity to the Thirteenth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992. Holsinger, Bruce W. “Sodomy and Resurrection: The Homoerotic Subject of the Divine Comedy.” Premodern Sexualities. Ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero. New York: Routledge, 1996. 243–74.
62
INTRODUCTION
Iannucci, Amilcare A., ed. Dante: Contemporary Perspectives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. ———, ed. Dante, Cinema, and Television. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Jordan, Mark D. The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Kelly, J.N.D. Early Christian Creeds. New York: D. McKay, 1972. Kushner, Tony. Angels in America. Part Two, Perestroika. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994. Lansing, Richard, ed. The Dante Encyclopedia. New York: Garland, 2000. Lunman, Kim. “Chrétien’s ‘Morally Grave’ Error.” The Globe and Mail, 31 July 2003, A1, A4. Mandonnet, Pierre. Siger de Brabant et l’Averroisme latin au XIIIe siècle. Louvain: Institut Supérieur de Philosophie de l’Université, 1908–11. Matteini, Nevio. Il più antico oppositore di Dante: Guido Vernani da Rimini: Testo critico del “De reprobatione Monarchiae.” Padua: CEDAM, 1958. McLellan, Dugald. Signorelli’s Orvieto Frescos: A Guide to the Cappella Nuova of Orvieto Cathedral. Perugia: Quattroemme; Orvieto: Opera del Duomo, 1998. Miller, James. “Christian Aerobics: The Afterlife of Ecclesia’s Moralized Motions.” Acting on the Past: Historical Performances across the Disciplines. Ed. Mark Franko and Annette Richards. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 2000. 201–37. ——— “Heavenquake: Queer Anagogies in Kushner’s America.” Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America. Ed. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. 56–77. ——— Measures of Wisdom: The Cosmic Dance in Classical and Christian Antiquity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986. Mitchell, W.J.T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Nugent, Robert, and Jeannine Gramick. Building Bridges: Gay & Lesbian Reality and the Catholic Church. Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1992. Oberhuber, Konrad. Raphael: The Paintings. Munich: Prestel, 1999. Pelikan, Jaroslav. The Christian Tradition 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100–600). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971. Pound, Ezra. The Spirit of Romance. New York: New Directions, 1953. Putnam, George Haven. The Censorship of the Church of Rome. 2 vols. New York: G. Putnam Sons, 1906; New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967. Steinberg, Leo. “Michelangelo’s ‘Last Judgment’ as Merciful Heresy.” Art in America 63 (1975): 49–63. Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Trans. Gaston du C. de Vere. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Vecchi, Pierluigi De. Michelangelo: The Vatican Frescoes. With an essay on the restoration by Gianluigi Colalucci. New York: Abbeville Press, 1996.
PART I TRAPASSAR
Dante’s Limbo At the Margins of Orthodoxy Amilcare A. Iannucci
I
n the fourth canto of the Inferno we reach the First Circle, Limbo, located on the far shore of the Acheron. Precariously poised at the edge of an abyss, Dante hears an unending stream of woeful sounds issuing from the melancholy valley of Hell: Vero è che ’n su la proda mi trovai de la valle d’abisso dolorosa che ’ntrono accoglie d’infiniti guai. [In truth I found myself upon the brink of an abyss, the melancholy valley containing thundering, unending wailings.] (Inf. 4.7–9)1
The marginal zone circling the abyss, we find out, is the afterlife resting place of those souls, both children and adults, who had died without personal sin but also without Faith and without Baptism. The pilgrim learns from Virgil ch’ei non peccaro; e s’elli hanno mercedi, non basta, perché non ebber battesmo, ch’è porta de la fede che tu credi… [that they did not sin; and yet, though they have merits, that’s not enough, because they lacked baptism, the portal of the faith that you embrace.] (Inf. 4.34 –6)
As a result, they are consigned to Limbo for eternity and here they exist in sorrow, but they are not tormented by physical pain, with the result that sighs, instead of cries, accompany their lot: Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare, non avea pianto mai che di sospiri
63
64
PART I
TRAPASSAR
che l’aura etterna facevan tremare; ciò avvenia di duol sanza martìri, ch’avean le turbe, ch’eran molte e grandi, d’infanti e di femmine e di viri. [Here, for as much as hearing could discover, there was no outcry louder than the sighs that caused the everlasting air to tremble. The sighs arose from sorrow without torments, out of the crowds—the many multitudes—of infants and of women and of men.] (Inf. 4.25–30)
Virgil subsequently describes their lot as a life of hopeless longing: “we have no hope and yet we live in longing” [sanza speme vivemo in disio] (Inf. 4.42). Within this Limbo a separate area is reserved for the greathearted pagans of the past, the magnanimi, who live in a “noble castle” [nobile castello] (Inf. 4.106) illuminated by a fire which “wins out” against the prevailing darkness of Hell [un foco / ch’emisperio di tenebre vincia] (Inf. 4.68–9). Surrounding the castle for defence are “lofty walls” and a “fair stream” [alte mura…bel fiumicello] (Inf. 4.107–8). Within, “on a meadow of green flowering plants” [in prato di fresca verdura] (Inf. 4.111), these same magnanimi, their faces “grave” and their speech “gentle” and infrequent [con occhi tardi e gravi…parlavan rado, con voci soavi] (Inf. 4.112–14), are left free to discuss their affairs and to pursue the intellectual values they espoused while alive. The above picture of Limbo, although possessed of great poetic beauty and intensity, nevertheless caused from a theological perspective deep shock and embarrassment to Dante’s early commentators, as Pietro di Dante, Guido da Pisa, and Boccaccio attest.2 They realized how utterly unorthodox Dante’s Limbo was and tried to defend him by maintaining that he was speaking poetically and not theologically, as Guido da Pisa explicitly states.3 Moreover, they also tried to distance themselves from Dante’s unorthodox portrayal of Limbo by pledging their allegiance to the true Faith. The Church, too, reacted to Dante’s dangerous theological readings,4 and in a far less understanding manner: provincial chapters repeatedly banned Dante’s Commedia from their curricula, as the Dominicans did in 1335.5 Perhaps the most insightful theological condemnation of Dante’s theology of Limbo is provided by the fifteenth-century churchman, St. Antoninus.6 A Dominican scholar of the Pierozzi family of Florence and a distinguished ecclesiastic who rose to the rank of adjutor of the Rota, Antoninus (1389–1459) was named Archbishop of Florence in 1446 by Pope Eugenius IV on the suggestion of Antoninus’s former fellow class-
DANTE’S LIMBO
65
mate, Fra Angelico. A pastoral bishop of the top sort, Antoninus was also a most prolific writer. Among his many works are handbooks for confessors such as the Confessionale and the Medicine of the Soul; a guide for penitents, the Mirror of Conscience; a short spiritual treatise entitled a Guide to Good Living; and a compendium of moral theology, the Summa theologiae moralis. But the work of most significance for Dante’s portrayal of Limbo is the Chronicon. Composed somewhere between 1440 and 1459, this immensely popular work—it was reprinted seventeen times between 1484 and 1586—contains a veritable history of the world in which both sin and virtue are key players. Here Antoninus not only speaks of Dante’s political turmoil and the reasons for it, but also takes Dante to task for his theological rendering of Limbo, a rendering which for Antoninus is dangerously unorthodox because it cannot be defended by an appeal to Dante’s poetic licence. Since the Commedia was written for and read by the vernacular masses, an audience, therefore, who were theologically unsophisticated (Antoninus uses the uncharitable term idiotis [idiots]),7 they were likely to be led away from the articles of the true Faith by Dante’s version of Limbo.8 What, then, is the basis of all this theological concern centring on Dante’s Limbo, especially that of Antoninus? Before addressing (for the purpose of answering) the theological objections of the goodly Archbishop, it is first of all necessary to review the orthodox picture of Limbo held by theologians of Dante’s time and to explore how Dante’s depiction of Limbo did or did not conform to it. The theology of Limbo was developed most fully by scholastic thinkers prior to and during Dante’s time, although they based their theological arguments on a long theological tradition extending back into the patristic period.9 As a rule, the scholastics divided Limbo into two separate compartments—a limbus puerorum and a limbus patrum. (The term limbus as an eternal place name was coined by Albert the Great in the thirteenth century.)10 The limbus puerorum, or Limbo of the Children, was the afterlife abode of the souls of those infants who had died in a state of original sin (that is, the sin inherited from Adam by all humanity and only to be removed by Faith and the celebration of the Sacrament of Baptism). The limbus patrum, or Limbo of the Fathers, a far more ancient concept than the former which extended back to the biblical Bosom of Abraham, was reserved for those Hebrew righteous who had awaited their deliverance by Christ during his Harrowing of Hell and was brought to an end by Christ’s salvific descent there. These two netherworld domains were linked to Hell and to Purgatory according to a topographic scheme that
66
PART I
TRAPASSAR
conceived them all as a series of afterlife receptacles stacked one on top of the other under the earth. The two greatest scholastics, Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure, brought this schema to perfection in the thirteenth century. Bonaventure, for example, seeks to provide a detailed account of the infernal topography in his Compendium of Theology11 and is clear on the main details. The afterlife apart from Paradise is viewed as a series of subterranean receptacles, which are divided thus: a Hell, a Purgatory, and two Limbos, a lower one reserved for those who have died in a state of original sin and an upper one referred to as the Bosom of Abraham. As for the inhabitants of these abodes, Bonaventure is equally clear: Hell is for those who have died in mortal sin (serious sin); Purgatory for those who have died in venial sin (less serious sin); the lower Limbo for those who have died in original sin (the inherited sin of Adam), namely, unbaptized children12; and the upper Limbo, the Bosom of Abraham, for the souls of the ancient just or elect who were delivered during Christ’s Harrowing of Hell.13 Aquinas likewise offers a detailed topography of Limbo and its inhabitants in his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard,14 dividing the whole of Hell into a series of “receptacula animarum post mortem” (receptacles for souls after death). The lowest of these, the Hell of the Damned, is reserved for those who knowingly turned against God in their life on earth. Above it stands the Limbo of the Children (limbus puerorum), reserved for the souls of infants who committed no personal sin, but who died in a state of original sin and hence cannot partake in the joy of the beatific vision. Still higher stands Purgatory, reserved for those souls undergoing purgation on their way to their eternal reward. Finally, at the top is the Limbo of the Fathers (limbus patrum), a place reserved for the souls of the ancient Hebrew just who were saved when Christ descended there after his death and carried them off in the Harrowing of Hell. What is most noteworthy in this description for the present discussion is the existence of two Limbos, the Limbo of the Children and the Limbo of the Fathers, completely separated from one another, both containing different categories of souls, and both of different temporal dimension, the former continuing for all time, the latter effectively brought to an end when Christ liberated its inhabitants at the Harrowing. Aquinas’s view of netherworld topography is thus similar to Bonaventure’s. In essence, there are four receptacles: two Limbos (though Bonaventure speaks of a threefold division, he then subdivides Limbo into two), one Purgatory, and one Hell. All are located under the earth and are reserved for different categories of souls and for different types of
DANTE’S LIMBO
67
punishment. At the same time, however, there is much fluidity in the exact arrangement of these netherworld abodes as is evidenced by the two theologians’ placement of Purgatory. In the scheme of Aquinas, Purgatory separates the two Limbos, the Limbo of the Fathers above, that of the Children below it, while Bonaventure locates Purgatory above both Limbos, which are nonetheless separate realms. In any case, this vision of the underworld was the dominant view, so widely accepted that it could be found not only in the theological literature (e.g., Honorius of Autun,15 Alexander of Hales,16 Albert the Great17), but also in popular iconographical representations of the underworld.18 When we turn to Dante’s Limbo, we are immediately struck by how vastly different Dante’s portrayal of it is from the above. In fact, Dante has dynamically appropriated material from sources as diverse as theology, the apocrypha, and pagan literature, and fused them to construct a Limbo which is daring not only for its repositioning but also for all of its attendant details.19 The resultant Limbo is full of res novae (new things), and, as a result, Dante’s treatment of Limbo can best be characterized as revolutionary and extremely heterodox from a theological perspective. The theological newness of Dante’s Limbo is extraordinary, as Giorgio Padoan notes in his penetrating study of Inferno 4,20 and it is by means of this newness that Dante brings into focus the major theological and literary concerns of his poem. Let us trace this newness on three important fronts. First, there are not two Limbos for Dante, but one, and this one Limbo contains the souls of both children and adults. The Limbo of Dante, in fact, consists of a single great wood—“the wood, I say, where many spirits thronged” [la selva, dico, di spiriti spessi] (Inf. 4.66). These throngs are composed of the souls “of infants and of women and of men” [d’infanti e di femmine e di viri] (Inf. 4.30). Dante, therefore, goes against all the preceding theological tradition, which had maintained that there are two separate Limbos, that the Limbo of the adult Fathers had come to an end with Christ’s Harrowing of Hell, and that the only remaining Limbo was the limbus puerorum, which contained the souls of infants alone, with the exception of mentally disabled adults who are treated by the theological tradition as children. The souls of all other adults existed in Heaven, or Hell, or Purgatory. Therefore, in the compartmentalized and gradated version of Limbo envisioned by both Bonaventure and Aquinas, Dante, in fact, steadfastly refuses to share. There is no place here for different receptacles or chambers, no distinction between adults and infants, no accommodation for an upper and lower Limbo. There is only one sole Limbo shared by different categories of souls.
68
PART I
TRAPASSAR
Secondly, Dante daringly redraws the infernal world maps of Bonaventure and Aquinas in fixing the topography of Limbo and its relation to the rest of Hell. For Dante’s Limbo is not an antechamber to Hell, or an abode separated from it, but is Hell’s First Circle: Così si mise e così mi fé intrare nel primo cerchio che l’abisso cigne. [So he set out, and so he had me enter on that first circle girding the abyss.] (Inf. 4.23–4)
It lies beyond the Acheron, and, hence, beyond salvation. In fact, the Circle of Limbo, “the brink…of the abyss of Hell” [la proda…de la valle d’abisso dolorosa] (Inf. 4.7–8) is distinct from Hell’s other circles only by virtue of the absence of physical torment and of the relative independence of its inhabitants to pursue their individual missions, as Virgil’s straightforward declaration “I’m not bound by Minos” [Minòs me non lega] (Purg. 1.77) confirms in his careful response to Cato’s stern interrogations on the shore of Purgatory. As such, this radical redrawing on Dante’s part represents not only a complete break with contemporary theology but also an act of poetic bravura that underscores the manner in which Dante the poet eclectically marshals/selects and dynamically appropriates his sources for his own poetic ends. In this case Dante, in fact, creates Limbo’s infernal topography from a combination of theological and secular sources. From theology Dante could glean the uncertainty and discrepancy about the exact location of Limbo and its topographical relation to the rest of Hell. I have noted above the fluidity in the accounts of both Bonaventure and Aquinas. Moreover, Aquinas, in a theological aside, had considered the possibility that Limbo and Hell might constitute one continuous realm in the netherworld.21 That Dante profited both from theological fluidity and Aquinas’s aside is beyond doubt as is Dante’s use of Virgil’s sixth book of the Aeneid to shape his poetic depiction of Limbo. For, as Giorgio Padoan has shown,22 Inferno 4 draws heavily on Aeneid 6 for many of the details associated with the initial descriptions of their respective underworlds. In Dante’s Limbo, as in Virgil’s Underworld, the first souls to be encountered are those of children; they are in a state of distress; and the souls juxtaposed with them are those of adults who died in negligence without personal culpability. The closeness is stark and it is thus clear that Limbo’s topography as the First Circle of Hell has been determined by a remarkable collation and fusion of theological and secular sources. The result is a unique reconstruction of Limbo as a single continuous realm
DANTE’S LIMBO
69
housing children and adults alike, a realm that is part of Hell on the far shore of the Acheron. Thirdly, and this takes us to the heart of Dante’s unorthodox approach, the First Circle of the Inferno is populated not only with the souls of children but also with the souls of virtuous adult pagans whom he depicts as absolutely blameless. In this bold poetic manoeuvre, Dante flies in the face of the entire preceding theological tradition, which, following Augustine, had either consigned such souls to the fires of Hell,23 or, following Peter Abelard, had considered the possibility that certain just pagans had also been liberated from Limbo during Christ’s triumphant descent there.24 No theologian, however, had left adult pagan souls in Limbo after the Harrowing, and no theologian had ever associated the eternal fate of unbaptized children with that of adult pagans. But this is precisely what Dante does, and he does so in order to shape a poignant account of the fate of the adult pagans in Limbo and the reasons for that fate. To accomplish this, Dante enters into two theological controversies, one centred on the theological evaluation of infidels and the possibility of their salvation, and the other on the theological meaning of the nature of the children’s suffering in the limbus puerorum. The issue of the salvation of pagans became, with Peter Abelard, a most vexatious one in scholastic theology. Led by his belief that the ancient gentile philosophers were capable of coming to a belief in the Trinity by virtue of their natural reason,25 Abelard dared to extend salvation to them. In this, he was bitterly opposed by Bernard of Clairvaux26 who, arguing that no one can come to faith in the Trinity by natural reason alone but must be led to it by Divine revelation, secured Abelard’s condemnation at the Council of Sens in 1140. But the issue continued to haunt the scholastics, reaching an apogee in the thought of Aquinas. Thomas, too, rejects the possibility of achieving salvation by the light of natural reason alone. But he also allows for the possible salvation of those outside the Church by developing two lines of thought. First, drawing a firm distinction between unbelief understood purely negatively, in the sense of not possessing faith, and unbelief in the sense of opposition to the Faith, he characterizes negative unbelief as not bearing the character of fault; accordingly one is not condemned for the sin of unbelief.27 Second, Thomas in his discussion of Faith recognizes that not all Faith has to be explicit, that is, a formal profession of Belief, but allows for the presence of an implicit faith28 in the sense of a general belief in Christ which might co-exist in the heart of an unbeliever with complete ignorance of Him or with unorthodox views about Him. Such an implicit
70
PART I
TRAPASSAR
faith, if present in the heart of a negative infidel, would suffice for salvation.29 With such theological nuances Thomas tried to accommodate the salvation of pagans outside the Christian tradition. In so doing, however, he had no delusions about the barriers to such salvation that humankind in its condition of sinfulness (especially humankind outside the Catholic Church) could erect. For all human beings are born in original sin and are subject to its effects, which consist of concupiscence and a privation of natural justice.30 Thomas believed that both of these realities drag the unbeliever downward and incline him/her towards sin. As a result, Thomas seems to find it difficult to believe that there exists any negative infidel adult who is purely in a state of negative infidelity any more than he/she is purely in a state of original sin.31 Consequently, the will of the negative infidel is warped, and unless this will somehow frees itself in preparation for God’s grace, it becomes an impediment and is the cause of serious sin. Thus, negative infidels, as such, die not only in a state of original sin but with the sin of omission hanging over their heads. Accordingly, they do not merit eternal life with God, but are condemned to Hell for their inaction and their negligence.32 That Dante was aware of this theological controversy is evidenced by his subtle treatment of his virtuous pagans. For the virtuous pagans are blameless; “they did not sin” [non peccaro] (Inf. 4.34). And even if they were not, in Virgil’s words, “clothed with the three holy virtues” of faith, hope, and charity, nevertheless, they “sinlessly knew the other virtues”— courage, justice, temperance, and prudence—and “followed all of them” [le tre sante / virtù non si vestiro, e sanza vizio / conobber l’altre e seguir tutte quante] (Purg. 7. 34–6). Dante, therefore, does not share Aquinas’s reservation about a potentially blameless pagan. And yet, against Thomas, Dante does not allow the virtuous pagans the possibility of implicit faith and salvation. They are condemned, in fact, solely for their absence of Belief, a fact underscored by Virgil’s remark to Sordello: “I am Virgil, and I am deprived of heaven / for no fault other than my lack of faith” [Io son Virgilio; e per null’ altro rio / lo ciel perdei che per non aver fé] (Purg. 7.7–8). This hard fact has proven most unpalatable to many Dantisti who want either to create an appropriate sin of negligence as the reason for the placement of the virtuous pagans in Limbo33 or to chide Dante for his neglect of the Thomistic doctrine of implicit faith as a means to grant them salvation.34 Dante thus resolutely unsettles the theological tradition that there is no such thing as a completely blameless pagan even as he dispenses with the concept of implicit faith, fashioning a drama of the vir-
DANTE’S LIMBO
71
tuous pagans which highlights the insufficiency of human reason along with the belief that all faith, in order to merit salvation, has to be explicit. It is explicit faith, moreover, that proves the exception to the rule of condemnation for virtuous pagans. On the brow of the Eagle in the Heaven of Jupiter, the pilgrim observes the luminous souls of two pagans, Trajan and Ripheus, who are saved precisely because of their explicit faith, which was elicited as a direct act of God (Par. 20.43 ff.). Thus does Dante defy the theological tradition and thus does he create a scenario of virtuous pagans in Limbo, which is a theological anomaly. Utterly blameless, they are nevertheless condemned to Limbo solely for their lack of faith. The second theological controversy, centred on the children, is crucial to Dante’s portrayal of the fate of the virtuous pagans. Both Bonaventure and Aquinas were in agreement on the privative nature of the fate of the children and both argued that it consisted solely in the “pain of losing the beatific vision” (poena damni) but did not entail any “physical pain” (poena sensus). But they were in sharp disagreement on the exact nature and the meaning of that fate. Aquinas, for example,35 argues that since eternal life consists in full recognition of God, a recognition only possible through faith, and since unbaptized infants did not profess faith in this world and did not receive the sacrament of faith, such infants cannot realize what is beyond their natural knowledge, namely, that the perfect Good is the glory enjoyed by the saints. Hence, of such recognition the unbaptized child has no realization and therefore experiences no affliction of any kind in the privation of the Divine Vision.36 Bonaventure, on the other hand, who deals with the fate of unbaptized infants in Book II of his Sentences,37 concludes that the fate of children who die in a state of original sin resembles a midpoint between grace and damnation. They share the fate of the elect in that they have no pain, but they also share the fate of the damned in that they are denied the vision of God, and they know they are denied: theirs is an eternal tension between sadness and joy.38 In an intertextual comparison between these two theologians and Dante, there can be no doubt which theological source Dante privileges in shaping the fate of his virtuous pagans. For Dante adopts the Bonaventurian position on the fate of the children39 and daringly transfers it to his virtuous pagans who are portrayed in Limbo as living a life of hopeless longing. As Virgil tells the pilgrim: “we have no hope and yet we live in longing” [sanza speme vivemo in disio] (Inf. 4.42). In an incredibly unorthodox move, therefore, Dante places the virtuous pagans in
72
PART I
TRAPASSAR
Limbo and assigns them the very same fate that Bonaventure envisioned for the children. In this way, Dante eclectically uses theology to unite poetically both children and adults: both died without Faith and both, as a result, share the same fate in Limbo. The above details, especially the placement of adult pagans in Limbo, caused deep embarrassment to the earliest commentators. Dante’s son, Pietro di Dante, comes closest to his father’s intentions when he notes that Dante telescopes in Inferno 4 three Limbos, a general Limbo, the Limbo of the Fathers, and the Limbo of the Virtuous Pagans, which Pietro emphasizes is the result of Dante’s imagination.40 Other commentators such as Guido da Pisa and Boccaccio excuse Dante’s theological treatment of Limbo on the grounds of poetic licence, but they also distance themselves from it, Boccaccio concluding his defence of Dante’s Limbo with his firm intention not “to stray from Catholic truth nor the opinion of those more wise” [io non intendo di derogare in alcuno atto alla catolica verità né alla sentenza de più savi].41 Because of this sensitivity to orthodoxy, the same commentators fail to delve beneath the surface to examine the reasons for Dante’s theological novelty. Yet delve beneath the surface we must if we are to appreciate the relationship between theology and poetry which the Commedia represents, and especially if we are to understand the way in which Dante uses theology to further his poetic ends, ends which are, in turn, driven by his firm faith-convictions. Everything in Inferno 4 is put into the service of the virtuous pagans.42 In their Limbo, Dante anchors not only the great theological themes of the poema sacro, the definition and role of Faith in salvation, the relationship between free will and grace, the whole complex question of predestination, and the myopic limits of human judgment versus Divine Justice, but also his rational assessment of pagan culture, a culture from which he had drawn so much. The pagans, therefore, are front and centre throughout the canto and Dante’s terse dismissal of the Limbo of the Children (they receive a mere line) is hardly surprising. What is more surprising, however, in addition to the novelties noted above, is his treatment of the Limbo of the Fathers, a treatment which underscores the main reason whereby Dante opted to fashion the Limbo that he did. For the traditional Limbo of the Fathers was grounded in Christ’s Harrowing of Hell, which had become a common and dominant image in the Middle Ages. The full account of the Harrowing in the second part of the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus43 had been epitomized and widely diffused in Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum maius44 and in Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea.45 Moreover, it was represented in a wide variety of literary
DANTE’S LIMBO
73
and quasi-literary texts, such as laude and sermons, and visually rendered in virtually every artistic form known to the Middle Ages from illuminations and mosaics to frescoes and stained glass. The motif of the Harrowing was therefore extensive and its imagery was always triumphant, emphasizing the victory of Christ over sin and death and the release of the captives from the jaws of Hell’s mouth. Dante changes all of this. He dedicates only a handful of verses to the Harrowing in Inferno 4 (cf. Virgil’s laconic description of it in vv. 52–63) although he retrieves the theme elsewhere, most prominently in the dramatic encounter between Virgil and the forces of darkness in front of the City of Dis in Inferno 8 and 9.46 Dante thus pushes the Harrowing into the background, and, in a revolutionary manner, shifts the emphasis from the limbus patrum and the Harrowing of Hell, complete with their triumphant imagery and their joyful themes of release and deliverance, to the sad plight of the virtuous pagans, who were not released but were left behind. And for these virtuous pagans Dante recasts his Christian Limbo in a Virgilian mould, for their segregated abode, with its “noble castle” and many pleasant distractions, is clearly modelled on Virgil’s Elysian Fields. Thus, Dante’s Limbo is a radical transformation of its theological essence and a redefinition of its meaning. His Limbo, which transfers the poetic axis from those whom Christ freed from Hell at the Harrowing (the Hebrew Fathers) to those whom He left behind (the virtuous pagans), is thus tragic, not comic, and the sad plight of the virtuous pagans is shaped by Dante in Inferno 4 into a drama resembling a Greek tragedy of necessity more than a Christian tragedy of possibility. How tragic that these virtuous pagans who had lived exemplary lives have been predestined, through no fault of their own (“they did not sin”), to an eternal life of hopeless longing simply because they lived at the wrong time or in the wrong place to experience the revelation of God!47 Though Dante’s unique treatment of Limbo is deeply rooted in his desire to give poetic expression to the tragic fate of Virgil and the other virtuous pagans, it is also grounded in his profound faith-convictions. For Dante, like St. Bernard, was convinced that no one can come to salvation except through faith and that such faith is conditional upon God’s election and revelation. Moreover, since such faith had to be explicitly professed, Dante did not subscribe to Aquinas’s notion of implicit faith. But, convinced as the poet was of the impossibility of salvation for his virtuous pagans, he was also deeply aware of their positive merits and their illustrious accomplishments and so could not be persuaded that they
74
PART I
TRAPASSAR
were damned to Hell. To the Augustinian judgment consigning them to the fires of Hell, he was steadfastly opposed. Between salvation and damnation, therefore, Dante took a middle ground which not only coincided with his faith but also gave him an incredible opportunity to fashion the tragic fate of the virtuous pagans that he does. And that fate is securely anchored by Dante in the theological reality of the unfathomable mystery of God’s judgment, a judgment which predestines some to salvation just as it predestines others to damnation. In the course of the poem, the poet comes to see God’s judgment as absolutely just, even if, as the Eagle maintains, it is beyond human understanding (Par. 19.97–9). Thus, Dante’s unorthodox treatment of Limbo is driven by the poignant tragedy of the predestination of the virtuous pagans who, though they lived honourably, are examples of the insufficiency of human efforts to reach eternal life with God, an insufficiency which condemns them to an eternal life of hopeless longing. In sum, Dante’s Limbo is shaped out of theology dynamically appropriated and driven by poetic ends and results in a creation that stands not only at the margins of orthodoxy but also at the heart of inspired poetry. In Dante’s Limbo we glimpse the interconnectedness of poetry and theology in Dante’s imagination and, rather than playing one off against the other or maintaining that one suffocates the other,48 we can only marvel at the uniqueness of Dante’s Limbo, a uniqueness that is born out of the unified vision that poetry and theology assume in the poet’s mind. Which returns us to the goodly Archbishop, Antoninus. He was a most astute critic who was obviously well versed not only in Dante but also in the commentary tradition. His criticisms of Dante’s Limbo are most insightful. He first of all complains that Dante does not treat the limbus puerorum (de limbo puerorum non tangit), an observation which is both true and not, for even though Dante pays the children mere lip service in Inferno 4 and pushes to the foreground the fate of the virtuous pagans, nevertheless, the children are there. In fact, their fate will continue to haunt the pilgrim until it is resolved by St. Bernard at the very end of the poem (Par. 32.40–84) in exactly the same manner as the fate of the virtuous pagans, being another instance of the inscrutability of God’s predestination and God’s will. Secondly, in a far more penetrating manner, Antoninus condemns Dante for “describing the ancient sages as being in the Elysian Fields” (antiquos sapientes…describit esse in campis Elysiis). Antoninus thus appreciated that Dante’s concern in Inferno 4 is, first and foremost, the ancient virtuous pagans for whom the poet constructs a Limbo along Virgilian lines. What the goodly Archbishop, how-
DANTE’S LIMBO
75
ever, failed to note is that this Elysian Limbo, with its “noble castle” and all its amenities, is simultaneously an image of happiness and of confinement, an image which ultimately stands not only for the celebration but also for the insufficiency of pagan reason and pagan culture. Where Antoninus shines, though, is in detailing the underlying reason he considers Dante’s depiction of Limbo so dangerous. True to his Dominican roots—the Dominicans had traditionally demeaned poetry for its theological lies49—Antoninus refuses to excuse Dante’s poetic Limbo because it serves to convince its audience, an audience of the unschooled and unsophisticated vernacular masses, that such an afterlife abode as Dante’s Limbo exists. Antoninus thus realized the extent and the pervasiveness of the influence of Dante’s poetic masterpiece on medieval audiences, an extent and pervasiveness accented by the tremendous oral reception of the poem. For, as John Ahern notes, the Commedia was inserted into a culture which contained “a very high residue of orality” and “there is considerable evidence that persons outside the medieval literary public sang the Comedy.”50 Dante himself, undoubtedly, encouraged this oral reception by writing his poem in the vernacular in a simple style and limiting each canto to a performable unit of 140 verses. It is thus clear that Dante did not wish to exclude the illiterate from enjoying his poem, and enjoy it they did, a fact reinforced by Petrarch’s letter to Boccaccio, which explicitly claims that the “ignorant [idiotae]…in shops and the market place” knew Dante.51 It is these idiotae, and their reading and singing of Dante, that troubled Antoninus the most. From a humanistic perspective Antoninus could be dismissive of this vast unschooled audience, and with Petrarch he could concur “what little weight the approval of the ignorant has for the learned.”52 But Antoninus was also a bishop, charged with the care of his flock of unlearned sheep, and it is this flock that Antoninus wants to keep aloof from the theologically unorthodox Limbo of Dante, for left to graze on the Commedia alone, this flock would be in danger of straying from the true and Catholic Faith, substituting for the theological truth of Limbo the possibility of a poetic, and errant, creation. Thus, poetry in the end is the enemy of theology, and in offering his trenchant critique of the poet’s theological shaping of Limbo, Antoninus reveals himself to be not only a discerning critic of Dante and his poetic creation but also, and more importantly, an appreciator of the awesome power of poetry and its potential for shaping the minds and imaginations of its readers.
76
PART I
TRAPASSAR
NOTES 1 Quotations from Dante’s Commedia are from the Petrocchi edition. Translations are those of Allen Mandelbaum. Citations from ancient commentators are those of the Dartmouth database of commentators, referenced by the gloss to a particular line number of a particular canto or by the section number(s) of a more expansive discussion. The edition of each commentator is listed separately in the select bibliography. For a discussion of the complete commentary tradition, see Mazzoni (1965). The components of the Commedia cited from include Inferno (Inf.), Purgatorio (Purg.), and Paradiso (Par.). 2 Both Pietro (gloss to Inf. 4.1) and Guido (gloss to Inf. 4.79) ascribe Dante’s novel portrayal of Limbo to poetic licence while Boccaccio (Esposizione allegorica, scs.16–49), after noting the level of criticism provoked by Limbo’s lack of orthodoxy and attempting a weak defence in its support, ends by pledging his allegiance to the truth of the Catholic Faith concerning the doctrine of Limbo. 3 Guido da Pisa, gloss to Inf. 4.79. 4 Equally suspect in the eyes of the Church were the political views of Dante as expressed in the Monarchia. Cf. Vernani’s Tractatus de reprobatione compositae a Dante. 5 See Kaeppeli and Dondaine (1941), 286. Cf. Foster (1977), 65. 6 On Antoninus, see Ricci (1970). The best sources for his life are Walker (1933), Jarrett (1914), and Castiglione (1680). 7 The word idiotae is a technical term to describe the illiterate or illitterati. Cf. Ahern (1997), 217–18. 8 Cf. Chronicon, Part 3, tit. 21, chap. 5, para. 2, c. 306, 2b. 9 On the theological development of Limbo, see Creehan (1971), Gaudel (1926), Gumpel (1969), Wilkin (1961), Dyer (1958), McBrien (1989), Rahner (1965). 10 Scriptum super Sententiis, 4, 1, 20: “Limbus ora est vestimenti, sicut locus ille in ora fuit inferni” [Limbus signifies the hem of a garment and can be applied to the place which is situated on the border of Hell]. 11 Centoloquium, Part 2, sect. 4: “Triplex autem locus est, sive receptaculum, post hanc vitam ad peccata hominum punienda, secundum triplex genus peccati. Est enim locus purgatorius, et hic debetur peccato veniali; est limbus, et hic debetur peccato originali; est infernus, et hic debetur peccato mortali: et creduntur esse sub terra gradatim posita ista loca, quae aliter distingui possunt secundum differentiam quadrimembrem. Poenalis enim locus dicitur alicui deputatus aut secundum poenam damni, et sic est limbus; aut secundum poenam sensus, et sic est infernus. Ultrumque autem membrorum in duo dividitur: nam qui poena damni puniuntur, aut simpliciter et aeternaliter puniuntur, et hi sunt in inferiori parte loci illius, qui dicitur limbus; aut puniuntur non aeternaliter, sed ad tempus, et hi erant in superiori parte ejusdem loci, qui dicebatur Abrahae sensus. Similiter qui poena puniuntur, aut simpliciter et aeternaliter puniuntur, et isti sunt in inferno proprie dicto, aut ad tempus puniuntur, et isti sunt in purgatorio.” [For there is a threefold place, or receptacle, for the punishment of the sins of humankind after this life, according to the threefold nature of sin. First there is Purgatory and this is destined for venial sin, next Limbo which is destined for original sin and finally
DANTE’S LIMBO
12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
77
Hell which is destined for mortal sin. And it is believed that these places exist under the earth in a graded manner according to a fourfold differentiation. For a place of punishment is said to be reserved for some according to the pain of loss and this is Limbo; or according to the pain of sense and this is Hell. And both of these members can be divided into two: for those who are punished by the pain of loss are punished simply and eternally and these are in the lower part of that place which is called Limbo and those who are punished only for a time and not for all eternity and these were in the upper part of that place which is called the Bosom of Abraham. In a similar manner, of those who are punished by the pain of sense, some are punished simply and for eternity and these are in Hell, properly called, and some are punished for a time and these are in Purgatory.] Cf. Scriptum super Sententiis, 2, 33, 3, 1. Cf. Centiloquium, Part 2, sc. 4. Scriptum super Sententiis, 3, 22, 2, 1, 2: “Ad secundam quaestionem dicendum quod quadruplex est infernus. Unus est infernus damnatorum, in quo sunt tenebrae et quantum ad carentiam divinae visionis et quantum ad carentiam gratiae, et est ibi poena sensibilis, et hic infernus est locus damnatorum. Alius est infernus supra istum, in quo sunt tenebrae et propter carentiam divinae visionis, et propter carentiam gratiae, sed non est ibi poena sensibilis, et dicitur limbus puerorum. Alius supra hunc est, in qua est tenebra quantum ad carentiam divinae visionis, sed non quantum ad carentiam gratiae, sed est ibi poena sensus; et dicitur purgatorium. Alius magis supra est, in quo est tenebra quantum ad carentiam divinae visionis, sed non quantum ad carentiam gratiae, neque est ibi poena sensibilis; et hic est infernus sanctum patrum; et in hunc tantum Christus descendit quantum ad locum, sed non quantum ad tenebrarum experientiam.” [And to the second question we say that hell has a fourfold division. One Hell is that of the damned and it is a place of darkness without the vision of God and without grace and it is a place of suffering. This Hell is the place of the Damned. And above it is another Hell which is a place of darkness without the vision of God and without grace, but it is not a place of suffering. This Hell is called the Limbo of the children. And above it is another Hell, which is a place of darkness without the vision of God, albeit not without grace, but it is a place of suffering. This Hell is called Purgatory. And still above it is another Hell, and it is a place of darkness without the vision of God, albeit not without grace and it is not a place of suffering. This Hell is called that of the Holy Fathers. It is to here that Christ descended and no further, but he did not experience the darkness.] Elucidarium, 3, 4. Scriptum super Sententiis, 2, 33. Scriptum super Sententiis, 4, 1, 20. Cf. Appendix Three, “Earliest Images,” of Le Goff (1984), 367–68. On Dante’s novel treatment of Limbo and the reasons for it, see Iannucci (1979–80); (1984), 58–81; (1987). Padoan (1977), 105: “La novità è grossa, anzi straordinaria….” Summa theologiae, Suppl., q. 69, a. 5: “Si considerentur [receptacula animarum post mortem] quantum ad situm loci, sic probabile est quod idem locus vel
78
22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36
37 38
PART I
TRAPASSAR
quasi continuus sit infernus et limbus….” [If we were to consider the nature of the site, it is probable that Hell and Limbo are the same or a continuous place.] Padoan (1977), 115ff. Opus imperfectum, 3, 199, (PL, 45, col. 1333); Serm. 294, 3, (PL, 38, col. 1337). Sic et non, chap. 84 (PL, 178, cols. 1468–1471). Epitome, chap. 11 (PL, 178, 1712); Theologia christiana, 1.2 (PL, 178, col. 1126); Theologia christiana, 1.5 (PL, 178, cols. 1140–1166) and 2 (PL, 178, col. 1172). Contra quaedam capitula errorum Abelardi (PL, 182, cols. 1053–1072). Summa theologiae, 2a2ae, q. 9, a. 1. Summa theologiae, 2a2ae, q. 2, as. 5–8. Summa theologiae, 2a2ae, q. 2, a. 7, ad 3. Summa theologiae, 1a2ae, q. 82, a. 3. De veritate, q. 24, a. 12, ad 2. Summa contra gentiles, 1, 3, c. 159. Cf. Busnelli (1938). Foster (1977), 185. De malo, q. 5, a. 3. De malo, q. 5, a. 3: “Et ideo se privari tali bono, animae puerorum non cognoscunt, et propter hoc non dolunt: sed hoc quod per naturam habent, absque dolore possident.” [The souls of such children do not realize that they are deprived of such a great good and because of that they are not in sadness. And they enjoy their natural goods without any affliction.] Scriptum super Sententiis, 2, 33, 3. Scriptum super Sententiis, 2, 33, 3, 2: “…videlicet quod animae parvulorum carebunt actuali dolore et afflictione, non tamen carebunt cognitione. Et illud potest satis rationabiliter intelligi per hunc modum. Decedentes enim in solo originali quasi medium tenent inter habentes gratiam, et culpam actualem: et quoniam status retributionis respondere debet statui vitae praesentis, in tali statu debent animae parvulorum poni, ut quasi medium teneant inter beatos, et aeternis ignis cruciatos. Quoniam igitur beati carent malo poenae sensibilis, et cum hoc habent Dei visionem; damnati e contrario sunt in tenebris, et puniuntur poena sensibili: parvuli secundum rectum ordinem divinae aequitatis, debent communicare in uno cum damnatis, et in alio cum beatis: sed non possunt communicare cum beatis in habendo divinam praesentiam, quia tunc in nullo communicarent cum damnatis; praesentia enim visionis Dei non stat cum poena sensibili: ideo cum beatis communicare in hoc, quod carent omni afflictione exteriori, vel interiori, cum damnatis vero in hoc, et lucis corporalis. Parvuli igitur sic divino judicio justo inter beatos, et simpliciter miseros, quasi in medio constituti, hoc noverunt, ut tamen ex una parte consideratio generet desolationem, ex altera consolationem: ita aequa lance divino judicio eorum cognitio et affectio libratur et in tal statu perpetuatur, unde nec tristitia dejiciat, nec laetitia reficiat.” [And it is clear that the souls of the children will lack any pain or affliction and yet they will not lack consciousness. And this can be rationally understood in the following manner. For dying with only the stain of original sin, they hold, as it were, a midpoint between those who have grace and those who have real guilt. And since the state of retribu-
DANTE’S LIMBO
39 40 41 42 43
44 45 46 47
48
49
79
tion must correspond to the state of the present life, the souls of the children should exist in such a state that they hold, as it were, a midpoint between the blessed and those tormented by the eternal fire. Since, therefore, the Blessed have the vision of God and so lack any pain, and since, on the contrary, the Damned are in darkness and are punished by physical pain, it follows from the ordering of divine justice that the souls of the children share both with the Damned and the Blessed. They do not share with the Blessed the Divine Presence, since then they would share nothing with the Damned for the vision of God does not co-exist with physical pain, but they do share with the Blessed the absence of any exterior or interior pain. With the Damned they share the privation of the vision of God and light corporeal. Therefore, by divine justice, the souls of the children are between the Blessed and the Damned and so they are both happy and sad. And thus by a special dispensation of divine justice their knowledge and their love are permanently fixed in state of equilibrium, in which there is not room for sadness or true joy.] On Dante’s reliance on the theology of Bonaventure for his depiction of Limbo, see Bottagisio (1898), Mazzoni (1965). Gloss to Inf. 4.1. Inf. 4., Esposizione allegorica, sc. 49. See Iannucci, (1979–80), 72ff. For the Descensus Christi ad Inferos, see chaps. 17–27. The Latin text of the Gospel is that of Kim (1973). An English translation is provided by James (1924), 95 ff. Book 7, chaps. 40–63. Chap. 54. See Iannucci, (1987), 99ff. As I have noted, using a key distinction provided by W. H. Auden, in my “Limbo: The Emptiness of Time,” 77, the drama of the virtuous pagans resembles more a Greek tragedy of necessity than a Christian tragedy of possibility. Perhaps of all the commentators, Boccaccio has best perceived the acute nature of the virtuous pagans’ hidden and interior suffering arising from the tragic realization that their desire for spiritual fulfillment is in vain: “Né creda alcuno questa pena essere di piccola graveza o poco cocente, cioè il dolersi co’ sospiri, senza speranza di alcuno futuro o disiderato riposo; anzi, si ben riguarderemo, è gravissima, e se gli spiriti fossero mortali, essi la dimosterrebbero intolerabile, sì come i mortali hanno spesse volte mostrato…” [Nor should one think that their suffering is of little significance or of little annoyance because it is a suffering with mere sighs and without hope of any future and desired repose. In fact, were we to regard it rightly, it is a most severe suffering which the spirits, had they been mortal, would have expressed as intolerable just as human beings have many times shown…], 266. These notions, best represented by Croce (1966), 72–73, and Getto (1961), 159, are at the heart of the traditional and still prevailing view, which maintains that theology suffocates the expression of the poetry in the Limbo episode. St. Thomas, for example, asserts in his commentary on the Sentences that poetry is sharply distinguished from theology as containing the least portion
80
PART I
TRAPASSAR
of truth (Scriptum super Sententiis, 1, 1, 5c, ad tertium) and in his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics (ed. Cathala 21, no. 64) he dismisses all poets as liars. 50 Ahern (1997), 214ff. 51 Familiares, 21, 5. 52 Familiares, 21, 15. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abelard, Peter. Epitome. Patrologia latina. Vol. 178. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Paris: Migne, 1855. ——— Sic et non. Patrologia latina. Vol. 178. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Paris: Migne, 1855. ——— Theologia christiana. Patrologia latina. Vol. 178. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Paris: Migne, 1855. Ahern, John. “Singing the Book: Orality in the Reception of the Dante’s Comedy.” Dante: Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. Amilcare A. Iannucci. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. 214–39. Albertus, Magnus. B. Alberti Magni opera omnia. 38 vols. Paris: L. Vivès, 1890–99. Alighieri, Dante. “La Commedia” secondo l’antica vulgata. Ed. Giorgio Petrocchi. 4 vols. Milan: Mondadori, 1966–67. ——— The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri. Trans. Allen Mandelbaum. 3 vols. New York: Bantam Books, 1982–86. Alighieri, Pietro. Il Commentarium di Pietro Alighieri. Firenze: Olschki, 1978. Antoninus, St. Chronica, sive opus historiarum. Nuremburg: A. Koberger, 1484. Aquinas, St. Thomas. De malo and De veritate. Quaestiones disputatae. Eds. P. Bazzi et al. 2 vols. Rome: Marietti, 1948–49. ——— S. Thomae Aquinatis in Metaphysicam Aristotelis commentaria. Ed. M.R. Cathala. Taurini: M.E. Marietti, 1935. ——— Scriptum super Sententiis. Ed. M.F. Moos. 4 vols. Paris: Lethielleux, 1929–47. ——— Summa contra gentiles. Taurina: M.E. Marietti, 1935. ——— Summa theologiae. 60 vols. London: Blackfriars, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1965–76. Augustine, St. Opus imperfectum contra Iulianum. Patrologia latina. Vol. 45. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Paris: Garnier, 1914. ——— Sermones. Patrologia latina. Vol. 38. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Paris: Migne, 1845. Bernard of Claivaux, St. Contra quaedam capitula errorum Abelardi. Patrologia latina. Vol. 182. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Paris: Migne, 1854. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Esposizione allegorica. Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante. Ed. Giorgio Padoan. Milan: Mondadori, 1965. Bonaventure, St. Centiloquium. Opera omnia Sancti Bonaventurae. Ed. A.C. Peltier. Vol. 7. Paris: L. Vivès, 1866. ——— Sentences. Opera omnia Sancti Bonaventurae. Ed. A.C. Peltier. Vol. 3. Paris: L. Vivès, 1865. Bottagisio, Tito P. Il limbo dantesco: studi filosofici e letterari. Padova: Tipografia e libreria editrice Antoniana, 1898.
DANTE’S LIMBO
81
Busnelli, G. “La colpa del ‘non fare’ degli infedeli negativi.” Studi danteschi 23 (1938): 79–97. Castiglione, Francis. Vita Sancti Antonini. Acta Sanctorum. May, vol.1. Ed. Godefridus Henschenius. Antwerp: apud Joannem Mevrsium, 1680. 310–58. Creehan, Joseph. “Limbo.” A Catholic Dictionary of Theology. Vol. 3. London: Nelson, 1971. 208–11. Croce, Benedetto. La poesia di Dante. Bari: Laterza, 1966. Dyer, George J. The Denial of Limbo and the Jansenist Controversy. Mundelein, IL: St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, 1955. ——— “Limbo: A Theological Evaluation.” TS 19 (1958): 32–49. ——— Limbo. Unsettled Question. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1962. Foster, Kenelm. The Two Dantes and Other Studies. London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1977. Gaudel, A. “Limbes.” Dictionnaire de théologie catholique. Vol. 9. Paris: Letouzey et Ainé, 1926. 760-72. Getto, Giovanni. Aspetti della poesia di Dante. Firenze: Sansoni, 1961. Guido da Pisa. Expositiones et glosse super Comediam Dantis. Ed. Vincent Cioffari. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974. Gumpel, Peter. “Limbo.” Sacramentum mundi. Vol. 3. London: Burns and Oates, 1969. 317–19. Honorius of Autun. Elucidarium. Patrologia latina. Vol. 172. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Paris: Migne, 1854. Iannucci, Amilcare A. “Dottrina e allegoria in Inferno VIII, 67–IX, 105.” Dante e le forme dell’allegoresi. Ed. Michelangelo Picone. Ravenna: Longo, 1987. 99–124. ——— Forma ed evento nella “Divina Commedia.” Roma: Bulzoni, 1984. ——— “Limbo: The Emptiness of Time.” Studi danteschi 52 (1979–80): 69–128. James, Montague Rhodes, ed. The Apocryphal New Testament. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924. Jarrett, Bede. St. Antonino and Medieval Economics. St. Louis: Herder, 1914. Kaeppeli, Thomas and Antonio Dondaine, eds. Acta capitulorum provincialium provinciae Romanae (1243–1344). Monumenta Ordinis fratrum praedicatorum historica. Vol. 20. Rome: Institutum Historicum Fratrum Praedicatorum, 1941. Kim, H.C., ed. The Gospel of Nicodemus. Toronto: Centre for Medieval Studies, 1973. Le Goff, Jacques. The Birth of Purgatory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Mazzoni, Francesco. “Saggio di un nuovo commento alla ‘Commedia.’ Il canto IV dell’ ‘Inferno.’” Studi danteschi 42 (1965): 29–206. McBrien, Richard P. Catholicism. Minneapolis, MN: Winston Press, 1989. 1123ff.
82
PART I
TRAPASSAR
Migne, Jacques-Paul. Patrologiae cursus completus. Series graeca. 161 vols. Paris: Migne, 1857–1912. ——— Patrologiae cursus completus. Series latina. 221 vols. Paris: Migne, 1844–1864. Padoan, Giorgio. “Il Limbo dantesco.” Il pio Enea, l’empio Ulisse. Ravenna: Longo, 1977. 103–24. Petrarca, Francesco. Familiares. Le familiari. Ed. Umberto Bosco. Firenze: Sansoni, 1942. Rahner, Karl. On the Theology of Death. New York: Herder and Herder, 1965. Ricci, Pier Giorgio. “Antonino.” Enciclopedia dantesca. Ed. Umberto Bosco. Vol. 1. Roma: Istituto della Enciclopedia italiana, 1970. 308–309. Vernani, Guido. Tractatus de reprobatione Monarchiae compositae a Dante Alighiero florentino. Firenze: R. Bemporad, 1906. Walker, James Bernard. The “Chronicles” of St. Antoninus. Washington: Catholic University of America, 1933. 3–18. Wilkin, V. From Limbo to Heaven: An Essay on the Economy of Redemption. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961.
Saving Virgil Ed King For charity which is the life of the soul, even as the soul is the life of the body, has no end: Charity never falleth away (1 Cor. 13:8). Moreover, the dead live in the memory of the living: wherefore the intention of the living can be directed to them. —Thomas Aquinas1
V
irgil is the only soul in Limbo who appears to suffer damnation twice: first, after his death, when Minos assigns his shade to the First Circle; and second, after his ascent to the Earthly Paradise, when Beatrice not only displaces him as Dante’s guide but “disappears” him as a continuing character at the literal level of the poem (Purg. 30.49). His fall from Eden into Limbo—if that’s where his shade ends up—re-enacts at an absurdly fast pace the long slow fall of Adam into Hell after the expulsion from the Garden. Damned by the polarizing dictates of typology, Virgil must play the Old Adam to Dante’s New Adam and be cast off into the darkness when Beatrice comes to judge the quick and the dead. The only other souls in the Inferno who might be considered doubly damned are certain traitors in the Ninth Circle such as Branca d’Oria and possibly Fra Alberigo. Their afterlife is strangely doubled in space rather than time. As soon as their souls fall into the deep freeze of Ptolomea (Inf. 33.122–38), their earthly bodies are snatched by demons who spookily animate them from within. Though the original possessors of the bodies may think they have died in a physical sense, their disjecta membra continue to operate in the world above—not as horror-movie zombies lurching across the land but, more frighteningly, as socially well-placed villains coldly plotting the destruction of Church and
83
84
PART I
TRAPASSAR
Empire. Virgil is obviously not like them. He is surely what he appears to be—the noblest of noble pagans. A quick glance at his candidly transparent body—“ombra vedi,” as he humbly reminds Statius [a shade you see] (Purg. 21.132)—would be enough to assure even the most paranoid pilgrim that no body-snatching has occurred, that no treacherous demon lurks within. All the more reason for readers to empathize with Dante-pilgrim’s intense anguish when his “dolcissimo patre” [sweetest father] (Purg. 30.50) is snatched away again by the infernal shadows after coming so far into the Light: any distress or bewilderment at his first damnation is bound to be recalled and intensified by the shock of his second. The loss of Virgil to Limbo, the hopelessness of his unharrowable afterlife, and the Virgilian “look” of Limbo itself, with its Elysian glades and flowery meadows and melancholy shadows, have distressed and bewildered readers of the Commedia since the fourteenth century.2 The disquieting emotions occasioned by the fate of the virtuous pagans in the poem range from exegetical embarrassment about Dante’s unorthodoxy (at the very least) to soul-searching anguish and rebellious outrage at the apparent injustice of the Divine Justice system. Virgil is the lightning rod for these stormy feelings—as Beatrice herself strategically sets him up to be—because he alone among the great souls of Limbo has the heavenly impetus to throw off despair and to hope for a new Harrowing. The impetus is Beatrice’s intercessory promise that she will put in a good word for him on high if he agrees to do her bidding: amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare. Quando sarò dinanzi al segnor mio, di te mi loderò sovente a lui. [Love moved me and makes me speak. When I am before my Lord I will often praise you to Him.]3 (Inf. 2.72–4)
If she were just toying with him, it could not have been love that moved her to speak—at least not the blessed kind that “never faileth” (1 Cor. 13:8). Virgil never for a moment doubts the trustworthiness of her charitable intentions towards him. Why should he? Despite his supposedly eternal relegation to the First Circle, he is miraculously released from it through Divine Grace as soon as he accepts Beatrice’s mission to guide Dante through Hell and Purgatory. Apart from the Emperor Trajan, whose happy “case” at first seems very different from Virgil’s, no other damned soul has been able to escape from Hell since Christ’s original Harrowing. As Beatrice indicates, the Virgin Mary herself has played a key role
SAVING VIRGIL
85
in bending the seemingly inflexible rules of the Divine Emperor for Virgil as well as for Dante: Donna è gentil nel ciel che si compiange di questo ’impedimento ov’io ti mando, sì che duro giudicio là sù frange. [In Heaven there is a gracious lady who has such pity of this impediment to which I send you that stern judgment is broken thereabove.] (Inf. 2.94–6)
Despite Virgil’s tragic confession that all souls in Limbo live “sanza speme” [without hope] (Inf. 4.42), he must at least have a memory of what it once felt like—if not a sudden rekindling of the real thing—on hearing such an infallible eyewitness report of the flexibility of God’s judgment. Are we to imagine that he carries Hell within him (in the manner of Milton’s Satan) wherever he goes, whatever he does? Or are our hopes for his salvation, like his own perhaps, quickened by the immediacy of his release from Limbo (during or sometime before Inferno 1) through the love-power operating behind and through the new Beatricean dispensation? His second release from Hell (at the end of Inferno 34) happens no less literaliter than the first, and in guiding Dante through Purgatory to Beatrice, he will see everything the pilgrim does—and a bit more, such as Lucy’s visitation—in the hopeful world illuminated by the Sun and the other stars. If he is the only soul in Limbo to suffer a double damnation, he is also the only one to enjoy a double Harrowing. This brutal irony and the very abruptness of his disappearance from the literal level have prompted readers to speculate about his post-Purgatorial condition and to adopt one of three positions on the question of his potential salvation. First is the rigorous “faith-is-all” position articulated by Virgil himself in the First Circle: there, as a damned soul, he must live in a state of longing without hope simply because he lacked Baptism, “which is the portal of the faith” [ch’è porta de la fede] (Inf. 4.36). Thus, after his disappearance from Eden, he simply returned to his old abode in Limbo despite all his new experiences in Purgatory. This view of his ultimate fate, as Amilcare A. Iannucci has shown,4 cannot have reflected medieval Catholic orthodoxy since Rome’s official position on the afterlife of noble pagans was still under discussion in Dante’s day (and for many centuries thereafter), owing to Aquinas’s daring speculations about “implicit faith.” Medieval Catholics who rejected the very idea of implicit faith tended to fall back on the stern view of Augustine that only baptized Christians could pass through the portal of the faith into Purgatory and Paradise,
86
PART I
TRAPASSAR
though their Baptism of course did not guarantee salvation. Contemporary readers who adopt this Augustinian position will generally point to the theological necessity of Dante’s sacrifice of Virgil in order to show the triumph of the Church’s teachings over pagan philosophy. With the fate of the children in Limbo, Virgil’s sacrifice also serves to emphasize the dire consequences for those who fail to recognize the crucial role of the Church and its sacraments in the salvation of the soul. Iannucci, moreover, argues that the damnation of Virgil not only reflects Dante’s deepest faith-convictions but also reveals his daring poetic project to create a classical tragedy of necessity at the heart of his Christian comedy of redemption— a creation which stands “at the margins of orthodoxy.” The second position on the issue of Virgil’s ultimate fate rests on an emotional conviction that his is truly a special case, a possible exception to the faith-is-all rule rather than a tragic example of its stern application. Following the lead of Kenelm Foster and Robert Hollander, who have spoken for many in wishing Virgil a better afterlife than the agonizing frustration of Limbo, Mowbray Allan has searched the Commedia for theological cues prompting even readers who distrust their emotions to hope rather than merely to wish for Virgil’s salvation. Focusing on Paradiso 19–20, Allan brings forward textual evidence from the Eagle’s discussion of the “living Justice” [giustizia viva] (Par. 19.68) to use at a celestial trial of Virgil. Hope for a happy outcome in this ever-controversial case, he contends, must be grounded not only on a fervent admiration for Dante’s guide but also on a mystical understanding of Dante’s God. If Justice is indeed an invincible principle in the Dantean universe, it is so ironically because the Divine Will can be conquered by “fervent love” and “living hope” [caldo amore…viva speranza] (Par. 20.95). Why, then, shouldn’t we expect Virgil to be pardoned even if he were to plead “guilty as charged” at his retrial? He’s already been released on parole for good behaviour! The steps to securing his permanent release, even if they are prophetically revealed within the text by the ultimate legal Eagle, still require readers—along with the angels and the elect—to become involved in a salvific process beyond the immediate textual frame.5 Criticizing Allan’s reliance on the “allegory of the theologians” as a hermeneutical approach to the Commedia, Teodolinda Barolini has staked out a third position in the debate over Virgil’s redeemability. From her neoformalist standpoint the question of Virgil’s extratextual fate is a non-issue for the simple reason that the Commedia is not a mystical mirror revealing the afterlife but simply a text. However intellectually complicated and emotionally compelling that text might be, it remains a rhetorical arti-
SAVING VIRGIL
87
fact created by the mind of Dante—not by the mind of God. To worry over Virgil’s afterlife as if he were a real person rather than a purely literary creation is simply to be taken in—like the gullible women of Verona—by Dante’s outrageous claim that his poem is the report of an actual journey through the afterlife. Since any answer to the theological question “Can Virgil be saved?” (underlying Allan’s explicit question “Does Dante hope for Virgil’s salvation?”) must fall outside the frame of the Commedia, why should we bother about it? It is a mere conundrum on a par with “How many children had Lady Macbeth?” or “Will Darcy and Lizzie live happily ever after?” Serious students of literature will not waste exegetical energy over such trifles. “It is, therefore, from a textual point of view, spurious to speculate about Vergil’s [sic] salvation,” Barolini concludes, preferring to bring her interpretation of his fate to a halt at the tropological level: “Vergil’s absence is noticed when it is noticed in order to create a node of surpassing textual tension, one that teaches us that all forward motion is bought at a price.”6 While this somewhat banal moral may well hold for the Spendthrifts and Hoarders in the Fourth Circle and even for the movers and shakers in the global economy, I suspect that it’s quite irrelevant to the operations of the Divine Will and to the understandings of the Commedia promised by Dante at the anagogic level where “nodes of surpassing textual tension” are supposed to be unknotted. To meditate on a change in Virgil’s afterlife is not necessarily to abandon Dante’s text, pace Barolini, if that text is read anagogically according to the poet’s own guidelines. Furthermore, as a “producerly text,” the Commedia is manifestly open to the creative involvement of its readers. “Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda,” Dante himself prophesied: [A great flame follows a little spark] (Par. 1.34). If the spark is Dante’s original text, then the fire must be the staggering production of works—including this distant one—ignited by the explosive publication of the Sacred Poem. And if the conflagration still in some way contains its spark, how can we now—after seven hundred years of blazing commentary—restrict the textual borders of the Commedia to its hundred cantos? The high fantasy of its genesis as a cosmopoetic Big Bang (the spark, of course, was never small) is reduced to a deceptive figure of speech by Barolini’s detheologizing bathos. No wonder she regards Allan’s anagogic reading of the Eagle’s oration on Justice as irrelevant to Virgil’s textually “fixed” fate: it leads to an expansive rewrite of the Sacred Poem, a transgression of its securely defined editorial limits, which for a textual determinist must be akin to bringing back Chaos and Old Night.
88
PART I
TRAPASSAR
To read the Sacred Poem anagogically is inevitably to theologize it in the Dantean spirit of trapassar del segno—which, coinciding with the Bataillean spirit of transgression, effectively reasserts its sacredness in the aftermath of Barolini’s critical profanation (and creative rewrite) of the poem as an “undivine comedy.” Following Allan’s lead, I shall shamelessly “exceed the mark” and “overstep the limit” of the text by speculating about Virgil’s fate after his literal disappearance from Eden. Where Allan looked ahead to Paradiso for prophetic signs of Virgil’s salvation, I shall look back through Purgatorio for intertextual encouragement that all is not lost for the dolcissimo patre. What I’ll add to the salvation debate (besides my own living hope) is a consideration of the purgatorial conversion of Dante’s lettor from doubtful decoder to decisive intercessor in the transition from Hell to Purgatory. Purgatory was a relatively new addition to Catholic orthodoxy in Dante’s day. Before the notion of a temporary middle realm in the afterlife could be firmly established, a complex theology of intercession (including detailed doctrines on the efficacy of prayer) had to develop over many centuries out of a clear distrust—at first probably no more than a vague distaste—for the strongly dualistic strain in early Christianity. Many lay people in the late Middle Ages clung to the belief that God’s mercy, strengthened by the compassion of all the saints, would ultimately save everyone including even the Devil from perdition.7 The popular religious desire for a universal salvation found its liveliest medieval expression, predictably, in vernacular writings on confession, penance, and preparation for death. Although universalism was certainly not championed in the Commedia, Dante’s decision to compose his Sacred Poem in the vernacular indicates his willingness to explore theological positions on salvation sympathetic to popular religious fantasy. A clear sign of Dante’s inclusionary vision of Purgatory is the strikingly broad class of the “to-be-saved.” Members of this class include a pagan suicide (Cato), an excommunicated bastard (Manfred), a Ghibelline warlord (Buonconte), a prodigal Roman poet (Statius), and a band of flaming queens (the repentant Sodomites). Presumably also in Purgatory for a spell, before Paradise received their spirits, were the noble pagans Ripheus and Trajan. By boldly “discovering” them on the brighter side of the afterlife, Dante opens up the unorthodox possibility that repentant souls can bridge the purgatorial gap between earth and Heaven without the sacramental intervention of the Church. To be an anagogic reader of the poem (at least from the first canto of Purgatorio on) is to become a potential intercessor simply by heeding the recurrent request of the Purgatorians to pray for their souls—souls deemed
SAVING VIRGIL
89
worthy of salvation on an individual emotional basis regardless of baptismal status. Purgatory maintains some “real time” communication with this world and the next primarily through the fervent prayers of its denizens for forgiveness and remembrance, and secondarily, through the prayers of readers (or listeners following the lead of Dante-pilgrim) who are moved by the ascetic condition of the souls to forgive and remember them. It is in this performative context of ritualized intercession that the question of Virgil’s purgatorial destiny leaves the realm of literary wishful thinking and becomes the crucial test case for the second cantica. The pilgrim’s startling “anthropological” discovery in Purgatory is that souls still living in real time can influence the afterlife experiences of the dead through their own language—not just through the official medium of Church Latin. Given the relatively plastic status of Purgatory in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Catholic theology, I believe that Dante was attempting to effect salvation for a broader category of souls than Augustine was willing to accept. While heretics and schismatics are clearly condemned in the Inferno, baptized Catholics are not alone in Purgatory or Paradise. The hallowed presence of Cato, Trajan, and Ripheus in the poem shows that there is also room beyond Limbo for noble pagans who died outside the period of God’s grace upon the earth, and more especially that the soul of Virgil cannot be damned out of hand through a mechanical application of the faith-is-all rule. The generous manner in which Dante sought to accommodate these souls through the expansive creation and vernacular defence of intercessional literature is more unorthodox in its implications—since it audaciously deepens the sacred value of imaginative literature as a whole in relation to the Holy Scriptures—than his intellectually “shocking” inclusion of Siger of Brabant among the Wise (Par. 10.136) or Ripheus of Troy among the Just (Par. 20.68). A striking peculiarity of Dante’s mountain pilgrimage is its breathtaking focus on his subjectivity, his proud awareness of his prodigious self. The visions, dreams, and pageants in the Purgatorio (even more than in the Inferno where the Damned implode into their own bathetic egos) are all unashamedly directed towards Dante himself. In large part, the bold articulation of his irrepressible egocentrism is responsible for the continuing fascination of the Commedia for contemporary readers affected by the postmodern obsession with fragmented subjectivities, although it has not always proven easy for a general readership to connect to his personal themes and mentors. Dante is not primarily concerned with trying to explain Christian dogma to the laity through
90
PART I
TRAPASSAR
allegory. Indeed, in orthodox Catholic terms, the Commedia largely fails to do this, not least by neglecting to highlight Christ as the one and only “way” to salvation. The alternative way is the poem, and it signally fails to acknowledge the Church as the sole mediator between humanity and divinity. Given the intensely subjective focus of Purgatorio, I am particularly struck by those passages on the Mountain where Dante is compelled to see beyond the blaze of his own ego and to empathize with characters whose reasons for being there are of little relevance to his own sinful state. The Envious, for example, are hardly noticed against the grey background of the rock face when he ascends to the Second Cornice, and his first thought on perceiving their sewn eyes is characteristically bent towards his own prospects in the afterlife: “Li occhi,” diss’ io, “mi fieno tolti, ma picciol tempo, ché poca è l’offesa fatta per esser con invidia vòlti…” [“My eyes,” I said, “will yet be taken from me here, but for short time only, because they have little offended with looks of envy…”] (Purg. 13.133–5)
Dante-poet cannot fail to acknowledge the hubris of Dante-pilgrim in denying his susceptibility to envy. In order for the Commedia to succeed on its own terms, the anagogic journey of Dante’s readers must become as important to them as the literal journey of the pilgrim is to the poet. Through their emotional engagement with the paradoxical esperienze (for instance, life-in-death) of the characters, the readers literally join the poet’s quest to untie the nodes of textual tension created all along the impossible route of the journey. Why would this supremely self-centred poet spend three full cantos (Purg. 13–15) examining the Cornice of the Envious, a relatively minor place of purgation for himself? If the thunderous cries of Cain and Aglauros cleaving the air of the Second Cornice (Purg. 14.133–41) are not for the pilgrim’s edification, why does he react so strongly to them by taking a frightened step closer to Virgil? Beyond manifesting the subconscious envy and bitterness he feels towards the “glory and light of other poets,” as he haled Virgil at the start of their journey [de li altri poeti onore e lume] (Inf. 1.82), this reflexive step suggests that Dante may not be the only soul being purged on the journey. After leaving the First Cornice behind, the pilgrim observes an increased lightness of foot in both himself and his guide:
SAVING VIRGIL
91
Io m’era mosso, e seguia volontieri del mio maestro i passi, e amendue già mostravam com’ eravam leggeri... [I had set out and was gladly following in my master’s steps and both of us were now showing how light of foot we were...] (Purg. 12.10–12)
This hopeful detail is by no means the first indication that Virgil’s irrevocable damnation is in question during the ascent. Looking back from here to the opening of the second cantica, the reader may trace how faithfully Dante-poet has been following in his master’s steps: e canterò di quel secondo regno dove l’umano spirito si purga e di salire al ciel diventa degno. Ma qui la morta poesì resurga, o sante Muse, poi che vostro sono; e qui Calïopè alquanto surga, seguitando il mio canto con quel suono di cui le Piche misere sentiro lo colpo tal, che disperar perdono. [and I will sing of that second realm where the human spirit is purged and becomes fit to ascend to Heaven. But here let dead poetry rise again, O holy Muses, since I am yours; and here let Calliope rise up somewhat, accompanying my song with that strain whose stroke the wretched Pies felt so that they despaired of pardon.] (Purg. 1.4–12)
The epic tone of canterò calls to mind the opening line of the Aeneid (“I sing of arms and the man”), which celebrates the subordination of the self to the martial advancement of imperial destiny as the highest mark of heroism imaginable to pagan poets. Here Dante alters the object of the verb “sing” to refer to Purgatory both as the second kingdom of the afterlife and as the site for a new understanding of human heroism through Christian suffering and purification. To exemplify the new Christian hero, Dante-poet grants himself the opportunity to purge Virgil’s soul of its melancholic nostalgia for classical heroism until its greatest Latin proponent “becomes fit to ascend to Heaven.” In case this opportunity is unclear to the lettor, it is highlighted in the poet’s daring request to the Muses that dead poetry rise again with the writing of the second cantica. He clearly did not mean simply his own poetry, the terza rima pioneered in the Inferno, but also the buried verses of the classical poets. That Dante-poet hopes to resurrect dead poets as well as to revive dead poetry is subtly suggested by his allusion to Ovid’s tale of the mag-
92
PART I
TRAPASSAR
pies (Metamorphoses 5.294–678). While the daughters of Pierus lied in their singing about the victory of the giants over the gods and were transformed for their presumption into chattering birds who “despaired of pardon,” Virgil told the truth about the heroism of Aeneas in Museinspired epic verses and about the Virgin and Child in his Messianic Eclogue, and so may live in hope that his doom may be reversed through the intercessory prayers of the Virgin herself and the many readers of the Commedia who hope for his pardon. Instead of a humiliating physical transformation, is he not bound to experience an uplifting spiritual conversion on the Holy Mountain? Dante’s intention to deal in Purgatorio with the resurrection of lost souls who under regular circumstances would be without hope, which is the particular punishment of the souls in Limbo, is immediately revealed by Cato’s trapassar del segno. As a noble pagan, Cato ought to be in Limbo with his wife Marcia, or as a suicide, in the Seventh Circle with Pier della Vigna. His “going beyond the mark” signals a trembling instability in the faith-is-all position, leaving the question of Virgil’s ultimate fate up in the air. Purgatory is prone to earthquakes, after all, but the seismic activity there is a planned and always happy result of God’s benevolence. Whether the Holy Mountain will ever quake for Virgil’s release from suffering becomes an urgent question during the interchange between Dante and Virgil in Purgatorio 6, where the pilgrim must learn to overcome his own superciliousness as a reader of the Aeneid before he can contemplate the deliverance of its author. After promising to pray for the souls of those who had died violently, Dante somewhat cruelly points out to Virgil that in the Aeneid he himself denied the efficacy of intercessory prayer: Come libero fui da tutte quante quell’ ombre che pregar pur ch’altri prieghi, sì che s’avacci lor divenir sante, io cominciai: “El par che tu mi nieghi, o luce mia, espresso in alcun testo che decreto del cielo orazion pieghi...” [As soon as I was free of all those shades, whose one prayer was that others should pray, so that their way to blessedness may be sped, I began, “It seems to me, O my light, that you deny expressly in a certain passage that prayer bends the decree of heaven...”] (Purg. 6.25–30)
Though his sniping criticism of the Aeneid—a poem he could only wish to have written—is laced with invidious smugness, Dante-pilgrim cannot ignore the brilliance of his guide’s prophetic powers or the magisterial authority of his wisdom. Given Virgil’s authoritative status as a “light”
SAVING VIRGIL
93
for his Christian readers, we are encouraged to wonder whether the doctrine of the intercessory power of prayer would have been taken as an unshakable truth by them if it had been affirmed rather than denied in the Palinurus episode (Aeneid 6.337–83). At the very least we must conclude that Dante is obviously not the only poet permitted to reveal the mysterious processes of salvation in prophetic language. This divine privilege extends to every inspired author, regardless of baptismal status. Speaking in his own defence, Virgil points out that the only reason the prayer of Palinurus was not heard on high was that it was “cut off from God” [perché ’l priego da Dio era disgiunto] (Purg. 6.42); in other words, during the long era when grace was withdrawn from the earth, God was not inclined to answer anyone’s prayers. Before the Son came to act as our advocate with the Father, the Father was largely incommunicado. We are left to conclude that Palinurus, like Virgil himself, was punished not for his wickedness but simply for the unlucky timing of his death. Yet by insisting that God had cut Himself off from pagan entreaties on behalf of Palinurus—rather than from Palinurus himself—Virgil implicitly encourages Dante as a Christian lettor to consider the alternative possibility that Christian prayer for a soul in Limbo might now reach its target in Heaven. Whether this possibility will ever be realized, however, remains one of those open questions for which Dante must await an answer from Beatrice, the celestial guide “who shall be a light between the truth and the intellect” [che lume fia tra ’l vero e lo ’ntelletto] (Purg. 6.45). He is not to worry about it until he meets her. Here, taking heart from the Epistle to Cangrande, we should make a leap to the typological level and read Purgatorio 6.25–30 as a narrative parallel to the Palinurus episode. If Dante corresponds to Aeneas, the heroic voyager to the underworld and beyond, Virgil clearly becomes his Palinurus, the pilot or guide who has died in a state of tragic unreadiness and now yearns for release from his unhappy marginality in the Underworld. The original pleas of Palinurus for burial take on a haunting new significance when read from a purgatorial angle as a prophetic expression of Virgil’s long-suppressed hope for salvation: quod te per caeli iucundum lumen et auras, per genitorem oro, per spes surgentis Iuli, eripe me his, inuicte, malis: aut tu mihi terram inice, namque potes, portusque require Velinos; aut tu, si qua uia est, si quam tibi diua creatrix ostendit (neque enim, credo, sine numine diuum flumina tanta paras Stygiamque innare paludem),
94
PART I
TRAPASSAR
da dextram misero et tecum me tolle per undas, sedibus ut saltem placidis in morte quiescam. [But I beg of you, by the joyous light and winds of heaven, by your father, by your hopes of Iulus as he grows to manhood, you who have never known defeat, rescue me from this anguish. Either throw some earth on my body—you can do that. Just steer back to the harbours of Velia. Or else if there is a way and the goddess who gave you life shows it to you—for I do not believe you are preparing to sail these great rivers and the swamp of the Styx unless the blessing of the gods is with you—take pity on me, give me your right hand, take me aboard and carry me with you over the waves, so that in death at least I can be at peace in a place of quiet.] (Aeneid 6.363–71) (emphasis added)
Does the reversing logic of Dantean typology turn Palinurus’s tragedy into a potentially happy outcome for Virgil here? A hopeful lettor would find the reversal hard to resist, especially given the “group psychology” operating in Ante-Purgatory. Throwing earth on the body is the pagan equivalent of a Christian burial, which the souls of the violently slain— who have gathered in a “dense crowd” around Dante and Virgil [turba spessa] (Purg. 6.10)—may have sadly missed but certainly do not require for salvation. To be released from their Palinurian restlessness in AntePurgatory they require only Divine Grace, but to receive grace they urgently need the charitable remembrance of others—saints, clergy, kinsfolk, friends, lovers, even strangers who happen to read about their pitiful cases in a poem. Hence, in contrast to the self-focused entreaty of Palinurus, their one prayer “was that others should pray, so that their way to blessedness may be sped” [pur ch’altri prieghi, / sì che s’avacci lor divenir sante] (Purg. 6.26–7). As we noted earlier, the case of Trajan (Par. 20.43–8) sets a remarkable precedent for trusting in the efficacy of intercessory prayer. According to a legend dating back to the eighth century, Pope Gregory the Great was crossing a square in Rome when his gaze happened to fall on a section of Trajan’s column depicting the Emperor’s postponement of a battle until justice was done for a lowly widow whose son had been unjustly slain. The Pope was so moved by the scene that on entering St. Peter’s basilica he immediately “prayed and wept” (ibi diutius oravit, et flevit) for the salvation of Trajan’s soul.8 Mindful that without Baptism none will see God, Gregory sought a way to save the pagan Emperor. Two explanations for Trajan’s salvation developed as the legend spread throughout Europe, and both are typologically relevant to the case of Virgil. The first explanation is that Gregory made use of both his saintly piety and his
SAVING VIRGIL
95
papal authority (divinae pietatis et potestatis) to bring Trajan back to life for as long as it took him to accept Christ, after which his newly converted soul was able to enter Paradise. Perhaps, following Gregory’s lead, Dante intended to make Virgil “live” temporarily—if only in the literary sense—so that his soul could enjoy the light of Purgatory and be converted to the Faith on the far side of death. Moreover, if Dante could make Virgil live long enough for the readership to care about his immortal soul, they might even care enough to pray for him and weep baptismal tears in his favour. The miraculous link between tears and conversion segues into the second explanation for Trajan’s salvation, which is taken from the earliest extant life of Gregory.9 According to tradition, three types of Baptism—by water, by fire, and by tears—are efficacious in admitting souls to the Faith. By weeping floods of tears as he entered St. Peter’s, Gregory was in effect baptizing Trajan posthumously so that the portal of the Faith could be opened for him upon his release from Hell. Lord knows the Emperor deserved an illustrious place among the saintly justicers for his humility as well as for his justness in bending his ear to the widow’s plea: “Lord, if you never return, there will be no one to help me.” While this legendary line may be read typologically as Virgil’s implicit plea to Dante for aid in seeking a just resolution to the problem of the noble pagans, it is equally applicable to the pilgrim’s plea to his guide not to abandon him on his quest to understand the Divine Justice system. Without Virgil’s humble acquiescence to Beatrice’s entreaty, Dante would never have been able to take the first step towards the Eagle. While weeping for Trajan, Gregory was moved to reflect on the typological implications of the Emperor’s story by recalling Isaiah 1:17–18: “Judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord.” This prophetic injunction is also typologically relevant to the case of Virgil, whose role as guide combines both fatherly and motherly care for Dante. Once Virgil vanishes, Dante will be left “fatherless” before Beatrice (whom he in effect “widowed” by abandoning her for philosophy) and so they must reason together throughout their celestial journey so that she may eventually entreat the otherworldly Emperor for justice in defeating the Church’s and the poet’s worldly enemies. Virgil will also be fatherless and must be judged as such when he returns to Limbo, since he will once again be denied the presence of the Heavenly Father. Who, then, should pray for Virgil, and why is Virgil not in Paradise awaiting Dante? At the literal level, of course, we should expect Dante
96
PART I
TRAPASSAR
himself to pray for the guide to whom he owed so much both as a poet and as a pilgrim. Are the compassionate tears that “darken” his cheeks at Virgil’s disappearance [le guance nette di rugiada / che, lagrimando, non tornasser atre] (Purg. 30.53–4) comparable to baptismal waters flowing from Gregory’s eyes on behalf of Trajan? Literally, no, since Dante is neither a saint nor a pope with miraculous powers of intercession. An affirmative answer may yet be sought at higher levels of reading, notably the typological and the anagogic, where we might also discover why Virgil does not fly up immediately to Paradise to await his poetic “son.” Let us return to the Palinurus episode for a moment and reflect on the Sibyl’s consoling prophecy following her direly fatalistic pronouncements about the futility of prayer: ‘…desine fata deum flecti sperare precando, sed cape dicta memor, duri solacia casus. nam tua finitimi, longe lateque per urbes prodigiis acti caelestibus, ossa piabunt et statuent tumulum et tumulo sollemnia mittent, aeternumque locus Palinuri nomen habebit.’ his dictis curae emotae pulsusque parumper corde dolor tristi; gaudet cognomine terra. [‘...You must cease to hope that the Fates of the gods can be altered by prayers. But hear my words, remember them and find comfort for your sad case. The people who live far and wide in all their cities round the place where you died, will be driven by signs from heaven to consecrate your bones. They will raise a burial mound for you and to that mound will pay their annual tribute and the place will bear the name of Palinurus for all time to come.’ At these words his sorrows were removed and the grief was driven from that sad heart for a short time. He rejoiced in the land that was to bear his name.] (Aeneid 6.376–83) (emphasis added)
If we identify the generations of Dante’s readers with the “people who live far and wide in all their cities,” the Sibyl’s prophecy may cheer us with the typological implication that these scattered multitudes will be united in prayer for Virgil’s soul under the influence of astral “signs” appearing in the Commedia (for instance, the constellation of the Eagle in Paradiso 20) rather than in the cosmos itself. This reading lends a charitable overtone to Dante’s otherwise caustic gloss on Virgil’s sententious denial of the power of prayer to bend the decree of Heaven. It also suggests why Virgil is not waiting for Dante in Paradise. Until Dante returns from the Rose to write his poem, we as readers can have no knowledge of our cru-
SAVING VIRGIL
97
cial intercessory role in the salvation of Virgil and therefore no impetus to participate in the consecration of his bones. In the Palinurus episode, then, even without knowing it, Virgil guided Dante towards a literary way out of the theological dilemma caused by the damnation of the noble pagans. Even with innumerable readers praying for his soul, and Beatrice putting in a good word for him with the Emperor against whose laws he once rebelled, Virgil would still require the benefits of purgation before he could ascend to Paradise. However nobly the Roman virtues shone in his soul during his life and long afterwards in Limbo, his fallen state still manifests itself from time to time during the journey to Eden. Far from perfection, his soul remains susceptible to occasional attacks of pride, envy, and wrath—the last particularly evident in his vexation before the Gates of Dis at the end of Inferno 8. At the beginning of Purgatorio 13, however, he faces his failings as a leader with patient resignation. Though he has no idea which way to turn around the Holy Mountain, he refuses to succumb to frustration or bewilderment here but calmly trusts in the “way” itself as a divinely charted route of purification. Pride in his virtues as a guide (so clearly reflected in his contemptuous attitude towards the guardians of the infernal circles) seems to vanish from his soul when the first “P” is erased from Dante’s forehead. Though Virgil’s forehead apparently shows no comparable sign of sinfulness, his actions on the Second Cornice reveal that far from being “above” the ritual of Christian penitence as a noble pagan, or “below” it as a damned soul, he is humbly undergoing purgation along with his charge. A tropological improvement in his soul is clearly marked by his invocation to the “sweet light” of the Sun in which he now trusts: Poi fisamente al sole li occhi porse; fece del destro lato a muover centro, e la sinistra parte di sé torse. “O dolce lume a cui fidanza i’ entro per lo novo cammin, tu ne conduci,” dicea, “come condur si vuol quinc’ entro…” [Then he set his eyes fixedly on the sun, made of his right side a center for his movement, and brought round his left. “O sweet light, by trust in which I enter on this new road, do you guide us,” he said, “with the guidance that is needful in this place…”] (Purg. 13.13–18)
Virgil’s soul is already so cleansed that, like the Eagle whose fixed gaze is prefigured here, he can look at the Divine Light without squinting. His eyes can distinguish the shades of the Envious from the livid stone behind
98
PART I
TRAPASSAR
them, while Dante’s eyes remain blind to the distinction between figure and ground. Following Virgil’s purgatorial lead, Dante feels no superiority to the blinded souls of the Envious when he passes fully sighted before them. Quite the reverse: A me pareva, andando, fare oltraggio, veggendo altrui, non essendo veduto… [It seemed to me that I did them wrong as I went my way, seeing others, not being seen myself…] (Purg. 13.73–4)
This sudden surge of guilt mixed with compassion compels the pilgrim to question the justice of a universe in which he can enjoy clear vision while others suffer in darkness. As he struggles to articulate his complicated doubts, which of course also bear upon the contrast between Purgatory and Limbo, his prescient guide curtly tells him to get to the point: ma disse: “Parla, e sie breve e arguto.” Virgilio mi venìa da quella banda de la cornice onde cader si puote, perché da nulla sponda s’inghirlanda… [but said, “Speak, and be brief and to the point.” Virgil was coming with me on that side of the terrace from which one could fall, since no parapet surrounds it…] (Purg. 13.78–81)
Was Dante about to inquire about Virgil’s own (predictably) envious state? There can be no doubt that Virgil is emotionally “on edge” here, experiencing the moral peril of the precipice along with his fellow climber. If he fails to focus his attention on their route, both of them could fall again into the depths of envious longing without hope of satisfaction— and then, as Cavalcante would bitterly put it, not even their “high genius” could get them through the “blind prison” a second time (cf. “per questo cieco / carcere vai per altezza d’ingegno] (Inf. 10.58–9). Virgil speaks no more in Purgatorio 13, and refrains from speaking until the end of the following canto when Dante nervously draws close to him after hearing the thunderous cries of Cain and Aglauros. Finally displaying a little envy of his own—though for instructive ends—he points out that Dante has been wilfully blind to the circling of the stars: Chiamavi ’l cielo e ’ntorno vi si gira, mostrandovi le sue bellezze etterne, e l’occhio vostro pur a terra mira; onde vi batte chi tutto discerne.
SAVING VIRGIL
99
[The heavens call to you and circle about you, displaying to you their eternal splendors, and your eyes gaze only on the earth: wherefore He smites you who sees all.] (Purg. 14.148–51)
If anyone is smiting Dante in the final line, it is Virgil, who knows what it’s really like to have the stars removed from his visual field. The obvious (and odious) comparison between their conditions is best left unsaid: it’s an over-the-brink irony that God should beat down one poet whose visions were exalted and raise up another whose gaze is downcast. If the prisoners of Limbo were only in a position to behold the stars, they’d surely seize the opportunity to escape the cave and contemplate the eternal source of light! But Virgil, ironically, is in such a position now. He may not see everything clearly but the stars he can see, and they certainly do not hide their bellezze etterne from him. Why shouldn’t he draw the obvious conclusion from this aesthetic vision—that it is an encouraging segno of his own anagogic trapassar? Purgatorio 15 provides the clearest indication that Virgil’s salvation is just as much at stake on the Holy Mountain as Dante’s. After climbing some way towards the Cornice of the Wrathful, the pilgrim asks his guide for clarification of a comment made by Guido del Duca on the cornice below: Che volse dir lo spirto di Romagna, e “divieto” e “consorte” menzionando? [What did the spirit of Romagna mean when he spoke of “exclusion” and “partnership”?] (Purg. 15.44–5)
Recalling Augustine, whose moral reflections sprang from an intimate acquaintance with envy and concupiscence, Virgil replies that the desire for bellezze etterne is not diminished by sharing—unlike the desire for material things: Perché s’appuntano i vostri disiri dove per compagnia parte si scema, invidia move il mantaco a’ sospiri. [Because your desires are centered there where the portion is lessened by partnership, envy moves the bellows to your sighs.] (Purg. 15.49–51)
We see here the reason Virgil is so keen to lead the pilgrim to Beatrice. Until Dante understands that love, partnership, and friendship do not operate as a zero-sum game10 but increase in value and intensity the more they are shared with others, he will always be in competition with Virgil and never in compagnia. The pilgrim’s competitive “edge” as a liv-
100
PART I
TRAPASSAR
ing person over his long-dead guide has brought them close to the brink— literally and spiritually—on the Cornice of the Envious. Until Beatrice shows Dante how “the love of the highest sphere turned upwards your desire” [l’amor de la spera supprema / torcesse in suso il disiderio vostro] (Purg. 15.52–3), he will not have the self-realization necessary to look beyond his own needs towards those of others. Until he does so, he will remain in the dark about the big picture: Ed elli a me: “Però che tu rificchi la mente pur a le cose terrene, di vera luce tenebre dispicchi…” [And he to me, “Because you still set your mind on earthly things, you gather darkness from true light…”] (Purg. 15.64–6)
As a penitent soul who gathered darkness from true light during his life but must now draw forth true light from the darkness of his stitched eyelids, Guido del Duca comprehends purgation (and by extension, salvation) as an inclusionary process. He has found compagnia with his companions in misery, and they have cheerfully learned to support one another so that none will fall over the edge. To exclude partners in any quest for the heights is the quickest way to “ruin down into a deep place” [rovinava in basso loco] (Inf. 1.61), as the pilgrim himself discovered in the Dark Wood. This lesson was universalized by Guido in his complaint about the social and psychological effects of envy: o gente umana, perché poni ’l core là ’v’ è mestier di consorte divieto? [O human race, why do you set your hearts where there must be exclusion of partnership?] (Purg. 14.86–7)
Though the journey to Beatrice has been shared by countless readers, it is still at heart an intensely subjective experience for the poet. In Purgatorio 13–15, as we have seen, Dante struggles with his own envy. Guido’s barbed complaint to him about “exclusion of partnership” pricks his conscience and lodges in his memory precisely because of its painful pertinence to his competitive relation with Virgil. In modern psychological terms the pilgrim “compensates” for the sharpness of the critique by misquoting it (“‘exclusion’ and ‘partnership’”) as if its key terms were polar opposites, as if it were easy to conceive Virgil as both a partner in the ascent and a lost soul forever excluded from the Light. Until the second “P” is wiped away by the angel of charity, Dante will be unable even to begin to acknowledge the intensity of his envy of Virgil.
SAVING VIRGIL
101
So fierce is his unspoken (and still largely unconscious) yearning for Virgil’s disappearance that the pilgrim is genuinely surprised by it when it happens. As long as he is blinded by invidious earthly desires—including the classical ambition to displace his rival as Top Poet on the Mountain (cf. Gallus’s displacement of Hesiod on Parnassus in Eclogues 6.64–71)—he can think of Virgil’s ultimate destiny only in terms of exclusion. As soon as the Cornice of the Envious is behind him, however, he begins to appreciate the long-term importance of his partnership with Virgil and to make some progress in the moral direction recommended by Guido. On the Cornice of the Wrathful, where a dense blinding smoke temporarily brings back the “Gloom of hell” [Buio d’inferno] (Purg. 16.1), he can hardly ignore the magnitude of what’s at stake for his guide in the outcome of their joint expedition. The return of infernal blindness is the only purgatorial experience that Dante fully suffers along with the shades on the Holy Mountain. Like the Wrathful, he must loosen the knot of anger at the prospect of a sudden shocking reversal of God’s judgment that their souls are to be saved. Compelled to empathize with the unjustly damned, the pilgrim reestablishes his partnership with Virgil in a simple gesture. He places his hand on the shoulder of his “wise and trusty escort” [la scorta mia saputa e fida] (Purg. 16.8) so that he may not stray to the edge or knock against anything that might kill him. In case the point is lost amid all the smoke, Virgil makes it plain by repeating a simple command with complex implications for his own future: “Take care that you are not cut off from me” [Guarda che da me tu non sia mozzo] (Purg. 16.15). Saving Virgil beyond the immediate obscurities of the allegory—somewhere off in the blaze of continuing creativity sparked by the Commedia—becomes the mission of the community of Dante’s readers who will pray for the souls of both partners in the journey: it cannot be solely the responsibility of Dante-poet within the relatively narrow confines of the hundred cantos. Even as Dante-pilgrim re-establishes his partnership with Virgil, so we as an emotionally (and even prayerfully) engaged readership must renew our creative partnership with Dante-poet in order to loosen the theological knot of Virgil’s disappearance and resolve the infernal discord of the noble pagans into a paradisial concord. Our partnership in the creative project of the Commedia deeply depends on a willingness to act as intercessors in Virgil’s case. We must continue to protest the injustice of his sentence and to work with the “higher authorities” for his release—as if, across time and space, the expansive circoli of Dante’s readership had formed a kind of Amnesty International to help prisoners in the afterlife.11
102
PART I
TRAPASSAR
While the quest to save Virgil became a personal obsession with me, I do not believe that my living hope for his salvation was the result of mere wishful thinking in the face of unpalatable yet irrefutable textual evidence. As the Eagle emphatically declared to Dante, the salvation of Trajan ...di viva spene fu mercede: di viva spene, che mise la possa ne’ prieghi fatti a Dio per suscitarla, sì che potesse sua voglia esser mossa. [...was the reward of living hope, of living hope that gave power to the prayers made to God to raise him up, that it might be possible for his will to be moved.] (Par. 20.108–11)
Since Dante has done everything in his poetic power to quicken and justify such hope in his readers, our intercessory readings of the poem— our prieghi—may have the collective power to alter even the most vindictive judgments of the Divine Will. We must therefore resist the tragic inclination to regard Trajan’s salvation as just an exception that proves the rule of damnation for noble pagans. Just as Dante himself had to struggle with the notion of Divine Love as the very opposite of a zero-sum game, he does not make it easy for his readers to remain untouched by the fate of the dolcissimo patre. If the high fantasy of saving Virgil were realized in Paradise without reader participation, the vital bond of hope linking the poet to his readers in Purgatory would be lost. Sustaining hope for Virgil’s suscitar requires a strenuous effort of will comparable to the physical labour of climbing the Holy Mountain or the mental toil of reading about it on four levels at once. While we may be initially tempted to let the poet simply lead us up the rocky stairs to knowledge, we soon realize that any understanding of the poem gained without strenuous spiritual effort on our part amounts to little more than encyclopedic information about a remote medieval text—like Singleton’s rock slide of annotations. It is certainly not the panoramic wisdom promised at the anagogic level to those who are raised upward by “the hope of the heights” [la speranza de l’altezza] (Inf. 1.54). Critical attacks on the sacredness of the Sacred Poem deny Dante’s readers any hope of the heights by displacing anagogic meditation with rhetorical analysis, which may be textually subtle but never spiritually vital. By struggling to hope for Virgil’s salvation, even readers with no faith (if my own experience is anything to go by) can attain an anagogic knowledge of the effort required for true purgatorial wisdom.
SAVING VIRGIL
103
As my “retheologizing” approach to Dante’s special orthodoxy in the Commedia follows from my emotional attachment to Virgil, I feel that it is not out of place to close with two anecdotes that stimulated my interest in the fate of the noble pagans. The first reveals the degree to which Dante’s readers can still become emotionally stirred by the spiritual altezza of his poem despite its glossatorial burial during the past seven hundred years. On the day that my undergraduate Dante seminar was scheduled to discuss the disappearance of Virgil in Purgatorio 30, a good friend and colleague of mine could not bring himself to attend class for fear that he might cry and embarrass himself.12 The intensity of his reaction led me to investigate medieval theological speculations about prayer and intercession that might bolster hope for the Baptism of the Damned. The second anecdote concerns the pervasive relevance of Dante’s theological questions to souls (such as mine) caught in the web of information technology. The ghost of Virgil, I discovered, lurks in the very machine I used to compose this essay. Each evening for about three weeks, I would type up my day’s research into a file stored in the mysterious depths of my hard drive. Though I became increasingly convinced that Virgil was not intended for damnation, he had vanished and I didn’t know how to get him back. Since my word-processing program only allowed for a file title of six letters, I inevitably called the file “Virgil.” Every night when I went to turn off the machine, the theological question of the reader’s will flashed before me and yet I was too preoccupied to see it. Finally, when I had almost despaired of finding a way into the paper, I signed off on the file, and the question hit me in the face once again: DO YOU WISH TO SAVE VIRGIL? I finally realized my deep commitment to the intercessory mission of Dante’s readership when I found myself typing in “Yes, Yes, Yes!” NOTES 1 Supplement to Part 3, q71a2, The “Summa Theologica” of St. Thomas Aquinas, vol 20, 42–43. The Supplement was compiled after Aquinas’s death, probably by his friend Fra Rainaldo da Piperna. Its contents are derived from Aquinas’s youthful commentary (composed 1235–1253) on Book Four of the Sentences of Peter Lombard. The biblical text cited by Aquinas appears in the Vulgate as Charitas nunquam excidit, which the Dominican translators of the Supplement render as “Charity never falleth away.” The same text is translated as “Charity never faileth” in the Authorized King James Version. All subsequent biblical references in the body of this essay are from the Authorized King James Version. 2 See Pietro di Dante (gloss to Inf. 4.1), Guido da Pisa (gloss to Inf. 4.79), and Boccaccio (Esposizione allegorica, scs. 16–49). For a discussion of Trecento
104
3 4
5
6
7
8
9
10
PART I
TRAPASSAR
responses to Limbo and to the damnation of the noble pagans, see Iannucci (1990), 42–53, and “Dante’s Limbo: At the Margins of Orthodoxy” in this volume. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Dante’s Commedia (text and translation) are from Singleton (1970–75). For a discussion of various medieval theological positions on the fate of the Noble Pagans, see Iannucci in this volume. While Augustine hailed various pagan Romans as models of virtue—notably, Cato of Utica, Junius Brutus, Curtius, and the Decii—he vehemently refuted the opinion of the “tenderhearted” that good people born outside the faith, along with everyone else, will be saved at the Last Judgment through the compassionate intercession of the saints. For his justification of the “faith-is-all” rule, see City of God 21.18–26. “It is to our ignorance of fact, and not to the irrelevance of human ideals of justice, that the Eagle appeals, in specifying why we cannot judge God’s judgment on the virtuous pagans: neither the living nor the elect yet know what it is,” concludes Allan (1989), 200, in his trenchant discussion of the Eagle’s discourse. See Barolini (1990), 142, for this quotation, and (1997), 116–17, for evidence that her rebuttal of Allan’s arguments in favour of Virgil’s salvation was deeply affected by her typological and narratological reflections on Dante’s damnation of Ulysses. Barolini (1990), 143 n. 8, follows Gilbert Highet in using “Vergil” instead of “Virgil.” On the patristic origins and medieval cultural development of the notion of Purgatory, see Le Goff (1984). That the belief in universal salvation sprang from early Christian reactions to the harshness of God’s judgment against the baptized (e.g., heretics and schismatics) as well as against the unbaptized (e.g., infidels and pagans) is clear from Augustine’s hard-nosed refutation of the doctrine in City of God 21.9–27. The Latin theological background to the treatment of Purgatory in medieval English literature is surveyed by Matsuda (1997), 34–59. The main sources for the legend of Trajan and the widow in the Latin Middle Ages were Paul the Deacon’s Sancti Gregorii Magni vita 27 (PL 75, col. 57: the source of the Latin quotations), which dates from the eighth century; and John the Deacon’s Sancti Gregorii Magni vita II 44 (PL 75, cols. 104–6), which dates from the late ninth century. The impact of the legend on thirteenth-century scholastic speculations about the efficacy of prayer can be noted in the allusion to Gregory and Trajan in the Supplement to Part 3, q71a5, of The “Summa Theologica” of St. Thomas Aquinas. For detailed discussion of medieval responses to the legend, see Paris (1878), Whatley (1984), and Vickers (1983). Vita Sancti Gregorii I Papae 29. The earliest extant life of Pope Gregory (St. Gall Codex 567) was written by an anonymous monk (or nun?) in Whitby in 713 AD. In game theory, a zero-sum game is defined as a competition in which the gains of one player must be exactly matched by the losses of another (or others).
SAVING VIRGIL
105
11 On Dante’s conception of Limbo as a “place of transition,” see Iliescu (1989), 104–105. Though Iliescu argues for Virgil’s salvation by likening his case to Cato’s, I am inclined to distinguish them and to view Trajan’s case as presenting a stronger precedent for the bending of the Divine Will in Virgil’s favour through human intercession. 12 This essay is dedicated to Scott Befford: may his tears help to baptize the dolcissimo patre. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alighieri, Dante. La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. Ed. G. Petrocchi. 4 vols. Milano: Mondadori, 1966–67. ——— The Divine Comedy. Trans. Charles S. Singleton. 6 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–75. Alighieri, Pietro. Il Commentarium di Pietro Alighieri. Firenze: Olschki, 1978. Allan, Mowbray. “Does Dante Hope for Virgil’s Salvation?” Modern Language Notes 104, 1 (1989): 193–205. Anonymous Monk of Whitby. Vita Sancti Gregorii I Papae: The Earliest Life of Gregory the Great. Trans. Bertram Colgrave. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1968. Aquinas, St. Thomas. The “Summa Theologica” of St. Thomas Aquinas. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 22 vols. London: Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1913–42. Augustine, St. The City of God against the Pagans. Trans. R.W. Dyson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Barolini, Teodolinda. “Q: Does Dante Hope for Virgil’s Salvation? A: Why Do We Care? For the Very Reason We Should Not Ask the Question.” Modern Language Notes 105, 1 (1990): 138–44. ——— “Dante’s Ulysses: Narrative and Transgression.” Dante: Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. Amilcare A. Iannucci. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. 113–32. Boccaccio, Giovanni. Esposizione allegorica. Esposizioni sopra la Comedia di Dante. Ed. Giorgio Padoan. Milan: Mondadori, 1965. Guido da Pisa. Expositiones et glosse super Comediam Dantis. Ed. Vincent Cioffari. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974. Iannucci, Amilcare A. “Inferno IV.” Lectura Dantis 6, Supplement (1990): 42–53. ——— “Dante’s Limbo: At the Margins of Orthodoxy.” Dante & the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression. Ed. James Miller. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005. 63–82. Iliescu, Nicolae. “Will Virgil Be Saved?” Mediaevalia 12 (1989, for 1986): 93–114. John the Deacon. Sancti Gregorii Magni vita. Patrologia latina. Ed. J–P. Migne. Vol. 75. Paris: Migne, 1849. Cols. 61–242. Le Goff, Jacques. The Birth of Purgatory. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984.
106
PART I
TRAPASSAR
Matsuda, Takami. Death and Purgatory in Middle English Didactic Poetry. Woodbridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 1997. Paris, Gaston. La légende de Trajan. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1878. Paul the Deacon. Sancti Gregorii Magni vita. Patrologia latina. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Vol. 75. Paris: Migne, 1849. Cols. 41–60. Vickers, Nancy. “Seeing Is Believing: Gregory, Trajan, and Dante’s Art.” Dante Studies 101 (1983): 67–85. Virgil. P. Vergili Maronis opera. Ed. R.A.B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. ——— The Aeneid: A New Prose Translation. Trans. David West. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. Whatley, Gordon. “The Uses of Hagiography: The Legend of Pope Gregory and the Emperor Trajan in the Middle Ages.” Viator 15 (1984): 35–63.
Sacrificing Virgil Mira Gerhard
H
ope gives rise to hermeneutics in the Commedia, as Dante discovers on beholding the verses inscribed over the Gate of Hell. “Master, their meaning is hard for me,” he complains to Virgil [Maestro, il senso lor m’è duro] (Inf. 3.12).1 Even before Dante has stepped over the initiatory threshold of the Inferno, which is also the interpretive threshold of the Inferno, he seems to have abandoned all hope of making sense of it. The hopeful allegorical impetus to read over the lines, and between them, and beyond them to whatever end they obscurely anticipate, ironically springs from a damned soul who’s supposed to have abandoned ogne speranza. Virgil turns out to be more that the first guide in the poem. He is also its first glossator—the prime mover in a long line of dauntless readers who have claimed authority in deciphering its senso duro. His hermeneutical chutzpah is hard to resist. He immediately gets round the exegetical impasse of the Gate by providing Dante with a strong tropological incentive to get through it: Ed elli a me, come persona accorta: “Qui si convien lasciare ogne sospetto; ogne viltà convien che qui sia morta. [And he to me, as one who understands, “Here must all fear be left behind; here let all cowardice be dead…”] (Inf. 3.13–15)2
As one who understands, Virgil also wilfully misunderstands. His gloss on the inscription amounts to a blatant inversion of its final admonitory command. According to him, it’s not hope that’s to be abandoned by the pilgrim-reader on the threshold of transgressive understanding. It’s fear, specifically the social fear of being judged a coward. Surely a proudly
107
108
PART I
TRAPASSAR
noble soul like Dante can abandon viltà without a moment’s hesitation. So buck up, lettor: it’s better to misread the signs—at least temporarily, as a way of getting through them—than to linger over their daunting obscurity until panic leads to paralysis and paralysis sinks into perdition. Virgil’s reading lesson may seem to push Dante in the immoral direction of the Damned, who have all overpassed the limit of the Law and can entertain no hope of divine forgiveness; but as Dante finds out on the other side of the Gate, the hopeful mission of the Virgilian reader is “to get beyond the sign” [trapassar del segno] (Par. 26.117) in the morally uplifting manner of the Blessed, who enjoy an excess of divine knowledge without symbolic mediation simply by seeing God face to face. As readers bewildered by how much is at stake in interpreting the enigmatic signs before our eyes, we soon come to rely on Virgil’s moraleboosting advice about sustaining hope in allegoresis as a route to salvation. So morally progressive are his readings throughout the first two cantiche that many readers are perversely inclined to misread Virgil’s temporary release from Hell as a sign of God’s willingness to forgive him, or at least “to get beyond” the signifying Letter of the Law to the Spirit signified in it. If the Spirit truly lives among the faithful, then a reading of the Law spiritaliter would surely quicken hope in the unhardening of God’s heart towards the unbaptized infants and noble pagans, those poor benighted souls whose only fault (according to Virgil’s self-defensive reading of Limbo) was their lack of Faith. What’s the sense in condemning Virgil, the most hopeful of readers, to live in longing “without hope” [sanza speme] (Inf. 4.42)? If the assertion on the Gate that “Primal Love” [Primo Amore] (Inf. 3.6) moved God to construct the hateful prison of the Inferno conveys a senso duro to us initially, then the ultimate meaning of this liminal paradox becomes durissimo when we try to understand what sort of loving God could possibly create the psychological torment reserved for Virgil in the First Circle. No wonder, after profiting from the wisdom of this compelling and sympathetic guide for almost sixty-four cantos, we find his sudden departure in Purgatorio 30 no less devastating for us as readers than it is for Dante himself. Unwilling to accept the hard lesson that the “Virgilian” mode of tropological misreading must be lost, along with Virgil, when Beatrice arrives on the scene to complicate the anagogic reading of its signs, Ed King in his essay “Saving Virgil” has suggested that Dante with his idiosyncratic approach to orthodoxy could easily have applied the tentative Aquinian notion of implicit faith to solve the problem of the virtuous pagans.3 Does
SACRIFICING VIRGIL
109
Dante not do just that by placing the soul of Ripheus the Trojan in the Heaven of the Just? The presence of Trajan in the same Heaven is quite another matter: he was a great emperor with a great pope working on his case. Ripheus by contrast was a virtual nobody, an extra in the crowdscenes of the Trojan War. But there lies the real problem. By revealing the salvation of this historically insignificant pagan in Paradiso 20.67–9, Dante seems to be either cruelly flaunting Virgil’s damnation, or worse, casually sweeping it under the theological carpet with the feeble excuse that God works in mysterious ways. Those ways cannot remain mysterious for King, who audaciously argues that Virgil has not been saved within the short-term narrative limits of the Commedia because Dante intends for us, the readers, to participate in a long-term intercessory movement to secure his salvation. By drawing a typological link between the Palinurus episode in Aeneid 6 and the dialogue between Dante and Virgil on prayer in Purgatorio 6, King attempts to show that the Sibyl’s words to the unhappy shade of Aeneas’s pilot are an implicit call to Dante’s readership to pray for Virgil’s salvation. In other words, if we only wish long enough and hard enough—like the audience at Peter Pan—the comic buoyancy of the Human Spirit will overcome the tragic gravity of earthly fate and our favourite character can finally soar into the bright blue yonder. But if that doesn’t happen, and until Judgment Day we have no way of knowing whether it has, at the very least our collective prayers can put Virgil’s spirit to rest by scattering imaginary dirt on his bones and hallowing his memory as a divinely inspired prophet. Charming as this fantasy of proleptic redemption is, I would like to suggest another interpretation of Purgatorio 6 in relation to Aeneid 6 that is considerably less “Virgilian” in its hopeful misreading and more Dantean in its stern reckoning with moral distinctions than King’s upbeat exegesis. If my reading of the typological connection between these passages is correct, it will serve as a tropological defence of the poet’s decision to sacrifice rather than to save Virgil. King’s central argument about Virgil’s eventual release from Limbo rests on the interpretation of the exchange between Palinurus and the Sibyl in the Underworld, to which our attention is drawn by a pointedly embarrassing question Dante poses (with the mock deference of a cocky schoolboy) to his illustrious teacher: El par che tu mi nieghi, o luce mia, espresso in alcun testo che decreto del cielo orazion pieghi; e questa gente prega pur di questo:
110
PART I
TRAPASSAR
sarebbe dunque loro speme vana, o non m’è ’l detto tuo ben manifesto? [It seems to me, O my light , that you deny expressly in a certain passage that prayer bends the decree of heaven; and these people pray but for this—shall then their hope be in vain, or are your words not rightly clear to me?] (Purg. 6.28–33)
The testo in question is Aeneid 6.376: “desine fata deum flecti sperare precando” [You must cease to hope that the Fates of the gods can be altered by prayers].4 In its original context this line does clearly indicate that Virgil, speaking through the authoritative persona of the Sibyl, denies the efficacy of prayer in altering Palinurus’s or anyone else’s divinely ordained end. King, however, argues that when the Sibyl’s dictum about the Fates is read through the corrective lens of the Commedia, it suddenly yields the opposite meaning—just as the despair-inducing inscription on the Gate yields a hopeful message when interpreted by a Virgil who’s had his hope of the heights restored by Beatrice’s promise of praise. We need to examine the original narrative context of the testo more closely than King allows in his haste to transpose its stern message into the stirring key of hope. What has Palinurus just said to cause the Sibyl to respond in this way? He has boldly begged Aeneas either to turn back to bury him or to carry him across the Styx: quod te per caeli iucundum lumen et auras, per genitorem oro, per spes surgentis Iuli, eripe me his, inuicte, malis: aut tu mihi terram inice, namque potes, portusque require Velinos; aut tu, si qua uia est, si quam tibi diua creatrix ostendit (neque enim, credo, sine numine diuum flumina tanta paras Stygiamque innare paludem), da dextram misero et tecum me tolle per undas, sedibus ut saltem placidis in morte quiescam. [But I beg of you, by the joyous light and winds of heaven, by your father, by your hopes of Iulus as he grows to manhood, you who have never known defeat, rescue me from this anguish. Either throw some earth on my body—you can do that. Just steer back to the harbours of Velia. Or else if there is a way and the goddess who gave you life shows it to you—for I do not believe you are preparing to sail these great rivers and the swamp of the Styx unless the blessing of the gods is with you—take pity on me, give me your right hand, take me aboard and carry me with you over the waves, so that in death at least I can be at peace in a place of quiet.] (Aeneid 6.363–70)
SACRIFICING VIRGIL
111
Dante’s Virgil does not affirm King’s interpretation of this passage. To the pilgrim’s two-part question (“…shall then their hopes be in vain or are your words not rightly clear to me?”), Virgil’s response is decidedly tart as it often is when Dante is going astray in his thought: La mia scrittura è piana; e la speranza di costor non falla, se ben si guarda con la mente sana… [My writing is plain and the hope of these souls is not fallacious, if with sound judgment you consider well…] (Purg. 6.34–6) (emphasis added)
Since Virgil connects these two principal clauses with “and” rather than “but,” his syntax suggests to me that they are concordant rather than contradictory statements. Furthermore, after explaining why the souls in Purgatory are justified in their prayers, Virgil defends himself against Dante’s exegetical attack by calmly pointing out why such prayers couldn’t work in the context of the classical Underworld: e là dov’ io fermai cotesto punto, non s’ammendava, per pregar, difetto, perché ’l priego da Dio era disgiunto. [and there where I affirmed that point, default could not be amended by prayer, because the prayer was disjoined from God.] (Purg. 6.40–2)
Obviously referring to the Sibyl’s response here, Virgil plainly affirms the point he has just been discussing, namely, that the request for prayer is justified in the new context of Purgatory, which does not, in fact, contradict the Sibyl’s statement about the futility of prayer in the old context of the Stygian shore. The fata deum were fixed, she implied, because if they were not, their origin could not have been divine. We should recall, moreover, that similar statements about the fixity of the Divine Will are made in Paradiso. According to the Celestial Eagle, La prima volontà, ch’è da sé buona, da sé, ch’è sommo ben, mai non si mosse. Cotanto è giusto quanto a lei consuona: nullo creato bene a sé la tira, ma essa, radïando, lui cagiona. [The primal Will, which of Itself is good, has never moved from Itself, which is the supreme Good. All is just that accords with It; no created good draws It to itself, but It, raying forth, is the cause of it.] (Par. 19.86–90)
112
PART I
TRAPASSAR
In case the message didn’t get through the first time, the Eagle states it again in his explanation of why King Hezekiah’s prayer for deliverance from death did not upset the Divine Plan: ora conosce che ’l giudicio etterno non si trasmuta, quando degno preco fa crastino là giù de l’odïerno. [Now he knows that the eternal judgment is not changed when worthy prayer there below makes tomorrow’s that which was today’s.] (Par. 20.52–4) (emphasis added)
As the authoritative advocate for the Divine Justice system, the Eagle insists that eternal judgment cannot be changed or moved from itself— just as the Sibyl insisted that a divine decree cannot be changed—because otherwise its origin would not be divine. But this is not to say that prayer is ineffective within such a system. Since God is the source of all good, prayer cannot cause Him to do good or to change His decrees. As a freewilled movement in a good direction, worthy prayer can only be an active acceptance of God’s will to do good. Worthy prayer does not change God’s will because it is already in accordance with God’s will. Unworthy prayer fails because it asks for what is alien to God’s nature, which is unchangingly good and therefore cannot be bent towards evil. Unfortunately for Palinurus, his taboo-breaking request to Aeneas is not a worthy prayer. The Sibyl blasts him for his presumptuous desire for a quick fix to his predicament: unde haec, o Palinure, tibi tam dira cupido? tu Stygias inhumatus aquas amnemque seuerum Eumenidum aspicies, ripamue iniussus adibis? [How did you conceive this monstrous desire, Palinurus? How can you, who are unburied, hope to set eyes on the river Styx and the pitiless waters of the Furies?] (Aeneid 6.373–5)
His prayer for burial is addressed not to a divinity but only to a mortal of divine heritage, Aeneas. Moreover, it is selfish and harmful. In the Aeneid, as in the Commedia, the hero must continually press forward. Aeneas has an important destiny to fulfill beyond the Stygian shore and must not dally or turn back for any reason—not even to help a comrade in distress. His pilot’s plea to be carried across the Styx contrary to divine decree is audacious, indeed. It would be like one of the inhabitants of Purgatory asking Dante to carry him to Paradise rather than progressing there by his own ascetic efforts under the influence of Divine Grace. As
SACRIFICING VIRGIL
113
the Sibyl preaches with proto-Augustinian vehemence, the plea of Palinurus is motivated by dira cupido. It is not the humble prayer of a true supplicant but an unholy request betraying the pilot’s hubristic defiance of the gods. Dante learns from Virgil’s posthumous gloss on his own poem that Palinurus’s prayer was “disjoined from God” primarily because the human motivation behind it was contrary to the Divine Will—and not, as King contends, because it happened to be uttered during a period when God had withdrawn His grace from the world. Distant as God may have been from the pagan heroes, he was not utterly deaf to their prayers. He certainly listened to the overtones of faith, hope, and charity in the unrecorded prayers of Ripheus. Virgil’s surprising affirmation of the power of prayer in his own work makes a far more emotionally powerful statement about the workings of the Divine Justice system than any denial of prayer we might expect him, as a pre-Christian pagan, to make out of mere ignorance. It suggests that Virgil was in some sense aware of the salvational power of implicit faith despite his protestation that he was damned because he failed to go through the initiatory rite of Baptism, which he correctly if now futilely reads as the “portal of the faith” [porta de la fede] (Inf. 4.36). Patristic readings of his fourth eclogue as a prophecy of the birth of Christ reinforced the common medieval view that Virgil possessed the knowledge of a coming Saviour but did not act upon it. His failure to practise the Faith is no doubt what sets him apart from Ripheus. Both pagans were virtuous in so far as they were miraculously infused with Faith, but the Trojan freely (if instinctively) behaved like a faithful, hopeful, and charitable Christian avant la lettre. That’s why he shines forth in Heaven while Virgil fades away in Limbo. Moreover, if Palinurus and Virgil are to be typologically linked, as King argues, then Palinurus’s wrongful prayer and fixation on earthly fame must also reflect negatively on Virgil’s character. Perhaps he is not so free of faults as his touching apologia in Limbo would lead us to believe, and his constant efforts to hide the dark side of his character—especially his stormy impatience (Inf. 8.118–20), his desperate envy (Purg. 14.150), and his overshadowing pride (Purg. 21.130–32)—might explain why his response to Dante on the subject of prayer is so sharp and unforgiving. He is uncomfortable dealing with a theological subject that reveals his own “shortcomings,” as he euphemistically called his sins [tai difetti] (Inf. 4.40), and so he tries to turn attention away from himself by recommending that Dante discuss the matter with Beatrice.
114
PART I
TRAPASSAR
According to King, if the Sibyl’s prophecy is interpreted in the context of the dialogue on prayer between Dante and Virgil, it clearly indicates the theological justification and even the ritual means for Virgil’s salvation. Such a reading strikes me as overly “Virgilian” in the Gate-of-Hell sense. It simply puts too positive a spin on the Sibyl’s words: sed cape dicta memor, duri solacia casus. nam tua finitimi, longe lateque per urbes prodigiis acti caelestibus, ossa piabunt et statuent tumulum et tumulo sollemnia mittent, aeternumque locus Palinuri nomen habebit. [But hear my words, remember them and find comfort for your sad case. The people who live far and wide in all their cities round the place where you died, will be driven by signs from heaven to consecrate your bones. They will raise a burial mound for you and to that mound will pay their annual tribute and the place will bear the name of Palinurus for all time to come.] (Aeneid 6.377–81)
The Sibyl does not actually say that the body of Palinurus will ever be found or buried. His shade is not promised a burial but only a tomb and offerings—an empty tomb, no doubt, like the cenotaph of Hector at which Andromache made her offerings in vain. The Sibyl also promises that the living will remember him by giving his name to a stretch of shore in his homeland. This is the posthumous reward that especially comforts Palinurus: “At these words his sorrows were removed and the grief was driven from that sad heart for a short time. He rejoiced in the land that was to bear his name” [his dictis curae emotae pulsusque parumper / corde dolor tristi; gaudet cognomine terra] (Aeneid 6.382–83). What most pleases his heroic soul are the trappings of earthly fame, of course, but the Sibyl promises these not as a remedy for his hard lot after death but only as a temporary solace while he endures his century of wandering on the Stygian shore. The prophetic resolution of the Palinurus incident may also be connected typologically with Beatrice’s descent into Limbo to seek Virgil’s aid. Beatrice makes a promise to Virgil as the Sibyl did to Palinurus: “When I am before my Lord I will often praise you to him” [Quando sarò dinanzi al segnor mio, / di te mi loderò sovente a lui] (Inf. 2.73–4). On the surface, as Virgil reports from his self-interested viewpoint, Beatrice seems to be promising something quite important. Moved by the impetuous hopefulness of “Virgilian” hermeneutics, King has jumped to the cheery conclusion that her promised encomium will somehow lessen Virgil’s suffering or even lead to his eventual salvation. This interpretation is seductive but must be
SACRIFICING VIRGIL
115
resisted. Just as the Sibyl’s prophecy seems to offer more than it really does, Beatrice’s promise falls somewhat short of a one-way ticket to Heaven. What is she really offering him? A few lines earlier she was flattering him by praising his eloquence and earthly fame—“O courteous Mantuan spirit, whose fame still lasts in the world, and shall last as long as the world…” [O anima cortese mantoana, / di cui la fama ancor nel mondo dura…] (Inf. 2.58–60). Note that her invocation, which is not as effusive as it first seems, contains a subtle admonition. Virgil’s fame, which he cherishes so dearly, is as transitory as the world that trumpets it. From Beatrice’s invocation to Virgil, we can infer that her promised speech to God will also emphasize Virgil’s earthly achievements, including his posthumous guidance of Dante. What else has she to praise? If she is truly Sibyl-like in her promise, then Virgil like Palinurus will gain merely eulogistic solace for his hard lot and not intercessory pleas leading to salvation, as King would have us believe. Up to this point I have disputed King’s interpretation of the Palinurus episode by showing that the Sibyl’s prophecy typologically highlights Virgil’s imperfections instead of foretelling his salvation. The same episode, however, also clearly associates Palinurus—and by allegorical extension, Virgil—with the idea of sacrifice. Let us examine the circumstances surrounding Palinurus’s death. His fate is foretold to Venus by Neptune, who tries to dispel her fears about the safety of Aeneas: pelle timores. tutus, quos optas, portus accedet Auerni. unus erit tantum amissum quem gurgite quaeres; unum pro multis dabitur caput. [Put away your fears. He will arrive safely where you wish, at the harbour of Avernus. One only will be lost. One only will you look for in vain upon the sea, and that one life will be given for many.] (Aeneid 5.812–15) (emphasis added)
At Neptune’s command, Somnus, the god of sleep, subsequently alights on Aeneas’s ship and touches Palinurus’s temples with a Lethe-dipped branch. Palinurus instantly falls asleep at the tiller and is flung with it into the sea (Aeneid 5.850–60). If a typological link is drawn between his sudden disappearance overboard and the sudden disappearance of Virgil beside Lethe, we have no choice but to conclude that Virgil and all he represents must be sacrificed so that Dante and his readers can move beyond him and his pagan world view. After Palinurus’s drowning, Aeneas finally takes charge, seizing the helm and guiding the way:
116
PART I
TRAPASSAR
…pater amisso fluitantem errare magistro sensit, et ipse ratem nocturnis rexit in undis multa gemens casuque animum concussus amici: ‘o nimium caelo et pelago confise sereno, nudus in ignota, Palinure, iacebis harena. […Father Aeneas sensed that he was adrift without a helmsman. In mid-ocean in the dead of night he took control of the ship himself, and grieving to the heart at the loss of his friend, he cried out: ‘You trusted too much, Palinurus, to a clear sky and a calm sea, and your body will lie naked on an unknown shore.] (Aeneid 5.867–71)
Similarly, after Virgil’s disappearance, Beatrice finally takes charge in her metaphorical role “as admiral” [Quasi ammiraglio] (Purg. 30.58) and can guide the pilgrim across the Great Sea of Being towards his ultimate homeland in the Empyrean. Until he loses Virgil, Dante cannot really achieve a separate identity as a poet. Right after he notices his loss, Beatrice calls him by name for the first and only time in the Commedia (Purg. 30.55), signalling that it is now time for Dante to move beyond his identification with “Father” Virgil and to cast aside his childish dependence on “Virgilian” hermeneutics. Like the distraught pilgrim, anguished readers who have benefited from the tropological impetus of hope behind Virgil’s (mis)readings of the signs are bound to bewail his reduction to a mere segno of the pagan past and to resist the Beatricean force of trapassar. King is clearly one such reader, and he accordingly treats the cruel “offing” of Virgil as if it were an unholy act, a kind of sacrilege. Yet perhaps it is precisely that which restores the Sacred to Dante’s world. As Georges Bataille observed in his meditations on the intense feelings aroused by the witnessing of a sacrifice: “The greatest anguish, the anguish in the face of death, is what men desire in order to transcend it beyond death and ruination. But it can be overcome like this on one condition only, namely, that the anguish shall be appropriate to the spirit of the man who desires it.…Anguish is desired in sacrifice to the greatest possible extent. But when the bounds of the possible are over-reached, a recoil is inevitable.”5 The recoil that Dante-pilgrim and pro-Virgil readers experience in their first encounter with Beatrice may have the age-old ritual function of reawakening their souls to the original anguish of fractured self-consciousness, of discontinuity from God. Out of that intense feeling arises humanity’s primordial consciousness of the Sacred as a route back to continuity with the Divine. The sacrifice of Virgil provokes a profound degree of anguish appropriate to the deeply broken spirit of the pilgrim,
SACRIFICING VIRGIL
117
who, aghast at the sacrilegious culture of the Inferno, is guided by Beatrice back towards the restored continuity of the divine with the human, a mystical synthesis figured in the multiple allegories of the Incarnation ritually enacted in and beyond the Earthly Paradise. Sacrifice, so important to the ritual world of the Aeneid, is also at the very heart of Christian culture. From an anagogic viewpoint, then, Virgil can be “read” at the moment of his disappearance not only as the Old Adam cast off by the New but also as a type of Christ in his role as sacrificial victim. Virgil’s sacrifice is necessary for Dante’s spiritual growth just as Christ’s sacrifice was necessary for the salvation of humanity.6 As Christ reminded his disciples in John 16:7: “It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter [the Holy Spirit] will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.” Although love of Christ’s humanity is never to be abandoned, Christians must progress from this to the deeper, more spiritual love of Christ’s divinity. The Saviour had to leave his disciples, despite the pain it caused them, before they could fully understand the spiritual love that comes with the Comforter. In the same way, Virgil must leave his disciples Dante and Statius before they can rise beyond the bonds of transitory human affection to the abiding spiritual love associated with Beatrice and Bernard. One final indication of Virgil’s ultimate fate lies in the verses sung by Beatrice’s followers just before his departure: Tutti dicean: “Benedictus qui venis!” e fior gittando e di sopra e dintorno, “Manibus, oh, date lilïa plenis!” [all cried, “Benedictus qui venis” and, scattering flowers up and around, “Manibus, oh, date lilia plenis.”] (Purg. 30.19–21)
The first Latin phrase (“Blessed art thou that cometh”) associates the arrival of Beatrice with Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday (cf. Matt. 21:9: “Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord”).7 A theologically appropriate correction is made in the displacement of Virgil-Christ by BeatriceChrist, though the masculine ending of benedictus ironically signals an “error” at the literal level. The second Latin phrase reinscribes Virgil’s presence at the typological level by recollecting a passage from the Aeneid: heu, miserande puer, si qua fata aspera rumpas, tu Marcellus eris. manibus date lilia plenis, purpureos spargam flores animamque nepotis his saltem accumulem donis, et fungar inani munere.
118
PART I
TRAPASSAR
[Oh the pity of it! If only you could break the harsh laws of Fate! You will be Marcellus. Give lilies from full hands. Leave me to scatter red roses. These at least I can heap up for the spirit of my descendant and perform the rite although it will achieve nothing.] (Aeneid 6.882–6)
At the climax of his journey to the Underworld, Aeneas is shown the future of Rome by the shade of his father Anchises. Among the future Romans paraded before Aeneas is Augustus’s adopted son Marcellus, who died in his youth. Virgil’s fate, like that of Marcellus, will be “bitter” (aspera) for he will not be able to break free from his fate, an eternity in Limbo. And the “empty ritual” (inani munere) reminds us of the futile offerings made at the symbolic tomb of Virgil’s other typological ancestor, Palinurus. At the start I asked why Virgil was not among the Saved. The answer is now clear. Virgil is even more valuable to Dante and his readers as a sacrificial victim than as a guide. While his tutelary role in the first two cantiche reveals how far pagan wisdom can go in prophesying the age of Christ and discerning the importance of prayer, his disappearance on Purgatory ultimately demonstrates how useless this knowledge is if it is not acted upon for the salvation of the soul. Through the anguish of Virgil’s sacrifice, Dante drives home the crucial theological point that despite what all the prisoners of Limbo may say, it is not bad luck, or ignorance of the Law, or even the wrath of a vengeful God that has damned them. They have damned themselves through the choices they made. These are hard lessons to learn, and through the painful sacrifice of Virgil, Dante deeply impresses upon us the importance of free will in the recovery of the Sacred. Ed King urges us to weep baptismal tears and throw metaphorical dirt on the grave of Virgil to ensure his salvation. In light of Virgil’s sacrifice, however, perhaps we would do better to cast lilies from our hands in sad remembrance, and then move forward. NOTES 1 All quotations from Dante in this essay have been drawn from Petrocchi’s edition of the Commedia and Singleton’s translation of The Divine Comedy (1970–75), unless otherwise noted. The components of the Commedia cited from include Inferno (Inf.), Purgatorio (Purg.), and Paradiso (Par.). 2 While Dante-pilgrim perceives the inscription as an apotropaic enigma presenting a barrier to interpretation, Virgil treats it as a set of manifest signifiers to be promptly decoded and passed through. The contrast in their hermeneutical approaches to the Gate reflects the primordial Western fracture between “the symbolic discourse of the Sphinx” and “the transparent discourse of Oedipus.” See Agamben (1993), 138–39.
SACRIFICING VIRGIL
119
3 King’s essay appears in this volume. My theological critique of King’s interpretation of the Palinurus episode is indebted to Caron Ann Cioffi’s typological reading of the Virgilian allusions in the fifth and sixth cantos of Purgatorio. “In the Aeneid, the welfare of Palinurus’ shade depends on the condition of his physical body” notes Cioffi (1992), 191: “In Purgatorio V, as in the canto of Manfred, Dante severs the connection between what happens to the spirit and what happens to the flesh.” 4 All quotations from Virgil in this essay have been taken from Mynors’s edition and West’s translation of The Aeneid. 5 Bataille (1986), 87–88. The bullfight was Bataille’s anthropological prototype for the pagan eroticization of a sacrificial rite. For his critique of Christian notions of sacrifice, see Erotism, 120–21. 6 Just as Christ is the Word of God made flesh, Virgil is the pagan incarnation of the Word as reason. The psychological operations of memory, reason, and will within each human being reflect the interplay of Power, Wisdom, and Love within the Holy Trinity. See On the Trinity, 10:11–12. Reason’s holy counterpart is Wisdom, which is usually associated with Christ. 7 The biblical reference is from the Authorized King James Version. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Agamben, Giorgio. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture. Trans. Ronald L. Martinez. Theory and History of Literature. Vol. 69. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Alighieri, Dante. La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. Ed. G. Petrocchi. 4 vols. Milano: Mondadori, 1966–67. ——— The Divine Comedy. Trans. Charles S. Singleton. 6 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–75. Augustine, St. On the Trinity [De trinitate libri XV]. Trans. Arthur West Haddan and William G.T. Shedd. A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Ed. Philip Schaff. Vol. 3. Buffalo: The Christian Literature Company, 1887. 17–228. Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death & Sensuality. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights, 1986. Cioffi, Caron Ann. “Fame, Prayer, and Politics: Virgil’s Palinurus in Purgatorio V and VI.” Dante Studies 110 (1992): 179–200. King, Ed. “Saving Virgil.” Dante & the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression. Ed. James Miller. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005. 83–106. Virgil. P. Vergili Maronis opera. Ed. R.A.B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. ——— The Aeneid: A New Prose Translation. Trans. David West. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.
PART II TRASMUTAR
Dido Alighieri Gender Inversion in the Francesca Episode Carolynn Lund-Mead
D
riven by desire like the doves of Venus, Francesca and her lover Paolo fly towards Dante and Virgil out of the schiera of Dido: “cotali uscir de la schiera ov’è Dido” [so did these issue from the troop where Dido is] (Inf. 5.85). A schiera is a mobilized group whose members have something in common—at the very least a common leader. Despite their relative obscurity as historical figures, Francesca and Paolo are introduced to us through their association with the legendary Queen of Carthage. What might Dido represent that makes her their prototype, and in some sense their leader? To find out what she signified to Christian readers, let’s first listen to St. Augustine: I was required to learn by heart I know not how many of Aeneas’s wanderings, although forgetful of my own, and to weep over Dido’s death, because she killed herself for love, when all the while amid such things, dying to you, O God my life, I most wretchedly bore myself about with dry eyes. Who can be more wretched than the wretched one who takes no pity on himself, who weeps over Dido’s death, which she brought to pass by love for Aeneas, and who does not weep over his own death, brought to pass by not loving you, O God, light of my heart, bread for the inner mouth of my soul, wedding together my mind and the bosom of my thoughts? I did not love you and I committed fornication against you…I did not weep over these facts, but I wept over the dead Dido “who sought her end by the sword.” I forsook you, and I followed after your lowest creatures…. (Confessions 1.13)1
In this apostrophe to God, the converted Augustine denounces the socalled “higher” Latin literary study he engaged in as a youth. Shouts of
121
122
PART II
TRASMUTAR
“Well done,” he recalls, had encouraged him to respond to Dido by “fornicating against his God” (fornicabar abs te), who is now “the spiritual nourishment for the inner mouth of his soul” (panis oris intus animae meae). Not only does Augustine believe that he should not have wasted his time weeping over Dido, but he also agrees with the conclusion of learned men that the story of Aeneas’s sojourn in Carthage is unworthy of consideration because “it is simply not true” (doctiores autem etiam negabunt verum esse).2 Unlike Augustine in the Confessions, Dante in the Convivio considers Virgil’s story of Dido and Aeneas to be an exemplary tale for a young man. This reversal of its didactic value is accomplished by interpreting the story from the viewpoint of Aeneas rather than of Dido. Though Dante accepts Augustine’s definition of appetite as an inborn impetus towards sudden anger or sexual desire, he goes on to argue that Aeneas demonstrates how a young man must govern his appetite by his reason in order to perfect his noble nature, just as a rider must learn to manage a horse: Questo appetito mai altro no fa che cacciare e fuggire; e qualunque ora esso caccia quello che e quanto si conviene, e fugge quello che e quanto si conviene, l’uomo è ne li termini de la sua perfezione. Veramente questo appetito conviene essere cavalcato da la ragione; ché sì come uno sciolto cavallo, quanto ch’ello sia di natura nobile, per sé, sanza lo buono cavalcatore, bene non si conduce, così questo appetito, che irascibile e concupiscibile si chiama, quanto ch’ello sia nobile, a la ragione obedire conviene, la quale guida quello con freno e con isproni, come buono cavaliere. [The operation of this desire always consists in either pursuing or fleeing something; and whenever it pursues what it ought and as far as it ought, and flees what it ought and as far as it ought, man keeps within the bounds set for his perfection. This desire must, however, have reason in the saddle, for just as a horse, no matter how noble its nature, when it is without bridle and is left to itself without the guidance of an expert rider, does not acquit itself as it should, so this desire (called irascible or appetitive), no matter how noble its nature, needs to obey reason, which directs it with bridle and spurs, like any expert horseman.] (Conv. 4.26.5–6)
The rein required for the control of man’s irascible and concupiscent appetite is temperance. Thus Aeneas, having enjoyed reciprocal delight and pleasure with Dido, left her “to follow an honourable, praiseworthy and beneficial course” [per seguire onesta e laudabile via e fruttuosa] (Conv. 4.26.8–9). Whether Virgil’s account of Dido and Aeneas is perceived from
DIDO ALIGHIERI
123
Augustine’s viewpoint as noxious or from Dante’s as salutary, Dido in either reading serves as an example of Woman associated with fornication and physical appetite.3 Virgil’s Mercury initiates this negative view of Dido by equating her with Woman as a dangerous and unstable thing (Aeneid 4.563–70). Warning Aeneas in a dream that he must leave Carthage immediately, Mercury reports that Dido revolves in her heart deceit and dreadful crime (illa dolos dirumque nefas in pectore versat); “certain of death” (certa mori), “she arouses in her heart shifting tides of anger,” as R.D. Williams translates the clause “variosque irarum concitat aestus.” Having completed his warning against Dido, Mercury delivers his famous generalization about Woman: “varium et mutabile semper femina” (a woman is always a fickle and changeable thing). By casting his axiom in the neuter gender, as Williams has noted, Mercury makes his statement “particularly contemptuous.” Before Francesca and Paolo appear in the whirlwind in Inferno 5, Virgil, the creator of the story of Aeneas’s visit to Carthage,4 points out to the pilgrim Dante the figure of Dido. By means of periphrasis, Virgil introduces Dido as “she…who broke faith with the ashes of Sichaeus” [colei che…ruppe fede al cener di Sicheo] (Inf. 5.61–2), translating Dido’s own words in his Aeneid, words with which she ends her tortured questioning of what options are available to her. Dido originally mentions the ashes of her husband [non servata fides cineri promissa Sychaeo] (Aeneid 4.552), just before Mercury appears to Aeneas warning him to flee fickle and changeable Woman immediately. In an interior dialogue, Dido recognizes that, as a reputable queen whose honour is compromised, she has no choice but to die. Her chief regret is that she has broken her vow to remain loyal to the memory of her husband Sychaeus by not marrying again. This vow she had solemnly reiterated in Aeneid 4.24–5, calling down curses upon herself should she break it. Even as she speaks, however, Aeneas’s “looks and words cling fast within her bosom” [haerent infixi pectore voltus / verbaque] (Aeneid 4.4–5). Both internal and external factors have precipitated this fatal wounding. “Because she is every inch a queen,” as Victor Pöschl expresses it, she cannot help responding to the heroism of this noble speaker.5 Unbeknownst to anyone, Aeneas’s successful verbal conquest of Dido’s heart has been facilitated by his mother Venus who sends his brother Cupid in the guise of his son Ascanius to beguile “the unhappy Phoenician, doomed to impending ruin” [praecipue infelix, pesti devota futurae…Phoenissa] (Aeneid 1.712–14). It is Venus’s plan that Dido, in exchanging kisses with Cupid, shall breathe in
124
PART II
TRASMUTAR
hidden fire and beguiling poison (1.688). As Dido fondles the child in her bosom, he “little by little begins to efface Sychaeus” [paulatim abolere Sychaeum / incipit], preparing to surprise her “long-slumbering soul and heart” with “a living passion” [vivo temptat praevertere amore / iam pridem resides animos desuetaque corda] (Aeneid 1.719–22). In the Inferno, Virgil’s particular choice of Virgilian phrase results in a critical reinterpretation of the text. Virgil chooses to deny, by exclusion, the fateful machinations of the gods, which form the superstructure of the Aeneid and which make Dido a tragic victim.6 Introducing her in the Inferno not as a tragic victim but as a lustful shade, Virgil prefaces his translation of Dido’s phrase from his Aeneid with a translation from Augustine’s critique of Dido. As Giuseppe Mazzotta has indicated, Virgil’s initial introductory phrase “colei che s’ancise amorosa” [she who slew herself for love] (Inf. 5.62) translates Augustine’s “quia se occidit ab amore” [because she killed herself for love] (Confessions 1.13).7 Three times, in fact, Augustine describes Dido as she who killed herself: in the first instance, for love; in the second, for love of Aeneas (mortem, quae fiebat amando Aenean); and in the third, by falling on a sword [extinctam ferroque extrema secutam] (a quotation from Aeneid 6.457). Augustine follows this Virgilian quotation, in the same sentence, with a condemnation of Dido as one of God’s lowest creatures (extrema condita tua). Augustine’s quotation is taken from Aeneas’s encounter with Dido in the Mourning Fields of the Underworld. Aeneas asks Dido to confirm the truth of the report brought to him: that she sought her doom with the sword. Aeneas proceeds to ask if he “was the cause of her death” [funeris heu tibi causa fui?] (Aeneid 6.458). With fiery wrath but stony silence Dido refuses to answer. In Book 4, Dido kills herself, as Irving Singer observes, “in a ceremonial act occasioned by her failure as a queen.”8 In the Underworld, she is identified as “Phoenician Dido” [Phoenissa…Dido] (Aeneid 6.450), but not as a queen. She wanders among those “whom stern Love has consumed with cruel wasting” [quos durus amor crudeli tabe peredit] (Aeneid 6.442): in death, the private life of a woman in love has become more important than her public role as queen. It is this private woman in death that Augustine represents in the Confessions, and that Virgil in the underworld of Dante’s Inferno, by way of Augustine, reintroduces as a damned soul. Just as in the original Virgilian context, where durus amor (stern Love) is the active agent and Dido the passive sufferer, so too in the Inferno, as Francesca insists, it is amore that caused her demise. Augustine has simply inverted agent and victim, making Dido completely responsible. By
DIDO ALIGHIERI
125
means of a coordinate conjunction, Virgil, in his introduction of Dido in the Inferno, harnesses together in equal measure Augustine’s critique of the Virgilian Dido and Dido’s Virgilian words of personal responsibility: “colei che s’ancise amorosa, / e ruppe fede al cener di Sicheo” [she who slew herself for love and broke faith to the ashes of Sichaeus] (Inf. 5.61–2). Virgil has become a reinterpreter, via Augustine, of his own text. And so, before Francesca speaks to Dante, she is associated with the great queen whom Virgil created for his epic but whom he now condemns as an unfaithful woman by selecting from his text her own admission of breaking faith with her marriage vow. Dido is the stereotypical seductress who brings amore not to fruition but to morte. By affiliation with Virgil’s unhappy queen, Francesca becomes a member of the schiera of what Mercury has delineated as fickle and unreliable things. By means of critical exposition, Francesca is further associated with the woman whom Augustine has interpreted as tempting the reader from loving God into spiritual fornication, and whom the younger poet Dante has glossed as tempting the hero from the pursuit of virtue into physical appetite. Dido’s tragedy ends with these words: “omnis et una / dilapsus calor atque in ventos vita recessit” [all the warmth ebbed away, and the life passed away into the winds] (Aeneid 4.704–5). Dido expires when Juno, taking compassion on the dying queen, sends Iris down to earth to release her struggling spirit by cutting off a lock of her hair. Juno sends Iris, as Singer observes, not as “the herald of a beneficent nature in which men and women may love one another and make a world for themselves” but as the agent of divine pity who provides respite after the terror of the pyre.9 The gentle rhythmical release of the lightly alliterated phrase “in ventos vita recessit” seems to reverberate in Dante’s description of the damned lovers “che ’nsieme vanno, / e paion sì al vento esser leggieri” [that go together and seem to be so light upon the wind] (Inf. 5.74–5; emphasis added). In the Inferno, Francesca and her lover seem to come out of the same winds into which Dido departed in the Aeneid. Francesca emerges in this windy space talking. Just as she and her lover appear to be light upon the wind—described as aere maligno [malignant air] (Inf. 5.86)—so the phrases she breathes forth sound delicate, refined, gentili. Amidst “the hellish hurricane” that torments the Lustful by “whirling and smiting” [La bufera infernal…voltando e percotendo] (Inf. 5.31, 33), she graciously addresses Dante in a diplomatic tone reminiscent of the idiom of the roman courtois: “se fosse amico il re de l’universo, / noi pregheremmo lui de la tua pace” [if the King of the universe were friendly to us, we would pray Him for your peace] (Inf. 5.91–2).10 This cultivated
126
PART II
TRASMUTAR
breath issues from her mouth “while the wind, as now, is silent for us” [mentre che ’l vento, come fa, ci tace] (Inf. 5.96). Francesca may be using the phrase ci tace to suggest that she and her lover are the recipients of a particular dispensation—as if the wind were stilled especially for them “in this place.”11 Her statement also takes on special significance by means of subtle allusion to a biblical passage. As Padoan has recognized, Francesca’s line about the wind recalls Ecclesiasticus 43:25: “In sermone eius siluit ventus” (At his word the wind is still).12 This verse forms part of a great hymn in praise of the Creator, which in turn anticipates a passage in the New Testament where Jesus orders the wind to be silent: “dixit mari: Tace, obmutesce. Et cessavit ventus: et facta est tranquillitas magna” [(he) said to the sea: Peace. Be still. And the wind ceased; and there was made a great calm] (Mark 4:39). Francesca’s tantalizingly faint biblical echo suggests not only that the King of the universe has made special arrangements for her alone to speak but also that she has attributed to herself absolute, creative oratorical power. As an agile, captivating speaker, Francesca delivers an account of a personal tragedy that makes Dante weep, just as Virgil’s account of Dido’s suicide made Augustine weep. “Francesca, i tuoi martìri / a lagrimar mi fanno tristo e pio,” confesses the pilgrim [Francesca, your torments make me weep for grief and pity] (Inf. 5.116–17). While the infernal gale for a moment is still, Francesca creates her own smiting wind. The force of her eloquent but powerfully emotive narration succeeds in prostrating Dante. Who could have foreseen that the great male poet of amorous gentilezza—whose eloquence was designed to conquer the hearts of implacable ladies—would be felled by the deceptively gentle breath from a cultured woman’s mouth? In the fourth book of the Aeneid, Aeneas is subjected to a verbal lashing more overtly vehement and tempestuous than Francesca’s speech to Dante. Dido twice pleads with Aeneas to remain with her in Carthage, becoming more and more agitated and inflamed. Next she sends her sister Anna for one final appeal, from which Fate blocks Aeneas’s hearing so that he will not be deterred from his imperial project: ac velut annoso validam cum robore quercum Alpini Boreae nunc hinc nunc flatibus illinc eruere inter se certant; it stridor, et altae consternunt terram concusso stipite frondes; ipsa haeret scopulis et quantum vertice ad auras aetherias, tantum radice in Tartara tendit: haud secus adsiduis hinc atque hinc vocibus heros
DIDO ALIGHIERI
127
tunditur, et magno persentit pectore curas; mens immota manet, lacrimae volvuntur inanes. [Even as when northern Alpine winds, blowing now hence, now thence, emulously strive to uproot an oak strong with the strength of years, there comes a roar, the stem quivers and the high leafage thickly strews the ground, but the oak clings to the crag, and as far as it lifts its top to the airs of heaven, so far it strikes its roots down towards hell—even so with ceaseless appeals, from this side and from that, the hero is buffeted, and in his mighty heart feels the thrill of grief: steadfast stands his will; the tears fall in vain.] (Aeneid 4.441–9)
The winds in this Homeric simile, “contending among themselves” (inter se certant) to uproot the oak, echo once again in Dante’s opening description of the Second Circle of the Inferno, a place where the sea “da contrari venti è combattuto” [is assailed by warring winds] (Inf. 5.30).13 Virgil’s simile demonstrates the difficulty with which male moral and physical strength withstands the potentially destructive winds of female garrulity, or as Dante interprets it in the Convivio, with which temperance controls physical appetite. Woman’s unbridled garrulity and profligate sexuality—the powerful allure of her two main orifices—threaten to uproot man, to make him fall “come corpo morto cadde” [as a dead body falls] (Inf. 5.142). The dangerous sexual and verbal power that threatens to surrender man’s rational soul to his appetitive nature is the shadow side of Woman’s positive role. While Virgil introduces Dido to Dante by invoking the negative stereotype of Woman, Francesca introduces herself by association with the positive. Virgil chooses from his own poem a line in which Dido condemns herself as a faithless lover. Francesca, however, chooses the first line from one of Dante’s poems in the Vita Nuova, in which he claims that the beauty of a virtuous lady is the catalyst that awakens to action the potentiality of ennobling Love that exists in a gracious man’s heart: “And then the beauty of a virtuous lady / appears, to please the eyes, and in the heart / desire for the pleasing thing is born” [Bieltate appare in saggia donna pui, / che piace a gli occhi sì, che dentro al core / nasce un disio de la cosa piacente] (VN 20.5). In creating this definition, Dante is following a poetic tradition as he makes clear at the beginning of the poem: “Love and the noble heart are but one thing, / Even as the wise man tells us in his rhyme,” as Barbara Reynolds translates the lines: “Amore e ’l cor gentil sono una cosa, / sì come il saggio in suo dittare pone” (VN 20.3). As is well known, Dante not only refers to the saggio Guido Guinizzelli but also echoes the first line
128
PART II
TRASMUTAR
of Guido’s fourth canzone: “Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore” (“Love returns always to a noble heart”). In this canzone, a noble man falls in love with a beautiful woman because she resembles an angel [Tenne d’angel sembianza] (4.58). In this tradition of love poetry, Woman is defined as a pleasant thing or as an angel; in the Aeneid, she is described as a fickle and changeable thing. Within these literary contexts Woman is represented as either more, or less, than human. Francesca begins a description of her love affair by placing herself within the poetic tradition to which Dante and Guinizzelli belong: “Amor ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende, / prese costui de la bella persona / che mi fu tolta” [Love, which is quickly kindled in a gentle heart, seized this one for the fair form that was taken from me] (Inf. 5.100–2). From the first lines of her predecessors’ poems, Francesca brings together amore and the cor gentil. These she combines with the operative verb s’apprende, which she lifts from the first line of Guinizzelli’s second stanza: “Foco d’amore in gentil cor s’apprende” [Love catches fire in the noble heart] (4.11). According to Francesca, her role was that of the passive bella persona: the beautiful female form which functions as “a sign of the interior perfection of the soul revealed in exterior harmony and grace.”14 As such, she was the mediating principle between Man’s appetitive and rational souls, causing the potential of noble love to catch fire in his heart. Thus Francesca associates herself with the Woman who is desirable as a cosa piacente (pleasing thing) rather than despicable as a varium or mutabile (fickle or changeable thing). She introduces herself as the positive antithesis of the destructive feminine paradigm with which she is initially identified through her association with Dido. What’s unusual about Francesca’s description of love is that it is delivered by a woman. The choice, nevertheless, is between two “things.” The poets of what Bonagiunta calls the “sweet new style” [dolce stil novo] (Purg. 24.57) are all men. Bonagiunta hails the pilgrim Dante as the poet who brought forth “the new rhymes” [le nove rime] (Purg. 24.50) with his first canzone in the Vita Nuova: “Ladies who have intelligence of love” [Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore] (VN 19.4). This canzone, in fact, is followed in the Vita Nuova by the sonnet that Francesca, in the Inferno, chooses to imitate. Dante notes in his introduction to the canzone that he thought it fitting to address his words to women, and not to all women, but only “to those who are gracious and not merely female” [ma solamente a coloro che sono gentili e che non sono pure femmine] (VN 19.1–2). Francesca, as a woman who is gentile, has chosen to respond by means of poetic imitation.15 In so doing she goes beyond Woman’s role
DIDO ALIGHIERI
129
as angel or pleasant object to assume the role of poet. The narrator of the canzone in the Vita Nuova, however, informs his women auditors that he wishes to speak to them about his lady “to ease his mind” [per isfogar la mente] (VN 19.4). The only response he seeks to elicit from the ladies to whom his poem is addressed is an eagerness to follow the example set by his lady. “All ladies who would noble be, draw near / And walk with her,” he advises [qual vuol gentil donna parere / vada con lei] (VN 19.9). And as he reveals in the introduction to the sonnet, it was a male friend’s response to his canzone [alcuno amico l’udisse] (VN 20.1) that inspired him to write this poem. For all that the canzone purports to be for and about women, it is really a work for and about the male poets to whose schiera Dante belongs. On the Seventh Cornice of Purgatory, Dante and Guinizzelli address one another as padre and frate, members of a male lineage or fraternity (Purg. 26.97, 115). As a member of this poetic fraternity, Dante in the Vita Nuova perpetuates the image of the angelic Woman whose beauty and virtue serve as inspiring stimuli for Man’s contemplation. As a member of a critical fraternity, on the other hand, Dante joins with Augustine in interpreting Woman as either a dangerous stumbling block or as a means of dramatizing Man’s need for dominance. Francesca chooses between these two antithetical literary paradigms, both of which are male creations. In addition she takes upon herself the role of the donna gentile—an interlocutor in the dialogue of love poetry. By assuming a poetic voice, Francesca subverts male expectations, causing a rupture in the assumptions of traditional male discourse and forcing the pilgrim-poet Dante to reassess those literary forms in which women are silent pawns.16 Francesca initiates a process of discursive subversion, which will culminate in Beatrice’s fully engaged, vocal leadership. Francesca begins this interlocutory process by repeating the word Amore three times at the beginning of three lines—a celebrated anaphora which effectively accentuates the doctrinal basis of her love. As a classical figure of speech, anaphora belongs to the highest rhetorical style. Neither Dante nor Guido Guinizzelli in the poems to which Francesca directly alludes makes use of anaphora.17 It is a device, however, which Dido twice uses in her second appeal to Aeneas when she senses that his decision is irreversible, when the inevitability of his rejection begins to fill her with agony and fury. In the first tricolon with anaphora, Dido reiterates her rage: num fletu ingemuit nostro? num lumina flexit? num lacrimas victus dedit aut miseratus amantem est?
130
PART II
TRASMUTAR
[Did he sigh while I wept? Did he turn on me a glance? Did he yield and shed tears or pity her who loved him?] (Aeneid 4.369–70) (emphasis added)
By choosing to couch these phrases in the elevated mode of formal thirdperson address, Dido raises what might have been merely a personal accusation to the level of a quasi-legal summation of her case. Similarly, Francesca, in attributing the action in her story to the personified figure of Love, lifts her secular apologia to the doctrinally solemn level of a litany [Amor…prese costui…/ Amor…mi prese…/ Amor condusse noi] (Inf. 5.100–6; emphasis added). These women adopt the rhetorical mode of address in order to describe their positions, from their point of view, with a combination of dignity and passion.18 Formal distancing effectively—if paradoxically—expresses intense emotion. As a woman describing her calamitous love affair, Francesca shares with the doomed Dido the role of female orator in the highest rhetorical style. In the Old Testament, the role of woman orator is defined by means of contradictory paradigms, again within the context of male experience. In the seventh chapter of Proverbs, for instance, the sage-narrator gives instruction to a young man whom he addresses as his son. He advises the youth to call Wisdom his sister (7:4–5) in order that she may preserve him from the “allurements of harlots” (meretricum illecebris), “from the stranger who sweeteneth her words” (ab aliena quae verba sua dulcia facit). The woman stranger he describes as “garrula et vaga”—both garrulous, and roving or inconstant (7:10). One day, the sage recalls (7:21), he saw from his window a harlot entangle a young man with many words and draw him away with the flattery of her lips: “Irretivit eum multis sermonibus, / Et blanditiis labiorum protraxit illum.” The chapter ends with the narrator’s warning (7:27) that the house of the harlot is the way to the infernal underworld: “Viae inferi domus eius, / Penetrantes in interiora mortis” [Her house is the way to hell, reaching even to the inner chambers of death]. The harlot’s loquacity and promiscuity—the waywardness of her two orifices—define the shadow side of Wisdom. The eighth chapter of Proverbs consists of a proclamation from Wisdom herself. She stands in the public places of power and decision in the city, crying out to all men to listen to her. Instead of sweetening her words, Wisdom declares that her lips will be opened in order that they may preach rectitude. Her mouth or throat will utter truth: “aperientur labia mea ut recta praedicent. / Veritatem meditabitur gutter meum” (8:6–7). Far from being a woman stranger, Wisdom declares (8:22) that she has existed from the
DIDO ALIGHIERI
131
beginning: “Dominus possedit me in initio viarum suarum, / Antequam quidquam faceret a principio” [The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his ways, before he made any thing from the beginning]. Rather than roving inconstantly like the harlot, Wisdom declares (8:20, 35) that she walks “in the way of justice” (in viis iustitiae ambulo) and leads men to life, not death (Qui me invenerit inveniet vitam). Dido and Francesca, women orators both, are represented as belonging to the category of Wisdom’s shadow, the harlot, whose way leads down to death. The day that Dido and Aeneas consummate their love is described by the narrator as “the first day of death” [ille dies primus leti] (Aeneid 4:169). And Francesca’s speech in which the word amore is thrice repeated ends with the word morte: “Amor condusse noi ad una morte” [Love brought us to one death] (Inf. 5.106). The Latin verb vagari, associated with the harlot in Proverbs, means not only “to rove” and “to be inconstant” but also, in a figurative sense, “to spread abroad,” “to be diffused.” In the Aeneid, immediately after Dido and Aeneas have consummated their love, the feminine figure Fama (Ill Fame or Rumour) goes forth. Small at first, gaining strength and vigour as she goes, she soon enlarges herself up to the heavens, so that she walks upon the ground with her head concealed in the clouds (Aeneid 4.173–7). Like the biblical Wisdom, she proclaims from the rooftops and lofty turrets; but she is represented as an untrustworthy messenger “clinging to the false and wrong, yet heralding truth” [tam ficti pravique tenax quam nuntia veri] (Aeneid 4.188). So Dido herself, according to the narrator, has distorted the truth of her intimate relationship with Aeneas, veiling her “sin” by calling it “marriage” [coniugium vocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam] (Aeneid 4.172). Following the lead of the narrator of the Aeneid, many Dante commentators condemn Francesca for covering her sin with the name of Love. Lanfranco Caretti, for example, describes what he calls Francesca’s “obstinate justification of fault” as “dissociated” and “highly personalized” logic.19 Like Rumour, Francesca is a messenger who distorts as well as reports the truth. When Dante the pilgrim asks Francesca to tell him precisely how Love made known his dubious desires, her response contains the wellknown misrepresentation of the kiss.20 Francesca not only assigns the role of initiator in the act of kissing to Lancelot but also suggests that the responsibility for what occurred belongs to Gallehault. In Le livre de Lancelot del lac, in the old French vulgate cycle of the Arthurian romances, Queen Guenevere, after conspiring with Gallehault to arrange a secret meeting with this knight, takes Lancelot by the chin, gives him a prolonged kiss
132
PART II
TRASMUTAR
as a preliminary pledge of her love for him, and finally swears both men to secrecy.21 Guenevere fits the paradigm of the woman who, with her wayward mouth, creates the obstacle that prevents a man from perfecting his noble nature. Because of his illicit relationship with the queen, Lancelot is later unable to approach the Holy Grail. In Les aventures ou la queste del Saint Graal, Lancelot, filled with despair, laments the joy that he has lost in failing to obtain what he describes as ultimate earthly honour.22 According to a hermit whom Lancelot consults, the Devil realized that, since Lancelot was endowed with all the natural virtues of a noble knight, he could best lead him into mortal sin through a woman. The Devil remembered that the first man was deceived by a woman, as was Solomon, the wisest man, and Samson, the strongest, as well as Absalom, the most handsome. Easily entering into Guenevere, who had not made a good confession since her marriage, the Devil encouraged her to glance lovingly at Lancelot on the day she dubbed him a knight.23 Woman’s seductive mouth seals Man’s fate with the kiss of death. Guenevere, having ceased to confess to God with her mouth since the time of her marriage, uses her mouth to pledge an illicit love. Guenevere’s kiss leads to the spiritual downfall of Lancelot and ultimately to the end of the ideal of chivalry symbolized (and temporarily realized) in the brotherhood of the Round Table.24 Guenevere’s kiss, in fact, becomes one of the subjects of a painting of Lancelot’s exploits that the knight himself executes on the wall of a chamber in which he is imprisoned. When, in La mort le Roi Artus, King Arthur sees this painting and interprets the meaning of the pledge, he swears to get revenge for his dishonour: “I’ll pursue this until they are caught together in the act. And then, if I fail to impose a punishment that will be remembered forever, I agree never to wear a crown again.”25 Francesca’s re-enactment of this kiss leads to the physical death and eternal damnation of herself and her lover. In her uncritical response to the tale of Guenevere’s kiss, she repeats the uncritical response of the youthful Augustine to Virgil’s Dido—a passionate misreading which is tantamount to a “fornication” against God. In contrast to the converted Augustine, who concerned himself not with the seductive mouth of Woman but with the “inner mouth” of his soul, for which God was the “bread,” Francesca goes to her death sinfully obsessed with the kiss of carnal passion described in her treacherous book of romance and promised in her lover’s lustful eyes. Like Virgil’s Fama, a female monster with “many tongues” [tot linguae] (Aeneid 4.183) which are never silent, Francesca wilfully distorts the
DIDO ALIGHIERI
133
story of Guenevere’s kiss; but at the same time, within the larger context of the Commedia, her misreading alludes to a deeper truth about the operations of Divine Love on the fallen human soul. Francesca ironically relates the climactic moment of the imitative chivalric kiss in her story to another famous literary moment, that of Augustine’s conversion to God (Confessions 8.12). Francesca tells how she and her lover, having read of the kiss in the tale of Lancelot, break off and read no more that day: “quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante” (Inf. 5.138). As commentators have often pointed out, this final line of her apologia alludes to Augustine’s “nec ultra volui legere, nec opus erat” (No further wished I to read, nor was there need to do so).26 Augustine breaks off from reading a text from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (13:13–14): “…not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in contention and envy. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ; and make not provision for the flesh, in its concupiscences.” Instantly he feels as if a light bringing freedom from care poured into his heart: “quasi luce securitatis infusa cordi meo.” This intimate, internal flooding of his heart by God precludes any relationship with a woman: “convertisti enim me ad te, ut nec uxorem quaererem” (you converted me to yourself so that I would no longer seek a wife). God, as Augustine explains when lamenting his “fornication” with Dido, is an active power performing an inner, spiritual marriage “between his mind and the bosom of his thoughts” [virtus maritans mentem meam et sinum cogitationis meae] (Confessions 1.13). Augustine’s turning to God as the bread of the inner mouth of his soul results from his reading God’s Word—not from reading a seductive tale of romance represented metonymically by a woman. The Word, for Augustine, has two manifestations: one in the firmament and the other in the Bible. Both of these are temporal representations of the face of God, upon which the angels read the decrees of God’s eternal will without any syllables of time (Confessions 13.15). God’s living Word, as described in the New Testament, is associated with the feminine figure Wisdom.27 Sapientia, whom the Lord possessed in the beginning of his ways, before he made any thing, declares: “eo eram, cuncta componens” [I was with him forming all things] (Prov. 8:30). This primordial relation to the Creator is also attributed to the Word (Logos) in the prologue to the Gospel of John: “In principio erat Verbum, / Et Verbum erat apud Deum, / Et deus erat Verbum…Omnia per ipsum facta sunt” [In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…All things were made by Him] (John1:1, 3). What we have here, however, is not only the association of the male Logos with the female figure of Wisdom
134
PART II
TRASMUTAR
(Sophia) but also a transfer of functions. A process of revision, evident in the work of Philo of Alexandria and of the Apostle Paul, was eventually to eclipse the role of Sapentia-Sophia in Christian theology.28 By the time of Augustine, following the formulation of the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity at the Council of Nicaea, the Son of God was firmly established in an all-male godhead. In the written Word that floods Augustine’s heart with light, Paul speaks with what Augustine, in his treatise on Christian education, describes as the Apostle’s style of wisdom delivered with eloquence (De doctrina christiana 4.7.11–13). Paul, in fact, pronounces his admonition in a triple anaphora, the same device with which both Francesca and Dido frame their rhetorical deliveries: …non in comessationibus, et ebrietatibus, non in cubilibus, et impudicitiis, non in contentione, et aemulatione: sed induimini Dominum Iesum Christum, et carnis curam ne feceritis in desideriis. […not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and impurities, not in contention and envy. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ; and make not provision for the flesh, in its concupiscences.] (Rom. 13:13–14) (emphasis added)
This is the oratorical wisdom of the Word that awakens Augustine to spiritual life rather than plunging him into the sort of violent death with which Francesca and Dido both end their stories. The orator, however, is no longer the feminine figure of Wisdom in Proverbs who declares that he who finds her finds life. In the Augustinian conversion, to which Francesca ironically alludes, there are no feminine figures, certainly no feminine orators, not even positive Old Testament role models. Like Augustine in his reading of St. Paul, Francesca reads a tale which should have led to her making no “provision for the flesh, in its concupiscences.” The chivalric romance that propels Francesca into an illicit love, if read and understood in its entirety, can be interpreted as a moral tale warning against just such an action. As Susan Noakes has argued, the prose Lancelot was a rewriting of the traditional story for this very purpose.29 From Augustine’s viewpoint, however, such a tale is itself seductive. Commenting on the danger of instructing the young with readings of Virgil’s “dulcissimum spectaculum vanitatis” [most delightful spectacle of vanity] (Confessions 1.13), Augustine declares that the many useful words he learned in this manner could better and more safely have been gleaned from other readings (Confessions 1.15). Recalling his youthful
DIDO ALIGHIERI
135
tears for Dido, he reassures his jealous God that he now understands clearly what he was doing then besides weeping: “I forsook you, and I followed after your lowest creatures” (Confessions 1.13). Dido is a compelling representative of God’s “lowest creatures.” The woman with the wayward mouth not only distorts the truth but as she talks she also expands. Just as Fama enlarges herself so that she reaches from the earth up to the heavens, so Dido has been accused of inflating her role in Aeneas’s life. “The fourth book of Virgil’s Aeneid is mainly Dido,” one critic charges: “She speaks one hundred and eighty-eight of the seven hundred and five lines—more than a quarter of the book.”30 As Dido enlarges verbally, she reduces Aeneas to silence. Like an ancient oak he wordlessly withstands the increasingly violent blasts of feminine oratory. Another critic has charged that “Francesca fills the stage wholly with herself.”31 The pilgrim Dante, who addresses Francesca by name, neither addresses her lover directly nor names him. Francesca, in response, when speaking of her lover never refers to him by name.32 The only first-person-singular speaker of this pair is Francesca. Her lover utters not a word that is identified as specifically his.33 This man has become a verbal adjunct to Francesca. At the moment in her story when Francesca tells the pilgrim Dante how her lover first kissed her, she refers to him as “questi, che mai da me non fia diviso” [this one, who never shall be parted from me] (Inf. 5.135). Like Ovid’s Hermaphroditus and Salmacis, the two have become one.34 Ovid introduces the myth of Hermaphroditus with the following topological reference: Unde sit infamis, quare male fortibus undis Salmacis enervet tactosque remolliat artus, discite. [How the fountain of Salmacis is of ill-repute, how it enervates with its enfeebling waters and renders soft and weak all men who bathe therein, you shall now hear.] (Metamorphoses 4.285–7)
He then tells of how the youthful son of Hermes and the goddess of Cythera wander into the world for the first time. The water nymph Salmacis surprises him in her pool, snatches kisses in spite of his struggling, and forces him into an embrace. It is she who prays that they may never be separated. When the gods answer this prayer, joining their two bodies into one, the narrator pronounces the name Hermaphroditus for the first time, identifying the composite person whom the two have become. Hermaphroditus finds to his despair that he has become but
136
PART II
TRASMUTAR
half a man, that his limbs are enfeebled and that his voice is no longer virile. At the end of Francesca’s story, Dante observes that while the one spirit spoke, the other merely wept [Mentre che l’uno spirto questo disse, / l’altro piangëa] (Inf. 5.139–40), so that, for pity, Dante swooned as if in death. The critic Bruno Nardi has categorically declared that it is a woman who delivers this impassioned account, because she is more easily overcome by passion. In the mouth of her lover, Nardi continues, it would have been less “seemly” (conveniente).35 With her mouth, Woman enervates Man, metamorphosing him into a cipher. Francesca’s self-representation as an ideal romantic heroine is thus seriously undermined by allusions to four unhappily lustful prototypes: Virgil’s Dido, the harlot in Proverbs, Queen Guenevere, and Ovid’s Salmacis. Before we assume that these allusions merely reflect the stereotypes of feminine concupiscence promoted by medieval misogyny, Dante, as many commentators have pointed out, executes a significant gender inversion. In the scene in which Francesca relates how she and her lover were seduced by the text of Lancelot, Dante implicitly takes on the role of Dido to Francesca’s Aeneas. When Dante asks Francesca to relate to him how Love first made known his dubious desires he assumes the role of Dido in the Aeneid, when she asks Aeneas to relate to her, from the beginning, the story of the disastrous fall of Troy. And Francesca takes on the role of Aeneas telling the dolorous tale. Both Virgil’s Aeneas and Dante’s Francesca are reluctant to tell their stories, yet both yield to the urgent demand. To the pilgrim’s request, Francesca replies: Ma s’a conoscer la prima radice del nostro amor tu hai cotanto affetto, dirò come colui che piange e dice. [But if you have such great desire to know the first root of our love, I will tell as one who weeps and tells.] (Inf. 5.124–6)
This echoes Aeneas’s reply to Dido: sed si tantus amor casus cognoscere nostros… quamquam animus meminisse horret luctuque refugit, incipiam. [Yet if thou hast such longing to learn of our disasters…though my mind shudders to remember, and has recoiled in grief, I will begin.] (Aeneid 2.10–13)
Reaching the end of his story, which coincides with the end of the third book, Aeneas comes to rest: “factoque hic fine quievit” (Aeneid 3.718;
DIDO ALIGHIERI
137
emphasis added). “But the queen,” continues the narrator at the beginning of Book 4, has had her rest destroyed. Aeneas’s oration has stricken her with a grievous love-wound: “his looks and words cling fast within her bosom, and the pang withholds calm rest from her limbs” [haerent infixi pectore vultus / verbaque, nec placidam membris dat cura quietem] (Aeneid 4.4–5; emphasis added). Quievit, at the end of Aeneas’s speech, ironically charges the quietem with which the opening description of the effect of Aeneas’s speech on Dido ends. The text describes Aeneas as a shepherd, hunting with darts, who has pierced a hind from afar, leaving in her the winged steel, “unknowing” [nescius] (Aeneid 4.69–72). The “winged steel” (volatile ferrum) anticipates the sword of Aeneas with which Dido will eventually end her agony. This image also suggests the violently erotic potential of language. A cycle of love and death has been set in motion: Aeneas’s beloved Troy, with his wife in it, has been destroyed; his narration of this loss inflicts a deadly love-wound within Dido’s breast. Her subsequent death is described in a simile which verbally echoes the destruction of Troy: flames roll over the buildings (Aeneid 2.758–9; 4.670–1), women wail (Aeneid 2.488; 4.667). And in the Inferno, the pilgrim Dante, like Dido, is completely overcome by Francesca’s narration of her love and death. Thus, both men and women unwittingly participate in the perpetuation of a deadly cycle. In casting himself as Dido, Dante opens himself to censure as a spiritual stumbling block. Francesca, after all, alludes to one of Dante’s own poems in describing her fatal love affair. She thereby exemplifies the fatal consequence of the equivocalness of feminine physical beauty encoded in the doctrine of ideal love poetry: it is the catalyst of both spiritual and carnal love.36 From Dante’s saggio, Guido Guinizzelli, Francesca has learned not only about the essential identity of amore and gentilezza, but also about idolatrous love. Guinizzelli closes his fourth canzone (the poem Francesca imitates) with ironic self-criticism, imagining his soul standing before God who accuses him of presumption: “You tried to compare me to a vain love” [desti in vano amor Me per semblanti] (4.54). In his notes to this poem, Gianfranco Contini has pointed out that the poet here alludes to the admonition of Isaiah against the idolaters: “To whom have ye likened me, or made me equal, saith the Holy One” (Isa. 40:25). This incomparable God does not suffer presumption gladly, as His punishment of the idolaters indicates: “suddenly he hath blown upon them, and they are withered; and a whirlwind shall take them away as stubble” (Isa. 40:24). This is literally what has happened to Francesca and her lover. Dante’s gender reversal, then, implicitly turns
138
PART II
TRASMUTAR
him as a younger poet into the kind of spiritual stumbling block that Augustine associates not only with Dido but also with Virgil’s Aeneid. Dante’s love poem has been instrumental in leading Francesca into physical fornication just as Virgil’s poem about Dido led Augustine into spiritual fornication. Playing Dido, Dante becomes (as Augustine would say) one of God’s “lowest creatures,” leading others to forsake God himself. If Dante is a spiritual stumbling block like Dido, then his genderreversing role casts moral doubt not only on the words he composed as a young poet but also on his utterances in the present of the Commedia itself. Is his pilgrimage a journey of dubious moral value, a passage into the turbulent world of the Unorthodox? Dante’s guide, according to Augustine, is the author of “a most delightful spectacle of vanity,” a tale of Aeneas’s sojourn with Dido, which learned men agree is simply not true. In introducing Francesca into his poem from the schiera of Dido and inviting her to tell her story, Dante extends the mythic into what Ernst Curtius has called “subjectively experienced history.”37 Dante creates another form of seductive tale, an egotistical romance which, once again, may induce readers to weep for the tragic heroine rather than for their own souls. This is, of course, what has happened throughout the history of reader response to the fifth canto of the Inferno.38 Francesca’s ironic allusion to Augustine’s conversion brings into play Augustine’s model of spiritual transformation. It is one, however, which Dante does not follow.39 Dante’s conversion will not be posited on a pivotal text from the New Testament in God’s Word. Dante will be led by the words from the mouth of a woman, whose description in Purgatorio 31, as commentators have noted, echoes that of the Old Testament figure of Sapientia. Beatrice is described as “isplendor di viva luce etterna” (Purg. 31.139), echoing the biblical description of Wisdom as “candor…lucis aeternae” (Wisdom 7:26). Just as in the Convivio Dante, in opposition to Augustine, creates a positive interpretation of the story of Aeneas’s sojourn with Dido, so his journey to God will be his own. And Virgil’s anachronistic translation of Augustine’s critique of Dido in the beginning of Inferno 5, which ironically alludes to Augustine’s negative perception of Virgil himself as poetic guide, indicates Dante’s awareness not only of the precariousness of the journey on which he has been launched but also of the hubris of which he may be guilty. This gender inversion also associates the pilgrim Dante with the same reason-opposing “appetite” with which he associated Dido in the Convivio. Unlike Aeneas, who withstands the blasts of feminine garrulity like a steadfast oak, the pilgrim Dante resembles Dido in so far as he is over-
DIDO ALIGHIERI
139
come by the arrows of masculine loquacity. Does this suggest that the poet Dante’s reason has been overpowered by Aeneas’s (Virgil’s) oratorical power? It does suggest that in casting Francesca as Aeneas, Dante exposes Aeneas to the same kind of censure as that to which Dido has been subjected. This includes the accusation of garrulity, traditionally applied to women. It is curious, indeed, that while Dido has been criticized for monopolizing Book 4 of the Aeneid, no critic, to my knowledge, has accused Aeneas of filling Books 2 and 3 of the Aeneid “wholly with himself.” After all, the whole poem is named for Aeneas! And so a man who speaks without pause for some fifteen hundred lines escapes censure while a woman is criticized for speaking less than two hundred. Although Aeneas, in mortally wounding Dido with the words of his mouth, is described by the narrator as “unknowing,” he is presented nevertheless in imagery that suggests intrusion and the taking of prey.40 Aeneas is instrumental in depriving this competent queen of her moral force as a ruler and in instigating her death. This he does as surely as Guenevere precipitates the downfall of Lancelot and the Round Table with the kiss of her mouth, or as surely as Francesca instigates the death of herself and her lover by imitating the amorous behaviour of characters in a chivalric romance. Will the poet Dante, like Dido, be consumed by Aeneas’s (Virgil’s) loquacity? Since the pilgrim Dante associates himself with Dido, who falls on a sword on a funeral pyre, instead of with the steadfast Aeneas, who leaves Dido to found an empire, the answer would seem to be in the affirmative. When Aeneas is confronted with the choice of responding either to Dido’s pleading or to the warnings of Mercury (who disparages all women), he responds affirmatively: “We follow thee, holy among gods, whoe’er thou art, and again joyfully obey thy command” [sequimur te, sancte deorum, quisquis es, imperioque iterum paremus ovantes] (Aeneid 4.576–7). The pilgrim Dante, however, by associating himself with the appetitive feminine on the threshold of Hell, although he falls, rises again and lives to complete his journey to God, which, as the poet of divine amore, he is ultimately able to record. On reaching the earthly Paradise where Adam and Eve first encountered each other and fell, Dante recreates his infernal meeting with Francesca in his purgatorial re-encounter with Beatrice. Once again he expresses himself in the words of Dido: “conosco i segni de l’antica fiamma” [I know the tokens of the ancient flame] (Purg. 30.48). This line harks back to Dido’s tormented confession in which she contemplates committing the fault with which Virgil identifies her in the Circle of the Lustful: “agnosco veteris vestigia flammae” [I recognize the traces
140
PART II
TRASMUTAR
of the olden flame] (Aeneid 4.23). This time, instead of Francesca, it is Beatrice who (as an admiral commanding Dante) implicitly takes on the role of Aeneas with respect to Dante-Dido. Or rather, as Hawkins incisively remarks, Beatrice is “both Sychaeus and Aeneas, old flame and new.”41 Beatrice, in fact, reclaims the role played by Francesca. As Amilcare A. Iannucci has insightfully observed, Francesca, when she enters the poetic love dialogue with Dante [Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende] (Inf. 5.100), assumes the position of Beatrice in the Vita Nuova. Francesca begins her interlocution at a turning point in Dante’s poetic career—just when he passes beyond self-preoccupation. Francesca chooses to imitate the sonnet following Dante’s first canzone, which marks his decision to dedicate his poetry to the celebration of Beatrice.42 In her own right, Beatrice enters into the poetic discourse as soon as she speaks in Purgatorio 30. Once again, dramatized by means of a Dido-Aeneas gender inversion, Dante is felled by a woman’s words which cause him to recognize and re-experience his own error.43 This time, however, the woman, instead of being trapped in an eternal repetition of her culpa, has the rhetorical power and theological wisdom to guide him to the source of all power and wisdom, which she forever contemplates. Beatrice, as “isplendor di viva luce etterna” (Purg. 31.139), replaces her shadow, whose way leads down to death: “Viae inferi domus eius” (Prov. 7:27). In the Heaven of Venus, Dante as narrator will mention Dido once more and overtly undercut Virgil’s authority.44 In Inferno 5.61–2, as we have seen, Virgil, by selective allusion to his own text, ignores the role Venus played in Dido’s downfall. Now in Paradiso 8.1–9, Dante directly cites the passage in which Venus sends her son Cupid to beguile Dido (Aeneid 4.711–14) as an example of what he calls “an ancient error” made by “ancient people” [le genti antiche ne l’antico errore] (Par. 8.6). This Venus, it must be remembered, is the mother not only of Cupid or Amore, but also of his brother Aeneas. To describe the workings of Virgil’s Venus, Dante, in Paradiso 8.2, uses what Amilcare A. Iannucci has identified as a “medieval technical term”: folle amore.45 Virgil, according to Dante, has wrongly confused the terrestrial Venus, who instills mad love, with her celestial counterpart, who, under the authority of God, incites man to caritas. Venus has her shadow in the Commedia, just as Wisdom has hers in Proverbs. Dante-pilgrim understands this truth, however, not from the authority of Virgil, or Augustine, or the Word, but from the experience of watching his lady take on an enhanced beauty as they enter into the positive influence of the planet Venus [ch’i’ vidi far più bella] (Par. 8.15). Beatrice’s beauty is a catalyst like that of Venus, but not for the masculine
DIDO ALIGHIERI
141
love-deity, Amore, whose flame is quickly kindled in the gentle heart by the bella persona in Inferno 5.101. Instead, as her beatific beauty intensifies, it awakens caritas in Dante’s heart, causing him immediately to see beyond Beatrice, beyond the antica fiamma he re-experienced in Purgatorio 30.48. Like “the spark within the flame” [come in fiamma favilla si vede], he sees other charitable souls moving in an ordered circle according to their internal sight (Par. 8.16–21). Under the influence of the positive Venus, instead of being seized by Love as was Francesca’s nameless lover-adjunct, Dante (who has been named by Beatrice in Purgatorio 30.55), immediately expands beyond the duality of self and beloved other to embrace a community of souls dancing and singing in the light of heavenly love. In light of the poet’s critique of Venus in Paradiso 8, we can conclude that Dante-pilgrim takes on the role of Dido in Inferno 5 without falling permanently under the influence of folle amore. Drinking deep draughts of love under the influence of Cupid, Virgil’s unhappy queen [infelix Dido longumque bibebat amorem] (Aeneid 1.749) asks Aeneas to tell of his misfortunes and wanderings. When Dante-Dido asks Francesca-Aeneas to tell him her tale, he is only temporarily overcome with pity under the influence of the earthly Venus. Eventually, through Beatrice’s intercession, he discovers (and literally penetrates) the planet of heavenly love operating over and above the earthly Venus under the direction of the Prime Mover. Dante’s gender inversion in Inferno 5 indicates that as a pilgrim he is not following in the footsteps of Virgil’s Aeneas. In his response to Francesca, Dante does not act upon his own formerly philosophical reading of the tale of Dido and Aeneas (in the Convivio) as a moral-psychological allegory about the opposition of appetite to reason. His allusion to this tale by means of gender inversion indicates a failure on his part to live up to an ideal of rational self-control, no doubt, but more importantly, it highlights the need for a poetic revision of the very concept of the virtuous hero—and heroine. The old heroic ideal enshrined in classical epic must be subverted by Christian paradox. Instead of imitating steadfast Aeneas, Dante seems to be emulating an Old Testament hero such as Samson, a man of strength whom the Devil in Les aventures ou la queste del Saint Graal remembers to have been deceived by a woman. In the New Testament, Samson is included in a roll call of biblical heroes who “recovered strength from weakness” [convaluerunt de infirmitate] (Heb. 11:32, 34). Virgil’s voice does not overcome Dante-poet because Dante is engaged in a process of re-evaluating the words of his guide. And Dante has to risk opposing Augustine in using Virgil as guide and in recreating another
142
PART II
TRASMUTAR
seductive tale which may, in turn, become a spiritual stumbling block.46 Just as Augustine had to weep over Dido before he turned to God and as Dante himself has to fall before Francesca’s words in order that he may rise again, so Dante cannot spare his readers the experience of Christian paradox. Dante’s gender inversions demonstrate that both men and women throughout literary history, up until the present moment of the poem, unwittingly perpetuate a cycle of love that leads to death. As Virginia Woolf observed in this regard: “It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly.…And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death.…Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.”47 This fatality is what Augustine struggles to avoid philosophically by making God the divine agent who weds together his mind and heart. It is the challenge that Dante meets poetically by engaging in gender inversion. The task that Dante sets out to accomplish is not merely to find for himself, as a man, a path to personal salvation. Nor is it his aim simply to single out the feminine gender for censure. His task is to break the cycle of love that leads to death for women as well as for men. Gender inversion is one of the devices by which Dante sets the stage for the possibility of accomplishing this work. It invites us to acknowledge the dual aspects of femininity and masculinity existing within every individual. It represents a first stage in breaking down gender stereotypes. If all men and women are culpable, Dante suggests, we must all work together for renewal of amore, for a love that leads away from the chambers of death. NOTES 1 The text of Augustine’s Confessions is from the Loeb edition, while all translations are by John K. Ryan. The text of Virgil’s Aeneid is from the edition of R.D. Williams (1972); unless otherwise indicated, all translations are by Rushton Fairclough in the Loeb edition. The text of Dante’s Commedia is from the edition by Petrocchi, while the translations are by Charles Singleton (1970–75). Excerpts from the Vita Nuova and the Convivio are from the edition of M. Barbi (1975). Translations of the Convivio are by Christopher Ryan (1989). Unless otherwise indicated, translations of the Vita Nuova are by Mark Musa (1973). The components of the Commedia cited from include Inferno (Inf.), Purgatorio (Purg.), and Paradiso (Par.). Also cited are Convivio (Conv.) and Vita Nuova (VN). 2 See Mary Lord (1969) for an exposition of the preference of the Church Fathers such as Tertullian and Jerome for the historical tradition of the Dido story that does not mention the association with Aeneas. Lord also discusses the
DIDO ALIGHIERI
3
4 5 6
7
8
9 10
11
143
manner in which Christian writers included the historical Dido in exempla of the second degree of chastity: widows who abstained from a second marriage. Dante is also capable of reinterpreting the Virgilian Dido as chaste, as Giorgio Padoan has pointed out (Enciclopedia, 431): when, in Monarchia 2.3.14 –16, Dante wishes to demonstrate the geographical scope of providential design in the mission of Aeneas, he forces the sense of Aeneid 4.171–2 by making Dido, as a representative of Africa, one of Aeneas’s three wives. As Lord (1969) explains, Naevius, of whose work only fragments remain, may have provided Virgil with a precedent for the love of Aeneas and Dido (40). See Pöschl (1962), 72. David Shirt (1982) demonstrates the manner in which the twelfth-century Old French Enéas discards the supernatural causes of Dido’s downfall, emphasizing instead that “while she still lives she is bound for ever to the love of a husband now dead, and once infected with love for Aeneas she is on a suicide course” (7). Mazzotta (1979), 168, in fact, attributes the translation of Augustine’s phrase to Dante, by which of course he means Dante the poet. Mazzotta investigates ways in which Dante develops a system of cross-references to Virgil and Augustine, carrying out a reworking at considerable expense to both. “Reading,” Mazzotta says, “is also the experience by which the reader resists the seductive authority of the text by doing violence to and interpreting the letter” (191). See Singer (1975), 772. On the same page, in his exposition of the significant transformations which the Virgilian epic undergoes in the twelfth-century Enéas, Singer also observes: “As if to emphasize the difference between his Dido and Vergil’s, the author adds an epitaph inscribed upon her tomb: ‘Here lies Dido who killed herself for love.’” See Singer (1975), 770. Carozza (1967), in an article identifying the many elements of courtly love in Canto 5, infers from Francesca’s words the fundamental principle of the chivalric contrat, a bond of fealty, service, and mutual defense which secured peace for both sovereign and vassal (292–93). According to Petrocchi’s investigations there are two variant manuscript traditions for this line: one using si tace and the other ci tace. While Pagliaro has restored the si tace reading, Barbi and Petrocchi retain ci tace. Most commentators prefer to interpret ci as an adverb of place (= qui, “here”): Francesca and her lover, issuing out of their group, come to a place either where the wind rages less, or where the poets stand (Barbi [1975], 263–64). Singleton is one of those who translate ci as a pronoun (= a noi or per noi, “for us”): “while the wind, as now, is silent for us.” According to Singleton, the purpose of this dispensation is for the benefit of Dante the pilgrim. Singleton overlooks the fact that Francesca throughout this speech of greeting repeatedly uses first person plural pronouns, not to refer to Dante and Virgil, but to herself and her lover. Sapegno, however, argues for the pleonastic use of ci. He maintains that a mysterious decree of Providence permitting a place to be temporarily spared from the onslaught of the wind is an improbable infraction of an eternal law. Both Sapegno and Singleton, taking the phrase at face value, over-
144
12
13
14 15
16
17
PART II
TRASMUTAR
look the possibility of irony. Francesca, not the poet, is speaking. She should not be mistaken for a reliable narrator (see Musa [1991], note to line 96). Biblical references in Latin are from the Vulgate (Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Clementinam). Biblical references in English are from the Douay-Rheims Version (New Catholic Edition of the Holy Bible). John Guzzardo (1989), who also calls attention to the relevance of this simile, notes that the locative phrases di qua, di là, di giù, di sù from Inf. 5.42–3— “quel fiato li spiriti mali / di qua, di là, di giù, di sù li mena” [so does that blast the sinful spirits; hither, thither, downward, upward it drives them]—echo the phrases hinc…illinc, hinc…hinc in Aeneid 4.443 and 448, translated above. See Shapiro (1975), 33. Poggioli (1957), 348–49, has argued that Francesca’s sense of nobility invests her appeal to the cor gentil with a meaning opposite to that intended by Guinizzelli and Dante, the new style of poetry being a reaction against the feudal ideology of high-born privilege as represented in Troubadour poetry. Contini (1979), however, in his erudite exposition of this episode (Un idea di Dante), makes an analogy between the stilnovistic principle of the noble heart and the morum probitas of the amor cortese. It is this worldly ethic, which persists in the stil novo and is found in the Vita Nuova, Contini argues, that Dante passes beyond in this canto as he journeys toward the Perfect Good, the radical terminus of love. Poggioli (1957), 347, uses the fact that “no woman was ever a member of Dante’s ‘circle,’ or that no feminine character ever speaks in the first person in any of the poems written by the poets of that school” as one of the ways to prove “completely wrong” the critical hypothesis that Francesca speaks according to the tenets of the dolce stil novo. Poggioli attempts to prove that Francesca represents a heroine from the medieval love romance while Beatrice comes from the poetic tradition in which, according to De Sanctis whom he quotes (353), “man fills the stage with himself; it is he who acts, and speaks, and dreams; while woman remains in the background, named and not represented…she stays there as man’s shadow, as a thing he owns, as an object he has wrought, as the being issued from his rib, devoid of a separate personality of her own.” Yet clearly Beatrice, when she arrives in the Commedia, is no such shadow. Contini (1979) begins his critique of Francesca’s rhetoric by saying that not all Dante’s meetings with practitioners of literature in the Commedia are with colleagues. He then describes Francesca as an intellectual of the provinces, a usufruct of letters, a reader but not properly a producer, putting together, with unexceptional rhetoric, a pastiche of citations (42–44). Interestingly enough, in his translation of Dante’s Vita Nuova, Musa (1973) has levelled this same critique against the young poet Dante himself. He describes Dante’s sonnet (which Francesca imitates) as “weakly imitative: the quatrains are clearly reminiscent of Guinizelli; the tercets could be from any poet from Giacomo da Lentino on—except, perhaps, for the last line,” which he calls “sheer bathos” (150). Contini, moreover, would deny Francesca autonomy as a character: “Francesca è insomma una tappa…della quale è superfluo cercar di distinguere se sia più letteraria o vitale” (48). Francesca’s rhetoric
DIDO ALIGHIERI
18
19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30
31 32
145
is Dante’s rhetoric (43). Consequently, whether or not Dante in Inferno 5 is consciously satirizing what he may have judged to be his own weak poem, he cannot present Francesca as an inferior imitator, as Contini suggests, without doing the same for himself. Commentators argue the degree of Francesca’s recognition of guilt. Padoan (1967), in his commentary on Inf. 5.100, declares that the Damned, because they are damned, do not know repentance. Charity (1966) argues, on the one hand, that it is Francesca’s own incomprehension of her fault that makes her fate seem so perverse, and on the other, that Francesca “disguises her culpability” by explanation and justification (214, 218). Surely one who has no comprehension of fault has no need to disguise it. Curato (1962), following Barbi (1975), argues that some of the Damned, Francesca included, do mature into a recognition of the fault they have committed (95). Peter Dronke (1975), in an article refreshingly balanced between the “hawks” and “doves” of Francesca criticism, maintains that while Francesca demonstrates “a recognition of guilt, there is no repentance for the love that led to guilt” (125). He describes Francesca’s defence as “moving: whether or not we see it as valid, it has an uncompromising magnificence” (135). See Caretti (1976), 24–27. See Hatcher and Musa (1968), 97–109. See Sommer (1910–13), Pt. 1, 263; Lacy (1993), Pt. 2, 146. See Sommer (1910–13), 45; Lacy (1993), 21. See Sommer (1910–13), 89–90; Lacy (1993), 41. Jean Frappier (1974) traces the sequence of events as follows: “The ruin of the Round Table is caused ultimately by the sin of Lancelot and the queen. This initial cause produces a secondary cause, the death of Gaheriet at the hands of Lancelot and Gauvain’s determination to avenge his brother. This in turn causes Arthur’s departure from Britain and provides the opportunity for Mordret, swayed by his lust for Guenièvre, to rebel against his father” (308–309). See Sommer (1910–13), 241; Lacy (1993), 107. See, for example, Swing (1962), 298–300; Hollander (1969),112–14; Mazzotta (1979), 166. See Fiorenza (1975); Robinson (1975). See Bruns (1973); Engelsman (1979). See Noakes (1988), 44. See Quinn (1963), 29. It is Quinn’s thesis that Dido “is a woman who can easily accept private standards of her own rightness of conduct, and maintain them by flagrant self-deception….A character like this is more than usually prone to moral disintegration” (45). Pöschl (1962), however, makes it clear that Dido adheres to the ultimate value in Roman and ancient ethics: love of self in the high Aristotelian denotation, characterized by a sense of dignity and self-respect as well as by a commitment to the demands of glory. He observes that Dido, like Aeneas, “suffers from the unrelenting tension between heart’s desire and the harsh demands of self-respect and glory” (90). De Sanctis (1972), quoted by Poggioli (1957), 354. Cambon (1969), 47–48, is of the opinion that Francesca’s modesty (“which shows her to be a born gentlewoman”), even when it is intensified by love,
146
33
34 35 36
37 38
39
PART II
TRASMUTAR
prevents her from naming Paolo. It is difficult to understand how modesty, in the sense of decorous aristocratic behaviour, should be thought to prevent Francesca from naming her partner for eternity, who is present with her as she speaks. Thomas Bergin (1957), 16–17, following Emilio Roncaglia (1875), argues that Inf. 5.107—”Caina attende chi a vita ci spense” [Caina awaits him who quenched our life]—is spoken by Paolo. His argument is based on the grammatical evidence of Inf. 5.108–9: “Queste parole da lor ci fuor porte. / Quand’ io intesi quell’ anime offense” [These words were borne to us from them. And when I heard those afflicted souls] (emphasis added). “Two successive uses of the plural,” Bergin maintains, “certainly suggest more than one speaker.” When it comes to identifying the specific lines spoken by Paolo, Bergin admits that he is “in the zone of subjective, intuitional criticism.” Francesca, in fact, is the only identified speaker. Since these two “go together” [’nsieme vanno] (Inf. 5.74), the sound emitted by one of them must of necessity proceed from them both, as De Sanctis eloquently explains: “Sono due colombe portate dallo stesso volere, tal che al primo udirli non sai quale parli e quale taccia, ed in tanta simiglianza ti par quasi che la stessa voce parta da tutti e due” (287). See Lund-Mead (1992). See Nardi (1983), 78. See Teodolinda Barolini (1984) for an analysis of the ways in which Inferno 2 presents the positive dimensions of the lyric, Inferno 5 the negative. I would argue, however, that the differences are more subtly shaded than this analysis would lead one to believe. While it is true that the word disio, which Francesca repeatedly uses (Inf. 5.82, 113, 120, 133), refers to desire for the other (as opposed to God), it does not necessarily refer exclusively to physical desire. Even the desire for a kiss (5.133), within the courtly love tradition, has a part to play in rational love (Walsh [1982], 20–21). Francesca’s use of the word animal in addressing Dante (Inf. 5.88) as opposed to Beatrice’s choice of anima in addressing Virgil (Inf. 2.58) signifies, perhaps, nothing more than the difference between addressing a living man as opposed to a shade. To attribute to Francesca a deliberate misinterpretation of her carnal love, as does Musa (1974, 26–27; 1991), is to disregard the inherently ambiguous potential encoded within the lyric tradition. See Curtius (1973), 369. In speaking of Dante as the third “Gallehault” (the other two being the romance of Lancelot and its author) in his detailed exposition of Inf. 5.137— “Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse” [A Gallehault was the book and he who wrote it]—Paolo Valesio (1994) argues that “the concentration on Francesca’s pathos at the (relative) expense of the context of her condemnation is not an anachronistic error of Romantic criticism; on the contrary, it is something that is built into the text by the author” (11). Iannucci (1997) demonstrates the manner in which Inferno 5 reflects a larger issue that Dante has with Augustine: his revision of Augustine’s paradigm of the two cities, as expounded in De civitate Dei. Dante contrasts Rome as the City of God’s providential plan (represented by Aeneas) with the confusion of Babylon (represented by Carthaginian Dido).
DIDO ALIGHIERI
147
40 For details on the Trojans as victims turned invaders in the Aeneid, see Nethercut (1968). 41 See Hawkins (1991), 121. Hawkins (1991) and Brownlee (1993) give detailed, insightful readings of the significance of Dante’s purgatorial repetition of Dido’s words within the overall plan of reinterpreting the Aeneid in the Commedia. Both read Dante’s fall before Beatrice’s words in the Purgatorio as indicative of Dante’s rewriting and substitution of the stoic Virgilian hero, who is not uprooted, with the model of the Christian pilgrim who must fall in order to rise. While this is certainly true, it is equally true that Dante initiates the rejection of the heroic model at the beginning of the infernal experience where the contrast between Aeneas’s stand and Dante’s fall are first dramatically brought together. 42 Iannucci generously shared this insight with me in conversation, Feb. 4, 1998. 43 Jacoff (1987), in her seminal article, calls attention to the numerous gender reversals in Purgatorio 30, which she interprets as Dante’s calling into question Virgil’s patriarchal value system in light of the way in which Christ (Beatrice being a figura Christi) is thought to have called into question the status of gender (172–73). 44 In Par. 9.97–8, Dido is recalled for the last time by Folco, the Provençal Troubadour Folquet de Marseille, as he “confesses the stamp of Venus on his own character” (Clay [1989], 104). Folco goes beyond Virgil’s indictment to characterize Dido as wronging not only her dead husband Sychaeus but also Aeneas’s dead wife Creusa. 45 See Iannucci (1997), 101. 46 Augustine himself, as many have noted, is ambivalent toward Virgil. In spite of his disclaimer in the Confessions, Augustine later makes considerable use of Virgil, particularly in his De civitate Dei (Comparetti [1966], 90). In his late work On Christian Doctrine, Augustine states that he does not rule out the possibility of finding truth in pagan literature (54). 47 Woolf ([1928] 1945), 102–103. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alighieri, Dante. Convivio. Ed. Piero Cudini. Milan: Garzanti, 1980. ——— Dante: The Banquet. Trans. Christopher Ryan. Saratoga, CA: ANMA Libri, 1989. ——— Dante’s Vita Nuova: A Translation and an Essay. Trans. Mark Musa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973. ——— La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. Ed. G. Petrocchi. 4 vols. 1966–67. Firenze: Le Lettere, 1994. ——— La Divina Commedia. Ed. Natalino Sapegno. 3 vols. Firenze: La nuova Italia, 1979. ——— La Divina Commedia. Inferno (canti 1–8). Ed. Giorgio Padoan. Vol. 10, Opere di Dante. Ed. V. Branca, F. Maggini, and B. Nardi. Firenze: Felice Le Monnier, 1967. ——— La Vita Nuova (Poems of Youth). Trans. Barbara Reynolds. London: Penguin, 1969.
148
PART II
TRASMUTAR
——— Opere di Dante. Ed. M. Barbi et al. Firenze: Società Dantesca Italiana, 1960. ——— The Divine Comedy. Trans. Charles S. Singleton. 6 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–75. Augustine, St. Confessions. Trans. William Watts. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1912. ——— On Christian Doctrine. Trans. D. W. Robertson. Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1958. ——— The Confessions of St. Augustine. Trans. John K. Ryan. Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1960. Barbi, Michele. “Per una più precisa interpretazione della Divina Commedia.” Problemi di critica dantesca. Prima serie. 1893–1918. Firenze: Sansoni, 1975. 197–303. Barolini, Teodolinda. “Autocitation and Autobiography.” Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. 3–14. Bergin, Thomas Goddard. “Lectura Dantis: Inferno V.” Lectura Dantis 1 (1987): 5–22. Brownlee, Kevin. “Dante, Beatrice, and the Two Departures from Dido.” MLN 108 (1993): 1–14. Bruns, J. Edgar. God as Woman, Woman as God. New York: Paulist Press, 1973. Cambon, Glauco. “Francesca and the Tactics of Language.” Dante’s Craft: Studies in Language and Style. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969. 46–66. Caretti, Lanfranco. “Eros e castigo.” Antichi e moderni: Studi di letteratura italiana. Einaudi: Torino, 1976. 7–30. Carozza, Davy. “Elements of the roman courtois in the Episode of Paolo and Francesca (Inferno V).” Papers on Language and Literature 3 (1967): 291–301. Charity, A.C. “Dante and the Aesthetes: The Typology of Death.” Events and Their Afterlife: The Dialectics of Christian Typology in the Bible and Dante. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. 208–26. Clay, Diskin. “Dante’s Broken Faith: The Sin of the Second Circle.” Quaderni d’italianistica 10, nos. 1–2 (1989): 91–108. Comparetti, Domenico. Vergil in the Middle Ages. Trans. E.F.M. Benecke. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1966. Contini, Gianfranco. “Dante come personaggio-poeta della Commedia.” Un idea di Dante. Torino: Einaudi, 1979. 33–62. Curato, Baldo. Il canto di Francesca e i suoi interpreti. Cremona: Padus, 1962. Curtius, Ernst Robert. “Dante.” European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. 348–79. De Sanctis, Francesco. “Francesca da Rimini.” Saggi critici. Ed. Luigi Russo. Bari: Laterza, 1972. 275–93.
DIDO ALIGHIERI
149
Dronke, Peter. “Francesca and Héloïse.” Comparative Literature 27 (1975): 113–35. Engelsman, Joan C. “The Expression and Repression of Sophia.” The Feminine Dimension of the Divine. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1979. 74–120. Fiorenza, Elisabeth S. “Wisdom Mythology and the Christological Hymns of the New Testament.” Aspects of Wisdom in Judaism and Early Christianity. Ed. R. Wilken. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975. 17–42. Frappier, Jean. “The Vulgate Cycle.” Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History. Ed. Roger Sherman Loomis. Oxford: Clarendon, 1974. 295–318. Guinizzelli, Guido. “Al cor gentil” in “Dolce stil novo.” Poeti del duecento. Ed. Gianfranco Contini. Vol. 2. Milano: Riccardo Riccardi, n.d. 460–64. ——— The Poetry of Guido Guinizelli [sic]. Ed. and Trans. Robert Edwards. New York: Garland, 1987. Guzzardo, John J. “Inferno V: Literary History and Historical Literature.” Textual History and the Divine Comedy. Potomac, MD: Scripta humanistica, 1989. 42–55. Hatcher, A., and M. Musa. “The Kiss: Inferno V and the Old French Prose Lancelot.” Comparative Literature 20 (1968): 97–109. Hawkins, Peter. “Dido, Beatrice, and the Signs of Ancient Love.” The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante’s Commedia. Ed. Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey T. Schnapp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991. 113–30. Hollander, Robert. Allegory in Dante’s Commedia. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Iannucci, Amilcare A. “Forbidden Love: Metaphor and History (Inferno 5).” Dante: Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. Amilcare A. Iannucci. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1997. 94–112. Jacoff, Rachel. “Models of Literary Influence in the Commedia.” Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers. Ed. M. Schichtman and L. Finke. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987. 158–76. Lacy, Norris J., ed. Lancelot-Grail. The Old French Arthurian Vulgate and Post-Vulgate in Translation. 5 vols. New York: Garland, 1993. Lord, Mary L. “Dido as an Example of Chastity: The Influence of Example Literature.” Harvard Library Bulletin 17 (1969): 22–24, 216–32. Lund-Mead, Carolynn. “Notes on Androgyny and the Commedia.” Lectura Dantis 10 (1992): 70–79. Mazzotta, Giuseppe. “Vergil and Augustine.” Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the Divine Comedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. 147–91. Musa, Mark. “Behold Francesca Who Speaks so Well.” Advent at the Gates: Dante’s Comedy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974. 19–35. ——— “Inferno V: Text and Commentary.” Lectura Dantis 8 (Spring 1991): 108–33.
150
PART II
TRASMUTAR
Nardi, Bruno. “Filosofia dell’amore nei rimatori italiani del duecento e in Dante.” Dante e la cultura medievale. Ed. Tullio Gregory. Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1983. 9–79. Nethercut, William. “Invasion in the Aeneid.” Greece and Rome. 2nd. ser. 15 (1968): 82–94. Noakes, Susan. “The Double Misreading of Paolo and Francesca.” Timely Reading: Between Exegesis and Interpretation. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. 41–55. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Trans. T.E. Page. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1921. Padoan, Giorgio. “Didone.” Enciclopedia Dantesca 2 (1970): 430–31. Poggioli, Renato. “Tragedy or Romance? A Reading of the Paolo and Francesca Episode in Dante’s Inferno.” PMLA 72 (1957): 313–58. Pöschl, Viktor. “Dido.” The Art of Vergil: Image and Symbol in the Aeneid. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962. 60–91. Quaglio, Antonio Enzo. “Francesca da Rimini.” Enciclopedia dantesca 3 (1971): 1–13. Quinn, Kenneth. “Virgil’s Tragic Queen.” Latin Explorations: Critical Studies in Roman Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963. 29–58. Robinson, J.M. “Jesus as Sophos and Sophia: Wisdom Tradition and the Gospels.” Aspects of Wisdom in Judaism and Early Christianity. Ed. R. Wilken. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975. 1–16. Shapiro, Marianne. Woman Earthly and Divine in the Comedy of Dante. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975. Shirt, David J. “The Dido Episode in Enéas: The Reshaping of Tragedy and its Stylistic Consequences.” Medium Aevum 51 (1982): 3–17. Singer, Irving. “Erotic Transformations in the Legend of Dido and Aeneas.” MLN 90 (1975): 767–83. Sommer, H. Oskar, ed. The Vulgate Version of the Arthurian Romances. 8 vols. Washington: Carnegie, 1910–13. Swing, T.K. “Lesson on the Rung of Spiritual and Carnal Love.” The Fragile Leaves of the Sybil. Westminster, MD: Newman, 1962. 291–312. Valesio, Paolo. “Inferno V: The Fierce Dove.” Lectura Dantis 14–15 (1994): 3–25. Virgil. The Aeneid of Virgil. Ed. R.D. Williams. 2 vols. New York: St. Martin’s, 1972. ——— Virgil. Trans. H. Rushton Fairclough. 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935. Walsh, P.G. “Introduction.” Andreas Capellanus on Love. Ed. and Trans. P.G. Walsh. London: Duckworth, 1982. 1–25. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. 1928; Reprint, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1945.
Fuming Accidie The Sin of Dante’s Gurglers John Thorp
W
hen Dante and Virgil arrive at the marshy bank of the Styx, they observe the shades of the Wrathful thrashing about in the water and continually striking each other with hands and head and chest and feet and teeth. As Virgil points out to Dante, there are also souls hidden under the Stygian mire. Their garbled words bubble up to the surface: Fitti nel limo dicon: “Tristi fummo ne l’aere dolce che dal sol s’allegra, portando dentro accidïoso fummo: or ci attristiam ne la belletta negra.” Quest’ inno si gorgoglian ne la strozza, ché dir nol posson con parola integra. [Fixed in the slime they say, “We were sullen in the sweet air that is gladdened by the sun, bearing within us the sluggish fumes; now we are sullen in the black mire.” This hymn they gurgle in their throats, for they cannot speak it in full words.] (Inf. 7.121–6)1
The submerged gurglers of the Fifth Circle of Hell are a big puzzle. What exactly is their sin?2 On the one hand, evidence on the surface of the text clearly points to the sin of accidia or “accidie,” as it was called in Middle English. If accidie were not the sin Dante had in mind here, why would he use this adjective accidïoso (Inf. 7.123) to describe the sinners’ fummo? Having arisen within them during their earthly lives—either literaliter as a physiological vapour from their bodily humours or figuraliter as a psychological steam clouding their moral vision—their “sluggish fumes” now bubble up from their submerged shades to pollute the external atmosphere of the Stygian swamp. The reversing irony of the contra-
151
152
PART II
TRASMUTAR
passo is in full force here: the inward fumers are now outwardly enveloped by the miasmal cause of their spiritual stagnation and murkily enshrouded by the putrid remains of their flesh—their inert bodies having literally dissolved into fetid mud. While the term accidia came from the remote technical vocabulary of moral philosophy rather than from the language of everyday life, a Latin synonym for it in medieval moral treatises was the more familiar noun tristitia (sadness), cognates of which Dante uses not once but twice in this short text (tristi, attristiam: Inf. 7.121, 124).3 The verbal evidence is therefore overwhelming that the gurglers have been damned for the vice of accidie. THE PROBLEM
Lying beneath the surface of the text, on the other hand, are three considerations that seem to argue strongly that accidie is not the sin in question here. One consideration is that while these souls seem to be punished for wilful gloominess or sullenness, accidie is a much richer and more intricate vice than mere sullenness. The homiletic definition of accidie in The Canterbury Tales, for instance, reveals how this deep and many-faceted vice was understood in the Middle Ages. According to Chaucer’s Parson, accidie makes a man peevishly pensive (“hevy, thoghtful, and wrawe”). Because it paralyzes the will, it causes loss through delay and waste through sluggishness (“forsleweth and forsluggeth”), which eventually leads to despair (“wanhope”). One who is afflicted with accidie does everything lazily, relunctantly, unenthusiastically (“with anoy, and with wrawness, slaknesse and excusacion, and with ydelnesse, and unlust”). It makes one afraid to begin any good works; it imperils one’s livelihood by recklessness; and it carries in its wake tardiness, coldness, undevotion, and worldly sorrow.4 By characterizing accidie as mere sullenness, Dante seems to have given it short shrift indeed. A second consideration arguing against the association of the gurglers with accidie is that Dante clearly and closely allied their sin to anger. As their punishment mockingly suggests, the sin appears to be a specific kind of anger—a submerged or repressed wrath that can barely express itself in words or deeds. And yet accidie and anger do not seem to be connected at a tropological level, if they are even essentially related at all. “It is not at all clear,” complained Natalino Sapegno in his gloss on the passage, “why Dante places those who succumb to accidie here, together with the wrathful, since these two sins are not precisely related to each other—not even by contrast.”5
FUMING ACCIDIE
153
A third consideration is that in the one place in the Commedia where Dante is certainly treating of accidie, namely, on the Fourth Cornice of Purgatory, the vice is depicted not as sullenness at all, but as “L’amor del bene, scemo / del suo dover” [The love of good which comes short of its duty] (Purg. 17.85–6) and later as “negligenza e indugio / da voi per trepidezza in ben far messo” [negligence and delay used by you through lukewarmness in well-doing] (Purg. 18.107–8). The sayings repeated by the souls as an antidote to their vice—e.g., “Ratto, ratto, che ’l tempo non si perda / per poco amor” [Swift, swift! let no time be lost through little love] (Purg. 18.103–4)—have to do with resoluteness and immediate action. That sullen joylessness does not figure at all in the explicit depiction of accidie in Purgatorio argues that Dante is not thinking of this same sin in Inferno 7. What, then, is the sin of the gurglers? Is it something other than accidie, so that Dante’s vocabulary here is remarkably misleading? Or if it is accidie after all, why does he characterize it in such an impoverished way, and why does he ally it so closely to anger? If it is meant to be accidie, why is it so strangely portrayed? SOME TRADITIONAL SOLUTIONS
The idea that the sin of the gurglers is accidie is in considerable disrepute, it seems to me, because it has often been defended as part of a larger thesis which is much less plausible, namely, that all seven cardinal (or capital, or deadly) sins are represented in the upper circles of Hell, outside the walls of Dis. Concerning four of those sins there is, of course, no difficulty. Lust in the Second Circle, gluttony in the Third, avarice (and prodigality) in the Fourth, and anger in the Fifth: about these there is no trace of ambiguity. If we seek to complete the familiar list before reaching the walls of Dis, then Dante’s verbal hint at accidie in the submerged gurglers is irresistible, if something of a stretch. The trouble is that it is a considerably greater stretch to find a place for the remaining two cardinal sins, envy and pride. Indeed, the stretch is intolerable, for Dante would end up making only implicit mention of the chief of the deadly sins, pride. The idea that all the seven capital sins should be found in this part of Hell is not a good reason for ascribing accidie to the gurglers. But if their sin is not accidie, what is it? One answer, proposed by Bernardino Daniello in the sixteenth century, is that both groups of sinners in the muddy lake are guilty of anger: if those who thrash about at the surface are the hot-tempered, then those who are submerged must be the grudge-bearers or grumblers in whom repressed anger festers.
154
PART II
TRASMUTAR
Commentators who agree with Daniello point out that Aristotle had distinguished three species of the angry: the sharp, who, so to speak, have a short wick; the bitter, who repress their anger for a long time; and the vindictive, who are not at peace until they are revenged.6 Thomas Aquinas repeats this distinction.7 Against this interpretation we must observe that if Dante was seeking to reflect Aristotle’s classification it is surely strange that he stopped at two of the kinds of anger, and did not include the third. Moreover, Virgil’s explanation of the scene rather suggests that only the souls visible at the surface of the lake are the ones who are guilty of anger: Lo buon maestro disse: “Figlio, or vedi l’anime di color cui vinse l’ira; e anche vo’ che tu per certo credi che sotto l’acqua è gente che sospira, e fanno pullular quest’ acqua al summo, come l’occhio ti dice, u’ che s’aggira.” [The good master said, “Son, you see now the souls of those whom anger overcame; and I would also have you know for certain that down under the water are people who sigh and make it bubble at the surface, as your eye tells you wherever it turns.”] (Inf. 7.115–20)
Another interpretation, first formulated by Manfredi Porena in the twentieth century, is that Dante is here picking up another Aristotelian distinction. Aristotle’s schematic analysis of virtue places each virtue as a mean state between two opposite vices. Thus courage is the mean between cowardliness and rashness; temperance, the mean between gluttony and insensibility; and so on. Now, on the subject of anger, Aristotle says that the opposing vices are irascibility, the vice of being too quick to anger, and inirascibility, the vice of being too slow to anger. He adds that anger is a strange case for there is really no name for the virtuous mean between irascibility and inirascibility.8 Porena suggests that since the souls thrashing on the surface of the lake are clearly the Irascible, the gurglers must be the Inirascible, those whose anger nothing will rouse, those who are excessively patient. The difficulty here, and it seems to be overwhelming, is that there is no discernible reason why excessive patience should necessarily show itself in glumness and sullenness. So the candidates for the sin of the gurglers are three: accidie, grudgebearing, and excessive patience. Each of these, as we have seen, is problematic. I shall argue that the sin of the gurglers is meant to be accidie after all—though I do not subscribe to the larger thesis that the complete list of the seven deadly sins can be found in this part of the Inferno.
FUMING ACCIDIE
155
To maintain that the sin of the gurglers is accidie I have to answer two questions. First, why does Dante give such an impoverished picture of accidie, apparently reducing it to mere sullenness? And, second, why does he ally it to anger? My answer to the first question is that accidie has a very unsettled history in moral reflection, meaning enormously different things to different authors, and that Dante was probably just as uncertain and confused about it as we are now. My answer to the second question is that there was a significant tradition—going back as far as Cassian and Gregory the Great—which portrayed the seven or eight deadly sins as links in a chain, each (except for pride) dependent on the one before. In this tradition of moral analysis, accidie is always linked with and derived from anger. THE UNSETTLED HISTORY OF ACCIDIE
The Latin word acedia is a transliteration of the Greek @=9¼6 or @=9:¼6, the etymology of which is clear enough. It is a compound of a-privative and the verb @ 9DB6> (“to care about”). Acedia, in its etymological meaning, was therefore the state of not caring.9 Over the centuries, of course, its range of denotations and connotations would expand far beyond this negative notion—its semantic complexity eventually giving rise to theological confusion. I shall set out some of the history of the word in the extant texts that contain it.
Accidie in Classical Literature and in the Septuagint The earliest extant occurrence of the term @=9¼6 or its cognates is in Homer. When the ghost of Patroclus visits Achilles, he reproaches the grieving hero for not having buried his corpse: “You did not neglect [@ 9:>0] me when I was alive, but you are neglecting me now that I am dead.”10 Indeed, the word had a particular connection with neglecting the duty to bury: the adjective @ 9:HID0 meant “unburied.” In the fifth century, Empedocles used the word in the sense not of neglect of one particular duty, but of general recklessness: “Will you not cease from illsounding bloodshed? Do you not see that in reckless [@=9:¼¬H>] folly you are consuming one another?”11 By the third century, the meaning of the word has expanded from its initial core, but in only one of two possible directions. Some people become reckless through high-spiritedness, while others develop an attitude of not caring through low-spiritedness, feebleness, torpor, or as we might say today, “depression.” The latter is the direction the Greek word begins to take. Sometimes, to be sure, it still just means neglect or indif-
156
PART II
TRASMUTAR
ference;12 but at other times, even in the same author, it means torpor or feebleness. Apollonius Rhodius in the Argonautica speaks of a person’s CDy0 as being enfeebled and losing control over the body.13 A late Hippocratic treatise on the glands seems to use @=9¼6 in the sense of being worn down.14 A very useful place to observe this further widening of the original sense of @=9¼6 is in the Septuagint, for here we can usually discover the Hebrew word which @=9¼6 has been used to render. Thus, in the Psalms,15 we find it used to mean feebleness or faintness of heart on the one hand (60:3, 101: introduction),16 or grief or sorrow on the other (118:28).17 In the Book of Isaiah (61:3), God is said to give his servants a robe of glory in place of dimness (@=9¼6) of spirit.18 The meaning seems to be expanded even further in a passage of the Book of Daniel (7:15). This text is a classicist’s delight for here the Septuagint contains not one but two parallel Greek translations of the original Aramaic text, one by an anonymous translator and one by Theodotion in the second century C.E. Daniel is describing his reaction to his dream of the four huge beasts. While the anonymous translator uses a verb from @=9¼6 to describe this reaction, Theodotion writes: “my soul shuddered [b;G>L:C].”19 Here, then, the sense of @=9¼6 has been so generalized that it just means “spiritual distress.” Still other meanings are probably at work in the two texts of Ecclesiasticus that contain the word. Here, since the Hebrew is lost, we have to deduce the sense from the context. The first passage (22:13) is a lively rumination on the tedium and frustration of dealing with a fool. It advises: “Avoid him, if you are looking for peace, and you will not be worn out [@=9UH¬0] by his folly.” The second passage (29:5) is harder to translate. The subject is repayment of debts, and the sardonic author observes that in many cases a person “treats a loan as a windfall…but when it is time to repay, pays back only words of @=9¼6, and alleges that times are hard.” What can words of @=9¼6 be? Perfunctory (i.e., careless) remarks? Outcries of distress or dismay? Complaints about being worn down by life? Excuses that wear down the lender? The truth seems to be that the passage is not securely translatable: by the second century C.E., the meaning of @=9¼6 has expanded to such width and vagueness that, where the context supplies no real constraint, we cannot say precisely what the word means. Two other pre-Christian texts are worth mentioning. One is the anonymous Vita Aesopi dating from the first century B.C.E. The witty slave Aesop is trying to rein in the excessive drinking of his rather doltish master
FUMING ACCIDIE
157
Xanthus. He says that when Dionysus invented wine, he prepared three cups of it. The first was the cup of pleasure; the second the cup of merriment; and the third the cup of @=9¼6. He advises his master to drink from the first cup by all means, and from the second if he must, but to leave the third to the young.20 It is hard to say just what this third stage of drunkenness may be. Torpor, perhaps? Or recklessness? Or maudlin despondency? A second text is an intriguing passage in a short letter of Cicero to Atticus. “I am worried about your @=9¼6,” he remarks, “though you say that it is nothing.”21 Though Cicero writes in Latin, he uses the Greek word @=9¼6 untransliterated: it must, then, be a term of art which has no perfect Latin equivalent—like ennui and weltschmerz and other such borrowings in English.22 In addition, his concessive clause (“though you say that it is nothing”) makes it clear that @=9¼6 is regarded as an indisposition of some sort, an illness which may be minor and passing or which might develop into deeper troubles. Otherwise, why would he be concerned about it?23 Bailey translates it as “languor,” but this sounds strange. Wouldn’t “depression” be the best modern equivalent? A bout of depression—that’s what Atticus suffered. If we look into pagan authors in the Common Era, we find one or two developments worth noting. The Epicurean philosopher Diogenes of Oenoanda (second century C.E.), who took care to inscribe his works on stone so that they would not perish, uses @=9¼6 to mean something like indifference; he begs his readers not to approach his words like passersby, in a desultory fashion—not even if we are somewhat indifferent (@=9¼6) and bored. Rather, we should read the whole thing.24 The sophist Lucian, in the second century C.E., uses the word to mean a state brought on by a life of endless toil: weariness, exhaustion. Arguing that it is silly to spend one’s life working hard merely to get near happiness, he observes: “You take all that trouble, wearing yourself out, and so much of your life has slipped away in @=9¼6 and weariness, slumped in sleeplessness.”25 In the same century or early in the next, the historian Cassius Dio recounts that a Lusitanian hero Viriathus was “superior to any heat or cold, and was never either troubled by hunger or annoyed by any other @=9¼6.”26 The use of the word “other” (XAAD0) in this passage shows that @=9¼6 is understood to designate bodily distress or deprivation: a general condition of which heat, cold, and hunger are particular examples. Among pagan authors, then, @=9¼6 with its cognates develops an astonishingly wide range of meanings. Springing from a core etymolog-
158
PART II
TRASMUTAR
ical sense of not caring, it travels, on the one hand, in the direction of high energy to mean recklessness, and on the other—and this is the main trajectory of its meaning—towards the various kinds of not caring (torpor, depression, listlessness, ennui) that come from low energy. In the latter direction, it sometimes becomes unhitched from its etymological origin so that it comes to stand as a general term for feebleness, dimness of spirit, heaviness, exhaustion. And from this it can even acquire a general sense of distress, whether physical or spiritual. My investigation of pagan uses of the term has perhaps been rather rambling, but it shows one thing unequivocally: by the second century C.E., when Christian writers took over acedia for use in moral theology, the term inevitably brought with it a complex and shifting array of denotations and connotations. I shall be arguing that this instability of meaning stayed with the term as it continued to be used by Christian writers. This instability is reflected, for example, in the famous lists of seven (or eight) capital sins, which vary, basically, only over accidie. Pride, lust, anger, avarice, gluttony, and envy nearly always appear on the lists, which mainly differ over how they are completed. Where the lists contain eight sins, the other two are accidia and tristitia; where the lists contain seven sins, they vary over whether the seventh is accidia or tristitia—between which there has never been a settled distinction.27 This semantic muddle has lasted into our own age, I believe, for our descriptive and analytic language for this part of affective life is woefully vague, shifting, and imprecise. How do we distinguish boredom from ennui? Sadness from sullenness? Torpor from depression?
Accidie in the Greek Ecclesiastical Tradition In its principal developments, the next part of the story has been often and well told.28 In the solitary ascetic spirituality of the desert that was developed in Egypt in the third century, a spirituality focused on singleminded denial of the body and pursuit of prayer, @=9¼6 was the term for a certain clutch of thoughts or sentiments which could obsess the monk and distract him from his spiritual quest. These thoughts were, loosely, boredom and sense of failure, and they bred lassitude in soul and body and inattention to the work of prayer. The source of these particular distractions was identified as the biblical “noonday demon,” since they normally struck in the middle of the day. The first author to write about the challenges of the eremitical life, and to use the term @=9¼6 for one of its standard patterns of difficulty, was Evagrius Ponticus in the fourth century. Evagrius was a keen psychological observer, and his spirited account
FUMING ACCIDIE
159
of a monk afflicted by accidie (best known in its reworking by John Cassian, quoted below) is a literary gem. This commandeering of the non-technical term @=9¼6 to mean a very precise distraction for hermits turned out to be the main contribution of Greek Christian writers to the development of our concept. Evagrius codified the eight monkish distractions, and before long these were made over into the eight (and later seven) deadly sins or vices for all Christians, and so the term @=9¼6 made its way into ordinary moral theology. But if the rather particular @=9¼6 of the desert was the major element of the story, there were other texts, usages, and remarks in the Greek Christian writers which played their part as well. A text attributed to Origen makes the point that every soul that loves God is worn down (@=9>) by living mortal life: @=9¼6, here, far from being a vice, is an inevitable concomitant of the godly life. Another passage in the same work provides a pleasingly direct definition of @=9¼6 as a “long-enduring movement of spirit and desire in the same,” or, as we might say, a psychic rut brought about by lack of novelty.29 This is perhaps the earliest text in the tradition to provide an actual definition of @=9¼6, and it is an etiological definition. A different etiology is provided by Athanasius, who writes that chattering breeds @=9¼6 and @=9¼6 in turn breeds poverty.30 In another work he defines @=9¼6 as irrational sadness, unreasonable sorrow.31 And though these remarks about @=9¼6 suggest that it is a habit of mind, a thing which endures or readily recurs, another passage indicates that @=9¼6 is simply one of a number of annoyances which may befall a monk at prayer. It is on a par with coughing, yawning, groaning, nodding off, and hawking up spittle.32 Clearly here @=9¼6 is understood as something more episodic—a fit of snoozing or daydreaming perhaps. Gregory Nazianzus shows signs of impatience with the vagueness and ambiguity surrounding the word @=9¼6 when he makes it a synonym for Nn;D0 (gloom).33 A recurrent theme in the Greek Fathers is the idea that @=9¼6 is allied to sleepiness, and sleep is allied to (spiritual) death. Thus Gregory Nyssen lists sleep, heaviness of body, softness of soul, @=9¼6, neglect of duty, and lack of perseverance as vices leading to the destruction of the soul;34 and John Chrysostom prays that sleep and @=9¼6 and fleshy heaviness may be cut off so that the wings of the soul may rise to heaven.35 Though the Greek Fathers certainly do not dispel the traditional ambiguity and vagueness surrounding our term, I think that the semantic evidence from their writings allows us to do some analytic work towards classifying definitions of @=9¼6. We have seen that the first explicit def-
160
PART II
TRASMUTAR
inition, Origen’s, is etiological: accidie is a state caused by spirit and desire running too long along the same track. But there is also Athanasius’s definition of @=9¼6 as a kind of feeling: irrational sadness. Gregory Nazianzus’s renaming it “gloom” is perhaps a similar effort at identifying it with a feeling; or perhaps what it designates is the demeanour belying that feeling. Still other suggestions tend towards understanding @=9¼6 as a behavioural outcome beyond mere demeanour. I have in mind those texts that seem to treat @=9¼6 and A>
Accidie in the Latin Ecclesiastical Tradition Acedia in the Latin West had very much the same beginning as @=9¼6 in the Greek East. The ascetic text in which Evagrius Ponticus had commandeered the word to name the hermit’s noonday demon was quickly reworked and embellished in Latin by John Cassian as part of his effort to establish Egyptian-style monasticism in southern France in the early fifth century. His description of the monk assailed by acedia is justly famous: When…[accidie] besieges the unhappy mind, it begets aversion from the place, boredom with one’s cell, and scorn and contempt for one’s brethren, whether they be dwelling with one or some way off, as careless and unspiritually minded persons. Also, towards any work that may be done within the enclosure of our own lair, we become listless and inert. It will not suffer us to stay in our cell, or to attend to our reading: we lament that in all this while, living in the same spot, we have made no progress, we sigh and complain that bereft of sympathetic fellowship we have no spiritual fruit; and bewail ourselves as empty of all spiritual profit, abiding vacant and useless in this place; and we that could guide others and be of value to multitudes have edified no man, enriched no man with our precept and example…. Toward eleven o’clock or midday it induces such lassitude of body and craving for food, as one might feel after the exhaustion of a long journey and hard toil, or the postponing of a meal throughout a two or three days’ fast. Finally one gazes anxiously here and there, and sighs that no brother of any description is to be seen approaching: one is forever in and out of one’s cell, gazing at the sun as though it were
FUMING ACCIDIE
161
tarrying to its setting: one’s mind is in an irrational confusion, like the earth befogged in a mist, one is slothful and vacant in every spiritual activity, and no remedy, it seems, can be found for this state of siege than a visit from some brother, or the solace of sleep….37
Something like this state is known to most of us, I think, and it is instructive to consider how hard it is to find a simple satisfactory English word for it. It is more than boredom, for sure; but we seem to reach for French words to name it: ennui, mal de siècle. “Accidie,” which might have done the trick, never had much currency in English, and is now not to be heard. However that may be, two treatments of accidie by Cassian have come down to us, and the interesting differences between them shed light on the development of the concept in the Latin West. In the passage from the De institutis coenobitorum just cited, Cassian introduces the subject of accidie by saying “our sixth struggle is with what the Greeks call @=9¼6, and we may call weariness or perturbation of heart.”38 He uses the Greek word in Greek, backed up by a disjunctive pair of vague Latin equivalents. It was a major determinant of the future of the concept, however, that in his other treatment of the topic, the Collationes, he simply wrote the Greek word in Latin: acedia. The fifth book of the Collationes (entitled “The Eight Principal Vices”) stands at the head of the long Western tradition of codifying sins under eight, later seven, main ones—variously called “principal,” “cardinal,” or “deadly.” In Cassian’s treatment, then, acedia came to occupy one of the eight slots, and despite everyone’s shaky grasp on its meaning, it continued to do so for centuries. The form endured, but the content was vague, shifting, and obscure. Everyone knew that acedia was one of the deadly sins, but no one knew exactly what it was. The impreciseness of acedia was bound to increase because its etymological meaning was lost on Latin ears. Speculative etymology connected it either with the adjective acidus (sour) or with the verb accidere (to befall).39 The former false etymology has perhaps something to do with the tendency to connect acedia with bitterness of temper, while the latter error explains why the word came to be spelled accidia, whence our English “accidie.” Further confusion within the tradition stems from variations in the number and sequence of the deadly sins. There are two main points of divergence in the lists. Some enter pride and vainglory as separate sins, while others fuse them. More interesting for our purposes is that some lists separate tristitia from acedia, while others fuse them into one sin. In these cases acedia sometimes appears as an alternative word for sadness,40 and sometimes as one of its species41 or as one of its “daughters.”42
162
PART II
TRASMUTAR
Virtually all discussions of accidie in the Latin ecclesiastical tradition occur in the context of listing the seven or eight deadly sins. It is as though accidie has no life outside that list; its survival is a great example of the victory of form over content! Now the general history of the deadly sins in the Latin West has been told before,43 and I shall not try to repeat it here. But if we extract from that history just a summary list of how various authors in the Latin ecclesiastical tradition portrayed accidie, we shall see very clearly that it was not a sin of which there was a settled understanding. Here, then, are the views of some of them: Cassian (d. 448): There are two kinds of accidie, one which leads the sufferer to sleep, and one which drives him to abandon his cell.44 Aldhelm of Malmesbury (d. 709): Accidie nurtures laziness and sleep on the one hand, and on the other, frivolity of speech and instability of behaviour.45 Alcuin (d. 804): Accidie is the state of taking no joy in spiritual work or in the health of the soul, nor even in working together with one’s colleagues.46 Pseudo-Hugh of St. Victor (d. ?): Accidie is born of aversion to interior goods, and in it the soul, having lost its proper good, remains solitary and alone, and is turned to bitterness and sorrow.47 Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1142): Accidie is a disproportionate bitterness of soul, or perverse irritation and grief.48 Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153): Accidie is of two kinds, one leading the monk to laziness in spiritual work and to sleep, and the other leading him to flee the society of his colleagues.49 Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274): Accidie is a degree of sadness which immobilizes the bodily members, and even the voice.50
In this short list we see accidie portrayed alternately as joylessness and as laziness, as inclining to chattering and as inclining to muteness, as driving one to seek solitude and as driving one to flee one’s cell and seek company. It seems too light a judgment to say merely that there was no settled view about accidie among the moralists of the Latin Church: rather there were multiple causes of ambiguity (linguistic as well as theological) resulting in definite strands of contradiction among their views. I have been arguing that in understanding accidie within medieval Latin theology we find great variety and instability of content, but constancy of form. That is, whatever exactly it consists of, accidie is one of
FUMING ACCIDIE
163
the seven or eight cardinal sins. But there is another constancy of form as well, and one which is very important for our purpose here. It was very common among these theological writers to portray the seven cardinal sins as a catena or chain, with each one arising out of the one before—the first link in the chain almost invariably being pride. The tradition of understanding the seven cardinal sins in this way—as a kind of monkish Rake’s Progress—goes back in fact to Cassian and Gregory the Great. Though the order of links in the chain varies from author to author, one segment of it is virtually constant: the tristitia-acedia pairing always follows on from ira (anger). Thus, despite other instabilities, it is one of the constants of the tradition that anger is what gives birth to sadness and/or accidie. So, for example: Cassian (d. 448): Avarice inevitably breeds anger; anger inevitably breeds sadness (tristitia); and sadness inevitably breeds accidie.51 Gregory (d. 604): Sadness grows out of anger.52 Alcuin (d. 804): Sadness and accidie proceed from anger gone awry.53 Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1142): After envy and anger, sadness arises.54 Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153): Sadness proceeds from anger.55
Once again, while the form is generally preserved—sadness and accidie arise out of anger—the content varies. Not many ecclesiastical authors in the Latin tradition actually work out the mechanism of just how anger breeds accidie, but some do, and the results are very different. Thus, Gregory suggests that anger makes one lose the sweetness of tranquility and that this loss causes sadness. Hugh of St. Victor suggests a slightly different mechanism: anger arises ultimately from one’s own imperfection, and it is awareness of this imperfection that leads to sadness. Bernard of Clairvaux suggests that it is anger at the appearance of trouble or the frustration of desire that breeds sadness. To summarize the story of accidie in the Latin ecclesiastical tradition we can say that, though the precise understanding of the sin or vice varied a good deal, there were two formal constancies: first, accidie was conceived as one of the seven or eight cardinal sins (whether melded somehow with sadness or listed separately); and second, the sadness/accidie pair was seen almost inevitably as arising out of anger.
Accidie in Dante’s Teachers It is all very well, of course, that there should be this diversity in the history of the concept of accidie, but it could only affect Dante’s thought if
164
PART II
TRASMUTAR
it were transmitted to him by his teachers and by the authors whom he read. And here we can very quickly see how two very different understandings of the essence of accidie—the gloominess portrayed in the Inferno and the negligence of good works portrayed in the Purgatorio—can have percolated through to him. On the one hand, Hugh of St. Victor, in a passage we have already seen, defines accidie as disproportionate bitterness of the soul, or perverse irritation and grief, and Aquinas quotes with approval Nemesius’s definition of accidie as a kind of sadness that is so severe that it makes one mute. On the other hand, leading Dante to the understanding of accidie as tepidity in the performance of religious duties were remarks by Bernard, Bonaventure, and Brunetto Latini. While Bernard describes accidie as breeding laziness in the divine office, Bonaventure sees the Blessed Virgin’s “tireless assiduity” as the cure for accidie.56 Brunetto, in a text we shall see in a moment, portrays accidie precisely as negligence of religious duties. As to the content and meaning of accidie, the authors who directly influenced Dante led him in two different directions, resulting in the dissonant presentations of accidie in the Inferno and the Purgatorio. We might say that whereas the Inferno depicts accidie by the demeanour which typifies it, the Purgatorio depicts it by the behaviour to which it gives rise. There is, then, no difficulty at all in understanding how Dante can represent accidie at one moment as gloominess and at another as laziness in the performance of good works. It was what his teachers taught. The same authorities can help us solve the other problem with which we began, namely, how to justify the condemnation of the gurglers for accidie when their sin appears to be a species of wrath. This puzzle, too, dissolves when we consider how constant a refrain it was among Latin Christian authors that sadness/accidie grew out of anger. Moreover, Dante will have encountered this idea in his reading: it is clearly present in the short passage from Hugh of St. Victor cited above, and, much more extensively, in the Penetenza appended to Brunetto’s Tesoretto. Brunetto recounts a sad tale of damnation in which the sinner moves through the familiar catena of the seven deadly sins. “In ira nasce e posa / Accidia nighittosa,” he observes [In anger is born and rests / Slothful inaction.]57 The mechanism of this birth is that when hate and anger fester unexpressed they lead to a kind of torment that paralyzes the will. Unable to initiate any good action, the sinner neglects his/her duty to go to Mass, fails to learn the Paternoster, and slips from slothful despond into deep despair. The above verse is often quoted in commentaries on the bog people of Inferno 7, but it always seems rather gratuitous. But it
FUMING ACCIDIE
165
is not gratuitous: we have heard the unison chorus of ecclesiastical authors standing behind it. I have answered the two questions that I posed in the attempt to make the case that the sin of the submerged gurglers was accidie after all. The very muddle and unsettledness I noted in the semantic history of @=9¼6 and accidia make it easy to understand how Dante might have portrayed this sin so differently in the two cantos where it figures. Despite its bewildering number of meanings, I have found a strong formal agreement in the Latin tradition that accidie and sadness grow out of anger. There is, then, no impediment to the traditional view that those who confess that they were “sullen in the sweet air” (Inf. 7.121–2) are understood by Dante to be those damned for accidie. This portrayal of accidie, which at first seems so strange that scholars have questioned whether it really is accidie, turns out in the end not to be strange at all: it keeps perfect faith with one strand of an ambiguous tradition. NOTES 1 All quotations from Dante are from Petrocchi’s edition as revised and translated by Singleton (1970–75). The components of the Commedia cited from include Inferno (Inf.) and Purgatorio (Purg.).Worth comparing with Singleton’s prose translation of Inf. 7. 121–6 is Pinsky’s (1994) version in nearrhymed tercets: “Lodged in the slime they say: ‘Once we were grim / And sullen in the sweet air above, that took / A further gladness from the play of sun; / Inside us, we bore acedia’s dismal smoke. / We have this black mire now to be sullen in.’ / This canticle they gargle from the craw, / Unable to speak whole words.” Note how Pinsky gets round the problem of rendering the ambiguous adjective accidïoso in English by replacing it with the noun acedia, its Latin etymon, which serves here not only as a technical term in moral philosophy but also as a newly coined example of poetic diction. 2 “In inquiring whether Accidia finds any place in the Inferno or no, and, if so, where, we are embarking on the most hotly disputed question of all,” observes Edward Moore (1899), 173. 3 Though Aquinas in Summa theologiae 1–2.35.8 (vol. 20) treats acedia as one of the four species of tristitia, he uses tristitia and acedia interchangeably in 1–2.84.4 (vol. 26). 4 The Parson’s Tale, 310–11. 5 Gloss on Inf. 7.110 in Sapegno (86): “no è del tutto chiaro…perché Dante li [i.e., gli accidiosi] collochi qui, insieme con gli irosi, non essendovi tra i due peccati una precisa relazione, neppure di contrasto.” 6 Nicomachean Ethics IV.5. 7 Summa theologiae 1–2.46.8 (vol. 21). 8 Nicomachean Ethics II.7, 1108a3ff. 9 Franco Calaresu, to whom this volume is dedicated, suggested that gli accidiosi were essentially i menefreghisti (“those who don’t give a damn”).
166 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23
24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38
39 40 41
PART II
TRASMUTAR
Iliad 23.70. Fr. 136. See Argonautica 2.219, 3.260. Argonautica 3.298. De glandulis 8.76, 20. The passage has proved challenging to translators. Potter, the most recent editor of the treatise, has emended @=9¼¬ to =F¼¬. All biblical references are from the Septuagint Version of the Old Testament translated by Brenton (1971). Here @=9¼6 renders the Hebrew ‘atop (faint or feeble). Here @=9¼6 renders Hebrew tugah (grief or sorrow). The Hebrew is katat. The Aramaic is kra’. Vita Aesopi G.68. The Greek words for the three cups are «9DC , :w;GDHsC=, and @=9¼6. Cicero’s Letters to Atticus, Vol.5, xii.45 (290 in Bailey’s numbering). Since Cicero sprinkles Greek words and phrases fairly liberally through these letters, it may not be the case that there is no way of saying @=9¼6 in Latin: it is just that the Greek word for the thing is the one that rises at once to the lips. Edward Moore (1899), ever the Protestant divine, diminishes Atticus’s @=9¼6 to laziness. Commenting on the word in this letter, Moore argues (184, n.3) that Cicero “reproaches Atticus with @=9¼6 for neglecting to write to him.” But this seems to ignore the subsequent clause, “etsi scribis nihil esse.” The Epicurean Inscription fr. 30 (text p.197; translation p.381). Hermotimus 77, l. 15. The Loeb translator, Kilburn, renders the word as “torpor.” Historiae Romanae XXII 73.2, l. 6. There is a useful summary of medieval lists of the capital sins on a fold-out page in Moore (1899), n.2. Most notably by Wenzel (1967), Schimmel (1992), and Bloomfield (1952). Selecta in Psalmos, PG vol. 12, col. 1480. The commentary is on Psalms 60:3. Sermo pro iis qui saeculo renuntiarunt, PG vol. 28, col. 1413, l. 13; col. 1412, l.45. Vita Sanctae Syncleticae, PG vol. 28, col. 1512, l.11. Epistulae ad Castorem, PG vol. 28, col. 852, l.18. In seipsum ad patrem et Basilium magnum, PG vol. 35, col. 829, l.17. De instituto Christiano, vol. 8.1, p. 81, l.19. Ad Stelechium de compunctione lib. 2, PG vol. 47, col. 411, l. 26. See Origen, Selecta in Psalmos, PG 12, col. 1552. The commentary is on Psalms 90:6. De coenobiorum institutis 10, PL 49, col. 359; the translation is by Waddell, 157. “Sextum nobis certamen est, quod Graeci @=9¼6 vocant, quam nos taedium sive anxietatem cordis.” The noun taedium also means “disgust,” which may be a better translation here than “weariness.” See the OED entry on “accidie” for details. See Expositio moralis in Abdiam, PL 175, col. 401: “Acedia seu tristitia est inordinata amaritudo animae….” See Summa theologiae 1–2.35.8 (vol. 20) for the famous and mysterious remark: “Acedia est tristitia vocem amputans” [Accidie is sadness which deprives the
FUMING ACCIDIE
42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57
167
sufferer of speech]. Though Aquinas attributes this saying to Gregory Nyssen, it is actually from Piso of Burgundy’s translation of Nemesius’s treatise On the Nature of Man. See De fructibus carnis et spiritus, PL 176, cols. 1000–1. See Bloomfield (1952), Moore (1899), and Schimmel (1992). Collationes, vol. 10, PL 49, col. 627. De octo vitiis principalibus, PL 89, col. 285. Liber de virtutibus et vitiis, PL 101, col. 635. Expositio altera orationis Domini, PL 175, col. 776. Expositio moralis in Abdiam, PL 175, col. 401. Tractatus de ordine vitae, PL 184, col. 578. Summa theologiae 1–2.35.8 (vol. 20). See above, note 40. Collationes, vol. 10, PL 49, col. 627. Moralia, PL 86, col. 621. De animae ratione liber ad Eulaliam virginem, PL 101, col. 639. Expositio moralis in Abdiam, PL 175, col. 402. Tractatus de ordine vitae, PL 145, col. 579. Speculum Beatae Mariae Virginis, 5. This work, which Dante will have taken to be by Bonaventure, is now known to be by Conrad of Saxony. Il Tesoretto, vol. 2, 135. The translation is by Holloway.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alcuin. De animae ratione liber ad Eulaliam virginem. Patrologia latina. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Vol. 101. Paris: Migne, 1851. Cols. 639–50. ——— Liber de virtutibus et vitiis. Patrologia latina. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Vol. 101. Paris: Migne, 1851. Cols. 613–38. “De acedia”: Col. 635. Aldhelm of Malmesbury. De octo principalibus vitiis. Patrologia latina. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Vol. 89. Paris: Migne, 1850. Cols. 281–90. Alighieri, Dante. La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. Ed. G. Petrocchi. 4 vols. Milano: Mondadori, 1966–67. ——— La Divina Commedia. Ed. Natalino Sapegna. Firenze: La nuova Italia, 1968. ——— The Divine Comedy. Trans. Charles S. Singleton. 6 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–75. ——— The Inferno of Dante. Trans. Robert Pinsky. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994. Anonymous. Vita Aesopi. Aesopica. Ed. Ben Edwin Perry. Vol. 1. ChampagneUrbana: University of Illinois Press, 1952. Apollonius Rhodius. Apollonii Rhodii Argonautica. Ed. H. Fraenkel. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961. Aquinas, St. Thomas. Summa theologiae. Vol. 20, Pleasure. Trans. Eric D’Arcy. London: Blackfriars, Eyre and Spottiswoode, McGraw-Hill, 1975. ——— Summa theologiae. Vol. 21, Fear and Anger. Trans. John Patrick Reid. London: Blackfriars, Eyre and Spottiswoode, McGraw-Hill, 1965.
168
PART II
TRASMUTAR
——— Summa theologiae. Vol. 26, Original Sin. Trans. T.C. O’Brien. London: Blackfriars, Eyre and Spottiswoode, McGraw-Hill, 1965. Aristotle. Aristotelis ethica Nicomachea. Ed. I. Bywater. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Athanasius of Alexandria, St. Epistulae ad Castorem. Patrologia graeca. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Vol. 28. Paris: Migne, 1857. Cols. 849–905. ——— Sermo pro iis qui saeculo renuntiarunt. Patrologia graeca. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Vol. 28. Paris: Migne, 1857. Cols. 1409–20. ——— Vita Sanctae Syncleticae. Patrologia graeca. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Vol. 28. Paris: Migne, 1857. Cols. 1488–557. Bernard of Clairvaux. Tractatus de ordine vitae. Patrologia latina. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Vol. 184. Paris: Migne, 1859. Cols. 559–84. Bloomfield, Morton. The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1952. Bonaventure, St. Speculum Beatae Mariae Virginis. Sancti Bonaventurae opera omnia. Ed. Ludovicus Vives. Vol. 14. Paris: Bibliopola, 1868. 232–92. Cassian. Collationes. Patrologia latina. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Vol. 49. Paris: Migne, 1846. ——— De coenobiorum institutis. Patrologia latina. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Vol. 49. Paris: Migne, 1846. ——— “Of Accidie: Of Mortification.” The Desert Fathers. Trans. Helen Waddell. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989. 229–35. Cassius Dio. Cassii Dionis Cocceiani historiarum Romanarum quae supersunt. 3 vols. Ed. U.P. Boissevain. Berlin: Weidmann, 1955. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Parson’s Tale. The Canterbury Tales X (1). The Riverside Chaucer. Ed. Larry D. Benson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987. 288–327. Cicero. Cicero’s Letters to Atticus. Ed. D.R. Shackleton Bailey. Vol. 5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. Diogenes of Oenoanda. The Epicurean Inscription. Ed. Martin Ferguson Smith. Naples: Bibliopolis, 1993. Empedocles. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Ed. H. Diels and W. Kranz. Vol. 1. 6th ed. Berlin: Weidmann, 1951. 308–307. Gregory Nazianzenus, St. In seipsum ad patrem et Basilium magnum. Patrologia graeca. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Vol. 35. Paris: Migne, 1857. Cols. 828–32. Gregory Nyssenus, St. De instituto Christiano. Gregorii Nysseni opera. Ed. W. Jaeger. Vol. 8.1. Leiden: Brill, 1963. 129–42. Gregory the Great, St. Moralia. Patrologia latina. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Vol. 75. Paris: Migne, 1849. Cols. 509–1162. Hippocrates. De glandulis. Oeuvres complètes d’Hippocrate. Ed. E. Littré. Vol. 8. Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1962. 556–74. ——— Hippocrates. Ed. Paul Potter. Vols. 5–6. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, 1988.
FUMING ACCIDIE
169
Homer. Homeri Ilias. Ed. T.W. Allen. Vols. 2–3. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931. Hugh of St. Victor. Expositio moralis in Abdiam. Patrologia latina. Vol. 175. Paris: Migne, 1854. Cols. 371–406. John Chrysostom, St. Ad Stelechium de compunctione. Patrologia graeca. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Vol. 47. Paris: Migne, 1858. Cols. 411–22. Latini, Brunetto. Il Tesoretto. Ed. and Trans. Julia Bolton Holloway. Vol. 2. Garland Library of Medieval Literature. Series A. New York: Garland, 1981. Lucian of Samosata. Hermotimus. Lucian. Ed. and trans. K. Kilburn. Vol. 6. Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann, 1913. Moore, Edward. Studies in Dante. Second Series: Miscellaneous Essays. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899. Origen. Selecta [ex commentariis] in Psalmos 1–150. Patrologia graeca. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Vol. 12. Paris: Migne, 1857. Cols. 1053–1686. Pseudo-Hugh of St. Victor. De fructibus carnis et spiritus. Patrologia latina. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Vol. 176. Paris: Migne, 1854. Cols. 997–1006. ——— Expositio altera orationis Domini. Patrologia latina. Ed. J.–P. Migne. Vol. 175. Paris: Migne, 1854. Col. 774. Schimmel, Solomon. The Seven Deadly Sins: Jewish, Christian, and Classical Reflections on Human Nature. New York: Free Press and Maxwell Macmillan, 1992. Septuagint. The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament: With an English Translation, and with Various Readings and Critical Notes. Trans. Sir L.C.L. Brenton. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, c. 1971. Wenzel, Siegfried. The Sin of Sloth: Acedia in Medieval Thought and Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967.
Heresy and Politics in Inferno 10 Guido Pugliese
T
hough the tenth canto of the Inferno has provoked a great deal of commentary in the past two centuries, three major streams of interpretation can be clearly identified in chronological order. The first is the late Romantic reading, emanating from the pen of Francesco De Sanctis.1 According to the great critic from Morra Irpino, the tenth canto ought to be named after Farinata because he dominates it as a “colossal” figure for whom Dante shows an unconditional admiration. The social reasons for this admiration are clear: Dante sees in Farinata a fellow citizen of “that noble fatherland,” Florence [quella nobil patrïa…Fiorenza] (Inf. 10.26, 92), with whom he shares a proud allegiance to aristocratic ideals.2 Much later in his journey, after speaking with the Sienese penitent Sapìa, Dante comes to the fearful realization that though he will spend some time after death on the Cornice of the Envious where she now sits with her eyes wired shut, his strong propensity for pride—a propensity already associated with the great lords of “Fiorenza”—will require him to spend a much longer time on the level below. His humbling torment on the Cornice of the Proud will be to carry a rock on his back for many weary years of purgation, and since the weight of the load must be proportionate to the gravity of his sin, a massive boulder no doubt awaits him. “Far greater is the fear that holds my soul in suspense, of the torment below, so that already the load down there is heavy upon me,” he tremulously confesses [Troppa è più la paura ond’ è sospesa / l’anima mia del tormento di sotto, / che già lo ’ncarco di là giù mi pesa] (Purg. 13.136–8). For De Sanctis, in the contrapasso assigned to Farinata, the principal object of artistic representation is not the depiction of the punishment merited by his sin, heresy, but the dramatic portrayal of a “great soul”
170
HERESY AND POLITICS
171
[magnanimo] (Inf. 10.73). Though the violation of a theological principle dooms him to a fiery tomb, Farinata strikes the pose of a magnanimo in front of his fellow citizen, the pilgrim, by rising up erect “with chest and brow thrown back as if he had great scorn of Hell” [col petto e con la fronte / com’ avesse l’inferno a gran dispitto] (Inf. 10.35–6). What mainly torments him is the thought that perhaps he “did too much harm” to his beloved Florence [a la qual forse fui troppo molesto] (Inf. 10.27). As a result, when the pilgrim brings him word that his descendants have been exiled and still continue to be hated by the Florentines, the news pains him like a stab wound. That the doctrinal issue is presented as artistically marginal in the interpretation of De Sanctis can also be seen in the critic’s reluctance to offer any comment on the concluding section of the canto, which looks beyond Farinata towards other sinners. Here a significant part of the contrapasso is explained, namely, that the heretics perceive the past and the future but have no knowledge of the present. The second type of reading derives from Benedetto Croce,3 and though it has few adherents now, it has become an obligatory point of reference owing to this critic’s authoritative reputation. In many respects, Croce’s appraisal of Inferno 10 is quite similar to De Sanctis’s—except for one fundamental point. It differs with respect to the devaluation of the poetic quality of Dante’s Commedia, which, by virtue of its religious and political aims, “might perhaps be called a ‘theological’ or an ‘ethico-politicotheological’ romance, by analogy with ‘scientific’ or ‘socialistic’ romances of recent times.”4 Since these aims pre-existed the text, they supposedly weakened the quality of free intuitiveness within it, and this was the very quality that Croce considered the primary aspect of true poetry. According to Croce, Farinata uncharacteristically “abandons his disdainful attitude and forsakes the thoughts in which he is absorbed, and which are all of them patriotic and political, in order to explain the limits of the knowledge of the present and the future among the damned.”5 The third and most recent model of critical interpretation springs partly from the recovery of structure as necessarily a main element of a text and therefore not as an element detrimental to its poetic essence; partly from a re-evaluation of the religious dimension of the Commedia through the influence of the American school of criticism headed by Singleton; and partly from a deepened understanding of the canto on the philological side.6 In this last regard, it should be pointed out that the figure of Farinata has been cut down to size, reassessed in a less positive sense, as a result of exhaustive research on the term magnanimo with
172
PART II
TRASMUTAR
which his distinctive character is expressed. Philologists have demonstrated that the epithet had negative connotations, too, both in the classical period and in the Middle Ages. Besides its literal meaning (great soul), the word could also denote an exaggerated sense of self, which leads to pride and arrogance.7 Rather than summarizing the analyses of others, I would like to propose here a reading of my own. While my interpretation will obviously take into account the critical work produced hitherto, it also seeks to demonstrate definitively the co-existence of the theological aspects with the political and human interest of Inferno 10. In fact, I will go so far as to argue for the inseparability of theology and politics in the canto, and I propose to do this by considering the structural and lexical elements that mark the episode. The canto may be divided into seven sections, which articulate its structure:
Lines 1–3 The opening tercet places us immediately within the City of Dis, on a solitary path between the “wall” and the “torments” [tra ’l muro de la terra e li martìri] (Inf. 10.2) in a broad cemetery covered with tombs.
Lines 4 –21 The two wayfarers proceed to discuss the destiny of the souls of the Heretics after the Last Judgment. The lids of the tombs are off, and their interiors are red-hot. Punished in one tomb are the followers of Epicurus, the Heretics “who made the soul die with the body” [che l’anima col corpo morta fanno] (Inf. 10.15).
Lines 22–54 The calm conversation of the wayfarers is suddenly interrupted by a sinner whose attention is caught by the pilgrim’s Florentine dialect. Farinata has risen upright out of the tomb—literally “erected himself” [s’ergea] (Inf. 10.35)—with his chest and brow disdainfully thrown back. In the ensuing dialogue the attitude of the pilgrim changes from respect to spitefulness when family affairs enter into play. When Farinata observes that Dante’s forebears were his fierce adversaries whom he twice scattered into exile, the pilgrim retaliates by declaring that his ancestors returned to Florence “on both occasions” [l’una e l’altra fïata] but the descendants of Farinata have not “learned this art” [non appreser ben quell’ arte] (Inf. 10.50–1).
HERESY AND POLITICS
173
Lines 55–72 The verbal combat between the two is interrupted by the intervention of another figure, Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, who behaves in a manner opposite to that of his companion in pain. Where Farinata is imperious, Cavalcante is “weeping” [piangendo] (Inf. 10.58). The latter is convinced that the journey is happening in recognition of the protagonist’s “high genius” [altezza d’ingegno”] (Inf. 10.59). He asks why his son Guido is not accompanying Dante through “this blind prison” [questo cieco / carcere] (Inf. 10.58–9). Informed by the pilgrim that the journey is not being made by himself alone but under the tutelage of a guide who will lead him “to one” [cui]8 whom perhaps Guido “had in disdain” [ebbe a disdegno] (Inf. 10.63), Cavalcante bursts into tears and falls back into the depths of the tomb, believing that his son is dead.
Lines 73–87 Farinata, remaining immobile as if wholly absorbed in the news concerning his descendants, observes that Dante himself will learn how difficult is the art of returning because he, too, will be banished from Florence. He affirms that the fate of his descendants torments him more than the red-hot bed on which he must lie, and he asks why the Florentines are so cruel towards his family. To this question the pilgrim responds that the malevolence is due to the great slaughter that occurred at Montaperti in 1260, a slaughter so bloody that it had “dyed the [river] Arbia red” [che fece l’Arbia colorata in rosso] (Inf. 10.86).
Lines 88–93 Many had moved against Florence with just cause, Farinata points out. But at the council of Empoli, when the victorious Ghibellines “agreed to make an end of Florence” [fu per ciascun di tòrre via Fiorenza] (Inf. 10.92), it was he who stood up openly and unafraid “before them all” [a viso aperto] (Inf. 10.93) to defend her.
Lines 94 –136 At this point every feeling of self-affirmation and revenge ceases: even the pilgrim wishes to make amends for his conduct, not only in relation to Farinata but also towards Cavalcante. He wishes peace to the descendants of Farinata, seeking confirmation that the Heretics have limited powers of vision. Farinata explains that they see “like one who has bad light” [come quei c’ha mala luce] (Inf. 10.100): while remote things in the past and future are visible to them, their “intelligence is wholly vain” [tutto è vano / nostro intelletto] (Inf. 10.103–4) when it comes to dis-
174
PART II
TRASMUTAR
cerning the present. He then foretells Dante’s exile. At first ignoring the prophecy, the pilgrim expresses regret that Cavalcante was not informed that his son is in fact still alive. The canto ends with the pilgrim acknowledging how Farinata’s prophecy has made him feel bewildered, or “disturbed” [smarrito] (Inf. 10.125).9 Can the prophecy be true? Instead of confirming it, his wise guide declares that Beatrice will solve the mystery for him, that it is she whom Dante will have to ask in order to find out his “life’s journey” [di tua vita il vïaggio] (Inf. 10.132). A schematic analysis of the plot reveals the following sequence of actions: 1. Meditative introduction on a theological theme; 2. Clashing encounter between the two Florentines for political and family reasons; 3. Misunderstanding provoking sharp pain in Cavalcante, a pain prompted by a breakdown in language; 4. Anguish strongly felt by the “magnanimous” Farinata on account of the ominous consequences of his actions in regard to Florence and his own family; 5. Return to the meditative tone in the final subduing of human grudges, and the clearing up of the theological theme: the souls of the Heretics know the past and the future but not the present; 6. Hint of the social crisis and political exile in store for the pilgrim; 7. Realization that the wisdom of Virgil is not enough to provide an answer that can make sense of this event: what’s required is the explanation of a being who looks down from heaven. This structural analysis reveals an alternating pattern of theological and political concerns, a pattern dramatically interrupted by the linguistic misunderstanding in section three: 1
2
3
Virgil
Farinata
Cavalcante
4
5
6
Farinata Farinata Farinata
7 Virgil
Theology¤Politics¤Family/Language¤Politics¤Theology¤Politics¤Theology Breakdown
The breakdown in communication between Dante and Cavalcante functions synecdochically as a small sign of the widespread disruption of social ties at the levels of Family and City—a desperate state of affairs provoked and exacerbated at a theological level by the spread of the Epicurean heresy10 among the cultural and political elite of the Guelf and Ghibelline parties. If Epicureanism were restricted to a few learned cler-
HERESY AND POLITICS
175
ics squirrelled away in isolated monastic libraries, it would pose little immediate danger to Florence; but it has ominously spread through the anti-clerical ranks of the Florentine laity and become a fashionable, worldly-wise outlook for the leaders of civil society. It should also be noted that structurally the canto of the Heretics is flanked by cantos dominated by rigorous theological didacticism: Inferno 8–9, in which the action effectively affirms the orthodox (Augustinian) doctrine that Divine Grace is necessary in view of the enormous evil in the Fallen World; and Inferno 11, in which the moral-physical organization of Hell is set forth according to the orthodox (Aquinian) distinction between sins of appetite and sins of malice. When the two wayfarers reach the gates of the City of Dis in Inferno 8, more than a thousand devils bar their entrance. Since hostility and unwillingness to co-operate are defining traits of infernal creatures, Dante and Virgil are not surprised that their progress has been impeded once again. The first creature to block their way was Charon, followed by the infernal judge Minos. In both of these cases the opposition was overcome easily enough with words uttered like a magic formula. “Thus is it willed,” Virgil declared to Charon, “there where that can be done which is willed; and ask no more” [vuolsi così colà dove si puote / ciò che si vuole, e più non dimandare] (Inf. 3.95–6). This is not an explanatory statement but a command which must be obeyed, even though obedience in Hell is always accompanied by ill will. One does not reason with instincts and appetites, which is what the infernal creatures and the sins of incontinence represent. One uses authority and power. The situation changes with the truculent guardians of the City of Dis, the walls of which formally identify it as a fortress-prison and mark the transition from the sins of the senses to the more serious sins involving ill will. Virgil, who is hailed as a “famous sage” [famoso saggio] (Inf. 1.89) and as a paragon of eloquence because of his masterful use of “fair speech” [parola ornata] (Inf. 2.67), does not make use of the conventional mode of address here because he knows that it would go unheeded. He resorts to philosophical speech, to rational modes of discourse, in an effort to gain entry. He will go on to reason with the devils. But to no avail: the interview fails completely. The devils retire into the city and “shut the gates” in the face of Virgil, “who remained without” [Chiuser le porte…/ nel petto al mio segnor, che fuor rimase] (Inf. 8.115–6). Gaining access requires the intervention of a divine messenger, who touches the gate with a small wand. It opens. Once again, as if by magic, the opposing devils disappear.
176
PART II
TRASMUTAR
The allegorical sense of this scene reveals the radical intensity of Dante’s fideism. The great evil sustained by diabolical ill will and symbolized by the fortress-prison can never be overcome by human arguments: what’s needed is the superhuman assistance of Faith. This principle can be explained more clearly in another way: any life-process or ideal not founded on the recognition of a divine dimension to life is necessarily bankrupt. The Epicurean Heretics are positioned as the first damned souls within the civitas diaboli (City of the Devil) because their denial of the immortality of the soul is tantamount to a wilful rejection of even the philosophical possibility of an otherworldly dimension to life. A fundamental problem arises here: if one embraces a doctrine as an article of faith, can there be ideals or other aspects of life not determined by it? Can a theological “fact” exist as a pure doctrine apart from life, or does it inevitably affect other aspects of human experience? In Farinata’s case, did his fatal choice of theological belief not influence or strictly determine his politics? Before answering these questions, let us consider other aspects of the canto. It is clear that Farinata’s initial reason for speaking to the pilgrim is sociolinguistic: he recognizes that they both express themselves in the Florentine loquela [dialect] (Inf. 10.25). The Ghibelline leader’s desire to speak with a fellow citizen would appear to be the act of a generous spirit, but if the common dialect initially brings the two individuals together, it very soon sets them apart—not because of their differences, ironically, but because of their similarities. Given its social provenance in the corrupt city of Florence, their loquela becomes, in effect, an expression of all earthly values. Farinata proclaims it a natural fact that the Alighieri had been his fierce adversaries whom he had exiled twice. The pilgrim, still mocking (here the distinction between Dante-pilgrim and Dantepoet is pronounced), dishes out more sarcasm in order to inflict greater pain on Farinata. “If they were driven forth,” Dante stingingly remarks about his own ancestors, “they returned from every quarter, both times…but yours have not learned that art well” [S’ei fur cacciati, ei tornar d’ogne parte…l’una e l’altra fïata; / ma i vostri non appreser ben quell’ arte] (Inf. 10.49–51). Language is also of capital importance in the conversation between Cavalcante and the pilgrim. A member of the Guelf party, Cavalcante is related to Dante not just as a political ally but as a champion of the intellect and as a loving father. In his own way, he is a heroic advocate for Family and Intellect. Believing that Dante’s journey is undertaken “by reason
HERESY AND POLITICS
177
of high genius” [per altezza d’ingegno] (Inf. 10.59), he complains when he does not see his son in the pilgrim’s company. His sorrow deepens to the point of despair when the pilgrim inadvertently uses a certain form of the verb avere (to have). I’m referring here to the famous form ebbe which occurs in his reference to Virgil, who will bring him to one “whom perhaps your Guido had in disdain” [forse cui Guido vostro ebbe a disdegno] (Inf. 10.63). From the ambiguous use of the remote past tense, Cavalcante deduces (mistakenly) that his son is dead. As a result he loses heart and collapses like one in despair. Though this ambiguity has significant consequences on the human level, as noted by most commentators, its important function in the theological argument of the canto has been curiously overlooked. For one thing, the two speakers are both Florentines who ought to understand each another. But communication breaks down here. For another, they are both intellectuals who look towards the altezza d’ingegno (literally, the “heights of genius”: Inf. 10.59), and for aspiring souls like them, as Dante himself argued in De vulgari eloquentia (1.3.2), language is the distinctive trait of human beings. It literally makes us human. Though language is supposed to be the instrument for expressing rational thought, it is demonstrably incapable of accomplishing its proper task. Accordingly there are strong grounds for arguing that no matter how excellent language is, it is a merely human means of communication and therefore, in the final analysis, fallacious. As Beatrice will say to Dante, he who places a blind trust in worldly things is in fact “following false images of good” [imagini di ben seguendo false] (Purg. 30.131). The term cieco, as applied to the infernal prison, also serves to indicate the fallacy of the exclusively human means of expression. The Inferno is “blind” because it is deprived of light (and here the subtext is theological in so far as light is the sign of the Divine); but the term may also be applied in a psychological and epistemological sense to the souls of the Damned as illustrated by the contrapasso inflicted on the Heretics. They know the past and the future but have no knowledge of the present. In other words they are “blind” to the present. The same charge can be leveled at intellectual companions as at politicians of whatever party, provided that they have succumbed to a heretical tendency to adopt an exclusively worldly perspective on life. The heresy that denies the survival of the soul after death has already come under philosophical attack in the Convivio: Dico che intra tutte le bestialitadi quella è stoltissima, vilissima e dannosissima, chi crede dopo questa vita non essere altra vita; però che,
178
PART II
TRASMUTAR
se noi rivolgiamo tutte le scritture, sì de’ filosofi come de li altri savi scrittori, tutti concordano in questo, che in noi sia parte alcuna perpetuale. [I declare that of all brutish opinions none is more stupid, more base or more pernicious than the belief that there is no other life after this. For if we go through the whole corpus of writings produced either by philosophers or by others endowed with wisdom, we find that all agree on this: there is in us something that endures for ever.] (Conv. 2.8.8)
This Epicurean doctrine should be condemned as stoltissima (on philosophical grounds) and dannosissima (on theological grounds) because of its harmful impact on human happiness, as is strikingly illustrated throughout Inferno 10. Whatever may have made Farinata and Cavalcante unhappy during their lives, their perpetual unhappiness in the afterlife is presented as the direct theological consequence of their foolish adherence to a philosophy of worldly happiness. Their belief that the soul dies with the body is not vilissima (on political grounds) because of its remote pagan origins but because of its immediate social effects. Ironically, an ideal life founded on this ignoble doctrine does not exclude the exercise of noble virtues—whether personal or civil. Farinata is undoubtedly great-souled. He is represented as a colossus. He behaves like a nobleman. He is animated by the love of City and Family. He seems to possess a rich moral life: his failure to attain peace of mind appears to stem from his self-critical belief that he had done harm to his “noble fatherland” [nobil patrïa] (Inf. 10.26). The regretful thought that his descendants may have suffered on account of his doings also proves a torment to him. That he is still a man of strong character is shown by his assertion that he put his own life at risk for Florence when he was “the one who defended her before them all” [colui che la difesi a viso aperto] (Inf. 10.93). However noble his engagement with politics may seem from his own viewpoint, it remains dannosissima from the perspective of Dante-poet, who does not let us forget that Farinata caused the deaths of a great many of his fellow citizens at Montaperti. In so far as Farinata’s politics focused exclusively on the Here and Now, it was the product not of clear thinking but of blindness, of a perspective that was too limited. The word cieco confirms this, along with the contrapasso that blinds him to the present. Dante no doubt admired Farinata’s political qualities and recognized them in his own character, but he also loved the life of study exemplified by the career of Cavalcante. For Dante, as for Cavalcante, the intellectual
HERESY AND POLITICS
179
life is the crowning glory of human endeavour. He repeatedly returns to the theme of the intellect and treats its proponents with great seriousness, as in the respectful representation of his teacher Brunetto Latini as one who seemingly “wins,” not “loses” [quelli che vince, non colui che perde] (Inf. 15.124), and in the moving admonition of Ulysses that human beings were “not made to live as brutes, but to pursue virtue and knowledge” [fatti non foste a viver come bruti, / ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza] (Inf. 26.119–20). Yet Dante concludes sub specie aeternitatis that the exercise of the intellect is vain if it is not guided by virtue, if it does not recognize above all that the earth is under heavenly scrutiny. This conclusion is demonstrated literally by his whole journey and symbolically by his retrospective glance at the earth from the perspective of the contemplative spirits in the Heaven of Saturn, who see it as “the little threshing-floor which makes us so fierce” [L’aiuola che ci fa tanto feroci] (Par. 22.151). As A.P. d’Entrèves observes, Dante, like Farinata, “is first and foremost a citizen of Florence, and Florence is the root of his knowledge of and interest in politics.”11 It is this interest, in the end, that provokes his exile. Even for Dante in exile, the earthly model of the ideal place where humanity can best realize its potential remains Florence, but a Florence that abides “in peace, sober and chaste” [in pace, sobria e pudica] (Par. 15.99) like its ancient ancestor, “a city based on concord and on the absence of internal strife.”12 But we need to recall that such an ideal conception is formulated in Heaven by Cacciaguida, and its celebration there serves to highlight the difference between the inspired Dantean conception of the Heavenly City and Farinata’s dispiriting vision of the earthly Florence as the domain of his purely worldly (and direly injurious) political interests. In conclusion, the heresy punished in Inferno 10 does not remain an external “given” at an abstract remove from life in the Here and Now. The so-called didactic elements in the canto are not introduced because they are required for the communication of orthodox doctrine at the tropological level of the allegory. They are of a piece with the diagetic elements of plot and conflict and setting, and like these, serve to drive home the poet’s fundamental point that an otherworldly perspective is necessary for the good of politics. This is the painful but profound point the pilgrim will understand when he learns the route of his “life’s journey” from spirits in Paradise, especially Beatrice, the blessed being who will make him blessed, even as the reader comes to understand it at the end of the long transgressive viaggio through the poem.
180
PART II
TRASMUTAR
NOTES 1 De Sanctis (1957), 53, 69–75. 2 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from the Commedia in this essay have been drawn from the Petrocchi edition as reprinted and slightly revised by Singleton (1970–75). All translations from Dante are from Singleton (1970–75). The components of the Commedia cited from are Inferno (Inf.), Purgatorio (Purg.), and Paradiso (Par.). Also cited are Convivio (Conv.) and De vulgari eloquentia (DVE). This essay was first delivered in Italian to the Italian Studies Association of Canada at the 2004 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Winnipeg. The translation is by James Miller. 3 For a discussion of Croce’s continuing influence on Dante studies, see Orsini (1961), Contini (1967), Caserta (1988), and Verdicchio (1990). 4 Croce (1922, 1971), 84. 5 Croce (1922, 1971), 94. 6 For examples of the third stream of interpretation, see Auerbach (1957), Durling (1981), Moleta (1980), and Scott (1962). 7 The most exhaustive philological study is by Scott (1962). 8 The interpretation of the relative pronoun cui here is one of the most famous Dantean cruces. In the past its antecedent was thought to be Virgil; modern scholarship has opted for Beatrice. For a summary of the semantic and theological debates over Inf. 10.63, see the note on this line in Durling (1996), 166. 9 The adjective smarrito, which Singleton renders as “disturbed,” is translated as “distraught” by Musa (1971), 83, and “dismayed” by Durling (1996), 161. But no single word in English can cover its full meaning. The smarrimento is an emotional, intellectual, and spiritual confusion originating in the complex experience of fear and bewilderment at the start of the poem, when Dante found himself “in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost” [per una selva oscura, / che la dirrita via era smarrita] (Inf. 1.2–3). 10 For a theological discussion of Dante’s Augustinian identification of Epicureanism with the heresy of mortalism, see Mazzeo (1958) and Pézard (1959). For a critical summary of Dante’s seemingly inconsistent references to the Epicureans in his philosophical writings (Conv. 2.8.7–12; 3.14.15; 4.22.15), see Durling (200), 346–47. 11 d’Entrèves (1952), 9. 12 d’Entrèves (1952), 12. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alighieri, Dante. Convivio. Ed. Piero Cudini. Milan: Garzanti, 1980. ——— Dante’s Inferno. Trans. Mark Musa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971. ——— De vulgari eloquentia. Ed. and trans. Stephen Botterill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ——— La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. Ed. G. Petrocchi. 4 vols. Milano: Mondadori, 1966–67. ——— The Banquet. Trans. Christopher Ryan. Saratoga: ANMA Libri, 1989.
HERESY AND POLITICS
181
——— The Divine Comedy. Trans. Charles S. Singleton. 6 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–75. ——— The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri: Inferno. Ed. and trans. Robert Durling. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Auerbach, E. “Farinata and Cavalcante.” Mimesis. New York: Doubleday, 1957. 151–77. Caserta, Ernesto G. “Croce critico di Dante.” Dante Studies 106 (1988): 61–79. Cassell, A.K. “Farinata.” Dante’s Fearful Art of Justice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984. 15–31. Contini, Gianfranco. L’influenza culturale di Benedetto Croce. Milan: Ricciardi, 1967. Croce, Benedetto. La Poesia di Dante. Bari: Laterza, 1958. ——— The Poetry of Dante. Trans. Douglas Ainslie. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1922. Mamaroneck, NY: P.P. Appel, 1971. d’Entrèves, Alessandro Passerin. Dante as a Political Thinker. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. De Sanctis, Francesco. “Farinata.” De Sanctis on Dante. Ed. and trans. Joseph Rossi and Alfred Galpin. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1957. 53–86. ——— “Il Farinata di Dante.” Nuova Antologia (May 1867). Durling, R.M. “Epicureans.” The Dante Encyclopedia. Ed. Richard Lansing. New York: Garland, 2000. 346–47. ——— “Farinata and the Body of Christ.” Stanford Italian Review 2,1 (1981): 5–35. ——— “Farinata and Cavalcante.” Lectura Dantis: Inferno: A Canto-by-Canto Commentary. Ed. Allen Mandelbaum, Anthony Oldcorn, and Charles Ross. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. 136–49. Mazzeo, J.A. “Dante and Epicurus.” Comparative Literature 10 (1958): 106–20. Moleta, V.B. “Dante’s Heretics and the Resurrection.” Medioevo Romanzo 7 (1980): 247–84. Orsini, Gian N.G. Benedetto Croce: Philosopher of Art and Literary Critic. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961. Pézard, André. “Un Dante épicurien?” Mélanges offerts à Étienne Gilson. Paris: Vrin, 1959. 499–536. Scott, J.A. “Farinata as magnanimo.” Romance Philology 15 (1962): 1–13. Verdicchio, M. “Croce Reader of Dante.” Dante Studies 108 (1990): 97–112. Wellek, René. Four Critics. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981.
Original Skin Nudity and Obscenity in Dante’s Inferno Mark Feltham and James Miller Questi, l’orme di cui pestar mi vedi, tutto che nudo e dipelato vada, fu di grado maggior che tu non credi…. —Inferno 16.34–61
‘‘H
e whose tracks you see me trample, though he goes naked and peeled, was of greater degree than you think,” Jacopo Rusticucci haughtily insists, as Dante looks down on him and his fellow Sodomites from the stony bank of Phlegethon. Wheeling ahead of Jacopo on the burning sands of the Seventh Circle is Count Guido Guerra, whose very name (“Guy War”) declares his social status as a noble warrior. His former social status, that is. Now that he’s been humiliated under the rain of fire and exposed as a pugilistic poseur in a mock-pyrrhic dance, his great name merely advertises his “hot” sexual status as a “butch top.”2 A distinct note of bitchiness can be detected in Jacopo’s commendation of Guido’s “greater degree.” (Never trust a bitter closet case to sing your praises: he’ll always throw a bit of shade at you, especially if you’re just a shadow of your former self.) Though Guido is dancing nudo under Dante’s eye to lure him into the army of Sodom, macho division, Jacopo cannot resist pointing out to the new “recruit” that the great Guelf commander is absurdly dipelato. His nudity goes beyond athletic bareness or flaunted manhood. At first glance it might seem sexually appealing, like the gleaming nakedness of wrestlers in the ring—he and his chums look like “champions, naked and oiled” [campion…nudi e unti] (Inf. 16.22)— but the illusion of oiled muscularity is shockingly dispelled by the reality of his nuked physique. He’s no longer in the buff. He’s in the raw. His
182
ORIGINAL SKIN
183
skin simply isn’t there to be bare. It’s been peeled off by the fiery depilatories of the Sodom Treatment until all that’s left of his attractive “outer man” is a suit of charred subcutaneous tissue, a grotesquely unspiritual “inner man” recreated by his post-mortem soul out of smutty infernal air. SECRET CHANNELS: NUDITY AND INTERIORITY
Willy-nilly, the vanquished soldier must lead his fellow Sodomites in a ludicrously proud burlesque of King David’s humble act of stripping and leaping before the Ark (2 Sam. 6:14).3 Destined to observe that holy dance in the bas-reliefs on the Cornice of the Proud (Purg. 10.65), Dante-pilgrim can safely look down on its unholy antitype from his moral high ground on the embankment without succumbing to the de haut en bas attitude of Saul’s daughter, Michal. Looking down from her window on David’s extraordinary performance, Michal despised him in her heart and later scolded him in public: “How glorious was the king of Israel to day, who uncovered himself to day in the eyes of the handmaids of his servants, as one of the vain fellows shamelessly uncovereth himself” (2 Sam. 6:20). The Lord forthwith cursed her with sterility. The Sodomites are cursed with sterility, too, though their naked tramping on the sterile deserts of the Violent is the retributive consequence rather than the transgressive cause of their disfavour with the Lord. Unlike David they are obscene, and their obscenity is morally revealing because their outsides have been ritually removed to reveal their insides—the blackness beneath the skin. Though suspended in their afterlives at the point of genocidal extermination, they still carry on a shadowy existence as discontinuous beings striving for divine continuity through the wheeling of their unholy dance. The shocking excessiveness of their nudity summons up an apocalyptic premonition of the sacred life as a “covering” in glory—a ritual vesting of the Glorified Flesh in white linen—which serves to heighten the sacrilegious éclat of their nude performance. That it has a deeply erotic impact on Dante is clear from the rapid repression of his attraction to their circle. If fear of an agonizing death in the flames had not inhibited him, he admits, he would have “cast himself down among them” [gittato mi sarei tra lor di sotto] (Inf. 16.47) in a frenzy of un-Davidlike enthusiasm—a driving passion left unchecked by Virgil, who, as a learned Sodomite himself, “would have permitted it” [’l dottor l’avria sofferto] (Inf. 16.48).4 Paura is typically opposed to disio in Dantean psychology, and yet this strange teetering on the brink of libidinal suicide provokes suspicion that Dante’s “natural” death-fear is
184
PART II
TRASMUTAR
only the negation of a powerful (because “unnatural”) death wish underlying or lying within his impetuous desire for continuity with the Sodomites. His erotic quest to lose himself among them, to dispossess himself of his moral superiority as Beatrice’s lover, cries out for the transgressive analysis of Georges Bataille. “Nakedness,” observed Bataille, “offers a contrast to self-possession, to discontinuous existence, in other words. It is a state of communication revealing a quest for a possible continuance of being beyond the confines of the self… Bodies open out to a state of continuity through secret channels that give us a feeling of obscenity. Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognised and stable individuality.”5 Wavering precariously on the levee, Dante is in a perfect position to experience the two feelings associated with obscenity in Bataille: a vertiginous desire to hurl oneself over the edge towards certain perdition (the “dizzying effect” produced by “the swing of accepted violence”); and a nausea-inducing movement backward (the moral “recoil” prompted by the fearful recollection and restoration of a consciousness of taboo, here the Christian taboo on same-sex desire).6 The opposition between disio and paura, concupiscent approach and contrite avoidance, is observable in Dante’s reactions to the Damned from circle to circle throughout the Inferno, and fortunately in the Seventh Circle, where it is experienced as a peculiarly violent “approach-avoidance conflict,” the recoil phase is strong enough to prevent the pilgrim from leaving the straight and narrow. If he had given in to the desire to fall, he would not only have felt the heat. He would have felt it peeling off his skin. The Inferno is a dermatologist’s nightmare. Fascinated by the elastic possibilities of the flesh as a figuring device for the diseases of the soul, Dante sings of skin subjected to a wide array of exquisite torments. It is flayed, bitten, incinerated, bloated, ripped, twisted, scourged, pocked, scarred, scraped, boiled, frozen, gnawed, sliced up, weighed down, grafted onto reptiles, and grotesquely metamorphosed down the scale of being. The psychosexual implications of Dante’s obsession with skin as a site of extreme violence and exciting violation would not have shocked or surprised Bataille, whose theoretical explorations of the erotically charged border between the bestial and the human illuminates both the theology and the anthropology of nakedness by associating the obscenity of the violated body with the oscillation of cultural forces between the poles of taboo and transgression.
ORIGINAL SKIN
185
Dante and Bataille make admittedly strange bedfellows. Though any Bataille-inflected reading of the Inferno will inevitably do violence to traditional Catholic (especially Aquinian) interpretations of Dante’s moral project, we shall proceed on the assumption that some sort of theory linking violence to eroticism—however remote its formulation from medieval thought—is needed to confront with understanding, or perhaps simply to perceive, the sadistic eroticization of nudity in the first canticle. To condemn Dante as a “sadist” for peeling the skin off the Sodomites is hardly to do justice to the transgressive aesthetics of the contrapasso in the Seventh Circle. It is merely to reinscribe in a reflexive manner the ancient taboo against cruel and unusual punishments—the very taboo that Dante repeatedly breaks in his fantasies of the painful corporealization of the Damned. Can we get under the skin of the Damned, as it were, by substituting Bataille for Virgil as our guide through Dante’s Hell? It’s worth a try—if only to see what the Inferno might look like from such an extreme angle of perception. Perhaps we shall find that it is Bataille’s Hell that Dante shines a guiding light upon, or through, in his exploration of the cultural and spiritual consequences of irrationality, unorthodoxy, obscenity. Though we shall juxtapose fourteenth-century Christian allegory with twentiethcentury religious anthropology in the interactive manner of text and gloss, the relation between the morally radiated “skin” of the poem and the underlying “tissue” of its psychosexual significance strikes us as neither stable nor predictable. Rather, each conceals and reveals the other. Since Bataille’s erotic theory is both in touch and at odds with Christian orthodoxy, it provides a creatively distorting lens through which to view Dante’s more startling depictions of obscene nakedness in the Inferno. To read Dante through Bataille is bound to result in a peculiar transference of cultural disturbances and psychosexual anxieties from the Sadean philosopher to the Catholic poet, and the resulting fusion of modern atheism and psychoanalysis with medieval theodicy and apocalypticism is not likely to reflect orthodox trends in Dante scholarship. “Poetry,” observed Bataille, “leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism—to the blending and fusion of separate objects.”7 The critical method in this essay will likewise entail a blending of what would usually be regarded as discontinuous. What should emerge from this reading, we hope, will be an eroticized Dante, and a context for further debate about the aesthetic impetus behind his purported sadism. Eroticism, continuity, discontinuity—these comprise for Bataille a conceptual trinity. In his view, each of us exists as a discontinuous being,
186
PART II
TRASMUTAR
an individual severed from every other individual. Since discontinuity is a basic condition of life, true continuity can be achieved only in death. Nevertheless, the sexual coupling of forms, the momentary blurring of boundaries as bodies collide, allows for a glimpse of continuity in the midst of quotidian discontinuity. Ever mindful of the psychological and religious dimensions of the quest for continuity, Bataille is careful not to reduce eroticism to physical copulation tout court: although he certainly regards sexual intercourse as a route towards erotic continuity, his analysis of the sexual act goes far beyond the blending of separate bodies. The anthropological thrust of his inquiry leads him to consider the erotic significance of rigorous taboo, ritual transgression, ceremonial nakedness, and sacrificial death. From his perspective, religious and erotic impulses always appear inextricably intertwined. In so far as Dante’s Inferno presents the Bataillean reader with scene after scene of ritualized violence and transgressive eroticism, the complex experience of nausea and vertigo induced by its fantasies of divine punishment functions as a poetic surrogate for the continuity promised to all True Believers—but denied to the Unorthodox—by the defenders of God’s Holy Law. Bataille’s legendary crisis of Faith, the obscure breakdown following his visit to a Benedictine monastery on the Isle of Wight in 1920, no doubt contributed to the insistent fusion of religious and erotic impulses in his theory of the Sacred. He lost his vocation, he claimed, because “his Catholicism caused a woman he loved to shed tears.”8 Rejecting the monastic taboo against sex prescribed by Holy Law, he immersed himself in the transgressive works of Dostoyevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud. Although he would insist that his subsequent pursuit of “the fundamental unity of the human spirit” did not “involve a return to the faith of my youth,” he nevertheless confessed that nothing intrigued him “more than the idea of once more coming across the image that haunted my adolescence, the image of God.”9 Like Bataille, Dante also suffered a crisis of Faith, abandoned theology for philosophy, and fantasized that a woman he loved wept over his confusion with eyes “which shone with tears” [li occhi lucenti lagrimando] (Inf. 2.116). Even in the Dark Wood, with no clear understanding of his quest, he was desperately hunting for the “image of God” in the long-lost face of his beloved. Although the Imago Dei is the star guiding both the Catholic poet and the Nietzschean atheist, Bataille’s use of the word “haunted” reveals the fundamental differences between their respective views of this image and its implications. Where Dante the pilgrim moves progressively closer to God through a mystical process of strip-
ORIGINAL SKIN
187
ping away the veils from the Divine Face, Bataille the anti-pilgrim perversely veils God (or le sacré) in the fantastic trappings of neolithic hunting cults and bloody voodoo rituals so that a haunting glimpse of continuity, in its rigid skeletal bareness, may be caught beneath the pulsing skin of civilization. The notion of Imago Dei is closely bound up with the Christian concept of the Creator’s immanence in the orderly structure of Creation, upon which the poetic structure of the Commedia depends. The triadic repetition of the word stelle (stars) at the end of each canticle is one of innumerable signs in the Commedia that its cosmopoetic patterning of images and reflections corresponds to the image of God replicated throughout Creation. Like the material universe, the poetic universe is designed to lift the pilgrim’s vision up from the signs and traces of immanence to the transcendent reality of the Trinity. Even Hell contributes traces of the godhead to the anagogic design of the poema sacro. Where the nine material heavens of Paradise present the pilgrim with affirmative images of the Sacred and its source, the nine corresponding circles of Hell provide sacrilegious inversions of the Imago Dei. Bataille’s contention that there “is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image” betrays his intellectual (albeit Sadean) allegiance to the old Catholic tradition of reading infernal images as inversions of paradisial ones.10 As Leonard Barkan observed in his analysis of the Ovidian metamorphoses in the Inferno, Imago Dei “is a term that cannot be spoken in hell” because what it signifies “is the mystery that lies beyond all the transformations.”11 The depilatory treatment of the Sodomites in the Seventh Circle, from Barkan’s viewpoint, must be regarded as a desecration of the divine image as well as of the human form. Guido Guerra and company are not only shadows of their former selves: they are phantoms of their Creator, spectral inverts haunting the “hard margins” of Dante’s humanism. NUDITY AND TABOO
Where Barkan’s reading of the infernal inversions of the Sacred inevitably brings out the orthodox currents in Dante’s thought, Bataille’s emphasis on the erotic dimensions of poesis prompts a collapse of the Sacred into the sacrilegious—even at the literal level—which is bound to give rise to unorthodox glosses on the traditional allegory of the ascent to God. Like any combination of text and gloss, the juxtaposition of the Inferno with Erotism is likely to highlight certain aspects of the sacred/sacrilegious divide in each work that other critical approaches are bound to ignore, dismiss, or censor. Bataille connects most exuberantly with Dante, not sur-
188
PART II
TRASMUTAR
prisingly, in an erotic reading of the corporeal punishments meted out to the Damned in the Inferno. A key aspect of their damnation is their nakedness. All the Damned are naked in Dante’s Hell, with a few dignified or ironic exceptions that prove the rule. Virgil is covered in a classical mantle, of course, as perhaps are the other noble pagans in Limbo. The Suicides in the Seventh Circle are clothed in gnarly bark, while the Hypocrites sink under leaden cloaks and the Evil Counsellors swathe themselves in flame in the Eighth Circle. In marked contrast to the souls in Purgatory, whose nakedness (like that of King David, figured on the marble wall of the First Cornice) is a sign of their humility before God, the nudity of the Damned betokens the hideous perpetuation of their humiliation. It is an egregiously shameful state. Presumably like Adam and Eve, whose eyes were opened through the illuminating experience of transgression, “they knew that they were naked” (Gen. 3:7). They must feel anew and forever the primordial imposition of the taboo on nakedness which marked the end of innocence for the human race. As soon as Dante-pilgrim steps over the threshold of Hell, he observes that the souls of the Indifferent are “naked” and “much strung by gadflies and wasps” [ignudi e stimolati molto / da mosconi e da vespe] (Inf. 3.65–6); slightly later, on the bank of the Acheron, he glimpses a host of “forlorn and naked souls” who blanch at the fearful curses of Charon [quell’ anime, ch’eran lasse e nude, / cangiar colore] (Inf. 3.100–1). In the Circle of Violence the excessiveness of the nudity becomes apparent when he comes upon whole “herds of naked souls” lamenting miserably upon the burning sands [D’anime nude vidi molte gregge] (Inf. 14.19). Passing beyond the plain where the Sodomites dance “naked and peeled” [nudo e dipelato] (Inf. 16.35) to the even more crowded Circle of Fraud, he witnesses the obscene eroticization of violence in the mortifying flagellation of the Panders and Seducers: A la man destra vidi nova pieta, novo tormento e novi frustatori, di che la prima bolgia era repleta. Nel fondo erano ignudi i peccatori… [On the right hand I saw new woe, new torments, and new scourgers, with which the first ditch was replete. At its bottom were the sinners, naked…] (Inf. 18.22–5)
As many commentators have observed, Dante uses nakedness to embody the radical abjection of infernal souls. They remain naked in the ditch like
ORIGINAL SKIN
189
social outcasts, homeless waifs, beggars. Unlike the man who fell among thieves and was stripped of his raiment (Luke 10:30), they have no hope that a Good Samaritan will pass by and mercifully bind up their wounds. In glossing the nakedness of the Damned, Singleton rather modestly notes that “Dante mentions the fact whenever he wishes to point up a particular great torment that is increased by a soul’s going naked.”12 Does the poet point out the obvious merely for rhetorical emphasis? In contrast to Singleton, who passes over in silence the complex social and erotic implications of the taboo-breaking act (and spectacle) of stripping, Bataille provides us with a more psychologically and anthropologically informed way to read infernal nakedness. “The whole business of eroticism,” he argues, is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives. Stripping naked is the decisive action….Through the activity of organs in a flow of coalescence and renewal, like the ebb and flow of waves surging into one another, the self is dispossessed, and so completely that most creatures in a state of nakedness, for nakedness is symbolic of this dispossession and heralds it, will hide; particularly if the erotic act follows, consummating it. Stripping naked is seen in civilizations where the act has full significance if not as a simulacrum of the act of killing, at least as an equivalent shorn of gravity.13
If clothing the body is a sign of obedience to taboo because it entails the integration of a “self-possessed” individual into the collective world of work, stripping the body is tantamount to a destruction of the civilized illusion of self-possession. That is why Bataille links nakedness to murder: it symbolizes the ultimate act of prohibited violence against the sacredness of individuality. Whether the lover’s object of desire is physical (like the poet’s donna gentile) or spiritual (like the mystic’s Imago Dei), its iconic beauty must be ceremonially destroyed for the purpose of attaining erotic continuity. Eroticism therefore entails iconoclasm. Its Dionysian “business” is to shatter the Apollonian integrity or unassailable separateness of the beloved—if not actually, then at least symbolically; if not permanently through an “act of killing,” then at least temporarily through a despoiling of appearances. The Catholic taboo on nakedness is triumphantly inscribed in the clothed figure of Beatrice on the summit of the Holy Mountain. Her first “appearance,” ironically, is through her layered coverings: “olive-crowned over a white veil a lady appeared to me, clad, under a green mantle, with hue of living flame” [sovra candido vel cinta d’uliva / donna m’apparve,
190
PART II
TRASMUTAR
sotto verde manto / vestita di color di fiamma viva] (Purg. 30.31–3). As an icon of Divine Beauty she is invincibly “self-possessed,” her nunlike costume literally enshrining her in quasi-pagan mystery as an inviolable embodiment of chastity, wisdom, and peace. While her iconic form is represented intact in the thirtieth canto of Purgatorio, the pilgrim has already encountered its evil inversion shattered and despoiled in the thirtieth canto of Inferno. Beatrice’s transgressive double is Myrrha, whose pallidly naked shade streaks across the bottom of the Eighth Circle like a rabid pig—an obscene embodiment of lust, madness, and violence. Having lost all power over herself, Myrrha is literally possessed by the demonic forces that continually strip her of her humanity. Her bestial transformation both conceals her former identity as a human being fashioned in the image of God and reveals the inhuman ferocity of the divinely excited desire that drove her to “falsify herself” under cover of darkness in order to sleep with her father [falsificando sé in altrui forma] (Inf. 30.41). So deep is her humiliation that the pilgrim is afforded only a haunting glimpse of her anima antica before she hides herself away in the bedlam of the Tenth Bolgia. The nakedness of Dante’s damned souls should not be regarded as a merely physical condition of their mortality, like the peeling skin and bare bones of cadavers seasoned for a while in the ground. Rather, it is the result of a “decisive action,” as Bataille would say. We must not forget that Dante the poet has made an aesthetic decision to expose the Damned obscenely—to strip Myrrha of her Ovidian princess robes, to despoil Achilles of his heroic armour, to peel the skin off Guido Guerra, to bring Mohammed’s insides out—just as he has made an aesthetic decision to mantle Beatrice in green and to vest the Blessed in white. If the Damned were originally made in the image of God, the immorality of their nakedness, coded by the Fall, is amplified in Hell beyond the natural limits of the body. Bataille’s discussion of nakedness epitomizes the main argument of Erotism, which spirals out from the dialectical interaction of his key binaries: life and death; excess and exhaustion; civilization and anarchy; taboo and transgression; discontinuity and continuity. Whereas the anguish of discontinuity springs from our status as individuated beings, the peaceful promise of continuity lies in our potential for unity, which we can realize temporarily in sex but permanently only in death. Before the true continuity of death can be reached in a physical sense, nakedness serves as a psychologically exciting surrogate because it temporarily destroys “the self-contained character of the participators as they are
ORIGINAL SKIN
191
in their normal lives.” The erotic experience of nakedness, in other words, allows for momentary glimpses of continuity. Yet as our civilization prescribes for us what should be our “normal lives,” in effect our discontinuous participation in the complex enterprises of the workworld, we normally associate nakedness with shameful secrecy and forbidden knowledge. Dante recalls these cultural codings on the very threshold of Hell, when he invites us to follow the pilgrim and his guide down “among the secret things” [dentro a le segrete cose] (Inf. 3.21) which turn out ironically to be even more rule-bound than the regulated familiarities of daily life. A similar invitation is issued by Bataille on the threshold of Erotism. Despite his Nietzschean aversion to the Church’s momentous appropriation of the Sacred wholly to the side of the good, he beckons us towards the long-lost pagan world of sacred monsters and demon lovers with the dauntless savoir faire of Dante’s Virgil. “And then,” he assures us, as if his argument were an allegorical narrative (complete with its own internal glossator-guide) to be mapped onto the route of nostra vita, beyond the intoxication of our youth, we achieve the power to look death in the face and to perceive in death the pathway into the unknowable and incomprehensible continuity—that path is the secret of eroticism and eroticism alone can reveal it. If this train of thought has been closely followed by the significance of the sentence already quoted will be abundantly clear in the light of the oneness of the various modes of eroticism: “There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.”14
While Erotism primarily concerns the anguished efforts of the living to attain brief glimpses of continuity before dying, the Commedia addresses the anguish of discontinuous souls after death. For Dante, continuity operates hierarchically according to the cosmological scheme of the scholastic universe. The Saved achieve social and intellectual continuity through God in the form of harmony with the angel-guided spheres, whereas the Damned find themselves forever trapped in a realm where their discontinuity is amplified according to an infernal logic of individually appropriate torments. The Inferno can be read in terms of continuity and discontinuity even before we catch our first glimpse of infernal nakedness. Glossing Dante’s famous opening phrase “Midway in the journey of our life” [Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita] (Inf. 1.1), Singleton rightly observes that the poem “from its first adjective” opens up “the possibility of allegory” for
192
PART II
TRASMUTAR
readers who include themselves in the antecedent of “our.”15 But the collective journey towards divine continuity, which is swiftly identified as “the true way” to God [la verace via] (Inf. 1.12), has been abandoned by the poet so that a crooked idiosyncratic way—the route of discontinuity and consequent anguish—is also swiftly established in opposition to the general cammin. This new route must be the way of his life, the individual life of the poet who is not us, and yet we can follow its downward twists and turns through the labyrinthine lines of its textual surrogate so that it also becomes your life here, and yours over there, and yours beyond the Here and Now. Tropological readings of the Inferno only intensify its resonance with Erotism. We must distinguish ourselves as moral interpreters of the journey from the hermeneutically bewildered pilgrim, but as fellow pilgrims following our own idiosyncratic routes through the segrete cose, we are invited to feel a strange sense of religious and sacrilegious continuity with the chief participants in the allegory. The promise of continuity regained through Christ’s ideal reflection of “our image” [nostra effige] (Par. 33.131) is held out to us at the paradisial conclusion of our journey as readers. The opening lines of the Inferno are charged with timor mortis: a deep and overwhelming fear of death. Just as Bataille transposes his anguish into an erotic death wish by chanting Sade’s koanlike command to know death by linking it to some licentious image, so Dante repeatedly confronts the frightening obscenity of death in the naked corporealizations of the Damned whose displays of violent eroticism unleash alternating currents of paura and disio in his soul like “the ebb and flow of waves surging into one another.” In the Seventh and Eighth Circles, especially, the poet links “the second death” of damnation [la seconda morte] (Inf. 1.117) with so many licentious images that his more taboo-minded readers, including anti-censorship feminists like Jane Rule, have reflexively associated him (and his God) with sadism.16 The association may be naive as a critical response to Dante’s moral designs, but it at least acknowledges the fierce exuberance of the erotic quest for continuity charging the very notion of damnation as “the second death.” It’s perhaps no accident that this poetic euphemism makes damnation sound like an orgasm. HAIRY PARTS: NUDITY AND TRANSGRESSION
Dante’s journey among the secret things is transgressive in several respects. First, it is an erotic quest for knowledge of the otherwise unknowable, namely, the sacred presence of his dead beloved within his profanely discontinuous life. In striking contrast to traditional Catholic allegoriza-
ORIGINAL SKIN
193
tions of the soul’s ascent to God, the spiralling route down through the Inferno compels the pilgrim to seek for the Sacred in the domain of evil before he seeks it in the realm of good. Second, from an anthropological standpoint, each circle in the Inferno may be viewed as a kind of tribal space encoded with religious symbols (gates, guards, tombs, bridges, procession routes) and constructed for ritualistic activities (initiation, sacrifice, entombment, orgiastic dance, idol worship). The erotic quest for continuity is best realized through the ritualization of violence, which provides a controlled context for the breaking of taboos. As Bataille observed in his discussion of murder, hunting, and war, “Transgression outside well defined limits is rare; within them taboos may well be violated in accordance with rules that ritual or at least custom dictate and organise.”17 Third, in an etymological sense, the infernal journey is literally transgressive: the Latin verb transgredi means “to step across, to go beyond prescribed limits.” If Bataille’s spiralling argument takes off from a single intuition, it is that continuity “is reached when boundaries are crossed.”18 Boundaries are certainly crossed in an ontological sense when a man turns into a snake, or a woman into a bird, or a man into a woman. The metamorphoses marking certain punishments in the Inferno are transgressive both literaliter and spiritaliter in so far as they confound the religiously prescribed distinctions between species, genders, forms, identities. As the external boundary of the human form, the skin inevitably functions as a site of transgressive metamorphosis with both morbid and erotic implications. You don’t have to be a disciple of Bataille to feel shivers running up and down your spine at the licentious mutations of human skin into reptilian scales or tanned hide or rough bark or shaggy fur in the Inferno. Barkan, for instance, noting how Dante’s respect for Ovid as a poet of transformative love and divine retribution ensures that “the great pagan vision of metamorphosis is to be respected, confronted, saved, and recast in an original form” for the great Christian vision of conversion, cannot help shuddering at the extreme physicalization of the metamorphoses in the first canticle: the “living sinner, through his death but more particularly through the fate of his special damnation, is transformed into an eternal objectification of his sin.”19 If the hideous particularity of the bodies of the Damned serves to reveal their spiritual discontinuity from each other, and, of course, from God, then perhaps their nakedness should not be interpreted as a symbol for the “dispossession” or temporary “annihilation” of the self— which was Bataille’s psychosexual spin on stripping in the taboo-bound
194
PART II
TRASMUTAR
Here and Now. Infernal stripping inverts Bataille’s vision of nakedness without denying its eroticism or demystifying its violence. Dispossession of the ego is not possible for the souls of the Damned since ego-less continuity, even in surrogate forms, is eternally denied them. That is their torment. Though dead, they can never die to themselves. Barkan exposes this paradox in his tropological observation that Dante “fused Ovidian metamorphosis with a multiple process whereby sinners achieve their inverse perfection, the world fulfills itself in the image of God, and the voyager finds his own psyche drawn through perplexities upward.”20 Barkan’s gloss resonates strongly with earlier comments in this essay regarding infernal discontinuity. The phrase “inverse perfection” aptly describes the particularized discontinuity of the Damned, rooted in their obscene physicality. Dying in Dante’s poetic universe leads not to the selflessness of continuity, as Bataille conceives it, but to formal discontinuity, infernal corporeality, and ego-driven erotic violence. In keeping with the logic of infernal inversion, their nakedness does not represent “a contrast to self-possession, to discontinuous existence.” Rather, it represents an extreme manifestation of discontinuity. Dante’s repeated act of crossing boundaries in the Inferno brings him face to face with the hylomorphic horrors awaiting those who transgress the human/animal divide. In the fourth ditch of the Eighth Circle, for instance, he weeps at the strangely distorted bodies of the False Prophets, among whom marches Tiresias with his head twisted backward and his chin tilted down towards to his buttocks. Recreating Ovid’s Theban sage in explicitly metamorphic terms, Dante recalls that Tiresias mutò sembiante quando di maschio femmina divenne, cangiandosi le membra tutte quante; e prima, poi, ribatter li convenne li duo serpenti avvolti, con la verga, che rïavesse le maschili penne. [changed semblance when from male he became female, transforming all his members; and afterwards he had to strike again the two entwined serpents with his rod before he could resume his manly plumes.] (Inf. 20.40–5)
Through the wide-angle lens of centuries of theological commentary on the Imago Dei, Barkan perceives the “distortion of sexual clarity” in this figure as deeply threatening to any orthodox Christian spectator.21 The glorious image of God has certainly been distorted again and again in this wretched human form, and the monstrous shock of it (in large measure,
ORIGINAL SKIN
195
an aesthetic horror) provokes so powerful a reaction in Dante-pilgrim that he recoils from the edge of the fondo, reflexively leaning back on a hard crag to recover his spirits. From Bataille’s sharply defined Sadean viewpoint, however, the present mutilations as well as the past metamorphoses of Tiresias combine into a brutally licentious image through which Dante can look both backward in anguish and forward in amazement: backward at the lost continuity of male and female bodies within his mother’s womb, and forward to the regained continuity of male and female souls in the roseate womb of the Empyrean. The violent twist in the sage’s vulnerable masculinity is transgressively erotic because it breaks down the “proper” taboo-enshrined distinctions between man and animal, man and woman, woman and serpent. Even Barkan, who is no disciple of Freud or Bataille, repeatedly draws attention to the association between genitals and snakes, and the psychosexual irony cannot have escaped him that the weeping (and hence unmanned) pilgrim meditates on the restoration of Tiresias’s “manly plumes” following an act of violence, the striking of the snakes with his phallic staff. As if this hot hermaphroditic fantasy were not enough for his Catholic male ego to bear, Dante-pilgrim is soon brought face to face with the sage’s twisted female double, the cruel virgin-sorceress Manto, who parodies Eve’s efforts to conceal her nakedness after the Fall by directing his fallen male gaze at her bestialized sexuality. “E quella che ricuopre le mammelle,” Virgil drily comments, recognizing a character from his own prophetic epic twisted into a new shape, che tu non vedi, con le trecce sciolte, e ha di là ogne pilosa pelle, Manto fu, che cercò per terre molte; poscia si puose là dove nacqu’ io… [And she that covers her bosom, which you cannot see, with her loose tresses, and has on that side all her hairy parts was Manto, who searched through many lands, then settled in the place where I was born…] (Inf. 20.52–6)
Why does Virgil “expose” Manto to the pilgrim’s scrutiny in this sardonic anti-blazon, drawing attention to the pilosa pelle with which she vainly tries to conceal her nakedness? Even if she were not deformed, her pubic hair alone would shatter the erotic illusion that her virginal body conformed to the classical ideal of smooth-skinned Venereal beauty. Like Ruskin, who was shocked on his wedding night to discover that his bride had hair down there, Bataille considered the “hairy parts” on an unideal-
196
PART II
TRASMUTAR
ized female nude as a transgressive sign of the blending of the human and the animal. Unlike Ruskin, however, he was excited by it. The goddess icon in its hairless perfection provoked violent fantasies of iconoclasm. “The image of the desirable woman as first imagined,” he confessed in his meditation of beauty, would be insipid and unprovocative if it did not at the same time also promise and reveal a mysterious animal aspect, more momentously suggestive. The beauty of the desirable woman suggests her private parts, the hairy ones, to be precise, the animal ones. Instinct has made sure that we shall desire these parts. But above and beyond the sexual instinct, erotic desire has other components. Beauty that denies the animal and awakes desire finishes up by exasperating desire and exalting the animal parts.22
Indeed, this blurring of human and animal is an infernal leitmotif that Dante himself (among other Catholic authors) might have passed on to the former seminarian, who goes on to observe that the “suggestion of the animal in the human form is unquestionably repugnant.” The association of body hair with transgressive animality is not restricted to the female population of Hell. The bestialization of male sinners in the Circle of Fraud is visibly anticipated in the iconoclastic description of Geryon, whose aspect mutates from human to animal (serpent, beaver, scorpion) as the pilgrim directs his gaze down the length of the monster’s body: La faccia sua era faccia d’uom giusto, tanto benigna avea di fuor la pelle, e d’un serpente tutto l’altro fusto; due branche avea pilose insin l’ascelle… [His face was the face of a just man, so benign was its outward aspect, and all his trunk was that of a serpent; he had two paws, hairy to the armpits…] (Inf. 17.10–13)
The shagginess of this “evil beast” [bestia malvagia] (Inf. 17.30) extends along his sides and over his back, where the tufts of fur, twisted like the yarns in a Turkish carpet, are deceptively transformed from an ugly animal pelt into something recognizably human because the surfaces are aesthetically knotted and painted. The cross-species confusion is further increased by the unnatural splicing of a reptilian trunk and an arachnid tail, normally hairless, onto Geryon’s hairy mammalian middle. The resulting hybrid is an idol of transgressive male sexuality—a hairy serpent with a poisonous phallus—which anticipates the orgiastic fusions and con-
ORIGINAL SKIN
197
fusions of men with snakes, and snakes with snakes, and men with men, in the Bolgia of the Thieves. Acting out the role of “master” in an erotic sense, as a Guerra-like top, Virgil literally “mounts” Geryon and commands Dante to complete the threesome—”Now be strong and bold…Mount in front” [Or sie forte e ardito…monta dinanzi] (Inf. 17.81–3)—after strategically placing himself between the trembling “boy” (Icarus-Dante) and the man-monster’s quivering tail. If Geryon with his “just” face presents an infernal image of God the Father in the role of Supreme Judge, Dante in his Icarus role corresponds to the Son. By placing himself between them, Virgil occupies the position of the Spirit proceeding from Father and Son. Thus arranged as a sodomitical parody of the Trinity, with the wheeling trio of Sodomites immediately at their back, they are prepared to descend to the deeper transgressions of the Eighth Circle where the scenes of homoerotic violence rival anything dreamed up by Sade for the orgies in the Château de Silling. Nakedness in the Eighth Circle is obscenely intensified by the torments of flaying and disembowelment, which Dante represents not simply as damage done to bodily surfaces but as invasive procedures inflicting deep subcutaneous pain—deeper even than the third-degree burns of the Sodomites. The “feeling of obscenity” (as Bataille would say) is here deepened from simple reflexes of disgust and dizziness to complex mixtures of erotic excitement, morbid curiosity, and horrified fascination by the sadistic impulse of the Fraudulent to assume an active role in their own stripping scenes. Their skin doesn’t crack and peel simply because they are passively lying on hot sands or running exposed under a fiery shower. They initiate their own copulatory transformations or inflict their own retributive wounds or scale off their diseased skin scab by scab. In the darkness of the Seventh Bolgia, Dante catches sight of a swarm of serpents amid which corrëan genti nude e spaventate, sanza sperar pertugio o elitropia: con serpi le man dietro avean legate; quelle ficcavan per le ren la coda e ’l capo, ed eran dinanzi aggroppate. [were people running naked and terrified, without hope of hidingplace or heliotrope. They had their hands bound behind with serpents: these thrust through their loins the head and tail, which were knotted in front.] (Inf. 24.92–6)
198
PART II
TRASMUTAR
Here, from a distance, Dante observes the unnatural blurring of human and animal and the transgressive shift from one form to another. Later he zooms in on a particularly horrifying transformation: Insieme si rispuosero a tai norme, che ’l serpente la coda in forca fesse, e ’l feruto ristrinse insieme l’orme. Le gambe con le cosce seco stesse s’appiccar sì, che ’n poco la giuntura non facea segno alcun che si paresse. Togliea la coda fessa la figura che si perdeva là, e la sua pelle si facea molle, e quella di là dura. Io vidi intrar le braccia per l’ascelle, e i due piè de la fiera, ch’eran corti, tanto allungar quanto accorciavan quelle. Poscia li piè di rietro, insieme attorti, diventaron lo membro che l’uom cela, e ’l misero del suo n’avea due porti. [They mutually responded in such a way that the reptile cleft its tail into a fork, and the wounded one drew his feet together. The legs and thighs so stuck together that soon no mark of the juncture could be seen; the cloven tail took on the shape that was lost in the other; and its skin grew soft, the other’s hard. I saw the arms drawing in at the armpits, and the brute’s two feet, which were short, lengthening out in proportion as the other’s arms were shortening. Then the hind paws, twisted together, became the member that man conceals, and from his the wretch had put forth two feet.] (Inf. 25.103–17)
Thus exposed, the thief’s penis become a locus of transformation in a thoroughly homoerotic copulation, a queer “coalescence” of male organs from which no continuity is attained even in surrogate form since the “lovers” are forced to exchange their discontinuous identities. The “manly plumes” that Tiresias once lost for separating a pair of copulating serpents but proudly displayed after Zeus restored them to him are lost again in the fusion of man and serpent, a species-confusion which results in the unmanning of Buoso by his fellow thief Guercio. Guercio’s new penis becomes “the member that man conceals,” a periphrasis encoded with taboo. By recalling the dark moment when Adam and Eve invented clothing to cover their newly realized nakedness, this phrase underscores the primal importance of the Fall for the construction and articulation of taboo throughout the Inferno. However, the very act of naming the shameful member, of exposing its primordial association with the abased and
ORIGINAL SKIN
199
ever-furtive Serpent, coupled with what Barkan primly refers to as its “genital implications,”23 is transgressive precisely because it reminds us of taboo, of that which is unnameable, unspecifiable. The transgressive character of the Thieves’ various enactments of the myth of male birth is enhanced by the writhing of the snakes, which indicates a metamorphosis downward towards the anarchic exuberance of animal sexuality. While Ovid is certainly a significant poet in the Dantean canon, the insistent yet strangely spectral presence of the Metamorphoses in the Inferno presents an intertextual paradigm for understanding infernal discontinuity. As Peter Hawkins strikingly puts it, Ovid becomes for Dante “a curator of the Fallen World in all its hideous permutations: a pagan master who would provide Dante not with a meditation on the cosmic power of providence but with a sustained nightmare of rage, rape, and human loss.”24 The human body in which the Imago Dei shines forth is radically destabilized by metamorphosis: the “Human Form Divine” melts into the evil multiplicity of animal forms, which nevertheless retain some trace of the Sacred. Back to Barkan for a moment: his observation that the “union of serpent and man stands as the essential desecration of the image and likeness of God” prompts him to conclude that the serpents “define the lowest human impulse by transforming themselves into the shape of the man’s sexual organs—indeed they almost seem to be engaged in a sexual act with their victims.”25 The prissy phrasing here is characteristic of his taboo-bound argument, which shies away from the graphic details of the Dantean metamorphoses even as it draws from them exciting Ovidian hints about the lost (pagan) world of sacred evil. Bataille would certainly not define such phallic energy as a sign of “the lowest human impulse,” since eroticism, as he understood it, remains primarily a psychological quest for continuity even when desire is expressed in physical terms. Since the Sadean homoeroticism of the Thieves is infernal in character, it doesn’t lead to their ultimate continuity with matter (despite Vanni Fucci’s spellbinding phoenix routine) but to a perpetual articulation of their discontinuity from each other and from God. In so far as Barkan skirts the taboo/transgression line in his commentary, he comes close to perceiving the paradoxically creative and destructive eroticism of the Thieves—especially when he refers to “Agnello’s transformation as a kind of hellish sexual act.”26 His neo-puritanical argument about the “desecration” of the Imago Dei gestures towards, even as it stop just short of, a more complex Bataillean conception of the violently erotic interplay between taboo and transgression in the lower circles of Hell.
200
PART II
TRASMUTAR
If the wilful destruction of the Human Form Divine is a sacrilegious act, an iconoclastic desecration, the act of denuding gains erotic élan as a symbolic anticipation or omen of erotic self-sacrifice. “Thus nudity is the collapse, even the betrayal, of the aspect of ourselves given to us through our clothes,” Bataille once observed in a meditation on Sadean violence.27 A particularly violent example of prophetic nudity taken to an obscene extreme is presented in the Bolgia of the Schismatics, where Dante-pilgrim is momentarily transfixed by the self-inflicted iconoclasm of the Prophet Mohammed: Già veggia, per mezzul perdere o lulla, com’ io vidi un, così non si pertugia, rotto dal mento infin dove si trulla. Tra le gambe pendevan le minugia; la corata pareva e ’l tristo sacco che merda fa di quel che si trangugia. Mentre che tutto in lui veder m’attacco, guardommi e con le man s’aperse il petto, dicendo: “Or vedi com’ io mi dilacco! vedi come storpiato è Mäometto!…” [Truly a cask, through loss of mid-board or side-piece, gapes not so wide as one I saw, cleft from the chin to the part that breaks wind; his entrails were hanging between his legs, and the vitals could be seen and the foul sack that makes ordure of what is swallowed. While I was all absorbed in gazing on him, he looked at me and with his hands pulled open his breast, saying, “Now see how I rend myself, see how mangled is Mohammed!…”] (Inf. 28.22–31)
Like the wide-eyed spectator in Dalí’s Lugubrious Game, the “soiled subject” whose vision of mutilation Bataille extolled for its shameless, taboodefying boldness, Dante gazes with such intensity on this grandiose act of self-sacrifice that his “self-possession” is temporarily annihilated.28 The Prophet becomes an anatomist of his own organic labyrinth, which like the winding passageway of the Inferno leads down through the bowels to the anus of his earthly mass. Can any sight more effectively demonstrate the obscene character of bodies that “open out to a state of continuity through secret channels that give us a feeling of obscenity”? Here, as in Dalí’s surrealist masterpiece, we are compelled to gaze at human suffering through the “anal eye” of the transgressor, whose vertical wound draws attention to “the part that breaks wind”: this particular “secret channel” is described in euphemistic terms that only emphasize its excretory function as the instrument of farting (cf. Mala-
ORIGINAL SKIN
201
coda’s “trumpet” in Inf. 21.139). So obscene is this very human “part” that Singleton—who didn’t hesitate to call an arse an arse when it was a demon’s culo—squeamishly yields to the concealing impulse of taboo. Robert Pinsky was not so delicate in his rendering of the passage: No barrel staved in And missing its end-piece ever gaped as wide As the man I saw split open from his chin Down to the farting-place, and from the splayed Trunk the spilled entrails dangled between his thighs. I saw his organs, and the sack the makes the bread We swallow turn to shit. Seeing my eyes Fastened upon him, he pulled open his chest With both hands, saying, “Look how Mohammed claws And mangles himself, torn open down the breast!…” (Inf. 28.22–31)
Pulling out all the stops, Pinsky exposes the scatological exuberance of these lines with a spirit of defiance comparable to that of the Prophet— or Bataille. The post-mortem soul of Mohammed has transformed his infernal body into an open book for visceral analysis, a living cadaver-text which has no secret channels of communication or hidden levels of meaning since it is an inverted figure of anti-allegory. All his insides are worn on his outside, including “the sack that makes the bread / We swallow turn to shit,” as if the segrete cose normally hidden by clothes—as the secret meaning of the allegory is normally hidden by “veils” of rhetoric—must now ironically function in the place of coverings to conceal his nakedness, the bare truth of his unexpectedly sexual sin. His hanging intestines occupy genital space, and their shocking exposure mimes the erotic display of his hidden (and presumably bisected) genitals in a grotesque parody of what Bataille would exuberantly call “sexual plethora” or “the activity of organs in a flow of coalescence and renewal.”29 Taboo-minded commentators have been swift to point out the tropological appropriateness of the Prophet’s rending to his divisive sin, and who can dispute such a reading? But hidden beneath the obvious logic of the contrapasso here is a lugubrious game, a ritual of cruelty, an irrational undoing of the Imago Dei by the transgressive eroticism of both the sacrificial victim and his transfixed witness. If the mangled body of Mohammed has a paradisial counterpart, it is the flayed body of Marsyas to whom Dante compares himself at the beginning of the third canticle (Par. 1.20). These two figures are tropologically connected through the horror of obscene nudity. According to
202
PART II
TRASMUTAR
Hawkins, the flaying of Marsyas in Ovid enacts Dante’s final self-canonization as a vernacular poet: “If we allow Marsyas to serve as an image of his author, the master of the Metamorphoses, then what we see here is Dante’s coming to terms with Ovid as poet by dramatically turning him inside out in a violent act of poetic revision.…No example less radical than this terrible flaying will suffice in order to suggest the radical transformation of identity that Dante’s conversion as poet entails or the danger that he knows he runs in writing as he does.”30 The sexual violence, mortal fear, and artistic risk associated with poesis through the figure of Marsyas combine to suggest a distinctively Bataillean formulation of Dante’s transgressive aesthetics. If nakedness represents the collapse of a “self-possessed” discontinuous being towards the blessed state of continuity, flaying takes to an extreme the aesthetic torments required to attain dispossession of the self. To be flayed is to become more than naked; it is to be stripped of even the cloak of skin. By collapsing the boundaries between the outer and inner body, flaying literally exposes the underlying Sadean rationale of Bataillean stripping, which is to know death through licentious image-making and idol-breaking. When Satan finally appears at the bottom of the Ninth Circle, his monstrous form can be read not only as the ultimate desecration of angelic beauty but also as the ne plus ultra of infernal nakedness. Stripped of his heavenly form, he is “discovered” in the hellish act of flaying Judas with his claws: A quel dinanzi il mordere era nulla verso ’l graffiar, che tal volta la schiena rimanea de la pelle tutta brulla. [To the one in front the biting was nothing compared with the clawing, for sometimes his back remained all stripped of skin.] (Inf. 34.58–60)
If Hell itself is the interior of a vast body with many secret channels, then Satan becomes the infernal “hairy part” par excellence. Just as the hairy body of Geryon served as a mode of conveyance, so the shaggy flanks of Satan function as a rough sort of ladder by which Dante and Virgil can ascend towards the Light despite all the deceptive tangles and downward metamorphoses in the allegory of the poets: Com’ a lui piacque, il collo li avvinghiai; ed el prese di tempo e loco poste, e quando l’ali fuoro aperte assai, appigliò sé a le vellute coste;
ORIGINAL SKIN
203
di vello in vello giù discese poscia tra ’l folto pelo e le gelate croste. [As was his pleasure, I clasped him round the neck, and he took advantage of time and place, and when the wings were opened wide he caught hold on the shaggy flanks; down from shag to shag he descended between the matted hair and the frozen crusts.] (Inf. 34.70–5)
This extraordinary encounter with infernal nudity recalls Bataille’s Sadean rule that “there is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image.” Of course, the licentious implications of Virgil’s hold on Satan can be ignored or dismissed simply by interpreting the scene as a linguistic allegory. Just as the knotting and dying of Geryon’s fur suggests deliberate uses of language for dialectical confusion and rhetorical allure, so the grabbing of Satan’s shaggy flanks represents the poet’s deliberate use of unavoidable common monosyllables and rough polysyllables—which he called “shaggy words” [verba yrsuta] (DVE 2.7.6)31— to construct his poetic vehicle for escaping the satanic confusion of tongues. However, if we perversely cling on to the literal level here, if we choose to observe the obscenity of the poets’ close encounter with the Devil’s hairy parts, then the licentiousness of the image springs to the fore. It’s literally “in your face.” The lugubrious game of watching the mutilation of the flayed souls becomes a truly Sadean sport, an erotic embrace with Death. Though Satan is presented as the terminus ad quem of discontinuity, his limit-position at the dead centre of the earth ironically leads the unflinching witness of his degradation in the direction of divine continuity. The horror of his hybrid form, with its matted hair and vainly flapping wings, is experienced from a safe critical distance at first, but the transgressive momentum of the downward journey brings the pilgrim closer and closer to the taboo-zone of erotic inversion where he is granted a bottom’s-eye view of the Devil’s crotch. Clasping Virgil round the neck, Dante sexually inverts himself into a “top” at this point—literally flipping over the hairy region “dove la coscia / si volge, a punto in sul grosso de l’anche” [where the thigh turns just on the thick of the haunch] (Inf. 34.76–7). Satan’s “pubic bush” thus serves as the obscene limit of the selva oscura. Lost in the unknowingness of the selva, Dante was both fearful of death and ignorant of its deep connection with desire. The she-wolf was particularly threatening to him then because of her rapacious sexual violence, her penchant for “mating with many beasts” across the divinely
204
PART II
TRASMUTAR
ordained boundaries between species [Molti son li animali a cui s’ammoglia] (Inf. 1.100). But after gazing on the obscene nakedness and animal matings of the Damned, he can face the erotic horror of Satan’s hairy parts with the calm realization that knowledge of taboo is only attainable through transgression in the Inferno. He finally comes to know death intimately—which is to say, licentiously—by embracing his Master in the shaggy darkness and mounting the Beast. NOTES 1 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from the Commedia in this essay have been drawn from the Petrocchi edition as reprinted and slightly revised by Singleton (1970–75). All translations from Dante are from Singleton (1970–75). The components of the Commedia cited from include Inferno (Inf.), Purgatorio (Purg.), and Paradiso (Par.). Also cited is De vulgari eloquentia (DVE). 2 In gay parlance, a “butch top” is someone who plays an aggressively masculine role as the dominant partner in a sado-masochistic scene: see Baker (2002), 91. Since nothing is known about the historical Guido’s sex life, our comment here is a slightly facetious inference from Dante’s decision to use his name as an allegorical sign in the homoerotically charged and aggressively masculine context of Inferno 16. 3 All biblical references are from the Authorized King James Version. 4 See In Vergilii Bucolica II.1, 18. If Virgil’s second eclogue is too subtle an imitation of Theocritus to be taken as biographical “evidence” of his love for boys, the Servian commentary on it spells out his erotic preference in no uncertain terms: “Corydonis in persona Vergilius intelliguntur, Caesar Alexis in persona inducitur. Alexim dicunt Alexandrum, qui fuit servus Asinii Pollionis, quem Vergilius, rogatus ad prandium, cum vidisset in ministerio omnium pulcherrimum, dilexit eumque dono accepit…nam Vergilius dicitur in pueros habuisse amorem.” 5 Bataille (1986), 17–18. 6 Bataille (1986), 69. 7 Bataille (1986), 25. On his paradoxical “hatred” for lyrical poetry, see Lala (1995), 108–109. 8 Bataille (1986), 107. For a discussion of the impact of this spiritual crisis on his intellectual life, see Richardson (1994), 19–20. 9 Bataille (1986), 8. 10 Bataille (1986), 11. 11 Barkan (1986), 157. 12 In his note on Inf. 14.19, Singleton (1970), 228, observes that all the souls in Hell are nude except the Hypocrites. This gloss is slightly inaccurate since Virgil is also an exception to the rule of infernal nudity. He wears a mantle, which suggests that other figures in Limbo are similarly attired in classical or medieval garb. Predictably, Singleton passes over in silence the complex cultural implications of nakedness in Dante’s world (and ours). 13 Bataille (1986), 17–18. 14 Bataille (1986), 11. The emphasis is Bataille’s.
ORIGINAL SKIN
205
15 See note on Inf. 1.1 in Singleton (1970), 3–4. 16 “Therefore, if we were going to deal with questions of humiliation, of sexual explicitness,” Rule (1995), 6, testified at the Little Sister’s trial in 1994, “we would have to know that we are dealing with Dante’s Inferno, the Marquis de Sade’s work as well as dealing with writers of our own time, recognizing that there have always been writers who have been preoccupied with the darker sides of human experience, who are perhaps best equipped to give us insights into those very troubling and often horrifying things that go on in the world today where in Bosnia women are routinely raped and children are molested, where in almost every case there is a sexual component which, if we don’t finally come to understand in all its complexity, we are in great danger of not knowing how to live our lives.” 17 Bataille (1986), 71. 18 Bataille (1986), 119. 19 Barkan (1986), 140, 142. 20 Barkan (1986), 162. 21 Barkan (1986), 159. 22 Bataille (1986), 143–44. 23 Barkan (1986), 154. 24 Hawkins (1991), 21. 25 Barkan (1986), 158–59. 26 Barkan (1986), 155. 27 Bataille (1994), 203. 28 Bataille (1985), 26–27, note to fig. 4: “C. Representation of the soiled subject escaping emasculation through an ignominious and nauseating posture” [suject souillé échappant à l’émasculation par une attitude ignominieuse et écœurante]. The soiled subject is the wide-eyed spectator in the lower right side of the canvas who can stare at the obscenity of the naked and mutilated figure in the centre without blinking or turning his gaze away. His emotional engagement with obscene nudity is marked by an excremental stain on his underwear. 29 Bataille (1986), 94–108. While he sometimes uses the phrase “sexual plethora” specifically in relation to male sexual experience as a synonym for “erection,” it often has a general biological significance in his writings. When a cell grows to the point where it can divide, it is said to have attained “a state of plethora.” 30 Hawkins (1991), 33. 31 Dante in Hell, 110–11: “Yrsuta quoque dicimus omnia preter hec que vel necessaria vel ornativa videntur vulgaris illustris. Et necessaria quidem appellamus que campsare non possumus, ut quedam monosillaba, ut sì, no, me, te, se, a, i, o, u’, interiectiones et alia multa. Ornativa vero dicimus omnia polisillaba que, mixta cum pexis, pulcram faciunt armoniam compaginis...” [And I call shaggy all other than these which are clearly either necessary for, or ornamental of, the illustrious vernacular. And I call necessary those which we cannot avoid, like certain monosyllables—like sì, no, me, te, se, a, i, o, u’—interjections, and many others. But I call ornamental all polysyllables which, when mixed with the well-groomed, produce a beautiful harmony in the composition...]. Since Geryon’s hair has been artfully transformed into a tapestry-like coat, it corresponds to a literary style mixing the yrsuta with the ornativa.
206
PART II
TRASMUTAR
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alighieri, Dante. Inferno. Trans. Robert Pinsky. New York: Noonday, 1993. ——— De vulgari eloquentia. Trans. Warman Welliver. Dante in Hell: The De Vulgari Eloquentia. Ravenna: Longo, 1981. ——— La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. Ed. G. Petrocchi. 4 vols. Milano: Mondadori, 1966-67. ——— The Divine Comedy. Trans. C.S. Singleton. 6 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970-75. Baker, Paul. Fantabulosa: A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang. London and New York: Continuum, 2002. Barkan, Leonard. The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Bataille, Georges. “The ‘Lugubrious Game.’” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. 24-30. ——— “Autobiographical Note.” Writings on Laughter, Sacrifice, Nietzsche, Unknowing. Trans. Annette Michelson. October 36 (Spring 1986): 107. ——— Erotism: Death & Sensuality. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights, 1986. ——— “Happiness, Eroticism, and Literature.” The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism. Trans. Michael Richardson. London: Verso, 1994. 186-208. Hawkins, Peter. “Dante and Ovid.” Dante and Ovid: Essays in Intertextuality. Ed. Madison U. Sowell. Binghamton NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991. Lala, Marie-Christine. “The Hatred of Poetry in Georges Bataille’s Writing and Thought.” Bataille: Writing the Sacred. Ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill. London: Routledge, 1995. 105-16. Richardson, Michael. Georges Bataille. London: Routledge, 1994. Rule, Jane. Detained at Customs: Jane Rule Testifies at the Little Sister’s Trial. Vancouver: Lazara Press, 1995. Servius Grammaticus. In Vergilii Bucolica et Georgica commentarii. Servii Grammatici qui feruntur in Vergilii carmina commentarii. Ed. Georgius Thilo. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1961.
Anti-Dante Bataille in the Ninth Bolgia James Miller
‘‘I
don’t know Dante’s Inferno particularly well,” admitted Georges Bataille in a heated discussion following the reading of his paper “The Surrealist Religion” at the Club Maintenant in Paris on February 24, 1948.1 He was not being modest. His knowledge of Dante was sketchy and indirect, mediated primarily through the romanticized hells of the nineteenth century. A nebulous vision of the Damned might also have come to him through an unfinished series of thirty-four lithographic illustrations of the Inferno (Enfer, 1930) by his friend Jean Fautrier, who had also illustrated his erotic tale Madame Edwarda (1945). Fautrier’s style for the Dante series, with its inky washes and ghostly shapes, has been aptly labelled informel or “indeterminate.”2 The scarcity of allusions to the Commedia in Bataille’s works bears out the impression that his meditations on the Sacred and the Sadistic were largely innocent of Dantean influence. His frank admission of ignorance at the Club Maintenant was prompted by an interchange between two theological respondents concerning the mystical function of pain in the Catholic afterlife. “In Dante,” observed one, “souls in Purgatory repudiate themselves in their torments, not by pure disinterested transformation of their torments into delights, [but] because they see an end to them.” Purgatorial souls should not be confused with sadists or surrealists, the other suggested, “because they take their delights to a logical conclusion”—namely, beatitude. Devotees of the Surrealist religion would presumably defy the old moral logic of purgation by seeking pleasure through pain in a Sadean frenzy of immorality, sacrilege, and torture. “But I believe the question of pleasure is secondary,” insisted the first respondent, returning to his main attack on Bataille’s argument that since the “animal state” of sexual passion was
207
208
PART II
TRASMUTAR
literally a “hell,” the true mystic was “fundamentally a man for whom tortures become delights.”3 Bataille’s radical humanism allowed no room for purgatorial pathos, no middle ground between carnal anguish and mystical ardour. For a discontinuous modern self trapped in a disintegrating material body, life in the post-war Here and Now could only be infernal, and its only alternative was the egoless continuity of death, which was hardly a paradisial Hereafter in a Catholic sense. How could anyone living in the anguished present of modernity, the “now” of the Club Maintenant, seriously contemplate the end of pain sub specie aeternitatis? “I don’t follow you too well,” Bataille disingenuously responded to his Catholic-minded critics. Pushing Dante out of the discussion, he proceeded to pull in his favourite atheist, the Marquis de Sade, to clarify his maudit notion of mysticism as the illumination of human suffering in the absence of the Divine: “Mystical experience is pursued to the extent that it becomes impossible, and it is always limited by the fact that the more it is realized, the more impossible it becomes.”4 Though this perverse retort confused the divinely inflicted torments in the Inferno with the self-imposed ascetic exercises in the Purgatorio, it effectively distanced his paradoxical argument about the irreligious bent of the Surrealist religion from Dante’s adherence to the traditional Catholic view of torture as the opposite of delight. Without ecstatic entrée into a privileged spiritual world, the Surrealist mystic must gain his/her boggling insight into pain through the baffling liberation of paradox. As a figure of scandal, he/she resembles the incontinent spectator in Dalí’s The Lugubrious Game (1929) whose blatant loss of dignity anticipates a blissful loss of self-consciousness. His eyes have a narcotic blankness about them, but they are not blind. They stare with morbid intensity at the “halo” of easeful death surrounding the “hell” of erotic life.5 In his treatise on eroticism, Bataille would later refer to the intensification of erotic pain in the obsessive quest for mystical pleasure as “morose delectation,” a phrase cunningly borrowed from Catholic theology, which over the centuries had developed an extensive vocabulary for the “near-death” experiences of pilgrims on the via dolorosa of asceticism: “In morose delectation the beauty of the object and its sexual attraction have vanished. Only the memory of them persists in the form of the halo of death I have mentioned. Thenceforward the object is less an object than the aura surrounding the state of the soul and it is impossible to say whether it is horror or fascination; there is a compelling feeling of death about this aura while the object of sensuality inspires fear
ANTI-DANTE
209
and passes out of the field of consciousness.”6 The psychological terminus ad quem of this condition is a paralyzing horror that leads to a kind of spiritual coma, a suspension and consequent prolongation of erotic temptation in a trancelike state. Apart from leaping into the dance of faith, the chief therapy for morose delectation prescribed by Dante in the Commedia is the joyous participation of his pilgrim-readers in the collective creation of the sacrato poema.7
Salvador Dalí, The Lugubrious Game (1929), Private Collection, Paris. According to Bataille, the soiled man (lower right) whose eyes bulge at the exploding figure in the centre of the painting represents the “subject escaping emasculation” through a therapeutic loss of dignity. Dante’s gaping reaction to Mohammed’s wound is akin to the Surrealist’s goggling gaze. Photo credit: VAGA, New York
Bataille’s notorious aversion to poetry as a pallid aesthetic substitute for hot-blooded religion stems no doubt from his echt-Surrealist (and exseminarian) hostility to the long tradition of Christian literature dominant in European culture since late antiquity. Considering his professed and rather studied ignorance of the Commedia, perhaps we should not try to involve him in the centuries-old project of expanding its little spark into a great flame. What’s to be added to the eternal fires of Dante’s poetic universe from the sacrilegious burnout at the Club Maintenant? What’s to be gained from plugging Sadean philosophy and Surrealist religion into the anagogic currents of the Sacred Poem? At the very least, a defamiliarizing flash—a sudden illuminating engagement with the psychological strangeness of the poet’s highly unorthodox “now”—occurs at the literal level when we try to read the
210
PART II
TRASMUTAR
Commedia surrealistically. Even the Damned, whom we might expect to be quite blasé about the cultural derangements with which Bataille identified Surrealism, are constantly amazed and disturbed by the intrusion of Dante’s living presence into the deadening ritualization of their afterlives. No Club Maintenant for them—they’re all stuck in the Club Toujours. Taboo lines must accordingly be drawn between them and their temporal visitor. “And you there, living soul, stand aside from these that are dead!” shouts Charon to the pilgrim [E tu se’ costì, anima viva, / pàrtiti da cotesti che son morti] (Inf. 3.88–9). The impossibility of spiritual union with the dead or with the Divine is direly assumed in Hell, and it is clearly Charon’s (as well as Bataille’s) metaphysical ground zero for the explosive rage at the core of religious experience. Prompted by the cynically modernist lure of this assumption, we might gain a new experience of the sacredness of the poem if we can position ourselves imaginatively à rebours to read the Inferno in an unfamiliar way, a way no doubt at odds with the tropological drift of the commentary tradition.8 As a defence of sacrilege, Bataillean hermeneutics prompts us to read the canticle of damnation from the “secret” viewpoint of the Damned. As for the canticles of purgation and salvation, they are not readable from this viewpoint except as desperately vapid fantasies. The Surrealist religion proposed by Bataille as a scandalous route beyond death—that is, beyond Christianity’s moral consciousness of death—can have little theological relevance to them because of Dante’s unshakeable allegiance to the mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. In the Purgatorio and Paradiso, the pilgrim’s ascent to God would never have got off the ground (literally) if the poet had not accepted the Areopagite’s Christian Neoplatonic assumption that divine union was miraculously possible for believers through the illuminating guidance of the Trinity. 9 Every soul encountered on the Holy Mountain and in the Heavens affirms the validity of this assumption by strengthening the pilgrim’s understanding of what follows from it, namely, the possibility of his own mystical union with God. Only in the Inferno does Dante-pilgrim meet a number of eminently religious souls who reject the very possibility of what they themselves can never experience in their perpetual exile from God. The Epicureans in their smouldering deathbed (Inf. 10.13–15) would certainly qualify as infernal prophets of the Surrealist religion. So, too, would the Simonists in the headbanging horror of their anal holes (Inf. 19.13–15). But the most compelling opponent of divine union as a human possibility—and the very model of a Surrealist mystic with a flair for sado-masochism—
ANTI-DANTE
211
is the “mangled” shade of Mohammed (Inf. 28.31) whose reward for denying the mystery of the Incarnation is to enact forever at a corporeal level the cutting off of humanity from divinity prescribed by his schismatic Christology. THE OPEN MAN
The previous essay in this volume (“Original Skin”) proposed a Bataillean reading of the Prophet’s mutilation as “self-inflicted iconoclasm,” an act initiated by the sadistic energy of the Divine Will but brought to horrific completion by the masochistic will of the victim himself.10 The nudity of erotic “self-dispossession” is taken to an infernal extreme through the obscene spectacle of Mohammed’s disembowelment, which occurs, ironically, at the very moment when he is baring his soul—his perpetually discontinuous selfhood—in a ferocious burst of egomania. Opening up in a psychological sense is a painful process comparable to stretching a chest wound and spilling your guts, as Fautrier suggested in his icon L’homme ouvert or The Open Man (see illustration below), which may well have been inspired by the Mohammed episode in the Inferno.11 Mohammed’s punishment as the Open Man of the Inferno is to be forever in a state of defiant self-possession, as if his ego were a demon possessing him from within and displaying his innards as external evidence of his schism from the Divine.
Jean Fautrier, The Open Man (1928–29), Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon. The similarity of this autopsy-like image to Dante’s portrait of Mohammed can hardly be accidental since Fautrier also produced around 1930 a series of drawings, in lithographic inks, illustrating the thirty-four cantos of the Inferno. Photo credit: Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon
While this reading certainly pushes traditional interpretations of the scene in an unorthodox direction, it does not go far enough or plunge deep enough into the horror of the Prophet’s strange new condition to explain
212
PART II
TRASMUTAR
the transfixing glamour of its obscenity. If Mohammed had simply suffered a cruel sword-cut from chin to anus, his iconoclastic rending would have served as a clear and simple emblem of the divisive impact of religious schism on the Body Politic. It is that, of course, and the length and locus of the demonic wound make perfect sense according to the implacable logic of the contrapasso.12 From this unholy incision, this sign of pseudomartyrdom, Christian commentators have drawn the obvious moral conclusions about disunity for so long that the demonic SM scene in which they have had to ignore the excessiveness of the wound in order to play out their lugubrious game of moralizing now seems like an utterly reasonable context for meditating on sacred unity. Yet something scandalously unreasonable confronts Dante’s gaping eyes when the neat surgical slice is suddenly stretched and mangled by human hands—Mohammed’s own hands—operating independently of the demon’s. The wound itself gapes with a strange kind of visionary éclat, intensifying and magnifying the exuberant appearance of organic life exposed at the very point of death. With prophets of any sort, even false ones, we are usually attracted to the uncommon contents of their souls. Through dazzling visions, sudden raptures, divine unions, their spiritual lives are transfigured with sacred knowledge of the angelic world or its demonic shadow. The transfiguration of Mohammed in Malebolge is grotesquely carnal. Instead of a divinely united soul, a demonically divided body captures our attention with the shock of the erotic, and its immodest contents are appallingly common to the Flesh. As if dangling “entrails” (minugia) and “vital organs” (corata) were not enough to remind us of our mortal corporeality, the secret inner life of our base material natures, Dante impetuously casts our gaze all the way down the labyrinthine tangle of the lower intestines to the rectum: “the sad sack that makes shit of what is swallowed” [’l tristo sacco / che merda fa di quel che si trangugia] (Inf. 28.25–7: translation mine). So this confusing and malodorous mess is all the Prophet’s inner life amounts to in the end? And yet, for all its bathetic immodesty and excremental baseness, it comes spilling out at us with a crazy excess of unforeseen significations. For an instant, like the Surrealist mystic at the Club Maintenant, Mohammed stands before us in Malebolge as “a man for whom tortures become delights.” No wonder Dante can’t take his eyes off the sight: its obscenity induces in his erotically anguished soul a transfixing bout of morose delectation. As a one-time “scene” staged specifically for the pilgrim, Mohammed’s self-mutilation marks a shocking transgression of the
ANTI-DANTE
213
viciously ritualized circle from wounding to healing to rewounding, which is his eternal lot in the Ninth Bolgia. The violence of the break would make no sense at all to a scholastically trained moralist. Why should a torture victim take dramatic delight in deepening his own pain? If Mohammed were a classical tragedian, his action might be interpreted as a noble aesthetic effort to arouse pity and terror in his audience. But he is not Sophocles, and Aristotle is not his spectator. As an infernal upstager, a scene-stealer, he makes his own peculiar hell at once conspicuous and incomprehensible to the poet through an obscenely erotic dispossession of all his traditionally determined identities: Holy Prophet, Founder of Islam, Christian Schismatic, Damned Soul. What he is or means now, in the extreme instant of his erotically intensified discontinuity, is not easily conveyed in the neat incisive terms of the old tropological glosses. It is something messy, inchoate, spilled, ruined beyond reason. The old Mohammed is no more—not even as a shade prepared by the demonic sword for moral autopsy. Appealing to Sade’s eschatological authority, Bataille zealously insisted that the best way to know death is to link it with some licentious image.13 Does the new self-revealing Mohammed of the Inferno function as such an image? Does he maliciously expose himself as a sick turn-on for those who yearn to die or who wish to know death intimately? The Surrealist mystic would certainly have no moral qualms about subjecting the Prophet’s open form to rapturous erotic inspection. Defying all Christian (not to mention Muslim) taboos concerning the viewing of the dead, he would knowingly yield to the temptations of the pornographic imagination for two defiantly irrational “reasons”: first, to feel the lure of the Prophet’s agony as a dangerous source of pleasure; and second, to revel in its obscenity as an awestruck witness to something sacred at its sacrilegious core. To the Surrealist gaze the religious meanings of Mohammed’s new sadistically flaunted figura can only yield themselves up through erotic contemplation of his disfigurement, but neither his intimate knowledge of death nor his exuberant show of life will mean anything—even to his infernal witnesses—unless his torture is first understood within an economy of secrets and then related to an eschatology of desire. Secret knowledge, mystical wisdom, always comes at a cost. Ask any Dionysian initiate or Freudian analysand. When mystical wisdom pertains to the unconscious end of desire—as it does in the Surrealist religion championed by Bataille no less than in the Christian Neoplatonism advanced by PseudoDionysius—then we are compelled to abandon the beaten tracks of con-
214
PART II
TRASMUTAR
scious reasoning in order to understand the mystic’s paradoxical desire to experience the extinction of desire. If we dare to contemplate Mohammed in Malebolge licentiously, his torture scene will have the same capacity to appal us as a murky clip or crumpled still from the most obscene form of photographic documentation: the “snuff film.” Though banished from the screen, this ghostly sub-genre of documentary is obsessively imagined by the very censors who try to extinguish its legendary place in the Bataillean twilight zone of independent cinema. The existence of even one such film anywhere would appear to compromise the moral value of the whole medium. Indeed, any photographic record of actual torture and murder for erotic pleasure is rendered so illicit (not to mention illegal) by its intended use that the evidence itself must be destroyed or at least censored into oblivion.14 The literary prototype of the snuff film is surely to be found in the psychological projections of the Ninth Bolgia, where Dante’s transgressive fantasy invents a documentary vision so obscene that it resists allegoresis by inducing morose delectation. In the cruel theatre of the Schismatics, we witness what amounts to an underground “snuff allegory.” Its first “clip,” the mangling of Mohammed, induces a blank obsessive stare in the pilgrim-witness after the usual physiological responses to the obscene—sweating, nausea, vomiting—have failed to settle his waves of morbid excitement. So graphic is this opening image that it temporarily quells the allegorical impulse to see beyond it, to read it in relation to other scenes. As a direct face-to-face vision of the Sacred unmediated by symbols, apocalypse effectively “snuffs out” allegory, and Mohammed’s opening is a kind of apocalypse, an anatomical unveiling in which eschatology collapses into scatology. Its effect is to present what purports to be immediate evidence of the human condition at the bitter end—the “Ecce Homo” moment—just before the flame of agonized consciousness is extinguished and the body’s wasted limbs and organs drop into the darkness like so much merda. Even if we force ourselves to view the Prophet’s evisceration as an allegory of the dark libidinal processes that give rise to sadistic foreplay, homicide, and necrophilia, we must be prepared to ask what this deeply private fantasy (a segreta cosa made vastly and vicariously accessible in the Ninth Bolgia) will cost us as transgressive readers of Dante when it is “spilled out” into the public domain of commentary. There can be no doubt that the costs are high, the horror of the Ninth Bolgia having been especially subject to glossing over and moral rationalization. For one thing, we will have to dispense with the familiar Catholic logic of punishment
ANTI-DANTE
215
and reward along with traditional rationalizations of pain as either the punitive absence or the ascetic surrogate of pleasure. For another, we will lose what the orthodox commentary tradition has long afforded Dante’s readers: the double security of Aristotelian ethics and Aquinian morality as foundations upon which to construct a knowledge of the Infidel, or as Bataille’s intellectual heirs would put it, the Religious Other. How can we know that Dante, even for a prophetically Sadean instant, perceived the Open Man as a licentious image? Do we have any access to the pilgrim’s fearfully repressed libido while his gaze is fixed on the Prophet whom Christians still regard as the very embodiment of the Religious Other? Not directly, of course. If his morose delectation produces a cathexis of the bisecting wound, and a consequent synthesis of himself with the Other through a forbidden fantasy, then its obscenely erotic fascination for him can only be inferred from the obsessiveness of his gaze. Gazing occurs in two directions during Dante’s brief encounter with Mohammed. “While I was wholly absorbed in looking at him, he looked at me,” the poet recalls [Mentre che tutto in lui veder m’attacco, / guardommi] (Inf . 28.28–9), as if they were staring each other down like prospective SM partners to see who would be the master and who the slave. Only three cantos earlier, in the Bolgia of the Thieves, a similar scene of intense mutual staring was played out between Buoso and Guercio, whose exchange of shapes—the one from serpent to man, the other from man to serpent—started with a sadistic demonstration of the Bataillean dictum that the “animal state” of passion is tantamount to Hell. The thief who was in an animal state fixed his fangs into the navel of his human partner in a parody of homoerotic penetration. Their sights were literally set on each other—”He eyed the serpent, the serpent him” [Elli ’l serpente e quei lui riguardava] (Inf. 25.91)—as objects of ferociously dehumanizing desire. Amazed by the exceptional queerness of their samesex, cross-species copulation, Dante could hardly believe his eyes when each thief “conceived” the other as himself in a grotesque replay of Narcissus’s self-begetting. Like Guercio, whose immodestly displayed penis was split lengthwise into two “legs” during his reptilian transformation, Mohammed is presumably forced to undergo a longitudinal phallectomy during his demonic surgery. In plumbing the depths of male anguish, Dante may well be the only erotic author in the Western tradition to imagine emasculation as a fullfrontal bifurcation of “the member that man conceals” [lo membro che l’uom cela] (Inf. 25.116). This unusual horror evidently repelled and fas-
216
PART II
TRASMUTAR
cinated him at a psychic level deeper than ordinary castration anxiety, since he suppresses any reference to the bisected phallus on the second occasion of its presentation to him. He simply leaves us to imagine for ourselves what Mohammed’s unconcealed “membro” looks like after the demonic blade has fallen. Not even Sade, who imagined plenty of homoerotic castration scenes in the three hundred criminal and murderous passions at the end of The 120 Days of Sodom, brought himself to fantasize about evisceration in the exquisitely painful wake of penile schism.15 The heteroerotic topos of the lover’s fascinated gaze, drawn irresistibly to the face and especially the eyes of his beloved, is not hard to discern behind the parodic cruising of the Thieves. It was a parody initially played out in the desert of the Seventh Circle where Dante and Virgil observed the Sodomites staring with intense yearning “as men look at one another in the evening under a new moon” [come suol da sera / guardare uno altro sotto nuova luna] (Inf. 15.18–19). The fascination of their stares was not lost on the pilgrim as he made his perilous way along the rocky bank of Phlegethon. When his gaze fell upon the circling troupe led by Guido Guerra, each Sodomite “directed his face” [il visaggio / drizzava] (Inf. 16.25–6) at Dante with such erotic force—a kind of ocular magnetism—that he almost hurled himself down on the burning sands to embrace them. From these arresting precedents, we may infer that the act of gazing is never innocent of transgressive eroticism in the Inferno. When the pilgrim stares at Mohammed, his immediate vision of the infernal body must be sharply distinguished from the poet’s long-range brightening glance at the exalted beauties of Beatrice’s face. As befits the low style of comedy, the only image with which the Prophet’s extraordinary appearance is metaphorically linked in the passage is so ordinary, so down-toearth, that its immediate effect is absurdly bathetic: Già veggia, per mezzul perdere o lulla, com’ io vidi un, così non si pertugia, rotto dal mento infin dove si trulla. [Truly a cask, having lost its mid-board or side-piece, gapes not so wide as one I saw, cleft from the chin to the part that breaks wind.] (Inf. 28.22–4)
Yet, even in ruins, something of the pagan sacré rises again from this metamorphosis by metaphor. The Bacchic wine barrel is broken, and the god of disintegration is set loose again upon the world. We shouldn’t wonder that Dante’s infernal mode of perception is darkly and reflex-
ANTI-DANTE
217
ively charged with lust of the eyes, but it is a sadistic lust made all the more horrifying to us, and tempting to him, by the Dionysian power of his inner eye (the visual imagination or visio spiritualis) to split open the victim’s body cask and spill its contents in a hallucinatory recreation of the sparagmos. An agonizing excess of flesh, such as would cruelly thrill pagan spectators at a Theban sacrifice, is displayed for the delectation of the imaginary Bacchic lover, who, abandoning all sense of Christian decency and modesty, momentarily revels in the excremental undoing of the human form. His shameless eye is attracted not just to the victim’s skin and eyes and other familiar erogenous zones, but to the sliced genitals hanging over the fart-hole and to the foul shit-sack spilling out below the chest. The erotic male gaze itself seems to be splitting the body open— a nightmarish vivisection—as if the highly ritualized inspection of body parts in the love poet’s joyful blazon had taken a dire turn inward to praise visceral “beauties” only to end up mutilating and disfiguring its object of desire.16 The heteroerotic version of this nightmare is visited upon Dante in the Dream of the Siren (Purg. 19.7–36), which ends with a symbolic disemboweling comparable in its iconoclastic effect to the evisceration of Mohammed. Once again hermeneutic attention is drawn to the paradoxical operation of the erotic male gaze, which will fashion an iconic object of desire only to strip it of its deceptive coverings. At the start of the dream the poet’s “glance” [lo sguardo mio] (Purg. 19.12), which must be identified with his visual imagination here since his eyes are closed, amorously transfigures an ugly old hag into an irresistibly beautiful maiden worthy of poetic praise. His idealizing blazon-vision is suddenly disrupted by the intercession of a saintly lady, a dream-projection of Beatrice, who sternly summons a visionary Virgil to reveal the maiden’s true identity to her Pygmalion-like admirer. This male figure is reflexively identified with Reason, the paternal voice of moral understanding that Dante has internalized in his long journey with his guide. But the Virgil of the dream acts in a violently irrational manner. He could have exposed the blazon-lady’s true identity simply by answering Beatrice’s question “who is this?” [chi è questa?] (Purg. 19.28) with an admonitory gloss on the fatal sensuality of the Siren. But for once he remains silent.17 Instead of voicing the ancient taboo against lust of the eyes, he fixes his own amorous gaze on the dreamsaint and performs an iconoclastic act as startling as Mohammed’s mutilation:
218
PART II
TRASMUTAR
ed el venìa con li occhi fitti pur in quella onesta. L’altra prendea, e dinanzi l’apria fendendo i drappi, e mostravami ’l ventre; quel mi svegliò col puzzo che n’uscia. [and he came on with his eyes fixed only on that honest one. He seized the other and laid her bare in front, rending her garments and showing me her belly: this waked me with the stench that issued therefrom.] (Purg. 19.29–33)
With a burst of transgressive energy, he perversely stimulates the dreamer’s lustful eyes with a misogynistic—indeed sadistic—attack on the Siren’s eerily passive body, which might as well be a corpse outstretched for the morose delectation of a necrophile. Has the even more ancient taboo against necrophilia prompted this enigmatic somnium? If the Virgil-within-Dante were a lover of the dead, as a Surrealist reader of the dream might surmise, the infernal dénouement of the dream might help to explain why the pilgrim long ago suspected that his teacher would have permitted his daring embrace of the blackened corpselike Sodomites (Inf. 16.48). Tearing off the Siren’s poetically cathected “drappi” (Purg. 19.32)—the “garments” that function in the dream as a fetishistic substitute for her skin—the male despoiler who arises from the visio spiritualis of the poet himself finally exposes the belly of the “femmina” for anti-blazon perusal and penetration, and from this forbidden zone of torture and delight, as from the Prophet’s “foul sack,” issues an infernal stench so strong that it awakens Dante to an anguished consciousness of the synergy of sex and death, sensuality and mysticism. Thus, in the twinkling of an eye, the loving glance towards the Saint can change into the Surrealist’s eviscerating gaze. THE VAGINAL MAN
Such a gaze was directed by Bataille himself on a faded old photograph given to him by his psychoanalyst, Dr. Adrian Borel, in 1925. Not for the faint-hearted, this infamous image was as gruesome a “slice of life” as anything laid on by Sade’s debauchees in the Château de Silling or cut off by Dante’s demons in the Ninth Bolgia. In 1961, after decades of private meditation on the consummate relevance of this photograph to his life and thought, Bataille dared to reproduce it shortly before his death in the gasping conclusion of his final work, The Tears of Eros.18 With grim amusement he recalled that it had originally appeared in 1923 as a scientific illustration for a psychology trea-
ANTI-DANTE
219
tise by Georges Dumas, who valued it solely as an example of a visual stimulus apt to trigger the reflex of “horripilation.” One glance at it—if you were an ordinary, mentally stable viewer—was enough to make your hair stand on end. (How irresponsible Borel must have been to flash it before the eyes of his extraordinarily unstable analysand!) Scientific observers were supposedly able to look at its hair-raising horrors with coifs in tact because they were protected from primitive panic by the safety goggles of objectivity and detachment. As a devotee of sacrificial rites, Bataille was anything but objective or detached in his response to the image as a revelation of “death-in-life.” Fascinated by its religious aura, he discovered that it came from a series of photographs documenting the torture of “the Hundred Pieces” suffered by Fou-Tchou-Li, a murderer whose execution took place in a public square in Peking in 1905. The photographer Carpeaux caught a crowd of sombre witnesses pressing round the criminal, whose naked body hangs from two cross-staves by ropes looped under his armpits. His arms have been lopped off close to the shoulders; his nipples have been cut out; and his chest has been sliced open over his lungs to reveal ribs and viscera. Streams of blood flow down his belly to his strangely androgynous groin. He appears to have been castrated. An executioner in the left foreground is diligently sawing off his leg at the knee. The casualness of the shot is deeply appalling. “The world evoked by this straightforward image of a tortured man,” gasped Bataille with the febrile excitement of a dying missionary unable to suppress his final erotic frisson, “is, to my knowledge, the most anguishing of worlds accessible to us through images captured on film.…I have been told that in order to prolong the torture, opium is administered to the condemned man. Dumas insists upon the ecstatic appearance of the victim’s expression. There is, of course, something undeniable in his expression, no doubt due at least in part to the opium, which augments what is most anguishing about this photograph.”19 The victim’s expression is indeed ambiguous. While his glazed eyes and tense grin suggest an intensity of pain beyond imagining, his upturned face—eerily shot from below like a beaux-arts statue, as if the camera were colluding with the repulsively aesthetic sculpting of the torturer—recalls the ardent gaze of a martyr who is granted an ecstatic vision of his celestial crown while his poignantly naked body is still bound to the tree of torment. If an iconostasis of eroticized torture scenes were ever erected for the Surrealist religion, this Chinese icon would certainly be displayed on it next to Sodoma’s St. Sebastian, Dalí’s The Lugubrious Game, and Fautrier’s
220
PART II
TRASMUTAR
The Open Man.20 Bataille seems to have “venerated” the photograph as if it really were an icon for initiates at the Club Maintenant, a privately sanctified version of those scandalous images publicly displayed at Surrealist galleries to shock bourgeois spectators into consciousness of their psychotic inner lives. That its paradoxical suspension of “death-in-life” gave him sadistic pleasure he was the first to admit, and he even imagined himself as the Marquis de Sade meditating on its voluptuous horrors in the solitude of his prison cell. “The photograph had a decisive role in my life,” he ardently confessed, I have never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at once ecstatic(?) and intolerable. I wonder what the Marquis de Sade would have thought of this image, Sade who dreamed of torture, which was inaccessible to him, but who never witnessed an actual torture session. In one way or another, this image was incessantly before his eyes. But Sade would have wished to see it in solitude, at least in relative solitude, without which the ecstatic and voluptuous effect is inconceivable.21
Out in public, presumably, the witness to such a scene (like the glumly attentive crowd in the photograph) can only feel a numbing horror at the obscenity of the torture. So strong is the impact of deep-seated taboos on sex and violence in the public domain that group psychology dictates the reflexive responses of nausea and repulsion for “innocent” bystanders. Behind the scenes, Bataille suggests, no bystander in touch with the anguish of the discontinuous psyche can ever be innocent of the erotic thrill afforded by the spectacle of sacrifice. Whose viewpoint should be adopted in contemplating this unholy icon—the crowd’s, the torturer’s, or the victim’s? Horripilation hardly begins to denote the shifting reactions of dread, guilt, compassion, salacious fascination, restless yearning that the image can provoke in viewers unable to sustain a sense of Stoic detachment from the illusion of photographic immediacy. The camera angle would seem to invite an immediate identification with the crowd, whose presence evidently extends beyond the cropped frame of the photograph. If Bataille identified himself at first with the passive onlookers, it was not for long: his Sadean fantasy implies that for a while—in the late 1920s at least—he imagined himself in the active role of the torturer. His relation to the icon changed dramatically in the 1930s when his questing soul turned towards the East for mystical insight after his stormy relations with “official” French Surrealist circles. He suddenly found himself entering imaginatively into the psyche of the victim. “Much later, in 1938, a friend
ANTI-DANTE
221
initiated me into the practice of yoga,” he tremulously recalled. “It was on this occasion that I discerned, in the violence of this image, an infinite capacity for reversal. Through this violence—even today I cannot imagine a more insane, more shocking form—I was so stunned that I reached the point of ecstasy. My purpose is to illustrate a fundamental connection between religious ecstasy and eroticism—and in particular sadism. From the most unspeakable to the most elevated.”22 Claiming that his final book was not written from within the limited experience of most men, the Surrealist mystic struggled to expound for himself and his followers the shattering impact of his yoga-purified vision, which was at once an ego-imprisonment and a self-transcendence: “What I suddenly saw, and what imprisoned me in anguish—but which at the same time delivered me from it—was the identity of these perfect contraries, divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror.”23 For all his dalliance with Eastern mysticism, the paradoxical experience he describes here could not be more Western in its twinning of affirmation and negation. Its intellectual origins lie in Neoplatonism. The discovery of an “infinite capacity for reversal” through intense meditation on a symbolic image is well known to Catholic intellectuals of the Modern Era—as it was to Dante in the Middle Ages—through the mystical theology of Pseudo-Dionysius.24 According to the Areopagite, anyone seeking divine union should first meditate on the Creator’s traditional names and manifestations. Hail God as the Rock of Ages, for instance, and the rocklike immutability of the Eternal Presence is brought to mind. Imagine God as a column of fire, and the guiding light of the Divine Mind shines forth above the dark wilderness of the Here and Now. After affirming the validity of these revealed analogies, the Catholic mystic learns to transcend the metaphoric processes of sense-bound thought by transforming affirmative images of divinity into “negative symbols.” As a purely spiritual being, God is the ontological opposite of a rock. As an eternal source of illumination, the Divine Mind is no flash in the desert sky. Every metaphorical image of the Divine has an infinite capacity for reversal when it is subject to rigorous denial or “apophatic” meditation, as the Areopagite’s own soul reveals to Dante in the Heaven of the Sun where it assumes the form of a “candle-flame” [il lume di quel ciero] (Par. 10.115). While the candle sheds light on the darkness of earthly perceptions, its little glow is hard to see against the Sun and even harder to distinguish—in fact, it would seem like an absence of light—against the infinite radiance of the Divine Mind.
222
PART II
TRASMUTAR
Perhaps the candle of Pseudo-Dionysius can help us illuminate the obscurity of Bataille’s meditations on erotic art, dispelling at least the disorienting strangeness (if not the sadistic cruelty) of his reaction to the photograph of the Hundred Pieces. Lurking within the psyche of the Surrealist mystic, ironically, are the meditative instincts of a medieval Catholic semiotician. At first he interpets Fou-Tchou-Li’s agony as a horrifyingly clear sign or positive image of the psyche’s anguish at its own discontinuity. Recollecting his birth-trauma, he sees through his tears that his lifelong schism from continuity has provoked a feverish erotic effort to reverse the deathward fall of Man from the sacred state of continuity. But how can his (or anyone’s) soul escape the Sadean prison of discontinuous subjectivity? Switching from an affirmative to a negative theological track, he wilfully reverses the significance of the icon by transforming the opium-induced serenity of the victim’s face into a negative symbol of his ecstatic attainment of continuity at the point of death. If Bataille were suddenly transported to the Ninth Bolgia, his sacrilegious imagination would no doubt perform the same kind of reversal on the unholy icon of Mäometto storpiato. But Dante has got there before him—a confessedly erotic, at times even homoerotic, spectator of the tortures imposed on the criminally insane. By encouraging a dangerous empathy between the pilgrim-as-reader and the reader-as-pilgrim, the poet has set us up for a tropological breakdown over the spectacle of the Prophet’s cruel and unusual punishment. As with the Hundred Pieces, three viewpoints on the Single Slice are offered to anyone who cannot sustain the rigorously apathetic stance of the Stoic sage or Buddhist monk, a desireless position not even Virgil can adopt here since he is a soul condemned to an afterlife of unsatisfied disio (Inf. 4.42). If we look at the torture through the eyes of the onlookers, our angle of vision is morally compromised either by the Limbo-limits of the guide’s futile rationality or by the perilously expanding scope of the pilgrim’s erotic curiosity. If we adopt the more remote viewpoint of the torturer, the punitive stance of the demon with the sword, our vision may be morally aligned with the dictates of Divine Justice but at an insufferable cost to our humanity since it instantly kills our impulsive compassion for the victim. It would also turn God into the Sade of Sades, a demonic theophany popular only with the Damned and certain French absurdists who don’t believe in Divine Justice anyway. That leaves only one angle open for empathetic entrance: schismatic identification with the sacrificial victim. Cut to Mohammed’s liminal viewpoint, which, like his body, is conspicuously bisected. Its divisiveness is not hard to imagine in temporal
ANTI-DANTE
223
terms, for it can be deduced from his two contrasting speeches. Janus-like, he first looks back at the Sowers of Discord throughout history (Inf. 28.34–6) and then looks ahead to the scandalous schism of Fra Dolcino in the Church’s all-too-foreseeable future (Inf. 28.55–60). Jolted into the present by the pilgrim’s sudden entrance, which disrupts the scandalmongers’ perpetually vicious circle of wounding and healing, Mohammed literally pounces on the “Now” at the start of his first speech [Or vedi] (Inf. 28.30) as if it were a shock not only to Dante’s imagination but to his own. What is hard to imagine from an external viewpoint is Mohammed’s psychologically divided and hence paradoxical perception of “extreme horror” yielding to “divine ecstasy.” It is his peculiar doom as a true Prophet—for as such he must still be imagined, since his shade does not appear as a false one with his head twisted round in the Fourth Bolgia— to experience something like the exaltation of ecstatic release within the horripilating cycle of his mutilations. If looks could kill, the pilgrim’s gaze in the Ninth Bolgia might have ended the Prophet’s sufferings in a stony coup de grâce; but instead, recalling that everything Dante “sees” down below springs from the desiredriven vortex of his visual imagination, we must reckon with the poet’s visionary yearning to enlarge the torment of discontinuity, to stretch out and open up the demonic incision until it becomes a door to the Divine, to keep the entrapping body in some sense imaginatively alive as long as possible in order to penetrate its secret chambers and transcend the agony of fallen human nature. If Mohammed is indeed Dante’s Fou-Tchou-Li, then the infernal icon of discontinuity must eventually reveal its “capacity for reversal” so that we, as its unhallowed spectators, can be made aware of our potential for achieving divine continuity (which is to say, for knowing death intimately) through the salacious evisceration of the victim. Only then might we experience a fantastic liberation from bodily death-in-life without escaping consciousness of the anguish at the living soul’s core, the tearful eros prompting the mystical ascent. This liberating revelation, as Bataille’s response to the Hundred Pieces suggests, is prompted not by Apollonian efforts to veil the icon of discontinuity in serenely rational commentaries but by Dionysian struggles to tear open and confront its obscene irrationality—sadism and all. To discover a “fundamental connection between religious ecstasy and eroticism” in the Ninth Bolgia, we must look deeper into the gaping cavity of Mohammed’s chest, deeper than the tropological commentaries have taken Dante’s orthodox readers, deeper even than the unorthodox analysis of infernal nudity has hitherto prepared us to look. We must
224
PART II
TRASMUTAR
prepare ourselves for a “limit-experience.”25 The threshold of intolerability must be approached unflinchingly in our meditations on the Open Man’s body if its deepest obscenities are to be laid bare before our occhio fisso, and its darkest auguries read in an aesthetic light. For surely his shade should be perceived as an aesthetic object—a figura originally fashioned from dense infernal air into a simulacrum of Mohammed by the creative energies of his soul when it was released from his old earthly body. When his new aerial body rained down to the Ninth Bolgia, it suffered further modification under the demonic iconoclast’s sculpting blade. And now, before Dante’s demiurgic love-gaze, it has opened itself up again to further creative reworking as a sign of the Prophet’s proudly unrepentant will. The widening of the demonic incision into a long gash foreshadows the voluntary body modification practised on the slopes of Purgatory: Manfred, for instance, reveals the ascetic-aesthetic work of his humbly repentant will by opening up a mortifying gash on his forehead so that he appears, at first glance, like a minor shade from the Ninth Bolgia, with one eyebrow divided. Dante-pilgrim mistakenly perceives this wound as evidence of an external attack: “a blow had cloven one of his eyebrows” [l’un de’ cigli un colpo avea diviso] (Purg. 3.108). Back in the Ninth Bolgia, the cyclical design of the Prophet’s contrapasso soon works its “healing” magic on his self-mutilated figure, unmangling it as if it were so much clay for reforming in the image of God. No sooner is the iconoclastic body restored to its former glory, of course, than it is reincised by the demonic blade as an ingloriously living monument to the long-dead Mohammed. What makes this entire process much more appalling to contemplate than the torture itself, what makes it spectacularly obscene, is the insidious pressure the scene exerts on “innocent” spectators (if Dante’s readers imagine themselves as such) to perceive the ritual wounding of the Prophet as the pornographic vision of a master aesthete. It forces upon us, almost without warning, an eroticized fantasy of aesthetic impunity comparable to the Sadean daydream that Bataille entertained in his early musings on the Hundred Pieces. Only here, in the Ninth Bolgia, there are an infinite number of pieces to be carved off the bodies under our surveillance, and even if we, like Sade, have “never actually witnessed a torture session,” our blessed lack of experience hardly affects the damning ferocity of the vision thrust upon or released within us. The dungeon of our (induced) sadistic gaze is maliciously set up so that the tortured souls must lurch and crawl their slavish way back around the ring as if they actually desired the repeated strokes of the master’s sword. Mohammed certainly
ANTI-DANTE
225
acts out the Sadean voyeur’s classic fantasy that the torture victim derives erotic pleasure from intensifying his/her own pain. Not even Pasolini’s fascist roués, gazing at the torture of their young love-slaves through fancy antique binoculars in the numbing conclusion to Salò, go quite as far as Dante in leading us into sadistic temptation— specifically the temptation to collude with aesthetic depravity through voyeuristic fascination with the erotics of horror.26 Dante, of course, also struggled to deliver us from the evils in his infernal dungeon, and so, in his own way, did Bataille. The same cannot be said of Sade, of course, or Pasolini in his final role as the Sadean Dantist. From a male viewpoint—a male erotic viewpoint, that is, since we first “see” the scene through Dante’s Troubadour-trained eyes, which are soon to find their infernal twins in the swinging head of the Ninth Bolgia’s own Troubadour, Bertran de Born—perhaps the most obscene aspect of Mohammed’s torture is the supernatural (and here, notably surreal) reversal of his “natural” gender. He doesn’t lose his penis and testicles, as Fou-Tchou-Li apparently did, through a grisly chop in the groin. What’s left of his virilia must still dangle on both sides of his expanded wound beneath a spray of bowels. But that horror is really nothing compared with the full metamorphic impact of his emasculation. It is the Prophet’s peculiar humiliation to lose his virility in a grotesquely hyperbolic way by being transformed into a walking vagina. To have incised a small female cleft in his crotch would have been one thing—gender reassignment surgery. But to extend the cleft all the way from chin to anus is quite another. It is to create a transsexual freak, a gender synecdoche, a figure of scandalous excess and immodesty comparable to the anthropomorphized “private parts” that turn up as public parts—vaginal faces, labial mouths, penile thumbs, phallic heads—in the erotic art of Dalí, Magritte, and Picasso.27 The notion of the “transsexual freak” does not apply to actual persons who bravely self-identify in public as “transsexual” because they have voluntarily undergone a sex-change operation. Rather, it pertains to strictly imaginary or surreal figures in which the mythic transference of male or female sexual characteristics to a body originally of the “opposite” sex is meant to be envisioned from an aesthetic standpoint as monstrous, repulsive, obscene. At least one medieval artist, the anonymous illuminator of the late fourteenth-century Holkham Hall manuscript of the Commedia, anticipated this Surrealist theme in his transgressively erotic depiction of Mohammed and three other cleft shades in the Ninth Bolgia as Vaginal Men fingering or spreading their new “labia.”28
226
PART II
TRASMUTAR
MS. Holkham misc. 48, p. 42 (North Italy, possibly Genoa; late fourteenth century), Bodleian Library. In this delectably morose illustration of Inferno 28, the first of three for this canto, Virgil points out Mohammed’s invaginating wound to Dante while Ali and an unidentified Schismatic approach the sword-wielding demon for more sadistic punishment. Photo credit: The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
A modern parallel to Mohammed’s obscene exhibitionism may be found in the opening sequence of Madame Edwarda, which Bataille privately published under the holy-card pseudonym “Pierre Angélique.” In its densely philosophical preface—which he signed in his own name as if “Bataille” referred to an emotionally detached commentator on the highly charged seduction scenes that make up the plot—he got down and dirty in an intellectual sense by struggling as usual to penetrate the mysterious contiguity of sex and death. Describing the dying process in an abstracted tone of morose delectation, he anticipated the apocalyptic objectives of the Surrealist religion articulated in his meditations on the Hundred Pieces. If Pseudo-Dionysius had written pornography instead of theology, he might have sounded like this: The act whereby being—existence—is bestowed upon us is an unbearable surpassing of being, an act no less unbearable than that of dying. And since, in death, being is taken away from us at the same time it is given us, we must seek for it in the feeling of dying, in those unbearable moments when it seems to us that we are dying because the existence in us, during these interludes, exists through nothing but a sustaining and ruinous excess, when the fullness of horror and that of joy coincide.29
Transcendence in the old Christian sense is still impossible for this philosopher of the bordello, this Porno-Dionysius. Yet the “feeling of dying” experienced during interludes of ruinous erotic excess or “little
227
ANTI-DANTE
This proto-Surrealistic detail from the second illustration of Inferno 28 in MS. Holkham misc. 48, p.43, shows three Vaginal Men opening themselves up for tropologically earnest inspection—and transgressively erotic display—as scandalous embodiments of schism. Photo credit: The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
deaths” triggers in his psyche an orgasm so powerful that the depths of horror feel like the heights of joy. Like Fou-Tchou-Li on pure opium, Bataille on pure “being” soars out of life’s unbearable agony into death’s ecstatic embrace. Predictably, the far-from-angelic narrator of Madame Edwarda provides his readers with plenty of demonic opportunity to know death through licentious images endowed with an infinite capacity for reversal. In the following scene, for instance, an initiatory glimpse of the sexually ruined body is offered to him at a bar in a Paris brothel. With drunken steps he draws near the lewdly exposed pudenda of a siren-like prostitute, whose alluring voice draws him across the void of discontinuity to her holy-of-holies: Madame Edwarda’s thin voice, like her slender body, was obscene: “I guess what you want is to see the old rag and ruin,” she said. Hanging on to the tabletop with both hands, I twisted around toward her. She was seated, she held one leg stuck up in the air, to open her crack yet wider she used fingers to draw the folds of skin apart. And so Madame Edwarda’s “old rag and ruin” loured at me, hairy and pink, just as full of life as some loathsome squid. “Why,” I stammered in a subdued tone, “why are you doing that?” “You can see for yourself,” she said, “I’m GOD.”30
Why is her voice “obscene”? At first it may seem so simply because she utters a gender-rending blasphemy identifying herself with God—a scandalous parody of “Ecce Homo.” Where Christ declared his fallen humanity at the mouth of his tomb, Madame Edwarda declares her ascendant divinity at the mouth of her womb. By opening herself up for obscene
228
PART II
TRASMUTAR
inspection, she might be regarded as the ruined secular version of a sacred icon such as the Madonna del Parto, Piero della Francesca’s erotically suggestive fresco of the Pregnant Virgin.31 Mary’s delicate hands are surprisingly active in this painting. They are “caught” in the act of opening her shift lengthwise to create a vagina-shaped opening over her swelling womb as if she were intent on revealing the secret chamber of the Incarnation. She doesn’t bray out “I’m GOD,” of course, but her prophetic mime of vaginal dilation implies a continuity with the Divine at a miraculously physical level. Within the Christian tradition, the identification of the self with God would be taken as either an act of demonic solipsism or an actualization of divine union. In the Surrealist religion, by contrast, what’s left of “God” must be rediscovered in the very site of divine absence—Fallen Woman’s immodestly dilated “crack”—where the male erotic gaze is still longingly cast through penetrable “folds of skin” despite the Church’s stern injunctions against lust of the eyes. Reading sacrilegious pornography as a kind of Sadean catechism, the Surrealist mystic can endure the dispiriting agonies of modern atheism by achieving continuity through erotic self-dispossession (“ruinous excess”) leading to ecstatic anticipations of death (“unbearable surpassing of being”). To Pierre’s ears, then, Edwarda’s theophanic declaration sounds more like an oracle than a blasphemy. The obscenity of her voice must spring, then, from something other than what she says—something suggested by her physical appearance, her loathsome nakedness. Pierre himself compares the thinness of her voice with the slenderness of her body, and his synaesthetic comparison implicitly suggests another analogy, which she vividly impresses upon his drunken consciousness while he gazes between her legs. As she opens her lips, she also opens her labia. For a shuddering dreamlike moment, a surreal moment, her mouth is superimposed on her crack, and her voice seems to issue from deep within her vagina. This porno-vision of the hidden source of prophetic utterance may not be so remote from Dante’s erotic gaze as his tropological commentators might lead us to believe—particularly those who read the pudicity of the lover-narrator in the Vita Nuova across the fault line of his exile into the allegories of sexual ruin in the Commedia. At least one modern illuminator of the Inferno, Peter Greenaway, has resisted the orthodox tendency to purge the poet of any embarrassing signs of sadistic engagement with his more seductive characters by forcing a Surrealist sguardo at their computer-regenerated shades on the commercially seduced viewers of television.32
ANTI-DANTE
229
In the fifth canto of Greenaway’s 1993 TV Dante, Francesca appears in the guise of a naked porn goddess adorned with a whorish wig of (appropriately) wind-frizzled curls. As played with world-weary bitterness by Susan Crowley, she becomes the Second Circle’s Madame Edwarda. Fullfrontal shots of her body, along with Paolo’s, are flashily split-screened and freeze-framed to draw satiric attention to the Kabuki-like conventionality of porno-nudity, still an exotically “shocking” sight for television audiences because it both violates and validates the neo-Victorian standards of modesty prevailing in Masterpiece Theatre-style adaptations of literary classics. The representation of Francesca as a consumer object, an advertising image to be manipulated by the male director’s gaze, curiously replicates in televisual rays and digitalized pixels the licentiously transformative “vista” of the turned-on, turned-off spectator in Dante’s dream of the Siren. Greenaway’s infernal take on the screen-siren’s lewdness is not a sadistic vision at first, but the scene heats up in a painful way as soon as the tormented shade opens her mouth. Behind her, in resentful silence, her limp partner begins to shed the tears of Eros. When she gets to her three famous tercets on the amorous suffering of the gentle heart— “Amor…Amor…Amor” (Inf. 5 100–8)—the word “Love” appears three times in burning capitals over her face like a brand seared into her flesh. At the end of her lamentation she will be branded again—this time typologically, with the scorching name “Eve”—as if her iconic status as a Fallen Woman who dared to desire the sacrificial despoiling of her body were not obvious to jaded viewers of television violence, particularly those who enjoy the rapes and murders of that infinite supply of disposable female victims on network crime shows. With relentless Sadean energy, Greenaway snuffs out Francesca’s popular romantic image as a lovelorn heroine by cutting her naked body away shot-by-shot. A newscast clip of her talking head gives way to a tight close-up of her mouth, anticipating her disappearance (made to seem inevitable through the familiar dictates of the TV “time-slot”) into a crowd of lost souls whose anonymous photo-portraits are ritually posted on the screen as the credits roll up. His final coup in her pornographic extinction would surely have delighted Bataille. The last bit of Francesca we’re shown, her voluptuously painted mouth, is turned into a surrealist icon of the vagina as the site of both female speech and male silencing. This transformation is effected by a literal turning of lips into labia at the very moment when her breathy voice is cut from the soundtrack. The close-up in which she silently mouths her final line, “That day we read no further word of it”
230
PART II
TRASMUTAR
[quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante] (Inf. 5.138: translation by Tom Phillips), suddenly tilts ninety degrees so that her magnified lips now open and close longitudinally and her hidden orifice is repulsively revealed like the Siren’s pudenda. Once again the Vaginal Woman is exposed and silenced by a male rhetorical reflex—her lips become a misogynist synecdoche of Fallen Woman—in the very act of prophesying the poet’s amorous return to the Celestial Womb. But what about the Vaginal Man? Can Mohammed’s obscenely cleft figure also be tilted to reveal its anagogic opposite, its mystical capacity for reversal? If his schismatic “crack” is perversely reopened for contemplation as a negative symbol of continuity—like the chest wound of Fou-Tchou-Li or the ruined vagina of Madame Edwarda or the siren lips of Francesca— then a strange but sacred joy might issue from the birth canal of agony like an exultant cri de coeur from the panting mouth of a martyr. The birth of joy from cataclysmic torment and division was prophesied by Mohammed himself in the eighty-fourth Sura of the Koran, an apocalyptic passage known as “The Rending” (Al-Inshiqaaq). The macrocosmic rupture and spillage envisioned by the Prophet eerily anticipates the microcosmic rending of his shade-body in the Ninth Bolgia: When heaven is rent asunder and gives ear to its Lord, and is fitly disposed; when earth is stretched out and casts forth what is in it, and voids itself, and gives ear to its Lord, and is fitly disposed!33
Since the Koran was translated into Latin around 1143, this Sura with its echoes of the Book of Revelation may not have been as culturally remote from Dante’s understandings of schism as his alienating treatment of Mohammed in the Ninth Bolgia may suggest. The Sura warns all apostates and unbelievers, even those who secretly split away from the Faith, that they will be cut down by Allah the All-Knowing, the Invincible Judge who has promised a joyful reward to those who “believe, and do righteous deeds.” The more remote the prospect of joy in the Ninth Bolgia, the more rhapsodic its effect on those who do not turn their eyes away from the scene. Reverse the implications of the parted Prophet, and perhaps a celestial glimmer of the Madonna del Parto (an icon-type not to be visually realized in Italian art until the Renaissance) shines through the horror of her infernal antitype. The dilation of Mohammed’s wound yields a worthless result, mere human waste, merda. But even this result cannot be utterly worthless if it brings to mind the expansion of Mary’s womb, which yielded
ANTI-DANTE
231
a figure of utmost value to humanity, the Word made Flesh, the Messiah. Where Mohammed’s issue, the Word of Allah, continues to exacerbate the already agonizing history of ecclesiastical division—as Dante suggests in the Prophet’s infernally forced “conversion” to Christianity—Mary’s issue, the Word of God, will excite the heavenly host to rejoice in healing the Church’s wounds so that the mystical body of Christ will no longer endure the torment of social fission and political fracture. No doubt also prefigured in the rending of the Prophet is the birth of Dante-profeta at the dawn of Paradiso. For this kind of reversal to occur under the intense conditions of the Ninth Bolgia—shifting our interpretive sights to the anagogic level of interpretation—we must imagine the pilgrim identifying himself no longer with the detached spectator-guide or with the vengeful demon-torturer, but with the torture victim himself, as Bataille would finally do at the climactic turn in his obsessive meditations on the image of Fou-Tchou-Li. Jolted for a shuddering instant to the emotional torture scene at the summit of Purgatory, we behold the transformation of Dante into the Vaginal Man when he encounters Beatrice as the Phallic Woman bent on penetrating him with the “other sword” [altra spada] (Purg. 30.57) of her indignation. The devil’s sword was nowhere near as sharp in its repeated blows, or as well aimed. The tears of Eros flow again at the lovers’ reunion, unleashed “to darken” [tornasser atre] (Purg. 30.54) the blush of amorous arousal. Conceived in this agonizing genderreversal is the high heteroerotic fantasy of the third cantica, the pilgrim’s return to fetal continuity in the enclosed garden of Mary’s Womb with its multitudes of resurrected infants. To tell of this otherworldly regression, he must be born again from the ruins of his old discontinuous worldly self, and only the eviscerating gaze of the Sun raying down his glory deep into the poet’s soul has the power to draw him out of his invaginated body—”from the sheath of his limbs” [de la vagina de le membra sue] (Par. 1.21)—as the satyr Marsyas was once tortured by a Sadean Apollo. Also born from this painful rending is the joyously unified book of Dante’s universe, the body of which is inseparable from the body of his new poem, cut, during the creative agony of its birth, into a hundred pieces. THE HEADLESS MAN
Though Bataille was a professional medievalist with a strong affinity for the chivalric culture from which the dolce stil novo sprang, his idiosyncratic researches never took him near the winding ways of the selva oscura.
232
PART II
TRASMUTAR
As his social philosophy took shape over the 1930s, his obscure role in the dark wood of French intellectual life between the wars turns out to be anything but Dantean in its intellectual drift. During the heyday of L’Acéphale, his secret society of taboo-breaking sociologues whose logo, The Headless Man, was designed by the Surrealist artist André Masson, Bataille comes into his own as a kind of anti-Dante. The lines of opposition between Dante and Bataille are easily charted. Where Dante transcended the self-obsessed lyrics of the Vita Nuova as an ardently erotic spiritualist, Bataille emerges from his youthful surrealist ravings as an arcanely neurotic materialist. Where Dante yearned for divine union with all the force of an Aquinian rationalist, Bataille denies the existence of God with all the chutzpah of a Nietzschean convert. Where Dante loathed the factionalism of local politics, Bataille despises the hegemony of bourgeois imperialism. Where Dante theorized the need for a monarch as head of state, Bataille defends the anarchicdemocratic fantasy of a “headless” local politics. Where Dante deeply desired the triumphant restoration of the Holy Roman Empire, Bataille cries out for irrational participation in the blood lust of primitive cultures in order to dismantle what was left of Christendom after the Great War. Where Dante explored the Superabundant Reality of the afterlife, Bataille acknowledges life only in the Here and Now—a life passionately foregrounded “up unto the point of death” and no further. Where Dante praised Christ for harrowing Hell, Bataille bitterly laments the unhallowing of Hell—the splitting off of evil from the Sacred—as the culturally calamitous result of Christ’s victory over the Devil. Where Dante envisioned an ideal society of blessed souls ecstatically united after death, Bataille repeatedly stresses the agonizing discontinuity of all human beings at the moment of their birth. Where Dante assumed the perpetuation of individuality for all souls in the afterlife, Bataille regarded such a state as not only philosophically absurd but psychologically appalling. Where Dante imagined death for the Damned as a hideous intensification of their alienation from God, Bataille perversely reimagines it for everyone as a deeply desirable process of being recycled into the material ecosystem in order to attain a Zen-like state of unconscious continuity. Perhaps, in view of their radical discontinuity, the worst that could happen by bringing Dante together with anti-Dante would be a small bang—a theoretical explosion—such as physicists imagine happening at the decidedly unerotic meeting of matter and anti-matter. Yet however obscure Bataille may seem, he isn’t a force field of utterly unknowable par-
ANTI-DANTE
233
ticles: something of his world, even of his psyche, can be recovered from his writings and borne with a reader deep into the alien world, and perhaps not so alien psyche, of Dante. Opposites, if approached from oblique angles, usually resemble each other in weird ways. Imagine Bataille entering Dante’s allegorical headspace.34 What might this truly queer penetration yield by way of critical insights into their similarities as allegorists of the Sacred? For a start, Dante and Bataille both strive to expose the mendacious instability of allegory itself—as a peculiarly Catholic form of didactic fiction—because their deepest and most explicit desire for wisdom in an intellectual as well as erotic sense is to break through the human limitations of language and literature into a domain of boundless ecstatic experience. Dante calls this imparadising process, in a famous neologism, trasumanar (Par. 1.70). It is his route towards apocalyptic esperienza on the far side of the ineffability topos. Bataille’s word for it is transgression, and his infernalizing experience of le sacré demands a complete breakdown—or breakthrough—of human consciousness into the primordial whirlwind of the demonic. “It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form,” Bataille proclaims at the infernal start of “The Solar Anus,” an early Surrealist prose-poem which culminates in a fantasy of mind-blowing erotic metamorphosis.35 “When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene,” he raves. “It betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection, a demanding thirst for indecency and criminal debauchery. For that reason I am not afraid to affirm that my face is a scandal and that my face is expressed only by the JÉSUVE.”36 Remarkably similar to Bataille’s surreal conflation of the blood-reflex of shame with the blood-rush of sexual excitement is the erectile blush of Vanni Fucci—”a man of blood and rage” [omo di sangue e di crucci] (Inf. 24.129) as Dante calls him when he suddenly rises erect from his own ashes in the Bolgia of the Thieves. The most indecent and criminally debauched of all the Damned in the Eighth Circle, Vanni is the very incarnation of Bataillean excess in all its transgressive energy. Right on cue, as if the passion of Christ demanded a mirror image on the demonic side of the Sacred, Vanni acts out the obscene role of the Phallic Man, the snaky shape-shifter, who rises and falls, rises and falls, inflating and deflating himself in an eternal parody of the cycle of male arousal and orgasmic “death.” The first thing Dante notices about him after his violent “rebirth” is a change in his complexion:
234
PART II
TRASMUTAR
E ‘l peccator, che ‘ntese, non s’infinse, ma drizzò verso me l’animo e ‘l volto, e di trista vergogna si dipinse… [And the sinner, who heard, did not dissemble, but directed toward me his mind and look, and colored with dismal shame…] (Inf. 24.130–2)
Vanni’s blush is not a mark of “vergogna” in the sense of penitent shame but rather of social humiliation or hurt pride. His face truly becomes scandalous when the blood rushing to it betrays his impious arousal at the thought of sticking it to God, which he promptly does with an obscene gesture known as “the Figs”: stiffly thrusting his thumbs between his index and middle fingers, he “scandalizes” all decent Catholic readers of the poem by raising up his sexualized hands and shouting, “Take them, God, for I aim them at you!” [Togli, Dio, ch’a te le squadro!] (Inf. 25.3). No wonder he’s regularly burnt to ashes by the Lord’s reptilian avengers, the thief’s eternal punishment being the attainment of merely a temporary continuity with the material substrate. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, but not for long in the psychotic ecosystem of the Inferno: Vanni the “Beast” must spring back into discontinuous consciousness, into the anguish of the human, which compulsively tries to “steal” the divine wholeness of primordial continuity from the sacred otherness of animal nature. The agony of his volcanic egotism is his contrapasso. His raging reaction to it is the Dantean counterpart to Bataille’s JÉSUVE, the Dalíesque conflation of “Je suis” with “Jésus” and “Vésuve”: I erupt, therefore I am. No less volcanic, psychologically, is the subsequent spectacle of phallectomy and phallogenesis in the double metamorphosis of Vanni’s fellow thieves, Buoso and Guercio. “I who saw it scarcely admit it to myself,” declares the poet: [io che ‘l vidi, a pena il mi consento] (Inf. 25.48). What he can scarcely admit to himself—though his poem trumpets his admission—is that he has just witnessed a sadistic castration scene and at some level deeply enjoyed it. Now he must pretend to “hide” his obscene joy under the rhetoric of silence and euphemism before the taboo-zone of the concealed membro (Inf. 25.116). The lugubrious game of concealing the male member only draws psychoanalytic attention to what must be the spookiest unmanning scene in all Western literature: the repeated decapitation of Bertran de Born in the Ninth Bolgia. If the homoerotically fearful pilgrim was transfixed by the phallic transmutations of Buoso and Guercio in the Seventh Bolgia, his visual imagination is all but undone by the eruption of libidinal energy at the “poetic” end of the schismatic procession. Castration anxiety hardly begins to describe the poet’s fearful wonder when the end is finally in sight.
ANTI-DANTE
235
The third illustration of Inferno 28 in MS. Holkham misc. 48, p. 44, shows Mosca lugubriously waving his stumps at Dante and Virgil while Bertran de Born (represented, stop-action style, by five headless bodies in a row) upstages his fellow SM slave by waving his phallic head up and down as it ejaculates blood. His fifth body is mislabeled “Geri del Bello,” a shade mentioned at the beginning of Inferno 29. Photo credit: The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
Once a celebrated Troubadour poet, Bertran appears as “a headless trunk” [un busto sanza capo] (Inf. 28.119) holding up his severed head by the hair and swinging it to and fro like a lantern. Excessive by any viewing standards, this performance is the climactic act in the theatre of cruelty that is the ninth division of Malebolge. Like the demon’s sword, Dante’s eviscerating pen splits open all the “evil sacks” of the Eighth Circle to release the foul ordure of fraudulent humanity figuraliter for the ritual purpose of witnessing. The human waste pooling in the bowels of the earth cannot be evacuated literaliter, of course, since what goes into Hellmouth almost never comes out the other end. Shit happens a lot in Hell, but infernal shit never actually gets flushed away. It just collects. As an instrument to bring mysterious innards outwards for magisterial inspection, Dante’s pen might also be compared to the sacred dagger of the Roman augurs and Aztec priests who so fascinated Bataille during his Acéphale period, the ordained witnesses who disemboweled sacrificial victims in order to read oracular messages in their steaming organs.37 The disfigured figure of Bertran is almost absurdly easy to read according to the traditional fourfold method of allegoresis, the hermeneutical “lantern” held out by Dante to Cangrande as the rational reader’s everready tool for illuminating the polysemous shadows within and beyond the selva oscura of the text. Peculiarly Catholic in origin and application, this analytical technique of interpretation appeals primarily to the intellect as the seat of discursive reason and the springboard of divine aspiration. Reflecting on events represented in the fictive present of the literal
236
PART II
TRASMUTAR
level, the fourfold reader relates these at the “typological” level to past literary or historical narratives perceived as parallels or foreshadowings. The reader’s intellectual eye is then raised to the “tropological” level by focusing on the moral implications of the text for a Christian wayfarer in the Here and Now. Finally, gazing towards the “anagogic” level, the reader perceives the relevance of the text to the eternal condition of the Blessed or the Damned in the Hereafter. When Bertran materializes on the literal level of Malebolge, the demonic infusion of his still-living human soul into the cast-off corpse of an executed criminal resembles the eerie life-in-death state of a zombie conjured up in a voodoo rite. He is a walking, talking impossibility. How can a man walk when his body is cut off from his brain? How can he speak when his throat is cut? Dante’s intellectual eye cannot process what his physical eyes perceive. All he can do at this level is to gape at God’s lugubrious game of fitting the punishment to the crime. For Dante the poet, it’s no easy matter convincing himself after the fact, or reassuring his readers now, that he “truly” (literally) saw such a sight. Accept the fact—or shut the book. There’s no other way to resolve the barbarous schism between seeing and knowing here. Typologically, however, the headless trunk is perfectly easy to read. Its literal disconnectedness can be connected to many other figures in literature and history who have suffered the ignominy of decapitation. Medusa, for instance, or John the Baptist. He even glosses himself at the second level—his lantern head opening its ghastly lips to draw an obvious Old Testament analogy: Io feci il padre e ’l figlio in sé ribelli; Achitofèl non fé più d’Absalone e di Davìd coi malvagi punzelli. [I made the father and the son rebel against each other. Ahithophel did not more with Absalom and David by his wicked instigations.] (Inf. 28.136–8)
And since head and trunk are “two in one and one in two” [due in uno e uno in due] (Inf. 28.125), Bertran’s disfigured figura is easy to read as an infernal antitype of the two-in-one nature of Christ, the Light of the World. The talking head immediately reveals his own tropological significance: Perch’ io parti’ così giunte persone, partito porto il mio cerebro, lasso!, dal suo principio ch’è in questo troncone. Così s’osserva in me lo contrapasso.
ANTI-DANTE
237
[Because I parted persons thus united, I carry my brain parted from its source, alas! which is in this trunk. Thus is the retribution observed in me.] (Inf. 28.139–42)
An oracle for Inferno criticism through the centuries, Bertran’s final line about the contrapasso sums up the apocalyptic meaning of his penalty. His glossatorial lantern explicitly reveals the retributive operation of Divine Justice in the life to come, and if its glimmering prophetic light is raised to the anagogic level, the reader may perceive a paradisial inversion of the schismatic’s infernal agony. Only a fool who says “There is no God” could fail to see that the grievous separation of Bertran’s head from his body inversely anticipates the joyous union of the Church as a mystical body with Christ as its head. Never trust internal glossators of the Inferno, however, especially when their moral readings seem like mechanical readouts. They are all deceivers in the Eighth Circle. They have all lost “the good of intellect” [il ben de l’intelletto] (Inf. 3.18) even when they seem to be applying it to explain their mad condition. The easier their commentaries are to understand, the harder they need to be questioned. Might Bertran’s head be an admonitory figure for the discursive operation of the fourfold method itself? Does it symbolize a hermeneutics of allusive connectedness that ironically cuts the intellect off from the heart that love exposes—and from the lower parts that must be concealed? Is it a disturbing metonymy for the Catholic rationalism upon which medieval allegorical exegesis was based? The fourfold method of constructing authoritative meaning out of ambiguous signs, of tracing a reasonable line of thought through the mazes of irrational babble following the confusio linguarum, is reminiscent of the syntax of coherent yet illusory Apollonian rationality described (and debunked with Nietzschean flair) by Bataille at the Dionysian start of “The Solar Anus”: Ever since sentences started to circulate in brains devoted to reflection, an effort at total identification has been made, because with the aid of a copula each sentences ties one thing to another; all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of an Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth. But the copula of terms is no less irritating that the copulation of bodies. And when I scream I AM THE SUN an integral erection results, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy.38
Reading Dante through Bataille is apt to provoke a Jesuvian experience at the hermeneutical level—an explosive feeling of liberation from the illu-
238
PART II
TRASMUTAR
sion of allegorical rationality. What is the infernal rhetoric of allegory but an “irritating” copulation of subjects and complements? Bertran is crazily fused with Christ in the Troubadour’s lament just as “I” is psychotically merged with “the Sun” in the Surrealist’s scream. Despite the intelligibility of Bertran’s self-allegoresis, we must reckon with the monstrous evidence of its applicability to Dante himself—even as the “I” in his narrative must confront the spectre of an eminent poet who has literally lost his head over the divisive impact of metaphoric conflation. Allegorical reasoning provokes apophatic resistance. Bertran is not Christ. Dante is not Aeneas. Bataille is not the Sun. Like the Sun-driven spheres of the Catholic cosmos, the Commedia has too often and too easily been read as a closed textual system obeying Thomistic laws of logic, morality, and cosmic harmony. By providing a decisively anti-Catholic gloss on allegory as a fragile construct of “the Idea” to be exploded by the Jésuve, Bataille also helps to explode the old editorial myth of allegorical wisdom serenely arising out of critical analysis and theological annotation. Just as Dante’s Lucifer created a spiralling funnel through the earth by falling headlong into it and causing the eruption of Purgatory on the other side, Bataille’s Jésuve forces open a critical passageway deep into the irrationally sacred heart of Dante’s volcanic poem. It leads to gaping confrontations with the oltraggio in Dante, his fascination with the outrageous, the excessive, the sacrilegious, the transhuman. Though Bertran de Born never screams “I AM THE SUN” in an amorous frenzy, his (or at least his lantern head’s) appropriation of the Apollonian role of illuminator—an allegorical transformation as mad as any in the poem—cries out for a visceral Dionysian reaction from the Bataillean reader, who, with a psychoanalytic reflex, rejects the Troubadour’s seeming sanity as a commentator on his own outrageous contrapasso. Perhaps Bataillean readings of Dante belong on their own ecstatic plane beyond or behind the anagogic—let’s call it the “acephalic level.” Meanings generated at this level are bound to be politically or psychosexually transgressive, at least by the orthodox standards set by Dante’s taboo-bound American editors, and if these unorthodox glosses succeed in exciting us at all after the dulling effects of postmodern irony, it would be simply because Bataille, like Dante, insisted that his readings of literature and culture from the vanished religious past be profoundly outrageous in order to shock the present age out of its complacent profaneness. What strange meanings would the schismatic figure of Bertran yield, for instance, if we were to read it in relation to the magical Tarot-like image of l’Acéphale?
ANTI-DANTE
239
As an occult emblem drawn by Masson for publication in the review Acéphale, Bataille’s Headless Man (see illustration below) is a paradoxical figure at once heroically imposing and hideously impotent.39 Standing erect on muscular legs, he stretches out his mighty arms at right angles to his totemic torso. Since his physique and especially his stance recall the classical statue-type of a hero or warrior-god, even his missing parts—head, phallus, testicles—hardly seem startling at first glance. You could see any number of figures like that in the Louvre. But this figure is not a lifeless statue: it is more like a Dedalian idol or a Stone Age fetish to be perceived as shockingly, shiveringly alive, and for that reason, to be venerated for its supernatural power. Its magical force is curiously enhanced by its parodic resemblance to Leonardo’s famous drawing of the divine proportions of the male body. With one hand l’Acéphale clutches a small sword or dagger, and with the other, a round organic object that might be a shrunken head with dreadlocks but turns out to be a heart with Aztec-style blood-spurts or charismatic flames ascending from it. No doubt it is his own heart, still hot and beating, which he seems to have just extracted from his chest cavity after slicing open his abdominal wall with his blade. His intestines are displayed like the plan of a prehistoric maze, twisting and turning beneath the orgiastic cosmos represented by the stars stuck onto his nipples or cut out of his chest.
André Masson, The Headless Man, drawing for the first issue of Bataille’s journal Acéphale (June 1936). Reminiscent of Dante’s decapitated alter ego, Bertran de Born, this hermetically sacrificial figure also recalls—and deviously parodies—the Ideal Man of Renaissance humanism celebrated in Leonardo’s famous drawing of the harmonious proportions of the human body. Photo credit: ADAGP, Paris
If the psychotic connection between decapitation and castration needs any further confirmation after Dalí’s exploding men, you can find it in the crotch of l’Acéphale: his missing head reappears as a skull positioned like a memento mori over the erotic taboo-zone where the genitals once
240
PART II
TRASMUTAR
hung. Sex and death have been anatomically conflated here, as they were in Dalí’s substitution of a bone for a boner beneath the Cartesian statueman on the left side of The Lugubrious Game. L’Acéphale is what the Cartesian man suffering from castration anxiety becomes after liberating himself from his head and all the repressive ideas within it. Self-beheaded, self-mutilated, he becomes a Surrealist travesty of the holy-card image of Christ holding out his Sacred Heart to the pious Catholic spectator and demanding worship as a sacrificial victim of his own victorious deathwish. So Bataille himself read the image in “The Sacred Conspiracy,” an article published in the first issue of Acéphale. “Man has escaped from his head just as the condemned man has escaped from his prison,” he proclaimed: He has found beyond himself not God, who is the prohibition against crime, but a being who is unaware of prohibition. Beyond what I am, I meet a being who makes me laugh because he is headless; this fills me with dread because he is made of innocence and crime; he holds a steel weapon in his left hand, flames like those of a Sacred Heart in his right. He reunites in the same eruption Birth and Death. He is not a man. He is not a god either. He is not me but he is more than me: his stomach is the labyrinth in which he has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words as a monster.40
By first disidentifying himself from the Headless Man, and then discovering himself in the monstrous shape as in a magic mirror, Bataille plays out the twin roles of the denying and gaping spectators in The Lugubrious Game. The denial of identification—”He is not me”—only betrays his unconscious desire to free himself from the anguish of discontinuous identity, to enter into continuity through sacrificial mutilation and ritual death, to release his inner monstre sacré in the manner of a Sadean revolutionary or a poète maudit. Liberation from the prison of the head leads to an eruption of poetic fire and anarchic political energy that just might save the money-driven secular world—outrageously—from its own triumphant profaneness, the sterile anomie and social paralysis resulting from the post-Christian rejection of the Sacred as evil. Following the unorthodox lead of Masson and Bataille, let’s superimpose l’Acéphale onto Bertran de Born for a moment, and see where that leads us in the interpretation of Inferno 28. Rather than viewing the agony of the Schismatics and Sowers of Discord as morally explicable in every detail, we must temporarily escape from our heads and confront the demented monstrosity of the sadistic orgy. Its violent excesses cannot be
ANTI-DANTE
241
explained away by Thomistic exegesis. A disjunction between what is witnessed on the experiential plane, and what is willed into knowledge at an intellectual level, is severely imposed by the poet as he recollects his pilgrim-narrator’s transfixing encounter with the damned poet and company. Scattered about their canto are the organic detritus of an imaginary acephalic rite. The labyrinthine intestines of l’Acéphale spill out of the Prophet Mohammed into the mazy passageway of Malebolge, the intestinal circuit of the Inferno. The iconic sword of the sacrificer flashes again in the demon’s sword with its relentlessly eviscerating edge. The missing head of the idol swings in the hand of the Troubadour, his headless trunk still erect after the symbolic castration, and where flames leapt from the brandished heart, an unholy light glows from his lantern face—presumably from his eyes. Like Bataille’s Headless Man, Bertran is a monstrous materialization of Christ the Archmartyr. The Sacred Heart of nineteenthcentury Catholic piety is missing from the parodic figure, of course, but a cannibalistic secular counterpart is associated with Dante’s other great Troubadour-doppelgänger, Sordello, whose lament for the Lord Blacatz summons all the princes of Europe to feast on the heart of a dead poet.41 At the literal level of Inferno 28, we are forced to reckon with the harsh “fact” that God has set up the whole torture scene as an apt punishment for sinners who rebel against his law of concord. At the acephalic level, however, allegoresis becomes perversely atheistic. Discord is the law here—the discord of anguished discontinuity. God drops out of the picture, and an erotically frenzied search commences for the Sacred in a radically humanistic vision of culture, which has been created entirely by Dante’s sadistic fantasia. Here in the parodic underworld of evil, where “crime” and “innocence” are impossible to distinguish, we are given discursive access through Bataille’s “sacred conspiracy” to the complex psychosexual links between Dante and Bertran. What draws the gaping spectator to the ghoulish spectre? If Bataille were reading the semiotics of human sacrifice into this scene, he would surely suggest that Dante’s motivation for gazing springs from a dark erotic desire to end his morbid paura (“anguish” in Bataillean terms) by symbolically identifying and uniting himself with the Headless Man. But Dante is not Bertran, though Bertran may be seen as another anti-Dante. In the beheaded Troubadour, the pilgrim can behold an infernal reflection of himself as a militantly secular, illustriously vernacular, fiercely ambitious political poet who sows discord between rulers with his words. The old Stoic reflex of contemptus mundi (long embedded in the Catholic psyche) must have repressed Dante’s fantastically self-deluding ambi-
242
PART II
TRASMUTAR
tion to be another Bertran—only better, more powerful—for the repression results in Jésuvian blasts of political satire throughout the Malebolge cantos. Yet, through his sacrificial experience of continuity, Bertran is also more than Dante here. He has found beyond himself not God but a “being who is unaware of prohibition,” in other words, his infernal identity as a monster. Fears of emasculation, the downside of the ejaculatory Jésuvian ego, charge the spectacle of Bertran’s beheading with an ecstatic nostalgia for continuity. But continuity with what? The Divine? Not on the acephalic level, for the Divine is absent. Since the Headless Man is neither man nor god, Bertran can only exist here as an evil illuminator of sacred energy sunk in the depths of carnality. As if prompted by this unholy light, a Dionysian intoxication overcomes the pilgrim. His eyes become “so drunken that they long to stay and weep” over the sacrifice of his alter ego [sì inebrïate, / che de lo stare a piangere eran vaghe] (Inf. 29.2–3). But like Bataille who comes to laugh at l’Acéphale, Dante the poet secretly exults in the memory of sadistic orgy and turns its disjecta membra into divine comedy. NOTES 1 Bataille (1994), 90. 2 On Fautrier’s Enfer, see Wilson (1995), 173–78. Bataille and Fautrier did not meet until 1942, twelve years after the Enfer series was abandoned as a failure. Wilson reproduces Fautrier’s lithograph of Inferno 4 as an example of “la peinture informelle” (176). Fautrier’s illustrations for Madame Edwarda appeared in the 1945 edition of the tale, which was first published in 1941. 3 Bataille (1994), 89–90. The two critics are mysteriously identified as “X” and “Durand [?],” the latter name having been corrected by hand to “Duron” or “Durou” in the manuscript. 4 Bataille (1994), 90. The event at the Club Maintenant was hosted by G.–A. Astre, and the audience included the eminent essayist on Sade, Pierre Klossowski, who joined in the discussion. “You are a Catholic,” Klossowski pointed out to Bataille, who deviously responded (83): “I’m a Catholic? I won’t protest, because I have nothing to say. I can also be anything you like.” 5 For Bataille’s essay on Dalí, see “Le « Jeu lugubre »” (1970), 210–16, and “The ‘Lugubrious Game’” (1985), 24–30. Bataille refers to the “halo of death” in Erotism, 237, and describes the “animal state” of sexual arousal and violence as “literally a hell” in “The Surrealist Religion,” 89. 6 Bataille (1986), 237. 7 Par. 23.62: “convien saltar lo sacrato poema” [the sacred poem is bound to leap]. The scriptural prototype for this anagogic participation in the divine order of Creation is the ecstatic leaping of King David before the ark in 2 Sam. 6:14 (Authorized King James Version). Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from the Commedia in this essay are drawn from the Petrocchi edition as reprinted
ANTI-DANTE
8
9
10
11 12
13 14
15 16
243
and slightly revised by Singleton (1970–75). Translations of Dante are my own, though I have checked my renderings against those of Singleton. The components of the Commedia cited from are Inferno (Inf.), Purgatorio (Purg.), and Paradiso (Par.). Also cited is Convivio (Conv.). Centuries of tropological meditation on Mohammed’s disfigured figura are summed up by Bassanese (2000): “His wounds are a literal embodiment of the mutilation of the unified body of Christianity by the schism of Islam” (630). The opening invocation of the Areopagite’s most influential treatise makes this point surabundantly clear despite the intimidating obscurity of the Transcendent Cause. See The Mystical Theology 1 (191): “Trinity, which exceedeth all Being, Deity, and Goodness! Thou that instructeth Christians in Thy heavenly wisdom! Guide us to that topmost height of mystic lore which exceedeth light and more than exceedeth knowledge, where the simple, absolute, and unchangeable mysteries of heavenly Truth lie hidden in the dazzling obscurity of the secret Silence.…” See “Original Skin,” in this volume. My intention in the present essay is not to correct the Bataillean argument of “Original Skin” but to expand its implications within the works of Bataille and to clarify its relevance to Dante’s Inferno by focusing on the sadistic treatment of bodies in the Ninth Bolgia. For a discussion of this painting (also known as L’autopsie or The Autopsy) in relation to Bataille’s meditations on wounding, see Wilson (1995), 175–77. The logic of divine “retribution” is highlighted in the Ninth Bolgia by Bertran de Born’s emphatic use of this technical term as the final word of the canto [Così s’osserva in me lo contrapasso] (Inf. 28.142). That this law-based logic continues to make perfect sense even to—or perhaps especially to—Muslim commentators on the canto is clear from Rasha Al-Sabah (1977), 147–50. Bataille (1986), 11. The emphasis is Bataille’s. Few cultural reflexes are more intense or insistent than the impulse to censor photographic or videotaped records of “murderous passions” (to use Sade’s expression), even when such records might be used as evidence to convict a sadistic murderer. A religious rationale for this kind of censorship was articulated in the case of Canada’s most infamous videographer Paul Bernardo, who recorded the torture of his teenage victims Leslie Mahaffy and Kristen French. “The families of the victims sought, and were granted, intervenor status to argue that the videotapes showing their daughters being assaulted and raped should be suppressed and not shown as evidence in open court,” reports Stephen Williams in Invisible Darkness (596): “They solicited affidavits from clergy who said that the video camera had captured the souls of their dead daughters. As a consequence, screening the videotapes in open court would be seen as an invasion of privacy to which the dead were allegedly entitled.” The souls of the dead are apparently not entitled to any privacy in the Inferno. For variations on the castration scene, see Sade (1996), Part III, 618–19 (criminal passions 121, 129); Part IV, 653–56 (murderous passions 111, 116, 122). On the anti-blazon tradition in medieval rhetoric, see Miller (1993), 377–80. Joseph of Exeter (d.c.1224) turns the heteroerotic male gaze into an eviscerating misogynist scope in his rhetorical dissection of the divinely beautiful but con-
244
17
18
19
20
21 22 23 24
25
PART II
TRASMUTAR
genitally flawed innards of Helen of Troy. For Joseph’s parody of a Vinsaufian descriptio, see Yliados IV, 172–207. This kind of joke against women is turned back on men, perhaps, in Dante’s surgical survey of Mohammed’s guts. Except for a snappy epigram urging Dante “to listen well” [Bene ascolta chi la nota] (Inf. 15.99), Virgil also says nothing during their encounter with the Siren’s homoerotic male counterpart, Brunetto Latini. Bataille (1989), 204. Other photographs of Fou-Tchou-Li’s torment are reproduced on pages 205–206. Considering the sado-erotic context in which these images are freely displayed and discussed without so much as a “Viewer Discretion” warning, I am surprised that Canada Customs in its role as upholder of the Supreme Court of Canada’s 1987 “Butler Decision” still permits the importation of The Tears of Eros into the country from the United States. Perhaps the volume is protected from censorship as a quasi-academic contribution to art history under the “artistic or literary merit” provision of the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1992 ruling on obscenity. See Cossman (1995), 39–40, 140. Bataille (1989), 205. Photographed by Carpeaux, the images first appeared in the 1905 publication Cent Morceaux and were reprinted in 1923 by Dumas for his Traité de psychologie. On Sodoma’s 1525 processional standard depicting the martyrdom of Sebastian, see Rossi (1957), note to plate 63. For a good reproduction of Dalí’s 1929 canvas (still in a private collection) with a scholarly discussion of its psychoanalytic implications, see Maur (1989), 68–69, plate 56. Wilson (1995), 175, includes a reproduction of Fautrier’s 1928–29 oil painting (Musée des BeauxArts, Dijon). Bataille (1989), 206. Bataille (1989), 206. Bataille (1989), 207. On the contemplative moment of reversal when affirmative theology gives way to negative theology, see Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, The Mystical Theology 3 (198): “…when affirming the existence of that which transcends all affirmation, we were obliged to start from that which is most akin to It, and then to make the affirmation on which the rest depended; but when pursuing the negative method, to reach that which is beyond all negation, we must start by applying our negations to those qualities which differ most from the ultimate goal.” The term “limit-experience” usually has a Foucaultian ring to it in contemporary critical parlance, but as my namesake James E. Miller points out in The Passion of Michel Foucault (30), the intellectual quest for limit-experiences is a mark of Bataille’s influence on Foucault: “As a connoisseur of literature and art, by contrast, Foucault, in the spirit of Nietzsche and the French philosophe maudit Georges Bataille, was also interested in exploring experience in what he sometimes called its ‘negativity,’ probing into aspects of human existence that seemed to defy rational understanding.…Heartened by the possibility of changing himself, Foucault sought out potentially transformative ‘limit-experiences’ on his own, deliberately pushing his mind and body to the breaking point, hazarding ‘a sacrifice, an actual sacrifice of life,’ as he put it in 1969,
ANTI-DANTE
26
27
28
29 30 31
32
33 34
35
245
‘a voluntary obliteration that does not have to be represented in books because it takes place in the very existence of the writer.’” On the appalling convergence of fascist aesthetics and gay aestheticism in the murderous final sequences of Salò—Pasolini’s Dantean coda and Sadean palinode to The Trilogy of Life—see Indiana (2000), 87–90. A woman’s nose and cranium assume obscenely phallic contours in Picasso’s 1931 sculptural variations on the head of his mistress Marie-Thérèse (see Cowling and Golding [1994], plates 77–79). The fantasy-woman whose staring eyes and gaping mouth have been replaced by breasts and crotch in Magritte’s The Rape (see Torczyner [1977], 77) is an image freakishly inseparable from the violent heteroerotic male gaze of the rapist. The male figure exploding in the centre of Dalí’s The Lugubrious Game (see Maur [1989], plate 56) is a particularly nightmarish example of a transsexual freak: a vagina appears to be opening up on the side of his head. The fantasy of male invagination following castration predictably turns up as a twisted homoerotic scenario in Sade’s list of 150 “murderous passions” ([1966], no. 122, 655): “After having sheared off the boy’s prick and balls, using a red-hot iron he hollows out a cunt in the place formerly occupied by his genitals; the iron makes the hole and cauterizes simultaneously: he fucks the patient’s new orifice and strangles him with his hands upon discharging.” MS Holkam misc. 48 (formerly Holkham Hall 514), pp. 42–43. Now in the Bodleian Library, this Italian manuscript dates from the third quarter of the fourteenth century. For further medieval illustrations of the Ninth Bolgia, see Brieger, Meiss, and Singleton (1969), 278–79. Bataille (1997), 226. I am indebted to my student Darren David for drawing my attention to this quotation. Bataille as Pierre Angélique, in Bataille (1997), 229. I am indebted to my student Darren David for drawing my attention to this quotation. For a reproduction of the Madonna del Parto (c.1455), see Lightbown, (1992), 189, plate 78. Located in the Cappella del Cimitero at Monterchi, this solemn fresco of Mary is still venerated by women hoping to become pregnant or seeking intercession during pregnancy and childbirth. Greenaway used as his script the 1985 rendering of the Inferno into blank verse by the British poet and illustrator Tom Phillips, who is also listed as codirector of the television project. See Arberry (1995), lxxxiv, 637. Though this homotextual fantasy owes more to Barthes perhaps than to Bataille, I’m offering it here as a critical jeu d’esprit in the spirit of Dante’s invitation for his readers to participate in the creative expansion of his poem. For a visual analogue for the hermeneutical mating envisioned here, see the illustration of blowhole penetration among Amazonian river dolphins in Bruce Bagemihl’s Bataillean fantasia on Darwinian themes, Biological Exuberance, 340. “Il est clair que le monde est purement parodique, c’est-à-dire que chaque chose qu’on regarde est la parodie d’une autre, ou encore la même chose sous une forme décevante.” Bataille, “L’anus solaire” (1970), 81, and “The Solar Anus” (1985), 5.
246
PART II
TRASMUTAR
36 “Quand j’ai le visage injecté de sang, il devient rouge et obscène. / Il trahit en même temps, par des réflexes morbides, l’érection sanglante et une soif exigeante d’impudeur et de débauche criminelle. / Ainsi je ne crains pas d’affirmer que mon visage est un scandale et que mes passions ne sont exprimées que par le JÉSUVE.” Bataille, “L’anus solaire” (1970), 85, and “The Solar Anus” (1985), 8. 37 On Bataille’s fascination with wounds, see his “Le gros orteil” (1970), 200–204, and “The Big Toe” (1985), 20–203); and Wilson (1995), 117. 38 “Depuis que les phrases circulent dans les cerveaux occupés à réfléchir, il a été procédé à une identification totale, puisque à l’aide d’un copule chaque phrase relie une chose à l’autre; et tout serait visiblement lié si l’on découvrait d’un seul regard dans sa totalité le tracé laissé par un fil d’Ariane, conduisant la pensée dans son propre labyrinthe. // Mais le copule des termes n’est pas moins irritant que celui des corps. Et quand j m’écrie: JE SUIS LE SOLEIL, il en résulte une érection intégrale, car le verbe être est le véhicule de la frénésie amoureuse.” Bataille, “L’anus solaire” (1970), 81, and “The Solar Anus” (1985), 5. 39 Masson’s drawing of l’Acéphale is reproduced as an illustration in Bataille’s essay “La conjuration sacrée” (1970), 444, and “The Sacred Conspiracy” (1985), 180. 40 “Il a trouvé au-delà de lui-même non Dieu qui est la prohibition du crime, mais un être qui ignore la prohibition. Au-delà de ce que je suis, je rencontre un être qui me fait rire parce qu’il est sans tête, qui m’emplit d’angoisse parce qu’il est fait d’innocence et de crime: il tient une arme de fer dans sa main gauche, des flammes semblables à un sacré-cœur dans sa main droite. Il réunit dans une même éruption la Naissance et la Mort. Il n’est pas un homme. Il n’est pas non plus un dieu. Il n’est pas moi mais il est plus moi que moi: son ventre est le dédale dans lequel il s’est égaré lui-même, m’égare avec lui et dans lequel je me retrouve étant lui, c’est-à-dire monstre.” See Bataille, “La conjuration sacrée” (1970), 445, and “The Sacred Conspiracy” (1985), 181. 41 “Let everyone split up his heart—yes, let those barons eat! / For they’re all heartless men who could stand a cordial treat!” [Qu’om li traga lo cor e que·n manjo·l baro / que vivon descorat, pueys auran de cor pro]. See Sordello (1987), 109. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alighieri, Dante. La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. Ed. G. Petrocchi. 4 vols. Milano: Mondadori, 1966–67. ——— The Divine Comedy. Ed. C.S. Singleton. 6 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–75. ——— Inferno. Trans. Tom Phillips. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985. Al-Sabah, Rasha. “The Figure of Muhammad.” Yale Italian Studies 1 (winter 1977): 147–61. Arberry, Arthur J., trans. The Koran Interpreted. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955. Bagemihl, Bruce. Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
ANTI-DANTE
247
Bassanese, Fiora A. “Muhammad.” The Dante Encyclopedia. Ed. Richard Lansing. London: Garland, 2000. 630. Bataille, Georges. “L’anus solaire.” Œuvres complètes. Ed. Michel Foucault. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. 79–86. ——— “La conjuration sacrée.” Œuvres complètes. Ed. Michel Foucault. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. 442–46. ——— “Le « Jeu lugubre ».” Œuvres complètes. Ed. Michel Foucault. Vol. 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. 210–16. ——— “Le gros orteil.” Œuvres complètes. Ed. Michel Foucault. Vol.1. Paris: Gallimard, 1970. 200–204. ——— “The Solar Anus.” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. 5–9. ——— “The Sacred Conspiracy.” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. 178–81. ——— “The Big Toe.” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939. Ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. 20–23. ——— “The ‘Lugubrious Game.’” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Ed. and trans. Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. 24 –30. ——— Madame Edwarda. Georges Bataille: My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man. Trans. Austryn Wainhouse. London: Marion Boyars, 1989. 135–59. Reprinted in The Bataille Reader. Ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. 223–36. ——— Erotism: Death & Sensuality. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights, 1986. ——— The Tears of Eros. Trans. Peter Connor. San Francisco: City Lights, 1989. ——— “The Surrealist Religion.” The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism. Trans. Michael Richardson. London: Verso, 1994. Brieger, Peter, Millard Meiss, and Charles S. Singleton. Illuminated Manuscripts of the Divine Comedy. 2 vols. Bollingen Series 81. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Cossman, Brenda. Censorship and the Arts: Law, Controversy, Debate, Facts. Toronto: Ontario Association of Art Galleries, 1995. Cowling, Elizabeth, and John Golding. Picasso: Sculptor/Painter. London: Tate Gallery, 1994. Dumas, Georges. Traité de psychologie. Paris: Alcan, 1923–24. Greenaway, Peter, and Tom Phillips. A TV Dante, Cantos 1–8. Channel Four Television, 1993. Elsevier Vendix, VPRO. Princeton: Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 1996. Joseph of Exeter. Frigii Daretis Yliados. Joseph of Exeter: Werke und Briefe. Ed. Ludwig Gompf. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1970.
248
PART II
TRASMUTAR
Indiana, Gary. Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom. London: British Film Institute, 2000. Lightbrown, Ronald W. Piero della Francesca. New York: Abbeville Press, 1992. Maur, Karin V. Salvador Dalí. Stuttgart: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1989. Miller, James E. The Passion of Michel Foucault. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. Miller, James L. “How to See Through Women: Medieval Blazons and the Male Gaze.” The Centre and Its Compass: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor John Leyerle. Ed. Robert A. Taylor, et al. Studies in Medieval Culture 33. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University Press, 1993. 367–88. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Dionysius the Areopagite on the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology. Trans. C.E. Rolt. London: SPCK, Macmillan, 1920. Rossi, Filippo. Art Treasures of the Uffizi and Pitti. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1957. Sade, Marquis de. The 120 Days of Sodom and Other Writings. Trans. Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1966. 181–674. Sordello. “Lament for Lord Blacatz.” The Poetry of Sordello. Trans. James J. Wilhelm. New York: Garland, 1987. 108–11. Torczyner, Harry. Magritte: Ideas and Images. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977. Williams, Stephen. Invisible Darkness: The Horrifying Case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. Toronto: McArthur and Company, 1996. Wilson, Sarah. “Fêting the Wound: Georges Bataille and Jean Fautrier in the 1940s.” Bataille: Writing the Sacred. Ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill. London: Routledge, 1995. 172–92.
PART III TRASUMANAR
Rainbow Bodies The Erotics of Diversity in Dante’s Catholicism James Miller
A
scending from one level of enlightenment to another is Dante’s chief ritual action and constant mystical aim throughout Purgatorio and Paradiso. It is also the insidious goal of heretical doomsday cults bent on escaping the erotic complexities of life in the body. Does the pilgrim who achieves liftoff from the Holy Mountain ultimately succeed in escaping the vortex of sexual passions unleashed in Inferno 5? If so, then a theological question urgently arises in the field of Christian apologetics and must be addressed in light of Beatrice’s prophecies. Does the poet who descends from the Empyrean to claim Catholic orthodoxy for his poem in the name of St. Peter (Inf. 1.134) succeed in preventing his spiritually buoyant project of trasumanar from falling into the Gnostic fissure between flesh and spirit?1 For anyone seeking a way out of the storm of fleshly passions—as Dante reveals in his uphill battle to distinguish true from false prophets— it’s no easy matter figuring out whose levels of enlightenment are to be trusted as stages in the ascent to perfection, as steps on the “ladder erected on high” [scaleo eretto in suso] (Par. 21.29).2 While St. Paul repeatedly advised the faithful to seek heavenly bliss by exercising self-restraint through sexual repression—an ascetic counsel that established his incontestable moral authority among the Orthodox as a prophet of salvation— Beatrice perversely urges Dante-pilgrim not to lose but to loose his “hot desire” [Solvi il tuo caldo disio] (Par. 21.51) in questioning her prophetic wisdom.3 Any true understanding of her exalted life, she insists, must be an amorous vision arising from intimate communication between herself and her repentant lover. Accordingly, Dante-poet sets his self-implicating struggle to affirm her prophetic wisdom, not just on the political
249
250
PART III
TRASUMANAR
battleground of Truth (where the Church Fathers had ritually waged war against heresy) but also on the psychological hunting ground of Love. HERETICS AT HEAVEN’S GATE
Following a prophet who promises a shortcut to Heaven through the extinction of desire can have fatal consequences for the Unorthodox. In March 1997, for instance, thirty-nine members of Heaven’s Gate—an organization of Cyber-Gnostics based in San Diego County, California— thought they could rise to the “Next Level” (or the “Evolutionary Level Beyond Human” as they called the Kingdom of Heaven) by committing suicide in tandem with a rare astronomical event, the approach of the comet Hale-Bopp to its orbital point nearest earth. Their leader, Marshall Applewhite, claimed to be an extraterrestrial who had been transported to earth long ago on an alien spacecraft and briefly incarnated as Jesus Christ. In his Second Coming, as the Prophet “Do,” he had returned to earth in the 1940s as the captain of a UFO expeditionary force whose members had “moved into” human bodies and subsequently scattered throughout the world. As the new millennium approached, he felt it was high time for his long-lost crew to gather with a select group of earthlings and beam themselves up with him to Heaven. A video tape made shortly before their souls were scheduled to leave their “body-containers” reveals how excited the prophet and his chosen people were by the concurrence of the comet’s advent with the arrival of Easter.4 In the aftermath of the Heaven’s Gate suicides, the American media responded to the apparent death of orthodoxy in the free-thinking era of the Internet by absurdly assuming the heresy-exposing role of the Inquisition.5 Public fears that the Internet had fallen to the Dark Side of the Force were certainly not dispelled by the eerie sight of the corporatestyle logo flashing at the cult’s homepage. By beaming the Heaven’s Gate logo into innocent living rooms via the nightly news, the television networks repeatedly tempted their viewers to peep through the cult’s apocalyptic keyhole into the unorthodox world of the cult members: a world where Exodus prefigures Star Trek, and Captain Kirk beams up the Saved, and suicide becomes a class trip to Heaven on an alien spaceship hidden in a comet’s tail. Hale-Bopp, full of grace. Instead of revealing Heaven on the other side of the keyhole, the TV cameras flagrantly exposed what the police camcorders had chillingly scanned at the beam-up site. How often that Holy Week was the public compelled to peer into the strangely impersonal bedrooms of Apple-
RAINBOW BODIES
251
white’s “monastery” in Rancho Santa Fe, where the bunked bodies of the suicides lay neatly arranged with triangular pieces of purple cloth over their heads! This spate of religious voyeurism required a strong counterimage to pull America back into the real world of old-time Family Values, and the networks (not wishing to lose viewers to reruns of The Twilight Zone) duly provided glimpses of the Church Triumphant in reassuring segments about the life-affirming joys of Easter celebrated by radiant Christian congregations ringing the black hole of heresy in Rancho Santa Fe. The True Faith still springs eternal in the soul of America, thank heavens, and no false prophet with a Dr. Spock hairdo can destroy it.
“Cult leader Marshall Herff Applewhite” on the cover of Time (Canadian Edition), 7 April 1997. The grainy image, supplied from video footage by Associated Press’s APTV service, effectively “outs” the Hale Bopp heretic as a homosexual hypnotist from the planet Vulcan. Photo credit: APTV-AP
What Watergate was to American politics, Heaven’s Gate may be to American religion—a massive “test of the system” that must identify an insidious virus at its core in order to “prove” the ultimate integrity of the nation’s doctrinal hard drive. Applewhite may zap his crazy eyes at the world for years to come on network rewinds of his suicide tape, but the faithful who tune in to the weekly Hour of Power need fear no evil from this demented wizard. Television has burnt him repeatedly at its electronic stake: the dishes of pill-spiked pudding and glasses of eleventh-hour booze his followers received are just the latest vessels in the long succession of poisoned chalices offered by heresiarchs to their sects in the Devil’s communion. Their prototype is the biblical cup of abominations that inquisitorial apologists of medieval Catholicism desperately tried to empty before the End of the World. Evidently the cup still runneth over. If the Heaven’s Gate coverage accomplished anything for the apologists of orthodoxy at our fin-de-millennium, it has been to raise new public alarm over the old cultural link between heresy and homosexual-
252
PART III
TRASUMANAR
ity. With prophetic urgency, the mainstream media plugged the old heterosexist doctrine that heretical evil is both a cause and a consequence of erotic perversion. Heaven’s Gate would never have happened, pundits insisted, if Applewhite had not lost the “straight way” in the middle of his life. After divorcing his wife in the late 1960s, he tentatively “explored” his sexuality by having an affair with a male student at St. Thomas University in Texas. St. Thomas naturally did not approve of this crime against nature, and so poor Marshall lost his teaching post. As if that scandal wasn’t bad enough, he went on to make the classic gay career move by becoming a closeted choir director and local musical theatre star. So deep-seated is the identification of Christian orthodoxy with sanity and moral purity that the media had only to hint at Applewhite’s closetry in order to characterize the unorthodoxy of his sci-fi doctrines as both mad and bad. His pop-cultural fantasy of anagogic escape from the “disappointments” of earthly existence appears to have been sustained by ritual acts of mortification and purification; since suicide became the purgative terminus ad quem for his heretical hackers, the media Inquisition wasted no time in interpreting their deaths as a projection of the heresiarch’s “mad” efforts to extinguish his gay identity. First he tried dieting, it seems, but that only made him look gayer. Then he tried a new haircut. No go. If he was ever to purge himself of homosexual desire and finally attain post-sexual bliss on the Next Level, something else had to be cut. The San Diego PD autopsy reports disclosed to a “stunned” public that the Gnostic Trekkie had made the ultimate sacrifice for an American male: like the ancient priests of Cybele he and seven of his male disciples had undergone castration (or “surgical neutering”) to prove their readiness for alien abduction to Heaven’s Gate. So that explains the weird glint in his eyes: the same gay male gaze that made Dante feel uncomfortably “cruised” [adocchiato] (Inf. 15.22) in the sterile plain of the Sodomites now transfixes us as we peer apprehensively at the tanned face of Applewhite, the Bad Teacher.6 Has Brunetto’s shade returned to haunt us as a videotaped projection of our worst nightmare about secular education? Through the spuriously immortalizing mediations of TV and the World Wide Web, Applewhite’s shade will linger on in the popular imagination as a charismatic cruiser with a dark erotic secret to hide behind his outwardly benevolent image as the Prophet Do. “Marshall Herff Applewhite was gay,” confirms a Net inquisitor: There are rumours that he had one or more affairs with male students when he was a music teacher. He is believed to have checked himself [into] a hospital over two decades ago in order to overcome
RAINBOW BODIES
253
his homosexual feelings. This occurred when many therapists believed that a person’s sexual orientation could be changed. Needless to say, the therapy was unsuccessful. One theory being proposed is that he was unable to accept his sexual orientation because of the homophobia that he had absorbed during his youth. This motivated him to live a celibate life and to create a group which also suppressed their sexual behaviour. Another theory is that among UFO groups, there is a widespread belief that extra-terrestrials have no vocal cords, an atrophied digestive system and no sexual organs.7
A time-tested way to assert and defend orthodoxy in a religious sense is to project its opposite onto the shadow screen of homosexuality. The glee with which TV reporters and Web pundits outed the Prophet Do as a psychotic closet case eerily parallels the sodomy charges hurled at the Cathar heretics during the heyday of St. Dominic. What would Dante have made of Heaven’s Gate? No doubt he would have located the Next Level somewhere on the far side of the Gate of Hell, well below rather than above the earth, and probably also much farther down the Scale of Being than the angelic heights occupied by the cult’s tabloid-alien role models. If Applewhite isn’t smouldering at this very moment in a crowded Sixth-Circle tomb, his bodiless shade is probably sprouting branches in the Wood of the Suicides or dragging entrails around the Bolgia of the Schismatics. Soon, no doubt, we’ll be able to check out the Hell’s Gate website for details of his contrapasso. Perhaps the Dantean domain closest in spirit to Heaven’s Gate lies— oddly enough—on the other side of the Gate of Purgatory. Though the Purgatorio bears little obvious resemblance to the media coverage of the cult, both offer unexpected revelations about the complex religious connections between purification, orthodoxy, eroticism, and anagogy. Both strive to defend a right-thinking way of reaching the Next Level (and the Next and the Next) from pernicious worldly steps to self-advancement or from poisonous escape routes to collective happiness. Both also raise tough heresy-skirting questions about the value of the human body—or the earthly “flesh-suit” as Applewhite called it with the marketing savvy of a California designer. How does the fleshly body figure in the traditionally spiritual quest for human perfection? Should an upwardly mobile soul simply discard its body as so much useless luggage, like the bags packed and then left behind by the suicides before their UFO getaway? Or can the living body and its organic processes be somehow integrated into the anagogic dance of purgation?
254
PART III
TRASUMANAR
THE DIGESTION OF SPERM
Though Dante’s answers to such questions are philosophically subtler than Do’s, they are hardly more orthodox in their prophetic implications. In approaching the Commedia as an unorthodox apology for the erotic life as a mode of prophecy—and for aesthetic anagogy as a mystical esperienza—I shall focus on the Purgatorial notion of the body as a “container” or “vessel” (vas, vaso, vasel, vasello). Biblical as well as philosophical in origin, this highly malleable image serves to link the poet’s medical understandings of the leaking body, specifically the digestive and reproductive systems, with his personal theological anxieties over heretical deception and homoerotic desire. In the narrow stairway leading up from the Sixth to the Seventh Cornice on Mount Purgatory, midway between the anorexia support group of the Gluttons and the aerobic exercise class of the Lustful, Dante asks Virgil one of those difficult and potentially embarrassing “how” questions that children like to pose to their parents about the workings of the digestive system. “Come si può,” he boldly inquires, puzzled by the emaciated appearance of the Gluttons on the Purgatorial diet plan, far magro là dove l’uopo di nodrir non tocca? [How can one grow lean there where the need of nourishment is not felt?] (Purg. 25.20–1)
As if explaining digestion in a living person weren’t hard enough, try explaining how it works in a dead one—or, to be more precise, how it appears to work overtime for a formerly fat soul in a post-mortem body created out of thin air. If a Heaven’s Gate member had innocently asked Do whether he/she should pack a lunch for his/her trip to the Next Level, his macabre answer can hardly have been loonier under the circumstances than the magisterial lecture on digestion elicited by Dante’s quaestio. The potential for heretical quackery here is enormous. Like a family doctor wisely consulting a specialist in a particularly difficult case, Virgil passes the question on to the newly liberated soul of the poet Statius: Ma perché dentro a tuo voler t’adage, ecco qui Stazio; e io lui chiamo e prego che sia or sanator de le tue piage. [But, in order that you may find rest in your desire, here is Statius, and I call on him and pray that he be now the healer of your wounds.] (Purg. 25.28–30)
RAINBOW BODIES
255
As a soul just released from the torments of the Holy Mountain, Statius knows the mysterious connection between digestion and purgation from the inside; but as he modestly explains to Virgil, he now understands it from the outside, too—from the divinely objective viewpoint of the Saved—since his newly purified intellect can find the answers to all medical queries in the How and Why Wonder Book of the Divine Mind. In the generous spirit of the Celestial Hierarchy he will offer his intellectual inferior what he calls “the eternal view” of the question [la veduta etterna] (Purg. 25.31) as well as an explanation of its temporal implications. Though Statius surely knows from a peek at the Divine Mirror that Dante has for some time been a grown man with a wife and kids, he begins his lecture—perversely enough—by filling the pilgrim in on the facts of life: Sangue perfetto, che poi non si beve da l’assetate vene, e si rimane quasi alimento che di mensa leve, prende nel core a tutte membra umane virtute informativa, come quello ch’a farsi quelle per le vene vane. [The perfect blood, which never is drunk by the thirsty veins and is left behind as it were food which one removes from the table, acquires in the heart an informing power for all the bodily members, like that blood which flows through the veins to become those members.] (Purg. 25.37–42)
This “perfect blood” in a man is semen, which begins as a mess of leftovers from the ordinary blood dished out from the “table” of the heart to the bodily members through the veins. Having not benefited yet from a prophetic reading of Harvey’s treatise on the circulation of the blood, Statius understands the cardiovascular system as working along digestive lines—just as Aristotle had taught in the De generatione animalium (1.17–19, 726a–b).8 This “seminal” passage from the Master of All Who Know had been digested by Dante at his banquet of wisdom: E però dico che quando l’umano seme cade nel suo recettaculo, cioè nella matrice, esso porta seco la vertù dell’anima generativa e la vertù del cielo e la vertù delli elementi legati, cioè la complessione; [e] matura e dispone la materia alla vertù formativa, la quale diede l’anima [del] generante… [I declare, therefore, that when the human seed falls into its receptacle, the womb, it brings with it a threefold power: that of the generating soul, that of the heavens, and that of the elements of which
256
PART III
TRASUMANAR
the seed is composed, that is, of its own constitution. It matures and disposes the matter to receive the formative power, which is given by the soul of the male parent…] (Conv. 4.21.4)9
The Aristotelian heart combines the functions of a stomach, a kidney, and a testicle or uterus. After changing digested food into “imperfect” (not completely processed) red blood through its own digestive powers, it then completes the process by purifying leftover red blood into two “perfect” distillates: the white fluid ejaculated by men and the menstrual blood produced by women. Bodily fluids in this anatomical scheme either temporarily pool in internal cavities such as the “lake of the heart” [lago del cor] (Inf. 1.20); or they gradually leak out through cracks or orifices such as the “fissure that drips with tears” on the Old Man of Crete [fessura che lagrime goccia] (Inf. 14.113). If the outward flow is blocked, the result is physiological hell. The body-vessel painfully bloats, collapses, suffers hideous disfigurement, loses its formal stature as a divine image. The dropsical body of Maestro Adamo is the incarnation of the infernal “holding tank” or “trough” that contains but cannot expel whatever “has rained down” into its stagnant pool [piovvi in questo greppo] (Inf. 30.95). Some controlled outflow, then, is a good and necessary thing for a body. Like the current of Lethe, the flow pattern in any living vessel is gravitationally directed inward and down, then outward and down, and finally around and down to the centre of the earth. Human reproduction is therefore strictly dependent on gravity, as Statius points out to Dante with a tactfulness not met with in literature again until the Anglican vicars in Victorian fiction: Ancor digesto, scende ov’ è più bello tacer che dire; e quindi poscia geme sovr’ altrui sangue in natural vasello. [Digested yet again, it descends there whereof to be silent is more seemly than to speak; and thence afterwards drops upon other’s blood, in natural vessel.] (Purg. 25.43–5)
Procreative intercourse has rarely seemed so trouble-free or so gender-neutral. From his veduta etterna, Statius perceives sex neither as a grand lifeaffirming joy nor as a grim death-defying labour. In the Big Scheme of Things it hardly figures at all: it’s literally a drop in the bucket, a tiny controlled leakage from one vessel to another. Troublesome notions like “male” and “female” barely enter into the embryological picture here— sexual difference serving as a familiar metonymic conveyor of the old cosmological distinction between “informing principle” and “receptive
RAINBOW BODIES
257
material.” Like a nourishing solution in an IV-drip, perfect blood quietly drops from the tip of the unmentioned male container (which modern medicine still euphemistically terms a vas) into the natural vasello of the womb. Unlike St. Peter, Statius does not characterize the wife’s body as a “weaker vessel” than her husband’s (1 Peter 3:7)10 but as a “natural” receptacle for the mixing of his digested blood with hers. As a natural philosopher he “scopes” the hidden operations of engendering at such close range that men and women, along with their gendered personal pronouns, ironically disappear from his lecture. In this Purgatorial context the term “natural” simply means organically generated rather than culturally fashioned. The morally heated significance St. Thomas gave the term in his discussion of crimes against Nature, for instance, does not raise any volcanic steam from the cool flow of Statius’s lecture. As the embryo takes shape in the womb, it naturally moves and feels at a subhuman level like a genderless “sea sponge” [come spungo marino] (Purg. 25.56), an organic vessel that absorbs fluids easily through its many pores but does not effectively contain them. Only when the First Mover breathes new spirit into the womb, replete with a new virtue that absorbs the spongy powers of the embryo into its own creative substance, does the principle of self-containment enter into the unborn baby so that it too becomes a natural vasello. In other words, the new human being receives “a unique human soul which lives and feels and circles back on itself” [un’alma sola, / che vive e sente e sé in sé rigira] (Purg. 25.74–5). Ontogeny clearly follows philosophy here rather than phylogeny. PURGATORIAL EMBODIMENT
Noting that this curious digression on sperm and sponges “has been something of a scandal in the history of Dante criticism, not only because of its apparent irrelevance, but also because of its technical aridity,” John Freccero has offered an ingenious reading of the lecture that makes it both theologically relevant to Dante’s hylomorphic conception of purgation and aesthetically pleasing as a rationalistic complement to his otherwise fantastic doctrine of poetic inspiration.11 Freccero insistently reads the lecture back into the discussion of poetics linking cantos 18 through 24 of the Purgatorio. Since Virgil as a damned soul cannot fully understand the mysterious process by which the second cantica has risen from the “dead poetry” of the Inferno [la morta poesì] (Purg. 1.7), he must defer to a Purgatorial graduate like Statius for a conclusive explanation of how God breathes spirit into anything—be it an embryonic body-vessel or an
258
PART III
TRASUMANAR
embryonic poem—so that it may contain its appropriate measure of creative virtue, intellectual light, animating harmony. Looking even further back in the poem to the description of Manfred’s wounds (Purg. 3.108–13), Freccero asks a question similar to the pilgrim’s stump-the-poets inquiry about the emaciation of the repentant Gluttons. Why does the otherworldly purgatorial body bear signs of worldly change, marks of historical trauma? If Manfred’s post-mortem physique is retrospectively conceived in Statian terms, it may be seen as a purgatorial embryo acted upon by the synergy of two informing “virtues”: the creative power of the warrior’s own soul, which has simply recreated his old earthsuit, wounds and all, out of air in a brief “out-of-body” experience following death; and the supremely creative power of the Divine Artist who will miraculously repair this broken vessel—convert it into a fittingly refigured container for Manfred’s gradually purified soul—as it is borne from cornice to cornice up the mountain. Similarly, the binge-purgers on the Sixth Cornice appear wasted, not because they haven’t eaten in centuries but because their souls after death fervently desire to impress the outward form of ascetic discipline upon their new aerial shapes as a sign of their repentance. When they finally graduate from body sculpting to rock climbing, the Divine Artist will reward them by fleshing out their cadaverous frames with the fulfilling gifts of the Holy Spirit. In so far as the purgatorial body is subject to the combined powers of the individual soul and the Divine Will, it corresponds to the ever-malleable materia of the poem as a whole, which is converted, canto by canto, into an increasingly fitting vessel for the Spirit. In order to ground the admittedly far-fetched fantasy of Dantean purgation on the familiarly rational and firmly orthodox bedrock of Augustinian theology, Freccero had no choice but to deny the possibility that Dante-poet might actually have believed what Dante-pilgrim had heard about gestation and rebirth from the born-again Statius. For, if the first part of Statius’s lecture is recycled Aristotelian embryology in perfect accord with orthodox scholastic teachings about human conception, its conclusion, the extension of these teachings to the purgatorial afterlife, is not only preposterous from a strictly Aristotelian viewpoint but also in Catholic terms doctrinally strange, to put it mildly. “Except for a passing reference in Hugh of Saint Victor,” Freccero observes, “there does not seem to be a precedent in specifically Christian thought of the Middle Ages for the belief that the soul could unite with the air in order to form an aerial body, although that demons had such power was a commonplace of popular and learned belief.”
RAINBOW BODIES
259
Heaven forbid that Dante should transfer to good Catholic souls a power enjoyed hitherto only by devils! Even if his enthusiastic imagination was simply extending a “popular and learned belief” of his time beyond the pale of orthodoxy to help rationalize a preposterous poetic detail, his rational intellect could not have entertained such a fiction as anything but that—something made up, an aesthetically pleasing fancy, a Geryon-deception without the sting. “Neoplatonic thought might well admit such a possibility,” Freccero zealously continues, “but the Christian emphasis on the indissoluble unity of the human composite and the Aristotelian theory of hylomorphism to which Dante subscribed rule out the possibility that Dante means us to take the fiction seriously as metaphysics.”12 So that old dodge, the “allegory of the poets,” prevails when Freccero reads Statius’s lecture at the literal level; only when it is read as a coda to Dante’s Pentecostal poetics—read, that is, from Freccero’s neo-Augustinian perspective as a signifier per litteram of conversion in spiritu—does it deserve to be taken seriously. And to be taken seriously means only one thing here: the passage must be interpreted according to the “allegory of the theologians.”13 Though Freccero advises us to discard the prophetic conceit of aerial bodies as a “mere” fiction when we have grasped its retrospective significance for purgatorial poesis, he would have us perceive God’s “creative power” [virtute informativa] (Purg. 25.41) as “truly” inhering in the body of the reborn poem no less than in the body of a newborn person. “Truly” at least for Dante. Whatever we may think of his mimetic essentialism now—and from postmodern positions of constructivist enlightenment it’s bound to seem thoroughly silly—it was a perfectly reasonable foundation of belief for a scholastic theologian way back then. PURGATORIAL SEX
As a thought experiment on the margins of orthodoxy, I propose that we reverse the direction of Freccero’s theologically retro reading. What significance might Statius’s lecture have for us (as the pilgrim’s progressive followers) if we read it forward as a prophetic introduction to the Cornice of the Lustful? In the doctrinal danger zone of lust, towards which Statius draws the pilgrim with his distinctly anaphrodisiac account of sex, Dante will literally find himself on “the edge” of Catholic sexual morality. As the abyss of perverse error yawns beneath him, he will move with Love’s heavenbound heretics through the flames of purification— a self-imposed auto-da-fé from which his mortal body will miraculously emerge without a mark.
260
PART III
TRASUMANAR
With its controllable drips and creative effluences and inspirited contents, the mortal body described by Statius functions as an incarnative allegory of Purgatory itself—just as the dropsical body of Maestro Adamo replicates the Inferno with its uncontrollable downfalls and stagnant pools and dispiriting contents. If the bodies we are born with, our “natural vessels,” are mini-purification plants, then the digestion of blood into spermatic or menstrual fluid is a purgatorial process miraculously conducted on the inside of our bodies long before our souls have even considered flowing into the air outside them. The exhalation of the soul from the body at death is surely prefigured, at an organic level, by the ejaculation of sperm and the flow of menstrual blood during our life in the earthly “flesh-suit.” The body’s self-purification process would be infernally incomplete, truly imperfect, if there were no creative outlet for the perfect blood. Sex not only provides such an outlet. It serves to complete the purification process at a physical level, perfecting it as a recreative or procreative act. But for whom? Though Statius explicitly describes procreative intercourse between a man and a woman, the purgatorial implications of his lecture would presumably apply to any sexual activity in which one person’s perfect blood “drops over another’s in a natural vessel” [sovr’ altrui sangue in natural vasello] (Purg. 25.45). What if that sangue happened to come from another man or the natural vasello happened not to be a vagina? A homosexual mingling of “l’uno e l’altro” wouldn’t be hallowed procreative intercourse, of course, but it would still be “purgatorial sex” (in the best possible sense) if the spillage were temperately controlled and lovingly motivated. Not an expense of spirit in a waste of shame, mind you, but an investment of semen in a future of love. An infernal parody of purgatorial sex—specifically the physical mingling of “l’uno e l’altro” prefiguring the exhalation of homo-souls bound for the Seventh Cornice—may be glimpsed in the seventh ditch of Malebolge: l’un per la piaga e l’altro per la bocca fummavan forte, and ‘l fummo si scontrava. [the one from his wound, the other from its mouth, smoked violently, and their smoke met.] (Inf. 25.92–3)
Instead of perfect blood issuing from their bodies, dense smoke billows out from the shades of the thieves Buoso and Guercio who give each other the malocchio version of the cruising gay male gaze. The paradisial opposite of this homoerotic union would be the spiritual telos of purga-
RAINBOW BODIES
261
torial sex between men, which Dante hints at in his invocation to Apollo at the start of the third cantica. In order for the deity to fill him with transhumanizing light, the poet must be refashioned into such a “vessel” [sì fatto vaso] (Par. 1.14) as might worthily contain the treasured spirits of the Blessed. This heavenly vessel was once contained within his purgatorial body—just as the satyr Marsyas was once contained within the “sheath” of his flesh [la vagina de le membra sue] (Par. 1.21) before Apollo flayed him. Like perfect blood, the glory of God must be poured out in order for it to be recontained. So don’t keep it bottled up inside: let it flow, let it flow, let it flow. The more ejaculation, the more purification. The more purification, the more inspiration. Lest Statius end up sounding here like a cross between Dr. Ruth and Anaïs Nin, we should recall his Aristotelian temperance and Christian modesty: he doesn’t use philosophy to incite lust in his student or to preach that we should go with the flow of our inner being in order to attain paradise on earth. Sex won’t get anyone to heaven in the Purgatorial world. However, Statius does allow for the pleasing physiological possibility—a decidedly irregular Catholic thought—that the regular digestion and purgation of sperm might at least help a lover get high up Mount Purgatory regardless of sexual object-choice or orientation. The social validation of this inference literally runs past the pilgrim and hugs his poetic alter ego Guido Guinizzelli on the Cornice of the Lustful. Guido’s company turns out to be those whose “sin was hermaphrodite” [peccato fu ermafrodito] (Purg. 26.82) in so far as they derived excessive pleasure from the act of joining male with female (“Hermes” with “Aphrodite”). After Dante has moved a few paces round the seventh ledge with these proto-heterosexuals, he glimpses a “new people” [nova gente] (Purg. 26.40) coming round the mountain in the opposite direction. Guido cheekily identifies these lustful souls as samesex lovers for whom the term “queen” once hurled at Julius Caesar by a saucy crowd is still, hilariously, applicable: “‘Regina’ contra sé chiamar s’intese” (Purg. 26.78). If this group had been the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, they would surely have greeted Dante with a rousing rendition of “She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes, when she comes”: an ejaculatory refrain perfectly in tune with Statius’s lecture. However, they appear to be very early pre-Stonewall homophiles.14 They have a rudimentary group identity and a liberation movement of sorts but no name of their own—at least none that Dante reports apart from their sincerely repentant identification with the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah:
262
PART III
TRASUMANAR
Tosto che parton l’accoglienza amica, prima che ‘l primo passo lì trascorra, sopragridar ciascuna s’affatica: la nova gente: “Soddoma e Gomorra”… [As soon as they end the friendly greeting and before the first step there speeds onward, each one tries to shout the loudest: the newcome people “Sodom and Gomorrah,”…] (Purg. 26.37–40)
Dante can hardly be called “unorthodox” in his treatment of sexual orientation in Purgatorio 26 for the simple reason that before that revolutionary canto was written the now familiar notion of sexual orientation—a notion still doctrinally embattled—did not exist in Catholic thought. Or in Western thought, for that matter. Dante-profeta envisions sexual orientation quite literally as the distinguishing direction of erotic companionship manifested in the physically opposing (but not spiritually opposed) movements of the two companies running around the mountain. If the presence of the queens on the burning road came as a shock to some of Dante’s original readers, it was because he dared to place the “new people” on an equal footing with their straight counterparts. To entertain such a vision of loving cooperation across the Homo-Hetero divide has only become officially unorthodox in the modern period—ironically—with the Vatican’s vicious pronouncements on the ontological inferiority of homosexuals in the heterosexist Chain of Being. Freccero’s aesthetic reading of Purgatorio 25 implicitly protects Dante’s orthodoxy as the modern Vatican would define it—and presumably defend it, since Dante is not on the infamous Index these days. That the poet should have transferred a popular superstition about the aerial bodies of demons into the doctrinally hypersensitive domain of human gestation and resurrection is simply unthinkable to Freccero. Why? Because it openly flirts with heresy or smacks of demonic influence? I suspect Freccero (like most learned Americans at a cultural distance from Heaven’s Gate) doesn’t much believe in demons. He may not even care a fig about contemporary Vatican pronouncements about sexuality. His formalist explanations for Dante’s wackier imaginings are meant to make sense of the poem as a self-contained aesthetic design—not to rationalize its prophetically conflicted relation to the World or even to reconcile its radical eroticism with the papally approved model of heterosexual monogamy. Though Freccero does not shrink from labelling as plainly heretical Dante’s revelations about the damnation of “neutral angels,” for instance, he tactfully stops short of exposing the poet to Vatican attack for daring to imagine the no less heretical salvation of same-sex lovers. Maybe he’s pro-
RAINBOW BODIES
263
tecting Dante from fundamentalist readers who would smell a homo wherever a heretic is burnt. Neutral angels, it seems, present much less of a threat to the moral health of today’s youth than spiritually engaged and physically active queens, who, you may be sure, are very far from neutral on the subject of the Divine Plan. Freccero’s conclusion that Dante never meant us to take the lecture of Statius seriously as a prophetic passage about the afterlife says more perhaps about the critic’s own “faith journey” than about the poet’s. For, if Dante actually believed that our souls would fashion iridescent aerial bodies for sojourning in the Next Level, then we, following the critic’s rational advice, could no longer actually believe in Dante’s authority as a great, uncompromisingly orthodox Christian poet. He would have to be reclassified as a crypto-pagan Neoplatonist, at best, or at worst, as a religious crackpot from the Outer Limits. He would have to fall in our collective estimation to the abysmal level of Marshall Applewhite. The spectre of a Florentine “Do” crowned with laurel leaves looms unattractively before us. Is Freccero wisely preventing the formation of a fanatical Dante cult, whose members, no doubt, would eventually be found dead with rainbow flags over their bodies and copies of Singleton’s commentaries covering their faces? How long can the formalist allegoresis of beautiful lies protect Dante from the doctrinal scrutiny of Dateline NBC? OFF STRAIGHT STREET
Dante was hardly cold in his grave when his orthodoxy became a hot issue for the Dominicans, whose sainted founder has been hailed in the Sacred Poem as the relentless hewer-down of “li sterpi eretici” (Par. 12.100). Heretical “stalks” or “trunks” were thick on the ground in the Dark Wood of the inquisitorial imagination. Even after St. Dominic had chopped down enough heretics in Languedoc to clear a way to Paradise for himself and his followers, there were still plenty of thorny shoots springing up all over Italy to lead Dante astray in the shady piedmont of the Mons Domini. By 1323 a brief but belligerent refutation of Dante’s theory of monarchy was already circulating among the Dominicans under the militantly moralistic title De reprobatione monarchiae. Its author was an ambitiously zealous friar from Rimini named Guido Vernani—a character Manzoni might have created for the cynical amusement of the nineteenth century. If Dominic (to extend Dante’s lumberjack metaphor in Paradiso 12.100–5) was the Paul Bunyan of the medieval Inquisition, a legendary
264
PART III
TRASUMANAR
giant hacking away at the thickets of heresy in the “orto catolico” (Catholic garden) of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, then Father Guido, by comparison, is the mendicant equivalent of a pesky smalltown clearcutter intent on felling the towering pride of an old-growth forest. Dante must have known that someone in the Church Militant would try to do a hatchet job on him sooner or later. His orthodoxy is massively self-defended. No less an authority on the faith than St. Peter examines him on the Creed amid the fixed stars and finds his performance, inevitably, stellar. Why does the poet receive (or award himself) this summa cum laude if not to clear himself in advance of any possible charges of heresy stemming from his high fantasy of joining the Celestial Hierarchy without the Pope’s blessing or knowledge? Just to be on the safe side, following the lead of Virgil who had ceremoniously “crowned and mitred” Dante on the threshold of the Earthly Paradise [te corono e mitrio] (Purg. 27.142), Peter graciously triple-crowns him with astral fire on the threshold of the Empyrean: così, benedicendomi cantando, tre volte cinse me, sì com’ io tacqui, l’appostolico lume al cui comando io avea detto: sì nel dir li piacqui! [so, singing benedictions on me, the apostolic light at whose bidding I had spoken encircled me three times when I was silent, I so pleased him by my speech.] (Par. 24.151–4)
Pleasing speech need not be opposed to right-thinking, Dante implies, despite the inquisitors’ reflexive equation of sophistic eloquence with heretical mendacity. The heavens themselves announce the election of “Pope” Dante. As the first (and as far as I know, the only) divinely appointed lay pontiff in the Catholic tradition, he would surely have nothing to fear from the Domini Canes. Let the Watchdogs of the Lord howl at his miraculous elevation. If Father Guido had attacked only the speculative arguments for the necessary separation of papal and imperial power outlined in the Monarchia, then his bark would have been worse than his bite. But he sank his teeth into more than Dante’s philosophical prose. The epistolary preface to the De reprobatione (sniffily addressed to Guido’s “very dear son Gratiolo di Bambaioli, Chancellor of the Noble Commune of Bologna”) also made a snarling attack on the poetry of the Commedia. “The pernicious Father of Lies,” warned the friar,
RAINBOW BODIES
265
has his vessels [sua vasa], which, though adorned with painted colours and false figures of truth, contain within their outward appearances of honesty a poison the more cruel and harmful the more transcendent a rational soul is known to be compared to a corruptible body, or the more eminent a life illumined by grace is known to be compared to the death of someone who did not stand firm in the truth but fell through pride.15
The old Virgilian image of a carefully crafted poem as a vasum, a painted or figured cup containing immortal truths conveyed from the poet’s soul to the reader’s lips in a sweet pastoral communion, is direly transmuted by the inquisitorial imagination into a poisoned chalice—fatal not only to the “fallen body” [corpus corruptibilis] but also to the “rational soul” [anima rationalis].16 Drink from this cup, and you don’t just die. You die mad. Though Guido has preserved the classical distinction between rhetoric and dialectic by mapping form and content onto the imaginary “outside” and “inside” of the poetic vessel, he has censoriously refigured this aesthetic topology as a moral dichotomy. The beauty of rhetorical colours and figures shiftily hides (even as it shakily “contains”) the mortal peril of the poet’s supposedly heretical message. Instead of sweet Apollonian truths, which would hardly have been to a Dominican’s taste under the best of circumstances, Dante-eretico has filled his vessel with bitter demonic lies and offered it to his easily intoxicated readers, who thirst, poor fools, for poetic pleasure when they should be begging for a good healing dose of ascetic doctrine. Thus does Guido turn the culturally palatable and mildly dismissive notion of the “allegory of the poets” into a major public health concern, a cause for paranoid panic over the vulnerability of souls and bodies to the Father of Lies. While generations of Catholic readers were taught to regard the beautiful lies of poetry as disposable containers or harmless artificial sweeteners for the capsule of Truth—the medieval equivalents of Styrofoam cups full of aspartame—Guido would have the defenders of orthodoxy affix warning labels to all such products. Dangerous to the Environment! Known to Poison Minds! Contains Demonic Additives! Induce Purging Immediately! But what if the poetic vessel were advertised as a Circean cup full of erotic enchantments? How could the unsuspecting non-Dominican reader resist such a goblet or such a brew? With a growl of ascetic indignation, Guido savages Dante’s reputation as a poet of Divine Love by darkly extending and direly eroticizing the poem-as-vessel analogy. “Truly,” he avers,
266
PART III
TRASUMANAR
among other such vessels [of the Devil] there was a certain man [namely Dante] who went about creating many poems in a fantastic manner. Though pleasing to many through the eloquence of his outwardly alluring words, he was a verbose sophist who brought in “theatrical strumpets” (as Philosophy said in her consoling speech to Boethius) to enhance his poetic fantasies and fictions; thereby, in a fraudulent manner, singing the sweet songs of the Sirens, he lured not only sick souls but also zealous and learned ones into destroying the Truth that brings health.
Guido’s warning here deserves to be taken seriously. He’s got one thing right: for anyone who subscribes wholeheartedly to the Vatican’s narrowly prescriptive views on erotic behaviour and sexual identity, Dante is a very dangerous author. Any male poet who sings like the Sirens, instead of merely singing about them, has to be read with extreme caution. No reader of the Commedia can easily ignore the fantastic allure of Dante’s desire-driven poetics; or deny his visionary transgression of deepseated Catholic taboos against immodesty and impurity and impudent knowledge of “secret things” [segrete cose] (Inf. 3.21); or dismiss his idiosyncratic pre-Vatican II effort to redeem mortal lovers of diverse sorts, including those deemed unnatural and hence irredeemable by the scholastic philosophers of St. Dominic’s order. If Dante’s authorship of the Fiore, a Tuscan reworking of the Roman de la Rose, is ever firmly established, his vernacular status as an allegorist of love in its corporeal as well as spiritual dimensions might be more widely accepted or at least recognized.17 Recently Teodolinda Barolini has argued that the old heresy-haunted question of how to interpret the Commedia—as an allegory either of the poets or of the theologians—has resulted in a critical impasse around Bruno Nardi’s crucial questioning of Dante’s poetic vocation. 18 Yet Barolini’s formalist efforts to rescue Dante from the theologizing embrace of Freccero and Singleton has led to an elaborately aesthetic begging of Nardi’s devastatingly simple question: Is Dante a prophet? Perhaps this impasse might be avoided if we read the Commedia as a something closer to the Roman—a perversely vernacular work to be read according to the strategically irrational (which is to say, highly fantastic) “allegory of the lovers.” Like the allegory of the poets, the allegory of the lovers entails the eventual discarding of a “husk,” namely, the mortal body of the beloved, in an effort to reveal and digest its spiritual contents. But since the lover’s spirit lies within a mortal vessel and seeks another to pour itself into, the container being an inherent sign of its contents, the allegory of the lovers shares a metaphysical interest in mimetic essentialism with the alle-
RAINBOW BODIES
267
gory of the theologians. So strong is the fantasy of redemptive love in Dante that the discarding of the mortal body at death does not result in psychic disembodiment (as it was supposed to do for the members of Heaven’s Gate) but in a miraculous sequence of physical re-embodiments, spectacular materializations, for the soul. If that’s a crazy fantasy, it’s surely no more so than any other version of the Resurrection of the Flesh. By making the fantastic seem perfectly natural in his poetic universe, Dante effectively disturbed the theologically policed boundary between the natural and the unnatural. His untheological pursuit of salutifera veritas in blatantly psychosexual directions (where he himself felt most in need of “health-bringing truth”) couldn’t help but threaten, even as it continues to push, the fragile envelope of Catholic orthodoxy. If Dominic had quizzed Dante on his self-confessed desire to hurl himself down among the athletic dancers on the desert of the Sodomites, I’m sure he would not have passed the orthodoxy test quite so readily. Despite Dominic, I cannot read Dante’s generous treatment of same-sex lovers on the Cornice of the Lustful without wishing to grant him an immediate lifetime membership to Queer Nation, Dignity, and ACT UP.19 As an honorary Gay Heretic he can be usefully enlisted to fight the Good Fight against Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Ratzinger, and the entire Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Though I do not share Father Guido’s aversion to the songs of the Sirens, his insistence on their importance to Dante’s poetic designs on our souls is worth considering as more than a theological ploy to discredit the allegory of the poets. The good friar is certainly right to distinguish Lady Philosophy’s “real” Muses from Dante’s fantasy ones. After censoriously banishing the Muses of the Theatre from Boethius’s tear-flooded prison, Lady Philosophy swiftly replaced them with her own inspirational chorus, the celestial Sirens from Plato’s Republic, who could not be easily dismissed as poetic fictions because they had long been identified with the Muse-ordered planets of the Pythagorean cosmos (De consolatione I, prosa 1).20 But the old erotic Muses who had made Boethius weep and wail and blear his eyes—however prostituted they were after centuries of serving comic poets rather than grave tragedians—were precisely the right ticket for a poet intent on reinventing comedy out of the tragic fictions of Virgil’s Underworld. Dante let Boethius’s passionate Muses back into his poetic universe, along with Apollo and both peaks of Parnassus, without a trace of Lady Philosophy’s contempt for their humble status as mythological fantasies.
268
PART III
TRASUMANAR
Their imaginary immanence in the Commedia, moreover, is heightened rather than transcended by the alta fantasia that reigns down from the Empyrean in the form of Beatrice. Unlike Lady Philosophy, who has a Roman Stoic’s aversion to strong emotions, Beatrice likes to see a grown man cry once in a while. It clears the vision. Inspired by her Muse-like intensification of long-buried feelings, the Commedia becomes a vessel to collect and recollect Dante’s many tears, which, but for his cathartic flair for the dramatic, would either have dried up inside him or dripped silently away to join the inferno-bound stream of bodily fluids leaking from the Old Man of Crete. In Guido’s extension of the poem-as-vessel analogy, the poet himself becomes a vaso—one of the Devil’s own special vats for stirring up the venom of heresy with the varnish of eloquence. Nothing could be more Dantean, ironically, than this metonymic version of the analogy. Fra Gomita the barrator, for instance, is hailed by his fellow pitchmate Ciampolo as the “vessel of every fraud” [vasel d’ogne froda] (Inf. 22.82). The moral antitype for all such deceptive vessels in the poem is St. Paul, whom the Lord converted from a bad-mouther of the disciples into a “vas electionis,” a “chosen vessel” of Christ’s truth, in Acts 9:15. Dante turns this biblical phrase into an epic epithet for the Apostle in his proselytizing role as the bearer of the True Faith to the capital of the pagan Empire. Just as Aeneas had been “chosen by the Empyrean heaven to be the father of glorious Rome” [ne l’empireo ciel per padre eletto] (Inf. 2.21), so Paul became “the Chosen Vessel” [lo Vas d’elezïone] (Inf. 2.28) by journeying to Rome to confirm the True Faith, which is “the route of salvation” [la via di salvazione] (Inf. 2.30). Paul’s first road of salvation had literally been a highway, the Road to Damascus leading to “a street which is called Straight” where he became God’s chosen vessel (Acts 9:11). His proselytizing extension of that salvific via to Rome serves as an allegorical figure of the pilgrimage route during the Jubilee Year of 1300, when the Pope promised to turn everyone who journeyed in the Faith to the Holy City into a chosen vessel full of the Spirit. Though Dante-pilgrim humbly denies any identification of himself with the charismatic Apostle—”I am not Paul” [io non Paulo sono] (Inf. 2.32)—he clearly aspires to become a chosen vessel, too, through his otherworldly journey to the Rome where Christ is Roman. Though he begins on the deviously winding path of the smarrimento rather than on Straight Street, his route to the Empyrean is typologically modelled on the Pauline mission to the Romans. To encourage him in this orthodox direction, Peter Damian, leader of the contemplative chorus in the Heaven of Sat-
RAINBOW BODIES
269
urn, bids him contemplate the mystical image of Paul as “the great vessel of the Holy Spirit” [il gran vasello / de lo Spirito Santo] (Par. 21.127–8), whom good priests model themselves on when they pour forth the truth about salvation from their pulpits. Needless to say, under the wicked sway of Boniface VIII, most preachers have turned into vessels of fraud like Fra Gomita or into vessels of false doctrine like the heretical Cardinal Ottaviano degli Ubaldini. These wicked vessels, in turn, become wickedly “envesselled” through the infernal inversions of the contrapasso. Hell now contains their souls, even as their souls once contained hellish ambitions and doctrines. Fra Gomita sinks out of sight as a piece of overcooked meat in a diabolical stewing pot. Cardinal Ottaviano is packed away like old junk in Epicurus’s incinerating coffer. Dante, by contrast, seems physically uncontainable throughout the poem. The iron walls of Dis cannot hold him down; the stone chasms of Purgatory cannot hold him back; the fiery core of the Sun cannot hold him in. By portraying himself as the ultimate escape artist who finds release from an amazing succession of worldly containers—a kind of mystical Houdini—Dante figuratively “proves” his adherence to orthodoxy in the etymological sense suggested by the Pauline “street which is called Straight.” Long before Virgil leads him through the Gate of Hell, the pilgrim appreciates the higher authority of la diritta via, the route of “straight” behaviour and “right” thought (Inf. 1.3) that his sinful life has caused him to forsake in favour of circuitous byways and labyrinthine digressions. Tropologically, through Beatrice’s guidance, he ultimately finds himself at the heavenly start of the Straight Way he had lost in the first tercet of the poem. En route he implicitly retracts his original denial of self-identification with Paul by re-enacting (indeed surpassing) the Apostle’s mysterious ascent to the Third Heaven. Take heed, Father Guido. To question Dante’s celestially expansive orthodoxy is tantamount to doubting Paul’s: a tall order even for a Dominican. Both used their charismatic gifts of eloquence—Paul in his epistles, Dante in his cantos—to lure sick souls towards the Truth. Both depended on the massive authority and influence of their writings to prove to future generations that they had become great vessels of the Holy Spirit through divine election. Pace Freccero, my critical inclination is to rejoice in the anti-Augustinian thrust of Dante’s daringly unorthodox fantasy of erotic redemption. Since I lost the Straight Way myself long ago, I see no earthly reason why we shouldn’t take Statius’s lecture on the formation of rainbow
270
PART III
TRASUMANAR
bodies very seriously as a spiritually engaging and socially uplifting prophecy about the afterlife of lustfully leaky sinners who shed their perfect blood in mortal vessels. Sometimes even wacky religious prophecies come true in unexpected ways. Every Gay Pride Day, for instance, I see plenty of rainbow bodies hugging one another and running around on hot pavement with a surprising abundance of anagogic energy.21 ESCHATOLOGY OF THE CLOSET
What happens to same-sex desire in Paradiso? Does it inform the harmonious interplay of knowing and loving that Beatrice defines as the life of the Blessed? Or does it disappear from the poem altogether—as a hindrance or irrelevance to trasumanar—at the moment of apparent heterosexual triumph when Beatrice supplants Virgil as guide and redirects Dante’s amorous gaze upon herself as they lift off for the stars? These questions literally hang in the air at the end of Joseph Pequigney’s groundbreaking essay “Sodomy in Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio,” the first serious study of the Commedia to articulate and defend distinctively gay readings of Dante’s allegorizations of desire.22 What happens to same-sex desire in Inferno is all too clear to Pequigney. As an out gay scholar writing in the 1990s—his critical vision of apocalyptic sadism having been sharpened by Moral Majority politics in the 1980s— he can hardly survey the punishments in the Seventh Circle from the safe aesthetic distance or look down on the immoral dancers of Disco Inferno from an unassailable moral high ground. Mapping the fate of Ser Brunetto onto his own academic position, he implicitly raises the question: Is Dante’s God a homophobe? No doubt the sadistically entertaining imperador who makes all the punishments fit the crimes in the Inferno is worthy of Reverend Jerry Falwell’s vindictive adoration, but as Pequigney rightly observes, Dante represents this Mikado-like deity indirectly through the appalling effects of his vendetta on the Damned. The torments of the Sodomites, in particular, seem designed to unsettle (rather than to reinforce) long-established acceptance of the contra naturam arguments shored up by scholastic theologians against the imaginary tides of lust and violence flooding the tight little channels of heterosexist piety. So you want a vengefully homophobic God, do you? Let’s just see what such a Volcano of Wrath would do to distinguished scholars like yourself! Thus does Pequigney’s Dante challenge the false prophets of the Religious Right. The God of Inferno doesn’t just wipe the poor sods out in a flash like the one-time destruction of the Old Testament Sodomites. No, he forces
RAINBOW BODIES
271
them to endure the genocidal horror of Sodom perpetually—denying them after death even the finality of the Final Solution. Worse still, by placing their shady bodies under the rain of fire, he further reduces them to charred zombies and then forces them to dance out a hideous hide-slapping parody of their erotic restlessness. Worst of all, he increases their secret humiliation from a social standpoint by having his inspired poet “out” them to posterity. Once revealed for what they were, they can be reviled for what they still are—cunning recruiters for Team Sodom. After sodomy has been performed as an ironic amusement from the violently objectifying viewpoint of God, sodomitical desire is then shockingly experienced and confessed by the pilgrim himself. Its fatal workings are finally perceived from a trembling subjective viewpoint as Dante-pilgrim teeters on the stony margin of Phlegethon, eager to hurl himself down among the boys in the sand. Fear alone represses his loving impulse to “embrace” them. Like most religious homophobia, his paura is more than a simple fear of the blackening effects of fire and brimstone on complexions and reputations. It is a dread resulting from the sudden discovery of same-sex desire lurking in the infernal closet of the self. Dante’s confession of his own homoerotic leanings is less astonishing to Pequigney than the inclusionary treatment of the Sodomites in Purgatorio 26. That same-sex desire should surface at all in the regimented world of Purgatory is cause for wonder—it even takes the pilgrim for a loop when he first catches sight of the flaming “queens” racing around the bend towards him on the Cornice of the Lustful. This unprecedented scene strikes Pequigney as a rehearsal for the Gay Liberation movement many centuries before the queens took on the police at the Stonewall Inn. If Dante does not exactly invent the modern distinction between homosexuality and heterosexuality on the Seventh Cornice, here at least, risking the flames himself at the exhilarating edge of unorthodoxy, he boldly allegorizes the psychosocial concept of “sexual orientation” for the first time in Western literature and envisions the formation of gay community on the basis of a shared “sexual identity.” The aerobic flamers of the Seventh Cornice may be purging their souls of excess lust, as all good Catholics should do; but like a prototypical Dignity group, they apparently have no fear or intention of losing their identity in the process. Their sexually contrary nature—as Dante dares to speculate after his Marian education in mercy on the Holy Mountain—must be a gift from God. According to Pequigney, who hails the Purgatorio as a foundational text for gay theology, “Dante’s thinking about homosexuality obviously and demonstrably evolved, drawing farther and farther away from the
272
PART III
TRASUMANAR
thought of Aquinas and the other scholastics as composition of the Commedia proceeded and finally reaching a position that was extraordinary for his own age and so advanced even in ours that dantisti have yet to catch up with it.”23 This conclusion is bound to rile queer theorists from the Halperin camp who refuse to believe that Dante could have thought about homosexuality—literaliter—since the word didn’t exist in his era and wouldn’t spread its baleful essentialist influence over Christian theology until our own.24 Nevertheless, taken spiritaliter, Pequigney’s encomium of Dante as a Gay Lib prophet has a certain counter-canonical appeal to gay dantisti who have read the voluminous arguments of Richard Kay denying the existence of same-sex desire anywhere in the Dantean Universe (including the Inferno).25 Curiously, the collective noun dantisti functions in Pequigney’s essay as an academic euphemism for all unenlightened zealots who entertain genocidal fantasies about homosexuality. If most reasonable Dantists have yet to catch up with the poet’s advanced thinking on sexual difference, what hope have those rabid Baptists who threatened to wave “AIDS Cures Fags” placards at the funeral of gay-bashed “martyr” Matthew Shepard?26 They don’t believe in Purgatory anyway, even as a humanistic vision of Divine Forgiveness worth entertaining for thirtythree cantos, and nothing short of the heavens opening up and displaying a few fabulous gay saints will convince them that same-sex desire leads anywhere but to Hell.
When the Sods instead of the Saints go marching in—as we did in 1994 during the Gay Pride parade down First Avenue to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots—it’s time for the outrageously homophobic Westboro Baptist Church to wave their “Fag Shame” placards. Note the Church’s through-the-looking-glass parody of the Rainbow Flag. Photo credit: James Miller
RAINBOW BODIES
273
Just at the point where Dante’s fantasy of sodomitical redemption breaks away from Old Time Religion and really becomes transgressive, Pequigney recoils from confronting his contemporary polemical foes and quietly refrains from asking the hot-button question that’s bound to detonate explosive reactions in the Heartland. Do gays go to Heaven? Translated back into the self-insulating idiom of Dante scholarship, this question sounds merely “academic”: Do the Sodomites of Purgatorio graduate to anything discernibly queer in the desire-driven universe of Paradiso? In other words, does Dante (or Dante’s God) include their love in the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars? If so, then Matthew Shepard’s mourners have some cause for singing a Te Deum very loudly at the diehard phobes from the Westboro Baptist Church. Why Pequigney dropped his taboo-breaking argument on the threshold of Eden is hard to say. Perhaps he feared a bomb in his mailbox. What happens to same-sex desire in Paradiso is a question worth asking, nevertheless, and for at least two reasons. First the effort of answering it will be of genuine theological interest to gay believers yearning for some new Eve to write an “Eschatology of the Closet” for them.27 And second, for non-believers who just want to expand their understanding of Dante, it is a question for which answers—literary answers—can be readily found in the text of the third cantica. If it were merely a heavy conundrum for gay dantisti to roll over and over in their minds like the rocks in the Fourth Circle of Hell—forever clashing against the hateful agitprop rolled against them by their straight adversaries on the Religious Right— any critical inquiry into the queerness of Paradise would be an infernal exercise in frustration. Following Pequigney, Gregory Woods in his recent History of Gay Literature simply begs the question by turning the notion of sodomitical salvation into a campy pederastic joke. “Of course,” he cautions, “we ought to remember that the Commedia consists of three parts, and that no matter how well respected the sodomites are in the first two, nothing can detract from the fact that they are altogether absent from the Paradiso; or at least, it may be that Paradise contains only those who have got away with it. Remember that Dante’s guide throughout the Divina Commedia is, of all people, that renowned lover of boys, Virgil.”28 Virgil may have been a lover of boys in his classical heyday, but in his medieval afterlife he was not Dante’s guide “throughout” the poem—only through Hell and part of Purgatory. Ironically, by projecting Virgil’s shade into Heaven, Woods appears to contradict his initial assertion about the total absence of same-sex lovers in the third cantica. This mistake betrays a touching
274
PART III
TRASUMANAR
desire on his part, as a gay (if not especially careful) reader of Dante, to find room for at least one well-respected gay author in the Celestial Hierarchy. While his explicit denial of queer presence in Paradise clearly reflects prevailing theological doctrines and common glossatorial assumptions about the impossibility of salvation for same-sex lovers, it also darkly mirrors the rhetorical exclusion of gay spirits from the afterlife advocated by Kay and other avowedly straight dantisti. What Kay did for Hell, Woods does for Heaven. If Paradise contains only those Sodomites “who have got away with it”—who have tricked God, in other words, by passing as straight saints—their closets have gone with them straight into the Empyrean. Yet this flippantly parodic version of Paradise cannot be Dante’s Heaven, for secrecy and sneakiness are necessarily absent from the circles of telepathic souls dancing around Beatrice. How can there be closetry in a zone of divine libertà where everyone is mentally “out” to everyone else? Woods is correct, however, in suggesting that no sphere in Paradise is specifically reserved for successful graduates of the ex-Sodomite movement in Purgatory. There is no Heaven of the Church Queens, for instance, and no petal in the Rose reserved for aesthetically gifted Florists. Presumably, when gay spirits take off from Eden, they are assigned their proper places in the celestial chorus according to the same planetary correspondences and dispositional criteria (e.g., venereal/martial, active/ contemplative) that govern the “natural” differentiation and distribution of straight souls throughout Heaven. The Pride Parade slogan “We Are Everywhere” would apply to the heavenly host no less than to earthly society. Indeed, it must also apply to the society of the penitent in Purgatory, which is a shadowy preface of the beata societas. Since every saint-to-be must climb all the way up the Holy Mountain and travel around every ledge to purge all seven sins, there must be lots of homos below the Seventh Cornice—Gay A.A. members, for instance, on the Sixth Cornice, and angry Act Uppers on the Third. Only in the opposing choruses of the Lustful can Dante distinguish the penitent sods from the “Pasiphaë and the Bull” crowd. Only as the sods approach the lowest limit of Paradise do they “come out” in a distinct social group, hiding nothing from each other or from their straight counterparts, not even their reluctance to hug each other. The purgative flames of the burning road—unlike the punitive flames of the Inquisition—prepare these sexual contrarians for inclusion in the cosmic design of Paradise. Dante based his dynamic vision of the cosmic chorus on the choreia astrôn of Plato’s Timaeus (40d) where the planetary dances along the Cir-
RAINBOW BODIES
275
cle of the Different were joined by the Demiurge to the rounds of the fixed stars along the Circle of the Same.29 This oppositional yet harmonious design is ritually imitated in the spectacle of the same-sex lovers encountering but not arresting the different-sex lovers in their mutually opposing revolutions. Both “orientations” around the Holy Mountain are natural in this cosmic design. Both rehearse the souls for the spiralling dance of anagogy. Both are ultimately liberating. In contrast to Woods, who sees no anagogic liberation for the purgatorial queens or any other homoerotically inclined soul in Dante, Bruce Holsinger approaches the question “What happens to same-sex desire in Paradiso?” by focusing on the homoerotic subjectivity of Dante himself— which does carry over from earth to the spheres as the bewildered pilgrim of the selva oscura gradually transhumanizes into the bedazzled poet of the somma luce. If Holsinger as the first queer theorist to explore the Dantean heights has a mission in his 1996 essay “Sodomy and Resurrection,” it is to boldly go where no Foucaultian has gone before.30 Down in the Seventh Circle, as Dante is perilously inclining towards some hot action with the Sodomites, his unstable “subject position”—literally wavering on the “hard edges” [duri margini] (Inf. 15.1) of the marginalized terrain of homosexual instability and sterility—is suddenly made clear to himself, and to his readers, through the attempted erasure of same-sex desire from his soul through an internalization of the Catholic discourse of “naturalized” and therefore procreative heterosexuality. The shadelike insubstantiality of his “other” self, the Dante who might have burnt up the floor of Disco Inferno in a queer exploration of unspeakable pleasures, haunts the first cantica as a victim of the censorious regime of the Closet: the panoptical architecture of the Inferno as carcere becomes a vast image of the institutional nexus of forbidden sexual knowledges and forbidding political powers that discursively produce the abject sodomitical body as a cause (when it is really an effect) of destabilizing temptation. His self-positioning as Ganymede in the dream recounted at the start of Purgatorio 9 only reawakens his fear of destabilization as a heteroerotic subject, Holsinger argues, since this purely subjective experience is also an ironic sign to Dante that no subject position is more unstable than that which requires the quake-prone Holy Mountain as its foundation.31 Finally, at the heights of Paradise, somewhere over the rainbow, the old homoerotic desire reawakened in the Ganymede dream really does come true for him: a cruising male gaze with Heaven’s blessing decisively intervenes to direct the poet’s eye away from his feminine object of desire towards a male face again—not the brimstone-blackened face of Brunetto
276
PART III
TRASUMANAR
this time, or the gravely paternal face of Virgil, but the rapturously transfixing face of St. Bernard. The historical Bernard, militant defender of virginity, would no doubt be surprised to learn of his queerly theorized role as an amorous mediator between Beatrice and Dante’s ultimate dream date—Christ. Yet, according to Holsinger, the pilgrim’s final assumption into the fiery circle “will entail the surrender of self in an eternal embrace with Christ,” an embrace that will not only universalize all the transgressive bodily practices explored throughout the poem but also synthesize the pleasures of sodomitical rape and eschatological rapture.32 Since Holsinger in a fit of body constructivism represents both sodomy and ecstasy as “burning pleasures,” Dante, having attained the status of top poet in the universe, is more than outed at the queer end of Paradise. He’s outed as a bottom.33 So what’s to be gained by giving the poet the same surprise treatment he gave Brunetto? Holsinger’s reworking of the Commedia according to the master-narrative of postmodernism, the fragmentation and dissolution of heterosexual male subjectivity, is bound to unsettle traditional Catholic glosses on the final canto as a Pseudo-Dionysian cancellation of symbolic images at the climax of the via negativa. Instead of apophatic transcendence of the temporal, the earthly, the embodied, and the gendered, Holsinger would have Dante feel the burning pleasure of something as transient, earthbound, carnal, and gender-specific as manto-man anal intercourse. The Pope wouldn’t care for this kind of climax, of course, but he didn’t write the poem and Dante himself didn’t much care for popes. As a literary answer to the question “What happens to same-sex desire in Paradiso?” Holsinger’s unorthodox conclusion is ironically orthodox within the prevailing terms of contemporary critical theory. Clearly it needs further substantiation, or “fleshing out” as Routledge theorists of The Body would say, if it is to withstand the derisive laughter of straight dantisti or the censorious attacks of Cardinal Ratzinger. From a cantica that reflects and multiplies corporeal images like a giant optical glass, Holsinger has selected only two—arsura (burning) and volo (flight)—upon which to base his anally transumptive, not to mention retentive, association of homoerotic subjectivity with ecstatic liberation. For some reason, perhaps in his haste to read the mystical finale of Paradiso in relation to the mortifying fate of Brunetto, he fails to see or comment upon the blatantly homoerotic image that opens the third cantica with a bang. Invoking Apollo as the god of enlightenment and inspiration, Dante begs for an agonizing intimacy:
RAINBOW BODIES
277
Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue sì come quando Marsïa traesti de la vagina de le membra sue. [Enter into my breast and breathe there as when you drew Marsyas forth from the sheath of his limbs.] (Par. 1.19–21)
Having already presented himself to Apollo as a “vessel of [his] worth” (del [suo] valor…vaso] (Par. 1.14), the poet momentarily evokes the Aristotelian imagery of Statius’s speech on human gestation (Purg. 25.34–108) in order to heterosexualize his receptive relationship as a feminized “vessel” to the procreative male deity whose active “strength” or valor will fall upon the passive matter of the poem and animate it in the womb of the poet’s imagination. But this mundane image of procreation surprisingly introduces a retelling of the flaying of Marsyas as a myth of rebirth: a homoerotic fantasy of male pregnancy following male-male intercourse. In flaying Marsyas, Apollo not only penetrates his rival’s body like a lover but also begets a new musician within the corpse of the old and brings him (and his new music, the notes of Paradiso) into the world like a physician drawing a baby forth from a bleeding “vagina.” So, if the invaginated male poet at first sounds “broody” in an Aretha Franklin way—calling upon Apollo to make him feel like a natural woman—his subsequent self-identification with a flayed satyr makes him sound more like an adoringly masochistic bottom who’s begging for penetration, insemination, and cutting-edge torture from his masterful top. Now there’s more going on in this queerly excruciating passage than the fragmentation or destabilization of heterosexual subjectivity attending the painful birth of a homoerotic subject. For one thing, what’s imagined here is a joyous fusion or confusion of procreative intercourse, Ovidian gender metamorphosis, Apollonian poetic initiation, Dionysian male rape, and the high fantasy of Christian Resurrection. If this invocation is anything to go by, same-sex desire will be hard to isolate from other kinds of desire in Paradise: in fact, as Dante approaches the generative centre of his universe, all desires—homo and hetero, spiritual and fleshly, epistrophic and procreative—harmoniously merge at their common source and ultimate target in the Empyrean. So intent is Holsinger on homoeroticizing divine union in Paradiso 33 that he fails to observe that Dante’s burning pleasures occur not only in the solar fires of a Christianized Ganymede myth but also at the centre of a giant Catholic womb teeming with babies: the Rose is the archetypal site of heterosexual fecundity presided over by Mary and eternally impregnated by the light of the Holy Spirit. When Beatrice yields to Bernard as the object
278
PART III
TRASUMANAR
of Dante’s desiring gaze, Bernard soon yields to Mary and Mary to Christ. Male-female flirting and male-male cruising alternate in such rapid succession in the Empyrean that both seem twinned to the point of inseparability. THE FRUITS OF EVERLASTING LIFE
In the City of the Saints, desire is universalized. Homo or hetero, it is known to all and satisfied for all at its divine source. In the City of the Damned, by contrast, desire is strictly differentiated and minoritized as well as desperately unsatisfied: the subjects of heterosexual passion are separated by five circles and a wall from the same-sex lovers on the burning plain. In Purgatory, the minoritization of same-sex lovers persists, though segregation from their straight counterparts is breaking down on the burning road with each hug across the sexuality divide. A charitable rapprochement of the two tribes of lovers is a necessary stage in their ritual adaptation to the operations of desire in Heaven. While those operations are primarily unitive in the Empyrean, the poet’s recurrent emphasis in the heavens below the Rose is on the observable diversity of desiring subjects and desired objects. Diverse voices make sweet harmony. Diverse ranks enhance the concord of the saints. Diverse effects stem from a single cause. Diverse leaves make up the book of the universe. Diverse choruses dancing in different ways attract his ever-desirous eye (Par. 6.124–6; 24.16–17; 33.88–90). Since Dante observes a joyously diversified ontology, teleology, cosmology, and meteorology beneath the Primum Mobile, why should he not also witness the celebratory signs of an erotics of diversity? If Holsinger had looked beyond the confines of postmodern subjectivity, he would have found objective signs—celestial segni—that same-sex desire is alive and well and transhumanizing lovers throughout the third cantica. These signs lie outside the pilgrim’s Narcissistic ego-reflections, outside his own shifting positions as a lover. They are divinely objective performances observable in the dazzling spettacoli performed by the Blessed within the planetary spheres. There’s something for everyone to enjoy up there. Even the fervent followers of Judith Butler (should they attain beatitude) will applaud the gender-troubling carol in which the great scholastics who appear to Dante in the Heaven of the Sun upset their own contra naturam prescriptions by appearing “as ladies not released from the dance” [donne mi parver, non da ballo sciolte] (Par. 10.79). A divine drag show starring the greatest intellectual divas of the age, and not an angry God in sight? Paradise could hardly be queerer if Butler herself directed the dance.34
RAINBOW BODIES
279
In the Third Sphere, where the errors of the “mad love” [folle amore] (Par. 8.2) once infernally associated with Dido and other flaming heterosexuals are corrected under the rational influence of that ultimate gay icon of female star power, the Heavenly Venus of Platonism, Dante beholds a carolling of lights from which the radiantly concealed form of Charles Martel descends on cue through the venereal clouds. Sidling over to Dante, Charles has one of the great pickup lines in the Commedia: Tutti sem presti al tuo piacer, perché di noi ti gioi… e sem sì pien d’amor, che, per piacerti, non fia men dolce un poco di quïete. [We are all ready at your pleasure, that you may have joy of us…and we are so full of love that, in order to please you, a little quiet will not be less sweet to us.] (Par. 8.32–9)
Though Charles officially speaks for the whole chorus—from whom he has just separated himself by moving to the front like a soloist—his personal attraction to Dante here is an unabashedly amorous reminder of their historic encounter in Florence in the spring of 1294. Back then the young ruler had displayed a suspiciously aesthetic bent by praising the author of the famous canzone, “You who move the third heaven by intellection” [“Voi che ‘ntendendo il terzo ciel movete”] (Par. 8.37; Conv. canz.1.1), for his pretty handwriting! The spirits moving the Third Heaven probably chuckled at that one. Now, as one such spirit, Charles can freely celebrate their homoerotic rapprochement without fear of violating either the heterosexual code of chivalric cortesia or the heterosexist dictates of Catholic dottrina. Both men are now free to move each other in the Third Heaven, far above the social strictures of Florentine diplomacy and beyond the moral confines of Santa Maria Novella.35 The signs that their cheerful reunion is a paradisially queer re-enactment of Dante’s infernally cheerless encounter with Francesca are hard to miss. The circling of the venereal lights is compared to “winds” [venti] (Par. 8.22) swiftly issuing from a cold cloud, which recalls the swift flight of the Lustful on the buffets of the infernal whirlwind. Just as Francesca approached Dante by descending from the whirlwind with a stormy blast, so Charles approaches him by descending from the swirling cloud of lights after a choral Hosanna. Even the “brief interlude of calm” [un poco di quïete] (Par. 8.39) that Charles romantically arranges for their rendezvous—a full backup choir can sometimes get in the way when you’re trying to create an intimate mood for declaring your secret love—harks back to the eerie quiet imposed on the cacophony of “the hellish hurri-
280
PART III
TRASUMANAR
cane” [La bufera infernal] (Inf. 5.31) before Francesca begins her seductive apology. This parallel elicits a singularly coy gloss from Singleton: “Even though this is the heaven of love, how far we may now feel we are from the circle of the lovers in Inferno…!”36 How far, indeed, but the distance between the two scenes is not simply measured cosmologically but also manifested erotically—in a comic switch of genders and sexualities—precisely because this is the Heaven of Love where such things can happen and no one gets blasted for it. Dante can here assume the role of Paolo to Charles’s Francesca without paura, for now “her” (his) male partner is no longer constrained by the glum silence of perpetual orgasmic exhaustion. When the new Paolo bids the light to reveal his identity— ”’Say who you are’” was my utterance, stamped with great affection” [‘Deh, chi siete?’ fue / la voce mia di grande affetto impressa] (Par. 8.44–5) as if he had already guessed the name of the male beloved behind the veil of light—Charles responds by revealing his affectionate arousal in a luminously phallic reflex. “How much I saw it increase in size and brightness!” Dante rapturously recalls [E quanta e quale vid’ io lei far piùe: (Par. 8.46). Charles was clearly not one to hide his candle under a bushel. Other signs of same-sex desire busting out among the Blessed appear farther away in outer space—to no less divinely comic effect. In the strategically frank manner of a high-society sex therapist, Beatrice herself urges Dante to overcome any lingering worldly inhibitions that might hinder his amorous access to the light. “Loose your warm desire,” she bids him in the Heaven of Saturn [Solvi il tuo caldo disio] (Par. 21.51) as he bathes in the otherworldly radiance of Peter Damian, who has just flamed down the mystical staircase to inform his visitor that “love as much or more is burning up there” [ché più e tanto amor quinci sù ferve] (Par. 21.68). For a man to loose his warm desire to this particular saint, author of the infamously homophobic Liber Gomorrhianus and virtual inventor of the medieval sin of sodomia, the music of the spheres itself would have to stop—which it does, on cue, to mark another quiet moment when the unspeakable happens to the ineffable.37 Was Peter Damian a cloister case all along? The homosocial warmth of their encounter dispels the chilly saturnine atmosphere of the monastic life. Its comic irony spills over into Dante’s subsequent encounter with St. Benedict, whose Rule includes strict instructions on the supervision of frisky young monks at bedtime by their older and wiser brothers.38 Homosocial panic does not break out in the celestial monastery, however, even when Dante boldly asks, as a young novice might to an attractive padre, whether he may behold Benedict in his “uncovered shape”
RAINBOW BODIES
281
[imagine scoverta] (Par. 22.60)! Desire is only heightened in this intergenerational taboo zone when Benedict teasingly postpones the saintly exposure of his glorified body until the last sphere where “every desire”— including, presumably, every queer monkish desire—”is perfect, mature, and whole” [Ivi è perfetta, matura e intera / ciascuna disïanza] (Par. 22.64–5: emphasis added). In the meantime, if Dante needs any objective evidence of hot couplings and homo pleasures among the top men of Paradise, he gets an eyeful in the Heaven of the Fixed Stars as a reward for his successful examination in the Faith. St. James of Compostela makes his grand entrance by reenacting the descent of the Paraclete upon Christ—only this time the dove descends amorously upon Christ’s vicar, St. Peter, like one of Venus’s sacred birds: Sì come quando il colombo si pone presso al compagno, l’uno a l’altro pande, girando e mormorando, l’affezione; così vid’ ïo l’un da l’altro grande principe glorïoso essere accolto… [As when the dove alights beside its mate, and the one lavishes its affection on the other, circling it and cooing, so did I see the one great and glorious prince received by the other…] (Par. 25.19–23)
They behave here like an old married gay couple still romantically bonded after all those years in the same love nest. Their cooing is a bit much, to be sure, but only a bitter old queen would grimace at the lavishness of their mutual affection, for which there is yet no precise term in contemporary gayspeak. “Homoerotic” is too narrow. Perhaps “homo-agapic” would cover it, though it’s not elegant. With a glance back to Charles Martel, St. James is also re-enacting in a “safe” male-to-male way the perilous dove-like descent of Francesca upon Dante as her substitute mate and unsuspecting erotic prey. The pilgrim has nothing to feel anxious about here because the paura arising from unbridled heterosexual passion is irrelevant to the scene, as is the paura of the sodomitical dance that Dante almost fell into down below with his pederastic master’s permission. In the harmonious circling of the Stellatum, Dante’s apostolic teachers would definitely permit him to fall or rise into the amorous rota, as they themselves are doing before his eyes, because its motion springs from the good will of the Creator. If a “true fruit” of everlasting life [vero frutto] (Par. 27.148) is the ability of each saint to read the thoughts and experience the desires of all
282
PART III
TRASUMANAR
other dancers in the dance, as Dante suggests in vision after vision of the star-souls spinning like dervishes when any one of them feels a love “increase” or a desire “swell” to satisfaction, then the desire of male for male (and presumably also of female for female) must be momentously diffused throughout creation in tandem with the desire of male for female and female for male. All the male saints who fly down to Dante in the constellated Eagle are Jupiters to his Ganymede, even as they are all Ganymedes to the divine bird of the Holy Spirit. But by the rule of interinanimation, all the female saints experience the “thirst” of the male lover and the “burning” of the male beloved, too. Cunizza cannot help but glow more brightly when Charles Martel is making out with Dante. The erotics of diversity at play in Paradiso also entails the empathetic participation of male saints in the amorous concatenation of female saints, as exemplified by the interactive but not interrupting gaze of St. Bernard in the flow of love down the Maria-Lucia-Beatrice line. In such a fluid system of communicable and conversionary desires the Homo-Hetero Divide is simply wiped out: every straight saint immediately and forever becomes a fruit of everlasting life (and vice versa) through participation in the “carols differently danced” [carole, differente- / mente danzando] (Par. 24.16–17). The infinite regress of thresholds that beleaguer the poor closet cases sentenced to Eve Sedgwick’s universe finds its eschatological limit in the utterly uncloseted possibilities of desire in Paradiso. Instead of a Foucaultian nightmare of proliferating sexualities under the orthodox regime of heterosexist discourse, Paradise opens up for Dante the high fantasy of a single polymorphously diverse sexuality under the unorthodox sign of the rainbow. NOTES 1 See my discussion of the unorthodox implications of the term trasumanar in the Introduction to this volume (pp. 6–7). For recent theological commentary on the significance of the term, see endnote 7 in the Introduction. 2 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from the Commedia in this essay are drawn from the Petrocchi edition as reprinted and slightly revised by Singleton. Translations of Dante are my own, though I have checked my renderings against Singleton’s (1970-75). The components of the Commedia cited from are Inferno (Inf.), Purgatorio (Purg.), and Paradiso (Par.). Also cited is Convivio (Conv.). 3 Cf. Paul’s dualistic dictum in Gal. 5:17: “For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary one to the other.” The Apostle was of course referring to the fallen flesh. When the Blessed enter into their glorified bodies, they will not experience any conflict between flesh and spirit.
RAINBOW BODIES
283
4 To view Do’s videotaped suicide note (“The End of the Age is Upon Us”) over the Net, follow the instructions at http://academic.info.net/nrmshg.htm. Two months after the story broke, two more members of the group—Wayne Cooke and Charles Humphrey—attempted suicide in a hotel room not far from the Rancho Santa Fe mansion. Cooke made it to the Next Level, but Humphrey had to try again in February 1998 before his soul finally dumped its body-container in the Arizona desert. 5 The inquisitorial reflexes of the mainstream American media were especially apparent in the Special Report on Heaven’s Gate (“Inside the Cult of Death”) published by Time magazine on April 7, 1997. “The celestial spectacle of the Hale-Bopp comet induces a monastic, computer-literate cult to annihilate itself at the beginning of Holy Week,” gasps the teaser for the Report on the contents page (3): “Penalized for his homosexuality, Marshall Herff Applewhite embarked on a quest for an antiseptic heaven and for passion without physical entanglement.” The de haut en bas tone of the media judgments on Applewhite seems to be criticized by Pico Iyer in his back-page essay “Our Days of Judgment: The Heaven’s Gate Tragedy asks us, When does a ‘cult’ become a faith?” (64). The pious conclusion of the essay, however, firmly draws the line between the orthodox “us” and the unorthodox “them” despite Ayer’s efforts to sound like a skeptical modern: “And though the Heaven’s Gaters’ doctrine may seem weird to us as ours apparently seemed to them, the wider tragedy of the cruel suicides would be if our own faith prevented us from lavishing at least as much sympathy on the group as curiosity.” 6 See, for instance, the sinister blowup of “Cult leader” Applewhite’s face on the April 7, 1997, cover of Time. The shaky still, taken from his suicide tape, was chosen for its mesmerizing silliness. With his raised brows, googly eyes, pointy ears, and expansive brow—is he a Conehead?—the Prophet Do looks like a B-movie alien-commander from Central Casting. 7 Robinson (1997), 2–3. 8 Other Aristotelian passages on nutrition and reproduction relevant to Statius’s lecture are De generatione animalium 1.3, 737a, and De anima 2.2, 416a. Aristotle’s famous definition of the soul as the actualization or “entelechy” of the living body (see De anima 2.1, 412a–b) is also fundamental to Statius’s explanation of human embodiment in this life and the next. The moment of conception in utero marks a human being’s first entelechy. At birth, when the fetus develops to the point where it can survive on its own outside the womb, it has achieved its second entelechy. At maturity, when its various potentials for growth, sensation, movement, imagination, and understanding have been realized, it is said to have reached its third entelechy—a state of completion undone by death. While Aristotle stops the series of entelechies at the grave, Statius boldly extends it into the afterlife. The post-mortem creation of a shade-body would constitute the fourth entelechy, while the fifth (for a Purgatorian like Statius) would be reached at the moment when a shade is completely purged of sin and released into Paradise. The ultimate entelechy would presumably occur at the Resurrection of the Flesh just before the Last Judgment. 9 Biblical references are from the Authorized King James Version (English) or from the Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Clementinam (Latin).
284
PART III
TRASUMANAR
10 On the mediation of Aristotelian embryology through Avicenna and Albert the Great to Dante, see Nardi, Studi di filosofia medievale, 48–49. 11 Freccero (1986), 201. 12 Freccero (1986), 203. Emphasis added. 13 As Dante explains in Conv. 2.1, the twofold “allegory of the poets” relates a fictive literal sense to an explicit or implicit moral. The “allegory of the theologians,” however, is fourfold. Originally developed as a method of interpreting Holy Scripture, it distinguishes a literal “level” of meaning from typological, tropological, and anagogic meanings. On Dante’s use of fourfold allegory as a model for writing as well as a method for reading, see the accessus section of the Epistle to Cangrande, paragraphs 6–7, along with Ascoli (2000), 350, and Hollander (1969) 3–56, 233–34. 14 The term “homophile” (literally “same-lover”) was a euphemism for “homosexual” adopted by members of the Mattachine Society and other early gay rights activist groups in the 1950s and 1960s. The suffix “-phile” was intended to suggest that homosexuality involved affectionate friendships as well as sexual relations, and to counter the stereotypical opposition of the sex-crazed homosexual to the emotionally warm and mature heterosexual. For an overview of the homophile movement, see Corber (2000), 446. 15 Vernani (1906), 2. Translations of the two excerpts from Vernani’s treatise are my own. 16 For an ecphrastic treatment of the vessel-as-poem, see Virgil’s description of the pocula in Eclogues 3.36–48. 17 On Dante’s possible authorship of Il Fiore and Detto d’Amore (a second Tuscan work based on the Roman de la Rose), see Brand and Pertile (1999), 7, 41; Bara´ nski and Boyde (1997), 13–48; Picone (2000), 379–81; and Bara´ nski (2000), 299–300. 18 Barolini (1992), 3–13. 19 ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) began as a primarily gay activist group fighting AIDS discrimination and AIDS-induced homophobia in New York City in 1985, but soon widened to include AIDS activists of all sexual orientations in an international network of organizations fighting the epidemic in the 1990s. Queer Nation was founded in 1989 as a subcommittee of ACT UP New York specifically devoted to fighting homophobia. Drawing on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender youth and their allies across North America and Western Europe, it became an international movement identified in the early 1990s with confrontational media-savvy demonstrations against heterosexism. The advocacy group Dignity works for respect and justice for all gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons in the Catholic Church and the world through education, advocacy, and support. On these groups, see Haggerty (2000), 10–11, 176, 725–26; and Martinac (1996), 344, 346, 358. 20 On the identification of the Muses with the Planetary Sirens in the Platonic tradition, see Miller (1986), 481–82. 21 For the anagogic implications of Gay Pride marches, see Miller (1997), 56–57, and (1993), 87–99. 22 For a discussion of Pequigney’s essay in relation to other critical writings sparked by Dante’s controversial treatment of the Sodomites, see Miller (2000), 42.
RAINBOW BODIES
285
23 Pequigney, (1991), 39. 24 According to Halperin (1990), 27: “It never occurred to pre-modern cultures to ascribe a person’s sexual tastes to some positive, structural, or constitutive feature of his or her personality.” This impetuous generalization is hard to advance in the wake of Dante’s meeting with the nova gente on the Seventh Cornice. The Purgatorial Sodomites form a group precisely because of their common psychological disposition to seek out lovers of the same sex and to orient themselves in opposition to Guido Guinizzelli and company. 25 On the identification of sodomy in the Inferno with the sin of sacrilege, see Kay (1978), 295–98. By vigorously denying rather than simply dismissing the “embarrassing” homosexuality of Brunetto and company on historical grounds, Kay demonstrates how a nonconformist exegesis of Dante can still conform to prevailing Middle-American standards of authoritarian heterosexism. So anxious is Kay to purge every sign of sodomitical lust from the Dantean universe that he pays scant attention to the Sodomites in Purgatory. For the scholarly debate between gay and straight dantisti provoked by Kay’s exegesis, see Boswell (1994), 65–66, and Kay (1994), 20–21. 26 There are Baptists, and then there are the Old School (Primitive) Baptists from the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. As I was marching in the Stonewall 25 parade through Manhattan on June 25, 1994, my gay gaze fell upon a lonely group of anti-gay protesters who were holding up various signs (including “AIDS Cures Fags”) parodying the rainbow messages of the marchers. The group turned out to be members of the Westboro congregation led by the “Reverend” Fred Phelps. For a truly infernal experience, check out the congregation’s website (www.godhatesfags.com) with its “Perpetual Gospel Memorial to Matthew Shepard.” The Memorial page includes an animated image of Shepard burning in Hell as a homosexual heretic. “People using Netscape Communicator with the proper plugins,” reads a helpful caption, “can place your mouse pointer over the image to hear Matthew scream ‘FOR GOD’S SAKE LISTEN TO PHELPS!!!’” 27 In the dense introductory paragraphs of her foundational essay “Epistemology of the Closet,” Eve Sedgwick (1990) comes close to suggesting that the heterosexist regime of the open secret will never have an end—that the very idea of an “Eschatology of the Closet” is absurd—as long as Modernism holds sway as the epist¯ em¯e. She has not endeared herself to the Old Guard of the Gay Liberation Movement by pointing out the unacceptably obvious persistence of closetry in the post-Stonewall era (68): “The deadly elasticity of heterosexist presumption means that, like Wendy in Peter Pan, people find new walls springing up around them even as they drowse: every encounter with a new classful of students, to say nothing of a new boss, social worker, loan officer, landlord, doctor, erects new closets whose fraught and characteristic laws of optics and physics exact from at least gay people new surveys, new calculations, new draughts and requisitions of secrecy and disclosure.” Her panoptical vision of this labyrinth of closets, with its constant disclosure of segrete cose, is strangely reminiscent of Dante’s Hell. 28 Woods (1998), 48.
286
PART III
TRASUMANAR
29 On the significance and transmission of the Platonic image of the astral chorus to the Latin Middle Ages, see Miller (1986), 37–55, 233–73; and Freccero (1986), 224–27. 30 “Perhaps the most enabling breakthrough in the study of premodern sexualities over the last decade has been precisely the rejection of easy equations between sexual practice and individual identity,” argues Holsinger in the introduction to “Sodomy and Resurrection” (243–44). “In the wake of Foucault’s famous dictum—’The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species’ [The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, 43]—scholars have recently brought to light a vast array of homoerotic discourses in the premodern West that were neither filtered through nor constrained by modern sexual identity categories.” 31 On the queerness of Dante’s imagined raptus, see Holsinger (1996), 252–59. 32 Holsinger (1996), 270. “By subsuming the burning pleasures of sodomy and raptus within his eschatological vision,” he concludes, “Dante queers the very end of time, universalizing the perverse bodily practices he has explored throughout the Commedia and projecting them into eternity along the ring of fire that is Christ.” While this mystical conclusion is inspiringly written—have any gay theologians dared to speculate what a queer end of time might be?— it reads more like a polemical projection of Holsinger’s own Foucaultian fantasies (for instance, the discourse-rupturing validation of “perverse bodily practices”) onto the Dantean Empyrean rather than a theological summation of the poet’s terminus ad queer. 33 In queer parlance, “to out” means “to disclose a person’s sexuality without his or her consent.” A “bottom” is someone who assumes the “submissive” or “receptive” position in sado-masochistic role-playing. A “top” assumes the “dominant” or “active” position, though this does not necessarily mean that he or she controls the scene. See Baker (2002), 87, 172, 203. 34 In Butlerian terms, the dancers in the Heaven of the Sun are demonstrating the comic “performativity” of gender. “Indeed, part of the pleasure, the giddiness of the performance is in the recognition of a radical contingency in the relation between sex and gender in the face of cultural configurations of causal unities that are regularly assumed to be natural and necessary,” Butler observed about drag shows in Gender Trouble, 137–38. This observation is strikingly pertinent to the paradoxical spectacularization of natural causality and radically contingent playfulness in Dante’s erotic revision of the Platonic dance of the stars. 35 On Charles’s visit to Florence in 1294, see Villani, Cronica 8.13. Charles offered Dante the post of calligrapher (dictator pulcherrimus). 36 Gloss on Par. 8.39 in Singleton (1975), 151. The distance felt by the commentator (who is far too polite or perplexed to articulate his moral feelings about it in the early 1970s, the heyday of Gay Liberation in America) is the yawning ideological chasm now known to queer theorists as the binarizing fault line provoked by modern “homo/heterosexual definition.” On the binarization of sexualities, see Sedgwick (1990), 1–63. In the Heaven of Venus, the alltoo-familiar moral correspondence between binarized terms (homo/ damned, hetero/saved) is implicitly inverted by the typological correspondence between
RAINBOW BODIES
287
Charles and Francesca. The hetero pair Francesca-Paolo (with Dante as a temporary Paolo substitute) is on the side of the Damned, while the homo pair (Charles-Dante) is exalted to the side of the Saved. 37 For a gay Catholic’s response to Peter Damian’s Liber Gomorrhianus, see Jordan (1997), 45–66. Jordan credits Peter with the invention of the abstract noun sodomia. 38 On the supervisory role of senior brothers in monastic dormitories, see The Rule of St. Benedict, xxii (“Quomodo dormiant monachi”), 70–71. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alighieri, Dante. La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. 4 vols. Ed. G. Petrocchi. Milano: Mondadori, 1966–67. ——— The Divine Comedy. Ed. C.S. Singleton. 6 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–75. ——— Il Convivio. Ed. Maria Simonelli. Bologna: Pàtron, 1966. ——— Il Convivio: The Banquet. Trans. Christopher Ryan. Stanford French and Italian Studies 61. Saratoga, CA: Anima Libri, 1989. ——— Il Detto d’Amore. Opere Minori. Ed. Gianfranco Contini. Vol. 1/1. Milan, Naples: Ricciardi, 1984. 799–827. ——— Epistle to Cangrande = Epistola XIII. Epistole. Opere Minori. Ed. Arsenio Frugoni and Giorgio Brugnoli. Vol. 2. Milan, Naples: Ricciardi, 1979. 598–643. ——— Il Fiore. Opere Minori. Ed. Gianfranco Contini. Vol. 1/1. Milan, Naples: Ricciardi, 1984. 553–798. Applewhite, Marshall Herff (“Do”). “’95 Statement by an E.T. Presently Incarnate.” First published October 11, 1995, on the original Heaven’s Gate website: www.heavensgate.com. Revised version from January 1997 on the mirror site <www.press1.com/hgate>. Aristotle. De anima: On the Soul. Trans. W.S. Hett. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, William Heinemann, 1964. ——— De generatione animalium: Generation of Animals. Trans. A.I. Peck. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, William Heinemann, 1943. Ascoli, Albert Russell. “Epistle to Cangrande.” The Dante Encyclopedia. Ed. Richard Lansing. New York: Garland, 2000. 348–52. Baker, Paul. Fantabulosa: A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang. London: Continuum, 2002. Bara´ nski, Zygmunt G. “Detto d’Amore.” The Dante Encyclopedia. Ed. Richard Lansing. New York: Garland, 2000. 299–300. Bara´ nski, Zygmunt G., and Patrick Boyde, eds. The Fiore in Context: Dante, France, Tuscany. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1997. Barolini, Teodolinda. The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Benedict, St. The Rule of Saint Benedict, in Latin and English. Ed. and trans. Justin McCann. London: Burns Oates, 1960.
288
PART III
TRASUMANAR
Boethius. De consolatione philosophiae: The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. H.F. Stewart. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, William Heinemann, 1936. Boswell, John. “Dante and the Sodomites.” Dante Studies 112 (1994): 63–76. Boyde, Patrick. “Summus Minimusve Poeta? Arguments for and against Attributing the Fiore to Dante.” The Fiore in Context: Dante, France, Tuscany. Ed. Zygmunt G. Bara´ nski and Patrick Boyde. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. 13–48. Brand, Peter, and Lino Pertile, eds. The Cambridge History of Italian Literature. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. Corber, Robert J. “Homophile Movement.” Gay Histories and Cultures. Ed. George E. Haggerty. New York: Garland, 2000. 446–47. Corliss, Richard, et al. “Special Report: Inside the Cult of Death.” Time, 7 April 1997, 16–35. Damian, Peter. Liber Gomorrhianus = Epistola 31. Die Briefe des Petrus Damiani. Ed. Kurt Reindel. Vol. 1. Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Die Briefe der deutschen Kaiserzeit. Vol. 4. Munich: MGH, 1983. Freccero, John. “Manfred’s Wounds and the Poetics of Purgatorio.” Dante: The Poetics of Conversion. Ed. Rachel Jacoff. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. 195–208. ——— “The Dance of the Stars: Paradiso X.” Dante: The Poetics of Conversion. Ed. Rachel Jacoff. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. 221–44. Haggerty, George E. Gay Histories and Cultures. New York: Garland, 2000. Halperin, David M. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge, 1990. Hollander, John. Allegory in Dante’s “Commedia.” Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969. Holsinger, Bruce W. “Sodomy and Resurrection: the Homoerotic Subject of the Divine Comedy.” Premodern Sexualities. Ed. Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero. New York: Routledge, 1996. Iyer, Pico. “Our Days of Judgment.” Time, 7 April 1997, 64. Jordan. Mark D. The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Kay, Richard. Dante’s Swift and Strong: Essays in “Inferno” XV. Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1978. ——— “The Sin(s) of Brunetto Latini.” Dante Studies 112 (1994): 19–31. Martinac, Pauline, et al. The Gay Almanac. The National Museum and Archive of Lesbian and Gay History. New York: Berkeley, 1996. Miller, James. “Alighieri, Dante.” Reader’s Guide to Lesbian and Gay Studies. Ed. Timothy F. Murphy. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000. 40–43.
RAINBOW BODIES
289
——— “Heavenquake: Queer Anagogies in Kushner’s America.” Approaching the Millennium: Essays on Angels in America. Ed. Deborah R. Geis and Steven F. Kruger. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. 56–77. ——— Measures of Wisdom: The Cosmic Dance in Classical and Christian Antiquity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986. ——— “Outscape.” Descant 81: Space II 24, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 76–102. Nardi, Bruno. Studi di filosofia medievale. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1960. Pequigney, Joseph. “Sodomy in Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio.” Representations 36 (Fall 1991): 22–42. Pertile, Lino. “Dante.” The Cambridge History of Italian Literature. Ed. Peter Brand and Lino Pertile. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 39–69. Phelps, Reverend Fred and the Westboro Baptist Church. “Perpetual Gospel Memorial to Matthew Shepard.” Updated daily at <www.godhatesfags .com>. Picone, Michelangelo. “Fiore.” Trans. Robin Treasure. The Dante Encyclopedia. Ed. Richard Lansing. New York: Garland, 2000. 379–81. Robinson, B.A. “Heaven’s Gate: Christian/UFO Believers.” Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance. First published March 25, 1997, on <www.religioustolerance.org>. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Usher, Jonathan. “Origins and Duecento.” The Cambridge History of Italian Literature. Ed. Peter Brand and Lino Pertile. Rev. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 3–36. Vernani, Guido. Contro Dante (Contra Dantem): Guido Vernani tractatus de reprobatione “Monarchiae” compositae a Dante Aligherio florentino. Ed. and trans. Giulio Piccini. Florence: R. Bemporad, 1906. Villani, Giovanni. Cronica di Giovanni Villani. Ed. F. Gherardi Dragomanni. 4 vols. Florence, 1905. Virgil. The Eclogues. Ed. and trans. Guy Lee. London: Penguin, 1984. Woods, Gregory. A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Dante/Fante Embryology in Purgatory and Paradise Jennifer Fraser
T
he stairway between the Sixth and Seventh Cornice of Mount Purgatory is so narrow that it literally “unpairs the climbers” [i salitor dispaia] (Purg. 25.9).1 As a result, Dante, Virgil, and Statius must climb it in single file. Any pairings formed below—Dante with Virgil, Virgil with Statius, Statius with Dante—must be abruptly uncoupled here as if their old familiar ways of relating will soon be irrelevant to them. Whether they bonded below as master and disciple, author and reader, guide and pilgrim, parent and child, friend and admirer, or lost shade and living substance, their worldly connections no longer pertain to their individual destinies as aspiring souls or to their common condition as ascending bodies. Surprisingly, all three climbers have bodies, as Dante soon learns, even though the two Roman poets have recently drawn attention to their apparent incorporeality. “Brother,” Virgil had solemnly reminded Statius down on the Fifth Cornice, “…you are a shade and a shade you see” [Frate, /…tu se’ ombra e ombra vedi] (Purg. 21.131–2). To which, Statius, duly humbled, replied with his famous apology: “I forget our emptiness and treat shades as solid things” [io dismento nostra vanitate, / trattando l’ombre come cosa salda] (Purg. 21.135–6). In the narrow stairwell beyond the throng of ascetically empty Gluttons, the emptiness of the poets will again be forgotten, but this time they will ignore the “vanity” of their existence virtuously because their material substantiality—not to be mistaken for perceptible solidity—will be established on a firm intellectual footing. The shades turn out to have bodies posthumously formed from air, which makes them appear to be “empty” to anyone whose body is solid flesh (that is, fashioned out of earth like Adam’s body). Rising to
290
DANTE / FANTE
291
the purgatorial challenge of refuting the dreary memento mori argument that “all is vanity” (Eccles. 1:2),2 Statius treats his fellow climbers to a long discourse on the glorious origins of human embodiment, a textual passage that will effectively corporealize the disembodied shades and inspire the embodied man to see beyond the “straitness” [artezza] (Purg. 25.9) of the rocky passage into the plenitude of Paradise. As the original architect behind both passages, Dante’s God displays a certain wry humour—a true esprit d’escalier—in breaking couples up en route to the Cornice of the Lustful. Up above, on the burning road, overzealous copulators must uncouple from their natural partners by embracing unnatural ones from the other side of the sexuality divide— straights with Sodomites, Sodomites with straights—so that all repentant lovers might learn to transmute the heat of sexual amore into updrafts of spiritual ardore. In the relative calm and coolness of Purgatorio 25, the reader learns— along with Dante and Virgil—the origins of the body and the soul. Statius elaborates the embryonic phases of the human body, which climax in the perfecting gesture of God who “breathes” [spira] (Purg. 25.71) into the body the self-reflecting soul. Dante uses the same verb in the previous canto to designate the divine origin of poetry within his soul: I’ mi son un che, quando Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo ch’e’ ditta dentro vo significando. [I am one who, when Love inspires me, takes note, and goes setting it forth after the fashion which he dictates within me.] (Purg. 24.52–4) (emphasis added)
Love literally “breathes” him into being as Dante-poet, animating and actualizing his expressive potential as a literary sign maker. Thus, Purgatorio 25 sets in motion what might be conceived as Dante’s “body of literature”: the origins of the body correlate with the origins of poetry. Dante will transgress the limits imposed by both origins in the unfolding of his poem. In Purgatorio 25, Dante-poet establishes the limits of birth and death while at the same time conceiving a poetics to bypass these boundaries. Since his route through the Commedia enacts a symbolic death superimposed upon a return to the womb, his poem ultimately activates a miraculous rebirth. Dante transgresses the natural cycle of the body in the same way that he transgresses the supernatural mode of communication with the Divine. Teodolinda Barolini has demonstrated the way in
292
PART III
TRASUMANAR
which Dante’s poetics enact “the overpassing of the bound” [il trapassar del segno] (Par. 26.117) just as Adam and Eve did in their primal Edenic transgression.3 Pursuing a parallel course, I will investigate the implications of Purgatorio 25 in order to describe its contribution to the theme of transgression, which, like the fortunate fall, ultimately becomes a celebration of the birth of sign making. When we consider the poetics of the Dantean body, the narrative of the Commedia transforms before our very eyes from a linear river into a circular rose and then into a spiralling chorus of angelic intellects. As James Miller has demonstrated in his study of the cosmic dance in Christian philosophy, the spectator of the blessed chorus becomes an initiate in its divine mysteries when the ascending “line” of vision becomes the expanding “spiral” of introspection and intercession. Like a mystical initiate in the cosmic dance, the reader of Dante’s chorally organized poem is transformed from a viewer of signs into a creative participant in its design through an inspiring “write” of passage.4 The journey of the pilgrim leads us forward through time and through the landscape of the afterworld; it corresponds to the journey of the poet—except in reverse. While the pilgrim is progressing through narrative time, the poet is regressing through embryological space. When the pilgrim dramatically encounters God at the end of the poem, the poet recollects his primary encounter with the Creator, the moment when the narrative of his life begins. When the pilgrim reaches the threshold of death, the poet returns to the threshold of birth. Thus, the Commedia travels in two directions simultaneously: it superimposes death upon a return to the womb. Though Dante scholars have tracked down the philosophical and theological sources of Statius’s biological doctrines, the poetic significance of Purgatorio 25 has largely been ignored. Bruno Nardi, to whom almost all subsequent critics defer, has written the seminal work on the long-forgotten embryology expounded (and expanded) in the canto.5 By careful documentation of Dante’s classical and scholastic sources, Nardi succeeds in bringing to life the medieval debate about the development of the embryo and the creation of the individual soul. Most editorial commentaries on the canto inform the reader that Dante’s main sources for Statius’s exposition on the generation of the embryo are Aristotle’s De generatione and De anima as mediated through medieval commentaries, particularly those of Thomas Aquinas. Nardi, by contrast, demonstrates that Dante, in fact, privileges the Aristotelian commentaries of Albert the Great. While most upholders of the commentary tradition acknowledge Dante’s rejection of Averroes’s reading of Aristotle, only Nardi puzzles over
DANTE / FANTE
293
Dante’s condemnation of Averroist opinion coupled with the pilgrim’s encounter in Paradise with Siger of Brabant, the foremost scholastic supporter of Averroistic understandings of Aristotelian biology. Not only is Siger sainted in Paradiso 10, but he is also linked in the carol of the Wise with the other significant theorists of the complex issue of the embryo’s gestation: Thomas and Albert. Unlike Nardi, I read the pilgrim’s meeting with these three souls in Paradise as Dante’s way of acknowledging their theological differences without having to grant any of them the final say in the debate. In the otherworldly light of Dantean salvation, does it really matter how any single theologian, caught up in the worldly conflicts of university life, understands the hidden generation of the embryo? Clearly not, since in Paradiso 10 we discover three stellar intellects who held opposing views on the subject. More important than their clashing doctrines—at least for my purposes—are the patterns of imagery woven around (and, in some sense, generated by) the pilgrim’s harmonious meeting with the three disputants in the embryology debate. Dante’s images of generation reveal a significant narrative design. The ordering of images in Paradiso 9 and 10 invites us to read Purgatorio 25 as a prophetic canto in which Dante reveals how he will creatively return to the miraculous moment in utero when his body became infused with his Creator’s loving breath and his soul was born. Statius recounts the generation of the embryo in a complicated speech stretching over seventy lines (Purg. 25.31–108). Let us reduce his dense explanation to the four fundamental phases of embryonic development. First the embryo begins in “plant” form [pianta] (Purg. 25.53); then it develops into a “marine” creature [spungo marino] (Purg. 25.56); next it develops limbs and organs in an animal phase; and finally, when God breathes into the developed embryo a “new spirit” [spirito novo] (Purg. 25.72), it becomes truly “human” [fante] (Purg. 25.61). When the imagery of Statius’s lecture is rendered in semiotic form, the following evolutionary sequence emerges: plant code, marine code, animal code, divine code (breath of God).6 There are only two other cantos in the poem—Paradiso 9 and 10—where these embryonic codes resurface in sequence. As we have already noted, it is in the Heaven of the Sun that Dante places the great scholastics who once debated about the generation of the embryo and the infusion of the soul: Aquinas, Albert, and Siger. Before we proceed with the resurfacing of embryonic imagery in the Paradiso, we should consider the problematic expression of the marine code in Purgatorio 25. In accordance with Catholic teachings, Statius speaks of
294
PART III
TRASUMANAR
the plant-like embryo as not yet come “ashore” [a riva] (Purg. 25.54) in the sense that it has not arrived at the limit of its development as a distinctively human being; however, his descriptive terms serve to convey a watery space which is further reinforced through the odd figure of the sponge or “sea fungus” [spungo marino] (Purg. 25.56). Critics often remark on the poet’s choice of terms here since his source, Aristotle, referred not to a fungus but to a sponge (normally “spugna” in Italian rather than “spungo”). Another term for this primitive invertebrate might have been “medusa” or “jellyfish,” but Statius chooses the nonce word “spungo”—which, like “fungo,” designates some kind of mushroom—to mark the evolutionary stage between plant and animal.7 Why introduce this odd word into a technical discourse on embryology? I believe the poet chooses it here precisely because it requires the qualifier “marino,“ which would have been redundant after “spugna” or “medusa.” The noun “spungo” needs a marine modifier (recalling the phrase “a riva”) to draw attention to the aquatic space of the womb. Throughout the Commedia, Dante imagines the generation of the embryo in a watery realm. Dante’s philosophical discussion of the generation of the human embryo in the Convivio lacks the one feature emphasized in the Commedia: the water code.8 While both works trace out an evolutionary sequence of phases in embryonic development, only the Sacred Poem depicts the womb as a watery space comparable to the “waters which were above the firmament” (Gen. 1:7). Dante configures Paradise as a vast waterway— “the Great Sea of Being” [lo gran mar de l’essere] (Par. 1.113). Where the pilgrim naturally descended into the cave of Hell and climbed up the mountain of Purgatory, he paradoxically ascends into Heaven by plunging into its oceanic profundity. The “little bark” of his wit [la navicella del mio ingegno] (Purg. 1.2), which charts the expanses of Hell and Purgatory, capsizes in Paradise as soon as the poet compares himself with Glaucus, the humble fisherman who experienced the Divine by diving into the sea (Par. 1.67–9). Ovid’s Glaucus recounts his maritime transformation in terms provocatively echoed and altered by Dante: utque mihi, quaecumque feram, mortalia demant, Oceanum Tethynque rogant: ego lustror ab illis, et purgante nefas noviens mihi carmine dicto… [Then Oceanus And Tethys were invoked to wash me clean Of what I was before; they chanted rhymes, Nine times around me…] (Metamorphoses 13.950–2)9
DANTE / FANTE
295
The pagan realm of metamorphosis is the purifying depths of the sea, where Glaucus’s apotheosis occurs in the magical period of nine rhymes chanted by the sea gods. By contrast, Dante’s sea-change is primarily a spiritual conversion occurring in the purifying heights of the firmament. The textual “space” in which he crosses the boundary between humanity and divinity is not encircled with nine pagan rhymes; instead, his Great Sea of Being revolves in the choral dance of ten chiming heavens. Anticipated by the symbolic role of Beatrice as the mystical nine in the Vita Nuova, the thematics of nine and ten are deeply embedded in the numerological prosody of the sacro poema. The mystical multiplication of threes is manifest in the three canticles consisting of thirty-three cantos in terza rima. The remarkable addition of the Prologue canto (Inferno 1) brings the work to a total of one hundred cantos —a perfect ten multiplied by ten—which creates a prosodic mirror of divine perfection. The resurfacing of embryonic imagery in the Paradiso takes place at the liminal passage from the Heaven of Venus (ending in canto nine) to the Heaven of the Sun (beginning in canto ten). Statius’s tale of the embryo supposes a natural gestation period of nine months, which is surpassed by the infusion of divine breath that transforms the embryo into a potential speaker—specifically a “speaker” (fante) of rhymes. Dante’s heaven consists of ten spheres; after the nine-month gestation of the embryo, the creation of the soul acts as a kind of tenth dimension. Admiring the nine months of Nature’s handiwork, the joyful Creator breathes into it the poet’s immortal soul. Intriguingly, the reader is invited to compare the womb and the heavens as watery zones whenever the pilgrim encounters heavenly souls who first appear to him reflected or submerged within a pool, river, or sea (Par. 3.11, 5.100, 30.61, 33.96). Shortly after comparing himself with Glaucus, Dante specifically relates the aquatic space of Heaven to the aquatic space of the womb. In the Heaven of the Moon, Piccarda describes God as “that sea” towards which all that is generated or created moves: E ’n la sua volontade è nostra pace: ell’ è quel mare al qual tutto si move ciò ch’ella crïa o che natura face. [and in His will is our peace. It is that sea to which all moves, both what It creates and what nature makes.] (Par. 3.85–7)
Piccarda thus harks back to the embryo canto where Dante learns from Statius that Nature generates the embryo but God creates the soul. The narrative direction of the Commedia moves constantly towards the divine
296
PART III
TRASUMANAR
source of life: hence, we read forward into the watery realm of Heaven while we travel backward into the amniotic fluid of the womb. In both spaces—the one reached by poetry, the other by memory—we are quickened by the breath of God. While the narrative voyage of the Commedia simultaneously moves in two opposite directions, the reader, following the poet’s intellectual “craft,” paradoxically reaches the same destination on either via. This combined movement of linear procession and cyclical return may be likened to the spiralling petal pattern of a great rose from which one emerges reborn, or to the collapse of time in a baptismal font whereby one’s death and birth are superimposed, allowing for a regeneration, a rebirth from the ritual waters. When we reach the Heaven of the Sun where Dante has placed the theologians who debated about the embryo’s development, the embryonic codes resurface. The sequence follows the patterning of Statius’s discourse with one striking difference: the water code comes first and sets the scene within which the development occurs. In the Heaven of Venus, the rubylike soul of the Troubadour Folco traces out the sequence of embryonic codes in his speech on the divine “art which so much love adorns” [l’arte ch’addorna / cotanto affetto] (Par. 9.106–7). Setting the scene, Folco uses water imagery to describe the brilliant beauty of the soul next to him: Rahab sparkles “as a sunbeam on clear water” [come raggio di sole in acqua mera] (Par. 9.114). Next, he condemns Florence by way of plant imagery: “Your city—which was planted by him” [La tua città, che di colui è pianta] (Par. 9.127). And then he activates the animal code: Your city “that has caused the sheep and the lambs to stray” [c’ha disvïate le pecore e li agni] (Par. 9.131). The opening lines of Paradiso 10 complete the embryonic imagery, which evolves in a watery realm from plant to animal to divinely inspired human being: Guardando nel suo Figlio con l’Amore che l’uno e l’altro etternalmente spira, lo primo e ineffabile Valore quanto per mente e per loco si gira con tant’ ordine fé ch’esser non puote sanza gustar di lui chi ciò rimira. [Looking upon His Son with the love which the One and the Other eternally breathe forth, the primal and ineffable Power made everything that revolves through the mind or through space with such order that he who contemplates it cannot but taste of Him.] (Par. 10.1–6)
DANTE / FANTE
297
Statius anticipates this passage in his lecture on embryology by referring to God as “the First Mover” [lo motor primo] (Purg. 25.70), and Dante on entering the Heaven of the Sun echoes Statius’s divine epithet by hailing God as “the primal Power” [lo primo…Valore] (Par. 10.3). A minor connection, perhaps, but it gains in significance when we compare the rhymes from both passages. At the outset of Paradiso 10, Dante rhymes spira with gira: God breathes as the universe turns. Down below, en route to the Seventh Cornice, Dante has Statius use the same rhyme scheme to conclude his tale of the embryo’s development: Apri a la verità che viene il petto; e sappi che, sì tosto come al feto l’articular del cerebro è perfetto, lo motor primo a lui si volge lieto sovra tant’ arte di natura, e spira spirito novo, di vertù repleto, che ciò che trova attivo quivi, tira in sua sustanzia, e fassi un’alma sola, che vive e sente e sé in sé rigira. [Open your breast to the truth which is coming, and know that, so soon as in the foetus the articulation of the brain is perfect, the First Mover turns to it with joy over such art of nature, and breathes into it a new spirit replete with virtue, which absorbs that which is active there into its own substance, and makes one single soul which lives and feels and circles on itself.] (Purg. 25.67–75)
At the macrocosmic level, the universe “turns” (gira) because God “breathes” (spira). At the microcosmic level of the individual, God’s “breathing” (spira) infuses the foetus with a soul, which “circles [and circles again] on itself” (sé in sé rigira). Although the rhyme spira/gira appears elsewhere in the Commedia, there are only four places in the poem where the breath issues from God and sets either the soul or the universe revolving. The third and fourth occurrences of this significant rhyme, which we will examine later, appear in the final canto of the poem. As we have noted, Folco’s speech in Paradiso 9 initiates the sequence of embryonic codes, which culminates in the Divine Breath of Paradiso 10. Not surprisingly, the developmental phases recur in the tenth canto: water, plant, animal. This time, the embryonic sequence is traced by Aquinas who tells the pilgrim that any soul who does not respond to his grace would be “like water that flows not down to the sea” [com’ acqua ch’al mar non si cala] (Par. 10.90). Acknowledging the pilgrim’s desire to know the names of the souls in the solar carol, Aquinas declares: “You
298
PART III
TRASUMANAR
wish to know what plants these are that enflower this garland” [Tu vuo’ saper di quai piante s’infiora / questa ghirlanda] (Par. 10.91–2). He then represents himself as one of “the lambs of the holy flock” [li agni de la santa greggia] (Par. 10.94). As in Paradiso 9, we come across the Statian sequence of the embryonic phases: water code, plant code, animal code. In contrast to the ninth canto, however, the tenth does not refer to the crucial final phase. The reference to Divine Breath is lacking. In order to complete the cycle of embryonic development, we must read the sequence in reverse. In the first of the three cantos of the Wise, the pilgrim beholds the inner circle of wisdom where the Divine Mind has placed the great scholastics who debated the development of the embryo and the infusion of the soul. The gathering of embryonic imagery leads the reader not only forward but also backward to the opening of the canto. Whereas Paradiso 9 progresses forward to the Divine Breath, Paradiso 10 effectively narrates a reverse motion in order to complete the cycle. The embryonic pattern of imagery moves both forward and backward in time with the breath of God at the eternal centre around which revolve the codes of imagery. Thus, on a small scale, the epistrophic procession of Paradiso 9 and 10 mirrors the paradoxical dynamics of the Commedia. The goal is always the Divine Breath. The poet writes forward to the encounter with God at the conclusion of the poem—which whirls him back in the cosmic cycles of recollection, the return in time to the moment in the womb when the embryo felt the effects of God’s inspiring breath. Furthermore, it is the infusion of the Creator’s breath that activates the circular narrative of return. This miraculous intervention is the inspiriting impetus whereby the soul “sé in sé rigira.” Statius explains that Averroes, despite his great wisdom, made a crucial error in his understanding of the human soul and its connection to the embryonic stages (Purg. 25.61–6). As Nardi has shown, Dante looks back to Aquinas and Albert for guidance, but ultimately privileges the latter’s reading of this complex biotheological issue. However, in Paradiso 10, the pilgrim (and along with him the reader) must realize sub specie aeternitatis that this debate is not all that important. Great minds struggle to interpret Nature and God, but inevitably make human errors of perception and judgment. Afloat in embryonic imagery, the pilgrim is enwombed by an illuminating sphere in which the three divergent thinkers in the gestation debate have ultimately achieved a harmonious understanding of the Divine Plan. In life they argued with one another. In the afterlife they unite as participants in a great circle of wisdom.
DANTE / FANTE
299
Clearly, then, Statius’s lecture is more than the tedious versification of a medieval academic debate. By means of Paradiso 9 and 10, Dante opens up Purgatorio 25—the generation of the embryo and the creation of the soul—to a more profound understanding of God’s role in human development from the perspective of the great intellectual saints. John Freccero asserts that “for the pilgrim and author to be one and the same requires nothing short of death and resurrection.”10 Instead of “death and resurrection,” I would say “death and a return to the womb” or “death as a return to the womb.” Dante constructs the Commedia so that these two fundamental moments coincide. The symbolic death of the pilgrim at the moment of divine union activates the momentous birth of the poem, and the birth of the poem requires a symbolic return to the womb in which the embryonic self experienced the Divine Breath and was transformed into a fante. To recreate the ultimate experience of trasumanar, Dante extends the uterine moment of humanization so that the reader may follow the pilgrim’s long textual journey of return, and at each step, recognize the immense poetic effort to harmonize his creative work with the divinely inspired birth of his language-gifted self. The primal moment of transformation for the new Glaucus is the miraculous instant his soul is infused with the poetic logos. Dante’s choice of the noun fante to convey the crucial shift from animal embryo to human embryo is as striking and unusual as his choice of “spungo marino.” The participial noun fante comes from the Latin cognate “fari” (to speak) and thus originally meant “one who is speaking.” The more common mode of expressing the stage of infancy (as in English) clearly hinges on the opposed notion: that one is a non-speaker, an in-fante. The implications of Dante’s diction are crucial here, especially when the lecture of Statius is linked to the passage in the preceding canto (Purg. 24.52–4) where Dante tells Bonagiunta about the Divine Breath becoming poetry. Despite this assertion of immediate inspiration from the God of Love, the pilgrim also realizes that Virgil has played an active role in the complex process of transforming him into a poet. Virgil parallels the pagan Glaucus who experiences metamorphosis according to the natural nine, but cannot make the leap to comprehend, let alone teach or reach, the divine ten. When Beatrice on the summit of Purgatory finally confronts the pilgrim as a nascent poet who has been formed in the womb of pagan poetry by his dolcissimo patre Virgil, he is named “Dante” with its rhyming echo of the moment he became a fante or fantolin (Purg. 30.44–55). Now he becomes a little child again, weeping in the presence of his new mother who has come to restore to him what his antica madre Eve lost in Eden.
300
PART III
TRASUMANAR
As in the narrow stairwell leading to the Seventh Cornice, he must be “unpaired” from his phantom-father in order to be recoupled with his fantasy-mother. The long-distance rhyming of fante (Purg. 25.61) with “Dante” (Purg. 30.55) with fante (Par. 33.107) creates a thematic terza rima across the poem where the immanent “now” of the central rhyme is Dante-poet. What generates Dante-poet is the relationship between these two key moments of becoming a fante: the humanizing infusion of the soul into the embryo and the transhumanizing inspiration of the soul in the Empyrean. These infantilizations of Dante set in motion his textual rebirth from pilgrim to poet. The defining moment when Dante is symbolically transformed from animal-like foetus into human fante at the end of the poem is marked, strangely enough, by the poet’s inability to speak and remember. The prevailing aim of the Commedia is to recall and articulate through art the most significant yet unsignifiable moment in the development of “our life” [nostra vita] (Inf. 1.1). Dante signals the death of the pilgrim by poetically superimposing it upon his rebirth as a poet. The amorous revolution of the Sun and the other stars at the end of Paradiso 33 whirls the reader back down to the amorous infusion of semen into the womb-world of Purgatorio 25. Struggling to convey his vision of God, the poet draws a stunning initiatory analogy between his actual inability to describe the Divine Presence and the potential ability of an infant to turn babble into speech: Omai sarà più corta mia favella, pur a quel ch’io ricordo, che d’un fante che bagni ancor la lingua a la mammella. [Now will my speech fall more short, even in respect to that which I remember, than that of an infant who still bathes his tongue at the breast.] (Par. 33.106–8)
At the end of the poem, Dante once again identifies himself as a fante by returning to the unusual diction of the embryo canto. As Statius once informed the pilgrim, the most difficult moment for us to understand in the gestation of the embryo is our transformation from inarticulate animal to articulate fante. The metamorphosis results from the divine infusion of breath by which a human soul enters the embryo. Because the key term fante from the embryo canto recurs at the end of the poem, we are encouraged to perceive the pilgrim’s ultimate encounter with God as a verbal memory of his primal encounter with God. At both moments, he becomes a fante. Just as the infusion of God’s breath transforms him
DANTE / FANTE
301
from an animal-like embryo into a (potential) speaker in the womb, so the inspiration of God’s presence, which coincides with the completion of the poem, marks his transformation from a verbally challenged pilgrim into a new David, a supremely gifted singer of the Word. His failure to express the moment-by-moment changes in the immortalizing process of trasumanar stems from a simple failure of memory. His encounter with God at the death of his pilgrim-self parallels his pre-birth esperienza when, despite the immanence of the Divine, he could not recollect or express his coming into humanity. Yet the fante analogy in the Empyrean is far from a conventional apology for inarticulateness at the threshold of ineffability. He is not in the end a helpless embryo lost in the nonage of womb-time. He is a nursing infant, a babe in arms, with an independent life ahead of him and an immense world of discourse to explore. Besides linking the two cantos with the term fante, Dante conveys his vision of God with the spira/gira rhyme, which, as we have already noted, occurs in the embryo canto and recurs in the Heaven of the Sun: Ne la profonda e chiara sussistenza de l’alto lume parvermi tre giri di tre colori e d’una contenenza; e l’un da l’altro come iri da iri parea reflesso, e ’l terzo parea foco che quinci e quindi igualmente si spiri. [Within the profound and shining subsistence of the lofty Light appeared to me three circles of three colors and one magnitude; and one seemed reflected by the other, as rainbow by rainbow, and the third seemed fire breathed forth equally from the one and the other.] (Par. 33.115–20)
Here, making its fourth and final appearance, the gestational rhyme appears with the plural noun giri linked with the third-person singular verb form spiri. The rhyme appeared as giri/spiri in its third appearance in the poem, near the start of the third cantica, where it also intriguingly alludes to the embryo canto. Upon entering the Heaven of the Moon, Beatrice explains to the pilgrim how the heavens influence individuals: Lo moto e la virtù d’i santi giri, come dal fabbro l’arte del martello, da’ beati motor convien che spiri… [The motion and the virtue of the holy spheres, even as the hammer’s art by the smith, must needs be inspired by the blessed movers…] (Par. 2.127–9)
302
PART III
TRASUMANAR
Once more reversed as well as pluralized, the giri/spiri rhyme acts as a poetic device to signal the embryo canto—a connection sometimes lost in translation. In contrast to Singleton, Sinclair translates “spiri da” as “derive from,” which fails to capture the original sense of Divine Breath. God’s breathing sets in motion the “blessed movers” (beati motor) who, in turn, spin the “holy wheels” (santi giri). The smith uses his hammer to drive in the nail. God’s breath moves the angelic orders so that they set spinning the holy wheels, which influence the generation of all living things on earth. Continuing her explanation, Beatrice draws another analogy, which takes us back to the embryo canto: E come l’alma dentro a vostra polve per differenti membra e conformate a diverse potenze si risolve, così l’intelligenza sua bontate multiplicata per le stelle spiega, girando sé sovra sua unitate. [And as the soul within your dust is diffused through different members and conformed to different potencies, so does the Intelligence deploy its goodness, multiplied through the stars, itself circling upon its own unity.] (Par. 2.133–8)
The echo of “sé in sé rigira” in “girando sé sovra sua unitate” provides another link between microcosm and macrocosm, between the divinely united soul and the divinely unifying spheres. Harking back to Statius, Beatrice refers to the primal moment when God breathed forth the soul of Adam and transformed dust into humanity. If her theological allusion to Genesis seems far removed from Statius’s biological discourse, we need only read ahead to a later speech she makes on the subject of generation to see how the embryo canto is crucially related to the argument of the third cantica. Approaching the Heaven of Venus, Beatrice unravels for the pilgrim a typically baffling conundrum about the Flesh—how will it be resurrected?—which may seem at first to have little bearing on the present discussion. However, if we focus on the imagery she uses to explain the miracle of resurrection, then the passage becomes highly relevant to the venereal conception of the womb-world: L’anima d’ogne bruto e de le piante di complession potenzïata tira lo raggio e ’l moto de le luci sante; ma vostra vita sanza mezzo spira la somma beninanza, e la innamora
DANTE / FANTE
303
di sé sì che poi sempre la disira. E quinci puoi argomentare ancora vostra resurrezion, se tu ripensi come l’umana carne fessi allora che li primi parenti intrambo fensi. [The soul of every beast and of the plants is drawn from a potentiate compound by the shining and the motion of the holy lights; but your life, the Supreme Beneficence breathes forth without intermediary, and so enamors it of Itself that it desires It ever after. And hence you further can infer your resurrection, if you reflect how was the making of human flesh then when the first parents were both formed.] (Par. 7.139–48)
Beatrice clearly sets her explanation in the context of what the pilgrim has already learned from Statius. After the embryo is compounded in the watery womb under the influence of the spheres, it “travels” through a plant stage and arrives on the “shore” of animal nature until it reaches its human form, at which moment God breathes a human soul directly into it. Fusing the discourses of Aristotelian biology and Catholic psychology, Beatrice explicitly connects the miraculous birth of Adam out of the dust with the generation of every subsequent human being (including Eve) who receives a soul directly from God. Adam and Eve “transgress the sign” in the Garden of Eden: they attempt to cross over the boundary established by God between divinity and humanity. The aesthetic design of Dante’s poem requires a comparable transgression of Mother Nature. The boundaries of both temporality and corporeality must be transgressed in order for the poet and his reader to return to the direct speech our primal Father and Mother once shared with God and lost in that fateful moment of disobedience in the Garden. As Eric Jager has argued, the Fall in the Garden marked for medieval exegetes the moment when natural discourse with God was lost and the art of sign making was born.11 The Fall becomes fortunate for Dante when he begins to employ his sign making to return to the infancy of speech in the Garden, the natural discourse he held for a brief moment when his Creator breathed in his self-conscious soul. Considering Dante’s use of baby talk in the Commedia and its relation to the confusion of tongues at Babel, Robert Hollander has argued that “grammatica” acts as a kind of redemption for humanity’s linguistic fall.12 Countering Hollander, I contend that Dante must return to baby talk—just as he must return to the Garden of Eden—in order “to trespass the sign” and thereby set in motion his salvation. The pilgrim needs to transgress what Hollan-
304
PART III
TRASUMANAR
der identifies as Virgil’s “grammatical excellence” by reverting to the babble of the womb and hence to the natural speech breathed into Adam before the Fall. Beatrice’s allusion to Adam sends the reader back to the typological roots of the embryo canto in Genesis, where an intriguing discovery may be made. The creation of the world repeats the sequence of phases in the creation of the embryo. First God created plants; then He brought forth the sea creatures; and finally He made the beasts of the field. The final step, of course, is reached when God “formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Gen. 2:7). I have elided one complex moment in the generation of flora and fauna of the earth in order to foreground it. The Creator makes sea creatures and flying creatures in the same speech-act: “And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven” (Gen. 1:20). As noted, Dante plays with this biblical correlation between flying and diving—ascension into the heavens and submersion in the sea—so that the two spaces mirror one another as reflecting images of the Great Sea of Being, our primal origin and our ultimate destination. In the cyclical design of the Commedia, Dante superimposes the watery end of the poem in Heaven upon the watery beginning of the soul in the womb. We have charted various ways in which the poem encourages us to participate in this design through patterns of recurrent imagery (fante) and recurrent rhymes (spira/gira). There is one further link between the primal beginning and ultimate end of Creation that requires attention. In both Purgatorio 25, which recounts the embryonic beginning, and Paradiso 33, which reveals the teleological end of creation, Dante raises a rainbow. The transient phenomenon of the rainbow occurs under paradoxical conditions—when the Sun shines through rain. Dante often associates the rainbow with the messenger of the pagan gods, Iris, who was in turn traditionally linked with Juno in her role as goddess of childbirth. The rainbow thus functions as an appropriate sign of the fleeting contradictory moment when a birth is divinely heralded, which in turn anticipates a human death, which ultimately promises a transhuman rebirth. Looking back to the Sixth Cornice in Purgatorio 25, Dante asks his fellow poets about the relationship between shades and bodies, and receives two contrasting replies—a mythological allusion from Virgil and a biological lecture from Statius—which provide only oblique answers to his
DANTE / FANTE
305
question about the paradoxical “hunger” of the repentant Gluttons. However, after his tale of embryonic development, Statius does respond directly to the pilgrim’s query. Although Statius bases his lecture on up-to-date scholastic learning in the intellectual wake of Albert and Aquinas, Dantepoet draws on his own imagination when he has Statius explain the relationship between a living body and a ghostly shade.13 As the flesh falls away after death, the liberated soul—consisting of memory, intelligence, and will—intensifies its formative power and swiftly generates a shadebody out of air similar in appearance to its former earth-body. Statius clarifies his explanation by comparison to a rainbow: Tosto che loco lì la circunscrive, la virtù formativa raggia intorno così e quanto ne le membra vive. E come l’aere, quand’ è ben pïorno, per l’altrui raggio che ’n sé si reflette, di diversi color diventa addorno; così l’aere vicin quivi si mette e in quella forma ch’è in lui suggella virtüalmente l’alma che ristette… [As soon as space encompasses it there, the formative virtue radiates around, in form and quantity as in the living members. And as the air, when it is full of moisture, becomes adorned with various colors by another’s rays which are reflected in it, so here the neighboring air shapes itself in that form which is virtually imprinted on it by the soul that stopped there…] (Purg. 25.88–96)
Just as the image of the rainbow suggests the generative relation of soul to body in Purgatorio 25, so it conveys an impression of the processional relation of Father to Son in the Trinitarian vision of Paradiso 33. Although these two rainbow comparisons seem very different at first glance, they function as microcosmic and macrocosmic parallels in the eschatological design of the poem. Following Nardi, who has called attention to the echoes of Augustinian psychology in Dante’s conception of the soul as a triadic unity of memory, intelligence, and will, I am inclined to interpret the two rainbow passages in light of an overarching correspondence between the three powers of the individual soul in Purgatorio 25 and the three Persons of the universal Godhead in Paradiso 33.14 If terza rima is a mimetic rendering of the Trinity, as Freccero has argued, then Dante’s prosodic creation dovetails evocatively with the creations in utero et in mundo announced by the rainbows of Purgatorio 25 and Paradiso 33. The concatenated design of terza rima also suggests a com-
306
PART III
TRASUMANAR
pelling overlap of beginning and end, start and finish. In his analysis of the progressive momentum of the Sacred Poem, Freccero emphasizes “the reconciliation of motion that terza rima implies: a forward motion, closed off with a recapitulation that gives to the motion its beginning and end. Any complete appearance of rhyme…BA BCB…incorporates at the same time a recall to the past and a promise of the future that seem to meet in the now of the central rhyme.”15 Ingeniously, Dante has created a verse form that looks back at the past and drives forward to the future so that these seemingly contradictory movements happen simultaneously in the symbolic “now” of the rhyme scheme. Recreated at every turn in the prosodic design of the Commedia is the superimposition of primal beginning upon ultimate end—the fante of the embryo canto upon the fante of the Trinity canto. Beginning and end unite through Beatrice’s intercession to generate the poet named “Dante.” The whole structure of the Sacred Poem, from the patterning of rhymes to the parallelling of canticles, serves to communicate the remarkable overlap between the primary encounter with God in the womb and the poetic encounter with God in the Empyrean. We can no longer read Purgatorio 25 merely as a doctrinal treatise on the generation of the embryo and creation of the soul, for the canto clearly has a profoundly prophetic relation to Paradiso 33. Dante binds the two cantos together by designating the womb and the heavens as watery spaces; by activating the spira/gira rhyme; and by raising the image of the rainbow to express the triune force of the immortal body arising from the individual’s extinguished form. Dante superimposes the primal beginning onto the ultimate end: his encounter with God in the womb parallels his creative encounter with God at the Summit of Heaven. The former leads to birth, the latter to death, and both are stilled in the central rhyme of the terza rima, which heralds Dante’s initiation into poetic time. One way to grasp the mystical inception of poetic time is to consider Dante’s initiation in the Empyrean as a sacred rite of passage. As Mircea Eliade explains in his anthropological account of such rites, “one common characteristic emerges—access to the sacred and to the spirit is always figured as an embryonic gestation and a new birth.” The impulse towards rites of passage originates in humanity’s religious desire to erase the “historical duration that has already elapsed.”16 By encouraging the reader to travel simultaneously forward and backward through narrative time— both within each tercet and across the whole rainbow arch of the poem— Dante creates a ritual passage of poetic “nows” which transgress the
DANTE / FANTE
307
natural boundaries of time to recreate an enduring impression of the eternal Now. Transgressing the boundaries of the body, the span of time, and the horizon of memory, Dante transforms himself from an infantilized babbler into a supremely confident fante of his own poetic universe. Bypassing the nine months of gestation and the nine circles of pagan rhymes, he travels into his own fantastic liminal realm, which circles like the heavens and flows around him like a vast amniotic sea. Virgil acts as his father-mentor only up to a point—the poignant moment of his encounter with Beatrice. Virgil’s limits are comparable to those reached by Mother Nature when her handiwork is done and God perfects it with his breath. Hence, while Dante-pilgrim travels forward through the narrative of the Underworld journey shaped by the sophisticated poetics of Virgil, Dantepoet travels backward towards the natural speech lost in the Garden of Eden. In the terrestrial paradise, Virgil ritualizes the return of Dante to the ancient garden where Adam and Eve once spoke directly with God. Dante’s poetics of transgression depend upon recrossing the boundary breached by our Edenic parents. The “trapassar del segno” (Par. 26.117) of the first human couple uncouples all of us from God and results in our dependence on sign making to communicate with one another and distantly with Him. Dante paradoxically builds a bridge back to simple communication with the Divine Mind through a human mind’s extraordinarily complicated act of sign making, the construction of the Sacred Poem. Just as the birth of his soul is conceived as his transformation into a fante, so the poetic rebirth of his soul, when he dies to himself by uniting with God at the end of the poem, returns him to an infantile state. The crucial issue of speech is raised at the primal beginning and the perfecting end of Dante’s life as a pilgrim-poet. The birth of Dante’s poem as a vast “body of literature” growing out of the Commedia corresponds to the developmental expansion of the embryonic body. Emerging from the sea journey of the womb, the fante holds fast to the fading memory of God’s ensouling breath. Emerging from the sea journey of the poem, the reborn fante struggles to recall God’s enrapturing inspiration. In the moment where temporal losses are restored and the Now of the central rhyme emerges, Dante encourages the reader to feel the inspiriting immanence of the Creator in his Creation and thus to be transformed.17
308
PART III
TRASUMANAR
NOTES 1 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from the Commedia in this essay have been drawn from the Petrocchi edition as reprinted and slightly revised by Singleton (1970–75). All translations from Dante are by Singleton (1970–75). The components of the Commedia cited from include Inferno (Inf.), Purgatorio (Purg.), and Paradiso (Par.). Also cited is Convivio (Conv.). 2 All biblical references are from the Authorized King James Version. 3 Barolini (1992), 48–73. 4 Miller (1986), 510–21. 5 Nardi (1964), 501–17; (1960), 9–68. 6 I have taken the term “code” from the work of semiotician Michael Riffaterre who uses it to indicate that the vocabulary has been organized in such a way that it contributes to a category. A string of swear words would thus form a “profanity code.” 7 See Bosco and Reggio’s discussion of why they replace “fungo” with “spungo” in their edition of the Commedia, vol. 2, Purgatorio (1979), canto 25, n. 56. 8 Conv. 3.2.10–17; 3.3.9–10. 9 The Metamorphoses, 379. 10 Freccero (1986), 133. 11 Jager (1993), 51–98, 191–240. 12 Hollander (1980), 122–29. 13 Gilson (1967), 124–42; Shankland (1975), 765. 14 Nardi (1960), 58. 15 Freccero (1986), 262. 16 Eliade (1958), 58. 17 A version of this essay appears under the title “Charting the Course of the Embryo” in Fraser (2002), 13–29. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alighieri, Dante. Convivio. Ed. Piero Cudini. Milano: Garzanti, 1980. ——— The Divine Comedy. Trans. John D. Sinclair. 3 vols. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961, 1966–68. ——— The Divine Comedy. Trans. Charles S. Singleton. 6 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–75. ——— La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. Ed. G. Petrocchi. 4 vols. Milano: Mondadori, 1966–67. ——— La Divina Commedia. Vol. 2: Purgatorio. Ed. Umberto Bosco and Giovanni Reggio. Firenze: Le Monnier, 1979. Barolini, Teodolinda. The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Eliade, Mircea. Rites and Symbols of Initiation: Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper, 1958. Fraser, Jennifer Margaret. Rite of Passage in the Narratives of Dante and Joyce. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2002.
DANTE / FANTE
309
Freccero, John. Dante: The Poetics of Conversion. Ed. Rachel Jacoff. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Gilson, Etienne. “Dante’s Notion of a Shade: Purgatorio XXV.” Mediaeval Studies 29 (1967): 124–42. Hollander, Robert. Studies in Dante. Ravenna: Longo, 1980. Jager, Eric. The Tempter’s Voice: Language and the Fall in Medieval Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Miller, James. Measures of Wisdom: The Cosmic Dance in Classical and Christian Antiquity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986. Nardi, Bruno. “L’origine dell’anima umana secondo Dante.” Studi di filosofia medievale. Roma: Edizione di storia e letteratura, 1960. 9–68. ——— “Il canto XXV del Purgatorio.” Letture Dantesche. Vol. 2, Purgatorio. Ed. Giovanni Getto. Firenze: Sansoni, 1964. 501–17. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Ed. Frank Justus Miller. 2 vols. London: Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951. ——— The Metamorphoses. Trans. Horace Gregory. New York: Viking, 1958. Riffaterre, Michael. Semiotics of Poetry. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1978. Shankland, Hugh. “Dante ‘Aliger.’” Modern Language Review 70 (1975): 765–85.
The Cyprian Redeemed Venereal Influence in Paradiso Bonnie MacLachlan
A
s Dante rises into the Heaven of Venus, his thoughts momentarily turn back to the pre-Christian world which had embraced and perpetuated a dangerous astrological belief about the lascivious influence of the third planet: Solea creder lo mondo in suo periclo che la bella Ciprigna il folle amore raggiasse, volta nel terzo epiciclo… [The world was wont to believe, to its peril, that the fair Cyprian, wheeling in the third epicycle, rayed down mad love…](Par. 8.1–3)1
That this mad love originated not with the planet alone but with the love goddess born on the waves off Cyprus was, in the poet’s judgment, the “ancient error” [antico errore] (Par. 8.6) that led the ancients to worship Venus along with her son Cupid and mother Dione. From the pagan madonna-and-child image enshrined in Virgil’s Aeneid (1.715–20), Dante recalls that Cupid had aroused more than maternal love when he “sat in Dido’s lap” [sedette in grembo a Dido] (Par. 8.9). Dido’s cradling of the disguised boy-god, whom she mistook for Aeneas’s young son Ascanius, inflamed her with amor—a passionate and dangerous attraction to Aeneas—all in keeping with the design of mother Venus. As Dante further recalls before his gaze is caught by the intensifying beauty of Beatrice, the ancients also bestowed the name “Venus” on the Morning and Evening Star: e da costei ond’ io principio piglio pigliavano il vocabol de la stella che ’l sol vagheggia or da coppa or da ciglio.
310
THE CYPRIAN REDEEMED
311
[and from her with whom I take my start they took the name of the star which the sun woos, now behind her, now before.] (Par. 8.10–12)
For Dante the ancient error in need of correction is not the association of passionate love with planetary influence or the perception of solar motion as an amorous pursuit, but the pagan understanding of amore as inevitably folle. The planet Venus with its powers to stimulate and sustain love has a place in his universe—a blessed place—because it is seen at close hand to shed only holy influences originating ultimately in God. While ancient perceptions and memories of Venus persist in the Commedia, their significance has been miraculously converted under Beatrice’s amorous gaze. Like Virgil’s epic, the allegorical blazoning of Beatrice’s beauty in the third cantica is a narrative carefully organized along teleological lines, but whereas the Aeneid aims to document the founding of Rome by acts of heroism, the anagogic movement of the Paradiso is directed primarily towards the apprehension of God. This progressive movement is made possible through the kinetic impetus of the amor that initially moves Beatrice to come to the poet’s aid (Inf. 2.72), a love that not only embraces and celebrates the erotic but considers it essential to the Divine Plan. In making this momentous departure from Virgil, Dante has incorporated the affective mode of spirituality that found its way into the pastoral theology and religious imagery of the High Middle Ages. The ardour informing Cistercian devotion to the Virgin Mary, for instance, wins Bernard of Clairvaux a prominent place in the culminating moments of Paradiso. But just as Dante-pilgrim left Virgil behind, so Dante-poet parts company with Bernard by transcending the saint’s orthodox understanding of love in his own unorthodox passion for Beatrice. Dante’s God is not only Love but in love. The Annunciation as Beatrice interprets and reenacts it for him is an act of purest carità but also of passionate amore. God’s emissary, the Archangel Gabriel, looks into the eyes of Mary and is “so enamored that he seems afire” [innamorato sì che par di foco] (Par. 32.105). This revelation is uttered by Beatrice’s successor as guide, the transfigured Bernard whose glorified body becomes more beautiful by proximity to his beloved Mary, just as the “Morning Star draws its beauty from the Sun” [come del sole stella mattutina] (Par. 32.107–8). Since the Sun is a recurrent metaphor for God (Par. 10.53, cf. Conv. 3.12.7), the astronomical image of solar “wooing” implies that Venus—whose beauty is desirable because it springs from the Divine Light—must also be regarded as a stimulus for God’s desire. God is both the primal origin of desire and the kinetic force that draws His creatures to Himself. In
312
PART III
TRASUMANAR
contemplating the Sun’s attraction to the Morning Star, we are reminded that God also feels passionate desire for the creatures whose hearts are warmed and minds illumined by His all-pervasive gloria (Par. 1.1). Another way Dante incorporates the power of Cyprian Venus into his poem is by inverting genders, an allegorical shock tactic that pushes his poem even further beyond the secular love poetry and devotional theology of the thirteenth century. Throughout the Commedia, the fluidity between male and female roles is arresting. On the transfiguring summit of the Holy Mountain, for example, Beatrice is hailed as both bride and bridegroom (Purg. 30.11, 19) and Virgil as both mother and father (Purg. 30.44, 50).2 Many ancient texts, including several familiar to Dante, attest to the widespread belief that Venus in her theogonic guise as Aphrodite on Cyprus (cf. “la bella Ciprigna] (Par. 8.2) possessed both male and female features. Virgil, describing Aeneas’s departure from Troy, refers to the hero’s protective mother as a “god”– not a goddess—“directing his course” [ducente deo] (Aeneid 2.632). Macrobius, a fifth-century Neoplatonist whose Latin compendia on philosophical and religious topics were widely read in the Middle Ages, noted that commentators had been puzzled by Virgil’s assigning maleness to Venus. On Cyprus, however, Venus was strikingly envisioned as both male and female. As Florentine Neoplatonists would recall two centuries after Dante, Macrobius confirmed that a celebrated statue of the goddess existed in antiquity showing her bearded, with male genitalia and a sceptre in hand, but attired as a woman (Saturnalia 8.1–3).3 Another ancient text known to Dante was the vast commentary on Virgil’s works by the fourth-century grammarian Servius, who records that transvestism was practised by participants in festivals of Cypriot Aphrodite (In Aeneidem 2.632). In making sacrifice to bisexual Aphrodite, men dressed up in women’s clothing and women in men’s. Dante’s understanding of the classical features of Cyprian Venus, namely, her erotic power and bisexuality, informs his poetic odyssey in ways which can certainly be considered unorthodox within the cultural context of early-fourteenth-century Catholicism. The two features of the goddess are, of course, interrelated. Hesiod, who assigned the birthplace of Aphrodite to Cyprus, gave her a place in cosmogonic succession (like those occupied by some divinities in other creation myths) at the climactic moment when creative forces were released by the splitting or cutting of primordial matter. For the Greeks this process entailed the castration of the sky god Ouranos and his consequent withdrawal from coupling with his mother, the earth goddess Gaia. The flesh of Ouranos was cast
THE CYPRIAN REDEEMED
313
into the sea near Cyprus. White foam rose up and Aphrodite was formed (Theogony 190–92). Her beauty became the divine stimulus of erotic desire. As Aphrodite Ourania, moreover, she guaranteed fertility by releasing the forces of creation. Aphrodite ensured that creatures sought a return to oneness, to momentary androgyny in an act necessary to ensure new life. Cupid (Eros) was frequently depicted as bisexual from the Hellenistic period through late antiquity. Endowed with procreative powers like his mother, he represented both the duality-in-unity of the sexual act between man and woman and the begetting of male and female offspring.4 Supreme gods with creative force, even if they do not have specific responsibility for sexual attraction, must be male and female because they contain all things in potentia. An Orphic fragment (21a: Kern) refers to “Zeus the male, Zeus the immortal wife,” and a terra-cotta relief from Caria dating from the fourth century B.C.E. depicts Zeus with a triangle of six breasts. To be perfect, the supreme divinity must embody all. The Hebrew Creator-God Ywa must have had bisexual potential, for He made mortals “in his own image…male and female created he them” (Gen. 1:27).5 Gender reversal was practised in certain rituals of Aphrodite on Cyprus. From Plutarch, we learn of a festival of Ariadne-Aphrodite in which a young man acted out the agonies of a woman giving birth (Life of Theseus 20.3). Though this feature of the Aphrodite cult was probably unknown to Dante, the male initiate’s dramatic experience of “the Other,” with the feeling of physical completeness it induced, is not unlike the dissolution of boundaries, of gendered contraries, that occurs in Paradiso. Both the female and the male aspects of God are ultimately apprehended in the Empyrean, the realm of final blessedness where Bernard supplants (but also mystically fuses with) Beatrice as the poet’s guide. For Dante, the ultimate salvation is an experience of the Divine as female, a new engendering in which his soul “in-hers” itself in close proximity to God: “Tu se’ sì presso a l’ultima salute,” cominciò Bëatrice, “che tu dei aver le luci tue chiare e acute; e però, prima che tu più t’inlei, rimira in giù…” [“You are so near to the final blessedness,” Beatrice began, “that you must have your eyes clear and keen. And therefore, before you enter farther in it (literally ‘in-her yourself’), look back downward…”] (Par. 22.124–8)
314
PART III
TRASUMANAR
When Dante reveals in the Heaven of Venus that each blessed spirit also has a masculinizing vision of the Divine, he switches the pronominal root of the salient verb from lei to lui: “Dio vede tutto, e tuo veder s’inluia,” diss’ io, “beato spirto, sì che nulla voglia di sé a te puot’ esser fuia.” [“God sees all, and into Him your vision sinks (literally ‘in-hims himself’), blessed spirit,” I said, “so that no wish may steal itself from you.”] (Par. 9.73–5)6
Clearly able to “in-him” herself, Beatrice takes over from Virgil the masculine role of guiding Dante in the Commedia. She also crosses gender lines by doubling as Christ at the climactic moment of her/his advent, when she is hailed with the masculine form of the Latin word for “Blessed” [Benedictus qui venis] (Purg. 30.19; cf. Matt. 21:9); and later, when she addresses her seven attendant Virtues in Latin with Christ’s prophecy, “A little while, and ye shall not see me” [Modicum, et non videbitis me] (Purg. 33.10; cf. John 16:16). Feminist critic Joan Ferrante has demonstrated how the gendered features of the spirits in Paradiso differ from those in Inferno and Purgatorio. In Hell, feminine traits are negative; in the Earthly Paradise, they are a positive counterpoise to bad masculine traits; in Heaven, masculine and feminine traits are not only complementary but experienced simultaneously. Just as Beatrice is identified with Christ the Bridegroom and with the Church his Bride, so Dante is both groom and bride.7 Men and women reach such a level of gender parity in Heaven that their once distinct natures as lovers are virtually—and virtuously—interchangeable. The result is an erotically lively yet paradoxically unsinful transgression of the “natural” boundaries between the sexes. Familiar social distinctions are also mysteriously fused in Heaven. Bernard’s ardent paean to Mary (Par. 33.1–39) opens with the acknowledgment of qualities in her, which, in an earthly woman, would embody serious contradictions. Not only is she at once humble and exalted, Virgin and Mother, but also the “daughter of [her] son” [figlia del tuo figlio] (Par. 33.1). The flexibility offered by the inflected character of Italian nouns, pronouns, and adjectives permits Dante to perceive spirits as “masculine” (spiriti) or “feminine” (anime), so that souls who were formerly male or female persons are addressed freely by feminine and masculine terms. God is inevitably perceived as masculine when He is hailed as “the primal and ineffable Power” [lo primo e ineffabile Valore] (Par. 10.3) or as “the Supreme Leader” [(il)
THE CYPRIAN REDEEMED
315
sommo duce] (Par. 25.72); but the same deity assumes a feminine character when She is perceived as “the final blessedness” [l’ultima salute] (Par. 22.124) or as “the Eternal Light” [la luce etterna] (Par. 11.20).8 Like Aphrodite-Venus, Dante’s God emerges as a male-female deity whose rites (as performed, at least, by the Blessed) entail the playful surprise of transvestism and gender inversion. What cultural design lies behind this bisexual or hermaphroditic conception of divinity? In a pioneering ethnographic study of myths and rituals, Mircea Eliade has examined this coincidentia oppositorum—the impulse to combine contraries—in folklore, dreams, meditation techniques, and forms of artistic representation. He proposes that the age-old engagement with bisexual divinity stems from a deep dissatisfaction with the human condition, in which mortals feel torn, separated from an immortal unity, and cut off from a primal source of creative energy.9 Shamans, yogis, alchemists, and other spiritual figures who engage in transvestite rituals or worship bisexual deities are striving to achieve reintegration, to recover a primal state of wholeness and holiness, which was known primordially before the creation of discrete bodies. Ritual transvestism is designed to recreate this divine state and to release its unifying energy for communal benefit. Frequently, a primordial androgynous deity represents wholeness in a primal sense, and in some cultures is specifically addressed as male-female. Roman agrarian divinities, for instance, were invoked with the formulaic call “sive deus sive dea” (god or goddess). The religious quest to experience eternal wholeness—if only temporarily through the body—often involves the participation of a god or spirit specifically associated with love. In Plato’s Symposium (203a–208b), Socrates learns from Diotima that Eros directs lovers beyond the momentary experience of oneness in the flesh to the eternal state of intellectual and spiritual wholeness. While Dante does not impose ancient pagan rituals on the Empyrean or derive saintly charity from symposiastic eroticism, he is driven by Beatrice’s passionate anagogic energy to identify his/her androgynous God with “the Primal Love” [(il) primo amore] (Par. 32.142). There was scriptural justification for this. Not only did Moses reveal that God created man and woman in His/Her own image (Gen. 2:21–2), but Paul insisted that male and female belonged equally to the Creator. For God said that He would be “a father to his people,” and that they would be His “sons and daughters” (2 Cor. 6:16, 18). Paul, moreover, argued that distinctions of gender, race, and class would all be dissolved in Christ. As he reminded the Church, “there is neither male nor female, for you are all
316
PART III
TRASUMANAR
one in Jesus Christ” (Gal. 3:28). This message could be taken by early Christians either as a political mandate endorsing their sense of uniqueness, or as a prophecy of a new creation in which humanity would be restored to its unfallen condition. The identical clothing worn by all Christian initiates for the sacrament of Baptism acknowledged the undifferentiated status of male and female participants. The Gnostics took this unifying impulse even further, conferring androgyny upon Adam in their exegesis of Genesis. By linking the figure of Adam as an androgynous creator-progenitor with the notion of eschatological wholeness provided by Baptism, early Christians were able to identify themselves as dynamically “Other”—which made them potentially subversive—within the oppressively stabilizing regime of imperial paganism. “If in baptism the Christian has put on again the image of the Creator, in whom ‘there is no male and female,’” Wayne Meeks has observed, “then for him the whole world has passed away and, behold! the new has come.”10 While Dante’s use of androgyny in Paradiso is not inconsistent with theological trends of his time, it can also be perceived, like Baptism in the early church, as potentially subversive. Like other thinkers of the High Middle Ages who were distressed by the abuses of a strongly patriarchal hierarchy in the church, Dante turned to the image of an androgynous God—in particular, to the female side of Christ—as a devotional tradition which might circumvent the corrupt perpetuation of this patriarchy. Bernard, like Julian of Norwich after him, developed the idea of “Mother Jesus” so that bishops and abbots might take upon themselves the nurturing capacity of Christ. As they were suckled at his breast, so they were to nurse their monks. In one of his many sermons on the Song of Songs, Bernard advises his prelates to turn from their chief delight, contemplation, to the less attractive activity of preaching, just as the bride must interrupt the kisses of the bridegroom to suckle her babes (Sermo 41.5–6). But the idealization and appropriation of the mothering and nurturing capacity of women could coexist with a belief in the inferiority of real women; this was clearly the case not only for Bernard but even for Julian of Norwich.11 In the Commedia, however, Dante moves beyond the appropriation of female powers as a corrective measure for men. In his eyes, the corruption of Papal Rome “has caused the sheep and lambs to stray, because it has made a wolf of the shepherd” [c’ha disvïate le pecore e li agni, / però che fatto ha lupo del pastore] (Par. 9.131–2). Unlike Bernard, he does not take over for himself the gentleness of ideal womanhood but turns to an individual woman.12 Beatrice invites him to experience the female side of
THE CYPRIAN REDEEMED
317
God when she guides him to drink spiritaliter from the breast of the griffin, whose double nature as eagle and lion makes him a grotesque yet fitting symbol of the maternal figure of God Incarnate (Purg. 31.128–9). Dante’s fantasy androgyny is different in kind from that of his contemporaries. It is markedly non-restrictive, embracing not only God but a woman and even a non-Christian man. Virgil, like Christ, functions as a nursing mother to Dante. When they are pursued by devils in the Eighth Circle, Virgil sweeps Dante up in his arms like a protecting mother and carries him upon his breast to safety (Inf. 23.37–51). When Dante is on the point of leaving Virgil, he salutes his pagan guide as “sweetest father” [dolcissimo patre] (Purg. 30.50) without forgetting that he has also played the role of “madre” and once even blessed Dante’s mother. “Blessed is she who bore you!” was Virgil’s approving response [benedetta colei che ’n te s’incinse!] (Inf. 8.45) to Dante’s indignant put-down of the muddy bully Filippo Argenti. Now Beatrice steps into the parental role as both father and mother. As a compassionate mother figure, she will imitate Mary by nurturing her figlio; but as a stern father substitute—until St. Bernard takes over as his “tender father” [tenero padre] (Par. 31.63)—she will discipline him and prepare him for his entrance examination into Heaven. The androgynous figure of Cyprian Aphrodite likewise represented the nurturing function of the parent. Many votive statuettes found in Cyprus from the Neolithic to the classical period have bisexual features and are cradling infants.13 This association was acted out in the Cypriot ritual of Ariadne-Aphrodite in which a young man imitated a woman in childbirth (Plutarch, Life of Theseus 20.3). Philochorus reports the legend that King Aegeus of Athens introduced the Cypriot cult of Aphrodite Ourania to Athens in the hope of curing his infertility (Fragment 184: Jacoby). The goddess cooperated, for Aegeus became the father of the hero Theseus. The association of childbirth with Aphrodite has continued on Cyprus into modern times. At the Christian Feast of the Milk-Giving Virgin, for instance, women still come from the church at Kouklia (once named “Panayia Aphroditissa,” or “All Holy Aphrodite-One”) to the nearby sanctuary of Aphrodite to touch the corner-block of the North Stoa.14 In Paradiso, images of the erotic and the maternal are mystically fused in the female figures of Beatrice and Mary. Following Mary’s lead, Beatrice becomes a “beloved of the First Lover” [amanza del primo amante] (Par. 4.118), yet acts as the “comforting mother” to Dante, the “pale and gasping” son who seeks reassurance [come madre che soccorre / sùbito al figlio palido e anelo] (Par. 22.4-5). Mary’s dual role as the Morning Star
318
PART III
TRASUMANAR
wooed by the Sun, and the Virgin Bride who inflames God through Gabriel’s intercession at the Annunciation, makes her the prototypical mater-mediatrix whose pity for Dante—like that of a dolce stil novo lady for her wayward suitor—provides the original impetus for his long journey towards her presence in the heavenly court (Par. 32.85–7; cf. Inf. 2.94–6). Her womb blossoms anew as the Celestial Rose, which encompasses and in a mystical sense gestates all the newborn saints in the Empyrean.15 The Blessed hail her as “Queen of Heaven” [Regina celi] (Par. 23.128) because her immortal powers exceed those of any mortal lady-love or mother. At the command of God the “Emperor” [imperador] (Inf. 1.124), she now reigns as “Empress” [Agusta] (Par. 32.119). In the cosmogonic role of Aphrodite Ourania, Cyprian Venus was once the Queen of Heaven by virtue of her patronymic epithet and her mythic descent from Ouranos. As the Morning and Evening Star, she was also the stella maris, the ocean star beloved of sailors who were guided by her constant presence in the dark sky. Carrying the sceptre, she was revered as the citadel goddess, guarantor of temporal power like her Mesopotamian counterparts Inanna and Ishtar. For Dante, the title “Queen of Heaven” would have gone back only to the twelfth century when the Western Church officially accepted Mary’s Dormition and Assumption, sacred events first reflected in Western art in the Winchester Psalter.16 Nevertheless, as his transgressively aesthetic meditation on “the fair Cyprian” at the start of Paradiso 8 reveals, his allegorical imagination was deeply stirred by the syncretistic parallels between Venus and Mary in their cumulative roles as lover, mother, ruler, star. Erotic passion was what Cyprian Aphrodite represented above all— not just for Dante’s classical authorities but for his Catholic contemporaries. Rejecting the destructive furor of this passion, which Virgil had represented in his tragic depiction of Dido under venereal influence (Aeneid 4.91), Dante rehabilitates erotic desire as a necessary step to the apprehension of God. In the Heaven of Venus, the new Cyprian—Beatrice—directs the poet’s amorous gaze away from her face towards the passionately reddish (and sublimely post-coital) glow of souls who had experienced strong erotic urges during their earthly lives but were miraculously redeemed because of venereal influence. First he encounters Cunizza, who was four times married and twice infatuated. She might have been whirling around with Francesca down in the orgasmic hellstorm, but here she is glorified because of her venereal endowment: a great capacity to love benevolently (Par. 9.32–6). Cunizza is aware of the bewilderment of ordinary mortals over her privilege, but finds reason behind
THE CYPRIAN REDEEMED
319
it. A clouding of vision—the result of our common failure to distinguish earthly from heavenly justice—prevents us from seeing why Piccarda and Costanza (who wished to remain virgins and become nuns but were forced to marry) should be consigned to a lower sphere than the passionate and promiscuous Cunizza. Once we realize the importance that Dante assigns to the will, and to the passion he associates with the will, this apparent injustice becomes only that—a worldly illusion.17 We should not be surprised, then, when Dante discovers in the company of Cunizza the pre-Christian and certainly non-Christian soul of the prostitute Rahab whom Christ himself had seen fit to harrow along with the Hebrew Just (Par. 9.115–25). Dante’s Heaven is a hot passionate place, and the heat of divine ardore intensifies as his soul approaches the climactic experience of divine union. On entering the glassy translucence of the Moon, he suddenly recognizes that the intellectual brilliance of Beatrice as a saint—the sunburst of wisdom raying out from her mind into his—is the same “sun which first had heated my breast with love” [sol che pria d’amor mi scaldò ’l petto] (Par. 3.1) back in Florence when they were only nine years old. The Beatrice-Minerva who illumines his adult vision is thus fused by his erotic memory with the Beatrice-Venus who warmed his youthful breast in the Vita Nuova. Even in the relatively cool sphere of the Moon, Piccarda and the other lunar souls find their affections “kindled solely in the pleasure of the Holy Ghost” [solo infiammati / son nel piacer de lo Spirito Santo] (Par. 3.52–3). Hot desire is not only sexual. It is intellectual. It yearns to know the Truth, to satisfy the intellect, which is why Dante’s mind is warmed by Beatrice’s answers to his questions even as his heart is brightened by her beauty (Par. 4.119–20). As Venus sends down her planetary influence in the form of passionate desire, so from God pours forth his intellectual energy in a distillation like rain. This is not cool Aristotelian reason doled out in calm scholastic arguments, for its source is “the Holy Ardor, which irradiates everything” [l’ardor santo ch’ogne cosa raggia] (Par. 7.74) with an illogical excess that never diminishes. The impact of God’s heat on the Blessed is so excessive that it feels like erotic violence, as the Eagle of Divine Justice reveals in the Heaven of Jupiter: Regnum celorum vïolenza pate da caldo amore e da viva speranza, che vince la divina volontate… [Regnum celorum suffers violence from fervent love and from living hope which vanquishes the Divine will…] (Par. 20.94–6)
320
PART III
TRASUMANAR
At the heart of Dante’s experience of Heaven is his Beatricean understanding that “fervent love” [caldo amore] (Par. 13.79; 20.95) is inseparable from wisdom as intellectual “vision” [l’ardor la visïone] (Par. 14.41). To the hotly debated scholastic question, “Which faculty of the human soul is superior, the intellect or the will?” the poet presented Beatrice in glory as his answer, for in her soul—and ultimately in his—intellectual vision has priority but immediately gives rise in the will to passionate desire for union with its divine source. In the Heaven of the Fixed Stars, just before Dante is examined in his understanding of the Theological Virtues, St. Peter encouragingly reveals that Grace “holds amorous discourse” with his mind in the manner of a dolce stil novo lady [La Grazia, che donnea / con la tua mente] (Par. 24.118–19). Between saints in the Hereafter, as between lovers in the Here and Now, desire is concomitant with vision (Par. 14.37–42, 46–51). Vision comes first to the intellect, but desire soon follows in the will, and therefore both faculties are equal in importance (Par. 15.73–8). Their interconnectedness is revealed even more forcefully in St. John’s lesson on amor: love reinforces “by philosophical arguments” [Per filosofici argomenti] (Par. 26.25) the doctrine that it “is kindled in proportion as it is understood” [in quanto ben, come s’intende, / così accende amore] (Par. 26.28–9). Not surprisingly, the Primum Mobile, which contains the other spheres and is closest to the Empyrean, is hailed as “the circle which loves most and knows most” [cerchio che più ama e che più sape] (Par. 28.72), because the angels circling within it burn with the brightest love and enjoy the clearest vision of God. Once the soul reaches the pure light of the Empyrean, the philosophical distinctions between vision and love, intellect and will, disappear as they are unified in the joy of fulfillment. “Light intellectual full of love, love of true good full of joy,” chants Beatrice [luce intellettüal, piena d’amore; / amor di vero ben, pien di letizia] (Par. 30.40–1). On this rapturous note, Dante resolves the scholastic debate. The erotic character of love in Paradiso has more than metaphorical power. Its dynamic nature draws the souls towards the ultimate experience of God, just as the kinetic force of love draws lovers together. Dante animates Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover with dynamic amor. During his doctrinal examination by Peter, Dante proclaims his fervent but notquite-orthodox belief in one God “who, unmoved, moves all the heavens with love and with desire” [che tutto ’l ciel move, / non moto, con amore e con disio] (Par. 24.131–2). The wills of individual souls are subdued and enveloped by the paradoxically transfiguring yet transgressive power
THE CYPRIAN REDEEMED
321
of this Divine Love, just as new lovers comply with the will of their beloved. In this way, God draws their wills to what He wills: creatures return peacefully to their Creator just like water returns in rivers to “that sea to which all moves” [quel mare al qual tutto si move] (Par. 3.86). Dante’s ascent through Heaven is assured because it is directed by an attraction that is both spiritual and physical. Initiated by a “ray of grace” from God, it is sustained by the alluring eyes and smiling face of Beatrice, whose beauty increases with their ascent. Dante’s encounter with this love during his journey kindles and increases his “true love” [verace amore] (Par. 10.84), which is the love of God. Not only the poet but his whole universe is affected by the kinetic force of God’s love. The Ninth Heaven moves the most swiftly because of its desire to be joined with the Empyrean and with God (Par. 27.99, 109–11). The final verses of Paradiso contain Dante’s acknowledgment that his own will—once so wayward, so out of sync with the holy wheels—responds to the same emanation of energy that is responsible for the rotation of the Sun and the other stars. The last line of the Commedia singles out amor as the site of this energy. Since it is stirred by God, “natural love” ultimately aims at a vision of the Divine. Virgil teaches Dante to distinguish this impulse from the love roused solely by the fallen mind, the love of personal choice: Lo naturale è sempre sanza errore, ma l’altro puote errar per malo obietto o per troppo o per poco di vigore. [The natural (kind of love) is always without error; but the other kind may err either through an evil object, or through too much or too little vigor.] (Purg. 17.94–6)
This is the sin for which Francesca and Paolo were condemned. Cyprian Venus, Aphrodite Ourania, was similarly contrasted with her profane counterpart, Aphrodite Pandemos. Her original title, reflecting her origin as an offspring of Ouranos, effectively spiritualized her so that she became known as the “Heavenly Aphrodite” through the Platonic tradition. The cult of Aphrodite Pandemos, a name probably assigned because the cult was open to “all the people,” gave rise to the Platonic (and later Neoplatonic) image of the Common or Vulgar Aphrodite, the slutty goddess of the crossroads. The distinction was first drawn by Plato (Symposium 179e–180a) and later developed by Plotinus (Enneads 6.9.9). In medieval mythography and iconography, Dante would have found a version of the two Venuses derived from Ovid’s elaboration of the Platonic contrast in the Fasti (4.1). Medieval Ovidian authors reflexively complained that,
322
PART III
TRASUMANAR
while “natural love” was legitimate because it was in harmony with cosmic law, its “unnatural” counterpart, lust, had to be viewed as illegitimate because it was self-directed towards improper objects. “Venus wars with Venus,” as Alan of Lille concisely put it in the Plaint of Nature (metre 1).18 In consonance with his philosophical and poetic authorities, Dante acknowledges that his poem is designed to confirm and expand intellectual truths through sensory experience (Par. 4.40–2). Only thus can he and his readers grasp these truths. This same mode of understanding, Beatrice points out, was responsible for anthropomorphic conceptions of God in the Scriptures and physical representations of purely spiritual beings in religious art (Par. 4.43–8). But in the Commedia another impulse is at work besides the desire to make theology comprehensible. This is Dante’s deep belief in the centrality of the Incarnation. Since God’s presence in history was confirmed by a physical, historical body, a physical response to God was essential to confirm humanity’s intellectual grasp of divinity. The most positive physical response we know is the erotic, yet Christian theology has traditionally left little space for eroticism in orthodox teachings on chastity, monogamy, and the duty to procreate. Dante’s immediate theological predecessors, particularly the Cistercians of the twelfth century, had made possible a consideration of the compassionate side of God, and Bernard, in his commentaries on the Song of Songs, had turned Christian life into a passionate response of the Church to her Divine Bridegroom. But it remained for Dante to expand this passion beyond Bernard’s idealized love for the Church and the Virgin so that it embraced an intensely personal (and historically actual) experience of physical love. His physical attraction to Beatrice is not allegorical but real, he insists, and its peculiar history of silent sufferings and fervent articulations is deeply implicated in his apprehension of God. With his vernacular readers in mind, he must have been aware of the pedagogical function of erotic language. Lovers on a grand scale belong in Heaven. Rahab and Cunizza bask in the planetary influence of Venus. Though many aspects of Cyprian Venus familiar to her worshippers in antiquity would not have been known to Dante, the bisexuality of the goddess may well have impressed itself upon his imagination through the commentaries of Macrobius and Servius. In the eschaton it makes sense to assume the dissolution of contraries, the most fundamental of which is the distinction between male and female. But Dante’s approach to the gender divide is different from that of his philosophical and theological authorities: Paradiso contains more than a union of opposites in the Neoplatonic Beyond and a reunion of Bride and Groom in the New Jerusalem.
THE CYPRIAN REDEEMED
323
Dantean transhumanization entails a dynamic experience of the double gendering of Primal Unity. God is now female, now male, once begotten in Christ, now beheld in Beatrice. At times, the unorthodox vision of eschatological androgyny permits Dante to subvert the patriarchal influence of ecclesiastical authorities. Led by an amorous and divinely comic Thomas Aquinas, the all-male cast of intellectuals in the Heaven of the Sun circle around Beatrice like “ladies not released from the dance” [donne…non da ballo sciolte] (Par. 10.79). By his vision of the liminal area where contraries meet, Dante releases for us the power of the threshold, the place where we meet the masculinity in our feminine anima and the femininity in our masculine virtù. We never lose sight of the miraculous evidence—wheeling above us with the fair Cyprian—that the poet’s erotic experience of wholeness is made possible by proximity to God. NOTES 1 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from the Commedia in this essay have been drawn from the Petrocchi edition as reprinted and slightly revised by Singleton (1970–75). All translations from Dante are by Singleton (1970–75). The components of the Commedia cited from are Inferno (Inf.), Purgatorio (Purg.), and Paradiso (Par.). Also cited is Convivio (Conv.). 2 The force of androgyny in the Commedia as a whole has been the subject of recent studies by Ferrante (1975, ch. 4; 1992) and Lund-Mead (1997). 3 On the representation of Venus as “androgynous” (biformis), “bearded” (barbata), and “attired” like Mars (armata) in Renaissance art and literature, see Wind (1968), 91–200, 211, and pl. 73, 77, and 80. 4 A discussion of androgynous Eros with illustrations can be found in Delcourt (1966), 55–59, plates V–VII. 5 Biblical references are from the Authorized King James Version (English) and from the Biblia Sacra iuxta Vulgatam Clementinam (Latin). 6 For a discussion of other examples of gender-crossing in the Paradiso, see Ferrante (1992), 28. 7 On Beatrice as a Christ figure, see Ferrante (1975), 21, 136, and Lund-Mead (1997), 206–20. 8 For other examples of the androgynous character of Dante’s God, see Ferrante (1992), 27–29. 9 Eliade (1962), 122. Much the same interpretation is given by Delcourt (1966), 62–81, in his discussion of androgyny in Orphism, Gnosticism, Eastern cosmologies, mystical literature, and alchemical treatises. 10 Meeks (1974), 207. 11 Bynum (1982), 136, 145. 12 In making this bold move, Dante may have been influenced by the extreme measures taken by the thirteenth-century Guglielmites, for whom the evils of the church left no option but to see women as the salvation of humankind. They were adherents of a woman, Guglielma of Milan, who saw herself as the incarnation of the Holy Spirit. On the Guglielmites see Wessley (1978), 289–303.
324
PART III
TRASUMANAR
13 For a demonstration of the long tradition of figurines associated with childbirth, some of which are shown as bisexual or asexual, see Karageorghis (1978) and Bolger (1993). 14 Economou (1975), 20–21. 15 On Dante’s highly unorthodox belief in the unequal distribution of grace among unbaptized infants in Heaven, as expounded by Bernard in the Rose (Par. 32. 73–8), see Botterill (1994), 97–98. 16 Pelikan (1996), 208. 17 Ferrante (1975), 151. 18 Plaint of Nature, 67. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alan of Lille. The Plaint of Nature. Trans. James J. Sheridan. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980. Alighieri, Dante. La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. Ed. G. Petrocchi. 4 vols. Milano: Mondadori, 1966–67. ——— The Divine Comedy. Trans. Charles S. Singleton. 6 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–75. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Opera. Vols. 1–2 (for Sermones super Cantica canticorum 1–86). Rome: Editiones Cistercienses, 1957. Bolger, Diane L. “The Feminine Mystique: Gender and Society in Prehistoric Cypriot Studies.” Report of the Department of Antiquities. Nicosia, Cyprus: Department of Antiquities, 1993. 29–41. Botterill, Steven. Dante and the Mystical Tradition: Bernard of Clairvaux in the Commedia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Delcourt, Marie. Hermaphroditea: Recherches sur l’être double promoteur de la fertilité dans le monde classique. Brussels: Latomus, 1966. ——— Hermaphrodite: Myths and Rites of the Bisexual Figure in Classical Antiquity. Trans. Jennifer Nicholson. London: Studio Books, 1961. Economou, George D. “The Two Venuses and Courtly Love.” In Pursuit of Perfection: Courtly Love in Medieval Literature. Ed. Joan M. Ferrante, George D. Economou, and Frederick Goldin. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1975. 17–50. Eliade, Mircea. The Two and the One. Trans. J.M. Cohen. London: Harvill Press, 1965. Originally published as Méphistophélès et l’Androgyne. Paris: Gallimard, 1962. Ferrante, Joan M. Woman as Image in Medieval Literature, From the Twelfth Century to Dante. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975. ——— Dante’s Beatrice: Priest of an Androgynous God. CEMERS Occasional Papers 2. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies,1992. Hesiod. Theogony. Ed. M.L. West. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966. ——— Theogony. Trans. Dorothea Wender. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
THE CYPRIAN REDEEMED
325
Jacoby, Felix, ed. Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1950. Karageorghis, Jacqueline. La grande déesse de Chypre et son culte à travers l’icongraphie, de l’époque néolithique au VIème s. a. C. Lyon, Paris: Maison de l’Orient, 1978. Kern, Otto, ed. Orphicorum fragmenta. Berlin: Weidmann, 1963. Lund-Mead, Carolynn. “Dante and Androgyny.” Dante: Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. Amilcare A. Iannucci. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Macrobius. The Saturnalia. Trans. Percival Vaughan Davies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969. ——— I saturnali. Ed. Nino Marionone. Torino: Unione tipografico-editrice torinese, 1967. Meeks, Wayne A. “The Image of the Androgyne: Some Uses of a Symbol in Earliest Christianity.” History of Religions 13 (1974): 165–208. Orphic Fragments. Orphicorum fragmenta. Ed. Otto Kern. Berlin: Weidmann, 1963. Pelikan, Jaroslav. Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Philochorus. Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. Ed. Felix Jacoby. Vol. III B. No. 328, fr. 184. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1950. 150. Plato. The Symposium. Trans. W. Hamilton. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951. ——— Symposium. Ed. Sir Kenneth Dover. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Plotinus. Enneads. Plotini opera. Ed. Paul Henry and Hans-Rudolf Schwyzer. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964. ——— Plotinus. Trans. A.H. Armstrong. Vol. 7 (for Enneads 6.9). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London, Heinemann, 1988. Plutarch. Life of Theseus. Plutarch’s Lives. Ed. and trans. Bernadotte Perrin. Vol. 1. London: William Heinemann; New York: Macmillan, 1914–54. Servius. In Aeneidem. Servii Grammatici qui feruntur in Vergilii carmina commentarii. Ed. Georg Thilo and Hermann Hagen. Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1961. Stock, Lorraine Kochanski. “Reversion for Conversion: Maternal Images in Dante’s Commedia.” Italian Quarterly 23 (1982): 5–15. Virgil. P. Vergili Maronis opera. Ed R.A.B. Mynors. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969. ——— The Aeneid: A New Prose Translation. Trans. David West. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. Wessley, Stephen. “The Thirteenth-Century Guglielmites: Salvation Through Women.” Medieval Women. Ed. Derek Baker. Oxford: Blackwell for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1978. 289–303. Wind, Edgar. Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. New York: Norton, 1968.
PART IV TRASLATAR
“Dantescan Light” Ezra Pound and Eccentric Dante Scholars Leon Surette
P
ound’s Dante is bound to appear a little strange to an Italian, I suppose,1 but it is a version of the Dante that he would have encountered at Hamilton College and the University of Pennsylvania in the first decade of the twentieth century.2 While an Italian might approach Dante as a fellow European, or as a lapsed Catholic, or as a direct heir of medieval culture, Pound’s approach was that of an American, a Protestant, and a modernist. Recalling Hugh Kenner’s and Walter Litz’s observations about the American perception of Dante,3 I would also draw attention to the Unitarian and Congregational context in which Dante had been embedded in the United States since the late nineteenth century, when his works enjoyed an unprecedented vogue amongst Boston mandarins. In Dante they found a mysticism which they hoped would renew the flagging spiritual energies of New England puritanism. The grandfather of this revival was the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose lifelong preoccupation with Dante culminated in a complete translation of the Commedia (1867).4 Together with James Russell Lowell and James Eliot Norton, Longfellow founded the Dante Society. It first met in 1881—a few months after Longfellow’s death. These men and the younger Charles Allen Dinsmore established the American view of Dante as a poet of the interior vision, and a predecessor of American transcendental thought. Here is Dinsmore’s summation of Dante in Aids to the Study of Dante (1903): He taught the coördinating and co-operating power of spirituality and reason, a truth which we are reviving to end the chronic warfare between science and religion. No modern evangelical preacher lays more weighty stress on the sovereign freedom of the will.…He antic-
327
328
PART IV
TRASLATAR
ipates the faith of Horace Bushnell in the trustworthiness of the intuitions; it is after theology personified in Beatrice has done its best that by direct vision he sees the ultimate mysteries. The immanence of God is the fundamental doctrine of the best religious thought of our day. It is a truth which is commonly supposed to have been lost during the period of Romanized thought, which prevailed from Augustine down to the middle of the nineteenth century.5
By construing Dante as a mystic who had experienced direct vision of divine immanence, these Boston Dantists exorcized the poet of his Catholicism—a faith which stood for corruption, tyranny, and idolatry within the pulpit rhetoric of their churches—and transformed him into a precursor of New England transcendentalism. Though Pound threw over the Puritan Protestantism of his forefathers at an early age, his selection of Romance languages and medieval poetry as an area of study at university was inspired by the perception of the High Middle Ages as a spiritual and aesthetic precursor of the spiritual revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of course, the revival of interest in medieval art and culture was not confined to the United States. In England the Pre-Raphaelite movement had brought about a similar revival in the mid-nineteenth century, and it had been continued by William Morris and Alfred Tennyson. On the Continent, the Symbolistes and Wagnerians were the formulators of a parallel medieval revival—though focusing more on the Grail legends than on Dante. It is in this context that we must place Pound’s early admiration for Dante. “My head,” he confided to Floyd Dell in 1911, “is usually full of Dantescan lines.”6 Though Pound’s admiration for Dante is not at issue, it still requires some explanation in the face of his repeated assertions of hostility to Christianity, and in particular to its Roman and papal version.7 Whatever he admired in Dante, it could not have been his Catholic piety and Thomistic philosophy. Apparently he read him as a Platonist, for in March 1904—when Pound was eighteen—he copied into his Temple edition of Paradiso the following passage from Plato’s Phaedrus (247c): “Now of the heaven which is above the heavens no earthly poet has sung or ever will sing in a worthy manner.” To this he added the comment: “ergo Dante’s nomination ‘divine.’” An undated entry on the recto of the same leaf cites the Phaedrus (249c) once again: “And this is the recollection of those things which our soul once saw when in company with god—when looking down from above on that which we now call being & upward toward the true being.” And he repeats this citation, with expansion in The Spirit of Romance.8 It would appear then that, like Dins-
“DANTESCAN LIGHT”
329
more, Pound read Dante not just as a mystic but as a pagan mystic whose Commedia was a report of the Otherworld. Such an understanding of Dante is even more apparent in the 1912 essay “Psychology and Troubadours”: …consider the whole temper of Dante’s verse…Consider the history of the time, the Albigensian Crusade, nominally against a sect tinged with Manichean heresy, and remember how Provençal song is never wholly disjunct from pagan rites of May Day…if paganism survived anywhere it would have been, unofficially in the Langue d’Oc. … The question: Did this “close ring,” this aristocracy of emotion, evolve, out of its half memories of Hellenistic mysteries, a cult—a cult stricter, or more subtle, than that of the celibate ascetics, a cult for the purgation of the soul by a refinement of, and lordship over, the senses?9
For Pound, then, Dante was not a Catholic—or even a Christian—but an adherent of a paganism that came down to him from the Troubadours and the Albigensian heretics of thirteenth-century France. Pound imagined he could isolate the paganism in Dante from the Catholic overlay. He told Henry Swabey in 1940: “Xtianity a poor substitute for the truth, but the best canned goods that can be put on the market immediately in sufficient quantity for general pubk.??? I admit the problem is difficult. Mebbe best line is to get rid of worst and rottenest phases first, i.e., the old testy-munk, barbarous blood sac, etc., and gradually detach Dantescan light (peeling off the Middle Ages bit by bit, that bloody swine St. Clement, etc.) Omnia quae sunt, lumina sunt.”10 The “Dantescan light” presumably could be seen by those with a “refinement of, and lordship over, the senses.” He explained in “Psychology and Troubadours” that such visions arose out of a mystical eroticism: “…if the servants of Amor saw visions quite as well as the servants of the Roman ecclesiastical hierarchy, if they were, moreover, troubled with no ‘dark night of the soul,’ and the kindred incommodities of ascetic yoga, this may well have caused some scandal and jealousy to the orthodox.”11 Pound’s notion that Dante was a pagan could not have come from the Dante Society. The New England transcendentalists acknowledged Dante’s Catholicism and admired him in spite of it. They did not construe his criticism of ecclesiastical corruption as evidence of heretical opinions. But Pound did not invent a pagan Dante all on his own. He was led to this view by Joséphin Péladan’s Le secret des Troubadours, a work which he reviewed in The Book News Monthly for September of 1906. According to Péladan: “Gemisto Plethon and Marsilio Ficino are the official teachers
330
PART IV
TRASLATAR
of old Albigensianism, as Dante is the prodigious Homer. Fiction and history, on this subject, correspond with a singular parallelism: the order of the Temple, is it not the order of the Grail? And does not Monsalvat [from the Grail legends] have a real name, Montségur [an Albigensian stronghold]?”12 But Péladan regarded “Old Albigensianism” as a purer, more primitive, and more esoteric form of Christianity, from which the Roman church had strayed. And he denied that it had Manichean roots as the inquisitors maintained: “Latin Catholicism turned away from esotericism too soon; seized by a Caesarian dream, it claimed to represent the universal conscience in the Roman manner. Devoid of great and lesser mysteries, devoid of initiation, the clergy thought it could achieve an equality—the most difficult of all—of souls. The elite rebelled.…” The rebellion, according to Péladan, was the Albigensian heresy. With the defeat of the Albigenses, the Faith was carried on through Troubadour poetry, the dolce stil novo, and the Commedia.13 It must be admitted that Pound in the 1906 review was skeptical of Péladan’s theory that Dante was a subversive Church reformer.14 However, four years later we have evidence that the skepticism had been replaced by enthusiastic agreement. Just back from a holiday in Sirmione where he had begun a translation of Cavalcanti’s sonnets and ballate, Pound declared his intention to write a history of the cult of Amor in the company of D.H. Lawrence, who described Pound’s project in a letter to Grace Crawford: “Italy had improved his health; I was glad of that. It had not improved his temper: he was irascible. He discussed, with much pursing up of lips and removing of frown-shaken eye-glasses, his project of writing an account of the mystic cult of love—the dionysian rites, and so on—from earliest days to the present. The great difficulty was that no damned publisher in London dare publish it. It would have to be published in Paris.”15 I have shown elsewhere how Pound’s work on the ballate persuaded him that Péladan’s claim that Cavalcanti belonged to a society of enlightened souls was correct.16 Indeed, from 1910 on, Pound accorded Cavalcanti pride of place even over Dante in the pagan cult of Amor. So important was Cavalcanti to Pound that he included his own translation of the obscure canzone “Donna mi prega” in canto xxxvi as a sort of gospel of the cult.17 The grand project of “an account of the mystic cult of love,” of which he boasted to Lawrence, dwindled to the essay “Psychology and Troubadours” cited above. It first appeared in G.R.S. Mead’s theosophical journal The Quest in October of 1912, and was inserted as chapter five in the 1929 edition of his 1910 London Polytechnic lectures, The Spirit of Romance,
“DANTESCAN LIGHT”
331
where it has remained ever since. There he identified Dante as a mystic, and hence as one who stands outside all doctrinal limitations—very much in the spirit of the Dante Society: Christianity and all other forms of ecstatic religion…are not in inception dogma or propaganda of something called the one truth or the universal truth.…Their teaching is variously and constantly a sort of working hypothesis acceptable to people of a certain range of temperament.…The old cults were sane in their careful inquisition or novitiate, which served to determine whether the candidates were or were not of such temper and composition. One must consider that the types which joined these cults survived, in Provence, and survive, today—priests, maenads and the rest—though there is in our society no provision for them.18
Obviously Pound believes that he—and other artists he admires—possess this “certain range of temperament.” Pound here postulates an esoteric “tradition”—a timeless brotherhood of artists who share a sacred mystery or arcanum esoterically expressed in their art. Dante is the pre-eminent figure in this tradition, for it is he who most perfectly exemplifies sanctity and esotericism in European poetry. Pound shows no interest in Dante scholarship after he left university—unless one counts Péladan.19 An exception to this general rule is Luigi Valli’s Il linguaggio segreto di Dante Alighieri e dei “Fedeli d’Amore” (1928). We know that Pound bought it sometime before February 7, 1928, for he wrote to Marianne Moore on that date offering to review it for The Dial.20 He seems enthusiastic about Valli, but when he comes to write about him, he is hostile to Valli’s argument that Cavalcanti belonged to—in Pound’s words—some “gang of mystics.”21 But he cannot get Valli out of his mind, and returns to his quarrel with him in the expanded version of the introduction to his translation of Cavalcanti’s poems, doubting that “Guido and his correspondents are a gang (secret) of Nonconformists, aching to reform mother church, plotting and corresponding in hyperheretical cipher” as Valli believed.22 Pound’s quarrel with Valli lasted nearly a decade. He wrote of him in 1932: “The work of Luigi Valli has been a stimulant for me in recent years. I do not agree with many of the details of his explanations, but I am truly sorry that he died before I had the opportunity to discuss them with him. He was not always convincing, but that is no reason to ignore his intuition that there is often a hidden or indirect meaning in these poems [Cavalcanti’s]. The most materialistic of critics concedes there are incomprehensible allusions.”23 Still later, in Guide to Kulchur (written in 1937), Pound returns to the quarrel, remark-
332
PART IV
TRASLATAR
ing—more or less out of the blue: “Says Valli, all these poets were Ghibelline. That seems to be provable assertion, while the rest of his, Valli’s, wanderings in search of a secret language (for Dante, Guido, and the rest of them) are, at mildest estimate, unconvincing. ‘Something’ behind it? Certainly ‘something’ behind it or beyond it. Which the police called ‘Manichean’ knowing nothing either of Manes or of anything else.”24 I was puzzled for a long time by Pound’s fascination with Valli. Why should the opinions of this eccentric and obscure Italian scholar still be troubling Pound a decade after first reading? It was not because Valli was a prominent Dante scholar. Although a professor of literature at the Royal University of Rome, Valli was a follower of Ugo Foscolo and Giovanni Pascoli—a discipleship that placed him on the margins of Dante scholarship. Foscolo had published his “discovery” of a “secret code” (sistema occulto) in the Commedia a century earlier (1825), revealing Dante as a member of a secret society dedicated to the reform of a Church and papacy corrupted by the temporal powers granted to it by the Donation of Constantine.25 Il linguaggio segreto was Valli’s third book on the subject.26 It was a response to the hypothesis of a heretical Dante, which Valli had recently encountered in the works of Gabriele Rossetti and Eugène Aroux.27 Gabriele Rossetti (1783–1854) was the father of the English poets, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti. In 1821 he had fled Naples under threat of arrest for his expression of Jacobin sentiments. He eventually found refuge in London, where he managed to secure a teaching post at King’s College, University of London. He married the niece of Lord Byron’s doctor, Polidori, and settled into a reasonably comfortable exile. However, his life was to be troubled by an idée fixe: that Dante was a Ghibelline and a heretic, and that all of his works were written in a secret code. He published the first of many attempts to establish this revelation— La Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri con commento analitico—in 1825, the same year that Foscolo published his discoveries. Neither was aware of the other at the time. Neither was well received. Rossetti tried again with Sullo spirito antipapale in medio aevo (1832), in which he traced secret societies of Neoplatonists, Templars, and Troubadours to Dante and Italian Ghibellines.28 It, too, fared very badly with the critics, prompting him to devote still more time and effort to proving his case. He had his third assault, Il mistero dell’ amor platonico del medio aevo, privately printed in 1840, but was persuaded to suppress it by his friends and patrons, Charles Lyell and John Hookham Frere, who feared that it would ruin his already tattered reputation as a scholar.29 But Rossetti was not to be dissuaded.
“DANTESCAN LIGHT”
333
He wrote still another work on the same subject, La Beatrice di Dante, and privately published the first of a projected nine ragionamenti in 1842. Nine years later he sent the book and still unpublished sections to Eugène Aroux in hopes that he would translate it, but instead Aroux plagiarized it for his own Dante hérétique (1854). The work that Valli studies “long and carefully”30 was the suppressed one, Il mistero dell’ amor platonico del medio aevo. He borrowed a copy from his “caro compianto amico Antonio Agresti” who happened to have married the granddaughter of Gabriele, Olivia Rossetti.31 Rossetti had an effect on Valli rather like that which we have seen Valli to have had on Pound. Rossetti’s argument overlapped with that of Foscolo, Pascoli, and Valli himself in so far as all three believed Dante to be writing in code, cipher, or jargon. But Rossetti, unlike the others, identified Dante’s secret as a pagan survival. He argued that it had been transmitted to Western Europe by crusader contact with Persian Manicheans and Sufis. The crusaders brought it to Provence, where it was adopted by the Troubadours and Albigenses, and transmitted from them to the Tuscan poets of the dolce stil novo. Obviously Rossetti’s theory challenged Valli’s belief that Dante was a superorthodox Catholic. Il linguaggio segreto di Dante attempts to absorb Rossetti’s enlargement of the supposed secret society while preserving its Catholic orthodoxy. What interested Pound was Valli’s articulation of Rossetti’s account of the Manichean provenance of Provençal poetry, an account that otherwise corresponded to his own tradition of mystical poets.32 Although he disagreed with both Rossetti and Valli on the content of the poetry, and although he believed in an esoteric tradition of poetic practice rather than a secret society, Rossetti’s and Valli’s Fedeli d’Amore included the same poets as his own tradition—most particularly the Troubadours, Cavalcanti, and Dante. Given that he had purchased Il linguaggio segreto to help him with his translation of Cavalcanti’s “Donna mi prega” as the gospel of this pagan tradition, he could not help but be disturbed by Valli’s insistence on the Catholic orthodoxy of Dante and his circle. In his most explicit prose statement on the esoteric tradition in “Terra Italica,” Pound refers to Valli twice, finally dismissing him with the claim that “the cult of Eleusis will explain not only general phenomena but particular beauties in Arnaut Daniel or Guido Cavalcanti.” “This key,” he continues somewhat cryptically, will save his readers from the bother of “reading Valli and my long arguments on that author.”33 This remark is simply a reiteration of his belief in a Greco-Roman esoteric tradition, described in “Psychology and Troubadours” as consisting of “half mem-
334
PART IV
TRASLATAR
ories of Hellenistic mysteries.” Now he attributes it to the Athenian autumn rites enacted at Eleusis—hardly Hellenistic, but suitably mysterious and possibly erotic. Valli’s claim that Cavalcanti and Dante can be decoded easily was undoubtedly what most offended Pound. After all, by 1929, he had spent nearly twenty years teasing out the profound and mystical meaning of Cavalcanti’s poetry, and even longer contemplating passages from Dante. How could he not be distressed by Valli’s claim that the most obscure poem of the Troubadour Fedeli d’Amore, and the most enigmatic canzoni of Dante, acquire an unexpected clarity, coherence, and profundity when read with a knowledge of a few words of the jargon. The same is true, Valli claimed, of all the other works informed with the same profound mystical spirit and the same secret doctrine, including Dante’s Commedia.34 Less distressing but equally unwelcome was Valli’s central claim that, once decoded, the poetry ceased to be vague, stylized, monotonous, cold, and artificial as it is when read literally. Decoded, Valli says, the poetry reveals an intense and profound love for the true essence of the Catholic revelation, and an animosity for the corrupt and worldly Church, called conventionally “Death” or “the Rock,” and vilified as an obfuscator of the Holy Wisdom that the Fedeli d’Amore pursue in the image of the lady.35 Such sentiments did not please Pound, whose lively distaste for Catholicism and the papacy went along with a firm belief in the untranslatability of artistic metaphors and symbols. For Pound, a code book could not help one to understand the mystical and esoteric poetry of the tradition. He had asserted in 1912 that only “a certain range of temperament” could do that. And he repeats the same point in Guide to Kulchur twenty-five years later. He is speaking of the “contemplation of the divine love”36 in the “celestial tradition”: “What remains, and remains undeniable to and by the most hardened objectivist, is that a great number of men have had certain kinds of emotion and magari, of ecstasy. They have left indelible records of ideas born of, or conjoined with, this ecstasy.”37 Nothing could have been more offensive to Pound than Valli’s claim that these mysteries became transparent to any who learned a few key terms of the jargon. Guide to Kulchur marks the end of Pound’s quarrel with Valli. There he accommodates Valli’s thesis by positing two traditions—a political and a mystical one. But he was to encounter the Rossetti thesis of a heretical Dante directly many years later. During his pro-Fascist propagandistic activities, Pound had become friends with Gabriele Rossetti’s granddaughter, Olivia Agresti, then resident in Rome. It was she who had loaned Valli a copy of Il mistero dell’amor platonico del medio aevo. Pound
“DANTESCAN LIGHT”
335
and Signora Agresti maintained a lively correspondence from the 1930s until her death in 1960. In 1956, finding that she had two copies of her grandfather’s last work, Il Beatrice di Dante, she sent one of them to Pound, suggesting that he might give it to the Catholic University if he did not want it himself. He received it on December 6, 1956: “yr/ Grampaw’s Beatrice di Dante, arrives. For which my thanks. I doubt if the Cat/ Un. will get it.” In the same letter he asks: “I don’t spose yu remember the date the big vol/ was printed. But I can get that from Pearson at Yale. i.e. whether before or after the Beat. di D.” The “big volume” is the five volume Il mistero dell’amor platonico del medio aevo, upon which Valli largely relied.38 He wrote again the very next day: want to know more of yr / grand-dad? Political exile ?? escaped from fury and bigotry of vatican??? not a mason but student of masonry? Interested to see he hooks D / to Swedenborg, as I have done for 50 years, but can’t recall having found in the VERY small amount of criticism or Dante-Studies that I have looked at. Prefer texts to comments. Of curse the Dant-Swed hook-up may have filtered thru footnotes, but I can’t recall anything but my own observations of the two writers. Real masonry, as from China etc. pure down to Mozart. and since flooded with mutts who have NOT the faintest inkling of the mysteries once guarded in an order.…39
It is striking that in 1956 Pound records none of the disagreement with the Rossetti thesis that he registered nearly thirty years earlier. He would have found in Il Beatrice di Dante the same attribution of a Manichean origin to the sectarian beliefs of Cavalcanti and Dante, and the same theory of a secret society communicating in code that had so troubled him in 1928. But he comments only on the attribution of a link between Dante and Swedenborg, and on the role of Freemasonry in the tradition. This very different response supports the hypothesis that he had made his peace with the Rossetti-Valli story. Instead of quibbling with the claim that Dante belonged to a secret society and wrote in code, Pound responds positively to Rossetti’s attribution of a connection between Dante and Swedenborg.40 A later remark explains what Pound thought they had in common: “Dant and Swed. both sound in their schema of increasing enlightened consciousness.” In short, both possessed that “certain range of temperament” which enabled them to have mystical experiences.
336
PART IV
TRASLATAR
If we compare this remark to one written almost fifty years earlier, it is clear that for Pound, Dante and Swedenborg were equivalent as mystics, and that for him, poetry was essentially an expression of mystical or ecstatic experiences. He wrote to Viola Baxter Jordan (October 24, 1907): “I am interested in art and ecstasy, ecstasy which I would define as the sensation of the soul in ascent, art as the expression and sole means of transmuting, of passing on that ecstasy to others.” And he goes on to bring Swedenborg into the equation: “Swedenborg has called a certain thing ‘the angelic language’…This ‘angelic language’ I choose to interpret into ‘artistic utterance.’41 If we take this “enlightened consciousness” to be equivalent to the “certain range of temperament” from “Psychology and Troubadours,” we have an equivalence between Dante and Swedenborg. However, that connection is not drawn here or elsewhere before the letter of 1956, even though Pound say he has “hooked” Dante to Swedenborg “for 50 years.” Perhaps in this context it is enough to notice that Pound makes the connection, for that very fact highlights the eccentricity of his understanding of Dante. But bear with me while I pursue two places where Pound might have encountered the association early in his career. The first possibility can be dated almost exactly fifty years before the 1956 letter to Signora Agresti. Hilda Doolittle recalls (in a memoir written in 1958) “the avalanche of Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Shaw, Yogi books, Swedenborg, William Morris, Balzac’s Séraphita, Rossetti and the rest of them” that she and Pound read together in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, between 1906 and 1908.42 Dante is mentioned only three times in Balzac’s Séraphita—a novelistic exposition of Swedenborgian philosophy—and only twice is he compared with Swedenborg. In the first occurrence Becker, a minister expounding Swedenborgianism, contrasts the profundity of Swedenborg’s work to the superficiality of Dante’s: “Dante Alighieri’s poem hardly has the effect of a spot, to one who will dive into the innumerable verses with which Swedenborg has made the heavenly worlds palpable, just as Beethoven builds his palaces of harmony with thousands of notes, just as architects erect their cathedrals with thousands of stones.”43 There is little in this to prompt Pound to regard Dante and Swedenborg as equivalent. The second allusion draws a comparison between a Swedenborgian vision of paradise and Dante’s. A young couple, Minna and Wilfrid, and Minna’s father are being treated to supernatural visions by an old man: “Minna saw the sky confusedly—at an angle; love revealed to her a cur-
“DANTESCAN LIGHT”
337
tain embroidered with mysterious images, and the harmonious sounds which reached her ears redoubled her curiosity. For them this evening was just like the meal for the three pilgrims in Emmaus, like that which was a vision for Dante, an inspiration for Homer; for them, the three forms of existence revealed, the veils rent, uncertainties removed, shadows illuminated.”44 Although this revelation involves love, it is unlikely to have implanted an equivalence between Dante and Swedenborg in the young Pound’s mind. The other candidate is Arthur E. Beilby’s article, “Dante and Swedenborg: Two Other-World Explorers,”45 which, in terms of its content, is a much more likely source. However, I have no evidence that Pound actually read it. He may have done so because it appeared in The Quest for January 1913, and Pound’s “Psychology and Troubadours” appeared in the same journal in October 1912. Beilby begins his account of Dante and Swedenborg by pointing out that “both, as their works, at any rate, claim, were other-world explorers; and they agree in seeing and describing that world as consisting of three main divisions, Hell, Purgatory, or a Middle State, and Paradise, whilst recognising in all three an indefinite variety of lot with the good and with the evil.”46 Like Balzac, Beilby was a Swedenborgian, and regarded Dante’s vision as much inferior to that of the Swedish mystic: “Dante’s Heaven, Hell and Purgatory are merely localities in space.…[Swedenborg] lifts the veil of a realm that is neither material nor spatial.…It is a spiritual world, the wide, wide world of the human mind, and has nothing in common with matter or space, or any mechanical measurement.”47 On the other hand, Beilby seems willing to concede to Dante’s genuine “experience”—as he calls it: “Whether their disclosures of the hereafter were experiential or imaginative is a question to be resolved by inherent evidence.…Yet it is but fair to the Florentine to remember that he himself, in one of his letters [Epistolae X], explicitly claims seership, thus actual experience of things seen and heard, many of which he could not relate.”48 In the letter to Signora Agresti already cited, Pound used the same term as Beilby—“experience”—to indicate Swedenborg’s superiority to another mystic, Plotinus: “…got hold of Swedenborg again / he at least said jew church bust / Xtn, no longer moral force, BUT lacking gk / lat culture and having read jew book…says too much. More intelligent than Plotinus, as more direct experience. Plot. ARGUING about what he don’t know. Swed, anthropomorphic from advance anatomy.” Disappointingly for my discussion, there is no further mention of Dante in this connection in the correspondence. But given the assertion of a similarity between
338
PART IV
TRASLATAR
Dante and Swedenborg, it is not unreasonable to assume that Pound’s remarks about Swedenborg’s “direct experience” should apply to Dante as well. And to that extent, he is expressing the same opinion in 1956 as Beilby did in 1913. We have already seen how Pound got around Dante’s unfortunate contamination by Christianity and “the jew book.” On this count, he and Beilby are in partial agreement, for Beilby is also dismissive of Dante’s medieval and Christian beliefs: “Dante’s religious doctrines, including his other-worldly lore, are just the accepted beliefs of his age, a great body of tradition, amongst which it is easy to trace a large amount of alloy from pre-Christian sources, mostly sanctioned, however, by the Church.…Swedenborg brushes aside these medieval imaginings.”49 It is difficult to be sure whether Beilby approves or disapproves of the “alloy from pe-Christian sources,” but we know that Pound regarded those elements in Dante as pure gold, as the “Dantescan light,” which he told Henry Swabey might be detachable from Christianity. And we know also that Pound was hostile to Roman Christianity, and hence would be predisposed to accept Beilby’s dismissal of Dante’s depiction of the Otherworld. Finally, like Pound, Beilby rejects the mainstream view that Dante’s passion for Beatrice was purely symbolic, or at least unconsummated: “So, then, this deathless passion [of Dante for Beatrice], that sets us all aflame, is platonic, after all! Modern romance, which in the future will look more and more to Swedenborg for inspiration, recoils from so tame and tedious an anti-climax. We will have none of it. Such a passion, we are persuaded, could not be platonic, nor would heaven be heaven on those terms. We picture our lovers not gazing at one another across a gulf, but together in their own home of love, husband and wife, to be parted no more for ever.”50 Although Beilby’s portrayal of wedded bliss is remote from Pound’s cult of erotic ecstasy, it is closer than the purely symbolic interpretation of Rossetti, Foscolo, Pascoli, and Valli. We shall probably never know whether Pound read Beilby’s little essay, but it is clear, I think, that his own understanding of Dante belongs in the sort of ambience in which Beilby writes. For both of them Dante is one of a select few who have recorded otherworldly experiences over the centuries. In order to articulate such a mystical and pagan Dante, Pound has been obliged to navigate in strange and poorly charted scholarly seas where Dante’s barque never flies the papal flag or displays the cross of the one true Church.
“DANTESCAN LIGHT”
339
NOTES 1 This essay was first presented as a paper at the International Conference “Dante e Pound,” organized by the Opera di Dante at the Biblioteca Classense di Ravenna, September 8–10, 1995. It was subsequently published in the proceedings of the conference: see Ardizzone (1998), 189–204. The present version of the essay has been slightly modified for the sake of consistency with the format of Dante & the Unorthodox. 2 Of course, Pound’s relation to Dante had received a lot of attention prior to the 1995 Ravenna conference. The following, in chronological order, are works which focus on that relation: Fussell (1970); Giovannini (1974); Wilhelm (1974); Gugelberger (1978); and Sicari (1991). None of these works has anything to say about Gabriele Rossetti, Foscolo, or Valli. Oderman (1986) discusses Valli in connection with Pound’s translation of Cavalcanti, but does not pursue Valli’s view of Dante. Concentrating on the visual arts, Ricciardi (1991) has little to say about Dante, and makes no mention of the eccentric scholars under review here. All previously unpublished quotations of Pound’s words are copyright The Estate of Ezra Pound. 3 For these papers, which were both presented at the 1995 Ravenna conference, see Kenner (1998) and Litz (1998). 4 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–82), like Pound, went to Europe as a very young man (nineteen years old) to round out his education. He was in Europe from 1826–29, one year of which he spent in Italy. He fell in love with Italy and things Italian, as Pound did. But, unlike Pound, he returned to an academic position at Bowdoin College, and had a successful academic and poetic career in his native country. Throughout his career he lectured on Dante, and ultimately published a complete translation of the Commedia, with notes, in 1867. 5 Dinsmore (1901), 42. 6 Tanselle (1962-63), 116. 7 For example, he complained to Harriet Monroe in 1922: “In your footnote you ought to point out that I refuse to accept ANY monotheistic taboos whatsoever. That I consider the Metamorphoses a sacred book, and the Hebrew scriptures the record of a barbarian tribe, full of evil” (Letters, 252). Thirty-four years later, his hostility had, if anything, hardened. He ranted to Olivia Rossetti Agresti in 1956: “And the horrible Xtians / perverting the religion of the universal god of all men, into the tribal punk of a mesopotamian tribe KEPT the occidental mind off honesty for centuries, footling round with discussions of fads and hair cuts” (Letter to Olivia Rossetti Agresti, 30 June 1956). 8 The Spirit of Romance, 140. Here Pound cites Phaedrus 247c and adds 249c: “For only the soul that has beheld truth may enter into this our human form—seeing that man must needs understand the language of forms, passing from a plurality of perceptions to a unity gathered together by reasoning—and such understanding is [Pound’s citation starts here] a recollection of those things which our souls beheld aforetime as they journeyed with their god, looking down upon the things which now we suppose to be, and gazing up to that which truly is.” He cites Par. 1.1–9 as equivalent to Plato’s remarks. 9 The Spirit of Romance, 90.
340
PART IV
TRASLATAR
10 Letters, 445. Emphasis added. 11 The Spirit of Romance, 91. 12 Péladan (1906), 45. The whole passage is very clear on the notion of a secret tradition: “Le néo-platonisme pénètre déjà profondément nos romans d’aventure, et lorsqu’il se montre ouvertement sous les Médicis, c’est que ceux-ci lui assurent une protection efficace, contre l’inquisition romaine. Gémisthe Plethon et Marsile Ficin sont les docteurs officiels de l’antique Albigéisme, comme Dante en est le prodigieux Homère. La fiction et l’histoire, en ce sujet, se répondent avec un parallelisme singulier: l’ordre du Temple ne réalise-t-il pas l’ordre du Graal, et Monsalvat n’a-t-il pas un nom réel, Monségur? [sic]” 13 Péladan (1906), 53–54. Concluding his discussion of the Troubadours and Dante with a mention of Gabriele Rossetti, “the father of the Painter,” and Arnoux, “a little known scholar,” Péladan (70) claims that the latter had discovered the link between the Albigenses, the Troubadours, and Dante. On the evidence of the review, Pound was not all that impressed by Péladan’s story of a cult of Amor, and there is no evidence that he pursued the subject by seeking out Rossetti and “Arnoux.” (“Arnoux” is a mistake for Eugène Aroux.) For a defence of the conjecture that Pound did, in fact, seek out Rossetti’s Il mistero dell’amor platonico in the British Museum, see Miyake (1991), 3. However Pound does not mention Gabriele Rossetti until the 1940s, although he must have known of his work on this subject from at least 1928 when he read Luigi Valli’s Il linguaggio segreto di Dante. In addition, Il mistero was difficult to obtain because most copies were destroyed by Gabriele’s widow after his death. There is a copy in the British Museum, but not in the Bibliothèque Nationale. I have no idea where Péladan got hold of a copy, but he did seem to have access to one. 14 Indeed, he rejects Péladan’s hypothesis: “Péladan invades the realm of uncertainty when he fills in the gap between these two with four centuries of troubadours singing allegories in praise of a mystic extra-church philosophy or religion, practised by the Albigenses, and the cause of the Church’s crusade against them.” 15 Lawrence (1979), 166. The letter is dated June 24, 1910. 16 For a discussion of Pound’s engagement with Cavalcanti as a Fedele d’Amore, see Surette (1993), 51–60. 17 For a discussion of the place of the Cavalcanti canzone in Pound’s aesthetic and “religion,” see Surette (1979), 67–79. 18 The Spirit of Romance, 95. Emphasis added. 19 The only Dante scholar mentioned in The Spirit of Romance is Paget Toynbee, a biographer, philologist, and literary critic. Pound does not mention Dinsmore, Lowell, or Norton. He must have drawn on other scholars, but does not credit them. He did write to his parents and request Péladan’s Origine et esthetique de la tragédie (the other Péladan book he reviewed in 1906) while working on the Polytechnic lectures, but Péladan does not receive any credit in The Spirit of Romance for either Le secret or Origine. 20 Moore had printed his essay on Cavalcanti in the March number of The Dial, and he wanted to reconsider the topic in the light of Valli’s book, which he described as “scholastic,” “important,” and “as bearing somewhat on my
“DANTESCAN LIGHT”
21 22 23 24 25
26
27
28
29 30 31 32
341
Guido article.” He added that it had cost him 40 lire, and that it was an “(important book, = I have to notice it in my “G.C[avalcanti]. = & so will later writers on Dante)”: see Sutton (1994), 34. My own “Cavalcanti & Pound’s Arcanum” was written before The Dial correspondence was published. I assumed then that Pound learned of Valli from G.R.S. Mead, who wrote to Mrs. Shakespear (Pound’s mother-in-law) in May of 1928 suggesting that Pound read Valli’s book. He had sent a draft of his translation of “Donna mi prega” to Mead in the spring of 1928, hoping that Mead would corroborate his Gnostic interpretation of it. Apparently Pound anticipated Mead, discovering Valli on his own. Nonetheless, it is striking that Pound should be consulting his old Theosophist friend on this topic as late as 1928. In his expanded Cavalcanti essay: see Literary Essays, 177. Literary Essays, 178–79. Preface to Guido Cavalcanti Rime, 8–9. Guide to Kulchur, 295. In this respect Foscolo’s position is very close to that of Péladan, who responded negatively to Gabriele Rossetti’s hypothesis that Dante was a heretic. See Péladan’s Introduction to D.-G. Rossetti’s La Maison de Vie [The House of Life], xxxiii–iv: “The great truths spoken by the initiators of such individuals as Orpheus, Moses, the Biblical prophets and Plato have come down to the poets and mystics of our era; these truths, which Mr. Rossetti dimly sees without truly knowing them, agree with the Roman [Catholic] teaching; one cannot find in Dante, Petrarch, or Boccaccio, in the middle of their fulminations against the clergy, a single attack on [Catholic] dogma.” Valli’s book appeared too early to be influenced by the Lateran Pacts signed by the Church and Mussolini on February 11, 1929. The “Concordat” finally ended the Church’s claim to secular powers beyond the tiny Vatican, and would no doubt have pleased Valli. His first two were Il segreto della Croce e dell’Aquila nella Divina Commedia (1922) and La chiave della Divina Commedia, Sintesi del simbolismo della Croce e dell’Aquila (1926). Il linguaggio segreto was dedicated to the “glorious memory of Ugo Foscolo, Gabriele Rossetti, and Giovanni Pascoli, the three Italian poets who have crossed the threshold of the mysterious works of Dante.” Space does not permit a discussion of Aroux. Unknown to Valli, he had, in fact, plagiarized his Dante hérétique, révolutionnaire et socialiste from Rossetti’s last work, Il Beatrice di Dante. For a discussion of Aroux, see Surette, (1993), 117. Sullo spirito is the only work of Gabriele’s ever translated into English—by Caroline Ward in 1834 as Disquisition on the Antipapal Spirit which Produced the Reformation. Its Secret Influence on the Literature of Europe in General and of Italy in Particular. See Doughty (1949), 46–48 and Vincent (1936), 95. After his death in 1854, Rossetti’s widow destroyed all but some forty copies of it. Il linguaggio segreto, 407. Il linguaggio segreto, 18 (note 4). See Il linguaggio segreto, 114 (Valli’s emphasis): La più importante delle eresie che hanno dominato il Medioaevo, quella che si congiunse strettamente alla vita letteraria dell’Occidente e pro-
342
PART IV
TRASLATAR
prio alla poesia d’amore, cioè l’eresia dei Catari o Albigesi, della quale si nutrì lo spirito di tanti poeti provenzali, era nato proprio in Persia sotto la forma di Manicheismo e dalla Persia attraverso la Siria, che fu il ponte tra l’Oriente e l’Occidente, per opera delle crociate, che ristabilirono pur con la lotta e la strage strettissimi rapporti col mondo arabo-persiano, penetrò nell’Occidente una nuova espansione proprio di questo stesso misticismo che soleva manifestarsi nel linguaggio segreto d’amore. E noto che, mentre i crociati combattevano con i mussulmani in Asia, gli Ismaeliti della Siria, che rappresentavano una estrema sinistra del misticismo persiano sotto la guida del terribile Hassan, il ‘Veglio della montagna’ (i cosi detti Assassini), influenzarono potentemente alcuni ambienti cristiani della Siria e della Palestina. Basti dire che quell’ordine cavalleresco, che era stato istituito proprio per salvare i pellegrini de Terra Santa contro gli infedeli, e cioè l’ordine dei Templari, finiva distrutto mentre era vivo Dante sotto l’imputazione di eresia e sotto l’imputazione di coltivare dottrine mussulmane!
33 34
35
36 37 38
39
The Manichean origins are listed as the fifth source of the Fedeli d’Amore: see Il linguaggio segreto, 81. Selected Prose, 59. See Il linguaggio segreto, 24: “Le poesie più oscure dei ‘Fedeli d’amore’ e specialmente le oscurissime canzoni di Dante, sulle quali si sono inutilmente affannati coloro che ignoravano il gergo, lette secondo il gergo sciolgono la loro oscurità, si fanno di ‘color nuovi’ e acquistano una chiarezza, una coerenza, una profondità insospettate. Non solo, ma con la conoscenza del signifiato segreto di queste poche parole del gergo, si chiarascono agli occhi nostri e si trasformano completamente nel loro spirito, altre opere…che, pur differendo esteriormente dalla poesia d’amore del ‘dolce stil novo’ sono informate allo stesso profondo spirito mistico, alla stessa dottrina segreta, escono in altri termini, dal seno della medesima setta.” See Il linguaggio segreto, 24–25: “Queste poesie, una volta tradotte nel loro significato reale con la chiave del gergo, al posto di quell’amore vago, stilizzato, monotono, freddo artefatto, che mostrano quasi sempre secondo la lettera, ci rivelano una vita intensa e profonda di amore per una mistica idea, ritenuta la vera essenza della rivelazione cattolica, di lotta per essa, contro la Chiesa carnale e corrota, detta convenzionalmente ‘La Morte’ o ‘La Pietra’ e che è dipinta come avversaria della setta ei ‘Fedeli d’amore’ e come occultatrice di quella Sapienza santa che i ‘Fedeli d’amore’ perseguono sotto la figura della donna.…” Guide to Kulchur, 223. Guide to Kulchur, 225. Pound had acted as middleman in the sale of Olivia Agresti’s copy of Il mistero to the University of Pennsylvania Library in 1948, but the copy was sent directly to John Alden, not to Pound at St. Elizabeth’s (Letter from Olivia Agresti, 26 September 1948). There is no record that he was interested in its contents at that time despite his call in “A Visiting Card” (1942) for “a new edition of Gabriele Rossetti’s Mistero dell’Amor Platonico (1840)”: see Selected Prose, 320. Pound’s extraordinary remarks cry out for comment, but space does not permit it. All that is pertinent here is that Pound is no longer negative about
“DANTESCAN LIGHT”
40
41 42 43
44
45 46 47 48 49 50
343
Rossetti’s secret history. For a consideration of Pound’s engagement with Masonic secret history, see Surette (1993), 9–10, 48–49, 112, 123. Pound does not identify the page where he found this link. In fact, Rossetti had involved Swedenborg in his secret society as early as his Disquisition on the Antipapal Spirit, 102. In Il Beatrice he cites as an analogue to Dante’s doctrine a long passage in French from Reghellini da Schio’s Masonic history, La maçonnerie considerée comme résultat des religions égyptiennes, juives et chrétiennes, in which Swedenborg’s theory of correspondences is described along with his doctrine of palingenesis. In a note, Rossetti argues that Swedenborg’s beliefs on these scores are equivalent to those expressed by Dante’s Statius in Purgatorio 25: see Il Beatrice, 165–67. Gallup (1972), 109. Doolittle (1979), 46–47. See Séraphita, 513: “Le poème de Dante Alighieri fait à peine l’effet d’un point, à que veut se plonger dans les innombrables versets à l’aide desquels Swedenborg a rendu palpables les mondes célestes, comme Beethoven a bâti ses palais d’harmonie avec des milliers de notes, comme les architectes ont édifié leurs cathédrales avec des milliers de pierres.” See Séraphita, 354: “Minna y voyait confusément le ciel par une écharpe, l’amour lui relevait un rideau brodé d’images mystérieuses, et les sons harmonieux qui arrivaient à ses oreilles redoublaient sa curiosité. Pour eux cette soirée était donc ce que le souper fut pour les trois pèlerins dans Emmaüs, ce que fut une vision pour Dante, une inspiration pour Homère; pour eux, les trois formes du monde révelées, des voiles déchirés, des incertitudes disipées, des ténèbres éclaircies.” The “three forms of the world” for Swedenborg are the physical, the spiritual, and the celestial. It is between these three worlds or realms that the correspondences subsist. Animals can perceive only the first, humans the first and second, and angels all three. Angels are just enlightened humans. Beilby (1913), 229–48. Beilby (1913), 234. Beilby (1913), 244. Beilby (1913), 240–41. Beilby (1913), 243. Beilby (1913), 248.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alighieri, Dante. The Divine Comedy. Trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. London: Routledge, 1867. Ardizzone, Maria Luisa, ed. Dante e Pound. Ravenna: Longo, 1998. Aroux, Eugène. Dante hérétique, révolutionnaire et socialiste. Révélations d’un catholique sur le moyen âge. Paris: Jules Renouard, 1854. Balzac, Honoré de. Séraphita. Ed. Marcel Bouteron. La comédie humaine. Vol. 10. Paris: Gallimard, 1955. Beilby, Arthur E. “Dante and Swedenborg: Two Other-World Explorers.” The Quest 4, no. 4 (January 1913): 229–48.
344
PART IV
TRASLATAR
Dinsmore, Charles Allen. The Teachings of Dante. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1901. Doolittle, Hilda [H.D.]. End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound. Ed. Norman Holmes Pearson and Michael King. New York: New Directions, 1979. Doughty, Oswald. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a Victorian Romantic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949. Fussell, Edwin. “Dante and Pound’s Cantos.” Journal of Modern Literature 1 (1970): 75–87. Gallup, Donald, ed. “Ezra Pound: Letters to Viola Baxter Jordan.” Paideuma 1 (Spring/ Summer 1972): 107–11. Giovannini, G. Ezra Pound and Dante. New York: Haskell House, 1974. Gugelberger, George. M. Ezra Pound’s Medievalism. Frankfurt am Maine: Peter Lang, 1978. Kenner, Hugh. “Pound and the American Dante.” Dante e Pound. Ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone. Ravenna: Longo, 1998. 35–38. Lawrence, D.H. Letter of June 24, 1910. The Letters of D.H. Lawrence. Vol. 1, September 1901–May 1913. Ed. James Boulton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1979. 166. Litz, A. Walton. “Dante, Pound, Eliot: The Visionary Company.” Dante e Pound. Ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone. Ravenna: Longo, 1998. 39–45. Miyake, Akiko. Ezra Pound and the Mysteries of Love: A Plan for the Cantos. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Oderman, Kevin. Ezra Pound and the Erotic Medium. Durham: Duke University Press, 1986. Péladan, Joséphin. Le secret des troubadours: de Parsifal à Don Quichotte. Paris: E. Sansot, 1906. ——— Introduction to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s The House of Life [La Maison de Vie]. Trans. Clemence Couve. Paris: Alphonse Lemerre, 1887. Pound, Ezra. “Cavalcanti.” Literary Essays. Ed. T.S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1954. 149–200. ——— Guide to Kulchur. London: Faber and Faber, 1938; New York: New Directions, 1952. ——— Letter to Olivia Rossetti Agresti, 30 June 1956. Beinecke Library, Yale University. ——— Letters to Viola Baxter Jordan. Ed. Donald Gallup. Paideuma 1 (Spring/ Summer 1972). 107–11. ——— Preface to Guido Cavalcanti Rime (1932). Pound’s Cavalcanti. Ed. David Anderson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. 7–9. ——— “Psychology and Troubadours.” The Quest 4 (October 1912): 37–53. ——— Review of Le secret des troubadours. The Book News Monthly (September 1906). ——— Selected Prose 1909–1965. Ed. William Cookson. New York: New Directions, 1973.
“DANTESCAN LIGHT”
345
——— The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941. Ed. D.D. Paige. London: Faber and Faber, 1951. ——— The Spirit of Romance. New York: New Directions, [1953]. Ricciardi, Caterina. Eikonez: Ezra Pound e il Rinascimento. Napoli: Liguore Editore, 1991. Rossetti, Gabriele. Il Beatrice di Dante: Ragionamenti Critici. Ed. Maria Luisa Giartosio de Courten. Preface by Balbino Giuliano. Imola: Paolo Galeati, 1935. ——— Sullo spirito. Disquisition on the Antipapal Spirit which Produced the Reformation. Its Secret Influence on the Literature of Europe in General and of Italy in Particular. Trans. Caroline Ward. 2 vols. London: Elder Smith and Company, 1834. Schio, Reghellini da. La maçonnerie considerée comme résultat des religions égyptiennes, juives et chrétiennes. 3 vols. Bruxelles: H. Tarlier, 1829. Sicari, Stephen. Pound’s Epic Ambition: Dante and the Modern World. Albany: SUNY Press, 1991. Surette, Leon. The Birth of Modernism. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 1993. ——— “Cavalcanti & Pound’s Arcanum.” Ezra Pound and Europe. Ed. Richard Taylor and Claus Melchior. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1993. 51–60. ——— A Light from Eleusis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979. ——— “Pound and Eccentric Dante Scholars.” Dante e Pound. Ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone. Ravenna: Longo, 1998. 189–204. Sutton, Walter, ed. Pound, Thayer, Watson, and The Dial: A Story in Letters. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Tanselle, G. “Two Early Letters of Ezra Pound.” American Literature 34 (1962–63): 114–19. Valli, Luigi. Il linguaggio segreto di Dante e dei “Fedeli d’Amore.” Roma: Optima, 1928–30. ——— Il segreto della Croce e dell’Aquila nella Divina Commedia. Bologna: n.p., 1922; Milano: Luni, 1996. ——— La chiave della Divina Commedia, Sintesi del simbolismo della Croce e dell’Aquila. Bologna: 1926. Vincent, E.R. Gabriele Rossetti in England. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936. Wilhelm, James J. Dante and Pound: The Epic of Judgement. Orono: University of Maine Press, 1974.
Ezra Pound in the Earthly Paradise Matthew Reynolds
O
n January 22, 1913, the English magazine Punch ran a skit on contemporary American poets. Amid a gaggle of sneers at colourful, now mainly forgotten names—Raphael Pumpelly, Volney Streamer, John Kendrick Bangs—appears the following couplet: “The bays that formerly old DANTE crowned / Are worn today by EZRA LOOMIS POUND.”1 Perhaps not one of Punch’s funnier moments, but it is a prophetic one. Pound was to strive more than any other writer of his generation to inherit Dante’s laurels, and he certainly brought vigour to the enterprise: his one hundred and sixteen Cantos (plus fragments) outdid the one hundred cantos of Dante’s Commedia in length if in nothing else. Though in 1913 the extent of his ambition was apparent to no one except maybe to Pound himself, there were already grounds for linking his name with Dante’s. He had published volumes with Dantean titles such as A Lume Spento and Canzoni—volumes which contained imitations not of Dante himself but of the writers whom Dante, too, had learned from in his youth, namely, the Troubadours Arnaut Daniel and Bertran de Born and the early Italian poet Cino da Pistoia. He had also produced translations from Dante’s friend and sparring partner Guido Cavalcanti and a book of lectures on Troubadour poetry, The Spirit of Romance. The Punch joke sends out mixed signals about this enthusiasm. On the one hand, how can the bearer of such a modern-sounding, transatlantic name as EZRA LOOMIS POUND2 set himself up as heir to the great European poet who is so familiar to us that we call him “old Dante” like Old Peculiar or Old Nick? Yet on the other hand, how telling it is that the only laurels this supposedly newfangled poet can get hold of are medieval hand-me-downs which must be faded if not already crumbled to dust!
346
EZRA POUND IN THE EARTHLY PARADISE
347
The Punch writer was not the only one to feel uncertain about Pound’s place in time. In a review of the 1909 volume Personae, Edward Thomas noted that “[Pound] cannot usefully be compared with any living writers, though he has read Yeats.”3 And of course Pound himself had a complex and conflicted relation with the modern, as we can see in the following lines: For three years, out of key with his time, He strove to resuscitate the dead art Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime” In the old sense. Wrong from the start— No, hardly, but seeing he had been born In a half savage country, out of date… (“E.P. Ode Pour l’Election de Son Sepulchre,” 1–6)4
In the first stanza it is “E.P” who seems antiquated with his commitment to the “old” and the “dead.” Tweezered between suspicious quotation marks, “the sublime” looks as if it must have something wrong with it—as though “E.P” has belatedly discovered that the sublime in the old sense will no longer do. The poem looks set to be a confession of error. But then, in the space between the stanzas, the time-zones swap round. Now it is the “country” that is “out of date”—so old, in fact, as to be “half savage.” And, in consequence, “E.P” metamorphoses from embattled antiquarian into embattled modernizer. Side by side in these stanzas are the antithetical twin impulses which in Pound’s work (as in much modernism) often squabble and are occasionally reconciled: a need to be modern and a reverence for the past. “Make it new,” Pound famously wrote,5 but what exactly did he mean? Make a new thing? Or take an old thing and refurbish it? In art, the most radical innovation can have its roots in the most distant past, as suggested by Pound’s own revolutionary slogan, which is itself a remake of an old saying by Confucius. This temporal circle, by which the new draws authority from the old and the old draws relevance from the new, can be seen in many a revolution. Indeed, it is evident in the etymology of the word “revolution.” But in Pound’s relationship with Dante there is an unusual complexity. Dante mattered to Pound, not as the ideal to which his stylistic revolution sought to return, but as someone who had himself been a revolutionary; not as a model of style tout court, but as someone who had himself been good at finding models and making use of them. Pound is not simply indebted to Dante. He is indebted to Dante’s indebtedness.
348
PART IV
TRASLATAR
“No one who is unprepared to train himself in his art…in the spirit of the author of De vulgari eloquio, can expect to be taken seriously,” Pound was later to write.6 His early verse translates and imitates not Dante so much as the poets from whom Dante had learned the art of poetry: the Troubadours and Cavalcanti. His book of criticism, The Spirit of Romance, was itself a kind of De vulgari eloquio. If we turn back to the “E.P. Ode,” we can see this second-order influence at work. The words “He strove to resuscitate the dead art / of poetry” (lines 2–3) are new; yet they also recycle the sweeping line at the start of Purgatorio in which Dante expresses his relief at having completed the first cantica and his exultant ambitions for launching the second: “Here let dead poetry from her grave up-spring” [Ma qui la morta poesì resurga] (Purg.1.7).7 We might be tempted to say that, in resuscitating Dante’s phrase, Pound’s words succeed where they claim to have failed. But in fact they are more complex than they appear. They are not just an echo to bring Dante’s old line to life again in the memory. They are evidence of the resuscitation of a desire to resuscitate. This relay effect is continued by the phrase “the sublime.” Readers well versed in the De vulgari eloquio (or De vulgari eloquentia as it is more commonly known today) will recognize that the quotation marks around the phrase do not signal a general suspicion of its meaning but announce a specific reference to Dante’s treatise on language: Et vulgare de quo loquimur et sublimatum est magistratu et potestate, et suos honore sublimat et gloria. [And this vernacular of which I speak is both sublime in learning and power, and capable of exalting those who use it in honour and glory.]8 (DVE 1.17.2)
Here again, the translation points back not to Dante’s language but to his metalanguage. One major respect in which Dante matters to Pound, then, is as a model modeller. This second-order influence, as I have called it, disrupts the circle of stylistic revolution, and so allows Pound to think of himself as being more innovative than he might otherwise seem. He does not imitate Dante so much as superimpose himself upon him. Can we relate this imaginative behaviour to the categories of orthodoxy and unorthodoxy? Yes, though with some tentativeness. A difficulty with being unorthodox is that if you are serious about your position you must strive to persuade other people to adopt it. If you don’t proselytize, you are merely striking a pose. But the more converts you make, the less unorthodox you become. Every unorthodoxy is an orthodoxy in waiting.
EZRA POUND IN THE EARTHLY PARADISE
349
In part, Dante was attractive to Pound because of his authority. Pound needed support for his stylistic innovations, and Dante was about the most powerful friend you could hope for in any mission to create and promote a stil novo—whether dolce or otherwise. But the problem with having powerful friends is that they make you a member of the Establishment, which is just what Pound did not want. Hence their second-order relationship: Pound wanted a connection with Dante, but not a close one. So much for style. When it came to Dante’s theological and political beliefs, Pound’s response was just as conflicted, though rather less subtle. He admired Dante the political malcontent, the Dante who inveighed against Pope Nicholas III (Inf. 19.90–117) and condemned “servile Italy” for failing to uphold her imperial destiny (Purg. 6.76–93) and penned Cacciaguida’s impassioned diatribe against the corrupted Florentines (Par.16.52–154). Dante once described himself as “Florentinus natione non moribus,” and Pound was fond of adapting the phrase to his own case: “Americano natione non moribus.”9 But Dante also, and predominantly, struck him as a representative of what he called “holy Roman Church orthodoxy.” For Dante had wholeheartedly pursued the paradoxical journey of the Unorthodox that I outlined above. Writing largely in exile, committed to minority political views and contentious religious opinions, Dante imagined himself—through the Commedia—into a position of absolute orthodoxy. Though he began the poem as a desperate wanderer, lost, frightened, and alone, he finished it at the heart of the universe, at one with God and the Heavenly Host. The critical history of the Commedia has continued this trajectory in a cultural sense. Dante has become the Establishment poet par excellence, “canonical” in both a religious and an aesthetic sense. While Pound was put off by the achieved orthodoxy of the Commedia, he was attracted by its unorthodox beginnings. His imaginative response to the poem uncovers the traces of unorthodoxy and develops them. It does this mainly in connection with two issues. First, he applauded Dante’s unorthodox views on economics. “Polite society,” Pound wrote in 1910, “did not consider usury as Dante did, that is, damned to the same circle of Hell as the sodomites, both acting against the potential abundance of nature.”10 In later years, as he became preoccupied with attacking what he called “the orthodox church of economics,” he gave inordinate emphasis to Dante’s few remarks about money. For instance, in The Fifth Decad of Cantos, published in 1937, the monstrous figure of Geryon is mutated into an image of usury. Though Pound
350
PART IV
TRASLATAR
developed his own ideas far beyond anything Dante would have recognized, his extreme stance on usury remains rooted in Dante. And second, he was drawn to Dante’s unorthodox views on desire. In his early poems he often compares (and prefers) the libertinism of Cavalcanti and certain other thirteenth-century love poets to Dante’s chaste love for Beatrice. For instance he has this to say about the little-known Troubadour Cino Polnesi: Servant and singer, Troubadour That for his loving, loved each fair face more Than craven sluggard can his life’s one love, Dowered with love, “whereby the sun doth move And all the stars.” They call him fickle that the lambent flame Caught “Bicé” dreaming in each new-blown name… (“In Epitaphium Eius,” 1–7)11
The words “love, ‘whereby the sun doth move / And all the stars’” are a translation of the last line of the Paradiso [l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle] (Par. 33.145), while the name “Bicé” (or simply “Bice”) is the Florentine contraction of “Beatrice” that Dante recalls in the Heaven of Mercury (Par. 7.14: “pur per Be e per ice”). Cheekily, the lines quote Paradiso in support of free love. Though Pound’s own writing here is feebly crepuscular (“lambent,” “new blown,” “dowered with love”), the passage is seminal for him, both in the way it draws sexuality towards mysticism and in the use it makes of Dante. For although Pound was aware that, on the whole, Dante would oppose the lumping together of libertinism and Divine Love, still he thought that he could find traces of such a view—intimations of immorality—in Dante’s work. Throughout the Commedia he felt Dante’s insistence that Divine Love was the motive force behind everything in the universe, an insistence culminating in the last line of Paradiso. And then there were the lovers in the Heaven of Venus, where, as Pound noted in 1910, “in defiance of convention, we have Cunizza”12—the famous wanton, who, as we shall see, becomes an important figure in The Cantos. Like Percy Bysshe Shelley or Gabriele Rossetti or Joseph Mazzini before him, Pound advances a “strong” reading of the Commedia, finding in it more varied meanings (including more unorthodox ones) than those Dante may have meant to express. In what follows, I mean to track through Pound’s work the two unorthodox Dantes who mainly emerge from it: the political maverick and the heretic of desire. Time forbids me
EZRA POUND IN THE EARTHLY PARADISE
351
from discussing the many works already written about Pound and Dante,13 but my silence on that score should be taken as respectful. Dante’s anguished interest in politics was writ large throughout the Commedia as well as the Monarchia, but it took on a new significance in the nineteenth century when he came to be seen as the founding father of Italian nationalism. “The unity of this powerful individuality,” Mazzini declared, “stands before us as the type of the whole nation.”14 In the light of the Risorgimento, the climb up Mount Purgatory to the Earthly Paradise could appear as an allegory of Italian national history, and an exultant line like “Ma qui la morta poesì resurga” (Purg. 1.7; emphasis added) could seem ripe with political possibility. Pound was awake to this aspect of Dante’s afterlife: the resuscitation of the dead art of poetry was for him an act not only of aesthetic defiance but inseparably also of social and political consequence. For instance, he welcomed the foundation of the magazine Poetry as a contribution towards “our American Risorgimento.”15 Italian nationalists like Mazzini harked back to Dante because of his poetic stature and his denunciations of civil strife, but also because of his creation of a literary language which, according to the De vulgari eloquentia (1.19.1), belonged not to Florence alone or to any other city or region of Italy but to the peninsula as a whole. Pound had no need to forge a language out of different dialects and he did not want to write in a distinctly American idiom: obviously enough, The Cantos are multilingual. Nonetheless, he viewed the vulgare illustre as an ideal because of the stylistic qualities associated with it: “We must have a simplicity and directness of utterance, which is different from the simplicity and directness of daily speech, which is more ‘curial,’ more dignified.”16 The term “curial” echoes Dante’s description of his ideal vernacular as “‘illustrious,’ ‘cardinal,’ ‘aulic,’ and ‘curial’” [illustre, cardinale, aulicum et curiale] (DVE 1.17.1). A “curial” language would be one that provided society with a rule or a standard, like the decrees of the medieval legislative body known as the curia. No doubt this Dantean term stuck in Pound’s mind because it accorded with his developing convictions about the social and political importance of literary style. “Good writers,” he argued, “are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear. It doesn’t matter whether the good writer wants to be useful, or whether the bad writer wants to do harm. Language is the main means of human communication. If an animal’s nervous system does not transmit sensations and stimuli, the animal atrophies. If a nation’s literature declines, the nation atrophies and decays.”17 This view tends to draw language into
352
PART IV
TRASLATAR
proximity with another means of efficient interaction—money. The analogy was particularly evident to Pound, not just because of his surname but because of his father’s employment in a mint. His childhood memories were filled with images of the testing and shovelling of coins. “I like the idea of the fineness of the metal,” he was later to remark, “it moves by analogy to the habit of testing verbal manifestations.”18 Poets, on this account, are like the Bank of England. They take in old worn-out words, melt them down, and issue new ones. They detect forgeries and destroy them. They replace words that lose their currency. This elaborate analogy between words and money is at the root of Pound’s entanglements with the economic theories of stamp-scrip and social credit. It was a line of thought that began with an attachment to clarity of literary style but ended up with shrill politico-cultural pronouncements (“with usura the line grows thick”; “an expert, looking at a painting… should be able to determine the degree of the tolerance of usury in the society in which it was painted”).19 Dante never compared the linguistic currency of the vulgare illustre to monetary currency, but he did give Pound some encouragement in that direction. In the lower reaches of the Inferno, where fraud is punished, sinners who lusted for money rub shoulders with those who misused words. It is in the Eighth Circle (Malebolge or “Evil Bags”: Inf. 18.1) that we find Panders, Simonists, Barrators, Thieves, and Counterfeiters vilely “bagged” along with Seducers, Flatterers, Diviners, False Counsellors, Sowers of Discord, and Perjurers. Verbal and venal sins converge with particular force in the Tenth Bolgia of the Eighth Circle, where Sinon the liar squabbles with the forger Maestro Adamo. “If I spoke false, thou too didst falsify / The coins,” jeers Sinon to his dropsical companion [S’io dissi falso, e tu falsasti il conio] (Inf. 30.115). This coupling of linguistic and monetary corruption is at the root of Pound’s satire of “the mind of London in 1919” in the Hell Cantos, XIV and XV: Profiteers drinking blood sweetened with sh-t, And behind them . . . . . . f and the financiers lashing them with steel wires. And the betrayers of language . . . . . . n and the press gang And those who had lied for hire; the perverts, the perverters of language, the perverts, who had set money-lust Before the pleasures of the senses… (The Cantos XIV 61)20
EZRA POUND IN THE EARTHLY PARADISE
353
Several different parts of Dante’s Inferno merge in this foul vision. The sinners have become unrecognizable, like the crowds of Spendthrifts and Hoarders who are “dim to all discernment” in the Fourth Circle (Inf. 7.49–54). The “perverts” recall the academic Sodomites running in the desert of the Seventh Circle near the crouched figures of the Usurers (Inf. 14.22–4). Lashing is the punishment meted out to the Seducers in the First Bolgia of the Eighth Circle (Inf. 18.34–6). The shit comes from the same canto, but from the Second Bolgia, where the Flatterers grovel in “excrement / As if from human privies it had flowed” [uno sterco / che da li uman privadi parea mosso] (Inf. 18.113–14). Financiers and profiteers merit this hell because they invest primarily for their own gain and not in order to foster production; that is to say, they detach currency from the reality it is supposed to represent. Money, Pound declared, should consist of “certificates of work done.”21 Since the perverters of language set words adrift from reality in a similar way, the purulent sludge they wallow in here is a realization of their own soggy style. For “the late Victorians and the Wellses were boggit in loose expression,” he contemptuously observed, inveighing elsewhere against “the slushiness and swishiness of the post-Swinburnian British line.”22 Like his economic theory, his linguistic thought relies on a view of meaning according to which the sign, whether it be a word or a banknote, stands for something distinct from itself, something it should represent as faithfully as possible. From his viewpoint, then, Jacques Derrida and George Soros would both be damned, and for the same sin.23 Canto XV describes an escape from the sewer of misrepresentation: Keep your eyes on the mirror. Prayed we to the Medusa, petrifying the soil by the shield, Holding it downward he hardened the track Inch before us, by inch, the matter resisting, The heads rose from the shield, hissing, held downwards. Devouring maggots, the face only half potent, The serpents’ tongues grazing the swill top, Hammering the souse into hardness… (The Cantos XV 66)
354
PART IV
TRASLATAR
The Medusa threatens Dante at the Entrance to Lower Hell (Inf. 9.52–60); but here, with the help of a mirror—which brings to mind both the mirror of art and the polished shield used by Perseus to avoid petrification—the Gorgon’s power is turned against the slush of loose finance and sloppy writing so that the soft soil hardens into a “track.” A road is thus created, inch by inch, through the infernal morass. (Pound later admired Mussolini for draining marshes and turning them into solid farmland.)24 The building of this escape route, we are prompted to see, is at least partly a matter of stylistic reform along the lines laid down by Dante, for behind the word “petrifying” in the line “petrifying the soil by the shield” lies Dante’s stylistically “hard” lyrical sequence known as the Rime petrose or “Stony Poems” (Rime 77–80). Elsewhere, in a passage praising Joyce’s style, Pound commented on “the love of hardness bred by reading Dante.”25 Here in Canto XV, Pound’s own writing seems to be struggling towards hardness. The indentation of the lines makes them look as though they are edging forward a step at a time, while the heavily dactylic pulse— “Hólding it dównward / he hárdened the tráck”—lends the accented syllables something of the firm feel of stepping stones bearing up under the rhythm of the narrator’s advancing stride. Implicit in the language of this passage is a hope that the morally unyielding consciousness, carefully weighing each word, will have no truck with the “swishiness” of the hypocrites and profiteers who have softened up the socio-literary domain with their usurious and sodomitical pollutions. Despite Pound’s belief that his views on style and money were faithfully patterned on Dante’s, his response to the Inferno in Cantos XIV–XVI remains strikingly cavalier. He clearly invites comparison with the Inferno by opening the Hell Cantos with a quotation, in Italian, of the ominous line that signals Dante’s passage beyond the glimmering lights of Limbo into the darkness of Hell proper at the start of the Second Circle: “Io venni in luogo d’ogni luce muto” (The Cantos XIV 61; cf. “I came into a place mute of all light”: Inf. 5.28).26 But then he reduces the carefully distinguished sections of Dante’s Hell to a mess. A malevolent misreading? Perhaps. Yet the explicit reference to Dante seems rather to act like a modesty topos, advertising the negligibleness of Pound’s modern-day Hell in comparison with the immense gravity of the Inferno. And this, then, increases the passage’s satirical force. Today’s sinners are indulging in the same old vices that Dante dealt with all those centuries ago. Only now, the bathetic comparison implies, they are nowhere near so grand or interesting as the Damned of the Middle Ages.27
EZRA POUND IN THE EARTHLY PARADISE
355
Set in contrast to the Hell of commerce and coagulation, the antisocial world where people don’t communicate and nothing gets done, is a social Paradise of honesty and love. This, too, has a root in Dante. In fact it goes back to the second kind of Dantean unorthodoxy mentioned earlier in this essay—the erotic heresy. The saintly figure who opposes the profiteers and the perverts is Cunizza, whom Dante locates in the Heaven of Venus and to whom he gives the beautiful lines: “But I gladly pardon in myself the reason of my lot, and it does not grieve me” [ma lietamente a me medesma indulgo / la cagion di mia sorte, e non mi noia] (Par. 9.34–5). She offers herself the same indulgence that she gave her lovers in her lifetime. As Pound explains in Canto XXIX: …the Lady Cunizza That was first given Richard St Boniface And Sordello subtracted her from that husband And lay with her in Tarviso Till he was driven out of Tarviso And she left with a soldier named Bonius nimium amorata in eum And went from one place to another “The light of this star o’ercame me” Greatly enjoying herself And running up the most awful bills. (The Cantos XXIX 142)
The line in quotation marks translates the words of Dante’s Cunizza: “mi vinse il lume d’esta stella” (Par. 9.33). Notice how the verb “subtracted” gives a mathematical character to the amorous giving-and-taking, which in turn looks forward to “the most awful bills” (a phrase nimbly evoking a socialite’s tone of voice) in the last line. We are asked to admire Cunizza’s love-life, to think it generous and resourceful. Reminded that her partners included a nobleman (Richard), a poet (Sordello), and a soldier (Bonius), we are led to infer that in its multiplicity—if in nothing else—her love resembles God’s. Or we might put it the other way round and say that, like Cino Polnesi, she finds a glimpse of her one ideal “in each new-blown name.” The rest of what we are told about her harmonizes with this impression of her saintly promiscuity. She varies not only her lovers but her locations, moving around “from one place to another,” which contrasts with the boggeddown state of the inhabitants of the Hell Cantos. By overspending, she fosters the circulation of goods. Love, liberty, extravagance: Cunizza represents everything that Pound finds attractive in a woman. She is his secular Beatrice.
356
PART IV
TRASLATAR
Much of Cantos XXXI–LXXIII is sunk in Pound’s economic and political obsessions. Where the earlier part of the work took imaginative vigour from his sense of his own unorthodoxy, these cantos set out to preach a new orthodoxy, and the manner in which they do so largely bears out Orwell’s remark that “orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.”28 Dante is mostly absent from these laborious tracts of verse, but when he is evoked at length, in the cantos in Italian (LXXII–LXXIII), the result is a travesty of the “great blaze” of creativity supposed to follow from the “small spark” of the Sacred Poem [Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda] (Par. 1.34). That feeling of distant connection which had animated the earlier writing here disappears to be replaced by a facile closeness. Dantean phrases are tumbled together. The Cantos become a cento of the Commedia: Fra il cui cigolar In tono soave: <
> Suonava come note di ben tesa corda. (The Cantos LXXII 430)29
The verb cigolar is taken from Dante’s description of the wind “hissing” out of Pier della Vigna’s branch (Inf. 13.42). The phrase tono soave echoes both the Angel’s “gentle and kind tone” in the passage to the Fifth Cornice [parlare in modo soave e benigno] (Purg. 19.44) and Cacciaguida’s surprisingly “sweet and gentle voice” in the Heaven of Mars [con voce più dolce e soave] (Par. 16.32). The positive assertion “Placidia fui” [Placidia I was] recalls Sapìa’s negative assertion “Savia non fui” [Sapient I was not] (Purg. 13.109), while “Suonava come note di ben tesa corda” echoes the “sweet note sounding” in the Heaven of the Sun [sonando con sì dolce nota] (Par. 10.143). For all their moments of Dantean suavity, Cantos LXXII–LXXIII are in substance a lurid celebration of the Fascist war effort. They belong to a sub-genre of propagandist writing that sought to reinvent Dante as a would-have-been supporter of Mussolini. Compare Pietro Iacopini’s Dante e il fascismo (1929): …torniamo a Dante. Egli guardando l’anarchia in cui era caduta l’Italia, esclama: Che val perché ti raconciasse il freno Giustiniano, se la sella è vota? Senz’esso fora la vergogna meno. [Purg. 6.88–90] Il codice giustinianeo regola in massima parte la proprietà privata. Ora se Dante lo esalta, è perché sta per la proprietà privata contro la collettiva, quindi contro i socialisti.
EZRA POUND IN THE EARTHLY PARADISE
357
Anche sotto questo aspetto pertanto chi dice Dante, dice Fascismo. Che vale, esclama il Poeta, che l’imperatore Giustiniano abbia fatto per te, Italia e condice e pandette, se poi non hai chi le faccia osservare?30 […let us return to Dante. Gazing on the anarchy into which Italy had fallen, he exclaims: What boots it, that thy reins Justinian’s hand Refitted, if thy saddle be unprest? Nought doth he now but aggravate thy shame. (Purg. 6.88–9) In large part, the Justinian code is concerned to regulate private property as against collective ownership, and therefore against the socialists. Therefore in this respect, too, whoever speaks Dante speaks Fascism. What good is it, the Poet exclaims, that Justinian created for you, Italy, both code and pandects, if you have no one to enforce the observance of them?] (Dante e il fascismo, 58–9)
This is the sort of company in which Pound’s Italian Cantos belong. It is a commonplace of Pound criticism (and not one I wish to contest) that at the start of the Pisan Cantos (LXXIV–LXXXIV) the character of the poem alters. Suddenly there is a centre of consciousness—the narrator in his prison camp—which is more clearly defined than anything we have encountered before, and this newly personal voice is chastened in its relation to history. Whether the change is motivated by repentance or simply by a recognition of failure is hard to determine, but it is clear that the propagandist stridencies of the preceding cantos have abated. Ceasing to urge the construction of a political paradise on earth, Pound’s work turns instead into something more like a meditation on the disparity between the ideal and the real. Since its political commitments are less explicit than those in earlier cantos, questions about its orthodoxy or unorthodoxy become harder to frame. Previously, as we have seen, allusions to Dante and other writers characteristically either staked a claim to authority or voiced a disagreement. Allusion was a rhetorical strategy. The absence of any consistent centre of consciousness meant that there was rarely any feeling of distance having to be crossed by the poet in order to reach his sources—which made his agreements and disagreements with them seem all the more vivid. Always inherent in allusion, however, is the possibility of having the act of alluding itself be expressive. T.S. Eliot, reviewing the early Three Cantos, judged them unfavorably by comparison with Joyce’s more creative use of allusion: “part of the effect being the extent of the vista opened to the imagination by the lightest touch.”31 In the Pisan Cantos, Pound achieves precisely this effect:
358
PART IV
TRASLATAR
…in a dance the renewal with two larks in contrappunto at sunset ch’intenerisce a sinistra la Torre seen thru a pair of breeches. (The Cantos LXXIV 431)
—which echoes Dante’s heartfelt description of dusk in the Valley of the Princes: Era già l’ora che volge il disio ai navicanti e ’ntenerisce il core lo dì c’han detto ai dolci amici addio; e che lo novo peregrin d’amore punge, se ode squilla di lontano che paia il giorno pianger che si more… [Now was the hour which longing backward bends In those that sail, and melts their heart in sighs, The day they have said farewell to their sweet friends, And pricks with love the outsetting pilgrim’s eyes If the far bell he hears across the land Which seems to mourn over the day that dies…] (Purg. 8.1–6)
It is not only the sunset that has brought the Dante passage to mind, but the song of the larks, their distant notes recalling the squilla of Dante’s far-off bell. The allusion has life because, itself a reminiscence, it enacts the narrator’s reminiscent mood, opening up a vista into the past like the view towards Pisa. Moreover, it compares his situation in prison, guarded by soldiers in breeches, to the situation of everyone with respect to the past, for although the past can be remembered or imagined, we cannot escape into it. Such moments of perspective help to create the new mood of reflection in this part of the poem. The Pisan Cantos contain many other echoes of Purgatorio, especially of the eighth canto, where Sordello leads Dante and Virgil to a valley occupied by rulers who have seen their political efforts in the world come to nothing and who now pray to be kept safe through the night until dawn—a dawn which implies both their eventual ascent into Heaven and the far-off advent of an imperial golden age on earth. Like them, Pound’s narrator is disillusioned by political events and cut off from politics in the purgatory of his cage. He stops trying to promote the creation of a paradise on earth by economic reform and gives himself over to thoughts of a more attenuated happiness:
EZRA POUND IN THE EARTHLY PARADISE
359
Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel but spezzato apparently it exists only in fragments unexpected excellent sausage, the smell of mint, for example, Ladro the night cat… (The Cantos LXXIV 438)
Yet if this new reduced Paradise is in the mind, its imaginary status does not make it only a solitary pleasure, as these lines themselves indicate, for the slogan “Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel” is Pound’s reply to Baudelaire and the word spezzato is taken from Dante’s vocabulary of ruin, specifically from the demon Malacoda’s deceptive report to Virgil that “the sixth arch lies all shattered at the bottom” [giace / tutto spezzato al fondo l’arco sesto] (Inf. 21.107–8). Not only our thoughts, the verse now suggests, but our merest glimpses of things are shaped by the influence of others: Hast’ou seen boat’s wake on sea-wall, how crests it? What panache? paw-flap, wave-tap, that is gaiety, Toba Sojo, toward limpidity, that is exultance, here the crest runs on wall che paion’ si al vent’ (The Cantos CX 777)
While the wave clapping and spraying up brings to Pound’s mind an image from the Buddhist painter Toba Sojo, the sheening of the water along the wall recalls the fluttering movement of Paolo and Francesca, who to Dante’s eye “seem on the wind so light” [paion sì al vento esser leggieri] (Inf. 5.75). Pound’s eye has been informed by Toba Sojo and Dante. Through their images he sees the world. Among the fragments in which Paradise now exists, alongside the “unexpected excellent sausage,” are the fragments of other people’s writing out of which The Cantos are largely composed. Speaking of the “smell of mint” or the “paw-flap” of a wave, Pound refers to experiences which his readers will usually have in common with him. But the allusions to Toba Sojo, to Dante, and to all the other figures recollected in The Cantos, many of whom will be unfamiliar, give evidence of—and help to create for his readers—a more populous community of thought and imagining than that which they might otherwise have an opportunity to experience.
360
PART IV
TRASLATAR
Pound keeps returning to this idea of community, and he does so by alluding to Dante’s Convivio (The Banquet), the very title of which announces its desire to bring people together: “Not political,” Dante says, a “compagnevole animale” Even if some do coagulate into cities (The Cantos XCV 643)
These lines take us back to the passage in the Convivio where Dante approvingly cites Aristotle’s definition of human nature: la umana civilitade…a uno fine è ordinata, cioè a vita felice; a la quale nullo per sé è sufficiente a venire sanza l’aiutorio d’alcuno, con ciò sia cosa, che l’uomo abbisogna di molte cose, a le quali uno solo satisfare no può. E però dice lo Filosofo che l’uomo naturalmente è compagnevole animale. [human civility…is ordained for a certain end, to wit the life of felicity; to which no man is sufficient to attain by himself without the aid of any, inasmuch as man hath need of many things which no one is able to provide alone. Wherefore the Philosopher saith that man is by nature a social animal.] (Conv. 4.4.1)32
Pound directly quotes the key phrase compagnevole animale to show that his thoughts are developing in company with the companionable author of the Convivio, Dante, and hence with the most sociable of philosophers, Aristotle, and this double allusion itself offers support for the claim of community that is being made. The lines clearly announce Pound’s retreat from the political ambitions expressed earlier in The Cantos. The satiric verb “coagulate” recalls the Hell Cantos, but what is now offered as an alternative to that vision of communal stagnation is not social and economic reform but the companionship of books. The Convivio also haunts the Rock-Drill Cantos, which are full of references to Dante’s insistence that human nature is essentially social— a point Pound drives home by alluding to the Dantean notions of courtesy and distributive justice. He looks back repeatedly to the community of the Blessed in Paradiso, especially to the lovers in the Heaven of Venus, where Charles Martel discourses to Dante not only on the nature of civil society but on its origin, which, as his location in “the third heaven” [il terzo ciel] (Par. 8.37) implies, must be love. For Pound, Paradise is an ideal community even in an economic sense. Its goods circulate perfectly and indeed literally because they are equitably shared, and any increase in one person’s happiness augments the happiness of everyone else. “Lo one, by whom our loves are magnified!” cry out a
EZRA POUND IN THE EARTHLY PARADISE
361
thousand spirits when Dante appears in the Heaven of Mercury [Ecco chi crescerà li nostri amori] (Par. 5.105). Pound recalls this exultant moment in the following lines: Chi crescerà (Paradiso) “of societies”… (The Cantos LXXXIX 590)
The earthly and fragmented Paradise of The Cantos is a society too, though not one that Pound any longer hopes to see created by politics. Implicitly his view of his own work has changed. It is no longer a contribution towards economic and social renovation but has become in itself an odd kind of community. The Cantos are more than anything else a collection of references to other writers; a record of indebtedness; a demonstration that an intellectual and imaginative life is a life lived in textual communication (and spiritual communion) with others. Myriad writers from America, China, Greece, Italy, England, France, and many other lands have come together in Pound’s expansive work, and the reader is asked to join in their society. Not necessarily to learn everything about all of them, of course: if you’re close friends with three or four of them, a nodding acquaintance with the rest will do. And so The Cantos ought really to be read by a community as well. To fathom the obscurities of the text you need to ask questions of historians and economists and philologists and Egyptologists. The Companion to the Cantos to which we must all from time to time resort is named with irony, for it is really an indictment of the poverty of our lived intellectual companionship. As a reader of Dante’s cantos, Pound was introduced to a multitude of different characters inhabiting an imaginary universe from which he recovered an epitome of medieval culture as a whole. The Commedia was his “Baedecker in Provence.”33 A little more than half way through his own work he speaks of two Chinese rulers who were separated by a thousand years: Shun’s will and King Wan’s will were as the two halves of a seal (The Cantos LXXVII 467)
Pound was not so at one with Dante as that—though a mere seven hundred years lay between them. Why, then, do The Cantos dwell so long and closely on the Commedia? One reason, surely, is that Pound is providing his readers with an example of intellectual community and asking them to follow that example in their own reading. Allusion is no longer an
362
PART IV
TRASLATAR
instrument of argument but a means of populating an imaginative Elsewhere. Shall we call this “orthodox” or “unorthodox”? Neither word seems right. Pound’s pages have become a refuge for a multitude of views and intuitions. They are heteroglossic and therefore heterodox. In being so, they are necessarily both revolutionary and conservative. On the one hand, all sorts of unorthodoxy might draw impetus from them; but on the other, there is nothing more orthodox than the consolation of literature. Dwelling on the distance between this imaginary community and practical politics, the poem adopts an elegiac tone—elegiac in the full sense of taking pleasure in regret: You are tender as a marshmallow, my Love, I cannot use you as a fulcrum. You have stirred my mind out of dust. Flora Castalia, your petals drift thru the air, the wind is ½ lighted with pollen diafana, e Monna Vanna . . . tu mi fai rimembrar. (The Cantos XCIII 632)
The word diafana comes from Cavalcanti, which brings to mind Cavalcanti’s beloved Monna Vanna, the lady who is called Primavera (or prima verrà in VN 24.20) because she preceded Beatrice. Primavera, in turn, leads our thoughts to Dante’s Earthly Paradise, and to these lines uttered by the pilgrim when he arrives in the Garden of Eden, sees Matelda, and recalls how Proserpina was kidnapped by Dis: Tu mi fai rimembrar dove e qual era Proserpina nel tempo che perdette la madre lei, ed ella primavera. [Thou puttest me in remembrance of what thing Proserpina was, and where, when by mischance Her mother lost her, and she lost the spring.] (Purg. 28.49–51)
This tercet wonderfully gives voice to the view that the real world is always coming short of our ideals. The mortal Dante meets a perfect human being and immediately thinks of the Fall. Primavera is here associated no longer with promise but with loss. The rhyme of “primavera” back to “era” brings out what will always be the pastness of that primal spring. Not prima verrà (first she will come), but prima v’era (first or once she was there). Alluding to both these moments together, Pound for once leaves the Earthly Paradise where it belongs: in the future, in the past, and in the mind.
EZRA POUND IN THE EARTHLY PARADISE
363
NOTES 1 Anonymous (1913), 58, partially quoted in Wilhelm (1987), 43. The present essay was delivered at the conference on Dante & the Unorthodox at The University of Western Ontario, London, in April 1997. The usual slight adjustments have been made to fit it for print. A substantial part of it has already appeared under the title “Ezra Pound: Quotation and Community” in Havely (1998), 113–27. 2 The poet’s full name is Ezra Weston Loomis Pound. 3 Thomas’s comment is cited in Homberger (1972), 51. 4 Collected Shorter Poems, 205. 5 He used this modernist battle-cry as the title for a collection of his essays, Make It New, published in 1934. 6. Selected Prose, 294. 7 English verse translations (with corresponding Italian passages) of the Commedia are quoted from Laurence Binyon’s edition (1933–43). Pound gave Binyon’s version of the Inferno a favorable review in The Criterion (April 1934): see Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 201–13. For his extensive commentary on Binyon’s Purgatorio in 1938, see Letters 334–35 and 347–50: To Laurence Binyon, 402–14. All other quotations from the Commedia in this essay are drawn from the Petrocchi edition as reprinted and slightly revised by Singleton (1970–75). Prose translations of Dante are my own, though I have checked my renderings against those of Singleton (1970–75). The components of the Commedia cited from are Inferno (Inf.), Purgatorio (Purg.), and Paradiso (Par.). Also cited are Convivio (Conv.), De vulgari eloquentia (DVE), and Vita Nuova (VN). 8 The Latin text and English translation of the De vulgari eloquentia are quoted from Steven Botterill’s edition. 9 For the famous description “Florentine by birth but not in manners”—or self-description if Dante is indeed its author—see the formal opening lines of the Epistle to Cangrande: Epistola 13.1. For Pound’s adaptation of it, see Letter 154: To John Quinn, 200. As Pound notes after his adaptation of Dante’s line: “Have been misquoting it for eight years.” 10 The Spirit of Romance, 101. 11 Collected Early Poems, 12. 12 The Spirit of Romance, 146. 13 See Ellis (1983), 171–208; Kenner (1985); Wilhelm (1987); and Ardizzone (1998). 14 Mazzini (1864–67), 147. 15 Carpenter (1988), 185. 16 Selected Prose, 41. 17 ABC of Reading, 32. 18 Hall (1962), 40. 19 The Cantos XLV 229 (first quotation) and Selected Prose, 293 (second quotation). All references to The Cantos are by canto number in Roman numerals, and by page number from the 1970 New Directions edition in Arabic numerals. The only exception is a page reference to the Italian Cantos from the 1987 Faber edition: see below note 29.
364
PART IV
TRASLATAR
20 For a discussion of the money/language convergence in the Hell Cantos, see Pound / Lewis, 284. 21 Selected Prose, 206. 22 Guide to Kulchur, 50. For his condemnation of the “post-Swinburnian British line,” see Letter 190: To Felix E. Schelling, 249. 23 See Redman (1991), 135, 141, for a detailed discussion of Pound’s views on money. Derrida would be damned for his advocacy of the free play of the signifier, and Soros for his fortune made from currency speculation. 24 Jefferson and/or Mussolini, 100. 25 Letter 122: To John Quinn, 164. In this letter Pound praises the “hardness” of Joyce’s learnedly allusive style in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 26 The Cantos XIV 61. The original line, in Petrocchi’s critical edition, reads: “Io venni in loco d’ogne luce muto.” 27 See Pound / Lewis, 284: “Incidentally Possum is all WET when he tries to set my 2 canto vignette of the mind of London in 1919 against ALL Dante’s hell.” He is referring here to T.S. Eliot’s comments in After Strange Gods, 42–43. 28 Orwell (1968), 135. 29 The Italian Cantos (LXXII–LXXIII) were not printed in the 1970 New Directions edition of The Cantos, which skips from LXXI to LXXIV without explanation. Since the 1970 edition remains the most widely available source for students of Pound’s masterwork in the English-speaking world, I have followed its pagination here for all but the Italian Cantos. The page reference for Canto LXXII is taken from the fourth collected (1987 Faber) edition of The Cantos. 30 Iacopini (1929), 58–59. In the Petrocchi edition, the tercet reads: “Che val perché ti racconciasse il freno / Iustinïano, se la sella è vòta? / Sanz’ esso fora la vergogna meno.” 31 Eliot (1918), 6. 32 The translation is by Philip H. Wicksteed. 33 Selected Prose, 292. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alighieri, Dante. Dante’s Inferno. Trans. Laurence Binyon. London: Macmillan, 1933. ——— Dante’s Purgatorio. Trans. Laurence Binyon. London: Macmillan, 1938. ——— Dante’s Paradiso. Trans. Laurence Binyon. London: Macmillan, 1943. ——— De vulgari eloquentia. Ed. and trans. Steven Botterill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ——— The Divine Comedy. 6 vols. Ed. Charles S. Singleton. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–75. ——— Epistle to Cangrande = Epistola XIII. Epistole. Ed. Arsenio Frugoni and Georgio Brugnoli. Opere Minori. Ed. Pier Vicenzo Mengaldo et al. Vol. 2. Milan: Ricciardi, 1979. 598–643. ——— La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. 4 vols. Ed. G. Petrocchi. Milano: Mondadori, 1966–67. ——— Convivio. Ed. Piero Cudini. Milan: Garzanti, 1980.
EZRA POUND IN THE EARTHLY PARADISE
365
——— The Convivio of Dante Alighieri. Trans. Philip H. Wicksteed. Temple Classics. London: J.M. Dent, 1903. ——— Rime petrose = Rime 77–80. Dante’s Lyric Poetry. Ed. and trans. Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. 158–75. ——— Vita Nuova. Trans. Mark Musa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973. Anonymous. “English Bards and American Reviewers.” Punch 144 (January 22, 1913): 58. Ardizzone, Maria Luisa, ed. Dante e Pound. Ravenna: Longo, 1998. Carpenter, Humphrey. A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound. London: Faber and Faber, 1988. Eliot, T.S. After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. London: Faber and Faber, 1934. ——— “A Note on Ezra Pound.” To-day 4.19 (September 1918): 3–9. Ellis, Steve. Dante and English Poetry: Shelley to T.S. Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Hall, Donald. “Ezra Pound: An Interview.” The Paris Review 28 (Summer/Fall 1962): 22–51. Havely, Nick, ed. Dante’s Modern Afterlife: Reception and Response from Blake to Heaney. Houndmills: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Homberger, Eric, ed. Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. Iacopini, Pietro. Dante e il fascismo. Rome: n.p., 1929. Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Ed. Chester G. Anderson. New York: Viking Press, 1968. Kenner, Hugh. “Ezra Pound’s Commedia.” Dante among the Moderns. Ed. Stuart Y. McDougal. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Mazzini, Joseph. Life and Writings of Joseph Mazzini. Vol. 4. London: Smith, Elder, 1864–67. Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Vol 4: In Front of Your Nose 1945–1950. Ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. London: Seeker and Warburg, 1968. 127–40. Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. London: Faber and Faber, 1951. ——— Collected Shorter Poems. London: Faber, 1984. ——— Guide to Kulchur. Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1952. ——— “In Epitaphium Eius.” A Lume Spento (1908). Collected Early Poems of Ezra Pound. Ed. Michael John King. New York: New Directions, 1976. 12. ——— Jefferson and/or Mussolini: L’Idea Statale, Fascism As I Have Seen It. 1935. Reprint, New York: Liveright, 1970. ——— Letter 122: To John Quinn (London, 18 April 1917). The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941. Ed. D.D. Paige. London: Faber and Faber, 1951. 163–65. ——— Letter 154: To John Quinn (London, 15 November 1918). The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941. Ed. D.D. Paige. London: Faber and Faber, 1951. 199–202.
366
PART IV
TRASLATAR
——— Letter 190: To Felix E. Schelling (Paris, 8–9 July 1922). The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941. Ed. D.D. Paige. London: Faber and Faber, 1951. 245–49. ——— Letters 334–335 and 347–350: To Laurence Binyon (Rapallo, 22 April–12 May 1938). The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941. Ed. D.D. Paige. London: Faber and Faber, 1951. 402–14. ——— Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T.S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber, 1954. ——— Make It New. London: Faber and Faber, 1934. ——— Pound / Lewis: The Letters of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis. Ed. Timothy Materer. New York: New Directions, 1985. ——— Selected Cantos. London: Faber and Faber, 1987. ——— Selected Prose 1909–1965. Ed. William Cookson. New York: New Directions, 1973; London: Faber and Faber, 1984. ——— The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1970. Fourth Collected Edition. London: Faber and Faber, 1987. ——— The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1907–1941. Ed. D.D. Paige. London: Faber and Faber, 1951. ——— The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound to John Quinn, 1912–1924. Ed. Timothy Materer. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. ——— The Spirit of Romance. New York: New Directions, 1968. Redman, Tim. Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Reynolds, Matthew. “Ezra Pound: Quotation and Community.” Dante’s Modern Afterlife: Reception and Response from Blake to Heaney. Ed. Nick Havely. Houndmills: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. 113–27. Terrell, Carroll F. A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Thomas, Edward. “Two Poets.” English Review 2 (June 1909): 627–32. Wilhelm, James J. Dante and Pound: The Epic of Judgement. Orono: University of Maine Press, 1974.
PART V TRALUCERE
Dante and Cinema Film across a Chasm Bart Testa
D
ante and cinema? The Commedia and cinema? The discussion has hardly begun—yet several film artists have already spoken first, and spoken of an abyssal chasm of time. What follows is a series of hazardous notes concerning three “artist’s films”: Stan Brakhage’s The Dante Quartet (1987); Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso (1964); and Bruce Elder’s The Book of All the Dead (1978–1996).1 One hazard I must point out here is that these notes cannot begin to respond to the immense reserve of philological and interpretative scholarship on Dante. Another is that they refer to “artist’s films” (Brakhage’s coinage), a term without critical currency in cinema studies where such works are slotted as “avantgarde” or “experimental” cinema. But that label draws a genre ghetto around films and the problem of defining this or that film genre is not at issue here. In any case, these films (which do not form “a cinema” because they remain three single films) do have a relation of radical Otherness to the movie industry. It is in this place of alterity that the chasm of time— the abyss of history between Dante and cinema—opens initially to view. Among the classic texts of the Western canon, the Commedia must seem the most remote to filmmaking. Is it not still hailed as the great epic (or anti-epic) of Catholic conversion, the return of the Lost Soul to God through pilgrimage? No medieval pilgrim-poet, it seems, could be further removed than Dante—in his forms and sensibility, in his compositional élan and cosmology, and (especially) in his aesthetic completeness and totalizing vision—from the modernity to which cinema belongs. I am not just referring to the fables promulgated by our media theorists. The fable of film technology, for one, tells us that a fragmented and phenomenalist visual culture, secularism, and the languages of instrumental rea-
367
368
PART V
TRALUCERE
son determined the invention of cinema and all that flowed across our century’s screens thereafter. That fable is true and its truth militates against the very idea of Dante as plausible in cinema. Nonetheless, even if we could fantasize some reform that would free filmmaking from these technocultural determinations, there is an epochal abyss between the poet and film still older, deeper, and darker than the meaning of “modern media.” A chasm was cut out of European time when the Renaissance gave rise to the baroque, the age of Shakespeare (in his later plays) and Milton (in his two epics), and in the visual arts, the age of Bernini and Velasquez. In film, it halted even Sergei Eisenstein—the great self-primitivizing artist of classic film history—and held him forever in the baroque Mexico that formed his later imaginary in the 1930s, as we can vividly see in his masterful film of ancient Rus, Ivan the Terrible. Consider, too, the postwar European filmmakers who resist the magnetic modern literary realism of Dickens and Balzac, Verga and Zola—the tradition that gave us Hollywood and socialist realism, French poetic realism, and Italian neorealism alike. Recall that Bergman and Tarkovsky attempted to traverse the chasm. Their efforts resulted in the most vivid religious film works of the modern-baroque era: The Seventh Seal and Cries and Whispers, Andrei Rublev and Nostalghia. Extraordinary and beautiful films they are, but none of them suggests to us any prospect for Dante and cinema. Among post-war filmmakers there are a rare few, nonetheless, who slip beneath the bar of the baroque. Carl Theodore Dreyer and Robert Bresson spring to mind. Both are northern Europeans, dissenters in spirit, and strict modernists in style. The only other filmmaker of the post-war era for whom such candidacy is plausible, if only for his willing it so titanically, and because of his intense “linguistic” saturation, is Pier Paolo Pasolini. But the discussion of these filmmakers and Dante has hardly begun, and only with Pasolini is the name of Dante even brought up.2 Dante and cinema, then? The films drawing me to this question in these hazardous notes do not belong to the tiny catalogue just outlined. The Dante Quartet, Il deserto rosso, and The Book of All the Dead do not envision Dante crossing the abyss of time to us. They do not try to bridge time or to “reconstruct” the Dantean text in modern terms. Instead, they exacerbate their modernity by inviting comparison with the Commedia. In other words, Brakhage, Antonioni, and Elder make the abyssal chasm between us and Dante, between his poem and their films, the issue. They do so by making time itself the main aesthetic problem in their works.
DANTE AND CINEMA
369
THE DANTE QUARTET
Beginning with Brakhage, we should perhaps first consider an imaginary or reimagined Dante—a Dante of space. Brakhage’s Dante is imagined within the intensities of a single subjectivity. The Dante Quartet proposes to its viewers Brakhage’s vaunting ambition of imaging the Commedia paradoxically as an artist’s interiority that can be known again— as if for the first time—by close analogy with Dante’s creative “ingegno” [genius] (Purg. 1.2).3 The film is extremely compressed, just six-and-aquarter minutes long. Its four sections are distinguished from each other in three ways: by titles handwritten on the screen, by frame-format, and by imagery. There are two sections for Hell and one each for Purgatory and Heaven. Each frame is an “abstract” handpainted directly on the celluloid surface, using various stocks, from IMAX 70mm, to 35mm and 16mm, and then the whole is printed on 35mm.4 The images, in fullsized projection, possess tremendous vividness and depth and texture. The effect seduces the viewer’s imagination instantly so that each shot seems like an interior landscape streaming over the screen. In his brief published statement on the film, Brakhage argues that its design “demonstrates the earthly conditions of ‘Hell,’ ‘Purgatory’ (or Transition) and ‘Heaven’ (or ‘existence is song,’ which is the closest I’d presume upon heaven from my experience) as well as the mainspring of/from ‘Hell’ (Hell Spit Flexion) in four parts which are inspired by the closed-eye or hypnagogic vision created by these emotional states.”5 Brakhage can claim that his film “demonstrates” the “earthly conditions” corresponding to the Sacred Poem because he believes that Dante’s work also speaks of interior conditions of the poet’s soul, which, he implies, have been unfolded into the epic form of the Commedia. Film, then, might speak of the same inner conditions in Brakhage’s own “earthbound” self and give rise to a visual work that is a plausible analogue of the poem. Another notion Brakhage broaches in this text—“hypnagogic vision created by these emotional states”—might be regarded as methodological in so far as it explains why such an analogue appears possible to the film artist’s envisioning. Behind our eyes is a vision of the emotions so dense and complex it may be said to compress Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven within us, and the artist can make that vision manifest in film. To suggest why Brakhage could proffer this explanation requires that we accept, as a preliminary, his aesthetic credo or at least its mythic arch¯e. The radical daring of Brakhage’s ambitious project in The Dante Quartet, and the significance of his aesthetic ambition, might be adumbrated by recalling that Dante as a cultural icon signifies to us a totality. A whole
370
PART V
TRALUCERE
civilization in all its dimensions lies within the Commedia. This recognition gives rise to the certainty the poem forms in us that it is truly epic in scale and spirit (though not, strictly speaking, in form). Yet Brakhage’s film is tiny in scale and intensely lyrical in spirit. It is the cinematic equivalent of a miniature. From this angle, his Dantean ambition is likely to seem absurd. The dire requirement the modern artist has set for himself, that a whole civilization must be made both to rest upon and to rise anew from his solitary subjectivity, seems desperate here and in a characteristically modern way. Yet we should not forget that Dante, for all his expansiveness, was a lyric poet at heart: all that happens in the grand design of his poem happens to him. The panorama of the epic is also the single event of the poet’s spiritual experience, his vision, his redemption. All that is narrated in the poem culminates in a single “fulgore” [flash] (Par. 33.141), an ecstatic instant of divine union from which his inspired and inspiring project springs. The apocalyptic moment of inspiration at the end of the allegorical journey is the symbol as well as the origin of Dante’s lyrical inspiration. What permits Dante this symbol is Neoplatonic temporality. The ultimate unity of time sub specie aeternitatis, and the final unreality of historical-narrative (or concatenated) time when posed against the vision of Paradiso, reveal the epic-lyric duality of the poem from another angle. It is a duality resolved in the totality of a narrative enfolded by another order of time, the time of sacral order itself. Guided by Virgil and then by Beatrice, the poet traverses this order as a totality. As critics have long recognized, this is the order of Augustinian time. Narrative history is the saecula senescens enfolded by Divine Time.6 Dante reaches that order in his vision at the climactic conclusion of Paradiso. Hence, in the pilgrim’s progress beyond time, the anagogic narrative leads the reader up towards and through a vast unfolded spatialized moment. There are many stories and characters in the poem, but the poet passes through them as a vast dilation of space and, so, while there are episodes, the poet’s traversal does not move in historical-narrative time. It unfolds as a journey in space, a totality fixed around a centre, not as a succession of fleeting moments. The poem’s vast volume is a synchrony. What first impresses viewers of The Dante Quartet, as I have suggested, is its vast spatiality. Film space takes on an intense mobility, as if we were imaginatively rocketing through a landscape. This is not the perspectival space of narrative painting, however, for the painted frames build up a space of layers and events that emerge out of and merge with an
DANTE AND CINEMA
371
immense and expansive tumult that stills and moves, converges and severs from a whole never quite grasped. The visual composition of The Dante Quartet produces an “all-at-once” temporal effect, a cinematic synchrony, despite its great variety and extraordinary sense of motion. Though any film must materially proceed through the passage of frames past the projector light, Brakhage’s composition thwarts the material effect of a successive timeline of frames through its quasi-musical editing and highly complex painted-on-film spatiality, which firmly plants the viewer “in the moment.” The taut dynamism of visual forms halts in a streaming image—Brakhage calls it “moving visual thinking”—here of tumult, there of transformation, but finally, paradoxically, of a mobilized stasis of light and colour. In all this, Brakhage inherits the radical intentions of the abstract expressionists. His films reinvent these modernist painters’ pioneering “overall effect.” Instead of perpetuating the traditional interplay of figure and ground—which moves the viewer’s eye from motif to motif according to the narrative of visual relations (the working of istoria) that painting absorbed in the Renaissance and fully internalized in the baroque—Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko tangle motifs in a “painterly” dynamism that moves the eye materially to different, interior rhythms. Their distinctively American mode of painting is characterized by a spatialized temporality of terrible intensity, an intensity inside the moment of maximum torsion of visual forms. From this torsion arise the skein of Pollack’s “drip paintings,” the single tear or “zip” of Newman’s Stations of the Cross, the frame-volumelight dialectic of Rothko’s stilled volumes of colour. Though abstract expressionism speaks a totalism that can be described formally, its overall effect is finally unnameable and radically resistant to paraphrase. Hence the notorious rumour that abstract expressionist paintings are “about nothing.”7 From the start, in the 1940s, the deep interpretive problem was not really “abstraction” but what E.A. Carmean, Jr., has called “the subjects of the artist.”8 These painters repeatedly denied that their works were abstract, and they often named and described them in religious or mythic terms, in the cadences of epic, because their artistic quest was to recover the arch¯e-language of visual forms. Theirs was an art that sought to cross the abyss of history by recuperating primal visual truths, the historic names for which were clothed in classical, biblical, or primitive language. But their art was also made in the belief that the artist can trapassar the verbal signs through which such truths are recalled, can detour around linguistic representations worn down by modern historicism.
372
PART V
TRALUCERE
Heir to this tradition, Brakhage found a solution in film to the problem of “the subjects of the artist” by highlighting the subjectivity of the artist, a strategy derived from modern American poetics, and especially from the poet Charles Olson.9 If we read Brakhage’s note to The Dante Quartet in light of the visual theory in his Metaphors on Vision (1963), we are led to consider the aesthetic importance of his belief that “emotional states” produce in the body effects that are registered in the eyes as “hypnagogic” or closed-eye vision. Claiming that such internal visual experience generates true insights—in effect, hypnagogic understandings, closed-eye truths comparable to Dantean fulgori—he argues that they permit the artist to produce rhythmic forms and imagery in film analogous to those in great poetic works. The filmic analogue of the “all-atonce” effect produced by abstract expressionist painting arises in The Dante Quartet from interior states of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven (or “song,” the dissolution of emotion into a musical or rhythmic ecstasis), which possess the film artist in a lyrical register and generate the film in colour and light and form and rhythm. For Brakhage, then, the internal experience of the subject permits a lyric recuperation of a Dantean totality that arises from the most intimate springs of his own art making—his body, his eyes, his emotions, his hand-to-celluloid (regarded as a taut unity). And so the Commedia arises “again” and yet for the “first time” in The Dante Quartet because what was in Dante welled up to be articulated in the Commedia without deviation, just as what arises in the modern artist by living and practising his/her art passes directly into his/her flow of images. Hypnagogic experiences are always already there in us. In this intuitive conception of creativity, the epic collapses into the lyric. Hence The Dante Quartet is not a reconstruction or a reinterpretation of the Commedia so much as a radical compression of it through which is projected outward onto the screen a lyrical inner space—the space of mystical totality—whence the epic arises. The images in The Dante Quartet, like the paintings of Rothko, Pollock, and Newman, are redolent of a vast interior landscape, because they seek to impose on the viewer a powerful sense of the miraculous continuity of visual and visionary space, the plenitude of a spiritually charged virtuality. Here, as Newman says, “It happens.” For all that severs us from Dante, this “all-at-once” sense of a spatialized totality is our culture’s virtually subcutaneous, even atavistic memory of the Commedia. Beyond this, what comes to expression in The Dante Quartet is not an analogue of what signifies in the poem—its allegorical design, its symbolic coherence, its compositional system—for surely
DANTE AND CINEMA
373
Brakhage’s film is far from being an adaptation of Dante’s themes or doctrines. Rather, it audaciously presents itself as an analogue of Dantean cosmopoesis. What was made manifest in terza rima—the world-forming capacity of intense creative experience—is now immanent in film. What once happened there, in the poem, now seems to be happening here on the screen: we watch with something like Dante-pilgrim’s amazement as The Dante Quartet condenses and intensifies into just over six visionary minutes what was once gradually unfolded across the epic breadth of one hundred cantos. Thus is the myth of Brakhage’s aesthetic brought to bear on this film. In his note on The Dante Quartet, Brakhage remarks that it was made over six years and after “37 years of studying The Divine Comedy.” What did he learn from that study? According to Bruce Elder, he drew upon poets and ways of reading poetry to forge the Brakhagian myth of filmmaking.10 That myth fuses the subjectivism of American modernist poetics with the dynamic spatiality of abstract expressionism, and through both, participates in the ambitious project of American mythopoesis, which I have just sketched.11 The mythopoeic project in American art and literature possesses an ethic and a pathos. The ethic is individualist and Pascalian: the artist wagers that he/she can, in solitude, come within range of the kind of totality embodied in the most ancient myths and texts. Dante’s poem is one such range. The wager falls on what is demanded of the artist when he/she seizes an art medium and wrestles with it—unless, of course, it is the medium that seizes and wrestles with the artist in a revisitation of the ethic of Augustinian vocation! Once the wager is made and “It” happens, then whatever “It” happens to be will happen in spite of the incapacity of a modern culture otherwise to know or imagine or remember, let alone speak again, what Dante is. A way to read Dante in this light is remotely plausible. Not everything Dante expressed in the Commedia can be traced back to the richly differentiated symbolism of the late medieval Tuscan-Catholic culture in which he lived. Dante did not write the poem wholly out of himself. Despite his admiration at the powers of his own ingegno, his innate “genius” arose within the condition of a historically determined order and knowledge, and so his poem, in a sense, was given to him to write by the tradition available to him.12 Nonetheless, the limit to that tradition is enunciated in a paradoxically humbling way by Beatrice, who reveals in the Empyrean that all things that have come before in the temporal order are but “umbriferi prefazi” [shadowy prefaces] (Par. 30.78) of the truth eternally manifested in the Divine Mind. History from Virgil’s perspective,
374
PART V
TRALUCERE
the long unwinding cultural history of Rome, becomes from Beatrice’s eternal vantage point no more than a make-do tissue of narrative allusions tailored to a fallen human consciousness unprepared to receive True Vision. The poet testifies that, having once attained the True Vision on high, he is able to enjoy it again in the “now” of poetic creation, and that such vision generates the epic expanse of the poem in which he recapitulates the process of its attainment. But he cannot write that recapitulation. Even as his poem in some mysterious way springs out from a luminous noetic experience given to him alone, so too does it collapse— no less mysteriously—into the transcendent intensity of a lyric insight that ultimately cannot be spoken. Hence, the pathos. Without suffering a kind of aesthetic martyrdom, there can be no true cosmopoesis. The wager that abstract expressionists made, and that Brakhage makes today, is that modern artists can again imagine a totality properly analogous to a work like the Commedia only by giving themselves over to the agony of art making, a process granting privileged access to the self that does not otherwise know itself. In effect, they must experience anew that noetic intensity from which the vast panorama of the poem arises. Brakhage cannot imagine Dante’s mystical vision in Paradiso, as his note freely admits, any more than he can recover the medieval culture of the poem. He bets nonetheless that he has truly imaged its spatialized time by painting its analogue on film. This wager is what moves us to the film and its truth, whether we accept the myth of his art making or not. The pathos of this wager runs through the whole problem of the “subjects of the artist” in abstract expressionism. Its mythopoeic intensities are not a search for a symbolic armature, for a recovery of the whole in articulate form. Critics may read Newman’s “zips” in Stations of the Cross through the lens of a theologized existentialism or even a “remystifying” Gnostic theology, or regard Rothko’s luminous canvases as a tragic light emanating from the tension of the Divine and the human—but these efforts are rightly suspect.13 Behind the pathos lies a dilemma. The perception of sacred symbols in their work (even if these were achieved in the making of a particular work, like the cross observed in Newman’s Stations of the Cross) would not only join their art to tradition, at least potentially, but also once again subject it to modern historicism and thereby reduce it to “iconography.” As such, it becomes mere illustration. If this option is rejected, the alternative to it is hardly more appealing. The modern effort to make symbolic art without or beyond iconography constantly threatens collapse into solipsistic delusion, into the romantic type of internal cruelty that puta-
DANTE AND CINEMA
375
tively destroyed Rothko.14 The subjectivizing of the arch¯e-language and the mythic primals in this way—towards the intense condensation of epic sublimity to the black hole of the artist’s ego—is a monstrous prospect, a wager with grave dangers. This is the pathos arising from the ethic of focusing a classical tradition onto a single sensibility, onto an artist’s solitude. Brakhage’s “existence is song,” the fourth movement in the quartet, recapitulates the musical form of the work itself and offers a brief liberation into contemplation. The Dante Quartet becomes truly Dantean by reaching this kind of Heaven, a musica divina for the liberated mind, for if we really watch this totalizing song behind our eyes, we come close to witnessing final bliss, to capturing again (as “for the first time”) what Dante’s vision was. If we can even imagine it! The filmed moment is only minutes long, however, and it is materially made. It is a hopeful fiction. It is not Heaven, Brakhage admits, but a cinematically made intimation. Yet it testifies to Brakhage’s immense vitality that he can admit the dilemma into his art, and he can do so without irony and without breaking himself on it. Now, this pathos also exemplifies the impossibility of Dante and cinema. The wager taken, The Dante Quartet is one of a precious few works in American cinema that one can place beside Newman’s Stations of the Cross without embarrassment. It is a great modern Dante film. But it must also be regarded, like Newman’s series, as a painfully clear sign that modern culture is deprived of all Dante represents, that his transcendent cosmology, authority, symbolism, and noetic experience are sadly not our own. The chasm that inevitably opens between him and modern artists opens as well across the iconoclastic expanse of abstract expressionist paintings, across the rapture of this Brakhage film. It fell to Brakhage, in making The Dante Quartet, to meet that loss by wagering on the fragile intensity of a solitude, however expansive. IL DESERTO ROSSO
There is another intensification of solitude, another pathos, and another, very different kind of cinematic time in Antonioni’s Il deserto rosso. Should we regard this deeply enigmatic film as Antonioni’s Inferno? A strong temptation. The film begins with an infernal image: a smokestack in close-up emitting poisonous yellow smoke. With the grating, pulsing thunder of industry providing an appalling accompaniment, the sequence proceeds to show a woman stumbling confusedly along a ditch. Then in close-up she stares out over a poisoned landscape, her vision filling the
376
PART V
TRALUCERE
frame as the camera pans close to the smoking grey sludge of a modern wasteland. The images are of Ravenna, where much of the Commedia was composed. The location for two important later scenes in the film is the Via Alighieri, the terminus of which is Dante’s grave. But the temptation should be resisted. The Inferno would be, in a way, too obvious and therefore too reassuring a model for Il deserto rosso. Surrounded by ecological catastrophe, the woman of that first sequence—Giuliana, the heroine, played by the hauntingly beautiful Monica Vitti—would seem to be a consciousness passing through the infernal landscape en route to various encounters with the Damned. Read from this perspective, the images in the film would soon fade into the secular equivalent of a diorama of Hell. We can readily, and with some legitimacy, interpret Il deserto rosso just this way, perhaps because its mise en scène has expanded— by metastasis—to become a commonplace in our contemporary cinema. Such an account of Il deserto rosso would, nonetheless, be impoverished. As imposing as its lurid spaces are to our eyes, it is a film primarily about time. Giuliana is not a ghostly consciousness passing through the film’s mise en scène. She suffers and struggles and comes to have meaning for us as a subject in process. Giuliana is married to an engineer, Ugo, who is not an uncaring husband though he has become largely irrelevant to her life. She has a son, Valerio, who puts her through a cruel trial of separation. And she takes a lover, Corrado, who tempts her and finally helps to strengthen her character. Though much of the film does concern encounters with ruined ghosts (and a major imagistic passage is devoted to this),15 and if Corrado can be assimilated to Dante’s Ulysses (as Sitney has convincingly argued),16 Giuliana also encounters other, much more ambiguous figures—a worker, his wife, people on journeys—who, like herself, are struggling to go or stay somewhere. She is not wholly alone, despite her solitude. Antonioni has singled her out from a procession of souls, without her realizing it, as if she were a restless character like La Pia from the lower slopes of Purgatory. Could Il deserto rosso be Antonioni’s Purgatorio? In suggesting such a reading, I wish to emphasize the filmmaker’s awareness that Dante’s second canticle unfolds in time in a way that the Inferno and Paradiso do not. Purgatorial souls are in constant motion, their perambulations and ascensions occurring in tandem with earthly temporal experience. Giuliana is likewise in motion, however hesitant her steps. Though her painful journey through the film is taken at times unwillingly, it is a distinctly purgatorial progress—a movement in time through a series of spiritual tri-
DANTE AND CINEMA
377
als and tribulations. Antonioni makes her drama an exemplum of historical time, the time of transition between a lost paradise and a present wasteland. While her “Sardinian fantasy” looks back to the lost paradise of childhood, the ravaged world of her Ravenna smarrimento takes on the appearance (thanks to her inchoate desires and fears) of Hell itself. As he does in all his films, Antonioni places his protagonist in an “inbetween” time, suspended between a past that is long gone and a future that is still strangely far off.17 Because the order of time is perversely unknown to modernity, modernists are appalled by this execrable state of in-betweenness. Not only is a modernist heroine like Giuliana uncertain of her destination, but she is also carried along under the burden of a terrible sense of loss, the loss of the Earthly Paradise that appears to her under the confusing guise of fantasy. In William Arrowsmith’s rich formulation: Antonioni explores this perennial fantasy of the paradisal worlds which contains so much of us that we are constantly in danger of thinking it our true selves, what we once were before being expelled from the bright Garden of Being. Philosophically, its power and appeal are in our bones as the old human hunger of “Becoming” for “Being.” It is Plato’s sun, Spinoza’s God, or Heidegger’s dasein. Erotically, it is Freud’s “oceanic feeling,” the warmth and security of the womb. Culturally, it is animistic feeling—the individual’s absolute “oneness” with nature and society, so irresistible to those who fear that they have fallen out of culture into mere fragmentary existence, that nature and the “gods” are dead. Politically, it is the appeal of millennialism in any form, the ideal past projected as the future.18
Antonioni resists this fantasy. Dante enfolded purgatorial time between the eternities of Hell and Heaven. Confronting the chasm between Dante’s world and the modern wasteland, Antonioni finds the medieval temporality of Purgatorio impossible to recover, and there are two “unorthodox” consequences of this distancing from the poem in the temporal design of the film. First the filmmaker is compelled to fold both Hell and Heaven into his Purgatory as images isolated, framed, emphatically beautiful, made compositionally atemporal. Then, at the most intimate level of Giuliana’s experience, time in the film is presented naked— emphatically denuded of its sacred trappings—because it has assumed the form of a painful suspension. The shooting and cutting in Il deserto rosso are the opposite of the rapid-fire hypnagogy of The Dante Quartet. Time in Giuliana’s world hangs suspended between moments of dramatic or spatial crystallization. The pauses and longeurs—so notorious an aspect of
378
PART V
TRALUCERE
Antonioni’s de-dramatized filmic narration—here inscribe the purgatorial suspension of Giuliana into every sequence, determine every measurement taken of the transitions between shots. Il deserto rosso is a film of pained intervals. But this is hardly to suggest a significant analogy between Dante and Antonioni. The allusions the filmmaker weaves into his film instead propose to us a chasm of imagining that, by the end, becomes abysmal. Let me offer two examples. P. Adams Sitney, who has lucidly explored the Dantean motifs of Il deserto rosso, remarks that Dante’s image for the earthly paradise, Eden at the summit of the mount of Purgatory, turns on a simile to the once beautiful harbour of Ravenna. Dante described the pine forest in Purgatorio 28 (l. 7-21) thus: “A sweet breeze that had no variation itself was striking on my brow with the force only of a gentle wind, by which the fluttering boughs all bent freely towards the quarter where the holy mountain casts its first shadow; yet were they not so deflected from their upright state that the little birds among the tops ceased practicing their arts, but singing greeted the morning hours with full joy among the leaves, which kept such a burden to their rhymes as gather from branch to branch through the pine forest on Chiassi’s shore when Aeolus lets forth Sirocco.” Chiassi was the port of Ravenna. The Edenic locus has become the centre of oil refineries at the mouth of the Po. The very factory Ugo directs is surrounded by pines, but the film makes it abundantly clear that Dante’s Arcadian site has become a phantasmagoria of foul pollution.19
At the very end of the film, Giuliana returns to the smokestack with her small son Valerio. In the final dialogue, she explains to him how the birds of the region have adapted to their polluted environment: Valerio: Giuliana: Valerio: Giuliana:
Why is the smoke yellow? Because it is poison. Then, if a bird flies into it, he dies. Yes, but the birds have learned not to fly through there any more.20
By recalling Dante’s exquisitely Edenic image of the lost Chiassi with its forested shore where the birds once greeted the morning with their songs, this final speech acknowledges the abyss that history has opened up in space—here, in the particular spot where Giuliana has brought her son. Birds still inhabit this site as they did when the poet heard them sing, but their old sweet song has been replaced with the clang of machinery. Giuliana’s moment of meditation on the site announces the irrecoverable
DANTE AND CINEMA
379
character of Arcadian Chiassi as a resource for the artist. History has turned the paradiso terrestre into a landscape of loss. Yet Giuliana can still be heard here, as Sitney points out, “catechizing her son.” She has come to where the film opens to acknowledge the purgatorial character of our modernity, and this speech follows (after an ellipsis) directly on another, which she addresses to an uncomprehending Turkish sailor: “I have to think that all that happens to me is my life.” If the Commedia was written retrospectively, as Dante-poet insists, after the possession of his vision, then we may assume that he knew where he would end up and was already—all along his winding via— the enabled poet who could write the Paradiso. But if Dante was writing the poem as he was advancing spiritually, then we may imagine him making his wager canto by canto that he would eventually become the artist who could finish his poem. While Etienne Gilson advanced the former view in the 1930s, recent commentators tend to adopt the latter. For Gilson, Dante is the great philosophical poet of the Middle Ages and his poem a vast compendium written with supreme confidence in the tradition of the scholastic summa, which explains why it celebrates the sacred sense of time and order and the mystique of noetic experience enshrined in orthodox Catholicism. For modern interpreters, Dante is much more a poet who struggles through acts of consciousness and creation. Because he writes in biographical time, the struggle of his unique consciousness to achieve creative coherence becomes the driving force behind the Commedia. In a way, Brakhage’s wager in making The Dante Quartet—despite everything that places him within a modern conception of history—affirms Gilson’s sense that Dante was writing sub specie aeternitatis, that his poetic powers (including his capacity to make the wager) were fully realized at every instant of his creative activity. Antonioni’s ascetic conception is more purely in the modern mode: Giuliana’s time is her biographical time, a purgatory suspended between the hell that seems to surround her and the paradise she recreates in fantasy. There are two solitudes at stake. Since the time between leaves us suspended in history, it turns into an “epic” solitude that pulls us from the spaces that (we imagine) once grounded us by drawing us towards the axial point of modernity at the “retreat and return of origin.”21 The solitude of Giuliana herself, however, is the aspect of this collective narrative that impresses us.22 In the film’s fourth sequence, she enters a small empty shop on the Via Alighieri, an old street where history does not intrude, which is perhaps why we find her there alone.
380
PART V
TRALUCERE
Corrado visits her. It is only their second encounter. Distressed and moving anxiously around the room, hugging walls, Giuliana worries that Ugo has told Corrado that she may have attempted suicide. Ugo has not. Trying to become better acquainted, Corrado launches into a suggestive abridgement of his life story, and it is here, with his lies and tales of restless travel, that his role as the film’s Ulysses (according to Sitney) clearly begins. As their fragmented conversation proceeds, Giuliana passes beneath two large rectangular patches of paint—samples on a wall of the unfinished shop. They are an allusion to Rothko and recall Antonioni’s original plan to name the film “Blue and Green,” recurrent colours in the landscape of loss symbolizing spiritual rest and fantasized motionlessness. The Rothko wager is reshaped as the film proceeds with Giuliana’s fantasy of paradise, which she narrates gently to Valerio who is temporarily bedridden. The fantasy places her outside history in a lovely cove where, refigured as a young girl, she encounters a ship that approaches and mysteriously retreats. Then she hears voices and becomes aware that the rocks surrounding her are like flesh. “Who is singing?” she asks. The whole world. Existence is song. Interpretations of this sequence abound, but here we might regard it (as Arrowsmith’s remark above suggests) as a pathetically earnest parody of Paradiso. It is a parody, because we recognize that Giuliana is telling this tale to comfort herself and her son, to allegorize their unity, which Valerio will very soon cruelly sever. Rejection by her son sends her desperately into Corrado’s arms where she temporarily replays the beach fantasy in sexual embrace. The failure of her paradisal fantasy—like all dreams of union, erotic relief is brief—sends her into the night and brings her back to the shop on the Via Alighieri for a scene deliberately symmetrical with the earlier sequence there. Giuliana stands firm before Corrado and argues—hesitantly, then firmly—for the rightness of her suffering, her troubled struggle, her anguished solitude. She at last dismisses Corrado, and enters into a dark dockside passage before emerging to deliver her testimony to the Turkish sailor: this is my life and all that happens to me. Il deserto rosso is a prelude—Arrowsmith has called it Giuliana’s “individuation”—with her unfinished shop serving as a critical chamber on a road with invisible termini. Though we perhaps know this winding via to be Dante’s road, we do not know where it leads. Antonioni’s composition of the Via Alighieri visually “turns a corner” and halts perspective, which is of a piece with his de Chirico motif in Il deserto rosso. Medieval Italy appears again, but as a mysterious, stilled zone, both comforting (given
DANTE AND CINEMA
381
the modernity offered by film as an alternative) and disturbing, unreachable but somehow there. When Giuliana first leaves her shop in the fourth sequence of the film, she immediately collapses. Antonioni blurs the focus of the image, makes it grow uncertain. The passage is akin to the composition that the desperate Giuliana much later sees from the window of Corrado’s hotel room: a dark shadowed ancient street. When she at last dismisses the tempter-intruder and leaves her shop the second time, she finally becomes the heroine of her own story. She has passed through the imagistic hell and her own paradisal fantasies into her own biography. But, as Sitney’s tracking of the direct allusion at the end of the film suggests, the new Earthly Paradise at the end of Purgatorio can no longer be regarded as a stop on the way to Paradise itself. The closing sequence closes a circle with the first, and Giuliana is at the portal of Purgatory again. Time will not stop. THE BOOK OF ALL THE DEAD
A modern Purgatorio is also at the centre of Canadian artist Bruce Elder’s massive film cycle The Book of All the Dead, which has a total running time of over forty hours. A fourteen-hour segment of the cycle entitled Consolations (1988) announces its purgatorial temporality with an allusive Heideggerian subtitle: Love Is an Art of Time. Time does not stop in Elder’s film anymore than it did in Antonioni’s, but here it radically decelerates. On one side of Consolations are nine heterogeneously styled films of various lengths representing the whole of Elder’s production between 1975 and 1985. On the other side are seven homogeneously composed pieces of roughly the same length (about 100 minutes each) dating from 1990 and 1996 and grouped collectively under the title Exultations: In Light of the Great Giving. It was upon exhibiting these later works that Elder announced the Dantean design for The Book of All the Dead.23 Almost twenty years after its inception, the expansive Book fell into a sequence of three “regions.” The earlier films became The System of Dante’s Hell; Consolations emerged as its Purgatorio; and Exultations completed the cycle as its Paradiso. Taken en masse—and here I assume that its current form is its final redaction—The Book of All the Dead must be regarded as the most ambitious Dante film-work ever attempted. Weighed down by its own baroque elaborations of modernity, it is certainly the most intellectually overburdened film of the three discussed in this study. In its complexity and stylistic variegation, the cycle must also be regarded as postmodernist; it marks a radical departure from the compression of The Dante Quartet
382
PART V
TRALUCERE
and from Brakhage’s modernist wager.24 Instead of committing to an artist’s internal imagination in the abstract expressionist manner of Brakhage, Elder reaches outward to compose his Commedia by amassing a vast assemblage of fragments, intertexts, and wide-ranging appropriations, which are operationally arrayed through a variety of “polyphonic” formal systems.25 What will initially impress and delight but eventually threaten to exhaust a dedicated viewer of The Book of All the Dead is the degree to which it is a work of erudition. Its vast curricula of allusions, its compendia of formal usages, its architectonics of structural remakings, all challenge conventional cinematic reception. And everywhere the cycle is punctuated with parodies both earnest and ridiculous. It is a film searching for a final construct, a vision of the whole, a myth of completion that might be equivalent to Dante’s totality. Such a project is doomed to failure in our fragmented age, of course, and Elder is resigned to this postmodern fate as the cost of attempting to “rewrite” the Commedia in film. The Book of All the Dead refuses, finally, to be finished. As if repeating a commandment, Elder quotes Pound’s prescription that to be epic a work must include history.26 The cycle is obsessively responsive to that obligation and to its staggering difficulties. Dante wrote his poem sub specie aeternitatis, believing in a divine totality that enfolded history. Moderns believe history to be constructed by human agents so that it enfolds anything worth knowing (as it were) sub specie humanitatis. Whereas Dante based his knowledge of history on assured hermeneutical criteria, modern poets and artists know only “historicism” with its hermeneutics of suspicion. Indeed, modernity shatters everywhere on questions of history, of meaning, of totality. This fragmentation of viewpoints is our history, and it is subtended, at best, by ideologies of historical progress. In Nietzsche’s corrosive mediation perfectly glossed by George Grant, we figure ourselves within “time as history.”27 That Elder makes this problematic Poundian ambition his guiding preoccupation is evident in his early twenty-four-minute miniature of the whole cycle, 1857 (Fool’s Gold), which dates from 1981. In it he juxtaposes Pound’s Cantos with Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things and Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year by overlaying a restricted set of optically treated images of storming seas and ocean journeys. In a way it is his one Brakhagian film, for here meaning arises from vision in synchronous tumult. In other ways, however, 1857 is a construct of textual allusions and visual processing techniques designed to hurl the viewer into time-as-history. If The Dante Quartet arises out of the artist’s faith that imagination can over-
DANTE AND CINEMA
383
come time internally by creating a space analogous to Dante’s totality, Elder’s Book is an accumulation over twenty years of highly wrought segments serving the prospect of a postmodern hermeneutical cinema of crossing over the chasm. What results is a great vault of mosaic-like structures, amassed allusions, clashing arguments, impetuous projections into the past. The immense effort staggers gigantically towards assembling an epic of total redaction. The redaction is to be a visual and textual archive—a huge ideogrammatic repertoire—of the modern itself. Like Pound’s Cantos, The Book of All the Dead is a magnum opus built on and of “ruins” in the sense Walter Benjamin prophesied. The salient cinematic features of the cycle—polyphonic montage, serial structuring, dense intertextual discursivity, elaborate synthesis of sound and image— arise from Elder’s conscious awareness of the modern “destitution” (his word) experienced by an artist who strives to place himself beside Dante but sees a great chasm of time separating them. Beginning with its title, Elder’s cycle is founded on a consciousness (where Brakhage is heroically and innocently unaware) that he is a belated artist who will never be able to resurrect the Dantean vision. In this respect Elder is closer to Antonioni than to Brakhage. Spiritually akin to Antonioni’s Giuliana, Elder’s artist-protagonist is in no way an avatar of Brakhage’s vitalistimaginative hero. So, now, erudition, energetic attentiveness, and grasping intelligence are the resources on which the artist relies in his quest to rework the modern inheritance and to stir it towards an immense, and immensely implausible, epic of recuperation. On the cultural enterprise embodied by Pound’s Cantos, Elder has based his belief (however forlorn) that film can traverse an entire epoch in one work. This project is to be discovered in the ruins of time, and its temporal realization is rooted in a negative theology that assumes the incommensurability of the artist’s construction with what he desires to make manifest. Like other large contemporary serial film works—Hans-Jurgen Syberberg’s Our Hitler: A Film from Germany, for instance, or Hollis Frampton’s Magellan, or (pointedly in respect to Dante) Peter Greenaway’s A TV Dante—The Book of All the Dead is erected within conditions of postmodernity. Its scholarly resources and laboured rigours are conditioned by the imaginative process described by Michel Foucault in his meditation on Flaubert’s The Temptation of St. Anthony: Possibly, Flaubert was responding to an experience of the fantastic which was singularly modern and relatively unknown before his time, to the discovery of a new imaginative space in the nineteenth century. This domain is no longer the night, the sleep of reason…but, on the
384
PART V
TRALUCERE
contrary, wakefulness, untiring attention, zealous erudition, and constant vigilance. Henceforth, the visionary experience arises from the black and white surface of printed signs, from the closed and dusty volume that opens with a flight of forgotten words; fantasies are carefully deployed in the hushed library, with its columns of books, with its titles assigned to shelves to form a tight enclosure.…The imaginary now resides between the book and the lamp.…Dreams are no longer summoned with closed eyes, but in reading, and a true image is now a product of learning: it derives from words spoken in the past, exact recensions, the amassing of minute facts, monument reduced to infinitesimal fragments, and the reproductions of reproductions.…Only the assiduous clamour created by repetition can transmit to us what only happened once.28
Elder’s cycle begins with a fifty-five minute autobiographical prelude, which concludes with the virtual death of the artist coinciding with the discovery of his vocation. Made of split-screens and a polyphonic soundtrack, The Art of Worldly Wisdom (1979) is neither an epiphanic disclosure of his sensibility nor a lyrical paean to postmodernism. Instead, it offers a broken portrait of Elder as a confused student of film at the end of his rope. Its closing image, a mirrored reflection, shows the filmmaker naked and wasted with disease. As he points out in his note on the film, the mirror in the artist’s sickroom reflects his Dark Wood (Inf. 1.2).29 Here is the modern protagonist—“a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body.”30 Elder’s overwritten and wrecked persona in Worldly Wisdom will multiply into a procession of dozens of fictional pilgrims in the next three films, even as the films themselves begin to multiply and lengthen geometrically. Each pilgrim weaves a tale of misery amidst a chorus of innumerable philosophers and poets whose snatched texts fill the soundtracks of Elder’s long films and flake his images with supertitles. The artistprotagonist is one among a vast pilgrimage of the Many. The first extended film, the three-hour Illuminated Texts (1982), is a proper Inferno. Black in mood and fitted with familiar infernal motifs, it is a reverse cosmogony of modernity. Gradually accelerating montage tells the tale of the construction of our world picture from the seeds of seventeenth-century rationalism and its severance from Nature, through the objectification of the body and the hegemony of instrumental reason, to the bold claims and bitter consequences of technological arrogance. It then follows the bleak trajectory of modernity not only to its collective end in the Holocaust, but also to its intimate end in the monadic subject, the alienated self whose geniuses are Henry Adams, Jean-Paul Sartre, and
DANTE AND CINEMA
385
Jacques Lacan. As logical and familiar as a recurring nightmare composed of direly recognizable images—a city street, a TV screen—the structure of the film traces out a succession of myth-forms derived from Northrop Frye. Predictably the mythic “illuminations” culminate in an apocalypse—the end of modern ideology. But if Frye’s literary typology, like Dante’s theological typology, is cyclical in its patterning, the hermeneutic scheme unfolded in Illuminated Texts is all trajectory: a relentless cause-and-effect countdown to the historic horrors that have dissolved any collective sense of the legitimacy of the epoch’s subtending ideals and confident totalities. Since history in any creditable sense has ended, Elder intends his film as a millennial obituary. It ends in furious self-disintegration before finally arriving at the stasis of Elder himself, again mirrored, this time as a ghostly image refracted off the gaping corridor of a Nazi concentration camp, while an abrupt text from Nietzsche hovers on the surface of the screen: “nostalgia, the wounds of returning.” Elder is not done with hell. Following Illuminated Texts is an eighthour film entitled Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World (1985), which traverses a second Inferno. This time the artist considers the infernal consequences of the modern imaginary’s fondest counter-myths— counter, that is, to the ideologies of technology and historical progress. While Texts treats modernity as a socio-political event, Lamentations engages with high modernism as an imaginative resistance. So intolerable does modernity become in its fragmentation of the world, the artist observes, that it gives rise to a recurrent dream that the Whole can be regained if the strongest souls undertake a mythopoeic quest back to origins, primals, sacred beginnings. Lamentations plunges into this current of modernistRomantic fantasy to the hilt, and its protagonist-pilgrims halt their “progress” along the disastrous course of modernity by turning back the clock in a vain effort to start over within the sacred precincts of history. Ruined temples are revisited. Ecstatic poses are struck. Like Syberberg’s German-Romantic Our Hitler, Lamentations is a majestic catalogue which powerfully rehearses promises of the cure for modern history. Based on the filmmaker’s ambivalent response to his own pilgrimage across the “sacred spaces” of three continents, the film both indulges in the strong effects afforded by renewing rituals and simultaneously ironizes or deconstructs them.31 The elusiveness of the promised cure leads to the depressing realization that wherever Elder journeys, historicism has got there first. It is an irony he cannot escape, and so modernity proves again to have “triumphed” as our totality. This fantasy of sacred wholeness restored to the modern world is what Elder calls
386
PART V
TRALUCERE
The Dream of the Last Historian (the subtitle of Part One of Lamentations). Nowhere else in contemporary filmmaking is the effect of Foucault’s “constant vigilance” more rigorously realized than in Elder’s corrosion of the pathos stemming from the irrationalist nostalgias sustained by the counter-myths of modernism. While Illuminated Texts was in a sense an anguished update of the agonizing structure of the Inferno, Lamentations, with its full arsenal of modern-baroque filmic ordnance, is finally more aggressively Dantean in its ironies. It is the seductiveness of the Damned at their most beautiful, erotic, and pathetically ennobled—recall Francesca’s “cor gentil” [gentle heart] (Inf. 5.100)—that sorely tests and tempts Dante-pilgrim in the “doloroso ospizio” [abode of pain] (Inf. 5.16).32 Recalling his swoon at the end of the Francesca episode, sensitive and passionate readers of Dante (including modern souls under Romantic influence) have with the best intent surrendered themselves to the nostalgic fantasy of erotic recuperation. By offering the viewer the strongest mythopoeic seductions a modern artist might imagine—and then by deconstructing them—Elder completes the exfoliation of the infernal “region” of his modern epic of divestiture and privation. To put it bluntly: the gods are gone. The sexual body, the ancient temple ruin, the primitive dancing ground, all the sacred spaces have been evacuated of the Divine and deviously transformed into ever more appalling circles of demonization. Welcome to the modern hell of counter-history at its most sincere and eager, its most cynical and disappointed, its most luxuriant and devouring. In one of several texts written in a Heideggerian cadence when Consolations was nearing completion, Elder remarks that “our origin has fallen into our future from whence it calls us to return to our possible greatness.”33 Consolations is a great film of waiting. Enduring its stupendous length is a necessary condition for grasping its significance. Elder tirelessly discerns how we proceed when living in our own great chasm, our own postmodern era, between times that knew and will know enfolding cosmologies. As he argues in a summary of his philosophical intentions in making the film: “The Holocaust destroyed the Enlightenment optimism for once and all. And in destroying the Enlightenment paradigm, it brought us into the ‘Between.’ This I take be the meaning of Heidegger’s comment, which I have used as a note on Fugitive Gods (part of Consolations): ‘It is the time of the gods that have flown and the god that is to come. It is a time of need, because it lies under a double lack and double Not. The No-More of the gods that have fled and the Not-Yet of the god that is coming.’”34
DANTE AND CINEMA
387
While Antonioni presents his Purgatorio in Il deserto rosso as the anguished achievement of a heroine who can now undertake her biography in the “in-between” time, Elder responds to the same chasm of the present in Consolations by slowing down its discourse to a crawl. Thus, he invites the viewer to feel time itself, to sense modern history dissolving into another, more contemplative temporality. Unlike his previous films, this work has little discernible structure. It is not a series of montage collisions but an interlace of carefully woven gossamer connections, which, as his purgatorial vision unreels metre after metre, enact momentum in reverse. As a word-infused vision (like Illuminated Texts and Lamentations) in which the viewer must meditate on images while reading texts and listening to voices, Consolations devolves into a magnificent deceleration. It is massively redundant. Since its repetitions evolve very slowly in minute variations, it induces a deeply contemplative mood in any viewer patient enough to resonate with its meditative rhythms. Many images recurring in it recall scenes or moments in the two previous films, which makes the experience of viewing it feel like a huge performative revisitation of Elder’s oeuvre, a mammoth superimposition of purgatorial time on the whole cycle. Of course, that has to be: Lamentations showed us that there is no escape from the irrevocable Here and Now of modernity. Consolations differs from Lamentations, however, in Elder’s treatment of imagery and its effects. Though the pilgrims return in procession to tell their tales again on the soundtrack, now their journeys culminate in a state of hopeful irresolution. Time enters the film stripped of its familiar cinematic correlate—narrative thrust. Love becomes the art of time, with cinema as its medium, which is why the film slips out of politics and critical theory into philosophical theology. Though Heidegger continues to predominate because Elder is still drawn to negative theology, a personification of love enters the picture with the late appearance of a modern Beatrice, Simone Weil, whose texts instruct the pilgrim in the arts of “attention.” For both Weil and Elder, Heidegger assumes the role of “l’alto dottore” [the lofty teacher] (Purg. 18.2) who stresses the necessity of relaxing after strenuous effort, of allowing the flow of time to be.35 Consolations arrives not at Paradise but at contemplative expectation of some kind of release from the hell of modernity. It is a postmodern Purgatorio—the most persuasive re-vision of Dante’s “second realm” [secondo regno] (Purg. 1.4) that cinema will likely manage. It is hardly triumphant, however, for it refuses to take the escapist route of aesthetic heroism and instead takes advantage of the disentanglement of that part
388
PART V
TRALUCERE
of the modern imaginary in Lamentations. The powerful baroque films Elder forges before Consolations burn with grief and indignation, but this film refreshes the viewer’s spirit with the expression of a wise Dantean wish for the artist to complete what he fears cannot be completed. As it ends, Consolations leaves the viewer in the paradoxical state of complete incompletion, of fearful hope, like a pilgrim who finally arrives at a distant shrine but finds no peace on its threshold. Should the subsequent group of films, collectively entitled Exultations, be regarded as consonant with the rest of The Book of All the Dead? Elder undertook these films after abandoning the cycle as an unfinishable work. Although the earlier sections of the cycle varied in style, they were similar in their unsettling interplay of text and imagery and in their theological preoccupation with the horrors of modernity. Now all that changes. The welter of philosophical and poetic intertexts vanishes in Exultations, and almost all its images and sounds are computer processed (where previously such processing was subordinate to Elder’s polyphonic montage and plein air shooting style). The viewer’s reception of Exultations undergoes mutation no less that the look and sound of the films within it. These films have passed through the “eyes” and “ears” of a machine. Throughout Lamentations, Elder tended to subordinate images, texts, and sounds to recognizable literary structures such as autobiography (The Art of Worldly Wisdom), apocalypse (Illuminated Texts), and Romantic questnarrative (Lamentations). However brilliantly reinventive or subversive the articulation of these structures, they served to guide the viewer through a notional progression that could be readily “mapped” onto a postmodern Inferno. Elder obviously regarded (and still regards) these structures as tainted ready-mades inherited from modernity, and therefore as signs of cultural divestiture. Hence, the textual violence he displayed in remaking them, and the complex proofs he generated of his hermeneutic intent to “murder” them. Consolations is different. Certain features of this “in-between” film, the most important being the rising importance of serial form, suggest a line of development from its purgatorial borders to the paradisial horizon of Exultations. Since Exultations has no recognizable narrative trajectory or assimilated large-scale structure, its form is strategically indeterminate. In this respect, it is the end of something—the terminus ad quem of all the modern narrative forms that precede it with presupposed endings or at least knowable closure strategies. When Exultations resumes the cycle, its completion is a priori an impossibility, and so, by beginning again
DANTE AND CINEMA
389
with an infinite serial work, Elder innocently insists that his terminal design is an indefinitely extendible fugue. With a constantly transforming Bach piece for its soundtrack and at least seven lines of imagery recurring contrapuntally, Exultations plays one element off another but subordinates none to a subtending structure. Some lines of imagery do seem to advance in a direction. There is a journey up a mountain, shown in rapid pixilated shots, which extends a familiar Purgatorio motif into the mysterious expansiveness of Paradiso. Other lines slowly and endlessly evolve. A dancer’s body melts into abstraction, while passages of abstract computer imagery reveal the mysteries of “fractal” mathematics. Elder’s imagery must be taken as an array of motifs, for there are no successive segments in the film to suggest a narrative chain of events. Liberated from the temporal constraints of plot, the motifs compose an ever-shifting vision of analogies and contrasts in their shape and texture and other features. Analogies are sometimes developed quite directly. As in the Paradiso, the image of a rose recurs in Exultations as a key symbol of heavenly beauty, happiness, creativity, vitality, wonder. Its implications constantly expand in a series of visual improvisations recomposed by the computer as Elder introduces numerous religious homologies of the rose-shape (mandalas, cathedral rose-windows). The many variants of the image do not develop significance directly. Assuming that the viewer knows Dante’s vision of the Mystical Rose, Elder deploys it as a given and then expands it graphically, proceeding by accumulation and association across the whole tapestry of Exultations. Similarly, viewers are expected to recognize that computergenerated fractal designs stem from a new mimetic mathematics that does not reduce natural phenomena to an abstract system and hence to technological measurement and control. Such designs serve as a metaphor for the infinite serialism of the film, and as a contemplative analogue of natural processes. So, could Exultations be Paradise in a consciousness freed of modernity? A tempting view, perhaps, but a dubious reading. Elsewhere in the film, vision slides backward into violence and ugly eroticism. Redemption is still inaccessible. The time is still in-between. All that might be glimpsed on the mystical horizon here is a heavily symbolic forecast, a technically processed intimation, of heaven. Rather than pretend that Christianity can be reincarnated in a film, even a very long one, Exultations offers a meditation on a possible cinematic form that might correspond to Christian culture as a tissue of formal disciplines. Like everything in The Book of All the Dead, these disciplines are inherited as historical remnants and are to
390
PART V
TRALUCERE
be remade after modernity. But it is in the remaking (here with computer technology) that the implausibility of entering a sustaining paradisal aesthetic looms like a barricade. Like The Dante Quartet, but at far greater length and with passages of terrible awkwardness foreign to Brakhage’s art, Elder’s cycle remains in the postmodernist regime of allusion and fragment. His Paradiso is a high-tech contraption, a homage to lost totality, a gloss on the paradoxes of the infinite, and finally a simulation-coda to the meditative sublimity achieved in Consolations. All the wagers collected, cinema remains in a Purgatory of yearning across the chasm of history separating us from Dante. NOTES 1 I would not even have begun this essay without the advice and guidance of Patrick Rumble and Bruce Elder. It certainly would never have been written without the patient encouragement of Amilcare Iannucci. First published in Iannucci (2004), it appears here in a slightly revised version. 2 Sitney (1992); (1995), 173–84. 3 All quotations from the Commedia in this essay are drawn from the Petrocchi edition as reprinted and slightly revised by Singleton (1970–75). All translations from the Commedia are by Singleton (1970–75). The components of the Commedia cited from are Inferno (Inf.), Purgatorio (Purg.), and Paradiso (Par.). Also cited is Convivio (Conv.). 4 The use of these larger formats is unusual for Brakhage, who could make only one 35mm print, which has been fatally damaged in projection. All copies of the film now circulate in 16mm. 5 Brakhage (1992). 6 Voegelin (1968), 92–93; (1974), 178. 7 Krauss (1985), 237–38. 8 Carmean (1978), 30–39. 9 Sitney (1979), 173–200; Elder (1998). 10 Elder (1998). 11 Sitney (1978), 153–62, 195–227. 12 This interpretation is most explicitly expressed by Etienne Gilson (1949) who reads Dante primarily as a doctrinal poet. It is challenged very idiosyncratically by Harold Bloom (1994), 72–97. Bloom is the leading proponent of the radical self-imagining myth of the strong poets of American literature. Bloom has projected this reading widely over the canon of European literature, and nowhere more intensely than onto Dante. 13 Policari (1991), 197–202; Taylor (1992), 83–95. 14 Bersani and Dutoit (1993), 139–45. 15 Arrowsmith (1995), 99. 16 Sitney (1995), 214–15. 17 Antonioni (1996), 82–84, 283–98. 18 Arrowsmith (1995), 89. 19 Sitney (1995), 213–14.
DANTE AND CINEMA 20 21 22 23
24
25
26 27 28 29
30 31 32
33 34 35
391
Sitney (1995), 217. Foucault (1970), 328–40. Arrowsmith (1995), 87. The clearest and most comprehensive statements appear in Elder’s “Letter to Dr. Henderson” (in this volume), “Approaching Heaven,” and “Letter to Antonio Bisaccia.” The latter two texts are unpublished. Elder knows The Dante Quartet intimately. He attended its Canadian premiere and has now written very insightfully on it (“A Short Note on Brakhage’s Relation to Dante” [1998], and in this volume, “Moving Visual Thinking” [2005]). He also includes an excerpt from Brakhage’s Dog Star Man in Exultations, and devotes a very beautiful and long passage to a celebratory depiction of Brakhage’s marriage in 1990. Elder does not regard postmodern art (in the fashionable way made familiar by writers like Fredric Jameson) as a symptom of the collapse of historical consciousness, much less as a nihilistic mode. On the contrary, like Jean-François Lyotard in his writings on art (1991), Elder regards postmodernism as an imaginatively recuperative-redemptive mode. See Elder’s remarks in Shedden on Heidegger, Pound, and postmodernism in connection with Consolations. Elder’s seminal book, Image and Identity (1989), is devoted to disclosing how Canadian art and film arose at the edge of the postmodern mode. Shedden (1991), 99. Grant (1969). Foucault (1977), 90–91. Elder’s note on The Art of Worldly Wisdom was written for use as a synopsis in the catalogues of cinema co-ops and distribution centres. The following version of the note appears in the online catalogue of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre: “Composition from journals kept during 1976–78. Moving Kodak snapshots taken during travels abroad and while at work back home; random glimpses of sites seen and persons visited, fragments of afternoon reveries and night dream visions with garrulous non-stop descriptions of education—in family, at school, while ill—trying to make sense of it all. ‘The dark wood encountered in the middle of life’s journey’ (Dante). This is the first composition of material from my ongoing film diaries.” Foucault (1977), 148. I mean this in the strong Derridean sense, which I have discussed in analyzing Lamentations: see Testa (1993). “Love becomes a demon when it becomes a god,” as Amilcare Iannucci trenchantly remarks in his illuminating discussion of these aspects of Inferno 5. He goes on to explain how such love is never without its political dimension: see Iannucci (1997), 105. Elder, “State/Intended,” 14. Shedden (1991), 105. For Elder’s remarks on Heidegger, see Elder’s “Thoughts Remade around Silence,” and “State/Intended,” in which he attempts to work out discursively what Consolations enacts on screen; and Shedden (1991), 108–11.
392
PART V
TRALUCERE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alighieri, Dante. La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. Ed. G. Petrocchi. 4 vols. Milano: Mondadori, 1966–67. ——— The Divine Comedy. Trans. Charles S. Singleton. 6 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–75. Antonioni, Michelangelo. The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema. Ed. Carlo di Carlo and Giorgio Tinozi. Trans. Marga Caltina-James. New York: Marsilio, 1996. Arrowsmith, William. Antonioni: The Poet of Images. Ed. Ted Perry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit. Arts of Impoverishment: Beckett, Rothko, Resnais. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Riverhead Books, 1994. Brakhage, Stan. Metaphors on Vision. Film Culture 30. 1963. ——— “Note.” Catalogue of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. Toronto: Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, 1992. Carmean, E.A. Jr., and Eliza A. Rathbone, with Thomas Hess. American Art at Midcentury: The Subjects of the Artist. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1978. Elder, R. Bruce. “A Short Note on Brakhage’s Relation to Dante.” Unpublished ms. 1998. ——— “Approaching Heaven.” Unpublished ms. 1991. ——— “Driftworks, Pulseworks, Lightworks: Letter to Dr. Henderson” (1 April 1991). Dante & the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Transgression. Ed. James Miller. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005. 450–88. ——— Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1989. ——— “Letter to Antonio Bisaccia.” Unpublished ms. 1994. ——— “‘Moving Visual Thinking’: Dante, Brakhage, and the Works of Energeia.” Dante & the Unorthodox: The Aesthetics of Trangression. Ed. James Miller. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2005. 394–449. ——— “Note on The Art of Worldly Wisdom.” Catalogue of the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. Toronto: Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, 1992: 23–26. Online catalogue <www.cfmdc.org/cfmdc_collection .html>. ——— “State/Intended.” Bruce Elder: The Book of All the Dead; Complete Film Retrospective, November 5–20, 1988. Ed. Jonas Mekas. New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1988: 13–18. ——— The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. 1998.
DANTE AND CINEMA
393
——— “Thoughts Remade around Silence.” Descant 50 (Fall 1985): 167–78. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970. ——— Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977. Gilson, Etienne. Dante and Philosophy. Trans. D. Moore. New York: Harper and Row, 1949. Grant, George. Time as History. Toronto: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 1969. Iannucci, Amilcare A. “Forbidden Love: Metaphor and History (Inferno 5).” Dante: Contemporary Perspectives. Ed. Amilcare A. Iannucci. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Krauss, Rosalind. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. Policari, Stephen. Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Shedden, Jim. “Interview with Bruce Elder.” Millennium Film Journal (1991): 98–114. Sitney, P. Adams. Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–1978. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. ——— “Accatone and Mama Roma.” Pier Paolo Pasolini: Contemporary Perspectives. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1992. ——— Vital Crises in Italian Cinema: Iconography, Stylistics, Politics. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1995. Taylor, Mark C. Disfiguring: Art, Architecture, Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Testa, Bart. “The Tasks of Lamentations.” Recherches sémiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry 13, 1–2 (1993): 175–87. Voegelin, Eric. Science, Politics and Gnosticism. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1968. ——— The Ecumenic Age. Vol. 4: Order and History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1974.
“Moving Visual Thinking” Dante, Brakhage, and the Works of Energeia R. Bruce Elder
B
rakhage released The Dante Quartet in 1987. Though this extraordinary film runs for only six-and-a-quarter minutes, it was years in the making—thirty-seven years, in fact, if we include the decades Brakhage spent studying the Commedia. He had worked on the preparation of the film itself nearly daily for six years, applying paint directly onto the film stock. The painting is entirely abstract, and though its visual dynamism reminds many viewers of a Jackson Pollock painting come to life, its spiritual character suggests a closer kinship with the paintings of Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, and Adolf Gottlieb. If Brakhage’s rhythmic play of forms and shades recalls Rothko’s colour fields, the fluidity of his streaming imagery calls to mind Newman’s efforts to convert the plastic elements of art into a “mental plasma.” Besides an aesthetic delight in the “ideographic” character of art, Brakhage shares with Gottlieb a deep concern with the body and a philosophical interest in the relation between bodily processes and thought.1 Like several of the hallmark paintings of abstract expressionism, The Dante Quartet is strongly sectionalized. From a technical viewpoint the difference between sections can literally be measured in centimetres because Brakhage used different film formats as his “canvas.” Though the format increases in size from section to section—16 mm, 35 mm, 70 mm Cinemascope, and IMAX—the “canvas,” of course, never exceeds the miniature dimensions of the frames in his film stock. From a thematic standpoint, the division of the film into four sections is clearly determined by Brakhage’s literary model: the mathematically articulated structure of the Commedia. Section one (“Hell Itself”) clearly corresponds to Dante’s underworld journey (Inf. 3–34), while section two (“Hell Spit Flexion”) relates
394
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
395
to the transitional zone of Ante-Purgatory (Purg. 1–9). The cornices and summit of the Holy Mountain (Purg. 10–33) correspond to section three (“Purgation”), and the ten heavens from the Moon to the Empyrean (Par. 1–33) are compressed into section four (“existence is song”). Brakhage handled the printing of the film in such a way that the visual forms in each of the sections have different sizes and shapes. In the first section, the painted forms cover the entire screen. In the second, they cover only a small rectangle in the centre of the screen, occupying between one-quarter and one-third of its area. In the third, they cover the entire width of the screen and three-quarters (approximately) of its height. In the fourth, they cover the entire screen again, though the forms have greater depth and detail here than in the opening section. The quality of the painting also differs from section to section. The first section consists primarily of gold, ruddy-gold, red, and blue forms applied to appear like gelatinous streaks on a clear ground. While the second begins with tight tiny coils against a dark ground followed by light sweeping colours, which seem to etherealize towards pure colour dynamics, it soon develops into a dance of highly textured yellow, green, and vermillion forms punctuated by what looks like a light streaming from a circular object. The third weaves together white skeins against a dark ground, luminous blues against a lighter ground, and densely impastoed dark ruddy forms through which occasionally appear various photographed images—a man in a doorway, a framed photographic portrait of a man, circular forms. In the fourth, forms seem to surge downwards through the image, and then upwards, as if by reaction, in a wavelike movement superimposed at times over images of a volcano or of some unidentifiable spherical form. Brakhage produced The Dante Quartet some thirty-five years into his career. He had been reading the Commedia since high school, he tells us.2 Shortly after he finished high school, a University of Denver journal published an article on Dante that he wrote while still a student. Though early poetic interests have a way of fading, in this case they did not, and we need to know why they did not. The greatness of the Commedia itself is one reason, of course, but surely other factors in his cultural formation may help us to understand why Dante would continue to fascinate him for over forty years. BRAKHAGE AND THE POETS
The persistence of Brakhage’s interest in Dante is also due in some measure to the role that the American poets Robert Duncan and Charles Olson played in his aesthetic education.3 Widely recognized as the leading advo-
396
PART V
TRALUCERE
cates of open form poetry, Duncan and Olson both served the young Stan Brakhage as mentors. Basing their poetics on a strong conviction that the form of a poem should not be imposed from the outside by the events or experiences motivating its composition, they insisted that the poem must develop from the inside out. In other words, the energy that inspires the poem should give rise to its shape. Poetry in their view has an urgent perlocutionary purpose: “to get the energy transferred from where the poet got it…by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.”4 Accordingly, the open form poets associated the vitality of a poem with the force of speech itself, with the social and psychological impact of speech acts. In Dante Études, a series of forty lyrics dating from late in his career (1984), Duncan expounds his concept of human language as a “natural” phenomenon in the sense that it is energized and driven by the same forces that give rise to wolf howls, whale songs, and all other forms of communication in the animal world. Objecting in his third étude (“A Little Language”) to Dante’s doctrinal claims that animals have no need of language and that Nature abhors the superfluous, he draws complex analogies between human and animal communication and also between the resonant world of the senses and the echoing field of discourse (including poetic speech):5 …And whales and wolves I’ve heard in choral soundings of the sea and air know harmony and have an eloquence that stirs my mind and heart—they touch the soul. Here Dante’s religion that would set Man apart damns the effluence of our life from us to build therein its powerhouse. It’s in his animal communication Man is true, immediate, and in immediacy, Man is all animal. His senses quicken in the thick of the symphony, old circuits of animal rapture and alarm, attentions and arousals in which an identity rearrives. He hears particular voices among the concert, the slightest rustle in the undertones, rehearsing a nervous aptitude yet to prove his. He sees the flick of significant red within the rushing mass
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
397
of ruddy wilderness and catches the glow of a green shirt to delite him in a glowing field of green —it speaks to him— and in the arc of the spectrum color speaks to color. The rainbow articulates a promise he remembers he but imitates in noises that he makes, this speech in every sense the world surrounding him.6
In his rhapsodic fifth étude (“Everything Speaks to Me”), he pushes these same analogies to their geophysical limits: Everything speaks to me! In faith my sight is sound. I draw from out the resounding mountain side the gist of majesty. It is at once a presentation out of space awakening a spiritual enormity, and still, the sounding of a tone apart from any commitment to some scale. The sea comes in on rolling surfs of an insistent meaning, pounds the sands relentlessly, demanding a hearing. I overhear tides of myself all night in it. And in the sound that lips and tongue and tunings of the vocal chords within the chamber of the mouth and throat can send upon the air, I answer. It is my evocation of the sound I’d have return to me. My word in speech answers some ultimate need I know, aroused, pours forth upon the sands again and again lines written for the audience of the sea.7
398
PART V
TRALUCERE
Affirmed in these lines is a notion of natural inspiration fundamental to open form poetics. In response to the age-old question “What is the origin of poetry?” Duncan turned to the psychology of perception to support his idea that all poetry—like all visualization and probably all thought— arises from forces beyond the self.8 This idea is crucial to Brakhage’s artistic principles and practices. Whether directly through philosophical discussion or indirectly through poetic example, Duncan taught Brakhage an unorthodox yet potent method of reading based on a creative engagement with poetry as both a transformer and a transmitter of energy. Reading his own poems in this “energetic” way along with certain great works (like the Commedia) led Duncan to formulate a radically holistic conception of his art, or rather of art itself as a single transcendent primordial “speaking” or “revelation,” which begins to sound like an ideal conception of film, an archetypal talkie: This has always been the One Art—the revelation, the moving picture, the urgent speaking to us of the world we see that moved us to make even of the sounds of our mouths an answering speech, the informing dance of images into which the Eye opens. She sends Her bears to claw the architectures loose from perfection. The Opening of Way again, the Wound in God’s side. Angry, confused, then a cloud in which the queen is hidden, the workers are released from the old order into the Great Work beyond their understanding. They must go beyond the bounds of their art. But the new sweetness!9
Echoing the “new sweetness” in Dante’s famous phrase “dolce stil novo“ [sweet new style] (Purg. 24.57), Duncan’s exclamation reveals his intense enthusiasm for Dante’s writing. It was an enthusiasm extending beyond the Commedia to the Rime, as indicated by the title of the work cited above: “Structure of Rime XXVII.” The composition of this sequence, which complements his Dante Études, would occupy him for most of his creative life.10 No matter how deep an impression Dante was to make on Brakhage through Duncan’s mediation, we would do well to consider the prima facie implausibility of perceiving any direct influence of the Commedia on The Dante Quartet. The two works seem worlds apart. The very title Brakhage chose for his film—with its echo of Duncan’s Dante Études as well as Eliot’s Four Quartets—would seem to emphasize its anomalous remoteness from the Great Work. For one thing, the film is a very small work—in duration. For another, given the immense significance and familiarity of
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
399
the tripartite division of the Commedia, Brakhage’s decision to allude to it in a tetrapartite form seems very odd indeed. Why four “movements” instead of three canticles? The impression of oddity only intensifies with further meditation on the film. In what way can it possibly be regarded as a “Dante” work? Thanks to the mystical impulse of Duncan and Olson to “go beyond the bounds of their art,” Brakhage’s ideas about art and art making are radically anti-discursive, while Dante’s critical engagement with philosophy and theology fills the Commedia with passages of scholastic discourse on many disputed questions. Nothing in The Dante Quartet corresponds, for instance, to the elaborate disquisitions on the generation of the human soul by Statius (Purg. 25.34–108) and Aquinas (Par. 13.34–142). While Dante is hailed for his splendid integration of thought and imagination in the Commedia, Brakhage is defiantly resolute in his opposition to art or literature produced according to aesthetic rules. As anyone who explores the Commedia through its commentaries soon discovers, it is a massively compendious work. Generations of commentators have treated it as an anthology of poetic forms and philosophical ideas. Inspired by its encyclopedic character, Ezra Pound strove to extend the medieval frontiers of knowledge into the modern world by fashioning his own poetic compendium of the important historical and cultural developments since Dante’s day. Following Pound, I was motivated by Dante’s universalizing vision to undertake The Book of All the Dead. Like Pound’s Cantos, my film anthology can be “read” as a meditation on the multiple worlds of discourse contained within the Commedia; as a modernization of its summalike survey of diverse modes of thought and means of knowing; and more concretely, as a projection of its dazzlingly complex homage to poets of earlier ages rendered through imitations of their style (which I read as embodiments of their way of thinking). But the encyclopedic impulse to enshrine cultural traditions, to imitate famous predecessors, to renew the past for the present, and to carry the wisdom of the ages into the future is quite antithetical to the Emersonian cast of Brakhage’s thought and vision. Brakhage’s renown as the pre-eminent maker of lyrical films further distances him from the compendious poet of the Commedia. Though the Vita Nuova sustains Dante’s renown as the pre-eminent maker of lyrical poems in the dolce stil novo tradition, the Commedia is not a canzone or a sonnet or any other medieval Italian lyric form but a sui generis creation, a long allegorical narrative explicitly constructed as a critical response to the limitations of his youthful love poetry. Like the pilgrim’s journey
400
PART V
TRALUCERE
through the three realms of the afterlife, the reader’s journey through the three parts of the narrative proceeds according to a clear principle of sequentiality: events are recounted in the chronological order in which they supposedly occurred—“ad una ad una” [one after another] (Inf. 3.116). While Dante sharpens the retrospective focus of typological narration to highlight his view of the past as shaping both the present and the future, Brakhage avoids any sense of the past in his work, and, like any good lyric “maker,” subsumes all temporal modalities into the immediacy of the Now. Indeed, the remarkable compression of Brakhage’s work is due largely to its being a recollection of the experience of reading through the Commedia consolidated in the immediacy of the present. How they relate words to images also sets the two makers, Dante and Brakhage, apart. Responding to the Dedalian arrogance of classical authors who asserted the superiority of rhetoric to all other arts, Dante humbly celebrates the miraculous synthesis of words and images in the “visibile parlare” [visible speech] (Purg. 10.95) displayed in the proto-cinematic tableaux on the walls of the First Cornice of Purgatory. Brakhage, by contrast, proudly strives to free images from words. Like his English and American predecessors in the Romantic tradition, he confidently valorizes the role of the imagination in purging human consciousness of linguistic confusion. While language is an arena of moral engagement for Dante, who, anticipating Wittgenstein, identifies sin with the lack of verbal and intellectual clarity symbolized by the selva oscura, the textual world is perceived by Brakhage as a labyrinth of deception from which images must be morally rescued and aesthetically distanced. Few representational forms appear in The Dante Quartet because, as the filmmaker points out, all representations are congregations of “nameable forms.” Except for a few important exceptions we’ll consider in due course, Brakhage’s notable practice of creating “unnameable” non-representational forms by the direct application of paint onto film stock, sometimes in very thick impasto, results in dynamic fields of “pure” imagery— abstract expressionism in motion. During the intensely creative period when The Dante Quartet was being made, he kept photographic imagery out of his work in order to avoid depictions of any sort. Film, he believed, needed to be released from the domain and the domination of language.11 The non-referential character of The Dante Quartet—its freedom from “pictures,” as Brakhage calls representations of congregations of “nameable things”—seems all the odder when we consider the immense attractiveness of the vivid (at times even hallucinatory) imagery of the Commedia for visual artists down through the centuries. For evidence of its endur-
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
401
ing appeal, we need only look at the drawings of Zbigniew Pospieszynski and the sculptures of Andrew Pawlowski discussed in this volume.12 Their work, in turn, recalls the Dante illustrations of Giovanni di Paolo, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Blake, Doré, and Dalí. Starting with Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Chaucer, generations of writers have also been impressed with the intensity and precision of Dante’s imagery. T.S. Eliot deliberated extensively on Dante’s significance as a visionary poet and cultural icon, praising the Commedia for its “clear visual images” and “lucidity of style.” Hell, insisted Eliot, is “a state which can only be thought of, and perhaps only experienced, by the projection of sensory images.”13 The radical oddness of Brakhage’s project in The Dante Quartet makes it an artistic risk, and artistic risks tend to provoke hostile reactions even from critics who do not regard themselves as cultural reactionaries. We can see why his film is still regarded as “controversial” many years after its release by reflecting on the troubled reception-history of Pound’s Pagana Commedia, which first appeared as A Draft of XXX Cantos in 1930. Pound’s political folly alone does not account for the hostility still shown to his work: defending right-of-centre values, visions, or viciousness didn’t hurt the artistic reputation of Wyndham Lewis, say, or T.S. Eliot, or even Leni Riefenstahl. The controversy still provoked by Pound’s masterwork surely springs from the persistence of formalist critical norms, as we can see by comparing its reception to that of Ulysses, another work indebted to Dante. Critics have demonstrated at great length that Joyce’s novel organizes a plethora of observed particulars in accordance with a “mythological method” of correspondence between Bloom’s world and its Homeric-Dantean prototypes. Rigour of correspondence is thereby elevated to an aesthetic norm. But since the collagelike form of Pound’s Cantos cannot be explained by this method, it is all too easily dismissed as formless. So, too, is the open form of The Dante Quartet. If these works are indeed part of the “great blaze” of creativity for which the Commedia provided the “little spark” [Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda] (Par. 1.34), they inevitably bear a certain formal relation to it in the causal terms Dante himself established. But that relation is loose here rather than rigorous—an artistic choice on Pound’s and Brakhage’s part. Hence, in their lyrical mode of composition, which I would contrast with Joyce’s structuring of Ulysses as a modern epic in prose, the correspondence between the Commedia and its flaming offshoots remains primarily teleological rather than typological. Can we counteract a formalist devaluation of The Dante Quartet by deriving its oddly lyrical structure from Dante’s strikingly original experiments
402
PART V
TRALUCERE
with literary form? A tempting way to defend Brakhage’s project would be to argue that the Commedia itself (despite its numerically “fettered” structure) strikingly anticipates certain characteristics of open form design. Like Pound’s periplum or Brakhage’s “Hell Spit Flexion,” the flexible form of the sacro poema can accommodate sudden shifts in mood and direction reflecting the poet’s unpredictable experiences in the tumultuous course of making his work. Dante seems to have highlighted this aspect of his allegory himself by charting its literal level as a journey in which the narrator is repeatedly taken aback by new things encountered along the “new, quite untravelled road of this life” [nuovo e mai non fatto cammino di questa vita] (Conv. 4.12.15). By retracing the pilgrim’s route through the poet’s memory, the reader also embarks on an adventure into unexplored territory.14 Since the “journey of our life” [cammin di nostra vita] (Inf. 1.1) continually expands the horizons of this cross-cultural adventure, we may expect to open up new artistic territory in continuing Dante’s quest to find “something new and previously unattempted in art” [novum aliquid atque intentatum artis] (DVE 2.13.13). The Commedia accordingly presents “our life” not just as a sequence of distinct spiritual crises but also as a process of continual aesthetic discovery. Extending this defensive line of argument, we could observe that the form of the Commedia is so open that its expansive plotting paradoxically implodes into breathtaking moments of lyrical synchrony. If the text, like “our life,” leads us to encounter the new and the marvellous, and if the experience summed up by Brunetto’s “What a marvel!” [Qual maraviglia!] (Inf. 15.24) is so forceful that the immediacy of the present overwhelms all other temporal modalities, then the very amazement afforded by the poem effectively undoes the successiveness of its narrative structure. “Ad una ad una” gives way to “ecco!” as the poem proceeds from the successive temporality of the journey through the earthbound cantos, which depict the realm of alienation from the Divine, to the quasi-divine temporality of the intensified lyric mode in the heavenbound cantos, which subsume the past and future into the immediacy of the Divine.15 Like Pound’s Pagana Commedia, the Sacred Poem integrates historical and mythical meditations with exalted lyrical passages. A glance back at Dante’s youthful work will confirm our impression of his experimental movement towards open form in the Commedia. While the Vita Nuova wraps a miscellany of disparate lyrical poems inside a courtship history, which subordinates them “ad una ad una” to the coherent temporality of narrative, the Commedia reverses this effect by rising from the sequentiality of the journey plot to the spacious “ecco!” of the
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
403
Empyrean’s intensified lyric present. Dante’s claim that the Sacred Poem was written as a whole only after he had been granted the vision of God described in the final canto is surely an apocalyptic topos, for the Commedia does not really offer a retrospective view of its narrator’s lightning-flash conversion from pilgrim to poet. Instead, it embodies his long hard struggle for vision.16 The evidence of its patchwork composition is too abundant to render Dante’s unitary claims about its miraculous genesis truly believable. For one thing, the topical satiric concerns of Inferno seem remote from the philosophical and theological interests of Paradiso; for another, the great set-speeches are clearly detachable from the overarching structure and can stand on their own. Their removal would not adversely affect the architecture of the whole.17 At a deeper level, the narrator presents himself as a fallen soul who, at the start of his journey and for most of its unfolding, is bewildered by philosophical doubt and beset by deadly sin. Precisely because he desperately needs to witness the horrors of Hell and to participate in the cleansing rituals of Purgatory, he can elide his life with “our life” and construct himself as an everyman in the process of becoming worthy of receiving the Beatific Vision. The parallel he sustains between his struggle to complete the journey and his effort to compose the poem clearly implies that his artistic project—all along—was to prepare himself to become an author worthy of rendering visible the “invisible things of God” to all readers open to his high fantasy in the visionary scenes of Paradiso. From the viewpoint of Pound and the open form poets, what’s at stake in Dante’s spiritual progress from Hell to Heaven is not so much the salvation of his soul as the perfection of his poem. His journey reveals that all poetic composition is an adventure—an unpredictable cammin in which the poet’s worthiness to realize his creative ambitions is discovered to the reader. The unfolding form of the Sacred Poem is ambitiously experimental, then, because there is a great deal at stake for Dante in its temporal completion—poetic fame, political influence, personal vindication—besides the achievement of his great eternal goal. In fact, his fantasy of attaining the Beatific Vision beyond the worldly limits of fame, politics, and justice perversely functions as a perpetual sign of his astonishing literary success in the Here and Now. If we interpret the supposedly eternal form of the Commedia in the most radically temporal way, which is how Pound interpreted it, its protean shifts in genre, style, and tone reveal the poet pitching himself headlong into his work, adapting it to his changing circumstances, revising it as he trod the paths of exile, and taking the chance that the insights nec-
404
PART V
TRALUCERE
essary to effect its closure would come to him during its composition. As for the Pagana Commedia, ironically, Pound could not bring it to completion. The conditions of his era defeated him. Fascism failed to deliver the Earthly Paradise. His friends turned against him: “Their asperities diverted me in my green time,” he confessed in a late fragmentary canto.18 And so his version of the “poem containing history” was doomed to collapse into a heap of arcane fragments, disparate intertexts, and quasilyrics, which are not as capacious as they should be, and, like narratives, are retrospective. “I have tried to write Paradise,” he lamented in the final fragment of the Cantos.19 Unorthodox as this open form reading of the Commedia may sound— and it is bound to sound at least somewhat controversial because of its association with Pound—I am convinced that it is more than an idiosyncratic modernist interpretation based on subjective understandings of the creative process mediated from Pound through Olson and Duncan to Brakhage. Textual support for it is also to be found in Joan Ferrante’s formalist analysis of Dante’s “poetics of chaos and harmony.”20 The Commedia progresses from the relatively disjointed plot line of the Inferno to the all-encompassing circularity of the Paradiso, she points out, because the poetics upon which Dante based his mutating composition seem to have changed radically from canticle to canticle. Coherence grows throughout the work as its poetic design shifts from the imitation of chaos to the infusion of harmony. The Paradiso contains more sustained speeches with intellectually coherent arguments than the Purgatorio, which in turn contains more such speeches than the Inferno. While few cantos in the Inferno open with transitional devices, more of them do in the Purgatorio, but many more of them do in the Paradiso. Finally, the Inferno makes the least frequent use of enjambment, and the Paradiso the most frequent. Ferrante’s meticulous study of continuity in the Commedia lends cogent support to the claim that the poem proceeds from the sequentiality of narrative time to the “all-at-once” temporality of the intensified lyrical mode. Her structural analysis confirms our tercet-by-tercet experience of the work as unfolding from chaos to harmony naturaliter as if we were reading it in the immediate wake of its composition—an effect much sought after by the open form poets. Duncan, for one, believed that Dante was interested not only in the allegorical production of meanings but also in “textual dynamics” (what a text does rather than what it says). Dante’s famous aversion to translations of poetry implicitly affirms the importance of textual dynamics, for, as he argued with respect to his own lyrics,
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
405
contra loro volere, largo parlando dico, sarebbe essere esposta la loro sentenza colà dov’elle non la potessero con la loro bellezza portare. E però sappia ciascuno che nulla cosa per legame musaico armonizzata si può de la sua loquela in altra transmutare sanza rompere tutta sua dolcezza e armonia. [it would be against the canzoni’s will, so to speak, that their meaning should be explained whenever it would be impossible for them to convey this together with their beauty. As regards this last point, everyone should recognize that no writing fashioned into a harmonious unity by its musical form can be translated from its original language without all its sweetness and harmony being destroyed.] (Conv. 1.7.13–14)
Duncan understood Dante to mean here that the sound of a poem in its original language, the unique interplay of its metres, rhymes, alliterations, enjambments, caesuras, and so forth, is capable of generating poetic meaning apart from the translatable significance of its words. Under Duncan’s influence, Brakhage read Dante as a distinguished precursor whose interest in the dynamic effects of art—on the eye as well as the ear—foreshadowed his own fascination with the unorthodox aesthetics of open form. Duncan’s view of the Commedia as a work-forever-inprogress, a quest for vision which, to an extraordinary degree, calls upon memory to discern and interpret the patterns arising from the unfolding succession of events, characters, speeches, allusions in the pilgrim’s journey, goes some way towards explaining its appeal for Brakhage. BRAKHAGE AND THE PHILOSOPHERS
The open form approach to the Commedia as an ongoing (and never-ending) quest for vision flies exuberantly in the face of the weighty Catholic tradition of commentary on the encyclopedic completeness or totality of Dante’s masterwork. Sustaining that tradition during the early twentieth century was Pierre Mandonnet, the great French Thomist whose doctrinally “closed form” reading of the poem endowed its diverse passages on Nature, Grace, Love, Sin, and Free Will with the scholastic rigour and authority of the great summas of the thirteenth century.21 Though modernist in its aesthetic implications, Duncan’s transgressive rejection of what we might call the orthodox “medievalization” of Dante nevertheless prompts us to consider how medieval culture construed the relation between word and image. For Dante’s contemporaries, painting was primarily the illustration of textually transmitted stories—scriptural tales, pagan myths, saints’ lives,
406
PART V
TRALUCERE
chivalric romances, local histories. Since medieval thought tended to relate painting and literature (or more precisely, narrative) through the operations of the soul, a harmonious triad of word, image, and subjectivity prevailed where Renaissance humanist thought, thanks to Leonardo da Vinci’s treatise on painting, would routinely perceive a binary opposition between the arts of the eye and the ear.22 To understand the aesthetic consequences of the word-image-soul triad, let us turn to the philosophers whose meditations on perception and imagination influenced Dante’s conception of the creative process. We need to consider the history of classical and medieval psychology at some length—despite its apparent remoteness from the creative process of filmmaking—because certain notions familiar to Dante and his scholastic predecessors are particularly important, I believe, for making sense of the otherwise rather peculiar (and even arcane) views I propose to advance about the relation of the Commedia to The Dante Quartet. Dante’s recurrent comparison of the soul to a book goes back to an analogy developed by Socrates in the Philebus (38c ff). Though this dialogue was not transmitted directly to the Middle Ages, the outlines of its arguments about sensation and intellection were known indirectly through the multiple currents of the Platonic tradition. Inscribed in the book of the soul are all the events of one’s life, Socrates observed, the medium of inscription being sometimes words and sometimes images. Memory working with the senses is sufficient to record events in words, but for images to be struck into the soul, “another member of the soul’s workforce” is required, namely, “an artist, who turns the secretary’s words into images in the soul.” While the recording of events in words is a process of transcription reliably assigned to the scribelike memory, the recording of events in images requires the artistry of the imagination. “The conjunction of memory with sensations, together with the feelings consequent upon memory and sensation,” reflected Socrates, may be said as it were to write words in our souls. And when this experience writes what is true, the result is that true opinion and true assertions spring up in us, while when the internal scribe that I have suggested writes what is false we get the opposite sort of opinions and assertions.…[But] please give your opinion to the presence of a second artist in our souls at such a time…[a] painter who comes after the writer and paints in the soul pictures of those assertions we make….[By his efforts we] as it were see in ourselves pictures or images of what we previously opined or asserted….Then are the pictures of true opinions and assertions true, and the pictures of false ones are false. (Philebus 38e–39d)23
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
407
Though Plato is discussing psychological operations here, his philosophical focus is clearly epistemological. He is judging the value of the soul’s powers of sensation, recollection, and imagination in relation to his prevailing dialectical project, which is to distinguish certain knowledge (epist¯em¯e) from fluctuating beliefs or opinions (doxa). In describing the formation of mental images by an inner artist, he is not celebrating the operation of a wondrous cognitive process beyond the comprehension of reason. His estimation of the worth of artists and art making, as we know from other dialogues, is too low to support such an interpretation of the passage. The highest form of cognition for him is the purely intellectual apprehension of the ideas or forms. Below that is the understanding of mathematical truths, especially geometrical theorems, followed by the knowledge of sensory particulars. Lowest of all is conjecture, which results from a combination of judgment and perception occurring when the information provided by the senses is incomplete. This is the sort of knowledge Plato means when he speaks of the work of the artist, which is the imagination. No mental image is formed when the mind apprehends an idea through pure reason; only the lower forms of cognition—sensory perception, imaginative intuition—are accompanied by mental representations. Since the inner artist only begins to work after the inner scribe has done his best to represent the assertions and opinions conveyed to the soul through the senses, the information encoded in mental pictures is more removed from reality and must therefore be less reliable as a source of truth than the verbal traces preserved in the memory. Though the project of distinguishing true knowledge from mere conjectures takes precedence over every other consideration about the soul in this passage, a vigorous deconstructive dynamic will later impel something occupying the margins of Plato’s text—or perhaps unconsciously lying within it—to the centre of philosophical debate over how the soul perceives the truth. Primary credit for this critical move goes to Aristotle, whom Dante will hail in Limbo as the “maestro di color che sanno” [Master of those who know] (Inf. 4.131). Prompted by a biological interest in change and process to focus on precisely how words and images are engraved upon the soul, Aristotle would question the validity of Plato’s distinction between the “scribe” who writes words in the soul and the “painter” who fashions images in it. These psychological agents are not distinct, as Plato suggested, but are really the same. In fact, they are not agents at all in an anthropomorphic sense but rather aspects of an activity. In Aristotle’s view, truths and falsehoods are imprinted on the soul by energeia.
408
PART V
TRALUCERE
The term is crucial to our inquiry. Aristotle, who coined it from the preposition en (“in”) and the noun ergon (“action, work”), sometimes used it in its etymological sense to denote “the state of being in action, at work, or in operation.” As his thought developed away from the Platonic preoccupation with permanence, he extended the philosophical meanings of energeia to include “force,” “activity,” “active exercise of a skill,” and in his influential analysis of change, “the process by which something is actualized” or “the development of something from potentiality to actuality.” In the latter sense it approaches the technical meaning of entelecheia, which literally denotes “in-ended-ness” or “the state of having reached the end of a process.” Aristotle often uses the two terms interchangeably. When energeia is synonymous with entelecheia, its metaphysical significance comes close to what Spinoza later means by “being” or what Heideggerians (myself included) sometimes designate as “be-ing.”24 In the middle books of the Metaphysics, Aristotle links energeia with dynamis, the root meaning of which is “force,” “power,” or “strength.” Its technical meaning in his thought is “the potential to become something.” Every energeia correlates with some dynamis, he reasoned, and though the two may be distinguished at a conceptual level, their close relation in reality is analogous to that between form and matter. While dynamis is the unrealized potential to be a certain thing or to act in a certain way, energeia is either the full actualization of that potentiality or the movement towards that actualization. If we think of dynamis as unrealized potentiality, energeia becomes the process by which (or the state in which) that potential is actualized.25 So, at least, we are led to conclude from the usual textbook treatments of the subject. However, George A. Blair has argued (and close examination of the Metaphysics bears him out) that Aristotle uses energeia to mean the particular activity that something has in itself, through being what it is.26 In other words, it is the activity belonging to something by virtue of its nature or its form—a formative process in which it actually becomes all that it can be. Surely that is why there’s an en in energeia.27 If we recall that Aristotle conceives the soul not as a separate spiritual entity which invades or attaches itself to a body but rather as a life-endowing form which serves to distinguish animate from inanimate substances, and if we deduce from his general definition of soul in the De anima (2.1–2) the particular doctrine that the human soul is the form that makes our bodies distinctively human, we may conclude that for human beings, as for other living things, energeia (as “be-ing”) properly pertains to the soul. Moreover, if we ponder the
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
409
implications of Aristotle’s corollary doctrine that the soul is an inward power or capacity for functioning, our hypothesis that the soul is energeia will be confirmed by its role as the formative principle through which animate things have their being as such.28 Thus, for all beings with souls, energeia should be construed as a spiritual principle—though it is not a principle separable from the body in any substantial sense.29 For Aristotle and his scholastic disciples, the soul represents the first activity of the body, namely, its undeveloped potential to perform certain acts and to engage in certain behaviours. Most infants can be said to possess an undeveloped ability to study geometry, for example, and Aristotle would describe such an ability (using the terms energeia and entelecheia interchangeably) as the “first actuality” or “first fulfillment” of their nascent talent for finding the area of a triangle. An adult who has mastered geometry but is not currently proving any theorems has a different sort of potential, which Aristotle characterizes as a “second actuality” of the soul. When a child learns geometry, energeia is at play; similarly, when an adult geometer sits down and deduces a theorem, the second kind of potential is being actualized. His/her soul is in a state of action. Aristotle would characterize this state of being-in-action as a manifestation of energeia. Energeia displays itself when people or objects do something. It is the action that preserves things in their being, the force that realizes their “be-ing.” Aristotle’s quasi-scientific approach to psychological functions makes him less inclined than Plato to downplay the role of the imagination in cognition. In Aristotelian psychology, which will exert an influence on Brakhage through Dante, the soul possesses an imaging function identified as phantasia. Unlike Plato, Aristotle does not claim that phantasia is called upon to form a judgment only when sensory information is lacking. What exactly Aristotle means by phantasia, and how he conceives the role of mental imaging in cognition, is difficult to determine from the brief and notoriously imprecise section of the De anima (3.3, 427a–429a) devoted to the imagination. But this much is clear: his view of phantasia as something more than a combination of perception and judgment required to compensate for the lack of perceptual data implies that it is an important power (in scholastic parlance, a distinct “faculty”) mediating between sensation and intellection. The Aristotelian imagination serves to revive sense impressions in the form of phantasiai—dreams, afterimages, visual memories, mental pictures—which are in turn presented to the intellect for abstracting, organizing, interpreting, judging. Without perception there is no imagination in Aristotle, and without
410
PART V
TRALUCERE
imagination there is no thought.30 The signal importance of his cognitive theory is that it does not disparage mental images per se (as Plato’s epistemology does) but rather recognizes them as indispensable to all higher forms of cognition.31 Since the Aristotelian soul uses the organs of the body for acquiring knowledge, its quest for sensation, pleasure, and knowledge must be fuelled by its own internal energeia—the principle that preserves it in being through its act of be-ing. If the soul is in the end what the body does, what the body does can only arise through the soul’s energeia. It is solely this principle of be-ing that allows us to engage in what Aristotle regards as the characteristic human activity—thinking. And thinking in turn gives rise to the expressive activities of speaking and picturing. After Aristotle, the imagination comes to be valued as a miraculous power of visualization presenting objects and events to the inner eye as if they were actually present.32 That a skillful writer can arouse mental images with his words (Aristotle’s phantasiai become visiones in Latin) is a commonplace of Roman rhetorical theory, which was passed on to the Latin Middle Ages through the ars poetica tradition. Reading Aristotle into Roman poetics, we might call the power of words to arouse images in the mind of the reader or listener the peculiar energeia of language, for this power constitutes its be-ing. Cicero, Horace, and later writers of the Roman period tend to associate it with the capacity of language to convey emotion. If the reader or listener experiences the same visiones as the writer or speaker—and it is within the power of language to ensure that this happens—then the reader or listener will experience the same emotions as those felt by the writer or speaker. Pseudo-Longinus, for instance, argues in his treatise On the Sublime (as does Cicero in the De officiis) that poets must themselves feel the emotions they elicit through their writings, and that their capacity to imagine allows them to feel the emotions appropriate to the situations they describe. Quintilian instructs not only poets but also legal counsellors (rhetores) to cultivate this power of transmitting visiones through the evocative powers of language.33 Though energeia accounts for the persuasive impact of oratory, the emotive interaction of words and images does not constitute simply a model of consciousness in Roman rhetorical theory. Since consciousness itself is made up of nothing but words and images, the energeia of language itself must have a close relation to subjectivity.34 Words have the power to stimulate the mind of a listener or reader to create images and to formulate thoughts, and so, according to the classical mode of reasoning on these matters, speaking and writing must be closely allied with thinking.35
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
411
With the revival of philosophy in the twelfth century, verbal and visual image production is conspicuously linked to the realm of subjectivity. Among the earliest medieval philosophers to confirm the connection between words, subjectivity, and energeia are the Augustinian mystics associated with the abbey of St. Victor near Paris. Hugh of St. Victor, whom Dante will recognize among the highly energetic intellectual dancers in the Heaven of the Sun (Par. 12.133), defines human energeia as the third and highest power of the soul. “It is rooted entirely in the reason,” he asserts in his most influential treatise, the Didascalicon, and exercises itself either in the most unfaltering grasp of things present, or in the understanding of things absent, or in the investigation of things unknown. This power belongs to humankind alone. It not only takes in sense impressions and images which are perfect and well founded, but, by a complete act of the understanding, it explains and confirms what imagination has only suggested. And, as has been said, this divine nature is not content with the knowledge of those things alone which it perceives spread before its senses, but, in addition, it is able to provide even for things removed from it names which imagination has conceived from the sensible world, and it makes known, by arrangements of words, what it has grasped by reason of its understanding.36
Written sometime before 1141 as a pedagogical synthesis of Augustinian theology and Boethian philosophy with Pseudo-Dionysian mysticism, the Didascalicon represents image production as a central fact of mental activity.37 Recalling Aristotle through Boethius, Hugh teaches that the higher cognitive powers must depend on phantasiai because we think and reason with images, including images of things that only the imagination can represent. The Aristotelian association of language with subjectivity is preserved and strengthened by the great scholastic philosophers of the thirteenth century. “The most obvious and broadest use of the term [verbum: “word”] is for something expressed by voice,” notes Thomas Aquinas in his analysis of “the Word” as a Divine Name, “and as to the two elements present in it, namely the utterance itself and its meaning, the vocal word derives from what is inward. For according to Aristotle [De interpretatione 1.16a], an utterance is a sign of the mind’s concept and, again, it issues from an act of the imagination [De anima 2.8.420b]. We cannot call a sound having no meaning a ‘word;’ we name a sound uttered a ‘word,’ therefore, because it expresses the mind’s inner concept.”38 Since the same energeia produces words and images, we might go so far as to say that words and
412
PART V
TRALUCERE
images call subjectivity itself into being. While Plato clearly distinguishes the interiority of living speech and mental images from the exteriority of written language and graven images, Aristotle overrides this distinction by arguing that energeia produces words and images alike and thus effectively generates the inner life.39 This is the root significance of the triangular relationship among word, image, and subjectivity—all are connected through the single concept of energeia.40 From medieval commentary on energeia, we can develop a surprisingly Heideggerian conception of words and images as the House of Being, for words and images not only generate thinking but also preserve thought in its existence. Aristotelian cosmology presupposes the transcendence of the Prime Mover, whose energeia or actuality is the metaphysical act of pure thought. Christian doctrine, by contrast, rests on the scriptural revelation that the Creator is mysteriously immanent in Creation and remarkably intimate with His creatures. In order to reconcile Aristotelian cosmology with the Christian hexaemeral tradition, Aquinas expands the compass of actuality to include beings as well as Being. His world system accommodates not only the actuality of Being but also the actuality of the being of beings, the energeia of existence.41 Aquinas’s conception of existence as energeia in the sense of “actuality” has monumental significance for the development of Western metaphysics. By applying Aristotle’s notion of energeia to the sheer existence of things rather than to their essence—the latter concept commonly suggesting transcendence—Aquinas evolves a new conception of the relation between Being and the existence of individual beings. In an early metaphysical treatise, he draws an analogy from the visual arts to expound his conception of the distinction between universal essence and individual existence: “…if there were a material statue representing many men, the image or likeness of the statue would have its own individual being as it existed in this determinate matter, but it would have the nature of something common as the general representation of many men” (On Being and Essence 3.7). The statue exists in its own right as a hylomorphic substance, a particular block of marble shaped in a particular way, quite apart from its nature as a representation of what is common to many men and women, the essence of their human nature. Though essences are universal and so cannot be temporal, the way we apprehend the essence of a given thing is similar to the way we come to understand the essence through which existents are actualized. We are confronted with the existential fact of their being there, but through the exercise of intelligence, we come to apprehend the essential determina-
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
413
tions that actualize their particular existence. From Aristotle, Aquinas takes over the belief that God’s Being as the original and ultimate thinking subject is actus purus—pure, absolute energeia—without the usual distinction between potentiality and actuality pertaining to finite beings. In so far as anything displays energeia and is actualized, it is like the God who reveals his Being in the Tetragrammaton—”I AM THAT I AM” (Exod. 3:14)42—as pure act, pure intellectual act. Each thing, by virtue of its existence, manifests an energeia related to the pure actuality of the Creator. Energeia sustains all beings in their existence. Herein lies the great importance of Aquinian metaphysics to Dantean cosmology. Thanks to the Angelic Doctor whose immense intellectual energy guides and unites the otherwise disputatious dancers in the Heaven of the Sun, Dante comes to understand that the principle of actuality is not confined to some transcendental realm beyond the stars but is miraculously instilled in the existence of each and every creature.43 This Aquinian insight is expressed in the textual threshold of Dante’s Heaven like a luminous inscription countering the dark words on the Gate of Hell: La gloria di colui che tutto move per l’universo penetra, e risplende in una parte più e meno altrove. [The glory of the All-Mover penetrates through the universe and reglows in one part more, and in another less.] (Par. 1.1–3)
When Dante wonders at his ability to pass through the celestial spheres like the penetrating glory of the All-Mover, Beatrice explains the miracle by expounding the Aquinian theme of the actualizing imprint of the Creator on everything in Creation: Le cose tutte quante hanno ordine tra loro, e questo è forma che l’universo a Dio fa simigliante. Qui veggion l’alte creature l’orma de l’etterno valore, il qual è fine al quale è fatta la toccata norma. Ne l’ordine ch’io dico sono accline tutte nature, per diverse sorti, più al principio loro e men vicine; onde si muovono a diversi porti per lo gran mar de l’essere, e ciascuna con istinto a lei dato che la porti. Questi ne porta il foco inver’ la luna;
414
PART V
TRALUCERE
questi ne’ cor mortali è permotore; questi la terra in sé stringe e aduna; né pur le creature che son fore d’intelligenza quest’ arco saetta, ma quelle c’hanno intelletto e amore. [All things have order among themselves, and this is the form that makes the universe like God. Herein the high creatures behold the imprint of the Eternal Worth, which is the end wherefor the aforesaid ordinance is made. In the order whereof I speak all natures are inclined by different lots, nearer and less near unto their principle; wherefore they move to different ports over the great sea of being, each with an instinct given it to bear it on: this bears fire upwards toward the moon; this is the motive force in mortal creatures; this binds together and unites the earth. And not only does this bow shoot those creatures that lack intelligence, but also those that have intellect and love.] (Par. 1.103–20)
When Dante enters the Heaven of the Sun, his eyes are dazzled by the stellar radiance of Aquinas as a blessed soul. Picking up where Beatrice left off, the great metaphysician traces the splendour of Creation (including his own brilliance) back to the Idea of its existence in the Divine Mind: Ciò che non more e ciò che può morire non è se non splendor di quella idea che partorisce, amando, il nostro Sire; ché quella viva luce che sì mea dal suo lucente, che non si disuna da lui né da l’amor ch’a lor s’intrea, per sua bontate il suo raggiare aduna, quasi specchiato, in nove sussistenze, etternalmente rimanendosi una. Quindi discende a l’ultime potenze giù d’atto in atto, tanto divenendo, che più non fa che brevi contingenze; e queste contingenze essere intendo le cose generate, che produce con seme e sanza seme il ciel movendo. La cera di costoro e chi la duce non sta d’un modo; e però sotto ’l segno idëale poi più e men traluce. [That which dies not and that which can die are naught but the splendor of that Idea which in His love our Sire begets; for that living light
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
415
which so streams from its Lucent Source that It is not disunited from It, nor from the Love which is intrined with them, does of Its own goodness collect Its rays, as though reflected, in nine subsistences, Itself eternally remaining One. Thence It descends to the ultimate potentialities, downward from act to act becoming such that finally it makes but brief contingencies; and these contingencies I understand to be the generated things which the moving heavens produce with seed and without it. The wax of these and that which molds it are not always in the same condition, and therefore under the ideal stamp it then shines now more, now less…] (Par. 13.52–69)
The clearest exposition of Aquinas’s vision of God as the pure act of Being is provided by Beatrice in the Primum Mobile while Dante is contemplating the procession of beings from the still point at the centre of existence. Everything that owes its existence to God “stands under” the Divine Splendour in the downwardly radiating circles of immortal and contingent substances: Non per aver a sé di bene acquisto, ch’esser non può, ma perché suo splendore potesse, risplendendo, dir “Subsisto,” in sua etternità di tempo fore, fuor d’ogne altro comprender, come i piacque, s’aperse in nuovi amor l’etterno amore. Né prima quasi torpente si giacque; ché né prima né poscia procedette lo discorrer di Dio sovra quest’ acque. Forma e materia, congiunte e purette usciro ad esser che non avia fallo, come d’arco tricordo tre saette. E come in vetro, in ambra o in cristallo raggio resplende sì, che dal venire a l’esser tutto non è intervallo, così ’l triforme effetto del suo sire ne l’esser suo raggiò insieme tutto sanza distinzïone in essordire. Concreato fu ordine e costrutto a le sustanze; e quelle furon cima nel mondo in che puro atto fu produtto; pura potenza tenne la parte ima; nel mezzo strinse potenza con atto tal vime, che già mai non si divima. [Not for gain of good unto Himself, which cannot be, but that His splendor might, in resplendence, say, “Subsisto”—in His eternity beyond
416
PART V
TRALUCERE
time, beyond every other bound, as it pleased Him, the Eternal Love opened into new loves. Nor before, as if inert, did He lie, for neither before nor after did the moving of God upon these waters proceed. Form and matter, conjoined and simple, came into being which had no defect, as three arrows from a three-stringed bow; and as in a glass, in amber, or in crystal, a ray shines so that there is no interval between its coming and its pervading all, so did the triform effect ray forth from its Lord into its being, all at once, without distinction of beginning. Therewith order was created and ordained for the substances; and those in whom pure act was produced were the summit of the universe. Pure potentiality held the lowest place; in the middle such a bond tied up potentiality with act that it is never unbound.] (Par. 29.13–36)
This ontological procession is noetically retraced in the downward spiralling of Dante’s desire and will through the spheres in the final tercets of Paradiso, which record the genesis of the poem itself from the flashpoint of divine inspiration: veder voleva come si convenne l’imago al cerchio e come vi s’indova; ma non eran da ciò le proprie penne: se non che la mia mente fu percossa da un fulgore in che sua voglia venne. A l’alta fantasia qui mancò possa; ma già volgeva il mio disio e ’l velle, sì come rota ch’igualmente è mossa, l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle. [I wished to see how the image conformed to the circle and how it has its place therein; but my own wings were not sufficient for that, save that my mind was smitten by a flash wherein its wish came to it. Here power failed the lofty phantasy; but already my desire and my will were revolved, like a wheel that is evenly moved, by the Love which moves the sun and the other stars.] (Par. 33.137–45)44
As we noted above, this amorous actualization of spiritual and material existence—the divine energeia diffused universally throughout all beings— is conceived primarily as an intellectual principle in scholastic metaphysics. Since it is apprehended by the intellect, it must be akin to the intellect.45 Because of the miraculous diffusion of Divine Light, the physical world may be understood not only as the material image of God’s Being but also as an ontological outpouring of His Power in every sense— intellectual, spiritual, emotional, erotic—even as a word or image may be
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
417
considered the epistemological extension of a thought. Hence, the power of words and images to reveal the being of beings.46 Because divine energeia brings the creative impetus of God out of its transcendent enclosure and installs it at every level on the Chain of Being, Dante-pilgrim can perceive its lightning flash or fulgore (Par. 33.141) in his soul. Its spiritual activity or puro atto (Par. 29.33) is to transform him into Dante-poet, the new maker of the ever-renewing Commedia. Irradiated with creative power, his whirling imagination is now able to fantasize into expansive existence the Sacred Poem that participates in the renewal of the world made possible by the immanent actuality that sustains beings in their being. The intellectual nature of energeia lifts his intelligence closer to the Divine Mind so that his reader’s intelligence, in turn, can follow the ascending track of the poem by discovering God’s presence at every level of the human soul. Sensations, memories, dreams, ideas— all are inwardly charged with divina virtù. Without Aquinas’s conception of God’s indwelling energeia as the ground of all existence, Dante could not have found the words or images to express the anagogic vision ultimately bestowed upon him. As the expressive extensions of his intellectual and emotional esperienza—the very stuff of subjectivity—his words and images together become the artistic paradigm for the atto puro through which all things in heaven and earth are moved towards their being. BRAKHAGE AND THE SELF
No aspect of The Dante Quartet is more strikingly anomalous than its relentless focus on the filmmaker’s subjectivity. The external world has all but disappeared in it, and we are presented only with the contents of a particular consciousness or of human consciousness generally.47 Bart Testa has argued that The Dante Quartet lyrically projects the total interior space from which Dante’s narrative arises, and in this he is quite correct. Indeed, the fundamental anomaly from which all the other anomalous features of the film derive is its withdrawal into pure subjectivity—an ingressus mentis to the fantastic core of Brakhage’s luminous creativity— which strongly contrasts with Dante’s regressus mentis along the ascending route of negative theology from Creation to Creator. Where the Commedia (like De vulgari eloquentia) looks outward towards the achievements of Dante’s predecessors, The Dante Quartet (like the Dante Études) looks inward to the mental processes of its maker.48 At the time of making The Dante Quartet, Brakhage expressed his ambition to create an artistic vision of “moving visual thinking”—a process that filmmaking alone, he asserted, could truly capture. He represented him-
418
PART V
TRALUCERE
self as an artist striving to envision what many poets and painters have longed to realize: the possibility of conveying the “primordial elements” out of which images and words evolve. In making such assertions, Brakhage seems to me to argue that film can convey the primordial elements out of which a resolved image forms. Underlying his conception of the psychological origins of artistic activity, I believe, is a synthesis of Augustine’s notion of visio spiritualis and Aquinas’s revisions of Aristotle’s idea of energeia. In so far as Brakhage’s primordial elements are the spiritual contents that lie behind sense perceptions, they are like the spiritual vision described by Augustine as formed in the soul but only perceived “with eyes removed from that which we were seeing through our eyes.” It is as though Brakhage were trying to discover these contents not just with his visual imagination but with his physical eyes as well, eyes not removed from the outward field of vision even though that field—the screen—paradoxically figures invisible processes deep within the soul.49 But since the primordial elements also represent for him an active principle resulting in image formation, they resemble the energeia that calls subjectivity into be-ing. Brakhage’s painting in The Dante Quartet not only makes visible what happens in his soul while he is reading the Commedia; it also conveys, by anticipating the images that make the Commedia so vivid, what he imagines went on in Dante’s mind during the reception of the “alta fantasia” [high fantasy] (Par. 33.142) from God. The inwardness of The Dante Quartet (and of many other films in Brakhage’s oeuvre) is a consequence of his desire to release energeia. Bernard of Clairvaux established the rule of silence to cultivate a similar inwardness, and his statements on the silent reception of the Word bear on Brakhage’s films. The Bride of Christ, Bernard preached, “wants to have the one she desires present to her not in bodily form but by inward infusion, not by appearing externally but by laying hold of her within. It is beyond question that the vision is all the more delightful the more inward it is, and not external. It is the Word, who penetrates without sound; who is effective though not pronounced, who wins the affections without striking on the ears” (Sermons on the Song of Songs 31.6). As the Word, Christ is internal. His nature cannot be known through the senses because these are directed towards external things. The Word is not spoken. His function is to act. As action, He is energeia. To know the divine energeia one must turn inwards, away from language towards silence. This ascetic imperative underlies Brakhage’s artistic impulse to escape the effects of language, to exchange a knowledge of divine edicts for a knowledge of the inner dynamics of divine action. That he understands the
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
419
escape from language in mystical terms as a quest for divine vision explains why he accords it utmost importance. Indeed, his frequent comments about the troubling nature of his artistic mission often sound like a description of that phase in the quest known as “the Dark Night of the Soul,” the purgative phase that opens up a space for the Divine to enter into the confines of fallen human nature. Brakhage’s resolute effort to realize the purgative potential of film has resulted in a body of work deeply concerned with the exploration of subjectivity, and especially with the discovery of what he likes to call “primordial modes of consciousness.”50 From the subjective character of The Dante Quartet follow all its other anomalous aspects: the use of an intensified lyric temporality; the avoidance of narrative (though the “Purgation” section does have a dramatic structure); and the interest in a more elemental form of thinking than reason. Indeed all these subjective features of his art derive from an aesthetic conviction—not so different from Dante’s belief—that the role of art is to stimulate desire for divine vision, to rouse the will to creative action, to engage the imagination in the quest for wisdom. In other words, to impart energeia. To clarify the connections between Brakhage’s mystically charged ideas on art and the aesthetic principles behind Dante’s world-reforming project in the Commedia, I shall follow three lines of inquiry. First, I shall consider how the idea of energeia shaping Dante’s conception of what a poem is (or ideally should be) might lead to the inwardness that marks The Dante Quartet.51 Second, I shall enquire whether the conception of poetry implicit in Dante’s writing has anything in common with open form poetics, which, as I have shown, influenced Brakhage’s understanding of the art of film. Finally, I shall try to explain why The Dante Quartet, withdrawn and introspective though it is, alludes to the imagery of the Commedia in a fascinatingly overdetermined manner. Archibald MacLeish’s famous dictum about the essence of poetry (“A poem should not mean / But be”) would be close to right, I believe, if— and it’s a big if—the metaphysics implicit in it were not so hidebound and constricting.52 His idea of poetry is grounded on a traditional Platonic doctrine of ontological transcendence that Alfred North Whitehead, among other philosophers in Aristotle’s line, has taught us to doubt. Thanks to Whitehead’s skepticism, we can no longer easily accept the metaphysical proposition that a hierarchical Chain of Being exists with a pure unchanging Essence at its top. Its literary corollary is also unacceptable, namely, that a poem can simply “be” in so far as it is perfectly wrought, formally immutable, and therefore akin to Transcendent Being.
420
PART V
TRALUCERE
Whitehead has instructed us, as he instructed the open form poets through the enthusiastic mediation of Olson, that a dynamic conception of reality is closer to the truth because it acknowledges change without privileging the permanent over the impermanent. Even if we share MacLeish’s skepticism about the value of a poem as a semiotic transformer, Whitehead would incline us to say, “A poem should not mean, but act.” I suggest—and Brakhage would certainly insist—that if a poem is truly something dynamic, the key difference between poetic language and ordinary speech is the quality (specifically, the intensity) of its dynamism.53 Brakhage and I would make the same point about film, contrasting the dynamic intensity of cinematic imagery with the casual flow of ordinary visual images. Thanks to Erich Auerbach’s groundbreaking rhetorical studies of the Commedia in the 1940s and 1950s, much scholarly attention has been devoted to the complex aesthetic implications of Dante’s use of direct address to the reader.54 Certainly, we can acknowledge that the poet’s rupturing remarks to the lettor in the liminal cantos on the border of Lower Hell (e.g., Inf. 9.61–3) not only sustain the meditation on poetic language initiated in the Vita Nuova but also anticipate his use of the ineffability topos in the superluminous cantos beyond the Primum Mobile (e.g., Par. 31.136–8 and 33.121–3). In addressing the reader, he creates a communal “here” in opposition to the solitary “there” at the eternal end of his quest. But his use of direct address also indicates that poetic language does something to somebody, that it has a “perlocutionary character” (to adopt a term from Grice). The plausibility of this interpretation becomes more apparent as we consider his lament in De vulgari eloquentia that the illustrious vernacular exists nowhere in act as a dynamic force capable of reforming the world of letters if not the world itself. In the Empyrean, under direct inspiration from God, he discovers that it is his responsibility to bring the illustrious vernacular into being, to actualize it, to release its energeia. When the young Brakhage was formulating his aesthetic ideals, the perlocutionary force of poetic language was attracting considerable interest in critical circles because of its importance to the poetics of Olson and Duncan. Though they couched their exposition of the perlocutionary force of poetry in terms of dynamism, it was not the causal role of the author in poetic creation (as in Romantic poetics) but rather the psychological and social effect of the work on the reader that became the primary focus of their poetic theory. For Olson, who exerted an especially strong influence on Brakhage’s ideas on art and art making, a “poem is energy
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
421
transferred from where the poet got it (he will have several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader.” The key problem of Olson’s poetics was methodological. As he himself put it in his typically propulsive manner: “So: how is the poet to accomplish same energy, how is he, what is the process by which a poet gets in, at all points energy at least the equivalent of the energy which propelled him in the first place, yet an energy which is peculiar to verse alone and which will be, obviously, also different from the energy which the reader, because he is a third term, will take away?”55 This problem is really not so remote from the reception theory of Cicero, Quintilian, Augustine, and Hugh of St. Victor, who all wondered how language could be used by an orator or poet to engender in a listener or reader the same emotion—Olson would say the “same energy”—that initially prompted its expression.56 The methodological solution offered by classical and medieval rhetorical theory was essentially the same as Olson’s and, I would venture to argue, as Dante’s and Brakhage’s resolution to the problem: the poet accomplishes a transference of the same energy through the mobilizing effect of energeia.57 Brakhage is convinced that energeia as a primordial principle of be-ing is conveyed better through non-representational forms, because, as Olson would say, the image constitutes “a dead spot” (an element lacking dynamism) in a work. Brakhage also believes that the mind’s deeper powers are manifested in sensations preceding those that evolve out of perseverant mental representations. Such sensations are simply surges and throbs of energy and are not formed into anything as stable and definite as an image or a concept. But the non-representational thrust of Brakhage’s thinking about primordial emotions and subconscious energies should not obscure the deep connection between his theory of “moving visual thinking” and Dante’s alta fantasia through the aesthetics of energeia. While Olson and Brakhage accept the traditional doctrine that art expresses the subjectivity of the artist, they also refine its psychological implications by arguing that the primary function of art is to transfer the soul’s energeia (the inner dynamics behind thought) from artist to audience. The doctrine can be taken in two directions. If the emphasis is on mental imagery as a form of thought, as Cicero and Quintilian developed it, then the greatness of an artwork can be measured by the vividness of the imagery it elicits. Because our most intensely felt images (of loved ones, say, or of favourite places) tend to be representational, the faithfulness of the image to what it represents becomes a key criterion of aesthetic value.58 Alternatively, if the doctrine is focused on energeia itself, as Duncan and Olson argued, then the content of the artwork becomes the unembodied
422
PART V
TRALUCERE
“open form” underlying all subjectivity in a dynamic yet indefinite state. In this case, since the best way to convey the raw drive behind artistic creation is by non-representational forms, the key criterion of aesthetic value becomes the forcefulness of the art, its subjective dynamism. The deeper its impact on the soul of the artist and audience, the greater its worth as an artwork. The idea that a poem achieves its effects by representing the dynamics of subjectivity is a basic truth for Brakhage, and he could have found it (or at least found it confirmed) in the Commedia. These conjectures are supported by Olson himself in a poetic aphorism on which Brakhage commented at length in a Canadian music journal: “Of rhythm is image. / Of image, is knowing / And of knowing there is a construct.”59 Recalling the traditional scholastic concatenation of sensation, imagination, and intellection, Olson suggests that from primordial experience (rather than sensory experience, as Aristotle had suggested) arise sensory images; from sensory images arise fantasies or thought images; and from thought images emerge the abstract concepts upon which knowledge is based. And what is this rhythm, the primordial experience of which inaugurates the whole process of cognition? Energeia, I suggest. It is the act of being, as Aquinas argued, or, as Dante redefined it in his direct addresses to the reader, the act of being creative. But how does energeia act in a work like The Dante Quartet? By conveying both the process and the products of “moving visual thinking”— namely, the primordial experience of that mysterious subjective dynamism out of which words and images arise—filmmaking reveals the workings of the inner artist who inscribes words and images on the Platonic soul, or the operations of energeia by which potentialities are realized in the Aristotelian soul. Film recreates this energy not through “pictures” (whether these are representations of the contents of consciousness or as images of the objects apprehended by the senses) but through “rhythm” in Olson’s cosmic sense. According to Brakhage, to conceive consciousness as a gallery of mental images is to fail to understand its essential dynamism. Since rhythm activates a dynamic identifiable with the workings of Aristotelian energeia, new possibilities for conveying the subjective dynamism of creativity must surely arise in the art of filmmaking with its intimate complicity of rhythm with visual form. Brakhage (to the dismay of many film critics) likes to argue that film has made the mediation of the “precise, lucid image” unnecessary. What Dante could accomplish only through the mediation of allegorical words and symbolic images, the filmmaker can accomplish without detouring through the products of energeia—the actual forms sustained in existence
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
423
by the principle of be-ing. Here again, Duncan’s ideas about the creative life loom large in the intellectual background of The Dante Quartet. In a lecture delivered in 1965 to mark the seven-hundredth anniversary of Dante’s birth, Duncan contrasted the actualizing impetus of Dantean poetics with the world-condemning ethos of Buddhism and Gnosticism: “In this poetics, the actual world and man are not weavings of a beautiful illusion, as in the Buddhist doctrine of Maia, nor are they in their matter bonds of evil and darkness to meaning, as in the gnostic vision, but the universe and our experience in it are a text that we must learn to read if we are to come to the truth of it and of ourselves.”60 Of the four levels of interpretation defined in the Epistle to Cangrande, the most significant for revealing the driving force behind Dante’s creative life is, in Duncan’s view, the literal—the very level most often overlooked by Dante scholars intent on fashioning grand theological arguments or abstracting mystical secrets from the Commedia. It is certainly not overlooked or discarded by the great poets who have read Dante, however, for they know from the operations of their own creativity, and from the ageold religious expressions of creative life, that mystical meanings can only be attained per litteram, by sensing and understanding the individual “letters” (i.e. the concretely actualized particulars) in the “text” of the universe. “This creative life,” Duncan argued, is a drive towards the reality of Creation, producing an inner world, an emotional and intellectual fiction, in answer to our awareness of the creative reality of the whole. If the world does not speak to us, we cannot speak with it. If we view the literal as a matter of mere fact, as the positivist does, it is mute. But once we apprehend the literal as a language, once things about us reveal depths and heights of meaning, we are involved in the sense of Creation ourselves, and in our human terms, this is Poetry, Making, the inner Fiction of Consciousness. If the actual world be denied as the primary ground and source, that inner fiction can become a fiction of the Unreal, in which not Truth but Wish hides. The allegorical or mystic sense, Dante says in his letter to Can Grande, is the sense which we get through the thing the letter signifies. It is our imagination of what the universe means, and it has its origin in the universe. To put it another way, it is by the faculty of imagination that we come to the significance of the world and of man, imagining what is in order to involve ourselves more deeply in what is.61
Duncan’s argument in this passage resonates with a doctrine central to the medieval world view: the analogical correspondence between mental processes and cosmic movements. His understanding of the mystical
424
PART V
TRALUCERE
level of significance (“It is our imagination of what the universe means, and it has its origin in the universe”) recalls the vacillation between meaning and reality so characteristic of scholastic philosophy. While Aquinas following Aristotle tended to link meaning with the intellect, Duncan associates it primarily with the imagination. In the same lecture, Duncan affirmed the absolute value of the actual or concrete existent and described as “heretical” his identification of the actual with Dante’s literal level of meaning.62 In fact, his doctrine is not so heretical, for we have already seen that Aquinas’s expansion of the compass of actuality to include beings as well as Being is a key to understanding the world view of the later Middle Ages. Also resonant with medieval thought is Duncan’s contention that the inner life and the outer life are not only analogous but mutually constitutive. It is a point made in his poetry as well as in his poetics: Sail, Monarchs, rising and falling orange merchants in spring’s flowery markets! messengers of March in warm currents of news floating, flitting into areas of aroma, tracing out of air unseen roots and branches of sense I share in thought, filaments woven and broken where the world might light casual certainties of me. There are echoes of what I am in what you perform this morning. How you perfect my spirit! almost restore an imaginary tree of the living in all its doctrines by fluttering about, intent and easy as you are, the profusion of you! awakening transports of an inner view of things.63
Duncan’s poetry rings numerous changes on the Dantean theme that to see deeply into something external is to discover the self, and if the self is truly creative, the aesthetic effects of its energy will reflect at once the contents of the world and the contents of consciousness.64 With an ardour reminiscent of Dante’s anagogic excitement on the summit of Purgatory, Duncan expresses his yearning for mystical knowledge as a projection (rather than rejection) of his visio corporalis: Come, eyes, see more than you see! For the world within and the outer world rejoice as one. The seminal brain contains the lineaments of eternity.65
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
425
The readiness with which Dante’s scholastic authorities developed the notion of the active intellect suggests how strongly they believed in the possibility of the direct communication of inwardness. The foundations of their belief had been laid by Aristotle, of course, but also by Augustine, whose notion of the inner life was deeply influenced by Neoplatonic psychology. Noting that different minds can share the same ideas and agree on the same truths, Augustine deduced that certain truths (such as the mathematical idea of oneness or the Idea of Truth itself) must eternally exist beyond the temporal multiplicity of human intellects. The Divine Mind, or God as Truth, therefore instructs all the different minds in creation. As the source of the agreement between minds, God must be our inner illuminator.66 Along with this doctrine, which lies at the epistemological font of Christian Platonism in the Latin West, Augustine also proposed that a power of mutual understanding exists between friends because of their common participation in Divine Reason. The minds of dear friends, he noted, often communicate with one another without a word being uttered.67 Just as for Dante the purpose of a poem is to impart divinely creative energeia through the direct communication of inwardness, so for Brakhage the purpose of a “poetic film” is to impart the deeper layers of thinking from soul to soul. What are these thought processes in “the seminal brain,” these primordial feelings which both conceal and reveal “the lineaments of eternity” but the dynamic pulses and rhythmic rejoicings of energeia itself? These we take as a subjective sign of the immanence of the Divine in the human. Since the intimate relation between the poet’s temporal subjectivity and his timeless poem—an “offspring” of his mind, which nonetheless has the potential to actualize an experience in time—recalls the ontological inseparability of the seed and tree in Aquinas’s analogy, it must also be comparable to the metaphysical identification of God’s essence with His existence. And God’s essence, as Aquinas concluded, is pure energeia in the sense of Life Everlasting, the principle of be-ing without becoming. The text of the poem has the potential to animate the mind of the reader—a potential actualized in the act of interpretation.68 As it is being read, the text transmits energeia like a light flashing upon the soul and satisfying its desire for knowledge. By drawing attention to the perlocutionary effects of the poem, Dante’s direct addresses to the reader stress the transmission of this light from soul to soul. Dante’s long-term view of the Commedia as a “great blaze” enkindled by the “small spark” of his original act of writing down his experiences depends on a fervent scholastic belief that poems, indeed all works of art,
426
PART V
TRALUCERE
are repositories of the psychic equivalent of potential energy (dynamis) which, under divine inspiration, may be converted to actualizing energy (energeia) and transmitted to receptive souls. In other words, the poet’s flash of meaning summons thinking into be-ing.69 Here is St. John of the Cross’s affirmation of the same doctrine: But, when [the soul] does not rest upon [sensory pleasures], but, as soon as the will finds pleasure in that which it hears, sees, and does, soars upward to rejoice in God—so that its pleasure acts as a motive and strengthens it to that end—this is very good. In such a case not only need the said motions not be shunned when they cause this devotion and prayer, but the soul may profit by them, and indeed should so profit, to the end that it may accomplish this holy exercise. For there are souls who are greatly moved by objects of sense to seek God. (Ascent of Mount Carmel 3.24.4)
Since beautiful sounds and visually stimulating objects can engender a higher form of awareness than ordinary sensory perception, energeia transforms not only the artist who transmits it but also the recipient. This, I believe, is what Dante means in the Epistle to Cangrande when he states that the Commedia was conceived “not only for speculation, but with a practical object,” which is “to remove those living in this life from a state of misery, and to bring them to a state of happiness.”70 The poem has a practical object because it is a perlocutionary generator. And it is a perlocutionary generator because it stores up dynamis or potential energy and converts it into energeia or actualized be-ing . THE MAN IN THE DOORWAY
After years of reading and rereading the Commedia, Brakhage doubtless realized that his ideas on art and art making were strikingly similar to Dante’s, and so it was probably to pay tribute to a kindred spirit that he made The Dante Quartet. But to say that the filmmaker makes contact with the poet through his belief in the transformative power of energeia does not mean that his film is only vaguely Dantean in spirit, that it makes no allusions to specific images in the Commedia. While much of Dante’s Inferno is played out in near obscurity—in mist, fog, smoke, and other materials that preclude clarity—“Hell Itself,” the first and most anomalous section of The Dante Quartet, is a beautifully painted work, composed primarily of lucid blues, glowing golds, ruddygolds, and reds, along with occasional splashes of green, all applied to appear like gelatinous streaks against a luminous clear white ground. Laced through these are sinuous lines of a cracked material—India ink,
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
427
I believe. The internal divisions of the section advance towards thicker, more multicoloured forms that occupy a greater portion of the screen, then retreat towards thinner washes of a single colour against a white ground. This colour scheme has little to do with Dante’s Inferno. When questioned about the obvious beauty of “Hell Itself,” Brakhage retorted: “Hell must be beautiful. Otherwise people would not spend so much time there.” This ironic comment echoes a theological warning issued by Duncan in his remarks about Ante-Purgatory in “The Sweetness and Greatness of Dante’s Divine Comedy”: “in the midst of all our too human delite [sic] in whatever partakes of heavenly beauty there is danger if we take no thought of God and our eternal life.”71 If we read Brakhage’s quip seriously in light of his resolute aesthetic opposition to what he calls “picture,” we get the sense of an artist who believes that too great attention to external matters can distract us from concern with inner matters and from interior exploration. His mystical inwardness recalls not only the ruminative mentality of the souls in Dante’s Purgatory but also the meditation of St. John of the Cross on the purgative function of the Dark Night of the Soul: “I shall only add, in order to prove how necessary, for him that would go farther, is the night of the spirit, which is purgation, that none of these proficients, however strenuously he may have laboured, is free, at best, from many of those natural affections and imperfect habits, purification from which, we said, is necessary if a soul is to pass to Divine union” (Dark Night of the Soul 2.2.4 ).72 Though the luminous state of Divine union seems remote from the discontinuous streaks of “Hell Itself,” the second section of The Dante Quartet, “Hell Spit Flexion,” begins with tight tiny coils against a dark ground and light sweeping colours which seem to etherealize towards pure colour dynamics. Brakhage develops his vision of Ante-Purgatory by moving through highly textured yellows and greens to vermilion, along with forms which occasionally suggest a stream of light. In its sequence of colours and iconographic allusions, “Hell Spit Flexion” is clearly patterned on Dante’s painterly description of the Valley of the Princes: Oro e argento fine, cocco e biacca, indaco legno lucido e sereno, fresco smeraldo in l’ora che si fiacca, da l’erba e da li fior, dentr’ a quel seno posti, ciascun saria di color vinto, come dal suo maggiore è vinto il meno. Non avea pur natura ivi dipinto,
428
PART V
TRALUCERE
ma di soavità di mille odori vi facea uno incognito e indistinto. [Gold and fine silver, cochineal and white lead, Indian wood bright and clear, fresh emerald at the moment it is split, would all be surpassed in color, if placed within that valley, by the grass and by the flowers growing there, as the less is surpassed by the greater. Nature had not only painted there, but of the sweetness of a thousand scents she made there one unknown to us and blended.] (Purg. 7.73–81)73
With Virgil and Sordello by his side, Dante waits for the Sun to rise—both literally and spiritually—over the dark night of the souls in this valley. In “Hell Spit Flexion,” however, not even the shade of a human being can be glimpsed in the background of the painting. Recognizable pictorial shapes disappear altogether, including the botanical forms of flowers and grass. Yet, even as Dante’s scintillating combination of gold (“oro”) with scarlet (“cocco”) and white (“biacca”) is recreated in Brakhage’s colour field, so the mystical implications of the poet’s prelapsarian palette remain in the filmmaker’s “luminous air” [cf. aere luminoso] (Purg. 29.23). The exotic jewel tones of the Valley of the Princes anticipate the dazzling dance of colours in the River of Light streaming down from the Empyrean, which is envisioned as “rich in grasses and flowers” [nel verde e ne’ fioretti opimo] (Par. 30.111); similarly, the flashes of clear light pouring into the reds and greens and golds of Brakhage’s Ante-Purgatory look ahead to the rhythmic illuminations in the third section of the film. “Purgation” is something of a palimpsest, the painted forms appearing mainly over the image of a man in a doorway, which clearly recalls Dante’s passage through the Gate of Purgatory (Purg. 9.76–145). Just as painful contrition blends with ecstatic joy in the emotional lives of the souls on the other side of this Gate, so two sets of colours are opposed in the dynamic painting of “Purgation”: luminous blues against a light ground on the one hand; and on the other, curving skeins of white resembling the India ink cracks in “Hell Itself.” Opposition between the two sets of colours also develops spatially. While the frames painted with the lighter colours are axially organized so that different tonal qualities appear on the left and right sides of the central vertical axis, the frames showing white lines against a black ground are painted with all-over forms. A dramatic conflict between these two sets of colours and spatially distinguished forms develops as the lighter forms assert themselves, pushing back the darker ones, which are in turn pushed back, until they assert themselves again, and again fall back. And so it goes. The clash of colours and forms engenders in “Purgation” a miniature drama, a kind of nar-
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
429
rative suggesting the passage of time. In his note on The Dante Quartet, Brakhage glosses “purgation” as “transition.”74 In view of this tactical definition, we should not be surprised that the third section of the film evokes the dynamic transitional character of Dante’s second cantica, which constantly alludes—by way of contrast—to the static dead-endedness of the Inferno. (Compare, for instance, the expectant mood of the Princes in Ante-Purgatory with the perpetual frustration of the Noble Pagans in Limbo.) The purgatorial sense of passing time is reinforced by the occasional interruption of movement. At first Brakhage achieves this effect by holding a frame still, then fading to black. Later in the section, he holds on a darker image without fading to black, and then gradually introduces a passage of lighter images. Assuming that these opposing sets of colours have moral significance, we might easily suppose that whatever is being purged in “Purgation” is represented by the dark images. However, if we recall that for Brakhage the luminous beauty of “Hell Itself” threatens to distract the soul from the quest for wisdom, then we should probably question our reflexive associations of dark with evil or ignorance, and light with virtue or knowledge. Indeed, the darker, more heavily impastoed sections in the film may represent for Brakhage the deepening of mystical understanding— an interpretation consistent with Dante’s association of darkness with meditative concentration and spiritual focus throughout Purgatorio. “I made for me the shade that lessens excess of light,” the poet explains upon raising his hands over his eyebrows when a sudden burst of angelic light blinds him on the Second Cornice [fecimi ’l solecchio, / che del soverchio visibile lima] (Purg. 15.14–15). After climbing to the next ledge, he enters into a dark cloud for a moment reminiscent of the polluted atmosphere of Hell. But purgatorial darkness is not demonic obscurity. Rather, it is a shadowy preface of the “Darkness which is beyond light” identified by Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite as the mystical state of mind preceding divine illumination. St. John of the Cross associated it with the first theological virtue: “It is clear, then, that faith is dark night for the soul, and it is in this way that it gives light; and the more the soul is darkened, the greater is the light that comes to it.”75 The darkness of the inner life itself is not what becomes visible at the end of “Purgation.” The final image in the section is a frozen frame subtly mediating between the passages of dark and light, which suggests that Brakhage’s aim is to strike a balance between outward perception and imaginative vision. Indeed, what mediates between the conflicting colours and forms here is morally significant for the whole film. As one or other
430
PART V
TRALUCERE
of the opposing forms begins to assert itself, a painted form of a third sort—composed of dense impasto in ochre or ruddy tones comparable to a highly textured bolus ground—almost always appears. As the conflict between dark and light plays itself out, the ruddy forms develop now towards, now away from, axial composition. If they advance towards the axis, the lighter forms begin to dominate the screen; but if they recede from it, the darker forms gain the upper hand. Like the dynamics of repetition and inversion in Purgatorio 20, which opposes yet also fuses the sweetness of the Nativity story with the bitterness of satiric reflections on dynastic history, the clashing design of “Purgation” reveals in miniature the form-synthesizing power of the cosmos itself. While Dante understood this power in Aristotelian terms, Brakhage conceived it as a mystical mating of opposites in accordance with open form poetics. “Poems then are immediate presentations of the intention of the whole,” noted Duncan, “the great poem of all poems, a unity, and in any two of its elements or parts appearing as a duality or a mating, each part in every other having, if we could see it, its condition—its opposite or contender and its satisfaction or twin. Yet in the composite of all members we see no duality but the variety of the one.”76 Perhaps the mating of dark with light at the end of “Purgation” is intended to purge the filmmaker’s (and the viewer’s) soul of anxieties resulting from the tumult of opposing forces in the world. The beneficent effect of perceiving “the variety of the one” amid the diversity of painted forms flows from the mystical understanding—an imaginative intuition shared by Dante—that all the momentous dualities and minute conflicts in life are really only passages in a vast cosmopoetic process tending towards unity. The colour scheme in “Purgation” is morally significant in another Dantean sense. The range of shades chosen for the lighter images conforms to the colours of the three steps leading up to the Gate of Purgatory: Là ne venimmo; e lo scaglion primaio bianco marmo era sì pulito e terso, ch’io mi specchiai in esso qual io paio. Era il secondo tinto più che perso, d’una petrina ruvida e arsiccia, crepata per lo lungo e per traverso. Lo terzo, che di sopra s’ammassiccia, porfido mi parea, sì fiammeggiante come sangue che fuor di vena spiccia. [We then came on, and the first step was white marble so polished and clear that I mirrored myself in it in my true likeness; the second was
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
431
darker than perse and was of a stone rugged and burnt, cracked in its length and in its breadth. The third, which lies massy above, seemed to me of porphyry as flaming red as blood that spurts from a vein.] (Purg. 9.94–102)
If Brakhage had a particular transition in mind when he was painting “Purgation,” it was probably Dante’s movement up these three tropologically colour-coded steps and through the Gate. This initiatory connection with the poem would explain the prevalence of the ruddy-hued forms towards the end of the third section. The two subsequent tercets in the passage, I think, lie behind Brakhage’s choice of the photograph of the man in the doorway: Sovra questo tenëa ambo le piante l’angel di Dio sedendo in su la soglia che mi sembiava pietra di diamante. Per li tre gradi sù di buona voglia mi trasse il duca mio, dicendo: “Chiedi umilemente che ’l serrame scoglia.” [Upon this step the angel of God held both his feet, seated upon the threshold that seemed to me to be of adamant. Up by the three steps, with my good will, my leader drew me, saying, “Beg him humbly that he withdraw the bolt.”] (Purg. 9.103–8)
Though no angel appears in the film, the angelic threshold, with its celestial flash of “diamante,” is perhaps suggested by the white lines Brakhage painted over the image of the doorway. The dynamic final section, “existence is song,” consists of forms which seem to surge downwards through the screen, and sometimes upwards, as though by reaction, in a wave-like movement often superimposed over images of a volcano or of some unidentifiable spherical form. Like “Purgation,” “existence is song” is divided by freeze-frames into clearly defined subsections. In each, the wavelike action is presented several times. First a blue-and-white form surges down the screen, and then, in successive waves, yellow, gold, and even black forms are introduced. As befits the motif of the celestial journey, which Brakhage evokes with the spherical forms and surging clouds of blue in “existence is song,” the conclusion to The Dante Quartet is transposed into the temporal mode of intensified lyricism. In this temporality the immutable Now of the Divine Mind is approached, and the brilliance of an enlarged present begins to eclipse and may eventually even annihilate past and future. When Dante passes from the World of Becoming through the River of
432
PART V
TRALUCERE
Light to the Rose, all his mental energies are consumed in the immediacy of perception—without recollection or anticipation. An ecstatic mode of temporal experience is engendered in the pilgrim (and subsequently in his readers) through which each successive moment presents itself as another instant in “the continuous coming-on of novelty.”77 But this visionary esperienza brings with it a realization that with each successive instant, the “now” just before it must die—as though slain by the very novelty of this “coming-on”—to give way to the eruption of another moment of ecstasy. Behind Brakhage’s experience of the intensified lyrical mode lies Duncan’s Dantean conception of the creative process as the poetic manifestation of energeia: The configuration of It in travail: giving birth to Its Self, the Creator, in Its seeking to make real—the dance of the particles in which stars, cells and sentences form; the evolving and changing species and individualizations of the Life code, even the persons and works of Man; giving birth within Its Creation to the Trinity of Persons we creatures know, within which the Son, “He,” is born and dies, to rise as the morning forever announces, the Created Self, Who proclaims the Father, first known as he named Himself to be Wrath, Fiery Vengence [sic] and Jealousy, to be made or revealed anew as Love, the lasting reason and intent of What Is—this deepest myth of what is happening in Poetry moves us as it moves words.78
As the Son, the Creator’s “Self,” is being born, everything is drawn towards the cosmos-engendering activity of dance. Visible in the patterned movements of stars and cells and particles are the dynamics of an incarnational and incarnated energeia hardly different in essence from the radiance streaming from the self-actualized divinity in scholastic theology. But the dance, as an erotic form, requires sacrifice. In Brakhage’s construction of time, the present moment must die. This sacrifice ensures that the Whole may be renewed and eternalized in God’s Consequent Nature which, as Whitehead pointed out, is primarily aesthetic in its manifestations. At the microcosmic level of human life the self too must die—like its incarnate prototype in the Trinity—so that each of us may enter into the dance and experience the unfolding of the Divine Plan. A visual construction appearing several times in “existence is song” clearly indicates the dense intertextuality of The Dante Quartet. As an image combining representational and non-representational elements, it may not be typical of the film as a whole, but I dare say that it is what most people are likely to recall after seeing the work for the first time.
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
433
This memorable construction consists of a layer of expressionist painting, of extraordinary beauty, underneath which appears footage of a series of fiery explosions. To use flames in the heavenly section of the film is certainly in keeping with the iconography of Paradiso. Dante enters into the Empyrean or “Fiery Sphere” after ascending through the nine heavens of the temporal world in his quest to attain the Beatific Vision. Fire is the predominant image in the empyreal cantos. Beatrice’s illuminating love is compared to “a sudden flash of lightning” [sùbito lampo] (Par. 30.46); the faces of the angels are ablaze with “living flame” [fiamma viva] (Par. 31.13); and Mary is hailed as the “noonday torch of charity” [meridïana face di caritate] (Par. 33.10–11). By placing the fiery explosions near the joyously sweet end of The Dante Quartet, Brakhage may well be looking back to “the burning without measure” [lo ’ncendio sanza metro] (Purg. 27.51), through which Dante and all other heavenbound souls must pass in their purifying ascent from the Cornice of Lust to the Earthly Paradise. This was the “fire that refines them” [foco che li affina] (Purg. 26.148) within which the repentant shade of the Provençal love-poet Arnaut Daniel hid himself, anticipating the mystical concealment of the Blessed within the flames of Divine Glory. But the intertextual radiance of Brakhage’s fire imagery in “existence is song” extends well beyond Dante’s Empyrean to the flamboyantly allusive world of Ezra Pound. In the second chapter of his book on the Troubadours, The Spirit of Romance, Pound comments on Arnaut Daniel’s use of the verb esmirar (to refine) in relation to Dante’s reference to the refining foco on the Seventh Cornice—a fire clearly enkindled there to transmute sexual desire into spiritual ardour. Pound knew that Dante imagined purgatorial fire as the element of transformation, the supernatural medium through which suffering is turned into song. If Pound’s influence on Brakhage extends to Brakhage’s reading of Dante, as no doubt it does, then we should expect the significance of the fiery passages in The Dante Quartet to be refined by Pound’s typological erudition. Indeed, Brakhage brought his Poundian understanding of typology to bear on the structuring of the film by paralleling the painted-over images at the end of “Purgation” with those at the end of “existence is song.” Since Brakhage is committed to the modern proposition that ardent sexual desire is among the highest forms of love, the medieval contrast between inflaming lust and refining love is not especially relevant to the psychological significance of The Dante Quartet. A hint of what the fire imagery might signify in the fourth section may be found in an earlier Brakhage film entitled The Fire of Waters. This curious title comes from a
434
PART V
TRALUCERE
letter to Brakhage from the poet Robert Kelly, who observed “that man lives in a fire of water and will eternally in the first taste.” Brakhage decided that Kelly’s oracular line must refer to the biological-experiential conditions in which we have our being, that the water is our nearly liquid constitution and the fire the “sparking of the synapses” that ignite experience.79 This poetic conceit makes fire intermediate between self and world, as if it were the quasi-mental, quasi-spiritual agent that animates matter. We might even stretch a point and refer to it as the energeia of our bodies. From Duncan, Brakhage learned that thought takes place in bodily processes and that corporeal morphology determines imagination. “Man’s myths move in his poetry as they move in his history,” argued Duncan, as in the morphology of the body all his ancient evolution is rehearsed and individualized; all of vertebrate imagination moves to create itself anew with his spine. Families of men like families of gods are the creative grounds of key persons. And all mankind share the oldest gods as they share the oldest identities of the germinal cell…God strives in all creation to come to himself. The Gods men know are realizations of God. But what I speak of here in the terms of a theology is a poetics. Back of each poet’s concept of the poem is his concept of the meaning of form itself.80
For Duncan, the flow of language, especially poetic language, re-enacts the cosmic dance by resolving elemental life energies into a dynamic harmony.81 For Brakhage, the flow of moving colour in film does the same. And for both artists, poetry, painting, film, and the other arts imitate nature in their mode of operation by transmitting energeia (the principle of be-ing) from “the meaning of form itself” (the Divine conceived in the artist’s soul) to the world at large. The painted-over images in “existence is song” may be viewed as a kind of palimpsest: a new aesthetic vision inscribed on an erasure. Following Brakhage, I have constructed my own Dante films as a palimpsest inscribed on the erasure of Pound’s Cantos, which was itself inscribed on the erasure of Dante’s Commedia, which, if we care to stretch the point, was inscribed on the erasure of Virgil’s Aeneid, which in turn was inscribed on the erasure of Homer’s Odyssey. How much like lyrical temporality, the essence of which is the sacrifice allowing novelty to emerge, is the ongoing experience of this creative ritual of succession! From the long-range perspective of cultural history, the form of the palimpsest seems entirely appropriate to a cinematic rendering of Dante’s masterwork. Brakhage’s use of the palimpsest is also consonant with the religious tenor (if not the
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
435
hermetic expression) of Duncan’s ideas on the nature of creativity itself. “To read the universe as a palimpsest,” Duncan affirmed, “from which one writing has been erased to make room for another,” and yet to find the one writing in the other, is to see history anew as a drama in which the One is in the many acts enacting Himself, in which there is an Isis in history, history itself being her robe of many colors and changes, working to restore in many parts the wholeness of What Is as Osiris. This is a form that exists only in the totality of being, a form in our art that exists only in the totality of that art’s life; so that in any particular work this work appears as faith or on faith.82
Such faith has two aesthetic consequences, both evident in the work of Duncan and Brakhage. First, the sacerdotal conception of creativity as sacrifice decisively offsets the ironic mode of allegory so much in vogue during the twentieth century. Neither Duncan nor Brakhage is an ironist. Second, the artistic drive to participate in “the wholeness of What Is” leads away from fashionable postmodern fragmentation back towards the totalizing world view of classical and medieval metaphysics. A tendency of postmodernist art and literature, from the 1960s on, has been to deny the image the transcendental status that it possessed from antiquity to the Romantic era.83 Both Brakhage and Duncan strive to make abstract works that transcend the flux of phenomena, to construct a unitive vision of the Creator and Creation, through perfecting the coherence of the parts of the image and, thereby, deepening its connection to the Logos. Art created in the mode of presentational immediacy all too easily slides towards solipsistic idealism. Since artists striving for intensified lyricism usually assume that meanings are divinely inscribed in what we behold, that we discover the self when we see deeply into something external, their work tends to represent the mind as the only real nature, the only guarantor of true presence. Duncan evinces this tendency in his poetry, as does Brakhage in his films. In attempting to recreate Dante’s Book of the Universe, Duncan and Brakhage end up producing a purely ideal construct of their own subjectivity. The result for both is a radically subjective oeuvre celebrating the triumph of their own imaginations. The intense inwardness of their aesthetic faith helps to explain Brakhage’s conflicted response to the common assumption that cinema is essentially a photographic medium. He finds that his experience of things hardly accords with their outward appearance, of which merely the illuminated surfaces are captured by photography. What he strives to capture in his films is something quite removed from the photographable world—
436
PART V
TRALUCERE
namely, “the form that exists in the totality of being,” the divine force field hidden beneath the universal palimpsest. Discerning a connection between idealism and the divine inscription of meaning, Duncan was remarkably aware of Dante’s understanding of its metaphysical basis in the operations of energeia. With an enthusiasm stemming from his recognition of the supreme aesthetic importance his great predecessor had placed on the actual, he extolled the literal level of meaning in the following rhapsodic gloss on the Epistle to Cangrande: This doctrine of the literal, the immediate and embodied sense, as the foundation of all others, is striking to the modern poet, for it very much is the meaning of the insistence of the Imagists upon the image in its direct presentation, from which all meanings may flow, as the primary in poetry, and of the abhorrence of all abstractions [note the Poundian inflections] if they be divorced from the primal reality of the incarnation. Not only in Theology but in Poetry too, something goes awry if in our adoration of the Logos we lose sense of or would be cut loose from the living body and passion of Man in the actual universe.84
The exaltation of the literal level became an aesthetic credo for Duncan reminiscent of the fiery conclusion of Dante’s credo in the Heaven of the Fixed Stars (Par. 24.145–7): “With Dante, I take the literal, the actual, as the primary ground. We ourselves are literal, actual beings. This is the hardest ground for us to know, for we are of it—not outside, observing, but inside, experiencing. It is, finally, I believe, the only ground for us to know; for it is Creation, it is the Divine Presentation, it is the language of experience whose words are immediate to our senses; from which our own creative life takes fire, within which our own creative life takes fire.”85 The allusions to Duncan’s poetics throughout The Dante Quartet reveal Brakhage’s transgressive adherence to the unfashionably premodern doctrine that energeia transmutes confusion into beauty, suffering into song. The trial by fire at the end of the film teaches us that existence, which we may identify with energeia—with Aquinas’s actus and Dante’s atto—is inseparable from the song of creation driving the cosmic dance. Or as Eliot put it in the most Dantean of his Four Quartets: we are “redeemed from fire by fire” (“Little Gidding” IV.7).86 The redeeming fire is the energeia of experience moving all things to their destiny, which is to be in God’s Light.
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
437
NOTES 1 On the conversion of the plastic elements of painting into “mental plasm,” see Newman (1990), 155. 2 See Brakhage’s note on the film in the catalogues of the New York FilmMakers’ Cooperative or the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from the Commedia are drawn from the Petrocchi edition as reprinted and slightly revised by Singleton (1970–75). Unless otherwise noted, translations are by Singleton (1970–75). The components of the Commedia cited from are Inferno (Inf.), Purgatorio (Purg.), and Paradiso (Par.). Also cited are Convivio (Conv.) and De vulgari eloquentia (DVE). 3 Duncan (1965) devotes several pages of his lecture on The Divine Comedy to the Ante-Purgatory cantos, while Brakhage devotes an entire section of The Dante Quartet (“Hell Spit Flexion”) to them. 4 Olson (1967), 52. 5 Duncan, in fact, referred more often to “open field poetry” than to “open form poetry” in discussions of his poetics. His frequent comments on “composition by the field” indicate that the idea of the “field” underlies much of his work. 6 Duncan (1984), 98–99. 7 Duncan (1984), 100–101. 8 The open form poets used Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy to help work out an ontological model on which the subject is an object “operated” by forces that transcend the subject. 9 Duncan (1984), 54. This passage leads me to suspect that Duncan did not have a very American conception of film. The highest sort of film, in his opinion, was the work of Ingmar Bergman. 10 Raised in a house of hermetic practitioners, Duncan continued to take an interest in arcana all his life. His work was deeply influenced by the occultism of Ezra Pound, whose coterie believed that Dante’s strong interest in the Troubadours and the Templars indicated a covert adherence to their unorthodox mystical traditions. 11 To explain Brakhage’s avoidance of language, one might be tempted to follow the lead of postmodern critics who have stressed the Derridean implications of Dante’s comments on vision outstripping language: e.g., Tambling (1988). The temptation should be resisted, I believe, because deconstructive interpretations of Dante are almost wholly wrong. In De vulgari eloquentia, (e.g., 2.1.1, 2.3.9) Dante hails poetry as the supreme art form because it is capable of conveying almost all truths. All we need to know about Dante’s ultimate view on this issue may be inferred from his discourse with St. Bernard in the Empyrean: even when the poet is on the verge of experiencing the Beatific Vision, he retains the ability to rebut opposing views with syllogisms. Though the Paradiso effectively blurs the distinction between poetic language and philosophical or theological discourse, Dante insists on the supreme capacity of poetic language to activate the potential of words to induce vision and to transform life (like the Word in John 1:1). Though he is certainly aware of the deceptive potential of parola ornata or “ornate poetic language,” he draws a crucial distinction between Jason’s or even Virgil’s seductive eloquence and the parole
438
12
13 14
15
16
17
18
PART V
TRALUCERE
sante or “holy words” of Bernard: see Botterill (1996), 154–55. Though Botterill’s insistence on the distinction is sound, I disagree with his understanding of parola ornata as necessarily immoral in contrast with the perfectly moral character of parole sante. The inferiority of the former, he argues (158), lies in its capacity to falsify truth. But surely Dante’s extensive use of the ineffability topos in Paradiso simply suggests that language has a higher aesthetic purpose than to be dazzlingly ornate or sensuously pleasing. Dante’s main rhetorical concern is not that language be simple or clear and therefore “true,” but that, on the model of the Divine Word, it be dynamically creative. To be truly poetic, words must be capable of po¯esis. They must have energeia in so far as they are “active” in realizing the Divine Plan to reform or recreate the Fallen World. Ornate language can certainly be active in this salvific sense, as Statius reveals in his remarks on the illuminating effect of Virgil’s Messianic Eclogue (Eclogues IV) in Purg. 22.70–2. Ornate language that is not salvific either denies its creative efficacy or directs it to evil ends so that its energeia is not what it seems. Even Dante’s own mastery of parola ornata in his dolce stil novo love poems had to be repudiated (in Purg. 2 and 26) because its sensuous beauty simply distracted him and his readers from their purgatorial quest to burn with Divine Love. In most important respects, his views on ornate language resemble Bernard’s well-known views on church ornamentation. For an analysis of the latter, see Eco (1988), 9–12. Though I do take some of what Dante says about the limitations of language in Paradiso as a mere topos, the poet also clearly expresses his ardent hope that his words will provide efficacious access to the City of God, just as the angel’s mercurial wand afforded Virgil and the pilgrim miraculous entry to the City of Dis. Brakhage’s most extended statement against “picture” is to be found in “The Domain of Aura,” a long manuscript written partly in response to my use of “picture” in The Book of All the Dead. The manuscript is unpublished. Eliot ([1929] 1965), 22, 29. The correspondence between the pilgrim’s route (corso) and the poet’s text (testo) is highlighted by Dante himself in his response to Brunetto’s prophecy: “That which you tell me of my course I write, and keep with a text to be glossed by a lady who will know how, if I reach her” [Ciò che narrate di mio corso scrivo, / e serbolo a chiosar con altro testo / a donna che saprà, s’a lei arrivo] (Inf. 15.88–90). I am thinking here especially of the poet’s “single moment” [punto solo] (Par. 33.94) of ecstatic union with God immediately preceding the divine conception of the poem in his mind. In other words, I cannot accept the poet’s claim that because the Commedia really was composed retrospectively following his Divine Vision, it is not like other poems or fictional works which only pretend to present events as they are actually occurring. The great monologues of Ulysses (Inf. 26.90–142) and Justinian (Par. 6.1–142) are two such passages, though the political themes expressed by these two souls are echoed by many other speakers throughout the poem. Justinian’s survey of imperial history literally does stand alone since it occupies an entire canto. “From Canto CXV,” line 10, in Pound (1970), 794.
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
439
19 “Notes for Canto CXX,” line 1, in Pound (1972), 803. 20 See charts 1–4 in Ferrante (1993), 154–57. 21 Mandonnet (1935). For a refutation of Mandonnet’s thesis that Dante was an impeccably orthodox Thomist philosopher, see Gilson (1948), 225–81. 22 On the Paragone or “comparison” between the visual and verbal arts, see Part I of Leonardo On Painting (1989), 20–46. Leonardo’s theory of the primacy of vision was deeply influenced by Neoplatonic commentaries on Plato’s discussion of the operations of eyesight in the Phaedrus—that strange and wondrous dialogue which resembles the Commedia in many important ways. Conversing with the young rhetoric student Phaedrus during a country walk outside the walls of Athens, Socrates stressed the relation of image and word to memory (subjectivity). According to Socrates, the Egyptian god Thoth “invented number and calculation, geometry and astronomy, not to speak of draughts and dice, and above all else, writing” (Phaedrus 274d). When the Egyptian ruler Thamus questioned the value of the latter invention, Thoth defended it thus: “Here, O king, is a branch of learning that will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memory: my discovery provides a recipe for memory and wisdom” (274e). Rejecting this argument, Thamus predicted that writing would inevitably implant forgetfulness in his subjects’ minds by replacing memories with mere reminders. With this myth Socrates taught Phaedrus about the danger of using words or pictures that have no adequate representations within the soul. Socratic dialectic, therefore, can only work as a method of conveying knowledge from one mind to another when words or images are connected with an adequately developed internal representation. Since this connection requires the use of words in the context of a genuine exchange of knowledge, Socrates praises the sort of knowledge that comes to be “written” as a memory in the soul of the learner. From his viewpoint, then, a written word resembles an image not only because it is external to the mind but also because it can be employed without any adequately developed internal representation to authorize its use. “You know, Phaedrus,” he concludes (275d), “that’s the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting [i.e, ‘the drawing of a living being’]. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive: but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence.” 23 For the sake of concision, I have excised Socrates’s speech from its conversational context. Like other interlocutors in Plato’s dialogues, Phaedrus is called upon to participate with Socrates in the excavation of truth. 24 Sometimes the best translation of energeia as an Aristotelian term is “being,” which may explain why Thomist philosophers in the 1950s were fond of saying that Thomas Aquinas (who adopted and extended Aristotle’s ideas on energeia) was the precursor of the modern philosophers of existence as “being.” On Spinoza as a philosopher of “be-ing,” see Weinpahl (1979), Deleuze (1990), and Negri (1991). 25 For Aristotle’s distinction between kin¯esis and energeia, see Metaphysics 9.6 and Nicomachean Ethics 10.4. While kin¯esis refers to a process not yet completed or concluded, energeia denotes an activity complete in itself. When the eye is glancing at something, it is “kinetic”; but when it has seen all that it can see of something, it has reached a state of actualization or energeia.
440
PART V
TRALUCERE
26 Blair (1967), 106ff. 27 The key passage in which Dante refers to this Aristotelian concept is Purg. 4.1–12, but see also Purg 17.92–6. For Dante’s allusion to the Aristotelian passage on the process of sight, see Par. 26.70–5. Also relevant to his understanding of energeia are Par. 1.115–26, 2.19–24, 2.139–41, 8.115–26, 28.64–78, 28.112–14, and 29.22–37. Though a “natural thirst” for knowledge [sete natural] (Purg. 21.1) is born within us, it can be satisfied only through God’s grace or revelation. Hence, it is the driving force behind Dante’s intellectual ascent in the Commedia. 28 The Platonic relation of external representations (words or images) to internal representations (memories or thoughts) in dialectical interchanges anticipates, to some degree, the Aristotelian relation between body (matter) and soul (form) in hylomorphic compounds. 29 Traces of this Aristotelian insight can be detected in Augustine’s famous distinction between outward vision, visio corporalis, and two kinds of inward vision, visio spiritualis and visio intellectualis. In his literal commentary on Genesis, he explains the distinction with an example drawn from his own practice as a reader of the Scriptures. Let us consider how we can read the scriptural injunction “Love thy neighbour.” First we see the text before our bodily eyes by activating our visio corporalis. If we then picture our neighbour though he is absent, we have made use of our visio spiritualis. And finally, if we see what Paul meant by charity, or if we contemplate love as a divine principle, our visio intellectualis has been called into play. The text is beheld corporeally, the neighbour spiritually, and love intellectually. “Corporeal vision, indeed, does not oversee any operations of the other two kinds of vision,” Augustine continues in De Genesi ad litteram 12.11.22, 191: “rather, the object perceived by it is announced to the spiritual vision, which acts as an overseer. For when an object is seen by the eyes, an image of it is immediately produced in the spirit. But this representation is not perceived unless we remove our eyes from the object that we are gazing at through the eyes and find an image of it within our soul.” But all seeing, finally, is spiritual when considered from this angle. If the consequences of Aristotle’s theory of energeia are worked out along these lines, a system of mystical forces emerges closely resembling the metaphysics and aesthetics of Meister Eckhart. For Eckhart’s discussion of the relation of ideas to words and images, see Selections from the Commentary on John, 130–35. According to Eckhart, the ideas subsisting in the Divine Mind and radiating down into human minds are explicitly defined not as archetypes or exemplars or standards or prototypes, but as operative principles, i.e., activities or “energies.” His forthright argument that the power of words derives from the creative activity of the original Word brings us very close to the poetic theories of Olson and Brakhage. 30 These links are based in perception, Aristotle believed, which helps to explain the empiricist cast of his philosophy. 31 Aristotle, however, did not accord the imagination (phantasia) an active synthesizing role in either perception or intellection. Since he believed that mental images or “visualizations” (phantasiai), like paintings, were basically unreal, he doubted that these could arouse any emotional response in the soul that
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
32
33
34
35
36 37
441
created them. The synthetic role of the imagination was not to be acknowledged philosophically until Thomas Hobbes formulated the key principles of associationist psychology. Cf. Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus 1.120–37, 48–49: “The painting faithfully fastens its attention on its special project so that its representation of the subject may the less depart from reality. Oh painting with your new wonders! What can have no real existence comes into being and painting, aping reality and diverting itself with a strange art, turns the shadows of things into things and changes every lie to truth.” Alan’s conception of the imagination is virtually the same as Descartes’s. Hence the basis of Descartes’s radical doubt: How do we know that we aren’t dreaming or imagining the things we think we’re sensing? Quintilian stresses that the poet must be able to put himself into the situation he describes in order to present it vividly. For Dante’s view on this issue, see Rime 69.52–53: “Poi chi pinge figura, / se non può esser lei, non la può porre” [thus he who paints a form, if he cannot “be” it, cannot set it down] (132). Such views were not so much rhetorical variations on “pure” Aristotelian themes as constructive reactions to the Aristotelian assertion that mimesis entailed an element of free creation. Roman rhetoricians developed their theory of consciousness and creativity by laying greater emphasis on the notions of energeia and entelecheia than Aristotle himself did in his psychology. For instance, Maximus of Tyre (Orations 11.3) and Pseudo-Longinus (On the Sublime 15.1) both emphasized the role of the imagination in philosophical inquiry and poetic imitation. Callistratus (Descriptions 7.1), Dio Chrysostom (Discourse 12.71), and Seneca (Epistle 65.7) all highlighted the inner model of the represented object and developed the notion of art as imaginative expression. Horace (The Art of Poetry 9–11) and Lucian (How to Write History 9) both stressed the freedom of the “maker,” who need not slavishly imitate natural objects or operations. The importance of inspiration was asserted by Callistratus (Descriptions 2.1) and Lucian (In Praise of Demosthenes 5), while the crucial role of invention in art making was proposed by Sextus Empiricus (Against the Professors 1.297). Most important of all, Flavius Philostratus (The Life of Apollonius of Tyana 1.2) advanced the claim that the prophetic imagination, since it can represent things unseen, must be “wiser” than the mere capacity to imitate things in the visible world. Plato, he recounts, “travelled into Egypt, and blended with his doctrines many opinions collected there from the priests and prophets, like a painter who improves his sketches with new colouring.” Dante uses imagine and imaginativa (Purg. 17.7, 13, 21, 31) in a way that does not distinguish clearly between the power of forming mental images and the mental images themselves. Didascalicon 1.3, 49–50. If energeia (principle of be-ing) = imagination, and if imagination = active representations (words and images), and if active representations = thinking, then this compound equation provides for that splendid integration of imagination and reason which gives the Commedia its distinctive character as a work of cosmopoesis. Since medieval thinkers tended to construe words and images as analogous representations of things, they also believed that pictures could
442
38
39 40
41
42 43
44 45 46
PART V
TRALUCERE
provide images of narratives designed to demonstrate the truths of the intellect. By linking instruction with delight, pictures permitted such truths to be apprehended by the unlettered. Summa theologiae 1.34.1, 27. Following Aquinas’s philosophy of language, Dante-poet presents his words as issuing “from an act of the imagination” [ex imaginatione]: namely, the energizing of Dante-pilgrim’s spiritual vision by the infusion of the high fantasy from God. Gazing on Beatrice’s luminous eyes, Dante is able to see the divine gloria (in the sense of the Creator’s energeia: Par. 1.1) permeating the universe. The poet’s creative vision of God’s glory implies that energeia is essentially subjective for ensouled creatures since it is the principle of their individual be-ing. Hence, the great appeal of the idea of active reason for the great scholastics—even though it entered European philosophy largely through the heresy-provoking commentaries of Averroes. The doctrine of the pervasive psychological influence of energeia provided Dante with a ready explanation for the intersubjectivity of higher intelligences and for the astrological influence so often mentioned in the Commedia. This idea is also embedded in the Greek language itself: the verb graphein can mean either “to write” or “to draw.” Plotinus (Enneads 4.5.6) identifies the energeia that gives form to the individual human subject with the active principle informing visual and verbal representation. He also argues that the interior idea is the perfect representation of a fundamental principle of nature, which the artist strives to embody in a resistant medium or intractable material. Medieval philosophers inherited the Neoplatonic idea that artworks developed out of exemplary ideas in the artist’s mind. Aquinas, for one, argues that an artistic idea exists as an image in the artist’s mind (Scriptum super Sententiis Magistri Petri Lombardi, bk. III, dist. 27, q. 2, a. 4, 3 ad 1). “In such a case, the operative intellect when preconceiving the form of what was made, possesses as an idea the very form of the thing imitated,” he explains (De veritate 3.2, 148). As if to stress a connection between this process and energeia, he goes on to conclude (De veritate 3.5, 160) that “there is no idea corresponding merely to matter or merely to form; but one idea corresponds to the entire composite—an idea that causes the whole, both its form and its matter.” For a rejection of this interpretation of Aquinas’s metaphysics and its consequences for his aesthetics, see Eco (1988), 69. I believe that Eco is wrong. On the one hand, he makes Aquinas out to be a formalist aesthetician, and on the other, points out the deficiencies in Aquinas’s remarks on aesthetic form. All biblical references are from the Authorized King James Version unless otherwise noted. Aquinas’s insight that a sacred action pervading all things with the sense of Real Presence is the original revelation of the Incarnation in the Eucharist underlies D.G. Leahy’s Thomistically inspired discussion of the cosmic missa jubilaea in his wonderful Novitas mundi. Notice in this passage how subject and object are moved together. This principle, I believe, is essentially the same as Dantean amore. For a very Heideggerian reading of the Commedia, see Franke (1996). While I agree with the thrust of his argument, he does overlook the basis of Dante’s
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
47
48
49 50
51
52
53
54 55 56 57
443
belief in the power of language to unveil being (in the Aquinian sense) as energeia. That belief surely underlies the invocation “O divina virtù” [O divine Power] (Par. 1.22), which Dante addresses to Apollo, the pagan figura of God, whose intellectual light is required to actualize the creation of the entire Commedia. To put it more precisely: we are presented only with cinematic forms that have a dynamic energy (energeia) equivalent to the actualizing drive of the contents of consciousness, or more precisely still, to the creative force of the ephemeral contents of Ur-consciousness (“primordial awareness”). Nevertheless, as I have made clear in my discussion of the relation between words and subjectivity, Dante would have felt that in reading the works of earlier authors he was closely communing with their minds. Brakhage, to be sure, thinks of the spiritual elements underlying sense perception more as dynamic principles than as static representational images. I don’t much like the phrase “primordial modes of consciousness” since it fails to identify the primordial nature of the mental process. In fact, as Brakhage knows from our conversations, I am very skeptical of the foundations of the claim implied by the phrase. Since inwardness is a quality typical of Brakhage’s films, I am inclined to view The Dante Quartet (at least in part) as a homage to the inspiring influence of the Commedia on his work as a whole. The famous slogan first appeared as the final two lines of “Ars poetica,” a twenty-four-line homage to Horace composed in 1925. For the full text of the poem, see MacLeish (1952), 40–41. That its epigrammatic force drives home the meaning of the poem adds a considerable measure of irony to the proposition. According to Pound, a poet’s strength lies in the capacity to create a rhythm exactly apposite to whatever feeling he/she wishes to convey. That Brakhage harbours the same idea about filmmaking—rhythm being essentially a kinetic quality of a work—is implied in several of his articles. Auerbach (1954), 268–78. Olson (1967), 52. In so far as emotions are actions, and not passions, they are energeia. Though Olson suggests that this effect is accomplished by the kinetic properties of the poem, his notion of kinetic properties reflects Aristotle’s concept of energeia rather than kin¯esis. Olson and Brakhage come close to Aristotle here because, like him, they believe that the energeia of an artwork is basically an operative principle or force that drives it towards actualization. It is not an effect or product of the creative process. T.S. Eliot, by contrast, developed a version of the art-as-energeia theory along representational lines. He claimed that the images or words produced by Aristotelian energeia can engender a creative “energy” equivalent to that which moved the artist or poet in the first place. While Olson and Brakhage insist that energeia as an actualizing principle can be conveyed from the poet or artist to the reader or viewer directly (and primarily) through rhythm, Eliot believed—as Dante, I suspect, believed—that an energeia equal to the driving force behind some artistic process, event, or object cannot be displayed in itself but can only be elicited in the mind of the
444
58
59 60
61
62 63 64
65 66
67 68
69
PART V
TRALUCERE
reader or viewer through the mediation of the words and images (as mental forms) that it produces. Herein lies the fundamental reason for the difference between The Dante Quartet and my Dante film, The Book of All the Dead. Despite my limited admiration for Eliot’s verse, I cite him several times in that region of The Book of All the Dead which refers most explicitly to the Commedia. This approach is exemplified by Eliot’s use of “objective correlatives” in his poetry. In formulating his famous theory of their poetic importance, he extolled the virtues of “clear, visual images” (see note 13, above) while emphasizing the dual status of the image as both a mental form and a phenomenon in the world outside the mind. The notion that such images not only animate feeling and thought but also unite feeling with thought became a fundamental tenet of his poetics. For his influential praise of metaphysical poetry on the grounds that it provided the reader with “a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling,” see Eliot (1932), 248. Brakhage (1990), 38. Brakhage reports that Olson received the aphorism from Ezra Pound in a dream. Duncan (1985), 144. His lecture “The Sweetness and Greatness of Dante’s Divine Comedy” was originally delivered on October 27, 1965, at the Dominican College in San Rafael, north of San Francisco. Duncan (1985), 145. While Duncan evidently believed that Dante wrote the Epistle to Cangrande, I do not know whether he was aware of the controversy over its authorship. Duncan (1965), 5. The published text of the lecture is unpaginated. Duncan (1964), 3. In the unity of mind and world forged by the imagination, the dynamics of the poem come to reflect the patterns of the cosmic dance. The correspondances of the Symbolistes pertain to a realm neither ideal nor material but simply real—like the realm occupied by Whitehead’s “actual events” or “actual entities.” Duncan (1964), 50. See Augustine, De beata vita 4.35 and Soliloquia I.1.1. Also relevant here is De magistro 11.28: “But, referring now to all things that we understand, we consult, not the one speaking, whose words sound without, but truth within, presiding over the mind, reminded perhaps by words to take note (to mark evidence). But he teaches who is consulted, Christ, who is said to ‘dwell in the interior man’ [Eph. 3:16]: that is, the changeless power of God, and the everlasting wisdom…” [De universis autem quae intelligimus non loquentem qui personat foris, sed intus ipsi menti praesidentem consulimus veritatem, verbis fortasse ut consulamus admoniti. Ille autem qui consulitur, docet, qui in interiore homine habitare dictus est Christus, id est, incommutabilis Dei Virtus atque sempiterna Sapientia…]. See Soliloquia I.1.9. For an extended discussion of the theory that poems engender a mental process, a movement from idea to idea, sensation to sensation, association to association comparable to what poets experience while scrutinizing concrete particulars, see Elder (1998). It does so according to its mode of attention.
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
445
70 The belief that this happiness is appropriate to the proper end of human existence is not much acknowledged in contemporary discourse on art. 71 Duncan (1965), 13. 72 St. John of the Cross distinguished two phases of the Dark Night of the Soul: the preliminary “night of sense” which results from the ascetic exercise of sensory deprivation; and, for mystical proficients, the “night of the spirit” which entails the actual purgation of sins at their psychological origin and so is much more spiritually taxing than the night of sense. On the transition between the two phases, see Dark Night of the Soul 2.1.1. 73 For an extended discussion of this canto, see Duncan (1965), 15. Whether Brakhage’s colour scheme and use of biomorphic forms in “Hell Spit Flexion” draw specifically on this scene because Duncan highlighted it in his lecture, or whether this connection is merely coincidental, I do not know. 74 Allusions (conscious or unconscious) to the Commedia are common in Brakhage’s oeuvre. In the spring of 1997, he finished a sequel to his much discussed Dog Star Man entitled Yaggdrisl, Whose Roots Are Stars in the Human Mind. I cannot hear this title without thinking of Cacciaguida’s description of Paradise as “l’albero che vive de la cima / e frutta sempre” [the tree, which has life from its top and is always in fruit] (Par. 18.29–30). I am also reminded of Dante’s description of his eyes “vanquished” [vinti] (Par. 14.78) by the sparkling of the Holy Spirit whenever I hear the title Through Wounded Eyes, which Brakhage gave to a film he made with Joel Heartling in 1996. 75 Pseudo-Dionysius, Mystical Theology 2, 12; St. John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel 2.3.4. 76 Duncan, The Truth and Life of Myth (1968), 63. 77 This phrase is from William James. 78 Duncan, Bending the Bow (1968), vii. 79 So we swim in fire, as Dante suggests in the description of his torrid yet fluid transition from the Seventh Cornice to the Earthly Paradise: “Sì com’ fui dentro, in un bogliente vetro / gittato mi sarei per rinfrescarmi, / tant’ era ivi lo ’ncendio sanza metro” [As soon as I was in it I would have flung myself into molten glass to cool me, so without measure was the burning there] (Purg. 27.49–51). 80 Duncan, Truth and Life of Myth (1968), 25. 81 Duncan’s ideas here were shaped not only by his occultist upbringing but also by the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. According to Whitehead, God has two natures: “Primordial” and “Consequent.” God’s Primordial Nature, defined as “the unlimited conceptual realization of the wealth of potentiality,” resembles the energeia or entelecheia of Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover. God contains primordially all the entities and relationships that could possibly be. Whitehead characterizes the vast potentiality of the Divine as a lure for feeling, an eternal urge that moves every being towards the completion of its development. What is realized through that process is the Consequent Nature of God, namely His feelings for Creation as he weaves together whatever His Primordial Nature makes possible. 82 Duncan, “Two Chapters from H.D.” (1968), 97–98. The italicized definition of “palimpsest” (Duncan’s emphasis) is drawn from H.D.’s subscript to the title of her volume Palimpsest (1968).
446
PART V
TRALUCERE
83 An important way to achieve this end is to point out that the picture or the text is pervaded by absence. On the cultural significance of this postmodern strategy and its relation to negative theology, see Elder (1989). Yet Brakhage’s film shares with Duncan’s poetry, and with Dante’s, an immediacy so great that their works seem to come into being whole at the wellspring of presence. 84 Duncan (1985), 143–44. 85 Duncan (1985), 145. 86 Eliot (1944), 42. So great is Brakhage’s faith in this fiery redemption that he quoted “Little Gidding” to me as a consolation during the trying time in which this essay was written. He prophesied that my suffering will be transformed into beauty in a work that I will make. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alan of Lille. Anticlaudianus: Texte critique. Ed. R. Bossuat. Paris: J. Vrin, 1955. ——— Anticlaudianus. Trans. James J. Sheridan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972. Alighieri, Dante. Convivio. Ed. Piero Cudini. Milan: Garzanti, 1980. ——— Dante’s Epistle to Cangrande. Ed. Robert Hollander. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. ——— De vulgari eloquentia. Ed. and trans. Stephen Botterill. Cambridge: Cambridge University, Press, 1996. ——— Epistola XIII [X]. Epistole. Ed. Arsenio Frugoni and Giorgio Brugnoli. Dante Alighieri: Opere minori. Vol. 2. Ed. Pier Vincenzo Mengaldo et al. Milan, Naples: Riccardo Ricciardi, 1979. 598–643. ——— La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. Ed. G. Petrocchi. 4 vols. Milano: Mondadori, 1966–67. ——— Rime 69. Dante’s Lyric Poetry. Ed. and trans. K. Foster and P. Boyde. Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. ——— The Banquet. Trans. Christopher Ryan. Saratoga: ANMA Libri, 1989. ——— The Divine Comedy. Trans. Charles S. Singleton. 6 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–76. Aquinas, St. Thomas. De ente et essentia. On Being and Essence. Trans. Armand Maurer. Medieval Sources in Translation. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983. ——— De veritate. Truth. Trans. Robert W. Mulligan. Vol. 1. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952. ——— Scriptum super libros Sententiarum Magistri Petri Lombardi. Ed. Maria Fabianus Moos. Vol. 3. Paris: P. Lethielleux, 1947. ——— Summa theologiae. Vol. 7: “Father, Son and Holy Ghost.” 1a.33–43. Trans. T.C. O’Brien. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, McGraw-Hill, 1976. Aristotle. De anima. (On the Soul.) Trans. W.S. Hett. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, 1964. 8–203.
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
447
——— De interpretatione. (On Interpretation.) Trans. Harold P. Cook. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, 1962. ——— Metaphysics I–IX. Trans. Hugh Tredennick. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, 1947. ——— Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, 1947. Auerbach, Erich. “Dante’s Addresses to the Reader.” Romance Philology 7 (1954): 268–78. Augustine St. De beata vita. (The Happy Life.) Trans. Ludwig Schopp. The Fathers of the Church. Vol. 1, Writings of Saint Augustine. New York: CIMA, 1948. 43–84. ——— De Genesi ad litteram. (The Literal Meaning of Genesis.) Trans. John Hammond Taylor. Ancient Christian Writers 42. 2 Vols. New York: Newman Press, 1982. ——— De magistro. (The Philosophy of Teaching.) Trans. Fr. Francis E. Tourscher. Villanova: Villanova College Press, 1924. ——— Soliloquia. (Soliloquies.) Trans. Thomas F. Gilligan. The Fathers of the Church. Vol. 1, Writings of Saint Augustine. New York: CIMA, 1948. 343–426. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Sermon 31 (“The Various Ways of Seeing God”). Trans. Kilian Walsh. The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux. Vol. 3. On the Song of Songs II. Oxford: Cistercian Publications and A.R. Mowbray, 1976. 124–33. Blair, George A. “The Meaning of ‘Energeia’ and ‘Entelecheia’ in Aristotle.” International Philosophical Quarterly 7 (1967): 101–17. Botterill, Steven. “Dante’s Poetics of the Sacred Word.” Philosophy and Literature 20, no.1 (1996): 154–62. Brakhage, Stan. “Time…on dit.” Musicworks 48 (Autumn 1990): 38–39. Callistratus. Description 2 (“On the Statue of a Bacchante”) and 7 (“On the Statue of Orpheus”). Descriptions. Trans. Arthur Fairbanks. Loeb Classical Library. London: William Heinemann, 1931. 381–85, 401–403. Deleuze, Gilles. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Zone Books, 1990. Dio Chrysostom. Discourse 12 (“On Man’s Conception of God”). Dio Chrysostom. Trans. J.W. Cohoon. Vol. 2. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, 1939. Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.). Palimpsest. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968. Duncan, Robert. Roots and Branches. New York: New Directions, 1964. ——— “The Sweetness and Greatness of Dante’s Divine Comedy: Lecture given October 27, 1965, at the Dominican College of San Raphael.” San Francisco: Open Space, 1965. ——— Bending the Bow. New York: New Directions, 1968. ——— “Two chapters from H.D.” Tri Quarterly 12 (Spring 1968). 67–98. ——— The Truth and Life of Myth. New York: House of Books, 1968.
448
PART V
TRALUCERE
——— Dante Études. Ground Work: Before the War. New York: New Directions, 1984. ——— “The Sweetness and Greatness of Dante’s Divine Comedy.” Fictive Certainties: Essays by Robert Duncan. New York: New Directions, 1985. 142–61. Eckhart, Meister. Selections from the Commentary on John. Meister Eckhart. Trans. Edmund Colledge and Bernard McGinn. New York: Paulist Press, 1981. Eco, Umberto. The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. Trans. Hugh Bredin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Elder, R. Bruce. The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998. Eliot, T.S. Dante. 1929. Reprint, London: Faber and Faber, 1965. ——— Four Quartets. London: Faber and Faber, 1944. ——— “The Metaphysical Poets.” Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber, 1932. 267–77. Ferrante, Joan. “A Poetics of Chaos and Harmony.” The Cambridge Companion to Dante. Ed. Rachel Jacoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 153–71. Flavius Philostratus. The Life of Apollonius of Tyana. Trans. Edward Berwick. London: T. Payne, 1809. Franke, William. Dante’s Interpretive Journey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Gilson, Etienne. Dante the Philosopher. London: Sheed and Ward, 1948. Horace. The Art of Poetry. Trans. H. Rushton Fairclough. Horace: Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, 1961. 450–89. Hugh of St. Victor. The Didascalion of Hugh of St. Victor. Trans. Jerome Taylor. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961. John of the Cross, St. Ascent of Mount Carmel. Trans. E. Allison Peers. Vol. 1 of The Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross. Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1964. 9–314. ——— Dark Night of the Soul. Trans. E. Allison Peers. Vol. 1 of The Complete Works of Saint John of the Cross. Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1964. 325–457. Leahy, D.G. Novitas mundi: Perception of the History of Being. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994. Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo on Painting. Ed. Martin Kemp. Trans. Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Longinus [Pseudo-]. On the Sublime. Trans. W.H. Fyfe and Donald Russell. Loeb Classical Library. Vol. 199. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. 160–307. Lucian. How to Write History. Trans. K. Kilburn. Vol. 6, Lucian. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, 1959. 2–73.
“MOVING VISUAL THINKING”
449
——— In Praise of Demosthenes. Trans. M.D. MacLeod. Vol. 8, Lucian. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, 1967. 238–301. MacLeish, Archibald. “Ars poetica.” Collected Poems 1917–1952. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952. 40–41. Mandonnet, P. Dante le théologien: Introduction à l’intelligence de la vie, des oeuvres et de l’art de Dante Alighieri. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1935. Maximus of Tyre. Oration 11 (“Plato on God”). Maximus of Tyre: The Philosophical Orations. Trans. M.B. Trapp. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. 93–106. Negri, Antonio. The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics. Trans. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Newman, Barnett. “The Plasmic Image (1945).” Selected Writings and Interviews. Ed. John P. O’Neill. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1990. 138–55. Olson, Charles. “Projective Verse.” Human Universe and Other Essays. New York: Grove Press, 1967. 51–61. Plato. Phaedrus. Trans. R. Hackforth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952. Plotinus. Enneads. Plotinus. Trans. A.H. Armstrong. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966–88. Pound, Ezra. “From Canto CXV.” The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1970. 794. ——— “Notes for Canto CXX.” The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1972. 803. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Mystical Theology and The Celestial Hierarchies. Trans. Editors of the Shrine of Wisdom. Nr. Godalming, Surrey: The Shrine of Wisdom, 1965. Seneca. Epistle 65 (“On the First Cause”). Seneca ad Lucilium Epistulae morales. Vol. 1. Trans. Richard M. Gummere. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, 1953. 444–59. Sextus Empiricus. Against the Professors (Adversus mathematicos). Trans. R.G. Bury. Sextus Empiricus. Vol. 4. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press and William Heinemann, 1959. Tambling, Jeremy. Dante and Difference: Writing in the Commedia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Virgil. Eclogue IV (“The Messianic Eclogue”). Virgil. Vol. 1. Trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, G.P. Goold. Loeb Classical Library 63. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999–2000. Wienpahl, Paul. The Radical Spinoza. New York: New York University Press, 1979.
Driftworks, Pulseworks, Lightworks The Letter to Dr. Henderson R. Bruce Elder EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
T
he Dantean universe was once a domain of intense creativity. In the Empyrean, from which all the artistic or formative energy in Creation was supposed to spring, Divine Love could beget an excess of light in a brief “flash” [fulgore] (Par. 33.141).1 What ever happened to the Empyrean? Was it swiftly bombed by the deicidal outrage of the twentieth century, or slowly smothered by what R. Bruce Elder calls “the antiartistic animus of modern existence”? If it was all a grand poetic fantasy—a fantasia in the Dantean sense— then there may still be hope for an empyreal revival. Since the tiniest ray of creative energy striking any part of the Whole has the potential to ignite a new life, a new vision, a new poem, a new art form, or a new world-order, even the dead old Empyrean may blaze forth again in our startled imaginations as a “Living Light” [vivo lume] (Par. 33.110). Dante hints at the need for an incendiary oltraggio of creativity when he proclaims his faith in the artistic life at the conclusion of his aesthetic credo: “this is the spark which then dilates to a living flame and like a star in heaven shines within me” [quest’ è la favilla / che si dilata in fiamma poi vivace, / e come stella in cielo in me scintilla] (Par. 24.145–7). Implicit in this personal vocation statement is a political mission. His long-range meditations on cultural history had convinced him that creative excess is especially needed in times of spiritual destitution and deepening contempt for the arts. Without the quickening power of the arts to actualize “the full intellectual potential of the human race” [humani generis… totam potentiam intellectus possibilis] (Mon. 1.4.1), we soon lose sight of “the purpose of human civilization as a whole” [finis totius humane civil-
450
DRIFTWORKS, PULSEWORKS, LIGHTWORKS
451
itatis] (Mon. 1.3.1) which is the attainment of a beatific state of peace. In such a state, everyone participates in the vitality of “God Everlasting with his art, which is nature” [Deus ecternus arte sua, que natura est] (Mon. 1.3.2). Hence the prophetic force of the Poet’s dictum: “A great flame follows a little spark” [Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda] (Par. 1.34). If the creative process is difficult to explain for a “little spark” like Brakhage’s The Dante Quartet, it is especially so for a grand polysemous blaze of a work like Elder’s Dantean film cycle The Book of All the Dead. In the following letter, addressed to Dr. Archie Henderson, a lawyer and bibliographer of Poundiana, Elder musters all his philosophical impeto to articulate what went into the making of his maximum opus. Having heard that The Book of All the Dead was influenced by The Cantos, Henderson wrote to inquire about Elder’s specific allusions to Pound. “He sent me a few simple questions,” Elder wryly noted in an e-mail gloss on his letter, “and, taking the request as an opportunity to reflect on my relationship to Pound’s magnum opus, I provided him with an extended response. Of course, these reflections included comments on Pound’s interest in Dante’s Commedia, and my own interest in that work.” The response turns out to be not just a scholarly introduction to his film cycle but also an impassioned manifesto for the aesthetics of transgression. If The Book of All the Dead is Elder’s Commedia, then the Letter to Dr. Henderson is surely his Epistle to Cangrande. In case his correspondent should miss this analogy, the filmmaker refers to Dante’s famous epistle twice. Adopting the detached tone of an academic commentator, he first alludes to it in his hermeneutical introduction to the (then) unfinished cycle as an imaginatively complete work to be read on four levels; then, speaking with the resurgent excitement of a visionary artist, he quotes it directly in his concluding reflections on the anagogic open-endedness of his “making.” Though caught up in Pound’s whirlwind of meditations on history, Elder is forthright in confessing his Dantean delight at the prospect of eternal release from temporal consciousness. His artistic trajectory is “outrageous”: it leads him to the preposterously unmodern goal of trasumanar. As Dante surpassed Virgil and Ovid in imitating the Divine Artist’s cinema-like “visible speech” [visibile parlare] (Purg. 10.95), so Elder proclaims his intention to out-Pound Pound through the transfiguring interplay of texts, sounds, and images in his film cycle: “The great ambition of The Book of All the Dead (not to say its colossal arrogance) is to attempt to go the full distance with him [Pound], and then to continue past him when he fails, so near to the goal, and to go where only the Poet [Dante] had been before.”
452
PART V
TRALUCERE
Going the full distance with Elder clearly means retracing the complete route of Dante’s pilgrimage, not just the anxious descent into Hell and the patient passage up Purgatory (which Pound retraced with modern steps in The Cantos) but also the exultant flight through the River of Light to Paradise (which modernity itself prevented Pound from recreating in his final “Drafts & Fragments”). Accordingly, The Book of All the Dead unfolds its massive length in three phases corresponding to the infernal, purgatorial, and paradisial stages of the Commedia. The custom of screening the cycle over three days highlights its Dantean structure in a simple and effective way, though the correspondences between canticles and screenings will always be complexly uneven owing to the variable lengths, styles, contents, and sequences of the films within each phase. Certain descriptive terms employed by Elder in the letter suggest the different ways the films may “work,” on their own and in sequence, to build up the Dantean momentum of the cycle as a whole. When he initially refers to the “un-wholed” selves and discourses represented in the films as “driftworks,” for example, his allusion to the cultural theorist Jean-François Lyotard evokes the infernal feelings of Dante’s smarrimento—disorientation, bewilderment, instability, loss of direction—along with the postmodern experiences of fragmentation and freeplay. Later on, when the filmmaker relates his montage techniques to Pound’s prosodic experimentation with rapidly modulating metres and line-lengths, his films take on the modernist (specifically Vorticist) character of energy patterns or “pulseworks.” As such, their musical “kinetics” strategically accord with the rhythmic conditioning of the souls in Purgatory, whose meditations, prompted by their choral rituals of chanting and circling, lead to ecstatic union with the dance of the Blessed. Finally, after all his Poundian agitation and excitement, when Elder drives home his sublimely obvious conclusion that “there is light” (literally) shining through even the darkest stretches of the cycle, his films are freed from modern angst and postmodern anomie to stream over the screen as “lightworks” in a paradisial sense. This poetic compound turns up at the end of the letter as the name of his production company. Though many different narratives are evoked in the various films composing the cycle, Elder insists that its ultimately paradisial form transcends the historical constraints of narrative. Consequently, the temptation to cast Elder in the starring role of Dante-pilgrim—with Pound as his Virgil, Olson as his Statius, Heidegger as his Aquinas, Brakhage as his Bernard, and Weil, perhaps, as his Beatrice—must be critically resisted
DRIFTWORKS, PULSEWORKS, LIGHTWORKS
453
from the start, though in the short run it is hard to resist even for the filmmaker, who explicitly locates himself in the Dark Wood when the cycle opens. In the long run (the really long run, over forty hours of viewing) the typological impulse to read the cycle as a master-narrative of “everything” proves not only psychologically impossible to sustain but also aesthetically at odds with the filmmaker’s mystically emergent design, an anagogic vortex in which visual images and textual fragments collide and coalesce to produce an exultantly altered state of consciousness in the viewer. Typological reading would necessarily impose an earthbound dramatic structure on what is resolutely not a Hollywood-style “remake” of the Hero’s Vision Quest. April 1, 1991 Dear Dr. Henderson, I am sorry that it has taken me so long to respond to your letter. I am at work on four new films, all of which, by the way, contain a few bits of Pound’s Cantos.2 Two of them had a strict and too-near deadline, which has made my life simply an agony for the last six months. I wish I understood exactly what your needs are. Unfortunately, I have culled tiny bits and pieces from all over The Cantos and presented them in an order that has much more to do with the form of the work I am making than with the integrity of the structure Pound gave us. Moreover, the quotations appear in various forms: as supertitles overlaid on images; as intertitles presented between images; as texts read by an actor (myself) before the camera; and as sound-collages, usually accompanied by a welter of other sounds. Because most of the films are very long, there are usually many quotations in each. I think you wouldn’t really be interested in a complete list, as it would run on. (Am I wrong about this?) Furthermore, since passages of The Book of All the Dead look backwards and forwards to other passages within it, specific phrases from The Cantos become associated in The Book of All the Dead with particular images, memories, and landscapes. It seems pointless to try to cite what portion of The Cantos appears where, for it is as though, in the making of The Book of All the Dead, an Ur-form of The Cantos had been shattered, the fragments spread out over a thousand different places, and the material from all these places reassembled in an order which, I hope, at once makes them new and preserves the meanings they had before they were broken. The Gnostic apothegm Harold Bloom uses to open Wallace Stevens: The Poems
454
PART V
TRALUCERE
of Our Climate—“Everything that can be broken should be broken,” with the supplementary formulae, “It must be broken; It must not bear having been broken; and It must seem to have been mended”3—is the most precise and simple truth I know about making art. At the same time, it is the pithiest statement of the phases in the creation of an authentic self. To create either a poem or an authentic self, we must experience language or the self as “un-wholed.” We must experience the appalling truth that meaning or evidence of the self is lacking. We must be familiar with the withdrawal of fullness into emptiness and the estrangement of what is most intimate. We must perceive the lack of ratio between knowledge and desire, just as we must reckon with death—the death of love, the death of desire, the death of creative power. And we must face the fact that language and the self are menaced in their existence by the apeiron: they are adrift (truly are “driftworks”)4 in the Limitless. But the discovery of the real truth of finitude takes place when limits seem to disappear, and one confronts the Unbounded Abyss. One who lives with the knowledge of death, of the deaths of love, desire, and creative power, abides from moment to moment with the horrible question, “Am I still a Poet?” and so must constantly reaffirm his or her vows. This question surely fuels the urge to make and to remake. A compositional method based on appropriation, allusion, quotation, and intertextual reference is one response to the terrible doubts this question instills in anyone whose self is identified with Creative Power. The breaking of the whole, the selection of the fragment, and its transformation into an utterly new whole are recognized phases in the psychological process of self-fashioning. But the same sequence of phases also occurs in the artistic process of incorporating intertextual references. Perceiving this correspondence helps us arrive at an answer to another chilling question provoked by acquaintance with the death of love—“Can I ever again love another as once I loved?” The identification of one’s own creativity with another’s, and the taking of another’s powers for oneself, provide a means (indisputably Freudian) of coping with the impact of this question on one’s creative life. Thus, The Book of All the Dead has made passages of Pound its own, just as it has made passages of Martin Heidegger and Simone Weil its own. (The only text cited in The Book of All the Dead that resists such treatment is the Bible.) But Pound’s work and thought have been incorporated into The Book of All the Dead in more ways than by simple quotation. Pound’s poetics have had a fundamental effect on the forms of constructions I have used.
DRIFTWORKS, PULSEWORKS, LIGHTWORKS
455
The following outline of my work may be of some use to you, without overburdening you with an unmanageable mound of details. The films about which you have asked are parts of an epic cycle entitled (as you have no doubt gathered) The Book of All the Dead. The major inspiration for the cycle is Dante’s “Divina” Commedia.5 Whether Dante’s great work is really an epic, or is completely sui generis, is of course a much contested issue, though I tend to side with those who believe it is sui generis. Like the Commedia, my epic operates on several levels. One level— Dante would have called it “the literal”—focuses attention on history, or to use a Poundian phrase, the “repeat in history.”6 Like Pound, then, I wanted to create a work which would include history. In particular, The Book of All the Dead is concerned with the collapse of history into modernity, where, I have sometimes feared, it shall remain frozen in the dystopic realization of Hegel’s “universal and homogeneous State.”7 On a philosophical (allegorical) level, it is concerned with the question of how consciousness came to its present state and, more broadly, with questions concerning the fate of consciousness. On a theological (anagogic) level, it is concerned with the possibility of recovering those capacities of consciousness, now lost, that once enabled it to dwell in the light of the Good. The individual’s quest presented on the personal or moral level of the cycle parallels Pound’s own for the paradiso terrestre, and suggests, finally, that the only way to recreate the paradiso terrestre is to understand and act on the maxim that “a man’s paradise is his good nature.”8 But, as the Gnostics well knew, our good nature derives from the High Holy One; and it was not just the Gnostics alone who knew this—after all, it is the point, in the Judaeo-Christian creation myth, of having God create human beings in His own image (Genesis 1:26).9 Moreover, like the “Divina” Commedia, The Book of All the Dead offers a description of stages in the transformation of consciousness: 1. from ordinary waking consciousness (in The Art of Worldly Wisdom, the title of which I keep misspelling in the credits as “The Art of WORDly Wisdom” in order to suggest the conventional nature of the knowledge the film presents); 2. through consciousness of the workings of the awesome Divine within ordinary life (in 1857: Fool’s Gold); 3. through the purging of our dreadful condition—i.e., from Hell into Purgatory (in Illuminated Texts); 4. to the comprehension of Pound’s “repeat in history,” i.e., the “Purgatory of human error”10 (in The Dream of the Last Historian—for, after all, it is recognition of the historical repeat that puts an end
456
5.
6.
7.
8. 9.
PART V
TRALUCERE
to the terrible vector of history so eloquently described in the Henry Adams sections of Illuminated Texts—and into parts of The Sublime Calculation); and to the sporadic, faltering beginnings of the contemplation of the love that leads one out of Purgatory (in Consolations [Love is an Art of Time]), first in its mode of absence (in The Fugitive Gods), then in the mode of possibility-to-be-made-once-again-present (in The Lighted Clearing, and especially in The Body and the World); and, finally, to the various stages of the Beatific Vision, beginning with an acknowledgement of the terrible powers of love (in Flesh Angels); followed by the eschewing of intellectual love (in Newton and Me—a title intended both to disjoin us, as many people, including William Blake, have thought of Newton as the exemplar of Reason and Intellectual Contemplation of the Divine, and to join us, as Newton forsook that paradigmatic activity of reason to reflect on apocalyptic literature. I also intend the title of this section of The Book of All the Dead to suggest the beginning of a new and dynamic cosmology); passing on to the peace of discovering the Divine Love in higher vision (in Azure Serene: Mountains, Rivers, Sea and Sky); and aspiring to the exalted knowledge of the Love that permeates all things and sustains all things in their being (in Exultations (In Light of the Great Giving)).
Furthermore, the spiritual education the cycle describes is similar to that which Dante’s Commedia presents—the growth towards the insight that everything given in experience truly is a gift. Though some of our experiences, like nightmare monsters wrought in the dark, may seem like cruel repayments for our efforts to find God, even such cruel succubi turn out to disclose the Be-ing11 of Goodness, if we wait long enough. Consciousness of the significance of the particular is enlarged until, at last, the poetry of experience is awakened, and an emotional experience is called forth that awakens one to our oneness with our “circumstance,” i.e., that which “stands around” us. Just as Lucia in Dante’s great poem initiates the Poet into Purgatory with a grace that leads to metanoia [spiritual illumination], so the coming of love in Consolations begins a process of transformation. The Book of All the Dead concerns the destitution of our time, when the Holy has departed and we live without an understanding of the Sacred. And how did Dante describe his times in “Doglia mi reca”?
DRIFTWORKS, PULSEWORKS, LIGHTWORKS
457
Omo da sé vertù fatto ha lontana; omo no, mala bestia ch’om simiglia. O Deo, qual maraviglia voler cadere in servo di signore, o ver di vita in morte! [Men have cut themselves off from virtue—no, not men, but evil beasts in men’s likeness. O God, how strange—to choose to fall from master to slave, from life to death!] (Rime 83, 22–5)
I hasten to add that an important difference between The Book of All the Dead and the “Divina” Commedia is that, unlike Dante, I do not believe that freedom is the natural state of the soul; rather, like the blessed Spinoza, I believe that everything that happens must happen, that the route to tranquillity is the contemplation of necessity, and that the route to enlightenment is the wilful submission to necessity. In fact, I accept only a very small part of Dante’s Neoplatonism, largely because I find the Neoplatonists’ propositions about matter, and, in particular, about the body, absolutely unacceptable. But Pound, too, believed that we who are living in the modern world have lost our reverence for sacred nature, and he, too, relates this deeply to the anti-artistic animus of modern existence. The journey described in The Book of All the Dead is not a straight line. It circles back upon itself again and again, even though it steadfastly approaches its destination. Didn’t Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite describe the route by which humans approach God as a spiral?12 There is always the falling back, even as we draw nearer to the goal. But even Dante’s great and holy poem, while one of the greatest testaments to the power of love, was also a truly a hateful poem. (In this, of course, it is no different from The Cantos.) Interpreted as a moral allegory, Dante’s Inferno is a treatise on sin and a depiction of the punishments appropriate to each of the sins. Some of Dante’s punishments—for example, having the Soothsayers’ heads turned backward—are truly ingenious, and they are a great source of pleasure for us in those passages in which they appear. Furthermore, those few who continue reading the Commedia past the Inferno know that there is a turning point in his quest drama, and what we and the Poet first experience as evil, we, like him, come to understand as part of the Good. So it is in The Book of All the Dead. Illuminated Texts, the very crux of the cycle’s region of Hell, contains a scene that concerns our desire to invent punishments. Similarly, both Illuminated Texts and the two parts of Lamentations present images and texts which convey an impression that the torments the protagonist delights to imagine are visited on his or her
458
PART V
TRALUCERE
enemies. However, these scenes, cruel though they be, do serve the whole, and the whole would not be the same without them. In several of the burlesque scenes in The Book of All the Dead, I have striven as well to recreate the rickety, grim, desperate, and finally unfunny attempts at humour that appear in cantos such as Inferno 21 (where the action takes place by the lake of pitch). For I feel great sympathy with Dante at these moments. It is evident to me that his motivation for writing was a sense—against all his Christian convictions, including his belief that the God of Love orders the universe—of the inevitability that justice will not be done in all human affairs. Furthermore, Dante gives a very prominent place to those who want to construct an Earthly Paradise unguided by considerations of virtue or the Good. Their representative in the Inferno is Ulysses. Their spirit is prominent in our own time, for it appears under the sign of technocracy. Accordingly, The Book of All the Dead gives them prominence. The idea that a technical form of thinking, not guided by any consideration of the Good, has become the only form within which we think, and that the loss of other modes of thought known to the ancients is the reason for our destitute condition is absolutely central to The Book of All the Dead. There are also parallels between The Book of All the Dead and Dante’s oeuvre taken as a whole, including the early love poems and the Vita Nuova. Like many of Dante’s early poems, many of the earlier parts of my cycle are works that lament love’s terrible wounding powers. Then, like Dante at the start of the Vita Nuova, I stopped bewailing my personal condition and consoled myself with poems in praise of love. Like Dante, too, I sorrowfully began to sing the praises of “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore” [Ladies who have understanding of love] (VN 21.15; Rime 33, 1). This, of course, has been a source of much hostility towards the cycle. Near the end of The Lighted Clearing, I reach the state that Dante described in the last poem of the Vita Nuova: Oltre la spera che più larga gira passa ’l sospiro ch’esce del mio core: intelligenza nova, che l’Amore piangendo mette in lui, pur su lo tira. [Beyond the sphere that circles widest passes the sigh that issues from my heart: a new understanding which Love, lamenting, imparts to him draws him ever upwards.] (VN 51.10; Rime 57, 1–4)
The Book of All the Dead culminates in praises to Divine Love for sending down its “power from heaven” [Amor, che movi tua vertù da cielo] (Rime
DRIFTWORKS, PULSEWORKS, LIGHTWORKS
459
67, 1). In the end, The Book of All the Dead depicts its protagonist’s consciousness passing over into the conscious love that permeates the universe, as did Dante’s desire and will at the end of Paradiso. Much of The Book of All the Dead evokes a tension not unlike that which Dante’s poem elicits between carnal love and intellectual love. Like the Commedia, it seeks after the Love that binds the scattered pages of the universe into one volume, after an understanding of all relations as “a simple light” [un semplice lume] (Par. 33.90). And like the conclusion of Paradiso, the end of The Book of All the Dead presents a vision of the cosmos held together by the three forces of light, reason, and love, which, in the end, are all understood to be identical. As Beatrice tells the Poet, the Empyrean is made up of light, reason, and love—“pure light: light intellectual full of love, love of true good full of joy” [pura luce: / luce intellettüal, piena d’amore; / amor di vero ben, pien di letizia] (Par. 30.39–41). One measure of Pound’s strength as a poet was that he came very close to traversing the full range covered by Dante in the Commedia. Guy Davenport points out that, in The Waste Land, Eliot went with the Poet in his descent into Hell.13 In “Ash Wednesday” and Four Quartets, Eliot stumbled through Ante-Purgatory into Purgatory itself. Joyce gave our century a depiction of the modern city as Hell in Ulysses, and then, in Finnegan’s Wake, brought us into a cyclical Purgatory from which there is no escape. Pound alone went the whole stretch—or nearly. The great ambition of The Book of All the Dead (not to say its colossal arrogance) is to attempt to go the full distance with him, and then to continue past him when he fails, so near to the goal, and to go where only the Poet had been before. Doubtless you can see, even from this superficial description of The Book of All the Dead, that my epic is both thematically and genetically related to Pound’s Cantos. Like Dante’s long poem, and Pound’s, mine begins in the Dark Wood (so described in my catalogue note for The Art of Worldly Wisdom, a description which, not surprisingly, was promptly ignored).14 There my protagonist begins a journey into the world of the dead (the past and the tradition, including the knowledge that it has piled up) in order to acquire gnosis or salvific knowledge. Like the Cantos, too, my epic includes a transformation involving wine, a Renaissance nativity scene, the birth of a goddess from sea foam who comes to be identified with Beatrice, and so on. (When will people even begin to see this?) Imagine someone trying to do The Cantos on film, and taking Heidegger rather than Major C.H. Douglas15 as the most profound analyst of the destitution of his or her times, and you would, I believe, generate a work resembling The Book of All the Dead.
460
PART V
TRALUCERE
The similarity of our “long poems” extends to the formal methods we employ. For one thing, the montage constructions I use in The Book of All the Dead are based on the ideogrammic method.16 That method seems to me, as it did to Sergei Eisenstein (who, like Pound, was inspired by the writings of Fenollosa),17 to suit the film medium, as do most of the other paratactical forms that Pound favoured. One reason they are appropriate to the film medium is that the device relies on the use of concrete particulars. An affinity for concrete particulars is one of the special strengths of film, for through the power of concretion, things bear witness. When things present themselves concretely, as luminous particulars, they manifest the originary Be-ing that begets them. Film derives its power from its very similar power of disclosure. Furthermore, the complex associations amongst the particulars presented ideogrammically has something of the density, the complexity, the suggestivity, and the mysteriousness of reality. Concrete images activate the imagination and impel us to undergo feelings. Thus, they confer a rudimentary form of knowledge—or, more exactly, the basis of a rudimentary knowledge—for they penetrate us, maintain a witness in memory, and form the feelings from which intuitive knowledge develops. This is why that which has lost touch with particularity is untrustworthy. “Go in fear of abstractions” was Pound’s counsel, I recall.18 Pound noted the capacity of the ideogrammic method to speak concretely of universal powers. The juxtaposition of an image of the sun and the moon reveals “the total light process, the radiation, reception, and reflection of light; hence the intelligence. Bright, brightness, shining.”19 Between two details a meaning is discerned, and what is depicted in these two details is discovered to be as dependent on what relates them as the meaning of the composite sign is upon the written strokes that support that meaning. It is everything that Eisenstein said—through the juxtaposition of two elements in montage, a new thing arises that is not present in elements taken either individually or serially—and more, for the materialism that Eisenstein espoused in at least his first years as an aesthetician prevented him from acknowledging the constitutive role of mind in the process, or, for that matter, from admitting the crucial role that the process of discerning a meaning between two juxtaposed particulars plays in the very constitution of Mind itself.20 There is another reason why Pound’s paratactical method fits film so well. Words, Pound has taught us, are the “primary pigment” of literature.21 Recognition of their reality, in all its concreteness, opened me to the possibility of radical juxtapositions of highly disparate elements with-
DRIFTWORKS, PULSEWORKS, LIGHTWORKS
461
out the use of the “smoothing” factors of syntax. Kenneth Rexroth, a poet whose works I loved before I loved Pound’s and whose works I love still, summed up the method best as he commented on the cubist method he used in making his own early poems: “It is the conscious, deliberate dissociation and recombination of elements into a new artistic entity made self-sufficient by its rigorous architecture.”22 The material qualities of the “primary pigment” of literature are effectively highlighted by the radical decomposition of texts into their component elements, each with its own metre and texture, and by the rejection of devices that smooth the differences amongst the elements. There is a strong emphasis in Poundian poetics on “the world as such”—on the sign both as material and as representation. Crucial to such an enterprise is a trope that was essential to Pound’s own method, namely, ellipsis. The elision of action is a primary feature of the style of The Book of All the Dead, as is the use of discontinuous, seemingly abrupt (because “off-metre”) transitions. Thus, in Illuminated Texts, Lamentations (both parts), and Consolations (all three parts), I have tried to arrange the shots, titles, and sounds in my films into patterns in which themes occur and recur in a quasi-fugal form, creating ever new relations amongst the repeating elements. The Book of All the Dead presents juxtaposed images and allusions with no narrative or syntactic connection for its “phalanx of particulars,” just as “knowledge is build up from a rain of factual atoms…A scrap here, a scrap there: always pertinent, linked to safety, nutrition, or pleasure,” as Pound stated (though, I think, with only partial correctness).23 The concatenated texts have different tenses and operate on various scales—the personal, the historical, the philosophical, the anagogic. Each particular possesses its own metre. When such various particulars are combined and recombined in shifting juxtapositions, meaning is generated, and this happens because the form encourages people to discover likenesses amongst dissimilar and unexpected things. Voices, images, fragments of documents, literary texts, and scientific works are put in a significant order, but it is up to the viewer of the films to discover the principles that decide how they are assembled, and why one thing is near or adjacent to another. When presented with two concrete particulars in a sequence, the mind strives to discover their meaning. The effect is also self-reflexive: the heightened mental activity that viewers experience makes them acutely aware of the conditions of their consciousness so that they explore possible interrelations of meaning among the images and sounds and words presented to them. The difference in meanings a fragment takes on when
462
PART V
TRALUCERE
it appears in different contexts also reveals the dependency of the particular on all that surrounds it. And, just as life does not comment on the particulars it gives us to experience, neither do The Cantos, and neither does The Book of All the Dead. The viewer is required to participate in the process through which meaning is constituted. The being of the viewer who constitutes the meaning emerges together with meaning. In the end, subjectivity becomes a function of textuality. The tumult of voices that speak through the cycle suggests a terrifyingly labile subject whose existence depends upon the apprehension of meaning, moment by moment. This meaning is to be found not in what is in the image or sounds, but what is amongst them. And, just as meaning is not given in the image, the subject is not given to the world, for it is dependent upon and belongs to what is beyond the world. If the subject is a function of meaning, then the task of composition is the very important one of fashioning a language to think in. Pound called this creative process “logopoeia,” which he defined as “the dance of the intellect among words.”24 Such a language must be able to present the processes of the mind, the movements of memory, the phenomenological activities of seeing or hearing, of remembering or anticipating, of speculating or fretting — the rapid shifts of attention from moment to moment. The endeavour to construct such a language also involves the examination of language as a system for representing thinking, of the process of inscription itself—an examination of the possibilities that film’s own “primary pigment” can serve as a system of meanings. The juxtaposition of different compositional styles, different metres, or different intensities is a basic stylistic feature of The Book of All the Dead. It serves less to foreground the “primary pigment” that constitutes the material of the work than to inventory the potential forms of a language to think in—to think in the profoundest way, as these different styles all present that which endures as important. Because the collage of styles makes The Book of All the Dead a film about the “language” of film and of thought, it has the capacity to criticize both the various styles that constitute it and its own composite style. The limitations inherent in an involvement with concrete particulars is a constant theme of the cycle. A further effect of the collage style of The Book of All the Dead is that its protagonist, like those of Pound’s Cantos and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and Charles Olson’s Maximus poems, is fragmented into pieces of text. Moments of his or her insight (for, like the angels, our protagonist is sexless) appear and disappear amongst a jostle of voices. Epiphanic revelations occur and are swept away in the vortex of more words from
DRIFTWORKS, PULSEWORKS, LIGHTWORKS
463
many more speakers. There is no single, unified voice impressed on every utterance in the cycle, and so no single voice can be identified as the authorial voice. Thus, only in a limited sense, is the protagonist of The Book of All the Dead modelled after Odysseus in Homer’s Odyssey or the Poet in Dante’s Commedia. The protagonist of The Book of All the Dead is more like Intelligence exploring through all the ages to find the way that would lead to its abode, the place where existents are restored to conformity with the Order of Things. He or she spends much of the time in Hell, because s/he does not know what it would require to proceed towards home. Because the protagonist lacks even a clear understanding of where home is and what it is like, there is not much potential for drama in the cycle. I consider this wholly good. Whether in our dealings with art or in our everyday experience, the desire for conflict and drama is a major factor preventing us from engaging in contemplative attention to particulars and from abiding in wonder with that which is presented as a gift of Being. Hence, I avoid drama in order to avail myself more fully of the process by which form emerges out of the ongoing experience of things in their concrete particularity. Rather, I rely on my faith that in the process of comparing many people, places, civilizations, and ways of thinking, an order will emerge—one that depends upon the phenomena compared, rather than on external conditions imposed upon them. I believe that if one gives his or her attention fully to contemplating the emergent order charted in The Book of All the Dead, or in any long work created through this method, he or she would appreciate what comes forth in this order as gifts of Be-ing constituting the Order of Values. If one can engage with the Order of Values, one will remain true to things in their concrete complexity. The contradictions that arise in experience can be incorporated into the artistic form that emerges through this process of engaging with the Order of Values. Hence, the form that this emergent order produces can accommodate the spirit that Keats calls “negative capability.”25 At the same time, however, the values exposed in repetitions and contrasts in textures between the various parts of the experience the form incorporates provide coherence to the piece. This compositional method makes one’s life co-extensive with the quest that the work recounts, and so art and life become one, for it relies on the faith (what else could it be?) that in the form-making process, a subject does emerge—a voice that, while not the commanding authorial presence of traditional texts, nonetheless coheres. One begins with the faith that in the process of creating the work, one will become the person capable of bringing it to closure. Like all faith, this one brings its
464
PART V
TRALUCERE
own rewards, as revealed in The Cantos. A subject does emerge there, most forcefully in the Pisan Cantos, which may be regarded as Pound’s Paradiso (though, as is well known, Pound later expressed doubts, in a very moving fashion, that he really had achieved this state in his spiritual education).26 I believe that a voice similarly emerges in the Paradiso regions of The Book of All the Dead, especially in the Newton and Me section. (This was one reason I gave it that very immodest title.) Furthermore, I believe that this voice arises, as does Pound’s, from the midst of crisis. Thus the adjacency of Hell and Paradise is a theme of these sections of the film, as it is of the Pisan Cantos. Pound showed me the way towards such a form, and he was astute enough to recognize that the classification procedures of the biologist provide a good metaphor for the process. Pound’s remarkable faith in both the form-making and the human-making potential of such a compositional process has been a great inspiration to me. His recognition of the advantages of the type of form that emerges from such a creative process has been one of his greatest contributions to twentieth-century art and had enormous influence on one of America’s greatest poets of more recent times, Charles Olson. Because the paratactical method presents each moment as nearly autonomous, as distinct from each preceding and succeeding moment, these works possess an open structure. They present themselves as being “in process,” for in their composition they are subject to continual, ongoing reassessment. This flux, too, is characteristic of consciousness itself. Yet the method of presenting concrete particulars in The Book of All the Dead is not mimetic, any more than it is in The Cantos. Eliot, in The Waste Land, uses fragments to depict the character of modern consciousness, for the serial presentation of the fragments that constitute that work enact the frenetic movement of modern consciousness. Thus, he uses the method of the presentation of fragments in order to reproduce an interior monologue, the formal features of which are to be taken as a demonstration of the disturbed condition of modern consciousness. I cannot accept Eliot’s ideas about “the dissociation of consciousness” upon which he based his practice (though I do believe that consciousness has forsaken certain of its primary powers, including contemplation, by the exercise of which alone the Good can be known). I think that Life has always presented itself to Mind as fragmentary, incoherent, and inscrutable. But, like Pound, I have ample faith that the world does have meaning, and that to know the meaning of the world is to know that what exists is not all there is. Recognition that we are dependent (something about which the heart’s
DRIFTWORKS, PULSEWORKS, LIGHTWORKS
465
desire to be in bondage speaks unceasingly) leads us beyond what exists to the meaning of the world, for the meaning of the world can be known only from outside the world. This is another reason for my objective use of the ideogrammic method. Luminous details afford “sudden insight into circumjacent conditions, into their causes, their effects, into sequence and law,” as Pound noted.27 Sometimes when this happens the luminous details transform themselves into a background which lights up the conditions that brought them to presence. Something of that which is beyond all presences shows itself when all that is recedes into the background and becomes a foil against which Nothing paradoxically manifests itself. The activity in which we contemplate the meaning of the world is prayer. In prayer, we empty our minds of abstract thoughts and give ourselves over wholly to perception, to seeing a thing for what it is. This activity discloses what Heidegger would call “the giving of things,” the Be-ing through which beings come into presence. It reveals that everything in existence is a gift. It consists in allowing the concrete particular to fill the mind entirely and in giving ourselves over to wonder that it has come to be. This leads us into a state in which we know through feelings that whatever is in the world is dependent on what has brought them to be. Feelings inform us that all we know is wholly contingent, and this feeling for things leads us ultimately into a state in which a significant ratio of beings is grasped, a ratio according to which beings are to their meanings as the material support of a sign is to its meaning. This is the knowledge that emerges from the contemplation of particulars. Acquaintance with this miracle plays a part in my interest in Pound’s method of presenting concrete particulars. Fenollosa pointed out another very important consequence of the paratactical method, as important to me as it was to Pound: namely, it resists the Western logic of the “schoolmen” who “despised the ‘thing’ as a mere ‘particular’”—something useful only for getting to abstractions.28 While the ideogrammic method of presenting concrete particulars in juxtaposition does not commit one to use the internal monologue form, it does constitute a way of thinking. The monolinear sequence of logical thinking is only one way of knowing, and its prospects are narrowly circumscribed, as the attempts to model creativity with logical programming languages show. The mind’s natural way of knowing is to heap up an assortment of facts until, at last, it intuits what connects. This is how we ordinarily learn even a systematic science such as linear algebra or the calculus. We peruse books and articles, reading the parts we like, and after a few months, hardly realizing we were making any effort, we find
466
PART V
TRALUCERE
it easy to find the integral of a complex function. The Book of All the Dead is a vast exercise in this form of learning. But there are very many passages in Dante’s Commedia, too, that imitate earlier writers. I also share Pound’s interest in pressing other texts into the service of my own, and I employ the strategy of appropriation in the service of ends that I think Pound also would have been familiar with—for example, constructing a genealogy of consciousness and excavating evidence of modes of consciousness lost to us moderns. The leavings and middens of a civilization amount to only a few snippets of special intelligence. From those bits which come to our attention, we attempt to reconstruct the form of thought of that civilization—really, its form of life—rather as an archaeologist attempts to reconstruct an economy, a religion, and a complex web of social conventions from shards of pottery, wooden carvings, foundation stones, and the like. The formal principle on which this operation is based is synecdoche, by which a whole is understood through its parts. From the few remnants of the documents a culture produces, we intuit a particular form of the life of the mind, and it becomes for us a living reality. Though the form of life we intuit is perhaps not the same form of life as that which was the provenance of the fragments, still, as Pound realized, we can have faith (for it has been borne out again and again) that a few dozen luminous details give us, in a way, a better sense of the intelligence of the period than what might be gleaned from an enormous number of inert pieces of information. Despite appearing outside their original context—a context which undoubtedly contributed to their meaning—the luminous details left to us by the incendiary intelligences of their time retain the power to inform us. This is not because their significance has been trapped in their form as a fly has been trapped, forever unchanging, in amber. Their illuminative power depends on their being complexly integrated unities. The persistence of their truths, abraded by time as they may be, is the result of the persistence of the patterns through which these complex unities emerge. Though time demands that these details pay it homage, both in their appearance and in their disappearance, the power of these details to reveal the workings of Be-ing are not lessened as they are obscured; for, in spite of everything, they are perfect wholes that belong to another order than the site of their origin, and so draw those who attend to them contemplatively into the lighted clearing of their Be-ing. The withdrawal of once-present meaning is only further testimony to the workings of time in relation to Be-ing, which advances through retreating and is unconcealed as present existents (or once-present meanings) withdraw into concealment. The truths these complexly
DRIFTWORKS, PULSEWORKS, LIGHTWORKS
467
integrated wholes disclose thus are not those of an arch¯e or origin; rather they are truths disclosed in their distance from an origin that can never be recovered. (Our inability to return to the origin was a major theme of my film Lamentations: A Monument to the Dead World.) In the same way that the power of language to call things into their ordained order discloses to those who attend to the gaps and absences and silences within language what is concealed by the vocation that issues forth from language, namely Nothing, the distance of the fragment from its unrecoverable origin shows us the forfeiture implicit in the coming-to-be of things, a sacrifice which (let us recall that today is the beginning of Lent) is undeniably productive and creative. The antitheses Order/Disorder and Being(s)/Nothing are disclosed just at the moment when they come to pass. Thereafter, there is only the forgetting and oblivion of the Be-ing that first brought on this event. But as I kept suggesting in Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time), the sacrifice is associated with the gift, as is the gift with the sacrifice; so the re-collection of the fragments of texts which no longer present their first meanings shows the power of time through which they first were. It shows the errancy of Be-ing, for it makes manifest those features of the relation of language to time and Be-ing which would remain forever in concealment were it not for the forfeits of time, for the testimony to time that the fragment bears—and bears just because it is “un-wholed.” In the same manner as the order of language always testifies to disorder, chaos, and Nothing, creation is always accompanied by destruction. Those destructive questions I began with, and the Nothingness they compel us to confront, are necessary to creative activity. All of this is revealed by compositional processes based on the destruction of an originary textual integrity, the s/election of some of the resulting fragments, and recreation of a textual unity which incorporates the fragments—that is, by a compositional process based on intertextual reference. Such a compositional method is thus destructive, for it disperses, dismantles, and liquidates beings in bringing once-present meaning to Nothing. It thus enables renewal and “re-creation” in the most profound sense of that word. Thus, what is at stake in the collage of quotations and allusions I have constructed is more than the simultaneous presence of various represented times in a film—more even than any theory of time which that co-presence might suggest, though these are both important. The incorporation of various forms of consciousness transforms a work of art into a meta-work (a second-order or nth-order work which both incorporates and reflects on earlier works in the “Tradition”). It is the particular power
468
PART V
TRALUCERE
of a meta-work to demonstrate how enduring are certain patterns of intelligence. It was on the basis of a Poundian precedent that I formulated the idea that there are advantages to be gained by recreating the forms of antecedent works. Pound discussed the vortex as a pattern of energy made visible to us by reason—“our kinship to the vital universe…of fluid force.”29 He realized that the Mind of the West, which we ordinarily call Tradition, is made up of semi-stable patterns of energy. As fresh minds create in new circumstances, with new materials, the same complexly integrated wholes occur and recur. Such patterns of intelligence we call by the names Odysseus, Romulus and Remus, the Bridegroom, Helen, Roland, and Thomas. Particularities differ, details of the configurations change, but the patterns remain essentially intact. The brave one—the city’s founder, the lover, the leader men long for—strives to return home, and both the hero and those who long for him pay the price of that longing. “Hast ’ou seen the rose in the steel dust,” asked Pound, “(or swansdown ever?)”30 The Nekuia, Homer’s tale of Odysseus’s visit to the land of the dead, was put into Latin in the sixteenth century by Andreas Divus Justinopolitanus. Divus’s rendering chants out: “At postquam ad navem descendimus, et mare….”31 Pound purchased a copy of Divus’s translation at a bookstall on a quay in Paris. The vortex whirled. The Book of All the Dead, accordingly, is not a version of Pound (or of Dante), but a demonstration of the endurance of a particular pattern of intelligence—a pattern to which we might give the name Nekuia after Homer’s text. The Commedia is one manifestation of this stable pattern of intelligence, The Cantos are another, and The Book of All the Dead yet another. But my cycle is not only a manifestation of this energy pattern. It is also about it—hence the cycle’s ironic texture. This is also why The Book of All the Dead is very allusive, almost as allusive as the Commedia and The Cantos. The Book of All the Dead, like its great predecessors, contains allusions to literary works, to the sacred places of the epic tradition, to history, to philosophy, and to religion. Many of these allusions take the form of direct incorporation. The incorporation is accomplished by the cinematograph. The cinematograph itself is a manifestation of the Intelligence of an age—an age that now is rapidly receding into the past. But it has also become a form in which we think. This form, brought forth from the Intelligence of an age, became the form in which the thoughts that made it move were recorded. More than that, it gave form to the thoughts of the age that was emerging when it was given birth. Our age’s self-knowledge is given form by the moving images in which we have attempted to
DRIFTWORKS, PULSEWORKS, LIGHTWORKS
469
embody our most inward thoughts and feelings. As the Intelligence of our age and the agency through which we discover our inner being, the cinematograph has looked outward to the history that constituted its fate, and so it now, in its own inner being, reflects the patterns that perdure through history. Thus it is that our personal experience has now become part of that which is “now in the mind indestructible,” as Pound put it.32 A film that includes history thus contains more than elements in recurrence. It also figures a Uniting Intelligence in which, occasionally, our own minds are able to participate, and through our participation, to discover the Order of Things. It reveals the transfiguring power of Intelligence, that by which all particulars are made an everlasting one. Works that manifest the enduring patterns of Intelligence themselves join a semi-permanent order of existence. Because they partake of some features of the enduring Order of Things, they have the power to console us. The Cantos, and, I hope, The Book of All the Dead, manifest the co-existence of works in this higher Order of Things and the co-presence of all such works even in the Intelligence of our own miserably destitute times. This is cause for thanksgiving. It may also be useful to know that I am fascinated by the social and spiritual implications of Pound’s ambition to create a work that could serve as a compendium of history. Pound was characteristically precise and profound when he defined knowledge as what remains when all the facts are forgotten. We can reconcile the apparent paradox inherent in the combination of his definition of knowledge and his insistence on the importance of particulars by recognizing that the concrete existent is important only as a manifestation of the power of the Be-ing that has brought it into presence. The best part of this knowledge of things concerns their correlations and connections. I have attempted to convey something of this power in the tumult of voices and images that make up The Book of All the Dead. Without the example of The Cantos, I should never even have imagined how to attempt this. Thus The Book of All the Dead attempts to make its predecessors speak again, just as The Cantos were designed to do. Consider, for example, how Cantos XXIV–XXVI “write over” scenes from Dante’s Inferno in order to intensify Pound’s sense of the hellish lack of reverence for sacred nature, the blighting of natural human affection, and the consequent corruption of art by unnatural greed, sloth, and ruthlessness in the modern world. Dante, of course, also reused the material of his predecessors. For his descent into Hell (e.g., the Charon episode and the Limbo scenes in Inferno 3–4) Dante found many “luminous details” in the sixth book of the
470
PART V
TRALUCERE
Aeneid, where Virgil had modelled Aeneas’s journey to the Underworld on Odysseus’s visit to Hades. Dante did not merely imitate these Virgilian reshapings of Homer’s Nekuia: he recast them for his own purposes, fashioning a universe of Christian meanings out of them. Dante used several other classical auctores—most notably Ovid—in a similar way, though not as extensively. That Pound understood his profound debt to his predecessors is clear from the way he highlighted his borrowings in The Cantos. For instance, he constructed an explicitly Ovidian second canto to follow his Homeric/Virgilian first canto. And yet—and this is one of Pound’s more brilliant turns in his opening performance—he realizes that, though we may read Homer, Virgil, and Ovid in the original, their works appear to us only through mediation: that is to say, the post-classical writers in the Western tradition who overwrote the Nekuia, especially Dante, have forever changed the ways we perceive and interpret the classical tradition. All successful allusions are effectively acts of overwriting. There is no such thing as a simple reference between texts, for the later text always corrupts the original by symbolically “erasing” it while letting parts of it shine through beneath the superscription. This is why I refer to allusive texts as “palimpsests.” But one should not think that because the words, images, and sounds in The Book of All the Dead overwrite other texts, the cycle as a whole is devoid of personal significance. In fact, the context from which words, images, and sounds are derived can give them added emotional weight in a palimpsest. Consider the title page of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations, which includes the dedication “For Jean Verdenal, 1889–1915, mort aux Dardanelles” and the following epigraph: la quantitate Puote veder del amor che a te mi scalda, Quando dismento nostra vanitate Trattando l’ombre come cosa salda.
It appears just so, italicized and untranslated, presumably in order to conceal (and to highlight the concealed) feelings which might otherwise appear too raw or embarrassingly “sincere” if he allowed them to show through his pose of literary detachment.33 Pound similarly uses foreign terms in The Cantos to prevent us from discovering him in a moment of emotional vulnerability. What feelings did Eliot feel the need to conceal? The epigraph means something like: “You can see how great my love for you is when I ignore our emptiness and treat a shade as a real thing.” If that were all there were to the quotation, and if we had to take it liter-
DRIFTWORKS, PULSEWORKS, LIGHTWORKS
471
ally rather than allusively, its message would simply be that Eliot so loved Verdenal that he refuses to accept that he is gone, and treats him as though he were still alive. Most of us are acquainted from our early years with such pathos, and so, even taken this way, it is not without strength. But how much greater is its power when we recognize the source and context of the quotation. It is from Dante, whose second guide, the Latin poet Statius, utters it on the occasion of the most moving of the many joyous meetings in Purgatory. When Statius first encounters Virgil in Dante’s company, without knowing whom he has met, he humbly identifies himself as a reader of poetry who became a poet because of his intense admiration for the Aeneid: Al mio ardor fuor seme le faville, che mi scaldar, de la divina fiamma onde sono allumati più di mille; de l’Eneïda dico, la qual mamma fummi, e fummi nutrice, poetando: sanz’ essa non fermai peso di dramma. E per esser vivuto di là quando visse Virgilio, assentirei un sole più che non deggio al mio uscir di bando.
Which may be rendered approximately thus: The sparks that warmed me, the seeds of my ardour, were from the holy fire—the same that gave more than a thousand poets light and flame. I speak of the Aeneid; it was mother to me, and it was nurse to me as a poet; my work without it would not amount to an ounce in weight. And to have lived on earth when Virgil lived— for that I would extend by a whole revolution of the sun the time I owe before the end of my exile. (Purg. 21.94–102)
Statius notices a smile on the face of Dante’s guide, and despite Virgil’s request that the pilgrim keep quiet, he tells Statius the reason. Statius is awestruck, and Virgil instructs him: “Brother, do not do so, for you are a shade and a shade you see” [Frate, / non far, ché tu se’ ombra e ombra vedi] (Purg. 21.131–2). That is when Statius replies with the verses cited by Eliot: “You can see how great my love for you is when I ignore our emptiness and treat a shade as a real thing” (Purg. 21.133–6).34 Knowing the context makes the quotation heart-rending, for we then understand something about the relationship Eliot had with Verdenal, and this understanding enables us to feel more of the passion Eliot harboured for him.
472
PART V
TRALUCERE
Remembering that Dante’s main reason for introducing Statius was to present an account of the conversion experience through the reading of poetry—an account recalling St. Augustine’s conversion through the reading of a scriptural verse (Confessions 9.12.29)—makes the epigraph all the more poignant. The art I practise is commonly called “cinema” (from Greek kin¯ema, “motion”). You shouldn’t be surprised, then, by my fascination with Pound’s interest in the kinetics of art—an aspect of Poundian poetics elaborated in Olson’s theory of open form. The movement of existents, how beings are transformed in every moment of their existence, greatly intrigues me. Fascination with speed and with compression has made me use elision to the utmost extent conceivable. The energy transmitted by the unfinished unit to the reader—who picks up the momentum of forward drive—also deeply interests me, for I believe this momentum excites feelings which, under the right conditions, can turn into knowledge. Pound defined the Vortex in terms of energy. I am fascinated by the flow of energy in cinema and awestruck by the potential for every moment of a film to spin myriad words, sounds, and images through itself, for every moment in a film to be a vortex whirled in the larger vortex that is the whole film. Through a single image circulates a number of different times: the time when the image is seen; the time when it was shot; the time when the text that is overlaid onto image was written; and even the “whole time” when the construction of image-text-sound was assembled (i.e., its entire cultural context) in relation to our own time. Paratactical constructions thus replace the single moment—which, according to the conceits of the lyrical poem, reflects the eternal “Now”—with a multiplicity of fugitive moments. As each moment surges into presence and then rushes away, we come to realize that a work constructed on the principle of parataxis must accept the fact of its earthly condition. But it is through beings, after all, that we come to know Be-ing. Parataxis suits the epic form with its consonance between structure and technique because the paratactical must come down out of the heavens and open itself to history, to change, and to death. Epic accepts the force of the negative as lyric does. Yet, if the abundance of energies succeeds in uniting the multiple times of epic, then these times are all made one through it, and the work as a whole manifests the energies of Be-ing coming to presence in beings and events. Unfortunately, epics succeed all too rarely, but “what a marvel” [Qual maraviglia] (Inf. 15.24) when they do! Pound’s rhythmics, too, have been a major source of inspiration for my filmmaking. Of particular importance has been Pound’s advice to allow
DRIFTWORKS, PULSEWORKS, LIGHTWORKS
473
lines and even phrases to follow the rhythm of the musical phrase, not of the metronome. It is empty counsel, in a sense, for even musical phrases can, and most often do, follow a metre as strict and unbending as the tick of the metronome. That most glorious of interpreters of Bach, Glenn Gould, has given us marvellous proof of how strictly Bach’s metres and tempi should be kept, of how out of place rubato is in performing Bach’s work and baroque music generally. Even more importantly, he has allowed us to glimpse the reason for that strictness, namely, that the strict form of the music, as precise as the order of number, reflects the Order of Being. But Pound was speaking polemically when he condemned metronomic verse, probably in response to the performance practice of the period just before his own, a period which resonated with the thumping hoof-beat rhythms of Algernon Charles Swinburne (a poet he admired and I detest): Before the beginning of years There came to the making of man Time, with a gift of tears; Grief, with a glass that ran; Pleasure, with pain for leaven; Summer, with flowers that fell; Remembrance fallen from heaven, And madness risen from hell; Strength without hands to smite; Love that endures for a breath; Night, the shadow of light, And life, the shadow of death. (Atalanta in Calydon 314–25)35
The Swinburne stomp is a dunning three-beat accentual metre with a variable number of syllables per line. Though the lines may skitter through eight syllables (ta-BOOM-ta-BOOM-ta-ta-BOOM-ta: “Remembrance fallen from heaven”) or march through only six (BOOM-ta-BOOM-ta-taBOOM: “Night, the shadow of light”), what the ear soon anticipates is the triplet of strong stresses in each line. And note how ten out of twelve lines begin with a noun (or “and” along with a noun) usually followed by a participial or prepositional phrase. This syntactic sameness reinforces the unvarying, bass-drum BOOM. How far that fixed kind of metre is from the flow of Pound’s vers libre: Thus was it in time. And the small stars now fall from the olive branch, Forked shadow falls dark on the terrace More black than the floating martin
474
PART V
TRALUCERE
that has no care for your presence, His wing-print is black on the roof tiles And the print is gone with his cry. So light is thy weight on Tellus Thy notch no deeper indented Thy weight less than the shadow Yet hast thou gnawed through the mountain, Scylla’s white teeth less sharp. (The Cantos XLVII 237–8)
There is no echo of the hoof-beat here, no stomping foot. Even when his song is most “in-spired” (most on-the-breath), he avoided stomping out the metre as though he were inveighing in a hateful tantrum or marshalling his anger to do battle against the usurers: And Brancusi repeating: je peux commencer une chose tous les jours, mais fiiniiiir (The Cantos LXXXVI 560)
How that sad sigh slides so gently from the first doubled “i” to the quadrupled “i” with its expression of heavy regret over the work still undone! There’s no heavy thump here, no resonance of Swinburne’s bass-drum or Handel’s military rhythms. This contrast does not arise simply because Pound’s metrical system is quantitative or because he uses conversational forms. He was quite capable of using strongly stressed accents over relatively long passages: But for the clearest head in the congress 1744 and thereafter pater patriae the man who at certain points made us at certain points saved us by fairness, honesty and straight moving (The Cantos LXII 350)
In his essay entitled “A Retrospect,” Pound counselled aspiring poets “to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome.”36 I have learned much from the advice: taken in the light of his own practice, it has taught me the importance of a rapidly shifting or modulating pulse which alters from one textual fragment to the next. Pound’s use of a modulating pulse lends a high degree of autonomy to each section of a canto. Sometimes each image within a section seems to conduct its own bundle of energies, as in the following verses:
DRIFTWORKS, PULSEWORKS, LIGHTWORKS
475
This liquid is certainly a property of the mind nec accidens est but an element in the mind’s make-up est agens and functions dust to a fountain pan otherwise Hast ’ou seen the rose in the steel dust (or swansdown ever?) so light is the urging, so ordered the dark petals of iron we who have passed over Lethe. (The Cantos LXXIV 449)
Passages like this provide me with a poetic analogue for the use of a rapidly modulating pulse in my filmmaking, a pulse that changes from one textual element to the next. This particular passage also provides evidence that Pound saw the mind as part of reality, and that he felt that our memories are responses to a gentle ordering force emanating from reality, just as iron filings are ordered by a magnetic field. Reality, of course, is the Tradition and the Order of Being. Or as Pound suggested, we can expand on this point by linking it with the history of the Ontological Argument: Guido C. had read “Monologion” vera imago and via mind is the nearest you’ll get to it, “rationalem” said Anselm. Guido: “intenzione”. Ratio, luna, speculum non est imago, mirrour, not image; Sapor, the flavour, pulchritudo ne divisibilis intellectu not to be split by syllogization to the blessed isles (insulis fortunatis) (The Cantos CV 747–6)
In as early a work as his first translations of the poet Guido Calvacanti, Pound made formidable claims for the powers of rhythm. “I believe in an ultimate and absolute rhythm,” he avowed, as I believe in an absolute symbol or metaphor. The perception of the intellect is given in the word, that of the emotions in the cadence. It is only, then, in perfect rhythm joined to the perfect word that the twofold vision can be recorded. I would liken Guido’s cadence to nothing less powerful than line in Blake’s drawing.37
476
PART V
TRALUCERE
Two aspects of this text, in particular, have inspired my filmmaking. The first is an idea that it conveys by implication, namely, that emotion and idea must be at one in a work of art. The second is the notion that when a filmmaker perfects the relation between rhythm and image (as a poet perfects the relation between rhythm and word), emotion and idea will become identical. In the same text, Pound went on to speculate that it should be possible to show that any given rhythm implies about it a complete musical form—fugue, sonata, I cannot say what form, but a form, perfect, complete. Ergo, the rhythm set in a line of poetry connotes its symphony, which, had we but a little more skill, we could score for orchestra. Sequitur, or rather inest: the rhythm of any poetic line corresponds to emotion. It is the poet’s business that this correspondence be exact, i.e. that it be the emotion which surrounds the thought expressed.38
Pound taught that musical dynamics carry the emotional and conceptual freight of a work of art, and that all musical dynamics originate in rhythm. I have taken these teachings to heart in the creation of my cinematic “pulseworks.” Finding the exact rhythm to convey the desired emotion/ idea has become the primary consideration of my making. Rhythm, as Pound himself pointed out, has the power to remind us of “the most primal of all things known to us.”39 In Pound’s thought, the two points, rhythm and emotion, together with the measure of rhythm’s vectorial power, triangulate with a third point, namely, time. In the “Treatise on Metrics” (appended to The ABC of Reading), Pound states that “Rhythm is a form cut into time, as a design is determined space.”40 The medium through which the filmmaker cuts his design in “time” is not the “articulate sounds” of language but rather the kinetics of the shot, including those that derive from its design, which conducts the eye through space, putting obstacles and complexities in its way to slow it down or removing them to speed it up, and the various gravities (i.e., weights-of-movements) of its colours. I would say, paraphrasing Pound, that the primary failing of a bad film results from the filmmaker’s lack of a keen sense of time, and a bad filmmaker is a bore because he or she does not perceive time and time relations and cannot therefore delimit them in an interesting manner, by gentler or sharper movements, by more ponderous or more sprightly colours, and by various other qualities of movement inseparable from the image. I have learned from Pound that the primary consideration in filmmaking is creating a design in time which is absolutely accurate to the emotion/idea that the filmmaker wishes to convey.
DRIFTWORKS, PULSEWORKS, LIGHTWORKS
477
Pound’s courage in reversing the paradigmatic Romantic topos of placing events in time has also been a great inspiration to me. The nineteenth century was a period obsessed with time, with evolution (Darwin and Spencer), with the mind’s recovery of past time (Proust and Freud), and with the history through which things come to be as they are (Hegel, the Young Hegelians and their offspring, the Marxist-Leninists and the legion of historicizing and relativizing sociologists). The potency of history must never be overlooked; learning to dwell here among purely contingent beings and to cherish, even amidst our inevitable mourning and remorse, the doomed beauty of all that is, is one of the principal lessons the wise person learns. But Mind can cancel the dislocations and disassociations that time creates, and it can restore relations amongst phenomena. Like Blake, we can learn to experience time as a space in which all that was once present is now and eternally present. Then time becomes exactly as film has it, a narrow ribbon on which is plotted the record of a sequence of crossings from one dimension of space to another and another. The notion that all artists are living authors in a literal sense is yet another reason for the chorus of voices that speak (as living presences, not just as ghosts) through my films. There are further complexities in Pound’s views on time that I have tried to capture in the form of The Book of All the Dead. In a letter to his father written in 1927, Ezra Pound provided a sketch of the outline of The Cantos. “Have I ever given you outline of the main scheme:::[sic] or whatever it is?” he asks, immediately providing an answer to capture its essentially musical character or form: “1. Rather like, or unlike subject and response and counter subject in fugue.” Then, becoming more specific, he expounds the different moments of the work: A. A. Live man goes down into world of Dead C. B. The “repeat in history” B. C. The “magic moment” or moment of metamorphosis, bust thru from quotidien into “divine or permanent world.” Gods, etc.41
Elsewhere, in 1944, he informed his readers that: For forty years, I have schooled myself, not to write an economic history of the U.S. or any other country, but to write an epic poem which begins “In the Dark Forest[,]” crosses the Purgatory of human error, and ends in the light, and “fra i maestri di color che sanno” [among the masters of those who know]. I have had to understand the NATURE of error.42
This Dantean sequence also applies to The Book of All the Dead.
478
PART V
TRALUCERE
1. The protagonist of the cycle finds himself in a moral, emotional, and spiritual crisis which brings him to the Gates of Death. A harrowing confusion of voices launches him on a journey down to the dead, back through the past, in a quest for the knowledge that might save us. This descent into the Underworld also holds out hope for a vocation, hope that in the midst of the tumult of voices a voice, like that which saved Augustine, will be heard. But who can serve as the true guide? And how will the Poet come into his own? (These are Dante’s questions.) 2. Beneath the surface differences among cultures are beliefs and actions that are repeated almost identically across cultures: for instance, the Nekuia or Underworld Journey. The Book of All the Dead is a quest film from beginning to end; the portrayal of the journey across deserts and over plains and into the mountains is, perhaps, the only constant of the entire cycle. It reveals these durable (if not permanent) patterns as recurring states of mind. Thus, by the end of Lamentations, the journey reveals that history is vectorial. There is no return to the past, no exit out of modernity, no way to resurrect the modes of thought that once apprised us of the Good. The vestiges of the past inhabit the present as mere simulacra. Yet it is as forms rather than as actual instances (to go back to the Neoplatonism from which I distanced myself earlier in this letter) that the past lives in the present’s knowledge, for the recurrent patterns known by consciousness constitute the unchanging objects of true knowledge. History may be a vector, but as it moves, it drags the past with it. Nothing is ever wholly lost. (This is the lesson of Consolations (Love Is an Art of Time).) Thus, in the end, the historical permanence of consciousness becomes the source of hope. It is in the realm of the Intellect that the permanence of that which passes is evident, and nowhere else. Intellect furnishes us with an image of eternity, though it is only an image we know, and not Eternity itself. Still, the image of what perdures does open toward the Divine. The ancients were right about this, too, namely, that it is Mind that leads us to the only knowledge that really is worth having, the knowledge that can save us. In this way, the quest described in Lamentations really is Purgatory, a space in which human error is cleansed. 3. Occasionally visions of light, of divine energy, break through. The eternal comes into history and halts the movement of time. The root from which such visions grow is the sense of the mysterious communion of self and nature. As in Pound’s work, so in mine: the vision of Paradise does not disdain erotic experience, but rather exalts it, for this, too, is a mode of experience which stops the frightful movement of time. Eros binds human beings to nature. Thus, in erotic
DRIFTWORKS, PULSEWORKS, LIGHTWORKS
479
experience, it is possible to recover, if only briefly, the Ovidian knowledge that one energy passes through gods and humans alike, that one energy connects all things with everything else. And there is light—the same manifestation of the Divine we find in Pound, in Dante, in Cavalcanti, in the Neoplatonic philosophers, in Grosseteste, in the Languedoc poets, and even, as Pound points out, in Confucius. From light we learn that all things derive from one source. Thus The Book of All the Dead can be said (albeit with facetious exaggeration) to be about everything, but more accurately about that Be-ing through which all existents come into presence. Consciousness discovers, as Azure Serene joins with The Cantos in saying, that light “fills the nine fields / to heaven”43; and so it turns towards prayer, towards the contemplation of the gift of the given and towards the state of wonder that discloses “the giving of things.” The culminating work in this section of the cycle is Exultations (In Light of the Great Giving). Here the gods show themselves again.
But only briefly. Not even Dante, as mighty as he was, could sustain the knowledge that was vouchsafed him at the climax of his ascent. Speaking of himself in the third person in his much-cited Epistle to Cangrande, Dante blamed the limitations of his memory for his failure to comprehend and express the full vision of the Empyrean: Et postquam dixit quod fuit in loco illo Paradisi per suam circumlocutionem, prosequitur dicens se vidisse aliqua que recitare non potest qui descendit. Et reddit causam dicens “quod intellectus in tantum profundat se” in ipsum “desiderium suum,” quod est Deus, “quod memoria sequi non potest.” Ad que intelligenda sciendum est quod intellectus humanus in hac vita, propter connaturalitatem et affinitatem quam habet ad substantiam intellectualem separatam, quando elevatur, in tantum elevatur, ut memoria post reditum deficiat propter transcendisse humanum modum. [And after he has said that he was in that place of Paradise which he describes by circumlocution, he goes on to say that he saw certain things which he who descends therefrom is powerless to relate. And he gives the reason, saying that “the intellect plunges itself to such depth” in its very longing, which is for God, “that the memory cannot follow.” For the understanding of which it must be noted that the human intellect in this life, by reason of its connaturality and affinity to the separate intellectual substance, when in exaltation, reaches such a height of exaltation that after its return to itself memory fails, since it has transcended the range of human faculty.] (Epistola X/XIII 28)
480
PART V
TRALUCERE
Nor could Pound hold the experience of Paradise fast (“Charity I have had sometimes, / I cannot make it flow thru”).44 I believe that it was the lack of permanence of our experience of what does not change that made Pound abandon his poem while it was still uncompleted. He could convey the experience only in “Drafts & Fragments” of an extremely tentative character. Even Dante’s marvellous conclusion really doesn’t make clear that our experience of Paradise comes only in fleeting glimpses, only in “magic moments” and “luminous details” that open up to something beyond the quotidian. I have tried to radicalize the ideogrammic form precisely to convey that sense. Still, even if our knowledge of the paradisial realm is only partial and fleeting, the testimony of art and the testimony of the “masters of those who know” 45 at least give the wisdom a place to dwell, a place for it to abide until the time of discovery. A final connection between my work and Pound’s may be noted. The form of The Book of All the Dead invites a similar response to that called for by the allusively vortiginous form of The Cantos. Donald Davie gets at this best when he urges us to listen for the large scale rhythms that ride through The Cantos in our experience of them when we read one at a time and fast. And this is just the sort of reading we ought to give them—not just to begin with, either. This, indeed, is what irritates so many readers and fascinates an elect few—that The Cantos, erudite as they are, consistently frustrate the sort of reading that is synonymous with “study,” reading such as goes on in the seminar room or the discussion group. It is hopeless to go at them cannily, not moving on to line three until one is sure of line two. They must be taken in big gulps or not at all. Does this mean reading without comprehension? Yes, if by comprehension we mean a set of propositions that can be laid end to end. We are in the position of not knowing “whether we have had any idea or not.” Just so. Which is not to deny that some teasing out of quite short excerpts, even some hunting up of sources and allusions, is profitable at some stage. For The Cantos are a poem to be lived with, over years. Yet after many years, each new reading—if it is a reading of many pages at a time, as it should be—is a new bewilderment. So it should be, for it was meant to be. After all, some kinds of bewilderment are fruitful. To one such kind we give the name “awe”—not at the poet’s accomplishment, his energy, or his erudition but at the energies, some human and some nonhuman, which interact, climb, spiral, reverse themselves and disperse, in the forming and re-forming spectacles which the poet’s art presents to us or reminds us of.46
DRIFTWORKS, PULSEWORKS, LIGHTWORKS
481
I would be delighted if someday somebody were to write similarly of The Book of All the Dead. Certainly, it is one reason I have constructed a form that plays theme against theme successively, in a quasi-fugal form, not unlike that which Pound employed in The Cantos. They are, as Davie suggests, energies that “interact, climb, spiral, reverse themselves and disperse.” Then again, there’s also Wagner’s Gesamkunstwerk as a formal model for my cycle. The Book of All the Dead begins with the emergence of nature out of Nothing and ends with the New Beginning. Its main theme is the irreconcilability of Love and Power (World-Domination). Its social mission is to rescue a world presided over by degenerate idols, which is certainly Wagnerian. But enough of this! As to your specific questions: 1) What were the names of the production company for 1857 (Fool’s Gold) and Consolations? All my films are produced by my production company, Lightworks. 2) Which texts from The Cantos were used in 1857: Fool’s Gold? Too many to list, I fear. I do have a copy of the texts I used, if you require them, but they are many and usually consist of just a few words. 3) Which texts from The Cantos did you read in Consolations? Again, too many to list. 4) Would it be accurate to describe Alexa-Frances Shaw as the co-director of Consolations? As regards film production credits, the term “director” makes less than accurate reference to the work done by most socalled experimental filmmakers, including myself. It suggests that the major responsibility of the principal figure amongst those involved in making a film is blocking action, directing actors, interpreting a script, and overseeing a set. Like many others who work in “experimental” film, I really can’t accept the division of labour that is customary amongst Hollywood filmmakers or even, for that matter, amongst so-called European art-filmmakers. It seems to me important to hold the camera in my own hands, to have my own body push it through space, to carve up the pieces it produces myself, to assemble them myself, to produce the sounds the film incorporates myself, and to assemble the sounds into a finished sound-structure myself, to decide on and to construct the
482
PART V
TRALUCERE
sound/image relations myself. Thus, I call myself a “filmmaker” rather than a “director.” However, Consolations was a massive endeavour. I had to find someone to help me. Ms. Shaw was familiar with my previous work, and she is very capable. She carried an enormous burden, shooting bits and pieces of the film, editing some passages, and creating many of the sound collages according to my less-than-precise instructions. She also did all the optical printing in accordance with my suggestions, which were similarly loose. She did so not only with diligence but with imagination. Her work belonged to a creative order beyond what’s produced by those who carry out assigned work, however skilfully or painstakingly. Consequently she suffered many of the miseries of a creator. Thus the place she occupied in the making of the film seems well-described by the term “co-maker.” She certainly merits an important credit. 5) What is the running time of Consolations? Consolations is actually three quasi-independent films: i) The Fugitive Gods; ii) The Lighted Clearing; iii) The Body and the World. As near as I know, their running times are, respectively, 41/4 hours, 41/2 hours, and 41/2 hours. You might be interested to know that the names of the four new films that contain little bits of material from The Cantos are: i) Flesh Angels; ii) Newton and Me; iii) Azure Serene: Mountains, Rivers, Sea and Sky; iv) Exultations (In Light of the Great Giving). Their running times are 117 minutes, 115 minutes, 95 minutes, and 121 minutes, respectively. 6) Are these films available for rental on video? I’m afraid not. They are just not the same on video. I hope all this is of some use to you. If you would like more information, or if you really do want more specific information on any of this, do not hesitate to inquire. I should hope that I could respond more quickly. Yours sincerely, R. Bruce Elder
DRIFTWORKS, PULSEWORKS, LIGHTWORKS
483
EDITOR’S NOTES 1 Unless otherwise noted, the text of Dante’s Commedia is from the edition by Petrocchi as reprinted and slightly revised by Singleton (1970–75). All translations from the Commedia are by Singleton (1970–75). The components of the Commedia cited from include Inferno (Inf.), Purgatorio (Purg.), and Paradiso (Par.). Also cited are Vita Nuova (VN), the Epistle to Cangrande (Epistola X/XIII), Monarchia (Mon.), and Rime. The title “Driftworks, Pulseworks, Lightworks” is an editorial addition to the letter. 2 The four films—Flesh Angels, Newton and Me, Azure Serene: Mountains, Rivers, Sea and Sky, and Exultations (In Light of the Great Giving)—are briefly discussed at the end of the letter. An unannotated version of the letter was published in Spleen 4 (Winter/Spring 1992), a magazine edited by Innis College students at the University of Toronto. The issue is unpaginated. It appeared in tabloid format, with densely packed print, as a supplement to the Innis Film Society’s program booklet. 3 Bloom (1977), 1. The Gnostic dictum and its three variations are italicized in their original context. 4 This compound implicitly “postmodernizes” Elder’s understanding of his project, for he has borrowed the term from Lyotard (1984). Elsewhere in the letter, especially in his discussion of the impact of Pound’s Vorticism on his practice as a filmmaker, he implies that the cycle is deeply rooted in modernist poetics. 5 The quotation marks in the title are Elder’s addition. Perhaps they are intended to signal his skeptical response to Dante’s claim that the composition of the poem was directly inspired by God. Or do they merely serve to remind his reader that “Divine” was not part of the original title? Dante himself referred to his masterwork as the “Comedy” [comedìa] (Inf. 16.128, 21.2) or as the “sacred poem” [sacrato poema, poema sacro] (Par. 23.62, 25.1). The honorific epithet would not appear in the title until 1555 with the publication of the Ludovico Dolce edition in Venice. See Vallone (1981) and (2000), 184. 6 Dante’s four levels of interpretation—literalis (literal or historical), allegoricus (allegorical or typological), moralis (moral or tropological), and anagogicus (anagogic or apocalyptic)—are spelled out in the Epistle to Cangrande (Epistole X/XIII 7, 20–22). Elder adapts the Dantean version of the fourfold method of interpretation to his Poundian project by redefining the second level as “philosophical” and relating it to the development of consciousness under modernity. Note his strategic downplaying of medieval typological interpretation on level two. Pound refers to the typological patterning of (sacred) historical narrative as the “repeat in history” in Letter 224: To Homer L. Pound, 285. 7 This Hegelian-sounding phrase comes from Hegel’s French commentator Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968). See Kojève (1969), 231: “It is in and by the final Fight, in which the working ex-slave acts as a combatant for the sake of glory alone, that the free citizen of the universal and homogeneous State is created; being both Master and Slave, he is no longer either the one or the other, but is the unique ‘synthetical’ or ‘total’ Man, in whom the thesis of Mastery and the antithesis of Slavery are dialectically ‘overcome’….”
484
PART V
TRALUCERE
8 The Cantos XCIII 623, XCIX 699. All references to The Cantos are by canto number (in Roman numerals), and by page number (in Arabic numerals) from the 1970 New Directions edition. 9 “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness….” All biblical references are from the Authorized King James Version unless otherwise noted. 10 For the sources of these phrases, see notes 41 (“repeat in history”) and 42 (“Purgatory of human error”). 11 Elder typically capitalizes and hyphenates this word when he is referring to Martin Heidegger’s notoriously difficult concept of Sein (literally “to be” or the gerund “being”). Heidegger drew a fundamental ontological distinction between Dasein (“temporal existence” or “being-there” in the world) and Sein (the miraculous activity of existence as it shows up phenomenologically to those existents or entities, e.g., human beings, to whom it is intelligible, and in whose temporal existence-in-the-world it is grounded). See Heidegger (1963) and Inwood (1997). 12 According to Pseudo-Dionysius, Divine Names IV.8–10, angelic minds move “with spiral motion, because, even while providentially guiding their inferiors, they remain immutably in their self-identity, turning unceasingly around the Beautiful and Good whence all identity is sprung,” while the human soul moves “with a spiral motion whensoever (according to its capacity) it is enlightened with truths of Divine Knowledge, not in the special unity of its being but by process of its discursive reason and by mingled and alternative activities.” On the origin of the mystic spiral in Platonic cosmology and Neoplatonic psychology, see Miller (1986), 497–98. 13 Davenport (1981), 57–58. 14 For the catalogue note on The Art of Worldly Wisdom, see Bart Testa’s essay in this volume, note 29, p. 391. 15 Major Clifford Hugh Douglas (1879–1952) invented the notion of social credit in the 1920s and went on to write a series of controversial books applying his monetary theory to economic and political issues in the 1930s. His influence on Pound’s polemics against usury and profiteering is evident in the Hell Cantos, XIV and XV. As Douglas was for Pound, so the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) has been for Elder—an authoritative shaper of his world view—though Heidegger’s influence on the filmmaker remains primarily in the domains of metaphysics and aesthetics rather than economics and politics. 16 Originally developed in the 1920s as a technique for writing poetry in the Imagist style, the “ideogrammic method” entails the associative linking of poetic fragments, quotations, images, and “luminous details” to represent (rather than simply to express) emotionally charged thought. Pound believed that readers should not passively receive meaning from a poem, but like biologists comparing slides under a microscope, actively generate it through engagement with the disparate specimens of poetry laid before their eyes by the poet. For a full exposition of the ideogrammic method, see its two Poundian manifestos, ABC of Reading (1934) and Guide to Kulchur (1938). For a critical account of its impact on Pound’s own work, especially The Cantos, see
DRIFTWORKS, PULSEWORKS, LIGHTWORKS
17
18 19
20 21
22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31
485
Kenner (1971). Elder has extended the application of this compositional method from verbal images in poetry to visual images in film. Ernest Fenollosa (1853–1908) was an American orientalist whose papers, including translations of Chinese poetry and the essay “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,” were posthumously edited by Pound. The essay first appeared as an addendum to Pound’s Instigations (1920), but it was later republished as a small book (1936) because of its seminal influence on Imagist poetics. Following Fenollosa’s psycholinguistic theory of “picture writing” (now widely disputed by sinologists), Pound came to believe that Chinese ideograms, in so far as they presented images of the emotionally charged experiences from which concepts were derived, provided a more direct medium for poetic communication than the alphabets of Western languages. “A Retrospect,” Literary Essays, 5. “The ideogrammic method,” Pound instructed in Guide to Kulchur, 51, “consists of presenting one facet and then another until at one point one gets off the dead and desensitized surface of the reader’s mind, onto a part that will register.” On Chinese characters as “energy-packets” providing Pound with a model for the ideogrammic method, see Kenner (1971), 160–61. On the development of Eisenstein’s film aesthetics, see Eisenstein (1949) and O’Pray (1993), 211–18. Gaudier-Brzeska, 88: “…my experience in Paris should have gone into paint. If instead of colour I had perceived sound or planes in relation, I should have expressed it in music or in sculpture. Colour was, in that instance, the ‘primary pigment’; I mean that it was the first adequate equation that came into consciousness. The Vorticist uses the ‘primary pigment.’ Vorticism is art before it has spread itself into flaccidity, into elaboration and secondary application.” Rexroth (1969), vi. The Cantos LXXIV 441: “philosophy is not for young men…their generalities cannot be born from a phalanx / of particulars.” “How to Read,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 25. Letter 32: To George and Thomas Keats, The Letters of John Keats, 71. These doubts are expressed throughout “Drafts & Fragments,” most explicitly in his concluding plea for forgiveness in the final lines of The Cantos (CXX 803): “I have tried to write Paradise / Do not move / Let the wind speak / that is paradise. / Let the Gods forgive what I / have made / Let those I love try to forgive / what I have made.” Pound first proclaimed “the method of the Luminous Detail” in his essay series “I gather the Limbs of Osiris” (1911): see Selected Prose, 21. Fenollosa (1936), 12. “Psychology and Troubadours,” The Spirit of Romance, 92. The Cantos LXXIV 449. On Pound’s interest in Divus, see “Translators of Greek,” Make It New, 137–46. The Latin verse from Divus’s rendering of Homer’s Nekuia (Odyssey XI.1) is taken from Make It New, 138. For a facsimile of the original pages containing the opening lines of Divus’s translation of the Nekuia, see Kenner (1971), 352–53.
486
PART V
TRALUCERE
32 The Cantos LXXIV 430, 442. 33 On Eliot’s influential distinction between “sincere” and “significant” (i.e., poetically transmuted) emotions, see “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Selected Essays (1969), 20–22. 34 The text of Statius’s speech in Petrocchi’s edition [puoi la quantitate / comprender de l’amor ch’a te mi scalda, / quand’ io dismento nostra vanitate, / trattando l’ombre come cosa salda] differs considerably from the wording of Eliot’s Italian epigraph [la quantitate / Puote veder del amor che a te mi scalda, / Quando dismento nostra vanitate / Trattando l’ombre come cosa salda]. 35 This excerpt is the opening stanza of a chorus. Swinburne’s tragedy Atalanta in Calydon was first published in 1865. 36 “A Retrospect,” Literary Essays, 3. 37 “The ‘Introduction’ to Sonnets and Ballate,” Pound’s Cavalcanti, 18. 38 “The ‘Introduction’ to Sonnets and Ballate,” Pound’s Cavalcanti, 18–19. 39 “The ‘Introduction’ to Sonnets and Ballate,” Pound’s Cavalcanti, 18. Pound argues, in fact, that rhythm itself is perhaps “the most primal thing known to us.” 40 “Treatise on Metre,” ABC of Reading, 198. 41 Letter 224: To Homer L. Pound, The Letters of Ezra Pound, 284–85. 42 “An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States,” Selected Prose 1909–1965, 167. On this pamphlet, see Kenner (1971), 475. 43 The Cantos LXXXIII 531: “it [the dawn sun] shines and divides / it nourishes by its rectitude / does no injury / overstanding the earth it fills the nine fields / to heaven.” 44 The Cantos CXVI 797. 45 Cf. Inf. 4.131: “the Master of those who know” [’l maestro di color che sanno] is Aristotle. 46 Davie (1975), 84–85. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alighieri, Dante. La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. Ed. G. Petrocchi. 4 vols. Milano: Mondadori, 1966–67. ——— The Divine Comedy. Trans. Charles S. Singleton. 6 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–75. ——— “Doglia mi reca.” Rime 83. Dante’s Lyric Poetry. Ed. and trans. Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. 182–93. ——— Epistle to Cangrande = Epistola X [in the Oxford edition]. Dantis Alagherii Epistolae: The Letters of Dante. Ed. and trans. Paget Toynbee. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966. 160–211. ——— Epistle to Cangrande = Epistola XIII [in the Milan edition]. Epistole. Ed. Arsenio Frugoni and Giorgio Brugnoli. Opere Minori. Ed. Pier Vicenzo Mengaldo et al. Vol. 2. Milano: Ricciardi, 1979. 598–643. ——— Monarchia. Ed. and trans. Prue Shaw. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ——— “Oltre la spera.” Rime 57. Dante’s Lyric Poetry. Ed. and trans. Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde. Vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967. 96–97.
DRIFTWORKS, PULSEWORKS, LIGHTWORKS
487
——— Rime. Dante’s Lyric Poetry. Ed. and trans. Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde. Vol. 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. ——— Vita Nuova. Trans. Mark Musa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973. Augustine, St. Confessions. Trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961. Bloom, Harold. Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. Davenport, Guy. The Geography of the Imagination. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. Davie, Donald. Ezra Pound. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Viking, 1976. Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. Ed. and trans. Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949. Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Selected Essays. London: Faber and Faber, 1932, 1969. 13–22. Fenollosa, Ernest. The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. Ed. Ezra Pound. San Francisco: City Lights, 1936. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1963. Homer. Odyssey. Trans. Andreas Divus Justinopolitanus. Paris: Christianus Wechelus, 1538. Inwood, Michael. Heidegger. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Keats, John. Letter 32: To George and Thomas Keats (21 December 1817). The Letters of John Keats. Ed. Maurice Buxton Forman. London: Oxford University Press, 1952. 69–72. Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Kojève, Alexandre. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. Ed. Allan Bloom. Trans. James H. Nichols. New York: Basic Books, 1969. Lyotard, Jean-François. Driftworks. Ed. Roger McKeon. New York: Semiotext(e), 1984. Miller, James. Measures of Wisdom: The Cosmic Dance in Classical and Christian Antiquity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986. O’Pray, Michael. “The Frame and Montage in Eisenstein’s ‘Later’ Aesthetics.” Eisenstein Rediscovered. Ed. Ian Christie and Richard Taylor. London: Routledge, 1993. 211–18. Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1951. ——— “An Introduction to the Economic Nature of the United States.” Trans. Carmine Amore and John Drummond. Selected Prose 1909–1965. Ed. William Cookson. New York: New Directions, 1973. 167–85. ——— “A Retrospect.” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1918, 1968. 3–14. ——— Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir. New York: New Directions, 1916, 1960. ——— “How to Read.” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T.S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1918, 1968. 15–40.
488
PART V
TRALUCERE
——— “I gather the Limbs of Osiris.” Ezra Pound: Selected Prose: 1909–1961. Ed. William Cookson. London: Faber and Faber, 1962. 21–43. ——— Instigations of Ezra Pound: together with An Essay on the Chinese Written Character by Ernest Fenollosa. Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1920, 1967. ——— Letter 224: To Homer L. Pound (11 April 1927). The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941. Ed. D.D. Paige. London: Faber and Faber, 1951. 284–86. ——— Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. T.S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1918, 1968. ——— “Psychology and Troubadours.” The Spirit of Romance. London: Peter Owen, 1910, 1970. 87–100. ——— Selected Prose 1909–1956. Ed. William Cookson. New Directions, 1973. ——— The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1970. ——— “The ‘Introduction’ to Sonnets and Ballate.” Pound’s Cavalcanti. Ed. David Anderson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. 11–20. ——— The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907–1941. Ed. D.D. Paige. London: Faber and Faber, 1951. ——— “Translators of Greek.” Make It New: Essays by Ezra Pound. London: Faber and Faber, 1934. 125–56. ——— “Treatise on Metre.” ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 1951. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. On the Divine Names and The Mystical Theology. Trans. C.E. Rolt. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1920. Rexroth, Kenneth. “Introduction.” Paul Reverdy: Selected Poems. Trans. Kenneth Rexroth. New York: New Directions, 1955, 1969. Swinburne, Algernon Charles. Poems and Ballads; Atalanta in Calydon. Ed. Morse Peckham. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970. Vallone, Aldo. “Commedia: Introduction.” The Dante Encyclopedia. Ed. Richard Lansing. New York: Garland, 2000. ——— Storia della critica dantesca dal XIV al XX secolo. Vol. 2. Milano: Vallardi, 1981.
PART VI TRASMODAR
Calling Dante An Exhibition of Sculptures, Drawings, and Installations Andrew Pawlowski and Zbigniew Pospieszynski
June 1995 Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto, Ontario April 1997 The University of Western Ontario London, Ontario
489
Curatorial Essay Prophet of the Paragone James Miller Entro nel petto mio, e spira tue sì come quando Marsïa traesti de la vagina de le membra sue. — Paradiso 1.19–211
‘‘E
nter into my breast,” Dante audaciously commands Apollo, “and breathe there as when you drew Marsyas from the sheath of his limbs.” With this excoriating Ovidian conceit, the poet calls upon the god to inspire him as he enters into his third cantica, an imaginary “arena” [aringo] (Par. 1.18) where his creative powers will be tested beyond the limits of human endurance. Here he faces the supreme challenge of recreating the glory of the All-Mover in glorious words that will move all his readers towards Heaven. Here, too, he enters the arena of Catholic orthodoxy as a martyr—the first self-crowned “martyr for art” in Christian history.2 THE NEW MARSYAS
By casting himself in the role of the satyr Marsyas, whose very name punningly suggests the agony of the Christian martiri, the poet daringly announces that he will risk his skin—in one sense or another—to recreate Paradise in poetry. Just as the satyr was flayed by Apollo at the gruesome finale of their musical contest, so the new Marsyas will be drawn forth from the “sheath” of the Flesh by the anagogic energy of the Holy Spirit. Now, however, the stakes are much higher than in the mythic past. The artistic rivalry is with God himself, the Divine Artist in whose image humanity was formed. A competitive comparison known in Ital-
490
CURATORIAL ESSAY
491
ian aesthetics as the “Paragone” is suddenly established between the cosmopoetic powers of divine and human art.3 In the Ovidian myth, the contest between Apollo and Marsyas was judged by King Midas, who earned his ass’s ears by favouring the shrill notes of the satyr’s pipes over the brightly plucked tones of the Sun God’s lyre. In Dante’s revision of the myth, the Midas role is imposed on the readers of his poem. It is a perilous position to be in. Will we be exposed as fools or philistines if we admire the unsheathed poet’s music? Do we, too, risk being changed at the inevitable resolution of the Paragone in favour of the Divine Artist? In the Marsyas passage, Dante’s word for “sheath” is “vagina,” a Latinism which may come as a shock to English readers used to the polite literariness of the poem in translation. How can a male body be invaginated by the penetrating power of the male god? The homoerotic conceit has a metaphysical edge to it, cutting through the usual gladiatorial gloss on the invocation to its transgressively sexual core. The martial image of a sword drawn from a sheath in the arena of masculinity gives way to its venereal counterpart, the heteroerotic image of a phallus withdrawn from a vagina after procreative intercourse. But who or where is the Mother-Muse in this myth of poetic engendering? The new poet of Paradise is begotten, along with his new poem, when his creative spirit is miraculously released from his flesh by the Sun of the Angels. Here, as in Giovanni di Paolo’s illumination of the Marsyas passage in a fifteenth-century Naples manuscript of the Paradiso, the death of the flayed musician is perversely envisioned as a myth of male birth.4 But if the flaying of Marsyas also serves as a typological parody of the birth of the Word, then the poet has even more perversely twinned himself in the dual role of Madonna and Child under the transparent caul of pagan myth. At a time when heretics were burned for making suggestions far less preposterous than this, the theological implications of the invocation no doubt caused quite a stir among the zealous defenders of orthodoxy. Dante has to be given credit for displaying even more nerve than Marsyas. Instead of suffering an agonizing death as a punishment for artistic hubris, as the satyr had done, the satiric poet imagines himself experiencing the reward of a painfully progressive rebirth as a celestial prophet of love under the influence of Beatrice—a private saint of his own amorous creation. Astonishingly, Beatrice supplants both Apollo-Christ and the Virgin Mary in the arena of poetic martyrdom as the luminous inspiration for the poem.
492
PART VI
TRASMODAR
Dante predicted that after his death his proud soul was destined to endure the torments on the First Cornice of Mount Purgatory. There, joining a repentant company of self-aggrandizing poets and artists for the moral equivalent of aerobic weightlifting, he would learn the virtue of humility from the ground up, literally, by bearing a heavy stone on his back around a rocky ledge for many years until his fiercely competitive desire for worldly fame was finally purged. The architect of this ego-flattening studio had ensured that none of the artists or authors working out there would ever forget (or escape) the Paragone. It was built into their agony. Should they glance up from their heavy burdens, they would see miraculous “carvings” [intagli] (Purg. 10.32) carved into the eighteen-foot marble walls along the inner arc of the ledge. The Divine Artist had breathed such life into his sculptures that they appeared to move and speak within the living rock. Living indeed: not even the technological wonders of 3-D cinema or holographic projection with Dolby stereo (which this ultimate mimesis might suggest to the modern reader) would come close to capturing the animated effect of the wall. No rhetorical ecphrasis, not even Dante’s efforts to suggest the “visible speech” of the scenes [visibile parlare] (Purg. 10.95), could surpass the visionary realization of God’s high fantasy of art fused with life at the event-horizon of matter and spirit. Gabriel’s “Ave” could be heard in the Annunciation scene; David’s feet could be seen leaping in his dance before the Ark; the wind blowing over Trajan’s army could be felt as the imperial eagles swept it with their wings (Purg. 10.34–93). How can a mortal sculptor compete with a demiurge able to carve vaporous trails of incense in marble, trails that seem to paint the air, incense that seems to perfume it? Thus is the inter-arts rivalry at a human level, notably the sophistic elevation of poetry above painting and sculpture, literally flattened into insignificance by the ultimate Paragone of all human arts with the “divine art” [divin’ arte] (Inf. 21.16). By comparison with the figures on the wall, the painters and poets groaning along beneath them had appeared to Dante the pilgrim as mere sculptures: their contorted bodies reminded him of the grotesquely hunched-up figures carved on the corbels supporting the ceilings in medieval churches. Only the Divine Artist could humiliate Dante and his rivals like this and get away with it. A CALLING TO THE PARAGONE
Considering his notorious contempt for the medieval papacy, one can well imagine that Dante still has centuries of weightlifting and circuit
CURATORIAL ESSAY
493
training to go before his release from the Cornice of the Proud. Could he be persuaded to take a break from his boulder? Perhaps, if there was special need for his critical intercession in the land of the living. Like Virgil, whose shade was temporarily freed from Limbo at Beatrice’s request, he might even be released from his humbling exercises in the Hereafter to answer a summons from the Here and Now. The exhibition Calling Dante was one such summons, an urgent conjuring up of this most impassioned of civil poets to help rescue human creativity from the corporate propagandists and theory-mongering sophists who would turn the arts into instruments of moralistic censure, commercial mesmerism, religious chicanery, personal career advancement, or political vainglory. As an invocation to the combative spirit of Dante, the exhibition was also a calling to the Paragone—an invitation to participate in the creative struggle prefigured on the Cornice of the Proud. The idea for Calling Dante came like an Apollonian “flash” [fulgore] (Par. 33.141) to Andrew Pawlowski, a Toronto-based Polish-Canadian doctor who was vacationing with his wife Danuta in the Umbrian hilltown of Gubbio during the summer of 1991. They were there to visit the site of the famous Corsa dei Ceri, the annual Race of the Candles up Monte Ingino, and to enjoy a sense of aesthetic communion with the remote world of the Trecento.5 In the silence of Gubbio’s narrow streets, they felt especially close to the spiritual intensity of the Middle Ages. Dante, who had visited the town himself several times between 1305 and 1320, praised its mountainous setting and its beloved patron saint, Bishop Ubaldo, in the Heaven of the Sun (Par. 11.43–5). Back on the Cornice of the Proud he had also hailed an Umbrian artist, the illuminator Oderisi, as “the honour of Gubbio” [l’onor d’Agobbio] (Purg. 11.80). Despite the heavy stone on his back, Oderisi had found the breath to moralize about the petty rivalries between ambitious Tuscan painters like Cimabue and Giotto. Poets, too, like the Florentines Guido Guinizzelli and Guido Cavalcanti, had boulders awaiting them in the afterlife. Dante took the hint. Pawlowski was intrigued by the humiliation of these medieval masters and their arts before the purely imaginary sculptures by the Divine Artist of the Catholic hexaemeral tradition. Though spiritually at odds with Catholicism and the “medieval fascism” (as he would say) that sustains its hierarchical world view, he nevertheless felt so strong an attraction to Dante’s unorthodox spirituality that his annual vacations to Italy were turning into pilgrimages. Not literary pilgrimages in the usual sense: more like philosophical seances, conjurations, dialogues with the dead.
494
PART VI
TRASMODAR
In an essay on the influence of Dante on Polish literature, Pawlowski quoted an entry from the journal of Witold Gombrowicz, a controversial Polish writer (1904–69) who spent most of his adult life in Argentina and France. “How could this have happened,” Gombrowicz had wondered about Dante’s masterwork, “that such a demoralized composition, so contradictory to human justice, could have changed into a most edifying and dignified poem? Christians, how have you made it? The entire Divine Comedy is in a state of deadly sin, yet the Catholic world adores it.”6 The same questions haunted Pawlowski, who decided to explore his perplexity over Dante’s dubious orthodoxy by writing a play about it. “I was pursuing the shade of Dante who would appear to me at times only to disappear,” Pawlowski confesses self-mockingly in the introduction to his closet drama Dante on the Steps of Immortality: “I was tracing his steps, eager to find him for myself, prepared by the thousands of publications on Dante and his works that fill up library shelves. Truth, lies, myths.”7 But the laureled shade was not to be found in the dusty limbo of scholarly articles, festschrifts, commentaries. As a dermatologist, Pawlowski had long been fascinated by Dante’s references to the skin diseases of the Damned. Perhaps this professional interest reinforced his personal desire to get under the poet’s skin, to make contact with the living spirit behind the tissue of lies and myths scarring the complex truths revealed to the new Marsyas. Like Apollo with his scalpel, working with exquisitely precise strokes to flay the false hide of immortal honour from the remains of a legendary upstart, Pawlowski set out to expose the arrogant, self-seeking, power-hungry, violently vengeful prophet behind the amorously idealistic Dante of literary legend. Writing a play would be one way to do this—especially if the work were a “paragonizing” drama in which the poet could be put on trial for his multiple failings but still be given a chance to speak in his own defence. If his shade could not be called up from the dead in real life, it could still be conjured dramatically in the theatre of the imagination. DANTE ON THE STEPS
The fantasy of conjuration is realized on the great staircase of the Palazzo dei Consoli at the heart of Gubbio in the opening scene of Dante on the Steps of Immortality, which was originally published in Polish in 1995 under the title Dante na Stopniach Nie´smiertelno´sci. The caller of Dante is Pawlowski’s alter ego, a Pole satirically named Kukla or “Straw Man.” Kukla has lived for so many years in North America that he has metamorphosed into a kind of spiritless technotourist, an android, a hollow man.
CURATORIAL ESSAY
495
As his name suggests, he is the puppetlike shell of an Eliotesque “Old Guy” who has lost his spiritual life in the consumer wasteland of the late twentieth century.8 The mechanicalness of his thinking is symbolized by a tape recorder and headset, which have virtually replaced his mind and senses. He hardly seems aware that the time-ravaged staircase in Gubbio, guarded at its base by the laurel-crowned statues of Homer and Virgil, has assumed a timeless allegorical status as the route towards poetic immortality. Nor does he seem to notice the disquieting statue of Mussolini hanging upside down, piñata-like, over the scene. Are these dreamlike sculptures (like those near the rocky stairway in Purgatory) installed by God to teach proud spirits a lesson in humility? Kukla does not ask this question himself because he has lost faith in the existence of the Divine Artist. Recollecting his visit to Dante’s tomb in Ravenna, he begins the conjuration by hailing the poet as both a counterpart and an antitype of himself. In Dante the exile, he sees himself as an alienated immigrant confronting the cultural turmoil of his century. In Dante the prophet, he sees himself as the dauntless crusader for Truth he would like to be, the visionary whose moral engagement with the world has pitted him against religious dogmatism and political deception. In the encomiastic verses of his conjuration, the hollow man praises the man of spirit for his intellectual courage in resisting blind adherence to orthodoxy: He raised up the late Middle Ages from its knees; He lashed out with his pen, Without hiding his sword.9
Only terza rima will do to summon the great inventor of the form, even if Kukla’s modern tercets come out haltingly, mechanically, without the fire of the Holy Spirit. Dante instantly appears on a lower stair, his face “terribly white” against the dark red of his robe and the black of his hood. Singing his praises is a sure way to catch his attention. “I know that you seek me,” the poet begins, having been tipped off by Beatrice that Kukla was beating on the doors of all the houses in Gubbio where he had stayed during his exile.10 Dante’s opening monologue on “the vengeance of the poet served in a golden chalice” sets the tone of aggressive defensiveness for the whole play.11 His calling will not come without a price: the destruction of his own self-constructed icon—Dante the political martyr, Dante the platonic lover—through the unveiling of dark secrets about his sex life, his political treachery, his dependence on mind-altering drugs, and other biogra-
496
PART VI
TRASMODAR
phical unorthodoxies “which still lie dormant in the ashes of the centuries.” Kukla must come to terms with his hero as a radical skeptic, a reckless spender, a rabid imperialist, a rapturous headtripper, even a rapist, before the curtain comes down on the steps of immortality. Just as Dante himself imagined a new Marsyas emerging out of the skin of the defeated satyr, so Pawlowski imagines a new Dante emerging in the second act from the tissue of old hagiographic myths and lies about the Dantean corpus dissected (or autopsied) in the first act. Besides being summoned from the dead to be his own iconoclast, the new Dante is “called” by the playwright for three other reasons. He is called to bear witness to the evils of his age, called to account for his secret life, and called to action in the war against modern tyranny. He bears witness primarily to the extreme cruelty of the heresyhaunted and death-driven culture of the later Middle Ages, which is epitomized in the play by the ritual crucifixion of conscripted martyrs in the Race of the Candles. The Trecento version of the race, as Dante describes it to Kukla, was a far cry from the jolly spectacle staged for tourists in Gubbio today. It was a grotesquely literal carnivalization of the memento mori theme treated allegorically by the poet in his pilgrimage through Hell. The present tourist board of Gubbio would no doubt be distressed to learn from the play that Dante supposedly witnessed the torture and sacrifice of wretched initiates in the cult of Saint Ubaldo. If Dante is called to account for such atrocities from a political standpoint as a staunch upholder of the Catholic faith, he is also called to task on a personal level for his atrocious treatment of friends and lovers. At the beginning of act two he is literally put on trial for his sins by a chorus of women—Beatrice his immortal beloved, Gemma his estranged wife, Gentucca his rape victim, and Gozzuta his pastoral fling—who materialize on the staircase as witnesses for the prosecution. Kukla serves as his judge, eventually urging the poet to plead guilty to all the charges of infidelity, betrayal, hypocrisy, and sexual violence levelled at him by his personal Furies. Though willing to admit his guilt in the banishment of Guido Cavalcanti, for instance, the accused stalwartly refuses to apologize for the intensity of his participation in the World and the Flesh or for the success of his poetic attack on the papal regime of the Devil. For his resistance to dogmatic censorship, for his ferocious comedy in the face of morbid ritualism, Dante is ultimately forgiven by Kukla. The living spirit of the poet is called into action in the sphere of contemporary art and literature, like a patron saint in the domain of moral action, to protect future generations from the Bonifaces and Ezzelinos and Corso
CURATORIAL ESSAY
497
Donatis who would extinguish the Apollonian light. If that means turning Dante the visionary into a sort of medieval Timothy Leary without the guff, then so be it. “We will journey through this life,” he prophesies, “and the next and yet another, slowly and tranquilly looking always forwards and on high all the way to the blinding light.”12 Mindful of the risks taken by the defenders of civil and artistic liberty under totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century—as Dante himself must be with the effigy of Mussolini hanging over him on his staircase— Pawlowski invites us to share Kukla’s final appreciation of the Dantean “laugh that carries so many hopes with it” for a divinely comic end to the tragic history of oppressions symbolized by the race up Monte Ingino.13 VISIBLE SPEECH
By incorporating copies of Dante on the Steps of Immortality into Calling Dante, where the books reappeared as “bookworks” suggesting props from an elaborate production of the play, Pawlowski invited his readers to consider the complex aesthetic relations between Word and Image underlying the diverse art objects assembled around them. The archaic look of these bookworks was designed by Pawlowski’s friend and fellow Polish-Canadian artist Zbigniew Pospieszynski. For each display copy of the play, Pospieszynski constructed a wooden box with a hinged cover, the outer and inner surfaces of which were painted with symbolic images (angels, devils, keys, skulls, shades) recalling the allegorical visions in the Commedia. The imagery chosen for these paintings was not repeated from box to box, except for a large slanting “A” with a cross at its apex and a banner at its right foot which appeared on each cover as well as on the cover of the original catalogue and on the banners for the exhibition. This mysterious sign functioned as both a monogram of Dante’s family name Alighieri and as a hieroglyph of his divided allegiance to Church and Empire. Included in the printed text of the play were reproductions of two graphite drawings (also by Pospieszynski), which served as provocatively complex extensions of the play’s visionary field rather than as simple illustrations of its narrative. Between the wooden cover of each box and the paper cover of the play was a detached wooden panel into which Pospieszynski had set a small rectangular lens. At first glance the lens might be mistaken for a semi-precious stone. Framed in copper, it looks somewhat like a crystal on a medieval breviary cover. But, since it is removable, it serves the practical function of magnifying the exquisite details of the published drawings and painted surfaces. Or is the glass there to enlarge the playwright’s words? Its sym-
498
PART VI
TRASMODAR
bolic function is clearly to draw attention to the competing claims of Word and Image in the exhibition as a whole. What it magnifies is a Paragone in miniature. The macroversion of this clash might be seen in the paragonizing combination of sculpture, drawing, installation, poetry, drama, video, and music presented under the single banner of Calling Dante. Pospieszynski had collaborated with Pawlowski on the artistic contents and curatorial organization of the exhibition since its opening at Toronto’s Istituto Italiano di Cultura in June 1995. Together they had found a way back to the aesthetic debate prophetically erupting (and sternly suppressing itself) on the Cornice of the Proud. What would happen to the Dantean Paragone if artists and authors no longer humbled themselves before the masterworks of the Divine Artist? Or if the Divine Artist were eliminated from the scene altogether? Calling Dante was an invitation to find out where the Paragone might lead if its Dantean resolution, the moral humiliation of mortal artists on Mount Purgatory, were rejected on anti-totalitarian grounds. All the artworks in the show bore a defiantly dialectical (rather than harmoniously dependent) relation to Dante’s great poem, of course, but also to Pawlowski’s play. If Dante’s allegorized journey through the afterlife was the master text behind the exhibition, Pawlowski’s dramatized headtrip to Gubbio was the “anti-master” reaction to the Dantean fantasy of cosmopoetic imperialism. Displayed between these clashing texts were Pawlowski’s wryly ironic sculptures of characters, moments, and political forces drawn from the Commedia; Pospieszynski’s graphite drawings and installations hinting at private religious dreams beyond the pale of public orthodoxies; and six of the ten bookworks that the two artists produced together between 1995 and 1996. In the expanded second version of the show, which opened under my curatorial guidance at the University of Western Ontario in 1997, the interarts rivalry was further illuminated and complicated by the addition of a video adaptation of the trial scene from the play. Entitled Dante on the Scales, it was produced and directed by Kevin Hehir, a student in my undergraduate Dante cycle. Though absent from the Cornice of the Proud, composers and musicians exerted their presence in Hehir’s vision of the steps of immortality: the incidental music originally composed for the play by Hilary Koprowski was added to the soundtrack of the video along with new compositions by another of my Dante students, Liam Birch. Advocates of Gotthold Lessing’s conciliatory theory that the visual and verbal arts have their own proper domains—time for literature, space
CURATORIAL ESSAY
499
for sculpture and painting—would have been thoroughly jangled by the invasive crossing of traditional aesthetic borders in the second version of Calling Dante. Dante himself envisioned the conflation of these domains in the Divine Artist’s “visible speech” carved on the wall above the Proud. If the Divine Artist should ever take notice of Pawlowski’s granite sculpture of the Giant Ephialtes, he might suspect that the artists in Purgatory had struck a blow for freedom against his regime by throwing down their boulders and carving them into totems of defiance. Pawlowski is known for taking liberties with anatomy in his simplified anthropomorphic forms. His often rough treatment of the main body of a figure (as evident, for instance, in his Piccarda and Paolo and Francesca) is usually finely balanced by his detailed work on eyes, hands, shoes, masks, wings, and other parts. The compactness of the semi-abstract figures in Calling Dante tends to suggest their pent up strength, their aggressive energy held at bay, though in some works, most notably the decapitated Ephialtes, the gigantic delusions of the original character are ironically cut down by the totemic squatness of its sculptural embodiment. However abstrusely intellectual Pawlowski’s Dantean work may appear, its ironic character is never independent of its material. His inventive combinations of wood, bone, stone, metals, and found objects spring directly from his paragonizing impulse to fuse allegorical figures from the Western literary tradition with sculptural forms from the traditions of Archaic and Inuit art. Irony is traditionally read as a rhetorical device rather than revealed as an aesthetic effect or creative principle in the domain of the visual arts. Pawlowski’s irony springs from his visual as well as verbal engagement with the Commedia. In his startlingly unconventional Dante, the poet’s iconic features—the stern eyes, sour mouth, and aquiline nose memorialized in millions of public statues and mantelpiece portrait busts—disappear behind a Venetian carnival mask. Was the sculptor hinting at an absurdist human comedy beneath the moral severity of the poet’s “Holy Face” [Santo Volto] (Inf. 21.48)? Was he revealing the wild heretical side of Dante traditionally hidden behind the Catholic image of the scholastic allegorist? Or was he reminding us that the real Dante died as a result of malaria contracted near Venice? The bronze portrait might be viewed simultaneously as a stern warning to the Proud about death or as a celebratory sign of the poet’s love of life. In the absence of the Divine Artist, Pawlowski took up the challenge of sculpting the perverse rupture of conceptually distinct planes through the aggressive interpenetration of the arts. In his visible rendering of
500
PART VI
TRASMODAR
Brunetto Latini’s pickup line “What a marvel!” [Qual maraviglia!] (Inf. 15.24), the sculptor chose to depict the pilgrim crossing the Desert of the Sodomites at the sexually charged moment when the old professor grabs the hem of Dante’s robe from below. In the poem, Brunetto marvels at the appearance of a living soul in the realm of the dead, as many of the Damned do on seeing Dante among them. More surprising to him still is the discovery of his famous disciple, the impeccably heterosexual lover of Beatrice, down there among the pederastic pedagogues under the rain of fire. In the sculpture, however, the grounds for marvelling cease to be social or psychosexual. Pawlowski’s Brunetto tilts his head and stares out over the heads of the sinners in his caged circle without the fixed erotic gaze of his Dantean prototype: he hardly seems disturbed by the fire and brimstone. Why this odd indifference? We must turn away from the poem to the play for an answer. “Bruno I placed in hell for his declared homosexuality,” Dante confesses to Kukla, whose suspicious reaction to this gossipy revelation prompts this reassuring rebuff from the poet: “No, no! Bruno never tried to change the nature of my sexual tendencies. I was not his type…I loved Bruno more than my father and I made him understand it well in my Comedy, but I had to cast him down into hell—for if not, the Church would never have pardoned me. My friends knew that it was only a game.”14 So Pawlowski’s thoroughly unorthodox Dante did not really believe in Hell, and would not have dreamed of dumping his revered mentor under the fire except to save his own skin from burning. No wonder the Brunetto who materializes in Calling Dante seems unconcerned with damnation! It was only a game to him and to his inner circle of philosophically enlightened disciples, among whom an unidentified woman appears in the sculpture—a figure definitely not to be found in the Desert of the Sodomites. The “maraviglia” rendered in wood and metal would be both spatial and temporal: the sculptural transformation of the complex tropology and topography of Inferno 15 into a minimalist geometrical game board. Away with the burning plain and bleeding river, the rocky dike and trodden sands. In their place appear two circular planes, one set above the other like the skins of a drum. As the pilgrim passes serenely over the top like a medieval chess piece, Brunetto’s long arm suddenly stretches up and miraculously passes through the solid metal of the upper plane as if it were air. His patinated hand, adorned with a red jewel like a stop signal, halts the pilgrim’s progress across the plane. This effortless rupture of what might have been easily and wrongly interpreted as the impassable
CURATORIAL ESSAY
501
boundary separating the Living from the Dead, the Saved from the Damned, not only dispenses with the conceptual distinctions essential to the Catholic world view; it also exposes (as the sculpture exemplifies) the transgressive game of the Paragone with its surprising challenges to the traditional hierarchy of the arts. Artistic freedom is the only rule of the game here: not even Dante’s master text can determine the afterlife of the characters brought back into play by the sculptor’s iconoclastic imagination. IMMIGRANT IRONIES
In Pospieszynski’s works the freeplay of the Paragone reduces the literary prominence of the master text almost to absurdity. The tiny scale of his intricately detailed drawings—The Damned and Exodus both measure only 16 x 12 cm—recalls at first glance the art of the miniaturists who elaborately illustrated the manuscripts of the Commedia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Their illustrations were for the most part humbly dependent on the poet’s visual details. If Dante described a damned soul (like the suicide Pier della Vigna in Inferno 13) as hidden in a thorn bush, they drew a stylized tree with a sad little face peeking out through the branches. If the upstart spirit of Oderisi da Gubbio, whose punishment on the Cornice of the Proud no doubt spoke to their souls, ever moved them to challenge the massive authority of the poet by illuminating his scenes with their own visual details or visionary insights, they did so at some risk to their immortal souls. With the sharpest of pencils, Pospieszynski strove to reclaim the artistic liberty of the true illuminator (rather than mere illustrator) of Dante from the faded memory of the Honour of Gubbio. In Exodus, for instance, the Old Testament journey from bondage to freedom has been envisioned as a dreamlike passage from Night to Day across a central dividing line. On the nocturnal side of the line stretches a shadowy wilderness peaked with Egyptian pyramids or nomads’ tents. A massive migration is in progress down the right edge of the drawing towards the central line. Are the tiny figures in this procession the tribes of Israel escaping towards the Light of Freedom, or are they “the lost people” [la perduta gente] (Inf. 3.3) trapped in the Shadow of Death? Ironies flicker back and forth across the line. If the daylight side represents the liberation of the people, why are they represented as bound and bundled at the base of a looming Bosch-like idol’s head? Their strange inconclusive exodus reflects the artist’s ironic meditations on his own immigration from Poland to Canada in 1987.
502
PART VI
TRASMODAR
The ironies of immigration seem to deepen in The Damned, where a beady eye stares out accusingly from a strangely writhing face. Could this be Dante’s profile with its prominent nose and chin? Or the face of Marsyas after his flaying? The pointy profile suggests a bearded satyr who has lost his skin and is painfully metamorphosing into a demon at a subcutaneous level. Cancerous cells cluster malignantly around his eye sockets. Veinlike filaments branch out from chin to neck. A tangled fabric of nerves and muscle fibres eerily weaves itself along the radii of an emergent web, with the eye at its sinister hub. Move closer to the face as if to dissect its hideous tissues with your eye, and you will discover a multitude of unexpected images hidden in the exposed interior of the demon. The malignant cells turn out to be tiny expressionistic faces uttering silent Munch-like screams or gaping skulls heaped up in a mass grave lurking just beneath the surface of consciousness. While these same skulls and faces can be seen bound up like cargo in its companion drawing Exodus and packed away like broken dolls in the installation A Drawerful, here they seem to crowd into view with frantic liberty as if competing with each other for space in a weird organic landscape revealed by electron microscopy. Under magnification, the web of nerve fibres and splayed muscles in The Damned fantastically grows in scale to the size and shape of ancient conifers and thorny thickets—as if the shade of Arcimboldo had cut down Dante’s “dark wood” [selva oscura] (Inf. 1.2) and fashioned a surreally leering face out of the heavy trunks and branches. Yet the trees, which were the radii of the web, still seem to float in the infernal air with spidery insubstantiality. A Bosch-like corpse sits nonchalantly on the end of a log, swinging his stick legs into the paradoxical space of shifting horizons and contradictory vanishing points glimpsed by the infernal eye. The dense arboreal texture of the drawing may also recall the “strange trees” [alberi strani] (Inf. 13.15) in the Wood of the Suicides, where, according to Dante, Pier della Vigna was to drag his discarded flesh on doomsday and hang it on the spiny trunks and branches guarded by the Harpies. Could the corpse on the log be a prophetic image of Pier’s unensouled body? Or is Pier himself staring out at us with the beady eye of the demon? If it is Pier’s profile you see at a distance, then Pospieszynski has ironically reversed the Dantean punishment for the Suicides. Instead of the Damned hidden in trees, we find trees hidden in the Damned. A carnivalesque comedy of inversion and transgression emerges out of the paragonizing interplay of works in Calling Dante, its conspicuous emblem being the Venetian carnival mask covering (or perhaps form-
CURATORIAL ESSAY
503
ing) the poet’s face in Pawlowski’s bronze of Dante. The comic spirit at work in the anti-fascist Danteum of the artists’ imagination should not be confused with the parodic impulse of postmodernist art to conjure up ghostly memories of meanings and master texts in the graveyard of literary authority.15 Calling—not Galling—Dante is what Pawlowski and Posieszynski called their show. By engaging in the creative play of the Paragone, they were keeping alive the Dantean spirit of artistic freedom paradoxically restrained and unleashed on the Cornice of the Proud. The Death of the Author was not celebrated in their work. “You’re truly alive, Alighieri?” Kukla asks the poet at the end of the play, as the Sun rises over the steps of immortality. “Yes,” Dante replies, “but I live a true life, not like that one of yours.” Then, with a laugh, the poet mischievously inverts the playwright’s conjuring spell: “I am not a spirit—you are my spirit.”16 NOTES 1 Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from the Commedia in this essay have been drawn from the Petrocchi edition as reprinted and slightly revised by Singleton (1970–75). All translations from Dante are by Singleton (1970–75). The components of the Commedia cited from are Inferno (Inf.), Purgatorio (Purg.), and Paradiso (Par.). 2 I first saw the unorthodox phrase “martyr for art” painted on a cross dragged in the 1990 San Francisco Gay Pride Parade by “Pink Jesus,” a solo marcher who was protesting Moral Majority efforts to cut off the public funding of transgressive art, literature, drama, and film by gay and lesbian artists. Teetering along Market Street on pink high heels and sporting a sexy pink loincloth, he drew great applause from the crowd for having gone to the sacrilegious trouble of painting his entire body a truly shocking pink to match his martyr ensemble. 3 On the origin and significance of the Paragone debate, see Kemp (1989), 26–34; Mitchell (1986), 47–48, 106, 121. 4 Yates-Thompson Codex, folio 129 recto (British Library), c.1445. For a fullcolour reproduction of Giovanni di Paolo’s illumination of the Marsyas-ApolloDante triad, see Pope-Hennessy (1993), 71. 5 For a description of the Corsa dei Ceri at Gubbio, see Touring Club Italiano (1966), 152. 6 This quotation is drawn from Pawlowski’s unpublished essay “Dante’s Place in Polish Literary History,” and used with the author’s permission. 7 Pawlowski (1997), 5. 8 I am referring here to T.S. Eliot’s famous epigraph (“A penny for the Old Guy”) and lines 2–4 (“We are the stuffed men / Leaning together / Headpiece filled with straw…”) from “The Hollow Men.” 9 Pawlowski (1997), 12. 10 Pawlowski (1997), 12. 11 Pawlowski (1997), 13.
504
PART VI
TRASMODAR
12 13 14 15
Pawlowski (1997), 35. Pawlowski (1997), 43. Pawlowski (1997), 19. As President of the Italian Dante Association during the Fascist period, the Milanese lawyer Rino Valdameri (1889–1943) initiated the construction of the Danteum. The construction of this Institute, which would have been the headquarters and ideological shrine of the Fascist Party, was interrupted during the Second World War. On the Danteum, see Pawlowski (1997), 40, and Schumacher (1985). 16 Pawlowski (1997), 44. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alighieri, Dante. La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. Ed. G. Petrocchi. 4 vols. Milano: Mondadori, 1966–67. ——— The Divine Comedy. Trans. Charles S. Singleton. 6 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–75. Eliot, T.S. “The Hollow Men” (1925). The Complete Poems and Plays 1909–1950. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1971. 56–59. Kemp, Martin, ed. Leonardo On Painting. Trans. Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo on Painting. Ed. Martin Kemp. Trans. Martin Kemp and Margaret Walker. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989. Mitchell, W.J.T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. Pawlowski, Andrew (Andrzej Pawowski). Dante na Stopniach Nie´smiertelno´sci. Toronto: Saga, 1995. ——— Dante on the Steps of Immortality. Trans. Anna Adlewska (Italian), James Miller (English). Toronto: Saga, 1997. Pope-Hennessy, John. Paradiso: The Illuminations to Dante’s Divine Comedy by Giovanni di Paolo. London: Thames and Hudson, 1993. Schumacher, T. The Danteum. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 1985. Touring Club Italiano. Guida d’Italia: Umbria. Milan: Garzanti, 1966.
Calling Dante Notes on the Artists James Miller ANDREW PAWLOWSKI
T
he healing arts, the liberal arts, and the fine arts converge in the European tradition of the humanist doctor, a tradition which has survived the sea-change of North American immigration and professionalization in the remarkable career of Andrew Pawlowski. Physician, author, sculptor—Pawlowski has succeeded in fusing all three roles with a dash of courtly sprezzatura in an era which increasingly promotes the narrow professional virtues of technical expertise and specialization. Born in 1933 in Warsaw, Poland, Pawlowski received his early medical training at the Warsaw Academy of Medicine in 1957–58. He went on to study dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1959–60 and anatomy at Oxford University in 1965–66. He received his MD (1963) and PhD (1968) in Poland before immigrating to Canada, where he graduated from the University of Toronto with a second MD (1979). After establishing his private practice in dermatology in Toronto, he joined the University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine as an assistant professor in 1983. Pawlowski originally taught himself how to sculpt. To enhance his technical skills and expand his artistic horizons, he studied with the eminent Polish-Canadian sculptor Edward Koniuszy from 1977 to 1980 and joined the Sculptors Society of Canada in 1985, serving as its president from 1992 to 1994. His award-winning work has been presented in several one-man shows (Toronto, 1985; New York, 1987; Toronto, 1991) as well as in many group exhibitions in North America and Europe. His sculptures are now included in the collections of the Museo Dantesco in Ravenna, the National Gallery in Warsaw, and the Museum of Polish Sculpture in Oronsko. In 1996, the Centro Dantesco in Ravenna displayed
505
506
PART VI
TRASMODAR
his sculpture Misericordia (Gate of Purgatory) in an international group exhibition entitled La Porta per la Città di Dante: Purgatorio. Besides publishing numerous scientific papers in international medical journals, Pawlowski has written extensively on the Polish-Canadian cultural experience. His critical writings on the Polish art scene in Canada include The Art of Eugene Chruscicki (1987) and Edward Koniuszy the Sculptor (1990). His social history of the Polish community in Toronto, The Saga of Roncesvalles (1993), has become the standard reference work on the subject. Turning from prose to poetical drama, he composed Dante na Stopniach Nie´smiertelno´sci for the premiere of the exhibition Calling Dante at the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in Toronto in 1995. Translated into English as Dante on the Steps of Immortality, the play was produced in part as a video installation to accompany the exhibition when it was remounted at the University of Western Ontario in London in 1997. How could Dante have transmuted his transgressive vision of Divine Justice into an edifying poem championed throughout the Catholic world? How could a pious Catholic have envisioned the impious horrors of the Inferno? The questions about the Commedia raised by Polish novelist Witold Gombrowicz in the wake of the Second World War are explored by Pawlowski in his play, and his perplexity over Dante’s dubious orthodoxy can be sensed in the ironic presentation of the poet and his characters in the Calling Dante sculptures. ZBIGNIEW POSPIESZYNSKI
As exile was for Dante, so immigration has been for Pospieszynski: a momentous experience of displacement and discovery marking a strong divide in his creative life between Before and After. Before coming to Canada, he studied painting and printmaking in the studios of professors S. Gierowski and H. Chrostowska at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, from which he graduated with an MA in 1978. While working as Chrostowska’s assistant at the Academy in the 1980s, he actively participated in the European art scene by exhibiting his work in France, Portugal, and Sweden. Martial law and political turmoil in Poland induced him in 1987, at the age of thirty-four, to immigrate to Ontario. In Canada his work has undergone a dramatic change. Instead of the refined abstract compositions of his Warsaw period, he now creates figurative works of an intensely symbolic character. His images are drawn from the personal domain of dreams and memories as well as from traditional sources in art history, biblical typology, and poetic allegory.
NOTES ON THE ARTISTS
507
The interdependence of symbolic systems and social fantasies receives careful attention in Pospieszynski’s visionary microcosms. The spiritually charged atmosphere evoked by the high degree of detail in his work exerts an almost hypnotic influence over the viewer. As level after level of complex allegorical significance opens up to the inner eye, the “inscapes” of these tiny compositions strangely seem to expand—only to disappear over the horizon of consciousness. As the title of one of his mixed media objects suggests, the line between “Miraculous” and “Real” is refined to the point of vanishing in his art. Through his drawings he has found an almost mystical access to Dante’s poetic universe where the miraculous becomes the real in the artist’s symbolic re-enactment of his exodus from Hell to Heaven. Yet Pospieszynski is quick to point out that he is not an illustrator of the Commedia. Rather, as an illuminator of the poet’s “high fantasy” [alta fantasia] (Par. 33.142), he imagines a passage back to the medieval mirror world of symbols without the oppressive intervention of the medieval hierarchy of spirits. The cascading meanings of Dante’s deeply symbolic rivers, for instance, flow through Pospieszynski’s mind in a current of visual and emotional associations. Just as the poet merged the contrastive states of being and becoming in his river imagery, so the artist fuses the temporal and the eternal in his flow of symbols. The very word “river” is enough to unleash a Poundian rush of opposing implications in his meditations on the symbol: River Rivers are symbols of the passing of unstoppable motions of renewal Rivers are lines, dividing happiness sorrow scream silence motion calmness imagination monotony forests deserts life death People trapped in the river roll in a constant dance of life of death
The paradoxical world view that emerges from this ironic conflation of binaries resists (rather than reflects) the now utterly predictable anxiety over the signifier and the signified associated with postmodernism, as Pospieszynski himself has suggested in a poetic reflection on his artistic development:
508
PART VI
TRASMODAR
In Poland I worked in linocut technique, creating abstract compositions. In Canada, alienated from the traditions, the language, and the truth [of Poland], I formed my cage of freedom, A cage that enables me to exist in the foreign world. This is a positive circumstance; it does not lead to the creation of inner imitations. Creations: monumental miniatures, objects, paintings. Dimensions: From 12 cm to infinity…
No doubt this same “cage of freedom” (another reminiscence of Dante mediated through Pound) encloses the bundle of souls on the daylight side of Exodus. Within the linguistic and cultural restrictions of his new country, Pospieszynski has found the freedom to express his paradoxical visions in the mimetically appropriate form of “monumental miniatures.”
Calling Dante A Portfolio of Words and Images
T
he seven quotations from Dante accompanying Andrew Pawlowski’s images were selected by the artist himself as textual glosses on his art, while the translations and annotations were provided by exhibition curator James Miller. By contrast, the seven quotations from Dante accompanying Zbigniew Pospieszynski’s images were selected by the curator alone and should not be read as texts specifically illustrated or addressed by the artist. Throughout the exhibition, in the case of both artists, the selection of quotations was designed to provoke meditations on the traditional rivalry between Word and Image which gave rise to the aesthetic debate known as the Paragone or inter-arts “comparison.” Photo credits: Andrew Pawlowski (images 1–7); Zbigniew Pospieszynski (images 8–14).
509
510
PART VI
TRASMODAR
Dante Andrew Pawlowski, 1994 bronze, 15x13x40 cm per che di provedenza è buon ch’io m’armi, sì che, se loco m’è tolto più caro, io non perdessi li altri per miei carmi. [wherefore it is good that I arm myself with foresight, so that if the dearest place be taken from me, I should not lose the others because of my songs.](Par. 17.109–11) In the Heaven of Mars, after the spirit of his blessed ancestor Cacciaguida has prophesied his exile, Dante finds consolation in the prophetic knowledge that his poetry will earn him honour as a weapon to smite the wicked in high places.
Cacciaguida Andrew Pawlowski, 1995 mixed media, 19x17x80 cm Poi seguitai lo ’mperador Currado; ed el mi cinse de la sua milizia, tanto per bene ovrar li venni in grado. [Afterward I followed the Emperor Conrad, who girded me with his knighthood, so much did my good work gain his favour.] (Par. 15.139–41) Born around the turn of the twelfth century, the Florentine nobleman Cacciaguida was Dante’s great-great-grandfather on his father’s side. In 1147 he joined the Emperor Conrad III on the Second Crusade, from which he never returned. In the Heaven of Mars he laments the demographic and moral decline of Florence.
A PORTFOLIO OF WORDS AND IMAGES
511
Ephialtes Andrew Pawlowski, 1995 granite, iron, 14x30x46 cm “Questo superbo volle esser esperto di sua potenza contra ’l sommo Giove,” disse ’l mio duca, “ond’ elli ha cotal merto…” [“This proud giant resolved to test his strength against supreme Jove,” said my leader, “so he deserves such a reward…”] (Inf. 31.91–3) The gigantic son of Neptune and Iphimedia, Ephialtes was so proud of his strength that at the age of nine he joined his brother Otus in waging war on the Olympian gods. Dante finds him chained in the Ninth Circle of Hell, guarding the frozen shades of the Traitors.
Sinners, Brunetto Latini Andrew Pawlowski, 1995 wood, metal, 30x30x76 cm Così adocchiato da cotal famiglia, fui conosciuto da un, che mi prese per lo lembo e gridò: “Qual maraviglia!” [When the chosen family had cruised me hard, I was recognized by one, who clutched me by the hem and squealed: “Well, get HER!”] (Inf. 15.22–4) Outed as a Sodomite by Dante, Brunetto (c.1220–c.1294) is not otherwise known to have committed any “sin against Nature.” Ironically, he was famous in his day as a proponent of natural philosophy. In Hell he dances over hot sand under a rain of fire. Despite his burnt face, he is recognized by Dante who praises him for his teachings on “how man makes himself eternal.” [Note: the translation into contemporary Gayspeak is shamelessly unorthodox.]
512
PART VI
TRASMODAR Piccarda Andrew Pawlowski, 1994 slate, 28x13x59 cm “Perfetta vita e alto merto inciela donna più sù,” mi disse, “a la cui norma nel vostro mondo giù si veste e vela…” [“Perfect life and high merit enheaven a lady higher up,” she said, “whose rule governs those who in your world take the veil…”] (Par. 3.97–9) A relative of Dante on his wife Gemma’s side, Piccarda Donati entered the convent of Santa Chiara at Monticelli (just outside Florence) but was forcibly abducted by her brother Corso in 1283 to marry Rossellino della Tosa for political purposes. She fell ill and died soon after her marriage. Santa Chiara, the “lady higher up,” helped raise Piccarda to the Heaven of the Moon despite her broken vows.
Paolo and Francesca Andrew Pawlowski, 1994 alabaster, iron, 30x13x41 cm Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona, mi prese del costui piacer sì forte, che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona. [Love, which absolves no one from loving, seized me so strongly with pleasure for this man, that, as you see, it does not leave me.] (Inf. 5.103–5) Temporarily released from the whirlwind in the Circle of the Lustful, Francesca da Rimini laments the fatal impact of Love on her unrepentantly passionate soul. She and her lover Paolo were stabbed to death by her jealous husband Gianciotto while they were reading of the first kiss bestowed by Queen Guinevere on Sir Lancelot.
A PORTFOLIO OF WORDS AND IMAGES
513
Misericordia (The Gate of Purgatory) Andrew Pawlowski, 1996 mixed media, 36x36x38 cm
vidi una porta, e tre gradi di sotto per gire ad essa, di color diversi, e un portier ch’ancor non facea motto. [I saw a gate, and beneath it three steps for going up to it, of different colours, and a gatekeeper who as yet spoke not a word.] (Purg. 9.76–8) Unlike the more famous Gate of Hell, this threshold is locked, guarded, and unmarked. Its white, blue, and red steps symbolize confession, contrition, and satisfaction—which alters the traditional Catholic sequence of contrition, confession, and satisfaction. The angelic gatekeeper shows mercy to Dante despite his sinful condition.
The Damned Zbigniew Pospieszynski, 1993 graphite on paper, 16x12 cm Cred’ ïo ch’ei credette ch’io credesse che tante voci uscisser, tra quei bronchi, da gente che per noi si nascondesse. [I believe that he believed that I believed that all these voices from within the tree-trunks came from people who were hidden from us.] (Inf. 13.25–7) On entering the second ring of the Violent in the Seventh Circle of Hell, Dante hears strange lamentations echoing through a sinister wood. Imprisoned in the thorn trees are the shades of the Suicides, who bewail the destruction of their bodies as a desecration of the Divine Image.
514
PART VI
TRASMODAR Exodus Zbigniew Pospieszynski, 1993 graphite on paper, 16x12 cm Allor fu la paura un poco queta, che nel lago del cor m’era durata la notte ch’i’ passai con tanta pieta. [Then somewhat quieted was the fear that in the lake of my heart had lasted the night I had passed in such anguish.] (Inf. 1.19–21) The fear that overcomes Dante in the Dark Wood of sin and error is temporarily dispelled at daybreak, when he can look back at the dangers of his divinely ordained journey as one who “has escaped from the deep” (Inf. 1.23), like Moses after crossing the Red Sea. Ironically, the pilgrim’s exodus through the Inferno is just beginning.
Angel of Doom Zbigniew Pospieszynski, 1993 graphite on paper, 16x12 cm e in quel che, forato da la lancia, e prima e poscia tanto sodisfece, che d’ogne colpa vince la bilancia… [and into that breast which, pierced by the lance, made such satisfaction, both before and after, that it tips the scale in our favour despite all sin…] (Par. 13.40–2) The mysteries of Divine Justice trouble Dante at many stages in his ascent towards God. In the Heaven of the Sun, to dispel the lingering clouds of theodicy-induced doubt from the pilgrim’s mind, the spirit of Thomas Aquinas explains how the Scales of Judgment were “conquered” by supreme charity when Christ sacrificed himself at the Crucifixion.
A PORTFOLIO OF WORDS AND IMAGES
515
In the Shadow of Your Wings Zbigniew Pospieszynski, 1994 graphite on paper, 41x33 cm non v’accorgete voi che noi siam vermi nati a formar l’angelica farfalla, che vola a la giustizia sanza schermi? [Are you not aware that we are worms, born to form the angelic butterfly that flies to judgment without defences?] (Purg. 10.124–6) Moved by the artists tormented on the Cornice of the Proud, the poet beseeches his readers to reflect on the lowly condition of fallen humanity. Individually we are no better than worms, but collectively, through the Church, we may aspire to fly towards God—defenceless though we are, in ourselves, against the Divine Wrath.
A Drawerful Zbigniew Pospieszynski, 1994 found object, mixed media, 86x76x49 cm E io: “Maestro, quai son quelle genti che, seppellite dentro da quell’ arche, si fan sentir coi sospiri dolenti?” [And I said: “Master, what are these people who, buried within these chests, make themselves heard by their woeful sighs?”] (Inf. 9.124–6) The open tombs in the Sixth Circle of Hell are packed like chests with the shades of Heretics. The Florentine Epicurean Farinata identifies three of his tomb-mates— Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, Emperor Frederick II, and Cardinal Ottaviano—among the thousands of unorthodox souls stuffed into the burning coffers behind the Gates of Dis.
516
PART VI
TRASMODAR
Prayer Desk Zbigniew Pospieszynski, 1995 found object, mixed media, 100x43x39 cm Vinca tua guardia i movimenti umani: vedi Beatrice con quanti beati per li miei prieghi ti chiudon le mani! [Let your protection overcome human impulses: behold Beatrice with so many saints clasping their hands towards you because of my prayers!] (Par. 33.37–9) In the Empyrean, St. Bernard prays to the Virgin Mary on Dante’s behalf. While Beatrice and all the saints join Bernard in this gesture of supplication, the Queen of Heaven responds by fixing her eyes on the saint and the sinner at the centre of the Celestial Rose to show them how greatly she is pleased by devout prayers from loving hearts.
Miraculous and Real Zbigniew Pospieszynski, 1995 found object, mixed media, 16x42x41 cm Menocci ove la roccia era tagliata; quivi mi batté l’ali per la fronte; poi mi promise sicura l’andata. [He led us to where the rock was cleft; there he struck his wings across my forehead and then promised me safe passage.] (Purg. 12.97–9) As Dante and Virgil leave the Cornice of the Proud, they encounter a white-robed angel who removes the mark of pride from Dante’s brow with a brush of his wings. The wings of angelic freedom are contrasted in the poem with the chains of demonic imprisonment, even as the white feathers in Miraculous and Real are set above and apart from the iron chains in the drawer.
Calling Dante From Dante on the Steps of Immortality Andrew Pawlowski Trans. James Miller THE PLAYWRIGHT’S INTRODUCTION
L
ately I have spent all my vacations in Italy. I was attracted by this country’s beauties and fascinated by its history and art. I was pursuing the shade of Dante who would appear to me at times only to disappear. I was tracing his steps, eager to find him in books—the thousands of publications on Dante and his works which fill up library shelves. Truth, lies, myths. Gubbio, the quiet medieval city where this drama unfolds, does not often appear in these books, though it has been listed among the many places visited by Dante during his exile. It is found at the foot of the Apennines, near Perugia. Behind it rises Mount Ingino, at the summit of which stands a church containing a pedestal with a crystal coffin. In this coffin rests the mummy of St. Ubaldo. As Bishop of Gubbio, this heroic warrior saved the city from the massacre planned by Barbarossa. The inhabitants of the city revere him almost as a god. He is the hero of the annual spectacle of the Feast of the Wax Candles, which each year on the fifteenth of May attracts thousands of tourists to Gubbio. It is said that after his death Ubaldo held out his hand to his faithful servant who remained in pain and poverty. He was wearing on his finger a ring impossible to remove, which the servant carried away for himself along with the saint’s forefinger. With this began the cult of St. Ubaldo in Alsace, where today in the city of Thann you can find a relic conjectured to be the finger. The most recent studies on the mummy of Gubbio and on the finger of Thann have not yielded the result that everyone has been waiting for. The finger didn’t quite fit the hand.
517
518
PART VI
TRASMODAR
The medieval houses of Gubbio have low and narrow side doors, through which the coffins of the dead are carried out. Also of interest in the town is a medieval fountain: if you go around it three times, you may obtain the privileges enjoyed by the mad zealots in the cult of Ubaldo known as the Fraternity of the Possessed. I took a turn around it three times and from that moment I was initiated into the Fraternity. The excellent wine of the region also helps one understand the profound mystery of the place.
Stairway leading to the front entrance of the Palazzo dei Consoli, Gubbio (first half of the fourteenth century). On these steps the shade of Dante manifests himself like a genius loci to Pawlowski’s alter ego Kukla at the start of Dante on the Steps of Immortality. Photo credit: Andrew Pawlowski
Dante visited Gubbio at different times between 1305 and 1320. He was attracted by the very rich library of the monastery of Fonte Avellana and by the friendship of the poet Bosone de’ Raffaelli, lord of the castle of Colmollaro. Another native of Gubbio was Cante Gabrielli, who as podestà of Florence in 1302 condemned Dante in absentia at first to exile with a fine and then to death. Cante was a Guelf, Bosone a Ghibelline. The clashes and battles between the Gabrielli and Raffaelli families lasted for centuries according to tradition. Did Dante really murder Cante? Were Bosone and Sebastiano (author of a treatise on death) his accomplices? Did the people of Gubbio help them send Cante from this world? These questions remain unanswered. It’s still not possible to prove their involvement in Cante’s death even if data do not exist to affirm the contrary. The sources providing us with information about Cante neglect to tell us where or how he died.
FROM DANTE ON THE STEPS OF IMMORTALITY
519
In Dante on the Steps of Immortality, I suggest that Bosone was also involved in the mysterious events surrounding the composition of the last thirteen cantos of the Paradiso. The official version states that these cantos were found nine months after the death of the poet. Iacopo Alighieri, Dante’s son, had a dream in which his dead father showed him a hiding place in the wall where he had hidden the manuscript. The next morning, Iacopo and a notary friend found the folios, which were damp and almost illegible; from them he recreated the missing parts of the cantos. Sometime later, Iacopo gathered some of his friends, including Bosone Rafaelli, who knew how to counterfeit the style of the Florentine genius. Together, they wrote the missing cantos without the knowledge of their contemporaries or of posterity. Dante’s application of the Platonic theory of love to Beatrice is a further aspect of his work I have represented here in a new and unorthodox light. Dante’s eldest son, Giovanni, whose traces were quickly lost, could have been the son of Beatrice. Giovanni was a witness to a loan that his father took out at Arezzo in 1308. So he had to have been of age: he was fourteen or fifteen years old and his birth would have been prior to the marriage of Dante with Gemma Donati. Unorthodox, too, is my view that Dante used hallucinogenic herbs. This should not come as a revelation, however, since what’s known as narcomania today was in the Middle Ages a widespread custom among ordinary folk—a social ritual comparable to smoking a cigarette or drinking a glass of wine. The novelty in my work is simply to have tackled this theme, which hitherto has been largely taboo because it would have shed a bad light on the poet’s immortal glory. People have long been fascinated with the possibility of expanding the boundaries of consciousness artificially, of pushing the limits of perception through drug “trips,” and this age-old quest is reflected in the present work with examples from antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the present day, particularly from the works of Aldous Huxley and his second wife Laura Archera. For a time it was thought that Dante suffered not only from epilepsy but also from schizophrenia. The poet’s illness is better described as epilepsy of the Jacksonian type. Dante’s mother possibly suffered from schizophrenia and may have committed suicide. Thanks to Anna Kepler, a direct descendant of Johannes Kepler of Württemberg, I have obtained Dante’s horoscope. Anna Kepler lives in Toronto and like Johannes, who lived around the turn of the seventeenth century, she is interested in astrology. She has been the first to determine the day and month of Dante’s birth, and the horoscope I received confirmed for me that I was on the right track and was not straying too far from the truth.
520
PART VI
TRASMODAR
In the horoscope, just as in the present work, the honesty of Dante is debatable above all in the period of his priorate in Florence (June 15– August 15, 1300) when he had a great influence on politics and on the administration of the city. Although the 1966 retrial of Dante in Arezzo freed him from the charges that led in 1302 to his condemnation to death, certain writings report en passant that corruption was not foreign to him. In the present work, the myth of Dante’s fidelity and noble behaviour towards the women in his life is also destroyed. He was known to have been brutal, vindictive, exploitative. He was always egocentric. I would also have us raise questions about the profundity and sincerity of Dante’s faith. He was a shrewd man. He knew that by covering himself with the name of God he would be able to formulate various doctrines even if these were not always in agreement with the dogmas of the Faith. His clashes with Pope Boniface VIII were nothing other than a conflict between earthly rule and religious power, between Empire and Church, clashes which were fought out on actual battlefields to obtain influence and control over rich Italian cities and families. The present work also treats a theme never tackled in the imaginative literature on Dante, namely, the project to construct the Danteum, a monument consecrated not only to the poet but also to the Fascist Party. Mussolini interrupted this project at the start of the Second World War. There also appear in the work allusions to Polish problems not all that remote from Fascism, actual political situations and events concerning the Church and the State. In the final scene, Dante warns the world about the dangers of the twenty-first century, about the traps people are laying for one another. Dante on the Steps of Immortality was written partly in a verse form resembling terza rima and partly in prose. Introduced into the text are some fragments of the Commedia as well as poetic excerpts from Lucretius, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Cyprian Kamil Norwid, and Jan Lechon. Immortality, the principal philosophical motif of the work, is considered a value dependent on human memory, imperfect but precious memory. Memory causes Dante to leap up the steps of immortality, symbolized by the steps of the Palazzo dei Consoli in Gubbio. FROM ACT ONE: THE ENCOUNTER ON THE STEPS
Gubbio. Piazza della Signoria. Twilight. Stage right, a time-ravaged stairway, made of rock slabs of ancient splendour. The stairway leads to the Palazzo dei Consoli. The last steps are in shadow. In the middle of the stairway is seated a figure representing KUKLA [“Puppet”], a man
FROM DANTE ON THE STEPS OF IMMORTALITY
521
of about sixty, with white hair and an intelligent face, dressed in a subtly elegant fashion. Under his arm Dante’s Divine Comedy and the Michelin Guide to Italy. Details in his way of dressing indicate that he’s a Pole who’s lived for years in America or Canada. KUKLA’s head is mobile. Within it there’s a tape recorder with a headset. Behind these lies a button which controls the start-up of the tape recorder. On the other side of the stage in front of the stairs, three statues, of which the last hangs from the ceiling, with its head down. Each statue measures approximately three metres in length: HOMER with empty eye sockets turned towards the stairs; VIRGIL, with his head low but crowned with laurel; somewhat distant from these, the third statue, BENITO MUSSOLINI, upside down. The walls, like the back of the stage, are covered in a semi-transparent fabric through which are seen, within, the red roofs of Gubbio… KUKLA
As my wandering life neared its end, I saw distant Italy, The wreath of laurels on Dante’s grave. The course of his life determined my route From Florence, ungrateful city, To places where his memory is still alive. In the Apennines where lies the stronghold of fourteen towers, Where the cloister fountain trickles with the water of faith, There rests the fame of Dante Alighieri. He raised up the late Middle Ages from its knees; He lashed out with his pen, Without hiding his sword.
DANTE, wearing a dark red robe with a black medieval hood on his head, appears in the middle between the statues of Homer and Virgil. KUKLA
The Muses protected him from the dogmas of the faith, And his sharp wits led him through the traps of life, Pointing the right way out to him like an old friend.
appears outside the curtains covering the statues, his face long and terribly white with his jaw and lips jutting out. Slowly approaching the seated figure of KUKLA on the stairs, he begins his monologue. DANTE
DANTE
I know that you seek me. Beatrice tells me that at Gubbio You beat on all the doors of the houses where I lived.
522
PART VI
TRASMODAR
DANTE is located on some stair lower than KUKLA. He is inclined forward, his left foot higher than his right.
Instead of listening to the silence for which Gubbio is renowned, You lift your arms towards heaven with these vain attempts. Fortunately you have stopped at the coffin gates. You have found the magic formula in the wine, And you run around the fountain of the Possessed. Before nightfall I will recount my life to you. Because when Ares enters into Saturn, And the cross of Monte Ingino reflects the last ray, That is the time when my coffin opens. On the steps of the Palazzo dei Consoli, down here, Do you see the shade? It is I—Dante. Let us converse as you wish. DANTE covers his face with the edge of his hood and slowly ascends the stairs. On the
final step he turns and speaks. The moment has arrived for unveiling the secrets Which still lie dormant in the ashes of the centuries, Treasures which permit us to open up the limits of understanding. KUKLA
You have sinned! Acknowledge it! Admit it!
DANTE
The vengeance of the poet served in a golden chalice, Poison coloured with hallucinations, Dressed in sumptuous garments, with laurel crowns.
DANTE leaps up the stairs and positions himself nearer to KUKLA, turning his shoul-
ders. I admit it but I do not beat my chest. I have been guilty before men, but not before God. I am guilty of the death of my friend. KUKLA DANTE
turns towards DANTE. Because of inescapable vengeance I also murdered my enemies, Because of too much power and conformism, Experiences of no value.
FROM DANTE ON THE STEPS OF IMMORTALITY
523
I am guilty of love for the city, of chauvinism, Of faith in the purity of the race, of intolerance, Of the desire to stop time, of bad faith and careerism. But I’m not to blame for the triumph of the Church, Nor for the success of the Pope: My will was not that presumptuous. I am not to blame for the vices of the human race, Nor for Benito’s high regard for me, Nor for the wrath of Boniface which goes back a long time. DANTE
descends, bringing his face close to KUKLA’s. He hisses. Remember: the Middle Ages was not a democracy. They condemned people to the stake for nothing; Justice was always on the side of the Church. That’s why I forged a sword for the fear of God and for the True Faith; I promised heaven to my friends; A severe eternal punishment awaited my enemies. Three times I was condemned, Three times cursed, Three times constrained to monastic solitude.
FROM ACT TWO: DANTE ON TRIAL
The same setting. DANTE
Times were good when the Roman emperor With his power united diverse peoples, When the people and the Khan of Crimea bowed before him as their sovereign. The emperor dispensed land and titles; He often limited the power of the Pope; He condemned ignoble betrayals and acts of cowardice. The lands of Casentino-Ottone he offered to Gualdrada, For his courage and his sincere words; He united by marriage the Adimari family with the Von Guidi. From that stock was born a rich and majestic family, Who constructed castelli by the springs of the Arno— The stone strongholds of Poppi, Pratovecchio, Porciano.
524
PART VI
TRASMODAR
For several years I remained there as an honoured guest. I ate from their dishes and drank from their glasses, Using my sinister way with words to divert the ladies. The very beautiful Manentessa, married to Selvatico, Was my protectress, the wellspring of my pleasures, Cheerful, provoking, terribly bored. Gerardesca Guidi went out with me For some excursions on horseback in the nearby forest; And there she declared her great love for me. Nearby Campaldino, amid the wooded hills, In Falterone, from the mountain where the Arno flows, We rode at a gentle trot to Pratovecchio and Casentino. Between the castello of Poppi and Bibienna down below Flows the river Archiano which hurls itself down into the Arno, And the poppies colour the fields red down there. This is the blood of Buonconte, who covered himself in Ghibelline glory; The current of the river dragged his wounded body With his throat pierced by a Florentine arrow. In the autumn night the trample of our horses echoed to the top of Mount Verna, In the places where Francis of Assisi prayed, Where the brothers still kneel in their brown habits. Gold Cassiopeia, the shining Queen of Heaven, Hung in the sky with her head turned back to earth; Of the planets only Saturn lights the gates of the gloomy castello, bereft of light. Amid the Apennines stretch the valleys which the mountain people patiently cultivate; To God, through his grace, they wholly consecrate themselves; They know how to serve the King well. There I saw Gozzuta, Like a mountain goat leaping towards the sky from one rock to another. With a simple word and with feeling I conquered her. Early May and a partial eclipse of the sun helped me, As well as the perfume of acacia and myrtle, And a breath of the pine forest, fresh and natural.
FROM DANTE ON THE STEPS OF IMMORTALITY
525
Master, the stars are dimming, the night is fleeing, let us call the witnesses for the prosecution.
KUKLA
From behind the transparent curtains appear four ladies. They seem suspended in the air above the statues. BEATRICE—young, slender, with a crown of blond hair on her head, clad in a transparent floor-length gown. GEMMA—fiftyish, dressed in a particularly sober fashion, with a gown that makes you think of a nun’s habit, with her head covered and her forehead and cheeks hidden. GENTUCCA—delicate, childlike, with her face covered in a veil and a fine ribbon tied to her hips. GOZZUTA— with a mass of black hair, nude under a fur coat with the fur inside out. Three of them speak in chorus. GOZZUTA is silent, with her head lowered. THE CHORUS OF WOMEN
We condemn you for infidelity and insensitivity, for seduction and false promises, for irresponsibility in your actions, for failing to support your children and for failing to take an interest in them. We condemn you for your cruelty. We have suffered because of you. You distanced yourself from us leaving behind the odour of sulfur and the music of poetry. You will not win in today’s trial. In the past you were our lord; today, after centuries of glory, the shadow of penitence alights on you. We will tear the leaves from your laurel crown. Your immortality we will put to the flame til it’s reduced to ashes. DANTE,
frightened, descends a few steps backwards. BEATRICE advances.
BEATRICE
I am Beatrice. Your eternal beloved. Your Muse. I accuse you of lying and cowardice. I have not wished to admit to the world that Giovanni is our son, that your “Platonic love” for me was merely a screen for our passionate embraces, our youthful desires. The circumstances of life and the moral writings of the Middle Ages destroyed our happiness. You have not been capable of making concrete decisions; you have been afraid of poverty and alienation. If you had not married Gemma, the whole family of the Donati would have marshalled themselves against you. You would not have got out of it alive. You did not want to believe in your strength, and so you ended up a narcissist. Visions had revealed reality to you. You have condemned me to silence. A harder silence persists concerning our love. What difference does it make to me that you have set me in Paradiso close to God? My earthly happiness was too brief. The mystery of you, the longing for you…
526 DANTE
PART VI
TRASMODAR
jumps a step higher, interrupting her. Why do you accuse me, you whom I have adored all my life, you who permitted Matelda to immerse me in the river Lethe? After so many years you drag out these stories? I have made sure that you would be loved for many generations! The truth has faded from my memory. Truth, falsehood. Falsehood, truth. One takes the place of the other. True and proper falsehood or false truth! Memory plays tricks with you and constructs myths. I am not sure, I do not know if you are right; but the law, for sure, will give you the winning card. So let it be: I am guilty. In our times children, women, and the mad did not have the right to speak, but in the twenty-first century those who stop loving will be burnt at the stake.
DANTE
GEMMA
rises outside the group of women.
GEMMA
GENTUCCA GENTUCCA
I am Gemma and I still curse my father who made me marry you. Your friends considered me a second Xantippe—me, who bore your children, who gave you family and money. You ruined my life. You pitted your own sons against me. And still you don’t understand that the most important thing is Family and Church? In God I have placed my hopes—even though you have not found a place for me in Paradise. That tart Cunizza received celestial bliss and you forgot about me! Get lost, disappear, you evil spirit!
positions herself in front of Gemma. I am Gentucca whom you seduced. You promised to read your poems to me and to teach me how to write verse! But you made me fall in love with you. You raped me! Yes, raped! Only when I was at the end of my life did a monk finally help me to understand it. I did not give an account of it because I was young. I was not yet wearing a veil over my face.
DANTE descends a step, crosses his arms, is silent. It is GOZZUTA’s turn to speak. With
head low, without changing position, she says: GOZZUTA
DANTE
No, I do not wish to join them. I am not here to accuse you. I have come to see you one more time. I have always longed for you—all the way to my death. I have sought you after death. I have come to defend you, even if you have always despised me.
(holding her hands) Gozzuta, my love!
FROM DANTE ON THE STEPS OF IMMORTALITY GOZZUTA
527
Do you remember? “My love”—that’s what you called me. I was always the first to leap over rocks and streams to hold out my hand to you. We ran in the morning on hills covered with dew, singing about the beauty of flowers and fields, in comparison with which “gold and fine silver, cochineal and white lead…fresh emerald at the moment it is split, would all be surpassed in colour” (Purg. 7.73–7). You told me that my tears of love and pain are more beautiful than the flowers of the Apennines. The verses glide more swiftly than the clouds over us, and I who tried so hard to understand your poetry and did not always succeed at it! Well then you treated me like a stupid idiot. You struck me with the stick I used to herd sheep, and I licked my blood from your hands! You abused my spirit and my body. The echo of my cries awoke the sleeping dogs and scared off the wolves. Suddenly with the night the day was born. The light of tears and of love dawned. I recall how it displeased you afterwards. I excused you because of your illness and temporary lack of control over your emotions. Then magnificently you told me stories of the saints and wisemen, but I still have a better memory of the story of Glaucus the Boeotian fisherman who after having tasted the magic grass was transformed into a god of the sea. You told me that you will also transform me, and that they will speak and write of me. You have kept your word. I have adored you more than God and I still adore you. I have been faithful until the end of my life. Oh, Durante! You were and are the only one for me!
The women disappear. DANTE, frowning, remains on foot on the stairs. KUKLA
Abandonment is not a crime. If the husband is not capable of taking care of himself or is sick, the wife ought to take care of him. All the women who accused you were young and healthy; they could look after themselves. Gentucca was not well prepared for her accusation and despite her young age succeeded in putting your actions in the shade. None of these ladies knew your mission: the only one to imagine it was Gozzuta and she’s the one who granted you permission to leave in peace. You were guilty mainly towards her but her love pardoned you.
FROM ACT TWO: DANTE ON THE DANTEUM
The same setting. Near dawn. DANTE
Political ideas and atmospheres do not perish as men do, even if they can fall down on the sidewalk of a street during a revolution or slowly leave this world in the leprosaria surrounded by a wall of
528
PART VI
TRASMODAR
fear and hate. Corrupt systems are hydras without a head but from their frigid body now and then grows a tenth head. One cannot suppress human thought. Despite all the books they will burn on the pyre, despite thousands of people whom they silence forever, thought will remain. It will return on the earth like a boomerang through the sinuous routes of the human brain. Song issues from it unhurt. The exhumation of human cadavers cannot revive them, but a political thought exhumed can cause Henry VII and Siegfried to be reborn. I believed in the resurrection of the Holy Roman Empire but when it was already too late. My pseudo-fascism of Gargonza and Casentino flourished with the crimes of your times, crimes which I myself caused to be reborn, crimes which added one more step to my political immortality. I confess to you that I was excited by the project to construct a Danteum in front of the basilica of Massenzio. Can there be for a poet a monument more magnificent than that to his work? Hitler attacked your country too quickly. In June 1939 Benito was swift to make a firm decision on the construction but the answer to the letter of solicitation of Valdameri was sent from the Palazzo Venezia on September 4. It was too late. All your fault, dear Poles! All the world turns around you. DANTE DANTE
threatens KUKLA with his finger. KUKLA turns his head. No, don’t get angry. I’m only joking. This Valdameri adored me in a way that deserves to be imitated. He was a Fascist. In 1922 he took part in the march on Rome. You know how he presented Mussolini with the Commedia illustrated by Amos Nettini? He wished to make of it Mein Kampf. It all corresponded to Mussolini. Il Duce ought to have realized my imperial dream! The Danteum was planned for a construction site in the centre of the National Fascist Party. There in the place of the Palazzo Littorio, very near the medieval tower of the Conti, would have been the centre of the Fascist Heaven and Hell: a gold rectangle was to link antiquity with destiny. The adepts would have entered as if without wishing it amid a “forest” of a hundred marble columns. “I cannot rightly say how I entered it” [Io non so ben ridir com’ i’ v’intrai] (Inf. 1.10). Straight into a hell of loyalty, for which a Fascist pin was awarded with honours. Only later would the dazzling light of the sun fall upon them. A heaven of silence, of isolation, of exclusion from the outside world. My temple of abstraction and political symbolism, an architectural counterpart to Pirandello.
FROM DANTE ON THE STEPS OF IMMORTALITY
529
Permit me, then, as is usual for your generation, to thank all those who have maintained me on the crest of glory. To thank the shades of the dead will not expose me to your accusations that I am interested only in worldly payoffs. The sole means of evaluating a man is the survival of his work; that’s why accusing me of such details as one would close an eye to today is an absurdity. First think about judging me. Is it not better for all to construct a myth about a genius than to reveal his weaknesses? For this I wish to thank first of all Matteo Visconti and his son Galeazzo and immediately afterwards Gabriele Pasquale Rossetti, father of the poet Dante Gabriele Rossetti. KUKLA
(turning his head in amazement) Why?
DANTE
(laughing) The Visconti, father and son, wished to hire me as the assassin of Pope John XXII, and Gabriele Pasquale Rossetti thought that I should be the head of a great Masonic lodge, which ought to have worked on the dismantling of the Church. That attracted me mightily. Undeserved glory and fame count for more than that earned by labour.
KUKLA
You carried to the tomb your own father; you murdered Guido Cavalcanti and Cante Gabrielli. You are an assassin. Assassin!
DANTE
You have interrupted my thank-yous. You are impatient and illmannered: the Middle Ages would have reduced you to a pulp. Or perhaps not. One such as you would certainly be secure behind the walls of the Holy Inquisition!
Notes on Contributors
R. BRUCE ELDER is an internationally acclaimed filmmaker, critic, and professor of film studies in the School of Image Arts at Ryerson University in Toronto. Retrospectives of his work have been mounted by the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), Cinémathèque Québécoise (Montreal), Senzatitolo (Trento, Italy) and Anthology Film Archives (New York). He is the author of Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture (1989), A Body of Vision: The Image of the Body in Recent Film and Poetry (1997), and The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson (1998). MARK FELTHAM studied Dante and Bataille with James Miller in 1996-97 and completed his PhD in English at The University of Western Ontario in 2004. He specializes in James Joyce, with particular focus on editorial theory, electronic text theory, and the history of the book. He currently teaches English and writing at Western. JENNIFER FRASER completed her doctoral dissertation on Dante and Joyce at the University of Toronto in 1997. An instructor for the Literary Studies program at the University of Toronto in 2001–02, she has published articles in the James Joyce Quarterly and European Joyce Studies. Her book Rite of Passage in the Narratives of Dante and Joyce was published by the University Press of Florida in 2002. MIRA GERHARD graduated with a BA in classics from Brock University in 1994. She studied Dante’s Commedia with James Miller in 1996–97 at The University of Western Ontario, from which she graduated with an MA in classics in 1998. She continued her studies of Dante, Virgil, and the clas-
531
532
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
sical tradition at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto in 1998–99. AMILCARE A. IANNUCCI was director of the Canadian Academic Centre in Italy from 1981 to 1983 and chair of the Department of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto from 1984 to 1988. He is currently director of the University of Toronto Humanities Centre in University College. He is the author of Forma ed evento nella ‘Divina Commedia’ (1984) and of numerous articles on subjects ranging from Petrarch to Marshall McLuhan. Cofounder of the journal Quaderni d’italianistica, he is also the editor of Dante e la ‘bella scola’ della poesia: autorità e sfida poetica (1993), Dante: Contemporary Perspectives (1997), and Dante, Cinema, and Television (2004). An associate editor of The Dante Encyclopedia (2000), he has also produced an educational video series on The Divine Comedy. ED KING earned his honorary TS (a transgressive T-Shirt bearing the glowering face of the Poet) after completing all three courses in James Miller’s 1995–96 Dante cycle. He went on to graduate from The University of Western Ontario with a BA in political science and comparative literature in 1998 and an MA in political science in 1999. His Master’s thesis was on economic rhetoric in Machiavelli’s The Prince. In 2004 he graduated with a PhD in political science from the University of California at Berkeley and joined the faculty in the Department of Political Science at Concordia University in Montreal. His main research interests include economic rhetoric and the effect of the imagination on political choices. CAROLYNN LUND -MEAD is a Toronto-based independent scholar whose publications include “Notes on Androgyny and the Commedia” in Lectura Dantis (1992) and “Dante and Androgyny” in Dante: Contemporary Perspectives (1997). Her doctoral dissertation on the relationship of fathers and sons in Virgil, Dante, and Milton reflects her strong interest in intertexuality, as does her present research for a project on Dante’s biblical allusions in collaboration with Amilcare A. Iannucci. BONNIE MACLACHLAN is an associate professor in the Department of Classical Studies at The University of Western Ontario. She is co-editor of Harmonia Mundi: Music and Philosophy in Ancient Greece (1991) and author of The Age of Grace: Charis in Early Greek Poetry (1993). Her articles include “Sacred Prostitution and Aphrodite” (1992), “Personal Poetry” (1997), “The Ungendering of Aphrodite” (2002), and “The Mindful Muse” (2002). Her main research interests include ancient Greek and Roman religion,
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
533
women in antiquity, ancient music, and the lyric poets Alcaeus, Sappho, Ibycus, Anacreon, and Corinna. JAMES MILLER is Faculty of Arts Professor at the University of Western Ontario and founding director of the Pride Library (www.uwo.ca/pridelib). He is the author of Measures of Wisdom: The Cosmic Dance in Classical and Christian Antiquity (1986) and the editor of Fluid Exchanges: Artists and Critics in the AIDS Crisis (1992). His cycle of Dante courses for the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures provides undergraduates with the rare opportunity to study the entire Dantean corpus over a period of two years. His next project is a study of gay readings/readers of the Commedia from Oscar Wilde to Derek Jarman. ANDREW PAWLOWSKI (MD 1963; MD 1979) established himself in private practice as a dermatologist in Toronto and joined the University of Toronto Medical Faculty in 1983. After teaching himself how to sculpt, he served as the president of the Sculptors Society of Canada from 1992 to 1994. Besides numerous articles in medical journals, his publications include studies of the Polish-Canadian art scene and a cultural history of the Polish community in Toronto, The Saga of Roncesvalles (1993). Since his retirement from medical practice, he has written two novels set in the Middle Ages: Pochylony nad ºokietkiem (“Leaning over Lokietek,” published in 2004) concerning a Polish king in Dante’s time; and Zatrzyma`c cie`n Boga (“To Stop the Shadow of God,” forthcoming) on St. Bernard’s role in the Second Crusade. Photographs of his sculptures serve as illustrations for his books. ZBIGNIEW POSPIESZYNSKI studied painting and printmaking at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Art, graduating with an MA in 1978. After immigrating to Canada in 1987, he has been active both as an artist and as a curator in the Toronto area. In April of 2004, he mounted a successful exhibition of his work under the auspices of the Roam Contemporary Gallery in New York City. He is currently director of the Peak Gallery in Toronto. GUIDO PUGLIESE (PhD, 1974) teaches Italian literature and language at the University of Toronto at Mississauga. He has lectured on Dante, Boccaccio, Goldoni, Conti, Leopardi, Manzoni, and Verga, and has published articles on most of these authors. His scholarly interests extend to Italian theatre and questions of pedagogy. He has edited the previously unpublished correspondence of Pietro Ercole Gherardi to Muratori (1982) and a collection of papers entitled Perspectives on the Nineteenth Century Italian Novel (1989).
534
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
MATTHEW REYNOLDS is The Times Lecturer in English at Oxford University and a Fellow of St. Anne’s College. His book on Victorian poetry, The Realms of Verse, was published by Oxford University Press in 2001. He is co-editor, with David Forgacs, of Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed (Dent, 1997) and, with Eric Griffiths, of the anthology Dante in English (Penguin, 2005). His next book will be A Rhetoric of Translation. LEON SURETTE (PhD, Toronto) is a professor emeritus in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario where he has taught courses in modern British literature, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, William Golding, literature and philosophy, and literary theory. He is the author of A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound’s Cantos (1979), The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats and the Occult (1993), and Pound in Purgatory: From Economic Radicalism to AntiSemitism (1999). He is co-editor of Literary Modernism and the Occult Tradition (1996) and I Cease Not to Yowl: Ezra Pound’s Letters to Olivia Agresti (1998). BART TESTA teaches film studies and semiotics as senior lecturer in the Cinema Studies Program at Innis College, University of Toronto. He is the author of Spirit in the Landscape (1989), Richard Kerr: Overlapping Entries (1994), and Back and Forth: Early Cinema and the Avant-Garde (1992). His numerous articles on cinema include “An Axiomatic Cinema: The Films of Michael Snow” (1995), “The Double-Twist Allegory: Denys Arcand’s Jesus of Montreal” (1995), and “Seeing with Experimental Eyes: Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes” (1999). He has served as books editor of the Canadian Journal of Film Studies and has long been a regular contributor to The Globe and Mail. JOHN THORP studied philosophy at Trent University in Canada and at Magdalen College, Oxford. He taught for the first half of his career at the University of Ottawa, and now teaches at The University of Western Ontario in London. He is the author of Free Will: A Defence against Neurophysiological Determinism (1980) and of numerous articles, including “Aristotle on Probabilistic Reasoning” (1994), “Aristotle’s Rehabilitation of Rhetoric” (1993), and “Aristotle’s Horror Vacui”(1990). His particular field of research is ancient thought, especially the thought of Aristotle. He is past president of the Canadian Philosophical Association.
Index Numerals in bold refer to sections of works. aesthetics: abstract expressionist, 371; and politics, 15, 43, 51, 245, 349, 450–51, 455, 498–503; and religion, 42–43, 265, 349, 432; and theology, 5, 40, 42–43, 47; and vision, 99, 440; Bataille’s, 15–17, 57, 88, 184, 196, 201, 208–10, 219–24, 237–38; Brakhage’s, 372–73, 398, 405, 419, 434, 443; contextualist, 36, 43, 46; Dante’s, 5, 30, 43, 55–56, 190, 254, 259, 367, 373–74, 402, 419–20, 422, 436–37, 450–51; detachment, 43, 270, 400, 470; Eckhart’s, 440; Eisenstein’s, 460, 485; formalist, 40–44, 46–48, 59, 86, 262–63, 266, 401, 404, 419, 442; Heidegger’s, 484; holistic, 398; Italian, 490–91; modernist, 43, 47, 371, 379, 405, 435, 486; of totality, 367, 435–36; of transgression, 13, 15–17, 30, 35–36, 55–57, 87–88, 185, 189, 195, 199, 201–203, 212, 214, 217, 219–20, 224–26, 238, 291, 303, 306–307, 318, 336, 351, 371–72, 374, 390, 398–99, 405, 419, 421, 435–36, 440, 450–51, 459, 490, 499, 502–503, 506; open form, 401–405, 421, 443; Plato’s, 17; Plotinus’s, 442; post-medieval, 7, 15–16, 40–41, 490–91, 509; postmodern, 43–44, 46, 57, 238, 259, 278, 381–84, 388, 390, 435, 437, 503; Pound’s, 336, 464–66, 468, 476, 484; Pseudo-Dionysius’s, 17; Romantic, 40–41, 59–60, 374–75, 463; Thomistic, 442 Agamben, Giorgio 118–19 Aglauros 90, 98 Agnello 199 agony 16, 48, 137, 227, 231; of Bertran de Born, 237; of childbirth, 313, 492; of Dante-poet, 276, 490–92; of Fou–Tchou–Li, 219–22, 227; of Mohammed, 211–13, 230 Agresti: Antonio, 333; Olivia, 333–37, 339, 342 Ahern, John 75–76, 80 AIDS 272, 284 Alan of Lille 322, 324, 441, 446
Abelard, Peter 69, 80 abjection 16, 43, 188, 275 Abraham: Bosom of, 65–66, 77 Absalom 132, 236 abstract expressionism 371, 373–75, 382, 394, 400 accidie (accidia, acedia) viii, 8, 151, 469; and sadness (tristitia), 156, 158–65; and anger, 152–55, 158, 163–65; as boredom, 157, 161; as depression, 155, 157–58; as monastic vice, 158–62; as noonday demon, 158, 160; dissonant Dantean notions, 164–65; definition, 152–54, 159–60, 162, 166–67; etymology, 155, 157–58, 161, 166; Greek notion, 155–60; Latin notion, 160–62 Acéphale: review, 239–40; rituals, 241; secret society, 232, 235; Surrealist icon, 238–40, 242, 246 acephalic level: see reading Acheron 63, 69, 188 Achilles 155, 190 Active Saints 361 actualization (actus): see being, energeia ACT UP 267, 274, 284 Adam 65–66, 83, 117, 132, 139, 188, 198, 290, 292, 302–304, 307, 316 Adamo, Maestro 256, 260, 352 Adams, Henry 384, 456 Aegeus, King 317 Aeneas 10, 92–93, 109–10, 112, 115–16, 118, 121–24, 126, 129, 131, 135–41, 143, 145–46, 268, 312, 470 Aeneid 68, 91–94, 96, 106, 109–10, 112, 114–19, 123–31, 136, 138–40, 143–44, 147, 310–12, 318, 325, 434, 470–71 Aeolus 378 Aesop 156, 166–67 aestheticism 47, 224; gay, 245, 279
535
536
INDEX
Albert the Great, St. 65, 67, 80, 284, 292–93, 298, 305 Albigenses 10, 18, 37, 58, 329–30, 333, 340, 342 Alcaeus 533 Alcuin 162–63, 167 Alden, John 342 Aldhelm of Malmesbury 162, 167 Alexander of Hales 67 Alexis 204 Alighieri: see Dante, Giovanni di Dante, Iacopo di Dante, Pietro di Dante Al–Inshiqaaq 230 Allah 230–231 Allan, Mowbray 86–88, 104–105 allegory 16, 22, 90, 101, 107, 185, 191–92, 233; and allegoresis, 108, 179, 214, 235, 238, 241; and anti-allegory, 201, 237–38; and apocalypse, 33, 47–48, 214, 233; as Catholic fiction, 233, 258–59; incarnative, 260; ironic modernist, 435, 506; of sexual ruin, 227–28; of the lovers, 266; of the poets, 22, 24, 36, 47, 58, 75, 202, 233, 259, 265–67, 284; of the theologians, 22–24, 47, 58–59, 86, 259, 266–67, 284; snuff, 214; visual, 507. See also fourfold reading, hermeneutics, readers, reading allusion: cinema of, 382, 390, 453–54, 468; poetics of, 347–48, 357–62, 374, 454, 470 Al–Sabah, Rasha 243, 246 Ambrose, St. 27 anagogy 1–3, 6, 8, 16, 90, 99, 187, 193–94, 249, 254, 270, 275, 311, 321, 336, 370, 398, 417, 424, 426, 431–33, 440, 455, 461, 479, 490, 514; and formalism, 44, 48, 102; and pop-culture, 252–53; Platonic erotic, 315. See also ecstasy, reading anaphora 129–31, 134 Anchises 118 androgyny 142, 323, 532; of Beatrice, 8; of Blessed, 314, 316; of Cyprian Aphrodite, 10, 312–13, 317; of Dante, 317; of Fou-Tchou-Li, 219; of Gnostic Adam, 316; of God, 8, 314–15, 323; of pagan gods, 315; of Zeus, 313 Andromache 114 angels 35, 86, 128–29, 133, 302, 311, 349, 356, 431, 433, 438, 484, 491–92, 497, 514–15; creation of, 414–15, 513; damnation of neutral, 262–63; of charity, 100; of humility, 516; sexless, 462; Swedenborgian, 343 anger: see wrath anguish 84, 118, 192, 195, 215, 219, 223, 514; as Bataillean term, 15–16, 116, 190, 192, 208, 220, 234, 240–41; erotic 15 animal code 293, 296–304 Anna 126 Annunciation 51, 311, 318, 492 Anselm, St. 1–2, 4, 60, 475; Monologion, 475 Ante-Purgatory: see Purgatory Antoninus, St. 64–65, 74–76, 80 Antonioni, Michelangelo 10–11, 367, 375–81, 383, 387, 390, 392. See also Il deserto rosso
anus 200, 212, 225; anal eye, 200; anal sex, 39, 276; infernal, 210, 217; solar, 233 Aphrodite 10, 262, 532; bisexual, 312, 315; Common/Vulgar, 321; Cyprian, 312–13, 317–18; Ourania, 313, 317–18, 321; Panayia, 317; Pandemos, 321. See also Venus apocalypse 33, 47, 183, 214, 230, 237, 370, 385, 388, 403, 456, 483; apocalypticism, 185, 270, 377 Apocrypha: Gospel of Nicodemus, 72 Apollo 24–25, 231, 237, 261, 267, 276–77, 443, 490–91, 493–94, 497, 503 Apollonius Rhodius 156, 166, 167 Applewhite, Marshall (Prophet Do) 250–54, 263, 283, 287 Aquinas: see Thomas Aquinas, St. Arberry, Arthur 246 Arbia 173 Archery, Laura 519 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe 502 Ardizzone, Maria Luisa 339, 343, 363, 365 Argenti, Filippo 317 Ariadne 237; and Aphrodite, 313, 317 Aristotle 3, 80, 154, 213, 283, 292, 294, 320, 360, 407–409, 411–13, 418–19, 422, 424–25, 439–40, 443, 477, 480, 486, 534; De anima, 283, 287, 292, 408–409, 411, 446; De generatione animalium, 255, 283, 287, 292; De interpretatione, 411, 447; Metaphysics, 408, 439, 447; Nicomachean Ethics, 59, 165, 168, 439, 447 Aristotelianism 54–55, 145, 215, 256–58, 277, 283–84, 292, 303, 419, 430; radical, 21, 37, 39, 59 Aroux, Eugène 37–38, 58, 61, 332, 340–41, 343; plagiarist, 333 Arrowsmith, William 377, 380, 390–92 Arthur, King 132, 145 Ascanius 123–24, 310 Ascoli, Albert Russell 284, 287 Assumption 318 Astraea 49 Astre, G.-A. 242 astrology 310–11, 442, 519 Athanasius 159–60, 166, 168 atheism 16, 57, 185–86; and Surrealism, 208, 228, 232, 241 Atticus 157 Auden, W.H. 79 Auerbach, E. 180–81, 420, 443, 447 Augustine 9, 22–24, 27, 61, 69, 74, 80, 85–86, 89, 99, 104–105, 113, 119, 121–26, 129, 132–35, 138, 140, 142–43, 146–48, 180, 259, 269, 328, 373, 411, 418, 421, 425, 440, 444, 447, 472, 478, 487 Augustus 118 authority 22, 24–26, 107, 175, 375; and authorship 26, 29, 51, 140, 263, 269, 318, 349, 357, 425, 501, 503; and hermeneutics, 237, 263; papal, 29–30; Sadean, 213; scholastic, 38–39, 54, 164, 259
INDEX avarice 10, 158, 469 Avellana, Fonte 518, 522 Avernus 115 Averroes 292, 298, 442 Averroism 37, 58–59, 293, 442 Avicenna 284 Babel 303 Babylon 146 Bach, Johann Sebastian 389, 473 Bagemihl, Bruce 245, 246 Baker, Paul 204, 206, 286–87 Balzac, Honoré de 336–37, 343, 368 Bangs, John Kendrick 346 baptism 32, 39, 63, 65, 71, 85–86, 89, 94–95, 113, 296, 316; by tears, 95–96, 103–105, 118; of the Damned, 103 Bara´ nski, Zygmunt 284, 287 Barbarossa (Frederick I), 517 Barbi, Michele 142, 145, 148 Barkan, Leonard 187, 193–95, 199, 204–206 Barolini, Teodolinda 14, 44–48, 57, 60–61, 86–88, 104–105, 146, 148, 266, 284, 287, 291, 308 baroque 368, 371, 381, 386, 473 Barrators 352 Barthes, Roland 245 Bartholomew, St. 30 Bassanese, Fiora A. 243, 247 Bataille, Georges viii, 9, 13, 15–17, 48, 57, 61, 88, 116, 119, 184–85, 189–90, 193–97, 200–201, 204–206, 214, 229, 242–47; Acéphale, 239; as anti-Dante, 232; as atheist, 232; as materialist, 232; as medievalist, 231–32; as Nietzschean atheist, 186, 191; as Pierre Angélique, 226–28; as Porno-Dionysius, 226; as radical humanist, 208, 241; as Sadean philosopher, 185–87, 191, 195, 200, 202–203, 209, 213, 215, 220–22, 224, 228, 237, 240; as social philosopher, 232, 235; as Surrealist mystic, 207–208, 210, 213, 218, 220–22, 226–28, 233; aversion to poetry, 209; compared with Dante, 186–88, 191, 194, 202, 209–10, 222–25, 232–34, 237, 242; drawn to Eastern mysticism, 220–21; Erotisme, 190–92, 204–206, 242; Madame Edwarda, 207, 226–30, 242; meditates on photograph, 218–22, 231; politics of, 232; “Sacred Conspiracy,” 240–41, 246; slight knowledge of Dante, 207–209, 231–32; “Solar Anus,” 233, 237–38, 245–46; “Surrealist Religion,” 242; Tears of Eros, 218, 231, 244 Baudelaire, Charles 359 Beatrice 2, 7, 10, 15, 17, 19, 33–34, 83, 85, 95, 108, 113, 116, 144, 180, 299, 387, 452, 459; as admiral, 116, 140; as androgyne, 313–14; as beloved/lover, 53, 117, 184, 192, 270, 276–77, 282, 311, 315, 317, 320, 322, 338, 350, 355, 362, 433, 491, 496, 500, 519; as Bice, 350; as bride/bridegroom, 312, 314; as centre of dance, 50–51, 274, 323; as champion of orthodoxy, 23–24, 50–51; as Christ figure, 117, 147, 314,
537
323; as father figure, 317; as gender-bender, 140, 316–17; as guide/teacher, 83, 93, 99–100, 117, 174, 177, 269–70, 301–302, 311, 313–14, 320, 322, 370, 373, 413, 415–16; as icon of Beauty, 190; as intercessor, 97, 110, 114–15, 141, 217, 282, 306, 311, 493, 516, 521; as mother/Mary figure, 19, 49, 299, 307, 311, 317; as Muse, 268, 491, 525; as mystical nine, 295; as New Cyprian, 318; as New Eve, 139; as perfect human being, 362; as Phallic Woman, 231; as pope, 51; as private saint, 491; as prophet, 249; as sex–therapist, 280; as theology/revelation, 327, 373–74; as vocal leader, 129, 140; as wisdom, 49, 138, 140, 179, 190, 319; beauty of, 17, 49, 140, 189–90, 216, 310–11, 319, 321; Church of, 17, 32–33, 39, 53–54; costume of, 189–90; dramatic role, 495–96, 525–27; eyes of, 15, 186, 321, 442; face of, 17, 186, 321 beauty 15–16, 208, 265, 436, 475; angelic, 202; doomed, 477; female, 127–29, 137, 140–41, 196, 216–17, 243, 310–11, 313, 319, 321; heavenly, 98–99, 311, 389, 427; incites iconoclasm, 189, 196, 202; infernal, 427, 429; poetic, 405, 438; venereal, 313. See also aesthetics, transgression Becherucci, Luisa 58, 61 becoming 377, 425, 431, 467, 507 Beethoven, Ludwig van 343, 336 Befford, Scott 105 Beilby, Arthur E. 337–38, 343 being 377, 456, 467, 507; Aristotelian actuality (entelecheia), 408–10, 439–40, 443, 445; Heideggerian Be–ing (Sein), 377, 408–10, 412, 418, 421–23, 425–26, 434, 439, 441–42, 456, 460, 463, 465–67, 469, 472, 479, 484; Thomistic act (actus purus), 412, 416–17, 424, 432, 436, 439; essence/existence, 412; mythic totality, 435–36; versus Nothing, 465, 467. See also becoming, energeia, existence, God belief: see faith, literature Benedict, St. 280–81, 287 Benjamin, Walter 383 Bergin, Thomas Goddard 146, 148 Bergman, Ingmar 368, 437; Cries and Whispers, 368; Seventh Seal, 368 Bernard of Clairvaux, St. 7, 59, 69, 73–74, 80, 117, 162–64, 167–68, 276–78, 282, 311, 313–14, 316–17, 322, 324, 418, 437–38, 447, 452, 516, 533 Bernardo, Paul 243 Bersani, Leo 390, 392 Bertran de Born 225, 234–38, 240, 243, 346 bestiality 31 Biagio da Casena 31 Bible 7, 30, 44, 51–52, 54, 88, 133–34, 138, 141, 236, 254, 270, 284, 329, 337–39, 454, 506, 532; Douay-Rheims, 144; King James, 56, 103, 119, 204, 283, 308, 323, 442, 484; Septuagint, 155–56, 166, 169; Vulgate, 144, 283, 323; Acts 9.11: 268; Acts 9.15: 268; 1 Corinthians 13.8:
538
INDEX
83–84; 1 Corinthians 13.12: 60; 2 Corinthians, 12.2: 2; 2 Corinthians 6:16: 315; 2 Corinthians 6.18: 315; Daniel 7.15: 156; Ecclesiastes 1.2: 291; Ecclesiasticus 22.13: 156; Ecclesiasticus 29.5: 156; Ecclesiasticus 43.25: 126; Ephesians 3.16: 444; Exodus, 250, 501, 507, 514; Exodus 3.14: 413; Galatians 3.28: 316; Galatians 5.17: 282; Genesis: 302, 304, 316, 440; Genesis 1.7: 294; Genesis 1.20: 304; Genesis 1.26: 455, 484; Genesis 1.27: 313; Genesis 2.7: 304; Genesis 2.21–2: 315; Genesis 3.7: 188; Hebrews 11.32–4: 141; Isaiah 1.17–18: 95; Isaiah 40.24: 137; Isaiah 40.25: 137; Isaiah 61.3: 156; John 1.1: 437; John 1.1–3: 133; John 14.6: 34; John 16.7: 117; John 16.16: 314; Luke 10.30: 189; Mark 4.39: 126; Matthew 21.9: 117, 314; 1 Peter 3:7: 257; Proverbs 7.4–5: 130; Proverbs 7.10: 130; Proverbs 7.21: 130; Proverbs 7.27: 130, 140; Proverbs 8.6–7: 130; Proverbs 8.20: 131, 133; Proverbs 8.22: 130; Proverbs 8.35: 131; Psalms 60.3, 100: 156, 166; Psalms 90.6: 166; Psalms 118.28: 156; Revelation, 230; Romans 13.13–14: 133–34; 2 Samuel 6.14: 183, 242; 2 Samuel 6.20: 183; Song of Songs 316, 322; Wisdom 7.26: 138 Binyon, Laurence 363 Birch, Liam 498 birth/rebirth 245, 283, 291, 299–301, 306–307, 313, 323, 432; myth of female, 304, 313; myth of male, 199, 215, 230–31, 240, 277, 317, 491; trauma, 222, 231–32 Bisaccia, Antonio 391 bisexual/ bisexuality 312–15, 317; Catholic, 284; divinity, 314–15, 322–24; initiation rites, 10, 315 Blacatz, Lord 241 Blair, George A. 408, 440, 447 Blake, William 14, 48, 57, 401, 456, 475, 477 Blasphemers 22 blazon 216–17; and anti-blazon, 243–44 Blessed 6, 32, 39–40, 49, 52, 55–56, 79, 86, 108, 190–91, 207, 236, 250, 261, 270, 274, 278, 280–82, 287, 314–15, 318–19, 360, 414, 433, 452, 501, 516, 526; continuity of, 195, 232 blindness 4, 98–99, 101, 151; heretical, 173, 177–78 Bloom, Harold 390, 392, 453–54, 483, 487 Bloomfield, Morton 166–68 Boccaccio, Giovanni 64, 72, 75–76, 79–80, 103, 105, 341, 401, 533 body 114, 116, 119, 291, 305, 307, 394, 434, 436, 481; acephalic, 239; Aristotelian, 255–57, 283; ascetic rejection of, 158, 249–50, 253, 290; as container/vessel, 250, 254–58, 260, 265–66, 269–70, 283; as flesh–suit, 253, 258, 260, 305, 490, 502; as image of God, 199, 256; Bataillean, 184, 186–88, 208, 227; bisexual, 315; Christ’s, 322, 514; Church as mystical, 231, 237, 243; cosmic, 231; Dantean, 9, 24, 259,
269, 290, 292–93, 303, 490, 495–96, 516; demonic, 31, 202, 262; embryonic, 307; erotic, 212, 227, 266, 386, 503; fallen, 265, 282, 305; female, 128, 130, 132, 195–96, 217–18, 227–29, 243; glorified/immortal, 183, 281–82, 306, 311; iconoclastic, 224; infernal 9, 31, 83–84, 151–52, 182, 184, 190, 192–97, 200–201, 211–12, 216–17, 222–24, 229–30, 236, 241, 260, 269, 271; invaginated, 218–31, 490–91; male, 233–34, 239, 491; Marian, 228; monstrous, 196, 202, 240; modernist, 384; mummified, 517; Neoplatonic, 457; painted pink, 503; objectified, 384; of Chinese torture victim, 219–20, 222–24; of literature, 291, 496; outer/inner, 200–201, 211–12, 217–18, 223–24, 235, 241, 243–44, 490; Ovidian, 135–36, 193, 490; Politic, 212; postmodern, 43, 46–47, 276; prophetic/sacrificial, 235, 436, 490; purgatorial (rainbow, aerial), 249, 257–59, 262–63, 269–70, 283, 290, 305, 516; ruined/torn, 227, 230, 236, 315, 384, 490, 502, 513, 524; shade, 84, 114, 151, 224, 230, 283, 290–91, 304–305, 470, 495–96; sodomitical, 182–84, 197, 271, 275, 503; solid, 290. See also embryo, soul Boethius 55, 59, 266–67, 287, 411 Boito, Arrigo 60–61 Bolger, Diane L. 324 Bologna: Bishop of, 37; Chancellor of, 264 Bonagiunta 128, 299 Bonaventure, St. 17–22, 27, 66–68, 71–72, 79–80, 164, 167–68 Boniface VIII 55, 58, 269 Bonius 355 Book of All the Dead: see The Book of All the Dead Borel, Dr. Adrian 218 Bosch, Hieronymus 501–502 Bosco, Umberto 308 Bosone de’ Raffaelli 518–19 Boswell, John 285, 287 Bottagisio, Tito P. 79–80 Botterill, Steven 6, 56, 59, 61, 324, 363, 438, 447 Botticelli, Sandro 401 bottom: see under top Bowdoin College 339 Boyde, Patrick 284, 287–88 Brakhage, Stan viii, 11, 367–75, 390, 392, 417, 437, 443, 447, 534; Act of Seeing, 534; aesthetic credo, 369, 372, 373–74, 398–400, 405, 418–422, 427, 434–436, 438, 440, 443; and Aquinas, 418; and Augustine, 418; and Bernard, 418; and Dante, 373, 394–95, 398–400, 404–405, 409, 417–19, 421–22, 425–26, 431–33, 435, 445–46; and Duncan, 395–96, 398–99, 404–405, 423, 427, 432, 434–36, 445–46; and Elder, 434, 438, 452; and Emerson, 399; and Olson, 395–96, 399, 404, 421–22, 440, 443–44; and painting, 369, 371, 373–74, 394–95, 400, 406, 418, 438; and Paragone, 400, 425, 437; and Pound, 401, 404, 433, 443–44; and Romanticism, 374–75, 400, 435; as ascetic, 418–19; avoidance of lan-
INDEX guage, 437; balances dark and light, 429; Dog Star Man, 391, 445; Fire of Waters, 433–34; inwardness/solitude, 375, 417–19, 427, 429, 435, 443; Metaphors of Vision, 372; modernist wager, 374–75, 379, 382; studies Commedia, 373, 395, 426; Through Wounded Eyes, 445; Yaggdrisl, 445. See also Elder, The Dante Quartet Branca d’Oria 83 Brancusi, Constantin 474 Brand, Peter 284, 288 Bratuz, Damjana x Bresson, Robert 368 Brieger, Peter 245, 247 Brownlee, Kevin 147–48 Brunetto: see Latini, Brunetto ser Bruns, J. Edgar 145, 148 Buddhists/Buddhism 359, 423 Buonconte 88, 524 Buoso 198, 215, 234, 260 Bushnell, Horace 328 Busnelli, G. 78, 81 Butler, Judith 278, 286, 288 Butler Decision 244 Bynum, Caroline Walker 323–24 Byron, Lord 332 Cacciaguida 179, 349, 356, 445, 510 Cachey, Theodore J. 57, 61 Caesar, Julius 261 Cain 90, 98 Calaresu, Franco Romano ix–x, 13, 165 Calling Dante Exhibition viii, 12, 489; curatorial essay, 493–504; drama excerpts, 520–29; playwright’s intro, 517–20; notes on artists, 505–508; portfolio, 509–16 Calliope 91 Callistratus 441, 447 Cambon, Glauco 145, 148 Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre, 391, 437 Cangrande della Scala 93, 235. See also Epistle to Cangrande Cante Gabrielli 518, 529 Cantos: see The Cantos Caretti, Lanfranco 131, 145, 148 Carmean, Jr., E.A. 371, 390, 392 carol: see dance Carozza, Davy 143, 148 Carpeaux 219, 244 Carpenter, Humphrey 363, 365 Carthage 121–23, 126, 146 Caserta, Ernesto G. 180–81 Cassell, Anthony K. 58, 61, 181 Cassian, John 155, 159–63, 166–67, 168 Cassius Dio 157, 166, 168 Castalia, Flora 362 Castiglione, Francis 76, 81 castration 219, 243, 245, 252; and decapitation, 239, 241; anxiety, 215–16, 234, 240, 242; cosmogonic, 312; homoerotic, 215–16, 225, 234, 252
539
catechism 32, 51, 379 Catharism 14, 21, 342 Catholicism: Anglo, 43; and Bataille, 186, 207–208, 214–15, 221; as allegorical world view, 192–93, 214–15, 221, 235, 238, 241; as culture, 8–9, 25–29, 38, 40, 49–50, 188–89, 192–93, 209, 235, 240–41, 271, 328, 389, 494, 496, 506; as discourse, 275, 501; as fertile garden, 14, 17–18, 21, 264, 277; Dantean, viii, 2, 5–6, 13, 196, 328; medieval, 18, 24, 40, 76, 89, 251, 258, 262, 293, 312, 318, 328, 338, 373, 379, 493, 496, 507; modern, 38–41, 341; orthodox, 2, 14, 18, 45, 49, 56, 58, 258, 341; Roman/ papal, 6, 13–14, 328–30, 338, 349 Cato 68, 88–89, 92, 104–105 Cavalcanti, Cavalcante de’ 9, 98, 173–74, 178, 515 Cavalcanti, Guido 173–74, 177, 330–35, 339, 346, 348, 350, 362, 475, 479, 493, 496, 529 censorship 36–37, 58, 214, 229–30, 243–44, 264–65, 267, 276, 496, 503, 528 Centro Dantesco 505–506 charity (caritas) 83, 103, 113, 140–41, 311, 315, 440, 480, 514; as allegorized Virtue, 32, 49, 70 Charity, A.C. 145, 148 Charon 30, 175, 188, 210, 469 chastity 143, 190, 322, 350 Château de Silling 197, 218 Chaucer, Geoffrey 152, 165, 168, 401 Chiara, Santa 512 Chiassi 378–79 children: see infant(s) chorea: astrorum, 50; beata, 50. See also dance/ dancer chorus: see dance/dancer Chrétien, Jean 57 Christ 13, 26–27, 30, 32, 34, 65, 69, 72, 77, 90, 92, 95, 113, 117, 126, 133, 147, 227, 233, 238, 268, 281, 314–15, 319, 444; as Archmartyr, 241; as Bridegroom, 314, 322, 418, 468; as head of Church, 237; as Incarnate God, 322–23, 416; as idealization of God’s image, 192, 416; as image in circle, 416; as Light, 236, 491; as Messiah, 231; as Mother, 316; as object of desire, 276, 278; as Pink Jesus, 503; as Prophet Do, 250; as Redeemer, 514; as Roman, 268; as Sacred Heart, 240–41; as Son, 50, 93, 134, 286, 296, 305, 414, 432; as Victor, 73, 232; as Wisdom, 119; as Word, 133–34, 231, 418; Crucifixion of, 514; genders dissolved in, 315–16; Nativity of, 430. See also Trinity Christianity 35, 117, 232, 243, 338, 389, 412; apologetics for, 249; Baptist, 272, 285; early, 88, 316, 330; Fundamentalist, 44–45, 263, 270–73; Middle Eastern, 342. See also Catholicism, Church, heresy, Pope, Vatican Christology 14, 55, 58, 211 Chrostowska, H. 506 Church 315, 338, 341, 492, 500, 515, 523, 529; and Empire, 37, 51, 59, 83–84, 88, 232, 316,
540
INDEX
497, 520, 523–24; and Family, 526; and Fascism, 341, 493; and the Sacred, 191; as bride, 314, 322, 418; as chariot, 23, 32; as hierarchy, 35, 493, 507; as mystical body, 237; as patriarchy, 316, 323; basilica of Massenzio, 528; Catholic, 4–5, 14, 17–19, 21, 25–29, 54, 70, 86, 90, 228, 332, 334, 349; Congregationalist, 327; Greek, 158–60; Kouklia, 317; Latin, 160–63; Militant, 15, 21, 25, 58, 264; Monterchi, 245; Orvieto Cathedral, 31; pageant of, 15, 23–24; reacts to Dante’s unorthodoxy, 64, 74–75; Santa Maria Novella, 279; St. Peter’s (Rome), 27, 35, 58, 94–95; St. Ubaldo’s (Gubbio), 517; Triumphant, 25–27, 250, 523; Unitarian, 327; worldly, 334, 342; Westboro Baptist, 273 Ciampolo 268 Cicero 157, 166, 168, 410, 421 Cimabue 493 cinema: see film cinematograph 468–69 Cino da Pistoia 346 Cino Polnesi 350, 355 Cioffi, Caron Ann 119 Circe 265 Circle: of the Different, 274–75; of the Same, 275 Circolo Dantesco di London ix–x, 12–13 Cistercians 311, 322 Clay, Diskin 147–48 Clement, St. 329 closet 252–53, 274: as censorious regime, 275, 282, 285; epistemology of, 43, 285; eschatology of, 270–78, 282, 285 Club Maintenant 207–10, 212, 220, 242 Colalucci, Gianluigi 58, 62, 81 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 40, 59, 61 Colmollaro: Castle, 518 comedy 483, 497; absurdist, 499; carnivalesque, 499, 502–503; erotic, 280, 323; redemptive, 86, 109, 242; rhetoric of, 216, 267; satiric, 496–97 Commedia ix, 8, 10, 19–20, 22, 37, 40–42, 60, 112, 116, 118, 144, 269, 297, 311, 323, 339, 346, 367–68, 395, 401, 439–40, 499–500, 520–21, 528, 531; allegorical design of, 14, 30, 33–36, 41, 107, 133, 152–53, 187, 191–93, 272–74, 278, 295–96, 298–300, 303–306, 312, 321–22, 361, 369–70, 372, 394–95, 399, 401–402, 404–405, 417, 423, 452, 497; as anthology of poetic forms, 399; as banquet, 6; as bewildering text, 84, 307; as book of cosmos, 231, 238, 435, 459; as cabalistic propaganda, 37–38, 332–33, 335; as Catholic apology, 334, 494; as closed form, 405; as comedy, 483; as compendium of learning, 399, 405; as concealing textual artifice, 46–48, 86–87, 332–33, 335; as corrective lens, 110; as critique of youthful poetry, 399; as dead poetry risen, 91, 399; as energy flow, 398, 419–20, 422; as epic/anti–epic of conversion, 367, 369–70, 373, 455, 472; as epic–lyric duality, 370, 372, 374, 400–402, 404, 472; as eso-
teric code, 330, 332–35; as falsification of God’s Word, 33, 37–38; as hateful poem, 457; as imitation of classics, 466, 469–70; as inspiration for later poets/artists, 11, 46, 87, 327, 346, 347–48, 359, 361–62, 369, 394–96, 398–99, 401, 406, 419, 424, 426, 455–57, 466; as inspired text, 370, 418, 483; as inquisitorial project, 25, 30, 32–33, 72, 103, 264; as integration of reason/imagination, 441–42; as labyrinth, 34–35, 193; as master text, 498, 501; as mathematical structure, 394; as mirror, 187, 276, 295, 354; as miraculous birth, 231, 291, 403, 425; as moral project, 185; as Nekuia, 468; as open form, 402–404; as pagan love poem, 11, 329–30, 350; as patchwork, 403; as philosophical summa, 399; as political manifesto, 351, 419, 498; as “producerly” text, 87, 394; as prophecy of liberation, 49, 254; as public performance, 75; as “pure” poetry, 171; as queering project, 286; as record of actual journey, 86–87, 402; as religious text, 171, 333–34; as return to womb, 292–96, 299; as Sacred Poem, 2, 6–7, 11, 16, 25, 30, 32, 43–44, 87, 48, 72, 87–88, 102, 187, 209–10, 238, 242, 263, 294–95, 306–307, 356, 369, 402–403, 417, 457, 483; as self–contained aesthetic unity, 41, 43, 231, 238, 262, 372, 379, 399, 403, 405; as spark of creativity, 55, 87, 101, 209, 245, 356, 367–68, 370, 401, 418, 425, 450–51; as stimulus for lust, 138; as sui generis creation, 399–400, 455; as synchrony, 370, 372; as totalizing vision, 371, 373–74, 390, 399, 405; as transgressive journey/odyssey, 179, 191–93, 291, 296, 307, 312, 316, 370, 402, 469–70, 494; as travel guide, 361; as Undivine Comedy, 48, 88; as unorthodox apology for erotic life, 254, 279; as vernacular text, 65, 75, 88; as vessel for tears, 268; as vessel for the Spirit, 258, 277; as vessel of demonic poison, 264–66; as vision quest, 405, 480; as way to salvation, 90, 96; as womb, 277; banned from curricula, 64; boundaries of, 87–88, 109, 405, 480; censorship of, 37–38, 64, 264–65; genesis/birth of, 4–5, 10, 22, 33, 48, 87, 277, 291, 299–301, 303, 307, 379, 403, 417, 425–26, 438, 443, 446, 480, 490–91, 519; illustrations of, 12, 14, 57, 207, 225–28, 235, 400–401, 491, 501, 503, 528; occult code in, 37–38, 332; philological approaches to, 171–72; reception–history of, 44, 46, 65, 75, 87, 101, 207, 209–10, 228, 237, 270, 272, 285, 327–29, 332–33, 349, 351, 375–76, 394–96, 401–403, 418–19, 423, 426, 442, 451, 457, 494, 497, 528, 533; title of, 483. See also Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso communion: see Eucharist Companion to the Cantos 361 Comparetti, Domenico 147–48 concupiscence 70, 99, 122, 133–34, 184; identified with Woman, 123, 133, 136 Condemnations: of 1277, 21, 35–36, 39, 59
INDEX confession 32, 88, 132, 139, 513, 522–23 Confucius 347, 479 confusio linguarum 237, 303 Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith 20, 57, 267 Conrad: of Saxony 167; Emperor, 510 consciousness 424, 441, 443, 455, 464, 478, 502; aesthetically altered, 453, 456, 507; dissociation of, 464; drug–expanded, 519; genealogy of, 466; modern, 464, 483; primordial modes of, 419, 422–23, 425, 443; stages in transformation, 455–56 Constantine: Donation of, 332 constructivism 259, 276 Contemplatives 268, 274, 316 contemptus mundi 241–42 Contini, Gianfranco 137, 144–45, 148, 180–81 continuity: as death, 16, 48, 184, 190–191, 208, 223, 232; Bataillean notion, 184–86, 190, 193–94, 199–200, 202, 208, 222, 228, 232, 240; Dantean notion, 191–192, 195, 202–203, 223, 231–32, 242, 404; denied to Damned, 194, 198–99, 203, 234, 242; erotic quest for, 193, 199, 228, 231; negative symbol of, 230; return to fetal, 231; sexual surrogate for, 190–91; with Divine, 116–17, 183, 186–87, 192, 228 contrapasso 151–52, 170–71, 178, 182–83, 185, 201, 212, 224, 234, 236–238, 243, 253, 269, 457 conversion 95, 133–34, 138, 193, 282, 478; and tears, 95–96, 121; Dantean, 138, 202, 259, 295, 403, 472; of Mohammed, 231; to unorthodoxy, 348 Convivio 24, 60, 138, 141–42, 255, 279, 294; 1.1.10: 6, 56; 1.4: 58; 1.7.13–14: 405; 2 canz. 1.1: 279; 2.1: 284; 2.8.7–12: 180; 2.8.8: 177–78; 3.2.10–17: 308; 3.3.9–10: 308; 3.14.15: 180; 4.4.1: 360; 4.12.15: 402; 4.21.4: 255–56; 4.22.15: 180; 4.26.5–6: 122; 4.26.8–9: 122 Cooke, Wayne 283 Corber, Robert 284, 288 Corliss, Richard 288 Coronation: of Beatrice, 51–52; of Dante, 52, 263–64; of Mary, 51; of Pound, 346 Corrado: Antonioni character, 376, 380 Corsa dei Ceri 493, 496–97, 503, 517 Corydon 204 cosmopoesis: Dantean, 373–74, 423; Brakhage’s analogue of, 373–74. See also poesis/poetics Cossman, Brenda 244, 247 Costanza 319 Council: of Empoli, 173; of Nicaea, 134; of Sens, 69; of Trent 58 Counterfeiters 352 Counter–Reformation 32 Cowling, Elizabeth 247 Crawford, Grace 330 creativity 48, 56, 389, 406, 418–19, 423, 435, 438, 441, 450, 465, 493, 508; and cosmogony/cosmology, 373, 423, 432, 435–36, 450, 456; and destruction, 466–67; and subjectivity, 454, 508;
541
as fiery act/energy, 435–36, 438, 443, 450, 454; as martyrdom, 16, 24, 30, 374, 436, 490; intuitive conception of, 372, 417, 422, 465; sacerdotal conception of, 435–36, 467 credenza 5, 8, 12; as side table, 5–6, 12; far 5–6, 32, 42 credo (creed) 49, 58, 264; Dante’s, 53–56, 320–21, 436, 450; Duncan’s, 436; Iago’s, 55–56, 60; Nicene, 54 Creehan, Joseph 76, 81 Creusa 147 Croce, Benedetto 40–41, 59, 61, 79, 81, 171, 180–81 Crompton, Louis 58, 61 Crowley, Susan 229 crown: celestial, 219; laurel, 24, 263, 346, 494–95, 521–22, 525; martyr’s, 490; of stars, 51; papal, 27 Crusades 333, 340: Second, 21, 510, 533; War in Iraq as modern, 60 cubism 461 Cunizza 10, 13, 282, 318–19, 322, 526; Pound’s, 350, 355 Cupid (Eros) 123, 140–41, 310, 313, 315, 478; androgynous, 323 Curato, Baldo 145, 148 Curtius 104 Curtius, Ernst 138, 146, 148 Cuzin, Jean–Pierre 58, 61 Cybele 252 Cythera 135 Dalí, Salvador 200, 209, 219, 225, 234, 239–40, 244, 242, 245, 401 damnation 77, 118, 164–165, 188, 270, 500; as second death, 192–93; double, 83, 85; of infants, 71; of infidels, 69–70; of ladies, 132; of neutral angels, 262; of sodomites, 182–85; of virtuous pagans, 71–74, 79, 83–84, 97, 102–104, 113 Damned 7–9, 31–32, 58, 63–64, 66, 79, 89, 101, 108, 124, 145, 171, 184–85, 188–92, 194, 207, 210, 222, 232, 236, 243, 270, 278, 286–87, 354, 376, 386, 494, 500–502, 513; as blind, 177; as figures of sin, 193, 195–96, 212–213, 354; as perverts, 352–53; as Unorthodox, 6, 22, 177 dance/dancer: abstract, 389, 395, 398; anagogic, 275; angelic, 33, 51, 484; astral, 50, 274, 281, 286–87, 432; cosmic, 19–20, 39, 49–50, 274–75, 292, 295, 302, 357, 432, 434, 436, 444, 507; contrary motions, 39, 274–75, 278; double, 33; ecclesiastical, 33, 49–50; erotic, 14, 17, 50–51, 281, 432; intellectual/solar, 292–93, 297, 411, 413, 462; new, 49; of colours, 428; of faith, 209; orgiastic, 193, 386; purgatorial, 452; saintly, 33, 49–50, 52–53, 55–56, 60, 141, 278–79, 281–82, 286, 292, 323, 389, 452, 492; sodomitical, 14, 182, 188, 197, 267, 270–71, 274–75, 278, 281, 511 Daniel 156
542
INDEX
Daniel, Arnaut 333, 346, 433 Daniello, Bernardino 153–54 Dante: American perception of, 327–28, 394–96, 399; ancestors/family of, 176, 317, 510, 519, 526; and Bataille, 186–188, 191, 194, 202, 209–10, 222–25, 232–34, 237–38, 240–42; and Bertran de Born, 241–242; and Brakhage, 373, 394–95, 398–99, 409, 417–19, 421, 430, 434, 443; and cinema, viii, 228–29, 367–488; and Elder, 383, 387–88, 390, 399, 444, 451–52, 455–56, 458–60, 463, 466, 477–83; and Fascism, 12, 245, 356–57, 493, 520, 523, 528; and Joyce, 401; and Paragone, viii, 32, 490–92; and politics, 13, 15–16, 32, 37, 59, 76, 232, 519; and Pound, 327–45, 346–66, 399, 401–404, 434; and religion/theology, 13, 21, 32, 349, 413, 416–17, 423; and sexuality, 13, 183–85, 249–82; as allegorist of the Sacred, 233, 241, 499; as ambitious political poet, 241, 349, 494, 523; as author/authority, 42, 235, 290, 299, 495, 501, 521; as Averroist, 59; as baby/child, 290, 299–301, 303, 307, 317; as bride/bridegroom, 314; as calligrapher, 279, 286; as canonical poet, 25–26, 28–29, 349, 494; as champion of orthodoxy, 20–21, 24, 26, 32, 49–50, 249, 263–64, 269, 349, 390, 439, 494–96, 499, 506, 523; as chauvinist, 523; as Christ figure, 197; as Christian hero, 91; as Christian reader, 93, 125; as civil poet, 493; as contemporary activist, 496, 503; as critic of papacy/patriarchy, 316–17, 323, 330, 349, 495–96, 523; as cultural icon, 369–70, 401, 494–96, 499, 517; as Dionysian transgressor, 30; as doctrinal poet, 390; as father of Italian nationalism, 351; as egoist, 2, 89–90, 138, 140, 232, 242, 278, 494, 520, 525; as encyclopedist, 399; as escape artist, 269, 508; as esoteric artist, 331–33, 341–42; as everyman, 403; as exile, 6, 174, 179, 349, 403, 495, 510, 517–18, 523–24; as Florentine, 170–71, 179, 337, 349, 363, 523; as Freemason, 529; as gender–bender, 136–39, 277, 313–14, 491; as genius, 37, 48, 173, 177, 373, 529; as heretic, 6, 37–38, 40, 51, 58–59, 65–67, 70–72, 75, 262–65, 267, 329–30, 332–35, 350, 355, 491, 494, 499, 523; as heterosexual, 40, 500; as humbled shade, 492–493; as Icarus, 197; as imaginary defendant, 495–97, 520–29; as inspired actualizer, 420; as inventor of cinema, 492; as iconoclast, 496; as language theorist, 396, 420, 442; as liar, 48, 520; as living man, 290, 362, 496, 500, 503; as lover/love poet, 127–29, 136, 139, 183–84, 224, 232, 265–66, 278–82, 287, 310–11, 322, 338, 350, 438, 494–95, 500, 520, 524–26; as lyric poet, 370, 374, 438; as Madonna/Child, 491; as martyr, 201–202, 231, 261, 490–92, 495–96, 503; as mediator between laity/clergy, 26, 33, 75, 89, 202, 322; as moralist, 192, 496, 499, 510; as murderer, 522–23, 529; as mystic/visionary,
1–4, 33, 50, 232, 327–29, 331, 335–38, 342–43, 349, 374, 401, 480, 497; as narcomaniac, 519; as “old Dante,” 346, 521; as pagan, 329–30, 338; as papal successor, 52–53; as philosopher, 6, 35–37, 39, 122–23, 141, 163, 257, 284, 298, 328, 360, 379, 430, 437, 439, 442, 457; as pilgrim, 4, 17, 23, 31, 33–35, 41–42, 52, 58, 84, 89–92, 95–96, 98–101, 107, 116, 118, 121, 123, 125–27, 129, 131, 135, 137–41, 147, 151, 170–76, 182–83, 186–88, 190–92, 195, 200, 202, 210, 212, 214, 216–17, 222–24, 231, 234, 242, 249, 254, 256, 258–59, 268–69, 271, 275, 278–79, 290, 292–95, 297–302, 307, 311, 313–14, 358, 362, 367, 370, 373, 386, 399–400, 402–403, 405, 411, 415, 417, 432, 438, 442, 452, 471, 492, 496, 500, 513–14, 516; as Platonist, 328, 519, 525; as poet, 24–25, 32, 34–36, 42–43, 51, 53, 55, 90–91, 96, 101–102, 125–27, 129, 136, 138–40, 144, 176, 178, 185–86, 190, 202, 222, 241, 249, 258–59, 263, 265–66, 271, 277, 291–94, 299–301, 305, 307, 310–11, 316, 322, 367, 373–74, 379, 390, 399–400, 402–403, 417, 438, 445, 451, 459, 463, 469, 472, 478–80, 483, 491, 495, 499, 502–503, 506–507, 509–10, 515, 519, 522, 526–27, 532; as political maverick, 349–51, 494–96, 523; as pornographic aesthete, 224; as potential sodomite, 197, 216, 222, 234, 252, 267, 271, 275, 500; as prophet/vessel, 13, 19, 33, 35–36, 44, 46, 51, 93, 231, 254, 262–63, 266, 269, 271–72, 277, 490–91, 495, 510, 520; as prophet of Paragone, 490–92; as proto–Gay Liberationist, 271–72; as psychedelic tripper, 495–97, 519, 522; as rabid imperialist, 496, 523, 528; as radical skeptic, 496; as rapist, 496, 520, 524, 526; as reader, 93, 107, 118, 122–23, 141, 290, 312, 322; as revolutionary, 37, 347; as rhetorician, 438; as sadist, 185, 214–15, 222; as saint–maker, 39, 491; as secret Ghibelline, 332, 335; as self–canonized saint, 27, 33, 202, 496, 523; as shade/spirit, 12, 37, 494–97, 503, 517, 521–29; as sign maker, 291; as socialist, 37; as solitary wanderer, 349; as spatial poet, 369–70; as student/disciple, 290–91, 295, 319, 500; as subversive Church reformer, 330–32, 334, 342, 349, 495, 520–21; as superorthodox Catholic, 196, 328–29, 333–34, 341–42, 349; as supplanter of Virgil, 451; as theologian, 24–26, 29, 33, 36, 39, 70–71, 118, 349; as top/bottom, 203, 277; as unique struggling consciousness, 379, 403; as upstart worldling, 54, 494; as Vaginal Man, 231, 490–91; as vengeful soul, 494–95, 522–23; as verbose sophist, 266; as vernacular love–allegorist, 266; as versified Aquinas, 39, 399, 499; as villain, 525–26; as voyeur, 32, 198, 200, 212–16, 222, 241; as witness, 42, 49–50, 198, 201, 203, 213–14, 222, 224, 235, 241, 403, 496; birth of, 423, 519; death of, 37, 492, 499, 519; dramatic role, 495–97, 499–500, 520–29; economic views,
INDEX 349–50; eroticized, 185, 197, 231, 495, 524–27; eyes of, 90, 98–99, 182, 212–13, 217, 222, 235, 242, 313, 499; grave of, 376, 495, 521; horoscope of, 519–20; iconic portraits of, 25–26, 28–29, 499, 502–503; medical problems of, 519; mind of, 2, 24, 87, 129, 294, 319, 369, 373; named by Beatrice, 116, 141, 299, 306; named by Gozzuta, 527; nose of, 499, 502; visits Gubbio, 493, 517–18, 521–29. See also Commedia, Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia, Epistle to Cangrande, Monarchia, Rime, Vita Nuova Dante conferences: London, Ontario, ix, 12–13, 363; Ravenna, 339 Dante Cycle 13 Dante on the Steps of Immortality viii, 12; excerpts, 520–29; playwright’s intro, 517–20 Dante Quartet: see The Dante Quartet Dante Society: Italian, 504; of America, 327–29, 331 Dante studies 44, 47, 257, 292, 335, 340, 367; as orthodoxy defence, 6 Danteum 12, 503–504, 520, 527–28 Dantists 70, 399; American, 327–29, 337–40; authoritative/Catholic, 15, 38–39, 405, 423; eccentric, 10, 12, 37, 331–33, 336, 338–40, 517–20; Italian, 332–35, 351; Sadean, 225 darkness: of evil/ignorance, 429; painted forms, 429–30; superluminous, 429 Dark Night of the Soul 419, 427, 429; phases, 445 Dark Wood (selva oscura) 34, 42, 100, 180, 186, 203, 231, 235, 263, 275, 391, 400; Elder’s, 384, 391, 453, 459, 478; Fascist, 528; Pospieszynski’s, 502, 514; Pound’s, 477 Darwin, Charles 477 Davenport, Guy 459, 484, 487 David 53–54, 188, 236; as dancer, 3, 183, 242, 492; as singer, 7, 301 David, Darren 245 Davie, Donald 480–81, 486–87 death 73, 88, 95, 116, 183, 191, 194, 210, 291, 472, 478, 499; and burial, 114, 155, 234, 517–18; and life/(re)birth, 190, 219–20, 223, 234, 240, 283, 291–292, 296, 299–301, 304–306, 457, 473, 491, 499, 501, 507; and sex, 15–16, 121, 124, 131, 136, 139, 142, 183–84, 186–87, 192, 193, 203–204, 208, 213–14, 226, 233–34, 240, 267, 491; as continuity, 186, 191, 223, 232, 234; code–word for Church, 334, 342; fear (timor mortis), 183–184, 192, 208–209, 241; halo of, 208, 242; of artist/author, 384, 491, 503; of creativity, 454; second, 192, 232, 234; spiritual, 159 de Campos, D. Redig 58, 61 decapitation 235–37, 239, 241–42 de Chirico, Giorgio 380 Decii 104 deconstruction 47, 385, 407, 437 defamiliarization 47, 209–10
543
Defoe, Daniel 382 Delcourt, Marie 323–24 Deleuze, Gilles 439, 447 Dell, Floyd 328 d’Entrèves, A.P. 179–81 Derrida, Jacques 353, 364, 391, 437 De Sanctis, Francesco 144–46, 148, 170–71, 180–81 Descartes, René 441 Deserto rosso: see Il deserto rosso desire (disio) 57: and death, 203, 208–209, 213–14; and fear, 47, 136, 183–185, 192, 271, 280–81; and love, 53, 100, 127, 131, 146, 272, 278, 321, 459; and poetics, 266, 348, 424, 490–92; erasure/extinction of, 214, 249–50, 253, 275, 454; eschatology of, 213; for continuity, 184, 196, 199; for meaning, 464–65; for return to God, 416, 418; for totality, 390; hopeless, 71, 73–74, 79, 85, 108, 222, 278; intellectual, 319; monkish, 281; same–sex, 59, 183–84, 215, 252, 254, 261, 270–73, 275–78, 280–81; sexual/ erotic, 122–23, 190, 196, 199, 215, 249, 277, 313, 318–19, 350, 433; universalized, 278, 281–82, 445 De Strobel, A.M. 81 detheologizing 14, 36, 44, 46–48, 86–87, 102, 266 Detto d’Amore 284 devils/demons 22, 31, 34, 55, 83–84, 132, 141, 175–76, 202–204, 212, 218, 222, 232, 251, 258–59, 262, 264–66, 268, 317, 359, 391, 496–97, 502, 516; possession by, 211, 258; salvation of, 88 De vulgari eloquentia 348, 417, 420, 437; 1.3.2: 177; 1.17.2: 348; 1.19.1: 351; 211: 437; 2.3.9: 437; 2.7.6: 203, 205; 2.13.13: 402 Dickens, Charles, 368 Dido viii, 8, 10, 121–26, 128–38, 141–42, 145–47, 279, 310, 318 digestion 254, 260–61 Dignity (group) 267, 271, 284 Dinsmore, Charles Allen 327–29, 339–40, 344 Dio Chrysostom 441, 447 Diogenes of Oenoanda 157, 166, 168 Dione 310 Dionysus 157, 216, 237 Dionysius the Areopagite 35. See also PseudoDionysius Diotima 315 Dis 362; City of, 56, 73, 153, 172, 175, 269, 438; Gates of, 97, 175, 515 discontinuity: as self–consciousness, 16, 116, 183, 185–86, 234; Bataillean notion, 184–86, 190, 202, 220, 222, 227, 232, 240–41; Dantean allegory, 192–94, 198–99, 202–203, 211, 213, 223, 231, 234 disembowelment 197, 200–201, 211, 214, 217–18, 223, 230, 235, 244 dismisura 3, 57 Disputa del Sacramento 25–29, 37, 46, 58
544
INDEX
diversity: doctrinal, 33, 50; sexual, 9 divine code 293 Diviners 352 divinity 402; and humanity, 211, 293–95, 299, 301–303, 315–16, 321, 374, 386. See also Christ, God, theology, Trinity Dolce, Ludovico 483 dolce stil novo 128, 144, 231, 318, 320, 330, 333, 342, 349, 398–99 Dominic, St. 13, 18–19, 28, 253, 263, 266–67 Dominicans 19–20, 22, 27, 35, 37, 64, 75, 103, 263, 265–66, 269, 444; as “Dogs of the Lord,” 22–23, 264 Donati, Corso 496–97 Dondaine, Antonio 76, 81 Doob, Penelope Reed 58, 61 Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.) 336, 343–44, 445, 447 Doré, Gustave 401 Dormition 318 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor 186 doubling: Dantean, 140, 190, 195, 201–202, 207, 225, 233, 236, 238, 241, 279–80, 314 Doughty, Oswald 341, 344 Douglas, Major C.H. 459, 484 drag 279, 286; pagan religious, 312 dream 4, 409, 417, 441, 444, 506. See also fantasy, Ganymede, image, imagination, Siren Dreyer, Carl Theodore 368 driftworks viii, 450, 452, 483 Dronke, Peter 145, 149 dualism 14, 88, 429–30 Dumas, Georges 219, 244, 247 Duncan, Robert 11, 395–96, 398–99, 404–405, 420, 423–24, 427, 435–37, 444–47; Dante Études, 396–98, 417, 448 Durling, R.M. 180–81 Dutoit, Ulysse 390, 392 Dyer, George J. 76, 81 Eagle 7, 71, 74, 86–87, 95–97, 102, 104, 111–12, 282, 319, 492 earthquake 92 Ecce Homo 214, 227 ecclesiology 55 Eckhart, Meister 440, 448 Eco, Umberto 438, 442, 448 Economou, George 324 ecphrasis 492 ecstasy 1–4, 219, 223, 238; erotic, 10, 15, 220–23, 227, 233, 276, 280, 286, 320, 334, 338; musical/rhythmic, 372, 375; Neo–Romantic, 385; poetic, 307, 336, 370, 432, 438; religious, 26, 208, 212, 221–23, 242, 320, 370, 428, 438 Eden 32, 83, 85, 88, 97, 273, 274, 299, 303, 307, 378 Eisenstein, Sergei 368, 460, 487; Ivan the Terrible, 368 Elder, R. Bruce viii, 11, 57, 367–68, 373, 381–90, 392, 394–488, 450, 531; aesthetic credo, 454, 463–67, 472, 476–77, 481; and Antonioni, 383;
and Brakhage, 382–83, 391, 420, 438, 443–44, 448, 452; and Dante, 383, 387–88, 390, 399, 444, 451–52, 455–56, 458–60, 463, 466, 477–83; and Eliot, 443–44, 459, 464, 470–71; and Hegel, 455; and Heidegger, 381, 386–387, 391, 408, 452, 454, 465, 467, 469, 472, 479, 484; and Olson, 452, 462, 464; and Pound, 382–83, 399, 434, 451–55, 457, 459–60, 462, 464, 466, 468–70, 472–85; and Rexroth, 461; and Spinoza, 457; and Weil, 387–88, 452, 454; as allegorist, 451, 455–56; as Dante–figure, 452–53, 455–59, 463; as director, 481; as filmmaker, 482, 531; as modernist, 450–52, 483; as postmodernist, 381–82, 390–91, 452, 483; as visionary artist/maker, 451, 453–54; avoids drama, 463; Body of Vision, 531; detests Swinburne, 473–74; Films of Stan Brakhage, 531; Image and Identity, 391–92, 531; letter to Henderson, 391, 451–82; on rhythm, 473–75; refutes Neoplatonism, 457, 478; revises fourfold method, 483; self–representation, 384–85, 481–82. See also Brakhage, The Book of All the Dead Eleusis 333–34 Eliade, Mircea 306, 308, 315, 323–24 Elijah 45 Eliot, T.S. 40–41, 46–47, 59–61, 357, 364–65, 401, 436, 438, 443–44, 446, 448, 470–71, 486, 487, 495, 503–504, 534; Four Quartets, 398, 436, 446, 448, 459; “Hollow Men,” 495, 503; poetics, 444; Prufrock epigraph, 470; Wasteland, 459, 464 Ellis, Steve 363, 365 Elysian Fields 73–75, 84 embryo 290–93, 295–96, 298, 300–303, 306–307; development of, 293, 298–99, 304–305; imagery of, 294–98, 303, 306 embryology viii, 9, 255–58, 261, 277, 283–84, 290–94, 296–97, 302; semiotic coding in, 293–94, 297–98, 304; mystical, 318 Empedocles 155, 166, 168 Empire 497, 520; Holy Roman, 232, 528 Empyrean 1–2, 18–19, 49–50, 100, 195, 269, 274, 278, 286, 300–301, 306, 313, 315, 318, 373, 433, 437, 450, 479 energeia viii, 11, 291, 440; and art/film, 419, 421–22, 425–26, 434–36, 460, 468, 472, 478–81; and being, 412–13, 416–18, 421–23, 426, 434, 436, 439, 441–42; and body, 434; and Christ/ Word, 418, 432, 436; and cosmos, 456; and dynamis, 408, 426; and emotions, 443, 472, 478–79; and entelecheia, 283, 408–10, 441, 445; and God, 412–13, 415–17, 422, 425, 432, 436, 442; and imagination, 441–42; and language, 410–12, 417–20, 434, 436, 438, 441–43, 467; and love, 416, 433, 442, 478–79; and memory/ experience, 407, 436, 443, 460; and poetics, 396, 420–22, 424–26, 432, 434–36, 442, 450, 452, 480–81; and rhythm, 422, 474–75, 480–81; and subjectivity, 411–12, 418, 421–22, 435–36, 442–43; etymology, 408
INDEX Engelsman, Joan C. 145, 149 enjambment 404 Enlightenment 386 Envious 4, 90, 97–98, 101 envy 90, 97–101, 153, 158 Ephialtes 499, 511 Epicurus 172, 269 Epicureanism 8, 14, 174–75, 177–78, 180 Epicureans: medieval, 9, 20, 170–73, 176–78, 180, 210, 515 epistemology: Aristotelian, 409–10; Augustinian, 425; Cartesian, 441; Platonic, 406–407, 410, 439–40; Poundian, 469, 472, 478; PseudoDionysian, 484 Epistle to Cangrande (Epistolae X/13) 24, 93, 284, 337, 363, 423, 426, 436, 444, 451, 479, 483 Eros: see Cupid eroticism 10, 15, 31, 48, 182–85, 194; and knowledge, 192–93, 222; and poesis, 187–88, 202, 262; and religion, 186, 191, 208–209, 223, 253, 270–71, 315, 329; and violence, 184–85, 189, 192–93, 200, 212–16, 222, 389; as psychological quest, 199–200, 222, 315, 329, 478–79; nostalgic, 386; repression of, 183, 215–16, 329; transgressive, 216, 219–23, 276, 315 erotics: Bataillean, 15, 48, 119, 184–93, 202, 208, 211, 213, 222, 225–27, 233; Dantean, 262, 270–82, 311, 315, 318–20, 322–23, 386, 416–17; Poundian, 329, 478–79; of diversity, viii, 249, 270–82; Ovidian, 479 érotisme à coeur 15, 199 eschatology 270–278, 286, 305: and androgyny, 323; and scatology, 214; and wholeness, 315–16, 322–23 esotericism 330–35, 342–43, 437, 445 essence: and existence, 412–13, 419, 425 essentialism 272; mimetic, 259, 266 Esterhammer, Angela x eternity 2, 478–79 Eucharist 25–27, 32, 442 Eugenius IV 64 Evagrius Ponticus 158–60 Eve 139, 188, 195, 198, 229, 292, 299, 303, 307 evil 193, 337, 339, 423, 429, 457; sacred, 199, 232, 240–41, 457. See also Fall, Hell, sin, taboo excess 3–4, 7, 16–17, 39, 48–49, 55, 108, 183, 188, 190, 212, 217, 225–26, 228, 233, 235, 238, 240–41, 319, 355, 372, 450. See also oltraggio exclusion: and partnership, 100–101 exile 172–74, 176, 179, 210, 228 existence 416–17, 439; and essence, 412–13, 415–16, 425; as gift, 465; concrete, 424, 469; contingent, 4, 414–16, 465; necessary, 4, 414–16; order of, 469; temporal “being–there” (Dasein) 484 existentialism 374 Excommunicated 45, 88 exuberance: anarcho–erotic, 199; Bataillean, 192; scatalogical, 200–201, 212 Ezzelino da Romano 496
545
faith 5–6, 8, 18–19, 21–22, 25, 29, 32–34, 36, 41, 49, 51, 54–56, 63, 65, 70, 72, 85, 92, 95, 108, 113, 175, 264, 269, 281, 521; and aesthetics, 435, 463, 466; and amorous fidelity, 33–34, 53; as allegorized Virtue, 32–33, 176, 429; Bataille’s crisis of, 186, 209; Dante’s crisis of, 186, 520, 523; definition of, 52, 69–71; explicit, 71, 73; fideism, 176; implicit, 69–70, 73, 85, 108, 113; Kukla’s crisis of, 495; opposed to unbelief, 69–70 Fall 190, 195, 198, 228, 265, 282, 292, 299, 303–304, 362, 374, 377, 403, 419, 515 Fallen World 41, 175, 199, 438 False Counsellors 352 False Prophets (Diviners) 194, 352 Falwell, Reverend Jerry 270 fame 114–15, 403, 492, 521; personified, 131–32 fantasy (fantasia): androgynous/hermaphroditic, 195, 317; Aristotelian, 409, 411, 440–41; conjuring, 494–95; cosmopoetic, 498; high (alta), 87, 102, 264, 268, 403, 416, 418, 421, 442, 450, 492, 507; heteroerotic, 231, 266; “homotextual,” 245, 277; iconoclastic, 196, 224; imperialist, 498; modernist, 384–85; make–believe making belief, 42; paradisial, 377, 381; purgatorial, 258–59; redemptive, 266–67, 269, 273, 277; religious, 210; Sadean, 220, 224, 277; Sardinian, 377, 380; transgressive, 214, 220, 277, 300, 507. See also image, imagination, orthodoxy fante viii, 290, 293, 299–301, 304, 306–307; etymology, 299; Dante/fante rhyme, 299–300 Farinata 9, 170–74, 176, 178–79, 515 farting 200, 217; demonic, 201 Fascism: and Dante, 12, 245, 357, 504, 528; and Pound, 334, 354, 356, 404; medieval, 493 Fates 110–11, 126 father 84, 88, 129, 176; Brunetto as, 500; stamps image, 27; Virgil as, 95, 116, 299, 312, 317, 532 Fautrier, Jean 207, 211, 219, 242, 244; L’homme ouvert, 211, 220, 244 fear (paura) 107, 183–84, 280, 514, 528; homophobic, 271, 280–81 Feast of the Wax Candles: see Corsa dei Ceri Fedeli d’Amore 334, 342 fellatio 31–32 Feltham, Mark vii, 9, 182–206 femininity: dissolved, 315–16, 323; negative traits, 314; positive traits, 314. See also gender, masculinity, Woman Fenollosa, Ernest 460, 465, 485, 487 Ferrante, Joan 314, 323–25, 404, 439, 448 Ficino, Marsilio 329–30, 340 fideism 176 Figs: obscene gesture, 234 film viii, 7, 10–11, 492; art, 481; art form, 367–68, 389, 398, 417, 419–20, 422, 425, 434–35, 437, 443, 460, 462, 468–69, 472, 476, 534; artist’s, 367; as photography, 435; as system of meanings, 462; as temporal medium, 387, 476;
546
INDEX
avant–garde, 367, 534; experimental, 367, 481; holistic conception, 398; montage, 460; porno, 229; postmodern, 383, 387; snuff, 214, 229, 243; space, 370; stock, 369, 371, 390, 394, 400; technology, 367–68, 389–90, 468–69, 481–82 Fiore 266, 284 Fiorenza, Elisabeth 145, 149 Flatterers 352 Flaubert, Gustave 383–84 Flesh: see body, skin Florence 9, 26, 58, 64, 170–176, 178–79, 279, 286, 296, 319, 351, 510, 518, 520–21; ideal, 179 Florentines 9, 170–75, 177–79, 263, 349, 524 Folco (Folquet de Marseille) 147, 296–97 formalism 40–44, 46–48, 59, 86, 262–63, 266, 401, 404. See also aesthetics Foscolo, Ugo 332–33, 338–39, 341 Foster, Kenelm 76, 78, 81, 86 Foucault, Michel 244, 275, 282, 286, 383–84, 386, 391, 393 fourfold reading 16, 102, 235–37, 284, 423, 451, 483; anagogic level, 16, 25, 41, 87–88, 90, 96, 102, 108, 117, 231, 236–37, 284, 398, 417, 423, 451, 455, 483; literal level, 36, 83, 90, 95, 187, 209, 236, 241, 259, 284, 334, 402, 423–24, 436, 440, 451, 455, 483; tropological level, 87, 107–109, 121–25, 135, 141, 152, 179, 192, 194, 201, 210, 212–14, 222–23, 228, 236–37, 240–41, 243, 259, 265, 269, 284, 423, 429–31, 451, 455, 483; typological level, 47, 93–96, 109, 113–15, 117–19, 126, 236, 268, 284, 286–87, 304, 385, 400–401, 423, 433, 451, 453, 455, 483, 491. See also allegory, hermeneutics, readers, reading Fou–Tchou–Li 219–20, 222–23, 225, 227, 230–31, 244 fox: image of heretic, 22–24, 38 Fra Alberigo 83 Fra Angelico 64 Fra Gomita 268–69 Frampton, Hollis 383; Magellan, 383 Francesca viii, 8–9, 121, 123–26, 128–40, 142–46, 229–30, 279–81, 287, 318, 321, 359, 385, 499, 512 Francis of Assisi, St. 524 Franciscans 19, 524; spirituality of, 18 Franke, William 442–43, 448 Franklin, Aretha 277 Frappier, Jean 145, 149 Fra Rainaldo da Piperna 103 Fraser, Jennifer viii, 9, 290–308; Rite of Passage, 531 Fraternity of the Possessed 518, 522 Freccero, John 6, 56, 61, 257–59, 262–63, 266, 269, 284, 286, 288, 299, 305–306, 308–309 Frederick II, Emperor 515 Freemasonry 37, 335, 343 freeplay 452 French, Kristen 243 Frere, John Hookham 332 Freud, Sigmund 48, 186, 195, 377, 454, 477
Freudians 57, 213, 218 friendship 99–100, 425 Frye, Northrop 385 fulgore 370, 372, 416–17, 425–26, 450, 493. See also ecstasy, energeia, inspiration Fundamentalism 44–45; Dantean, 44, 176 Furies 112 Fussell, Edwin 339, 344 Gabriel 51, 311, 318, 492 Gaheriet 145 Gaia 312 Gallehault 131, 146 Gallup, Donald 343–44 Gallus 101 game: theory 104; zero–sum, 99, 102, 104 Ganymede 10, 277, 282; dream of, 275 Gaudel, A. 76, 81 Gauvain 145 gay: activism, 283–84; artists, 503; authors, 272–74, 503; Catholic, 287; community formation, 271, 284; gaze (cruising), 252, 260, 275, 278, 285; icon, 279; identity, 252–53, 271; liberation, 261, 271, 282, 284–86; parade, 58, 270, 274, 284–85, 503; pride, 58, 270, 274, 282, 284, 503; readers, 270, 272, 274–75, 285, 533; saints, 280–81; salvation, 273; sex, 260; slang, 204, 281, 286, 511; theology, 271–72, 286 gaze: erotic, 132, 183–84, 200, 215, 217, 219–22, 224–25, 228, 236, 241, 270, 278, 282, 311, 318, 500; fallen male, 195, 225, 228–29; infernal, 502; heteroerotic, 216–17, 222, 225, 227–28, 243, 245, 278, 282, 310; homoerotic, 215, 217, 225, 275, 278, 282, 285; moral, 218; Sadean, 224–25, 229, 241; saintly, 516; Surrealist, 213, 219–22, 245, 502 Gemini 32 Gemma Donati 496, 519; dramatic role, 525–27 gender: binary, 8, 131–34, 136, 286, 315, 322; dissolved with race and class, 315; fluidity, 312, 313–14; inversion, viii, 8, 15, 121, 136, 138–42, 277–78, 280, 312, 314–15; neutrality, 256–57, 316; parity in Heaven, 314–15; performativity, 286; pronominal, 313–14; reversal, 51, 137–38, 147, 225, 227, 231, 313–14, 323; transgression, 193, 277, 313–14; trouble, 278 Gentucca 496; dramatic role, 525–27 Gerardesca Guidi 524 Gerhard, Mira vii, 45, 107, 531 Geryon 48, 196–197, 202–203, 205, 259; Pound’s, 349–50 Gesamkunstwerk 481 Getto, Giovanni 79, 81 Gherardi, Pietro Ercole 533 Ghibellines 88, 173–74, 176, 332, 518, 524 Gianciotto 512 Giacomo da Lentino 144 Giants 511 Gierowski, S. 506 Gilson, Etienne 308–309, 379, 390, 393, 439, 448
INDEX Giotto 493 Giovanni di Dante 519, 525 Giovanni di Paolo 401, 491, 503 Giovannini, G. 339, 344 giri/spiri rhyme 301–302. See also spiration Giuliana: Antonioni character, 376–81, 383, 387 Glaucus 294–295, 299, 527 Gluttons: penitent, 254, 258, 290, 305 gluttony 158 gnosis: as salvific knowledge, 459, 478 Gnosticism/Gnostics 23, 88, 249, 316, 323, 341, 374, 423, 453, 455, 483 God 16, 70–71, 74, 86, 92–93, 116, 132, 135, 193, 234, 261, 307, 322, 339, 367, 377, 426, 438, 442–43, 457, 515, 520, 522, 525, 527, 533; androgyny of, 8, 10, 142, 313–17, 323; as Act of Being, 413–16; as Artist/Architect, 258, 291, 450–51, 490–92, 495, 498–99; as Beautiful and Good, 484; as Creator/Demiurge, 126, 133, 137–38, 187, 275, 281, 292, 295, 297, 307, 315, 321, 415–17, 435–36, 455; as Emperor, 15, 85, 95, 97, 125–26, 270, 318; as Eternal Worth, 413–14; as Father, 95, 305, 414–15, 432; as final blessedness, 315; as Holy Ardour, 319; as homophobe, 270–71; as Law–Giver, 240; as Lover of Creation, 5, 10–11, 19, 53, 55, 272, 311–12, 318–20, 355, 412, 416, 445, 458; as Mirror/Mind, 255, 298, 302, 307, 319, 373, 412, 414–15, 417, 425, 431, 440; as Perfect Good, 71, 112, 144, 455–58, 464, 478, 484; as primal Love, 315, 415–16; as primal Power, 297, 314, 443; as primal Unity, 323, 414–15, 425, 435; as Rock of Ages, 221; as sadistic torturer, 222, 241, 271; as sea/profundity, 295; as Spirator, 291, 293, 295–97, 300–304, 306–307; as spiritual nourishment, 121–22, 132; as Sun/Light, i, 97, 121, 140, 177, 202, 221, 301, 311–12, 315, 319, 413–16, 433, 436, 443, 455, 479, 491; as Supreme Beneficence, 303, 322; as Supreme Leader, 314–15; as Transcendent Cause, 243; as Truth, 425; as Ultimate Desire, 55, 133, 144, 186–87, 193, 221, 292, 311, 313, 349; as Unmoved Mover, 55, 141, 257, 297, 320, 412–13, 445, 490; as wrathful Judge, 55, 99, 101, 104, 118, 137, 197, 230, 234, 271, 278, 432, 515; Consequent Nature of, 432, 445; death of, 450; existence of, 2, 425, 495; femaleness of, 227–28; glory of, 38, 312, 442; image of, 186–87, 194–95, 199, 224; immanence of, 187, 227, 291, 300–301, 307, 322, 328, 412, 417, 425, 436, 442; maleness of, 134; Primordial Nature of, 445; transcendence of, 187, 300–301, 412; union with, 210, 318; vision of, 3, 108, 187, 300, 432. See also Trinity Golding, John 247 Golding, William 534 Goldoni, Carlo 533 Gombrowicz, Witold 494, 506 Gomorrah 39, 261–62 Gottlieb, Adolf 394
547
Gould, Glenn 473 Gozzuta 496, 524; dramatic role, 525–27 grace 59, 70–72, 77, 79, 84, 89, 93–94, 112–13, 175, 297, 321, 405, 440, 456; personified, 320 Grail 328, 330, 340 Gramick, Jeannine 57, 62 grammatica 303–304 Grandgent, Charles H. 40 Grant, George 382, 391, 393 Gratiolo di Bambaioli 264 Great Sea of Being 294–95, 304, 413–14 Green, Richard x Greenaway, Peter 228–29, 245, 247, 383; TV Dante, 229, 383 Gregory Nazianzus 159–60, 166, 168 Gregory Nyssen 159, 166–68 Gregory the Great 45, 94–96, 104, 109, 155, 163, 167–68 Grice, Herbert Paul 420 griffin 317 Grosseteste, Robert 479 Gualdrada 523 Gubbio 12, 493–98, 503, 517, 520; architecture, 518; setting for play, 520–22 Guelfs 174, 176, 182, 518 Guercio 198, 215, 234, 260 Gugelberger, George M. 339, 344 Guglielma of Milan 323 Guido da Pisa 64, 72, 76, 81, 103, 105 Guido del Duca 99–101 Guido Guerra, Count 182, 187, 190, 197, 204, 216 Guinevere (Guenevere) 52, 131–32, 136, 139, 145, 512 Guinizzelli, Guido 39, 127–29, 137, 144, 149, 261, 285, 493 Gumpel, Peter 76, 81 Gundert, Beata x Guzzardo, John J. 144, 149 Hades 10, 470 Haggerty, George E. 284, 288 hair: on infernal body, 192, 195–96, 202–204; pubic, 195–96, 202–204; symbolizing “shaggy” words, 203, 205 Hale–Bopp: comet, 250, 283 Hall, Donald 363, 365 Halperin, David 272, 285, 288 Hamilton College 328 Handel, George Frideric 474 harlot 136: as flatterer, 130; as rover, 131 Harpies 502 Harren, Michael 59, 61 Harrowing of Hell 65–67, 69, 72–73, 77, 84–85, 232, 319 Harvey, Gilbert 255 Hatcher, A. 145, 149 Havely, Nick 363, 365 Hawkins, Peter 140, 147, 149, 199, 202, 205–206 Heartling, Joel 445
548
INDEX
Heaven 67, 91, 93, 96, 250, 273–74, 278, 295–96, 304, 314, 317, 319–21, 343, 358, 369, 374, 377, 389, 433, 490, 507, 528; Moon, 50, 301, 319, 395, 512; Mercury, 350, 360–61; Venus, 7, 9, 140, 279–80, 286, 295–96, 302, 310, 314, 318, 322, 350, 355, 360; Sun, 2, 5, 9, 17, 19, 21–22, 26, 50, 221, 269, 278, 286, 292–93, 295–97, 301–302, 323, 356, 411, 413–14, 493, 514; Mars, 179, 356, 510; Jupiter, 7, 71, 109, 319; Saturn, 179, 268–69, 280; Fixed Stars (Stellatum), 5, 17, 33, 49, 52, 55, 264, 281, 320, 436; Primum Mobile, 2, 278, 320–21, 415, 420; Empyrean (Rose), 1–2, 18–19, 39–40, 49–50, 100, 116, 249, 268, 274, 277, 278, 300–301, 306, 313, 318, 321, 324, 373, 389, 395, 420, 428, 432, 433, 437, 450, 479, 516. See also Paradise, Rose heavenquake 2 Heaven’s Gate (cult) 250–53, 262, 267, 283 Hebrew Just 65–66, 73, 319 Hector 114 Hegel, Georg W. F. 455, 477, 483 Heidegger, Martin 377, 381, 408–10, 412, 442, 465, 484, 487; as Aquinas, 452; as Virgil, 387 Hehir, Kevin 498; Dante on the Scales, 498 Helen of Troy 244, 468 Hell 67–69, 83–84, 88, 187–88, 196, 199, 210, 269, 272–74, 280, 285, 294, 314, 337, 364, 376–77, 401, 403, 429, 452, 455, 469, 496, 500, 507, 511; and secrecy, 191–92, 200, 210, 285; Antonioni’s, 375–76, 381; as animal passion, 215; as body, 202, 256, 260; Brakhage’s, 369, 427, 429; Cantos, 352–53; Elder’s, 384–85, 457–58, 463–64; Fascist, 528; Gate of, 107–108, 110, 114, 118, 188, 191, 253, 269, 413, 478, 513; gloom, 101; Joyce’s, 459; mouth, 73, 235; Pound’s, 352–55, 360, 459, 469; romanticized, 207; topography of orthodox, 66, 77. See also Inferno Henderson, Dr. Archie viii, 391, 450–51, 453 Henry VII 528 heresy viii, 6, 17–21, 24, 35, 55, 59, 251, 268–69, 331, 355, 424, 491, 496; Albigensianism, 37, 329–30, 333, 340, 342; and homosexuality, 251–52, 254, 262–63, 283, 285; and politics, 170, 250–51, 332; Averroism, 59, 442; Bataillean atheism, 16, 232; Catharism 14, 21, 253, 342; doomsday cults, 249; Epicurean mortalism, 8, 14, 172, 174–79, 180, 515; etymology, 38; Gnosticism, 23, 88, 249, 316, 323, 341, 374, 423, 453–55, 483; Guglielmite soteriology, 323; Heaven’s Gate Cyber–Gnosticism, 250–53; Humanist pantheism, 38; Manicheanism, 329–30, 332–33, 335, 342; Photinian Christology, 14; Platonic animism, 14, 50; Sadean atheism, 208; Templar, 342; universalism, 88, 104 Heretics 20, 22, 37, 49, 56, 89, 104, 170–77, 210, 249, 267, 515; as blind, 177; as foxes, 22–23, 26, 58; as fraudulent, 269; as weeds/stalks, 263–64; Love’s, 259; modern counterparts, 250–51, 283
hermaphrodite 39, 194–95, 261; divine, 315 Hermaphroditus 135 hermeneutics 46–47, 86, 107–108, 114, 116, 118, 235, 245, 284, 451; Bataillean, 210, 217, 237–38; medieval, 382, 423; of credulity, 45, 47; of connectedness, 237, 383; of discontinuity, 192; of suspicion, 382; postmodern, 383, 385, 388, 461–62, 483; Thomist, 411, 424. See also allegory, fourfold reading, readers, reading Hermes 261. See also Mercury hero/heroism: classical, 91–93, 112–13, 123, 125–27, 141, 147, 157, 239, 311–12; Dantean, 91, 112, 141, 147, 176; modernist, 383, 387; postmodern, 383; vitalist, 383 heroine: Dantean, 141; modernist, 380, 387; romantic, 136, 138, 144, 229; tragic, 138 Hesiod 101, 312–13, 324 heterodoxy 362 heteroeroticism 491 heteroglossia 362 heterosexism 252, 262, 266, 270, 279, 282, 284–85 heterosexuality 40, 270–71, 275, 277–79, 281, 284, 291, 313; “hermaphrodite,” 261, 313; naturalized, 275–77 Hezekiah 112 Highet, Gilbert 104 Hippocrates 166, 168 historicism: modern, 371, 374, 385; new, 46 history: and allegory, 23, 58, 138, 306, 322, 330, 340, 351, 367, 373, 379, 382, 385, 430, 451; and body, 384; and counter–history, 386; and filmmaking, 451, 455, 468, 477–78; and myth, 434–35; and painting, 371; and poetry, 357, 373, 382, 404, 451, 472, 477; and textuality, 46; chasm of, 367–68, 371, 378–79, 390; dynastic/ imperial, 420, 438; ecclesiastical, 33; epochal/ cultural, 368, 371; modernist view, 377, 378–79, 382, 384–85, 455, 477; nineteenthcentury Italian, 351; postmodern view, 385, 389; repeat in, 455, 477, 483–84; salvation, 32; Victorian view, 477; Virgilian view of, 373–74 Hitler, Adolf 528; Mein Kampf, 528 Hoarders 87, 353 Hobbes, Thomas 441 Holkham Hall: manuscript, 225–27, 235, 245 Hollander, Robert 86, 145, 149, 284, 288, 303–304, 308–309 Holocaust 384–86 Holsinger, Bruce W. 57, 61, 275–76, 278, 286, 288 Holy Grail 132, 141 Holy Spirit 7, 25, 27, 52–53, 117, 197, 258, 268–69, 277, 319, 323, 445, 490, 495; as Paraclete, 281–82. See also Trinity Homberger, Eric 363, 365 Homer 25, 155, 166, 169, 330, 337, 340, 343, 401, 463, 487, 495; Odyssey, 434, 463, 468, 470; statue of, 521 homoeroticism 9, 14, 31, 197–99, 204, 215, 222, 254, 260, 271, 275–82, 286, 491; “homoagapic,” 281
INDEX Homo–Hetero divide 262, 271, 275, 277, 282, 286, 291 homologia 21 homophiles 261, 284 homophobia 272, 284–85: Dante–pilgrim’s, 234; God’s, 270; internalized, 253; medieval, 280; religious, 57, 59, 266, 270, 280, 285 homosexuality 284–86, 500; and heresy, 251–53, 263, 283; and purgatorial sex, 260; as fragile subject position, 275, 277; as ontological disorder, 262; as sterility, 275; modern concept of, 271–72, 275 homosociality 280 Honorius of Autun 67, 81 hope 84–87, 92, 102, 107–108, 110, 113, 319, 478; as allegorized Virtue, 32, 49, 70 Horace 410, 441, 443, 448 horripilation 219–20, 223 horror 220–23; erotics of, 225–27 Hugh of St. Victor 162–64, 166–67, 169, 258, 411, 421, 441, 448 humanism: Bataillean, 208, 241; Dantean, 187; Renaissance, 26, 38, 75, 406; secular, 44 humanity 382; and animal nature, 190, 193–98, 234, 396, 457; and divinity, 211, 293–95, 299, 301–303, 315–16, 321, 374, 386, 419, 425, 434, 455, 477, 479, 490, 515; definition, 360, 408, 411; embryonic genesis, 293–94, 302–303; good nature, 455; ontological borders, 184, 193, 195–98, 408 Humphrey, Charles 283 Huxley, Aldous 519 hylomorphism 256–59, 283, 303, 409, 412, 440, 442 Hypocrites 188, 204, 354 Iacopini, Pietro 356, 364–65 Iacopo di Dante 519 Iago 55–56, 60 Iannucci, Amilcare A. vii, 7, 13, 57, 62–63, 77, 79, 81, 85–86, 104–105, 140, 146–47, 149, 390–91, 393, 532; Dante, Cinema, and Television, 532; Forma ed evento, 532 Ibsen, Henrik 336 Icarus 17, 197 iconoclasm 189, 193, 196–97, 200, 211–12, 217, 224, 229, 375, 495–96, 501 idea: as emotion, 475–76; as energy, 440, 442 idealism 435–36. See also transcendentalism ideogrammic method 460, 465, 484–85 Il deserto rosso 11, 367–68, 375–81; as Purgatorio, 376–77, 387 Iliescu, Nicolae 105 image 406, 497; as “unnameable form,” 400, 435–36; cinematic, 420, 435–36, 443, 460–61, 492; inversions of paradisial, 187; mental, 406–407, 409–12, 421, 441–44; of eternity, 478; of God, 7, 9, 186–187, 190, 194, 199, 224, 256, 315–16, 416, 455, 475, 490, 513; poetic, 444; primordial elements of, 418–19, 422–23, 435;
549
transcendental status, 435–36; symbolic, 507. See also allegory, Paragone, word imagination 6, 283, 357, 359, 411, 422–24, 441, 444, 532; Aristotelian, 409–10, 440–41; Augustinian, 440; Brakhage’s, 382–83, 400, 418–19, 421–22, 429–30, 434–35; Dante’s, 72, 74, 217, 223, 234, 241, 267, 277, 305, 318, 401, 417–18, 421–22, 430, 435, 441; Elder’s, 382–83, 385; inquisitorial, 263–64; modernist, 378, 384–85, 450; Pawlowski’s, 494, 501, 503; Platonic, 406–407, 409; pornographic, 213, 226; Pospieszynski’s, 503, 507; prophetic, 441; visual, 217, 375, 406–407, 409, 418, 435, 440, 442 Imagism/Imagists 436, 484–85 Imago Dei 186–87, 189–90, 194, 199, 201, 224, 315–16, 490, 513 immortality: of Dante, 494–96, 520, 525, 528–29; of human soul, 8; steps of, 496, 498, 503, 520–29 impedimento 16 impetus (impeto) 16, 20, 24–25, 31, 33, 84, 97, 122, 298, 311, 318, 321, 451. See also energeia, love, Virtues Inanna 318 Incarnation 8–9, 119, 211, 228, 236, 317, 322, 432, 436, 442 incontinence 175 Index 36–38, 58, 262 Indiana, Gary 245, 248 Indifferent 188 ineffability 374; topos 2, 5, 233, 280, 300–301, 420, 438, 479 infant(s) 317, 409; baby talk, 303, 307; blessed, 39–40, 59, 231, 277; Dante as, 300–301, 303; in Virgil’s Underworld, 68; spirated 10, 257, 299–300, 303; suckled by monks, 316; unbaptized, 7, 63–66, 69, 71–72, 74, 78–79, 86, 108; unequal distribution of grace to, 59, 324. See also birth/rebirth, embryo, embryology, spiration Inferno (cantica) 83, 89, 91, 164, 184–87, 191–92, 198–99, 205, 207–208, 210–11, 213, 216, 225, 228, 237, 243, 245, 257, 270, 275, 285, 314, 348, 353–54, 363, 375–76, 403–404, 426, 429, 457–58, 469; 1: 85, 295; 1.1: 191–92, 205, 300, 402; 1.1–2: 391; 1.1–3: 34, 269; 1.2: 384, 502; 1.2–3: 180; 1.3: 269; 1.10: 42, 528; 1.12: 34, 192; 1.19–21: 514; 1.20: 256; 1.23: 514; 1.54: 102; 1.61: 35, 100; 1.82: 90; 1.89: 175; 1.100: 204 1.117: 192; 1.124: 318; 1.125: 15; 1.134: 35, 249; 2: 146; 2.28: 268; 2.28–30: 33; 2.30: 268; 2.32: 268; 2.58: 146; 2.58–60: 115; 2.67: 175; 2.72: 311; 2.72–4: 84; 2.73–4: 114; 2.94–6: 85, 318; 2.116: 186; 2.142: 34; 3: 469; 3.3: 8, 501; 3.6: 108; 3.12: 107; 3.13–15: 107; 3.18: 237; 3.21: 191, 266; 3.65–6: 188; 3.88–9: 210; 3.95–6: 175; 3.100–1: 188; 3.116: 400; 4: 67–68, 72–74, 469; 4.1: 103; 4.7–9: 63, 68; 4.23–4: 68; 4.25–30: 64; 4.30: 67; 4.34: 70;
550
INDEX
4.34–6: 63; 4.36: 85, 113; 4.40: 113; 4.42: 64, 71, 85, 108, 222; 4.52–63: 73; 4.66: 67; 4.68–9: 64; 4.79: 103; 4.106: 64; 4.107–8: 64; 4.111: 64; 4.112–14: 64; 4.131: 407, 477, 480, 486; 5: 123–25, 128, 137–38, 141, 145–46, 249, 391; 5.10: 145; 5.11: 31; 5.16: 386; 5.28: 354; 5.30: 127; 5.31: 279–80; 5.31–33: 125; 5.42–3: 144; 5.61–2: 123, 125, 140; 5.74: 146; 5.74–5: 125; 5.75: 359; 5.82: 146; 5.85: 121; 5.86: 125; 5.88: 146; 5.91–2: 125; 5.96: 126, 143; 5.100: 140, 386; 5.101: 141; 5.100–2: 128; 5.100–6: 130; 5.100–8: 229; 5.103–5: 512; 5.106: 131; 5.107: 146; 5.108–9: 146; 5.113: 146; 5.116–17: 126; 5:120: 146; 5.124–6: 136; 5.133: 146; 5.135: 135; 5.137: 146; 5.138: 133, 229–30; 5.139–40: 136; 5.142: 127; 7: 153, 164; 7.49–54: 353; 7.110: 165; 7.115–20: 154; 7.121: 152; 7.121–2: 165; 7.121–6: 151, 165; 7.123: 151; 7.124: 152; 8: 73, 97, 175; 8.45: 317; 8.115–6: 175; 8.118–20: 113; 9: 73, 175; 9.52–60: 354; 9.61–3: 420; 9.62: 42; 9.124–6: 515; 10: 170–72, 178; 10.1–3: 172; 10.2: 172; 10.4–21: 172; 10.13–15: 210; 10.15: 172; 10.22–54: 172; 10.25: 176; 10.26: 170, 178; 10.27: 171; 10.35–6: 171; 10.49–51: 176; 10.50–1: 172; 10.55–72: 173; 10.58: 173; 10.58–9: 98, 173; 10.59: 173, 177; 10.63: 173, 177, 180; 10.73: 171; 10.73–87: 173; 10.86: 173; 10.88–93: 173; 10.92: 170; 10.93: 178; 10.94: 173; 10.94–136: 173; 10.100: 173; 10:103–4: 173; 10.125: 174; 10.132: 174; 11: 175; 11.48–50: 59; 11.50: 38; 13: 501; 13.15: 502; 13.25–7: 513; 13.42: 356; 14.19: 188, 204; 14.22–4: 353; 14.113: 256; 15: 43, 500–501; 15.1: 35; 15.18–19: 216; 15.22: 252; 15.22–4: 511; 15.24: 402, 472, 500; 15.88–90: 438; 15.99: 244; 15.124: 179; 16: 14, 204; 16:22: 182; 16.25–6: 216; 16.34–6: 182; 16.35: 188; 16.47: 183; 16.48: 183, 218; 16.74: 3; 16.128: 483; 17.10–13: 196; 17.30: 196; 17.81: 197; 18.1: 352; 18.22: 188; 18.29: 58; 18.34: 353; 18.113–14: 353; 19.13–15: 210; 19.73–5: 39; 19.90–117: 349; 20.40–5: 194; 20.52–6: 195; 20.113: 8; 21: 458; 21.2: 483; 21.16: 492; 21.48: 499; 21.107–8: 359; 21.139: 201; 22.82: 268; 23.37–51: 317; 24.92–6: 197; 24.129: 233; 24.130–2: 234; 25.3: 234; 25.48: 234; 25.91: 215; 25.92: 260; 25.97: 31; 25.103–17: 198; 25.116: 31, 215, 234; 26.90–142: 438; 26.119–20: 179; 28: 240, 226–27, 235; 28.22–4: 216; 28.22–31: 201; 28.25–7: 212; 28.28–9: 215; 28.30: 223; 28.31: 211; 28.119: 235; 28.55–60: 223; 28.125: 236; 28.136–8: 236; 28.139–42: 236; 28.142: 242; 29: 235; 29.2–3: 242; 30: 190; 30.41: 190; 30.95: 256; 30.115: 352; 31.91–3: 511; 33.122–38: 83; 34: 85; 34.58–60: 202; 34.70–5: 202–203; 34.76–7: 203 Inferno (place) 6, 15, 58, 98, 107, 117, 124, 153, 187, 193–94, 204, 234, 260, 272–73, 506, 514; anthropological design, 193; blind prison, 177,
275; tropological structure, 153–54, 175, 187; Antinferno, 31, 107–108; First Circle, 7, 63, 67–69, 83–85, 108, 429; Second Circle, 32, 127, 139, 153, 229, 279–80, 354; Third Circle, 153; Fourth Circle, 87, 153, 273, 353; Fifth Circle, 151, 153, 353, 420; Sixth Circle, 9, 37, 56, 253, 515; Seventh Circle, 9, 38, 92, 182, 184–85, 187–88, 192, 216, 253, 275, 278, 349, 353, 499, 502, 513; Eighth Circle (Malebolge), 9, 31, 48, 188, 190, 192, 194, 196–97, 212–15, 218, 222–24, 230–31, 233–37, 241–43, 245, 260, 268, 317, 352–53; Ninth Circle, 83, 202, 511 Infidels 22, 69–70, 104, 215 ingegno 17, 369, 373 Ingino, Mount 493, 497, 517, 522 ingressus mentis: Brakhage’s, 417 Innis Film Society 483 Innocent III 27 Inquisition 17–23, 35–37, 52, 263, 274, 330–31, 340, 529; media as, 250, 252, 283 inspiration 257, 261, 276–77, 291, 299–301, 307, 370, 398, 426, 441, 474, 490–91, 493. See also Apollo, estasy, spiration, poesis intellect (mind) 6, 93, 173, 176, 178–79, 235, 237, 257, 259, 265, 293, 305, 319–21, 375, 407, 409–10, 412–13, 416, 421–22, 424, 435, 438, 443, 460–61, 465, 475, 477–79; active, 425, 442; circular dynamics, 423, 484; epochal Intelligence, 468–69, 477; mechanized, 495; saintly telepathic, 281–82, 425, 442. See also imagination, reason, soul, will Intentional Fallacy 48 intercession 88–89, 92–94, 96, 101–105, 109 interiority 183, 265, 369, 372, 423–25 intersubjectivity 442 intertextuality 47, 71, 88, 199, 382–83, 388, 432–33, 454, 467, 470, 532. See also allusion, fourfold method, reading, writing invagination: of Dante, 277, 490–91. See also Man, vagina Inwood, Michael 484, 487 Iphimedia 511 Iris 125, 304 irrationality 16, 185, 201, 212–13, 217, 223, 237–40, 265–66 Ishtar 318 Isis 435 Islam 213, 243, 342 Istituto Italiano di Cultura (Toronto) 13, 489, 498, 506 Italy 351, 357, 493, 517, 521; medieval, 380, 493. See also Florence, Ravenna, Rome. Iulus 110 Iyer, Pico 283, 288 Jacobus de Voragine 72 Jacoby, Felix, 325 Jacoff, Rachel 147, 149 Jager, Eric 303, 308–309 James, Montague Rhodes 79, 81
INDEX James, William 445 James of Campostela, St. 281 Jameson, Fredric 391 Jarman, Derek 533 Jarrett, Bede 76, 81 Jason 437 Jerome, St. 142 Jerusalem 117; New, 322 Jésuve 233–34, 237–38, 242, 246 John, St. 320 John Chrysostom 159, 166, 169 John of the Cross, St. 426–27, 429, 445, 448 John Paul II, 21, 29, 267 John the Baptist 236 John the Deacon 104, 105 John XXII 59 Jordan, Mark 59, 62, 287–88 Jordan, Viola Baxter 336 Joseph of Exeter 243–44, 247 Joyce, James 354, 357, 364–65, 531, 534; Finnegan’s Wake, 459; Ulysses, 401, 459 Jubilee: medieval, 33, 58, 268; modern, 29, 31, 58; missa jubilaea, 442 Judas 202 Julian of Norwich 316 Julius II 26–27, 29 Junius Brutus 104 Juno 125, 304 Jupiter: god (Jove), 10, 282, 511. See also Heaven Just (saints) 89, 95, 109, 282, 319 justice: distributive, 360; divine, 72–74, 79, 84–87, 95, 98, 112–13, 131, 222, 237, 319, 506, 514; earthly/human, 319, 403, 458, 494, 523; infernal parody, 197; natural, 70. See also contrapasso, Eagle, God, theodicy Justinian 356–57, 364, 438 Justinopolitanus, Andreas Divus 468, 485 Kaeppeli, Thomas 76, 81 Karageorghis, Jacqueline 324–25 Kay, Richard 272, 274, 285, 288 Keats, George and Thomas 485 Keats, John 463, 487 Kelly, J.N.D. 58, 62 Kelly, Robert 434 Kemp, Martin 503–504 Kenner, Hugh 327, 339, 344, 363, 365, 485–87 Kepler: Anna 519; Johannes, 519 Kern, Otto 325 Kierkegaard, Søren 186 Kim, H. C. 79, 81 kinetics (kin¯esis) 439, 443, 452, 472; and cinema, 472, 476 King, Ed vii, 7–8, 45, 83, 108–11, 113–16, 118–19, 532 kiss: Francesca’s, 131–33, 135, 139, 146; Guinevere’s, 131–33, 139, 512; Salmacis’s, 135 Klossowski, Pierre 242 knowledge: see epistemology Kojève, Alexandre 483, 487
551
Koniuszy, Edward 505 Koprowski, Hilary 498 Koran 230 Krauss, Rosalind 390, 393 Kukla 494–95, 500, 503, 520–29 Kushner, Tony 56, 62 labyrinth: body as, 200, 239–41; Inferno as, 58, 200, 269; multicursal, 58; of closets, 285; unicursal, 58 Lacan, Jacques 385 Lacy, Norris J. 145, 149 Lala, Marie–Christine 206 Lancelot 131–33, 136, 139, 145, 512 language 22, 400, 411, 442–43, 461; allegory of, 203, 205, 237–38; and silence, 418–19, 439, 467; and selfhood, 454, 462; and time, 467; angelic, 336; arch¯e, 371, 374, 436, 467; as ars grammatica, 303–304; as barrier 7, 233; as copulation, 237–38; as currency, 351–53, 364; as gift of God, 10, 299–301; as maze, 47, 53, 237, 400; as mirror, 46; as moral arena, 400; as natural energy–flow, 396, 410, 421, 423, 434, 436–37, 440, 443–44, 467, 484–85; as visible speech, 400, 451, 492, 497, 499; as weapon, 137; as wind, 126–27; baby talk, 303–304, 307; breakdown/fall of, 174, 177, 300, 303; “curial,” 351; distinctively human, 177, 351, 396, 411; erotic, 137, 322; escape from, 418–19; Florentine dialect, 176–77; literary/poetic, 351, 396–97, 420, 434, 437; logopoeia, 462; man’s, 139, 396–97; metalanguage, 348; of reasoning, 367–68; postlapsarian, 303; prelapsarian, 303–304, 307; secret/coded, 332–33, 335, 342; vernacular, 348, 351, 420; woman’s, 126–27, 130–31, 135, 138, 229 Lansing, Richard 56, 62 La Pia 376 La Porta per la Città di Dante Exhibition 506 Last Judgment 172, 283; Michelangelo’s fresco, 30–32, 58 Lateran Pacts 341 Latini, Ser Brunetto 13, 43, 164, 167, 169, 179, 244, 252, 270, 275–76, 285, 402, 438, 500, 511 Lawrence, D.H. 330, 340, 344 Leahy, D.G. 442, 448 Leary, Timothy 497 Lechon, Jan 520 Le Goff, Jacques 77, 81, 104–105 Leonardo da Vinci 239, 406, 439, 448, 504 Leopardi, Giacomo 533 lesbian: artists, 503; desire, 282; youth, 284 Lessing, Gotthold 498 Lethe 32, 115, 256, 475, 526 Lewis, Wyndham 401 libertinism 38, 350 Lightbrown, Ronald W. 245, 248 Lightworks viii, 450, 452, 481, 483 Limbo viii, 7, 45, 83–86, 92–93, 95, 97–98, 108, 113–14, 188, 204, 354, 407, 429, 469, 493; as
552
INDEX
margin, 7–8, 63, 105; as prison, 99, 109, 118; etymology, 7, 65; history, 64–67, 76; limbus patrum, 65–67, 72–73, 77; limbus puerorum, 65–72, 74, 77; orthodox theology of, 65–66, 69, 104; topography, 65–68; unorthodoxy of Dante’s, 64–65, 67–77, 79, 85 liminality 323, 428, 431, 513 Limit: and Unlimited, 4, 454 Lisbon 37 literal level: see reading literature: American, 390; and belief, 36, 40–44, 46–47, 49, 89, 362 Little Sister’s trial 205 Litz, Walter 327, 339, 344 logopoeia 462 Logos: see word London, Ontario 12–13, 363 London Regional Art and Historical Museums 13 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 327, 339, 343 Longinus: see Pseudo-Longinus Lord, Mary L. 142–43, 149 Louvre 239 love (amore/ardore) 405; and death, 123–25, 131–32, 137, 139, 142–43, 193, 454, 526; and knowledge, 270, 425, 454, 459; and partnership, 99, 291; and power, 481; and time, 387; carnal/passionate, 137–38, 140, 146, 266, 291, 310–11, 313, 318–20, 322, 433, 459, 512, 525–27; chivalric/courtly, 126–29, 131–32, 137, 140, 143–44, 229, 250, 266, 279, 318, 321, 442, 512, 526; cosmic/divine, 9–10, 50–51, 84, 86, 100, 102, 119, 133, 139, 141, 272, 279, 300, 311–12, 315, 317–22, 334, 336–37, 350, 360–61, 413–16, 432, 438, 442, 450, 456, 458–59; cult of, 330, 334, 338, 340, 342; free, 350, 355; heterosexual, 39, 261, 266, 278, 291, 380, 526–27; homosexual, 260–62, 266, 270–79, 291; idolatrous, 137; mad (folle), 140–41, 279, 310–11; natural/ unnatural, 39, 291, 321–22; nostalgic, 358; personified/deified, 130, 136, 140–41, 291, 299, 329–30, 387, 391, 458; Platonic, 338, 519, 525; primal, 108; promiscuous, 355; rational, 146; self, 145, 321; spiritual/intellectual, 117, 137, 266, 291, 311, 338, 342, 433, 440, 459, 516; transformative, 193. See also charity, friendship, lust Lovers (sainted) 318–19, 322, 355, 360, 525 Lowell, James Russell 327, 340 Lucian 157, 166, 169, 441, 448–49 Lucifer 238 Lucretius 382, 520 Lucy, St. 8, 85, 282, 456 Lugubrious Game: see The Lugubrious Game Lund–Mead, Carolynn vii, 8, 13, 121–50, 323, 325, 532 Lunman, Kim 57, 62 Lust (luxuria) 59, 121–25, 131–34, 138, 153, 158, 190, 249, 259, 261, 270–71, 285, 310, 322; of the eyes, 217, 228; of the flesh, 282
Lustful 9, 32, 38–39, 121, 124–26, 139, 279–80, 512; penitent, 259, 261–62, 266, 270–71, 274, 285, 291, 433 Lyell, Charles 332 Lyotard, Jean–François 391, 393, 452, 483, 487 lyric/lyricism: and Dante, 402, 404; and epic, 370, 372, 374, 401, 472; and film, 399, 431, 435, 472; “now,” 374, 400, 402, 431, 435, 472 Machiavelli, Niccolo 532 MacLachlan, Bonnie viii–x, 10, 12, 310–25, 532; Age of Grace, 532 MacLeish, Archibald 419–20, 443, 449 Macrobius 312, 322, 325 Maeterlinck, Maurice 336 Magisterium: Catholic, 37–39 Magritte, René 225, 245 Mahaffy, Leslie 243 Maia 423 Malacoda 200–201, 359 Malebolge: see Inferno Man: and Logos, 133, 299; animal nature, 396; Cartesian, 240; Headless, 231–42; Hegelian, 483; Open, 211, 215, 224; outer/inner, 183, 214, 260, 444; Phallic, 233; stereotypes of, 121, 128–29, 132, 136, 142, 182–83, 195, 233; undone by Woman, 131–32, 135–36, 140; Vaginal, 218, 225–27, 230–31, 245, 261, 277 Mandonnet, Pierre 59, 62, 405, 439, 449 Manentessa 524 Manes 332 Manfred 88, 119, 224, 258 Manicheanism 329–30, 332–33, 335, 342 Manto 195 Manzoni, Alessandro 263, 533–34 Marcellus 118 Marcia 92 marine code 293–94, 296–98, 304 Marras, Ausonio vii, ix–x, 13 marriage 131, 143, 262, 312, 318, 338, 376; Brakhage’s, 391; Dante’s, 526–27; monogamy, 322; same–sex, 21, 57 Mars 323. See also Heaven Marsyas 24, 30, 201–202, 231, 261, 277, 490–91, 494, 496, 502–503 Martel, Charles 9, 279, 281–82, 286–87, 360 Martinac, Pauline 284, 288 martyr: artistic 16, 24, 30, 374, 490, 503; conscripted, 496; ecstatic, 219, 230 Marxist–Leninists 477 Mary, St. 8, 19, 53, 92, 277, 317, 491; as Empress, 318; as intercessor, 84–85, 245, 318; as Lactating Virgin, 317; as Mater Mediatrix/Misericordiae, 50, 318; as Pregnant Virgin (Madonna del Parto), 228, 230–31, 245, 278, 311; as Madonna, 310, 491; as Morning Star, 317–18; as Queen of Heaven, 49, 51, 318, 516; as saintly love–object, 282, 311, 314, 322; as Stella Maris, 49, 318; as torch of charity, 433; as Virgin Bride, 318; parallels Venus, 310, 318
INDEX masculinity 9, 18, 128–29, 135–36, 139, 142, 195, 314; crisis of, 198, 225, 276, 491; dissolved, 315–16, 323; female, 312, 314; negative traits, 314; of sodomites, 182, 204, 276 Masson, André 232, 239, 246 Matelda 362, 526 Matsuda, Takami 104, 106 Mattachine Society 284 Matteini, Nevio 58, 62 Maur, Karin V. 244, 248 Maximus of Tyre 441, 448 Mazzeo, J.A. 180–81 Mazzini, Joseph 350–51, 363, 365 Mazzoni, Francesco 76, 79, 82 Mazzotta, Giuseppe 143, 145, 149 McBrien, Richard P. 76, 82 McLellan, Dugald 62 Mead, G.R.S. 330, 341 media 250, 252, 283, 367–68 medievalism 328–29 Medusa 236, 353–54; jellyfish, 294 Meeks, Wayne 316, 323, 325 Meiss, Millard 245, 247 memento mori 290–91, 496 memory 1–2, 5, 296, 300–301, 305, 307, 319, 402, 405–407, 409, 440, 460, 462, 475, 479, 506, 520, 526; as cosmic recollection, 298, 328, 339, 417, 439 menstruation: impure blood of, 256–57, 260 Mercury: god (Hermes), 123, 125, 135, 139; planet, 361. See also Heaven Messianic Eclogue 92, 113, 438. See also Virgil metamorphosis 24, 295: of animal to fante, 300; of Bataille, 233; of Buoso and Guercio, 234; of Damned, 6, 8, 184, 187, 193–97, 199, 201–202, 204, 216; of Dante, 277, 295, 299–301, 307, 490–91, 496; of Dante’s reader, 307; of daughters of Pierus, 91–92; of Francesca’s lips into labia, 229–30; of Geryon, 196; of Glaucus, 294–95, 299, 527; of Gozzuta, 527; of Hermaphroditus, 135–36; of Kukla, 494; of Marsyas, 490–91, 496, 502; of Midas, 491; of Mohammed, 225; of Myrrha, 190; of Pound, 347, 477; of Satan, 202; of Thieves, 198–99, 215–16, 233–34; of Vanni Fucci, 233–34; of Virgil, 299 metanoia 456 Michal 183 Michelangelo 30–32, 58, 401 Midas 31 Migne, Jacques–Paul 82 Miller, James vii–viii, x, 1, 9, 12–13, 56–57, 60, 62, 105, 180, 182–289, 292, 308–309, 450–53, 484, 487, 490–509, 533; Bataille seminar, 57, 531; Dante cycle, 12–13, 103, 245, 498, 531–33; Elder marathon, 56–57; Fluid Exchanges, 533; Measures of Wisdom, 286, 289, 309, 533; Paragone essay, 498, 509–516; Pawlowski translation, 517–29 Miller, James E. 244, 248
553
Milton, John 48, 85, 368, 532 mimesis 440–41, 492, 508 mind: see imagination, intellect, memory, reason, soul, will Minerva 49, 319 Minos 30–32, 58, 68, 83, 175; as Midas, 31 misogyny 15, 218, 230, 314; and literary criticism, 139; medieval 136, 243, 316 Mitchell, W.J.T. 57, 62, 503–504 Miyake, Akiko 340, 344 modernism 15, 285, 347, 368, 370–71, 373, 377, 379, 382, 385–86, 452, 483 modernity 10–11, 367–68, 377, 379, 381–82, 384–85, 388, 390, 452, 455, 457, 464, 466, 483, 495, 520; anti–artistic animus, 450, 457, 469; as hell, 387–88, 455; as inescapable totality, 385, 387, 478 modesty 145–46, 229, 261; topos, 354 Mohammed 9, 48, 190, 200–201, 210–16, 222–26, 241, 243–44; as Vaginal Man, 226, 230; as wine cask, 216–17 Moleta, V.B. 180–81 Monarchia 37–38, 59, 76, 263–64, 351; 1.3.1: 450–51; 1.3.2: 451; 1.4.1: 450; 2.3.14–16: 143 monasticism 287; queer, 280–81; transgendering, 316 money: Dante’s view, 349, 352–53; Pound’s view, 351–55, 364 Monk of Whitby 104–105 Monna Vanna 362 monotheism 55 Monroe, Harriet 339 Montaperti 173, 178 Montsalvat (Montségur) 330, 340 Moore, Edward 166–67, 169 Moore, Marianne 331, 340 Moralia 27, 167 morality: Aquinian, 215; Catholic, 38, 58, 214–15, 259, 266; sexual, 38–39, 58, 259, 266 Moral Majority 270, 503 Mordret 145 morose delectation 208, 212, 214–15, 218, 226 Morris, William 328, 336 mortalism 8 Moses 53–54, 315, 341, 514 mother 49, 140, 299, 316; as fetishized space, 16, 195; as pagan madonna, 310, 317; as prophetic vessel, 19; as role for Virgil, 95, 312, 317; eroticism of, 317–18; power of, 318 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 335 Munch, Edvard 502 Musa, Mark 144, 145, 149, 180 Museo Dantesco 505 Muses 25, 91–92, 266–69, 284, 491, 521 Mussolini, Benito 12, 341, 354, 356, 364, 495, 497, 520, 523, 528; statue of, 521 Myrrha 190 mysticism 208, 372; Augustinian, 411; Eastern, 323, 329, 333, 336, 342, 359; PseudoDionysian, 411; Surrealist, 210, 213–14, 218;
554
INDEX
Swedenborgian, 336–37, 343; Troubadour (erotic), 329–30, 333–35, 342, 350. See also religion, theology, union, vision mythopoesis: American, 373, 432, 434–35; cinematic, 382, 385–86, 432, 455; Dantean, 490–91 Naevius 143 nakedness: see nudity Narcissus 215, 278 Nardi, Bruno 136, 146, 150, 266, 284, 288, 292–93, 298, 305, 308–309 nature 298, 303, 384, 396, 405, 434, 481, 527; and self, 478; as God’s art, 451; generates embryo, 295, 307; sin against, 38–39, 59, 349, 511; sacred, 469 necrophilia 214, 218 negative capability 463 Negligent 358 Negri, Antonio 439, 449 Nekuia 468, 470, 478, 485 Nemesius 164, 167 Neoplatonism 259, 332, 340, 425, 439, 478–79, 484; Christian, 210, 213, 221, 322, 424; cryptopagan, 263; Dantean, 328, 370, 457; Florentine, 312, 329–30, 340, 439; pagan, 312, 321, 442 Neptune 115, 511 Nethercut, William 147, 150 Nettini, Amos 528 New Criticism 47 Newman, Barnett 371–72, 374, 394, 449; mental plasma, 394, 437; Stations of the Cross, 371, 374–75 Newton, Isaac 456 Nicholas III 349 Nietzsche, Friedrich 186, 232, 237, 244, 382, 385 Nin, Anaïs 261 Noakes, Susan 134, 145, 150 Norton, James Eliot 327, 340 Norwid, Cyprian Kamil 520 Nothing 465, 467, 481 nudity viii, 9, 30–31, 182–91, 193, 195–97, 200, 202, 205, 223–24, 280; and killing, 189, 219; porno, 229; prelapsarian, 198; prophetic, 200–201, 211; satanic, 202–204 Nugent, Robert 57, 62 numerology: and poetics, 295, 299, 306–307, 430 Oberhuber, Konrad, 58, 62 objective correlative 444 obscenity viii, 8, 182–85, 190, 192, 194, 197, 200–201, 203–205, 212–15, 220, 223–27, 233–34 Oderisi da Gubbio 493, 501 Oderman, Kevin 339, 344 Oedipus 118 Old Man of Crete 256, 268 Olson, Charles 11, 372, 395–396, 404, 420–22, 437, 440, 443–44, 449, 452, 464, 472; Maximus, 462
oltraggio 1–2, 5, 11, 13–14, 17, 30, 36, 42–43, 48–49, 57, 87, 238, 240, 450–51; courtesy term, 4; etymology, 3–4, 56; fare, 4, 98. See also aesthetics, excess, transgression ontogeny 257 Ontological Argument 1–2, 475 open form poetics 396–98, 401–403, 419–22, 430, 437, 443, 464, 472; open field, 437 O’Pray, Michael 485, 487 Origen 159–60, 166, 169 origin (arch¯e): return to, 467 Orpheus 341 Orphic Fragments 313, 325 Orphism 323 Orsini, Gian N.G. 180–81 Orthodox 18–19, 21, 46, 186, 283 orthodoxy viii, 5, 13, 20, 23–24, 41–43, 56, 185, 249, 252–53, 495; as concord, 28, 33, 36, 51, 179, 278; as critical category, 348–49, 357, 362; Augustinian, 175, 258; Constantinian, 21; Dantean, 15, 17, 19–27, 29–30, 32–36, 38–41, 43, 49–50, 52–55, 103, 108, 187, 262–64, 268–69, 310–11, 320, 349, 390, 439, 494, 506, 523; economic, 349; etymology, 35, 269; fantasies of, 2, 6, 15, 17–23, 28, 30, 32, 36, 50–56, 179; Franciscan, 18; impact on style, 356; literary critical, 14, 185, 215, 228, 238, 276; medieval Catholic, 21–22, 33, 35, 40, 54, 72, 88, 179, 194, 249, 264–65, 267, 279, 293, 322, 333, 379, 490–91, 520; Michelangelo’s, 32; modern Catholic, 2, 4–6, 8, 14, 17–18, 21, 38–39, 45, 279; Nicene, 21, 53–54; paradoxical relation to unorthodoxy, 348; political, 21, 28, 54, 496, 498; Poundian, 356; Renaissance Catholic, 25–28, 30; Roman, 33, 54; test, 43, 49–53, 58, 253, 264, 267, 281, 320; Thomistic (Aquinian) 38–39, 185, 215, 238, 241, 272, 279, 439. See also truth, unorthodoxy orto catolico 18–21, 28, 51, 264 Orvieto 31 Orwell, George 356, 364–65 Osiris 435, 485 Otello 55, 60 Other: Christians as, 316; female as, 313; radical, 367; religious, 215, 313 Otherworld: Swedenborgian, 329, 337–38 Ottaviano degli Ubaldini, Cardinal 269, 515 Otus 511 Ouranos 312–13, 318, 321 outrage 3–4, 36, 56, 84, 451. See also excess, oltraggio, transgression Ovid 7, 9, 14, 31, 91, 135–36, 150, 187, 193–94, 199, 202, 277, 294, 308–309, 321, 339, 451, 470, 479, 490–91. See also metamorphosis Padoan, Giorgio 67–68, 77–78, 82, 126, 143, 145, 150 paganism: as culture, 72, 75, 94, 147, 191, 199, 217, 310, 312–13, 315–16, 322, 333–34, 337, 532;
INDEX as error, 26, 34, 311, 322; lost gods, 386; medieval revival, 329–31, 333 Pagans 22, 68, 69, 104; noble, 7, 45, 63–64, 69–74, 79, 84–85, 88–89, 92, 95, 97, 101–104, 108, 113, 188, 312–313, 429; as magnanimi, 64, 171 Paggioli, Renato 150 pain: as pleasure, 207, 214–15, 225, 276–77; transmuted into art, 436. See also agony, anguish, sacrifice, sadism, torture, violence painting: see visual arts Palazzo: dei Consoli (Gubbio) 494–95, 520, 522; Littorio (Rome), 528; Venezia (Rome), 528 palimpsest 428, 434–36, 445, 470 palingenesis 343 Palinurus 93–94, 96–97, 109–10, 112–16, 118–19 Panders 188, 352 Paolo 121, 123, 125–26, 132–33, 135–36, 141, 143, 146, 229, 280, 287, 321, 359, 499, 512 papacy 334, 338; medieval, 20, 332; modern, 20–21. See also Catholicism, Pope Paradise (place) 6, 10–11, 85, 88–89, 95–97, 112, 179, 187, 263, 275, 277, 282–83, 290, 292, 337, 380–81, 387, 452, 464, 479–80, 490–91, 526; as arena, 490–91; as garden, 18; as plenitude, 291, 375; as tree, 445; as watery space, 294; Earthly, viii, 15, 83, 117, 139, 261, 264, 314, 346, 351, 357–58, 362, 377–78, 381, 404, 433, 445, 455, 458; postmodern, 389–90, 478–79; Poundian, 355, 357–59, 362, 455, 478–80, 485; queers in, 273–74, 277, 490–91; Swedenborgian, 336–37. See also Heaven, Rose, womb Paradiso (canticle) 9, 88, 111, 210, 231, 249, 270, 273, 275–78, 282, 293, 295, 302, 310–11, 313–14, 316–17, 320, 322–23, 328, 350, 360, 370, 376, 379–80, 389–90, 395, 403–404, 433, 437–38, 459, 464, 491, 519, 525; 1: 395; 1.1: 38, 312, 442; 1.1–3: 413; 1.1–9: 339; 1.13–21: 24–25; 1.14: 261, 277; 1.18: 490; 1.19–21: 277, 490; 1.20: 201; 1.21: 231; 1.22: 261, 443; 1.34: 87, 356, 401, 451; 1.67: 294; 1.70: 56, 233; 1.103–20: 413–14; 1.113: 294; 1.115–26: 440; 2: 395; 2.11: 6; 2.19–24: 440; 2.127–9: 301; 2.133–8: 302; 2.139–41: 440; 3: 395; 3.1: 319; 3.11: 295; 3.52–3: 319; 3.85–7: 295; 3.86: 321; 3.97–9: 512; 4: 395; 4.40–2: 322; 4.43–8: 322; 4.118: 317; 4.119–20: 319; 5: 395; 5.100: 295; 5.105: 361; 6: 395; 6.1–142: 438; 6.124–6: 278; 7: 395; 7.14: 350; 7.74: 319; 8: 141, 318, 395; 8.1–3: 310; 8.1–9: 140; 8.2: 140, 279, 312; 8.6: 140, 310; 8.10–2: 310–11; 8.15: 140; 8.16–21: 141; 8.37: 279, 360; 8.39: 279, 286; 8.44–5: 280; 8.46: 280; 8.99: 279; 8.115–26: 440; 9: 293, 295, 297–99, 395; 9.32–6: 318; 9.33: 355; 9.34–6: 355; 9.73–5: 314; 9.97–8: 147; 9.106–7: 296; 9.114: 296; 9.115–25: 319; 9.127: 296; 9.131–2: 316; 9.139–40: 30; 10: 39, 293, 295–299, 395; 10.1–6: 296; 10.3: 297, 314; 10.63: 2; 10.79: 278, 323; 10.84: 321; 10.90: 297; 10.91–2: 298; 10.94: 298; 10.115: 221;
555
10.136: 89; 10.136–8: 59; 10.143: 356; 11: 395; 11.20: 315; 11.27: 19; 11.43–5: 493; 12: 395; 12.59–60: 19; 12.85: 13; 12.100: 263; 12.100–5: 18, 263; 12.133: 411; 13: 395; 13.20: 33; 13.34–142: 399; 13.52–69: 414–15; 13.79: 320; 13.40–2: 514; 14: 395; 14.41: 320; 14.78: 445; 15: 395; 15.73: 320; 15.99: 179; 15.139–41: 510; 16: 395; 16.32: 356; 16.52–154: 349; 17: 395; 17.109–11: 510; 18: 395; 18.29–30: 445; 19: 86, 395; 19.68: 86; 19.86–90: 111; 19.97–9: 74; 20: 86, 96, 395; 20.43–8: 45, 71, 94; 20.52–4: 112; 20.67: 109; 20.68: 89; 20.94–6: 319; 20.95: 86, 320; 20.108–11: 102; 21: 395, 519; 21.29: 249; 21.51: 249, 280; 21.68: 280; 21.127: 269; 22: 395, 519; 22.4–5: 317; 22.60: 280–81; 22.64–5: 281; 22.124: 315; 22.124–8: 313; 22.151: 179; 23: 395, 519; 23.40–5: 26; 23.62: 242, 483; 23.96: 51; 23.128: 318; 24: 395, 519; 24.11: 49; 24.12: 50; 24.16–17: 278, 282; 24.49: 52; 24.118–19: 320; 24.123: 5; 24.130: 53; 24.130–2: 60; 24.131–2: 320; 24.133–4: 33; 24.133–44: 53–54; 24.145–7: 55, 436, 450; 24.151–4: 52, 264; 25: 395, 519; 25.1: 483; 25.19–23: 281; 25.72: 314–15; 26: 395, 519; 26.25: 320; 26.28–9: 320; 26.70–5: 440; 26.117: 108, 292, 307; 27: 395, 519; 27.25–6: 29, 49; 27.99: 321; 27.109–11: 321; 27.148: 281; 28: 395, 519; 28.3: 15; 28.64–78: 440; 28.133–5: 27; 29: 395, 519; 29.13–36: 415–16; 29.22–37: 440; 29.33: 417; 30: 103, 395, 519; 30.19–21: v, 17; 30.39–41: 459; 30.40–1: 320; 30.46: 433; 30.61: 295; 30.78: 373; 30.111: 428; 30.133–8: 37; 31: 395, 519; 31.13: 433; 31.63: 317; 31.136–8: 420; 32: 395, 519; 32.40–2: 59; 32.40–8: 39; 32.40–84: 74; 32.73–8: 324; 32.85–7: 318; 32.105: 311; 32.107: 311; 32.119: 318; 32.142: 315; 33: 13, 276–77, 297–98, 300, 304–306, 321, 395, 519; 33.1: 314; 33.1–39: 314; 33.10–11: 433; 33.37–9: 516; 33.55–7: 1; 33.58–60: 4; 33.88–90: 278; 33.90: 459; 33.94: 438; 33.96: 295; 33.107: 300; 33.110: 450; 33.115–20: 301; 33.121–3: 420; 33.131: 7, 192; 33.137–45: 416; 33.141: 370, 417, 450, 493; 33.142: 18, 418, 507; 33.145: 321, 350. See also Commedia Paragone viii, 7, 12, 26, 30–32, 57, 406, 493, 503, 509; in Brakhage, 400, 418–19, 422–23; in Dante, 400, 490–92, 498, 503; in Elder, 388, 400; in Leonardo, 439; in Lessing, 498–99; in Pawlowski, 494, 497–98, 501, 503, 509; in Pospieszynski, 497–98, 501–503, 509 Paris, Gaston 104, 106 Parnaso 25 Parnassus 24–25, 101, 267 Parson: Chaucer’s, 152 Pascalian wager: taken by artists, 373–74, 379, 390 Pascoli, Giovanni 332–33, 338, 341 Pasiphaë 39; and the Bull, 274
556
INDEX
Pasolini, Pier Paolo 225, 245, 368; Salò, 225, 245 Patroclus 155 Paul, St. 2, 7, 9, 33, 35, 133–34, 249, 268–69, 282, 315, 440 Paul the Deacon 104, 106 Pawlowski, Andrew viii, 12, 401, 489, 503–504, 509, 533; as anti–Dante, 495–97; as author, 494, 505–506, 533; as doctor, 494, 505, 533; as Kukla, 494–97; as ironist, 499; bio, 505–506; Brunetto, 500–501, 511; Cacciaguida, 510; Dante, 499, 503, 510; Dante on the Steps, 494–97, 520–29; Ephialtes, 499, 511; exhibitions, 505–506; historical novels, 533; playwright’s intro, 517–20; Misericordia, 506, 513; paragonizes Dante, 498–99; Paolo and Francesca, 499, 512; Piccarda, 499, 512; visits Gubbio, 493; writes play, 494, 506 Pawlowski, Danuta 493 Péladan, Joséphin 329–31, 340–41, 344 Pelikan, Jaroslav 58, 62, 324–25 penance 88 penis 31, 225, 245, 255–57, 280, 312; bisected, 215–16; concealed, 198–99, 215–16, 234, 237; erect, 233; immodestly displayed, 215, 233. See also castration, phallus, phallectomy, phallogenesis Pentecost 25, 259 Pequigney, Joseph 270–73, 284–85, 289 performative utterance 53, 55, 175; divine speech–act, 304; perlocutionary force, 396, 420, 425–26 performativity 286 Perjurers 352 Perseus 354 Pertile, Lino 284, 288–99 Peter, St. 5, 33, 49, 50–52, 249, 257, 264, 281, 320 Peter Damian 268, 280, 288; Liber Gomorrhianus, 280, 287 Peter Lombard 103 Petrarch 75, 82, 341, 401 Petrocchi, Giorgio 56, 60, 76, 80, 105, 118–19, 143, 147, 165, 167, 180, 204, 206, 242, 246, 282, 287, 308, 323–24, 363–64, 390, 392, 437, 446, 483, 486, 503–504 Pézard, André 180–81 Phaedrus 439 phallectomy 201, 215, 234, 239, 245 phallogenesis 234 phallus: as symbol, 31, 195, 199, 280, 491; bisected, 215–16; erect, 233 Phelps, Reverend Fred 285, 289 Phillips, Tom 230, 245, 247 Philochorus 317, 325 philogeny 257, 293–94 Philo of Alexandria 134 philosophy 32, 37–38, 49–50, 95, 175, 257, 261, 264, 294, 322; and film, 455; and painting, 394, 405–406; and poetry, 398–99, 423–24, 435,
437, 485, 534; and theology, 86, 176–78, 186, 320, 322, 328, 336, 399, 403, 437, 500; and vision, 437; Christian (Thomist), 292, 320, 328, 405; moral, 152, 165; mystical, 340, 435; natural, 511; personified, 266–67, 268; Roman (Stoic), 6, 268. See also Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, Platonism, Scholastics/Scholasticism, theology Philostratus, Flavius 441, 448 Phlegethon 182, 216, 271 Photinian heresy 14 Picasso, Pablo 225, 245 Piccarda 295, 319, 499, 512 Picone, Michelangelo 284, 289 Pier della Vigna 47, 92, 356, 501–502 Piero della Francesca 228; Madonna del Parto, 228 Pierus: daughters of, 92 Pietro di Dante 64, 72, 76, 80, 103, 105 Pinsky, Robert 20, 201 Pirandello, Luigi 528 Piso of Burgundy 167 Pius IX 37–38 plagiarism 37 plant code 293–94, 296–98, 302–304. See also Rose Plato 17, 49, 267, 315, 341, 377, 406, 407, 409, 412, 441; Phaedrus, 328, 339, 439, 449; Philebus, 406; Republic, 267; Symposium, 315, 321, 325; Timaeus, 49–50, 274 Platonism 14, 49–50, 279, 286–87, 321, 338, 406, 419, 519; Christian, 424, 484. See also Neoplatonism Plethon, Gemisto 329–30, 340 Plotinus 321, 325, 337, 442, 449 Plutarch 313, 317, 325 poesis/poetics 258–59, 265, 291–292, 295, 299–300, 304–307, 347–48, 354; American, 372–73, 395–98, 435–36, 444, 452, 461, 472, 480; and filmmaking, 373, 379, 395–96, 419, 435–36, 443, 472; and theology, 434–36; art of indebtedness, 347–48, 361; Dantean, 374, 379, 404–405, 419, 423, 425, 425, 436–38, 491; of chaos/harmony, 404–405, 434, 436, 444; open form, 395–98, 401–404, 419–21, 443, 472; Poundian, 347–48, 357–62, 443, 454, 459–60, 472, 474–75, 480, 483–84; Roman rhetorical, 410 Poggioli, Renato 144–45, 150 Policari, Stephen 390, 393 Polidori, John 332 politics: and language, 351, 362; and Paragone, 498; and religion, 54, 170, 172, 212, 520; and sexuality, 275; Dantean, 37, 76, 179, 264, 351, 358, 360–61, 403, 438, 495–96, 520, 523, 527–28; ecclesiastical, 19, 54; Fascist, 356–57; Florentine, 173–74, 179; Hegelian, 455; imperial, 19, 37, 358, 495; of taboo, 15; of transcendence, 36, 178–79, 351; Poundian, 356–58, 360–62 Pollock, Jackson 371–72, 394
INDEX polytheism 322 Pope 25, 31, 38–39, 49, 52, 264, 276, 316, 492, 496, 523; Beatrice, 51; Boniface VIII, 55, 58, 268–69, 496, 520, 523; Dante, 264; Eugenius IV, 64; Gregory I, 27, 45, 94–96, 104, 109, 155, 163, 168; Innocent III, 27; John XXII, 59, 529; John Paul II, 21, 29, 267; Julius II, 26–27; Nicholas III, 349; Paul II, 31; Pius IX, 37–38; Sixtus IV, 26–27; Sylvester VII, 39. See also Peter, St. Pope–Hennessy, John 503–504 Porena, Manfredi 154 pornography 227–29 Pöschl, Victor 123, 143, 145, 150 positivism 423 Pospieszynski, Zbigniew viii, 12, 401, 489, 497–98, 503, 509, 533; Angel of Doom, 514; art training, 506, 508; as illuminator, 507; as immigrant, 501, 506–507; as ironist, 501, 508; as miniaturist, 501, 507–508; curatorial projects, 533; Damned, 501–502, 513; Drawerful, 502, 515; Exodus, 501–502, 508, 514; inscapes, 507; Miraculous and Real, 516; Prayer Desk, 516; Shadow of Your Wings, 515; spirituality, 507; symbolism, 507–508 postmodernism 57, 89, 238, 259, 276, 278, 381–82, 384, 391, 435, 437, 446, 452, 483, 503, 507 postmodernity 383, 386 Pound, Ezra viii, 7, 10–11, 56, 62, 344–45, 382–83, 487–88, 507, 534; ABC of Reading, 476, 484, 486; A Draft of XXX Cantos, 401; A Lume Spento, 346, 365; and Beilby, 337–38; and Buddhism, 359; and Cavalcanti, 330–35, 339–41, 346, 348, 362, 475, 486; and Duncan, 437; and Elder, 451–55, 457, 460–61, 468, 473–75; and Fascism, 334, 354, 356–57, 404; and Homer, 468, 470; and Imagism, 436; and Longfellow, 327–28, 339; and Olson, 444; and Swedenborg, 335–38; and Valli, 331–35, 338, 340–41, 361; antisemitism, 337–39, 342; “A Retrospect,” 474, 485–86; Canzoni, 346; childhood, 352; complex relation to Dante, 347–50, 353–54, 357–58, 362, 401–404, 433–34, 451–52, 459, 470, 477, 483, 508; conflict with modernity, 347, 455; critic of usury, 349–50; disagrees with Rossetti, 333, 335; “Drafts & Fragments,” 452, 480, 485; early admiration for Dante, 328–29, 331, 337, 346, 399; economic views, 352–54, 358, 360–61, 474, 477, 484, 486; education, 327–28; enthusiasm for Amor cult, 330, 333, 338; epic ambition, 382; “E.P. Ode,” 347–48; Fifth Decad, 349; full name, 363; Gaudier–Brzeska, 485; Guide to Kulchur, 331–32, 334, 341–42, 344, 364–65, 484–85; Hell Cantos, 352–55, 360, 364, 469–70, 484; hostility to Christianity, 328–29, 334–35, 338–39, 349; “How to Read,” 485; ideogrammic method, 460, 465, 480, 484–85; in correspondence,
557
328–29, 331, 335–37, 339–40, 344–45, 363–66, 483, 486; “In Epitaphium Eius,” 350, 365; in prison, 358–59; Instigations, 485; Italian Cantos, 356–57, 364–63; luminous details, 460–61, 466, 469, 480, 484–85; Make It New, 485; on Dante as mystic, 335–36, 338; on rhythm, 443, 472–76, 486; Pagana Commedia, 401–402, 404; Pisan Cantos, 357–58, 464; poetics of allusion, 347–48, 357–62, 443, 454; political folly, 401; retreat from politics, 360–62; revision of Inferno, 353–55; revision of Paradiso, 360–61, 464; revision of Purgatorio, 358–59; Rock–Drill Cantos, 360–61; Spirit of Romance, 328–30, 339, 345–46, 363, 366, 433, 485; spoofed in Punch, 346–47; Three Cantos, 357; views on language/ style, 351–54, 460, 473. See also The Cantos Pound, Homer L. 483, 486 prayer 89, 103, 114, 158–59, 426, 465, 479, 515, 524; efficacy, 7–8, 45, 88, 92–95, 102, 104, 109, 111–12; futility, 96, 109–11, 113; worthiness, 112 predestination (election) 72–74, 269 Pre–Raphaelites 328, 332 pride 97, 153, 155, 158, 161, 163, 170, 172, 234, 265, 511, 516; artistic hubris, 491–92, 495; gay, 58, 503; parade, 58, 503 Primavera 362 Primum Mobile 2 Princes: in Purgatory, 358, 428–29 prophecy/prophets 18–20, 96, 109–15, 156, 174, 200, 211, 228, 230, 249, 270, 293, 314–16, 341; false, 20, 22, 194, 212, 215, 231, 249, 270, 352 Proserpina 10, 362 Protestantism 368; Puritan, 328 Proud 492–93, 499, 501 Proust, Marcel 477 Pseudo–Dionysius 17, 35, 210, 213, 221–22, 226, 243–44, 248, 276, 411, 429, 445, 449, 457, 484, 488 Pseudo–Hugh of St. Victor 162, 167, 169 Pseudo–Longinus 410, 441, 448 psychoanalysis 185, 218, 234, 238. See also Freud, Freudianism psychology 406; Aristotelian, 407–409, 440–42; associationist, 441, 444; Augustinian, 305, 425, 440; Bataillean, 184–86, 189, 193, 197, 208–209, 211, 220, 222, 232, 234; Brakhagian, 433–34, 443; Catholic/Scholastic, 303, 422, 442; Dantean, 183–85, 209, 211, 216, 232, 234, 241, 250, 267, 305, 321–22, 329, 417, 442; Neoplatonic, 425; perceptual, 397–98, 406–407, 440; Platonic, 406–407; Victorine, 411 Ptolomea 83 Pugliese, Guido vii, 8, 170–81, 533; edition of Gherardi, 533 pulseworks viii, 450, 452, 474–76, 483 Pumpelly, Raphael 346 purgation 97, 100, 170, 207, 252–53, 259–60, 265, 271, 329, 403, 419, 427, 430, 433, 445, 455;
558
INDEX
and temporality, 376, 429, 478; as transition, 429, 455; hylomorphic, 257–58, 283 Purgatorians 376–77, 427, 452 Purgatorio (canticle) 9, 60, 88–92, 153, 164, 208, 210, 249, 253, 270–72, 314, 348, 363, 395, 404, 429, 506; 1: 88, 395; 1.2: 294, 369, 376–77, 381, 387; 1.4: 387; 1.4–12: 91; 1.7: 25, 257, 348, 351; 1.77: 68; 2: 395, 438; 3: 395; 3.108: 224; 3.108–13: 258; 4: 395; 5: 119, 395; 6: 92, 109, 119, 395; 6.10: 94; 6.25–30: 92–93; 6.26–7: 94; 6.28–33: 109–10; 6.34–6: 111; 6.40–2: 111; 6.42: 93; 6.45: 93; 6.76–93: 349; 6.88–9: 356–57, 364; 7: 395; 7.7–8: 70; 7.12: 36; 7.34–6: 70; 7.73–7: 527; 7.73–81: 428; 8: 358–59, 395; 8.1–6: 358; 9: 275, 395; 9.12: 217; 9.76: 428; 9.76–8: 513; 9.94–102: 430–31; 9.103–8: 431; 10.32: 492; 10.34: 492; 10.65: 183; 10.95: 400, 451, 492; 10.124–6: 515; 11.80: 493; 12.10–12: 91; 12.97–9: 516; 13: 90, 97–98, 100; 13.13–18: 97; 13.27: 6; 13.73–4: 4, 98; 13.78–81: 98; 13.109: 356; 13.133–5: 90; 13.136–8: 170; 14: 90, 98, 100; 14.86–7: 100; 14.133–41: 90; 14.148–51: 98–99; 14.150: 113; 15: 90, 99, 100; 15.14–15: 429; 15.44–5: 99; 15.49–51: 99; 15.52–3: 100; 15.64–6: 100; 16.1: 101; 16.8: 101; 16.15: 101; 17.7: 441; 17.13: 441; 17.21: 441; 17.31: 441; 17.85–6: 153; 17.92–6: 440; 17.94–6: 321; 18: 257; 18.2: 387; 18.103–4: 153; 18.107–8: 153; 19.7–36: 217; 19.12: 217; 19.28: 217; 19.29: 218; 19.32: 218; 19.44: 356; 20: 430; 21.1: 440; 21.94–102: 471; 21.130–32: 113; 21.131–2: 290, 471; 21.132: 84; 21.133–6: 471, 486; 21.135–6: 290; 22.70–2: 438; 22.77: 5; 24: 257; 24.52–5: 299; 24.57: 128, 398; 24.50: 128; 24.52–4: 291; 25: 291–93, 295, 299–302, 304–306, 343; 25.9: 290–91; 25.20.1: 254; 25.28.30: 254; 25.31: 255; 25.31–108: 293; 25.34–108: 277, 399; 25.37–42: 255; 25.41: 259; 25.43–5: 256; 25.45: 260; 25.53: 293; 25.54: 294; 25.56: 257, 293–294; 25.61: 293, 300; 25.61–6: 298; 25.67–75: 297; 25.70: 297; 25.71: 291; 25.72: 293; 25.74–5: 257; 25.88–96: 305; 26: 43, 262, 271, 438; 26.28: 38; 26.40: 261; 26.78: 261; 26.82: 39, 261; 26.97: 129; 26.115: 129; 26.148: 433; 27.29–30: 5; 27.49–51: 445; 27.51: 433; 27.142: 264; 28.7–21: 378; 28.49–51: 362; 29.23: 428; 30: 108, 140, 147, 190; 30.11: 312; 30.19: 15, 312, 314; 30.19–21: 117; 30.31–3: 189–90; 30.44: 312; 30.44–55: 299; 30.48: 139, 141; 30.49: 83; 30.50: 84, 312, 317; 30.53–4: 96; 30.54: 231; 30.55: 116, 141; 30.58: 116; 30.131: 177; 31.128–9: 317; 31.134: 33; 31.139: 138, 140; 32.102: 30; 32.118–23: 23; 33.10: 314. See also Commedia Purgatory (place) 6, 45, 65, 67–68, 76, 84–85, 88–91, 95, 98, 102, 104, 111–12, 118, 188, 207, 238, 260–61, 269, 274, 290, 294, 337, 351, 369,
377, 387, 390, 403, 452, 455–56, 459, 471, 477–78, 484, 495, 498; Ante–Purgatory, 94, 224, 358, 376, 395, 427–29, 437, 459; Valley of the Princes, 358, 427–29; First Cornice (Pride), 90, 170, 183, 188, 395, 400, 492–93, 495, 498–99, 501, 503, 515–16; Second Cornice (Envy), 4, 90, 97–101, 170, 395, 429; Third Cornice (Wrath), 99, 101, 274, 395, 429; Fourth Cornice (Sloth), 153, 395; Fifth Cornice (Avarice), 290, 356, 395; Sixth Cornice (Gluttony), 254, 258, 274, 290, 304, 395; Seventh Cornice (Lust), 38–39, 129, 254, 259, 260–61, 267, 270–71, 274–75, 278, 285, 290–91, 297, 300, 395, 433, 445; Gate of, 253, 381, 428, 430–31, 506, 513; summit (Eden), 23, 231, 249, 299, 312, 362, 378, 381, 395, 424, 433, 445, 458; topography of orthodox, 66–67, 76–77 Putnam, George 37, 58, 62 Pygmalion 217 Pythagoras 4, 267 Quaglio, Antonio 150 queen (regina) 263, 271, 281, 398; church, 274; of Heaven, 318; penitent Sodomites, 261–62, 275 queering: of end–time, 286 Queer Nation 267, 284 queerness 233; of damnation, 198, 215; of salvation, 273–74, 276; of Paradise, 276–79, 281, 286 queer theory/theorists 14, 57, 272, 275–76, 278, 282, 286 Quinn, Kenneth 145, 150 Quintilian 410, 421, 441 Rahab 296, 319, 322 Rahner, Karl 76, 82 rainbow: gay symbol, 270, 282; paradisial image, 301, 304–306, 397; purgatorial image, 305–306 Raphael 25–30, 32, 39, 46 Ratzinger, Cardinal 267, 276 Ravenna 376–78, 495, 505 readers 107–108, 116, 134–36, 142, 144, 192, 201, 215, 224, 228, 266–67, 275, 292, 296, 322, 327–29, 350, 410, 527; as community, 359–62, 480; as conjurors, 494–97; as decoders, 333–34; as intercessors, 96–97, 101–103, 109; as Midas–like judges, 491; as receivers of energy, 396, 400, 417, 421–22, 425–26; as pilgrims, 222, 259, 290–91, 298–99, 306, 370, 400, 402, 417, 432, 438, 493, 517; as glossators, 235–37, 440; as poisoned drinkers, 265, 522; as potential poets, 300, 471; as transformed transgressors, 303, 307; American, 327, 373, 396, 398, 400; Augustinian, 440; Bataillean, 185–87, 192, 210–11, 214, 218, 238, 240–41; Brakhagian, 418, 422; Dante’s address to, 420, 422, 425; Fundamentalist, 263; gay, 270, 272, 274–75, 285, 533; Italian, 327; modernist, 373, 384, 386–87,
INDEX 492; orthodox Catholic, 223, 234, 236, 262, 265, 405; Poundian, 359, 361–62, 480, 485; Romantic, 386; Surrealist, 218, 223–24 reading: allegory of, 35, 107–108, 185, 201, 214, 233, 237–38, 265, 292, 384, 398, 400, 410, 418, 472, 483; acephalic, 48, 214, 232–33, 238–39, 241–42; anagogic, 16, 25, 41, 87–88, 90, 96, 102, 108, 117, 231, 236–37, 284, 398, 417, 423, 451, 455, 483; and misreading, 107–108, 110, 114, 116–17, 132–33, 143, 238, 334; and prayer, 88–89; as energy flow, 398, 421, 425; as actualization, 425; as initiation/conversion, 292, 471–72; choral, 292; gay, 270; literal, 36, 83, 90, 95, 187, 209, 236, 241, 259, 284, 334, 402, 423–24, 436, 440, 451, 470–71, 483; open form, 404; tropological, 87, 107–109, 121–25, 135, 141, 152, 179, 192, 194, 201, 210, 212–14, 222–23, 228, 236–37, 240–41, 243, 259, 265, 269, 284, 423, 429–31, 451, 455, 483, 500; typological, 47, 93–96, 109, 113–15, 117–19, 126, 236, 268, 284, 286–87, 304, 385, 400–401, 423, 433, 451, 453, 455, 483, 491, 506 realism: aesthetic resistance to, 368; French poetic, 368; Italian neo, 368; literary, 368; socialist, 368 reason 71, 383, 411, 419, 441, 456, 459, 468, 475; active, 442; and passion, 122, 127–28, 138–39, 141, 214; Apollonian, 237; Aquinian, 232, 237; Aristotelian, 319; as horseman, 122; Cartesian, 384; discursive, 235, 367–68, 484; divine, 425, 432; instrumental, 367–68, 384; natural, 69; pagan, 75, 119; personified (Virgil), 217, 222. See also imagination, intellect, soul Red Cross Knight 34 Redman, Tim 364, 366 Reformation 28 Reggio, Giovanni 308 regressus mentis 3, 47–48, 138–39, 416; as poetic design, 298, 367, 417, 468 religion 468; American, 250–51, 272, 327–28; and politics, 54, 170, 172, 212, 328, 334, 349, 520; anthropology of, 185–86, 189, 193, 306, 315, 331, 466, 532; Dantean, 396, 520; Dionysian, 216–17, 331; Hellenistic mystery, 329, 333–34; medieval popular, 88, 258–59, 311, 323, 329, 331; Old Time, 272; pagan, 312, 315, 329, 333; psychology of, 210, 213, 306, 396; Surrealist, 207–10, 213, 219; Troubadour love–cult, 330, 333 Remus 468 Renaissance 25–32, 38, 230, 368, 371, 459 Resurrection: and death, 299; and sodomy, 275, 277, 286; Dante’s heretical notion of, 40, 92, 262, 267, 275–77, 303, 305; of dead poetry, 91; of the Flesh, 267, 302–303 retheologizing viii, 1, 4–5, 14, 48–49, 103, 374, 434 Rexroth, Kenneth 461, 485, 488 Reynolds, Matthew viii, 10, 13, 346–66, 534; Dante in English, 534; Realms of Verse, 534
559
rhetoric 1–2, 24, 41–42, 44, 47, 86–87, 102, 126, 129–30, 145, 203, 264–66, 268–69, 420, 461; classical, 400, 410, 421, 441; holy, 437–38; infernal, 238, 268; man’s, 134, 137, 139, 230; of taboo, 198–201, 234; ornate, 175, 203, 205, 437–38; veils of, 201; woman’s, 129–31, 134–35, 139–40, 144. See also language, Paragone, word rhythm: and emotion, 476; as energeia, 422, 425, 443, 472–73; contrasted with metre, 473; in filmmaking, 476 Ricci, Pier Giorgio 76, 82 Ricciardi, Caterina 339, 345 Richardson, Michael 206 Riefenstahl, Leni 401 Riffaterre, Michael 308–309 Rime (Dante’s) 398, 441, 456, 458; “Amor, che movi” (67), 458–59; “Doglia mi reca” (83), 456–57; “Donne ch’avete” (33), 578; “Oltre la spera” (57), 458; petrose (77–80), 354; “Structure of Rime XXVII,” 398 Ripheus 13, 71, 88–89, 109, 113 Risorgimento 351 rites of passage 306 River of Light 428, 431–32, 452 Robinson, B.A. 283, 289 Robinson, J.M. 145, 150 Roland 468 romance (roman courtois) 125, 131–32, 134, 138–39, 141, 143; modern, 338 Roman de la Rose 266 Romanticism 328, 385, 388, 400, 420, 435, 463, 477; as solipsism, 374, 435 Rome 13, 21–22, 25–30, 33, 49, 58, 94, 118, 146, 268, 311, 316, 374; as Sodom, 38; Fascist, 528; Heavenly, 15 Romulus 468 Roncaglia, Emilio 146 Rose: Dante’s 2, 32, 39, 59, 96, 195, 274, 278, 296, 318, 324, 389, 432, 516; Elder’s, 389; womb, 277, 291–92, 318 Rossetti: Christina 332; Dante Gabriel 332–33, 340–41, 520, 529; Gabriele Pasquale 37, 332–36, 338, 339–43, 345, 350, 529; Olivia, 333–37, 339, 342 Rossi, Filippo 244, 248 Rothko, Mark 371–72, 374–75, 380, 394 Rule, Jane 192, 205–206 Rumble, Patrick 390 Rumour (Fama) 131–32, 135 Ruskin, John 195–96 Rusticucci, Jacopo 57, 182 Sacraments 88; baptism, 32, 65, 71, 85–86, 316; confession, 32, 513; Eucharist 25–27, 442 Sacred 3, 8–9, 15–17, 102, 116, 118, 186–87, 189, 191, 193, 199, 207, 213–14, 232–33, 240–42, 306, 456; space, 385–386; symbols of, 374 sacrifice 8, 48, 86, 107, 109, 115–19, 186, 193, 200–201, 219–220, 222, 235, 240–42, 312, 432, 434–35, 467, 496
560
INDEX
sacrilege 9, 22, 31, 35, 39, 116–117, 183, 187, 192, 199–200, 207, 210, 222, 228, 238, 285, 503, 513 Sade, Marquis de 35, 48, 192, 197, 199, 202–203, 205, 208, 213, 222, 224–25, 240, 242–43, 245, 248; 120 Days of Sodom, 216, 218, 220, 243, 245, 248 sadism 9, 185, 192, 197, 199, 207, 211, 214–18, 220–25, 228–29, 234–35, 240–43, 270, 496 sado–masochism (SM) 48, 204, 210–12, 215, 277, 286 Salmacis 135–36 salvation 86, 88, 90, 100–101, 108, 269, 286, 293, 389, 438; allegory of, 34–36, 100, 117, 142, 403; Dante’s, 303–304, 313; of pagans, 69–72, 109; through faith alone, 73–74, 85, 89, 92, 94, 104; through women alone, 323; universal, 88 same–sex lovers 9, 14, 39, 262, 267, 273–75, 285; minoritization, 278. See also desire, homosexuality, love, Sodomites Samson 132, 141 San Brizio Chapel 31 Sapegno, Natalino 152, 165, 167 Sapìa 170, 356 Sapientia: see wisdom Sappho 533 Sartre, Jean–Paul 384 Satan 31, 85, 202–204 Saul 183 Saved: see Blessed Savonarola, Girolamo 27–28 scatology: and eschatology, 214 Schimmel, Solomon 166–67, 169 Schio, Reghellini da 343, 345 Schismatics 20, 22, 89, 104, 200–201, 211, 213–14, 222–23, 230–31, 235–37, 240, 243, 253 Scholastics/Scholasticism 7, 27, 54, 69, 258, 266, 293, 298, 305, 319–20, 379, 399, 406, 409, 411, 416, 422, 424–25, 432, 442, 465 Schumacher, T. 504 Scott, J.A. 180–181 Sculptors Society of Canada 505, 533 sculpture: see visual arts Scylla 474 Sebastian, St. 219, 244 Sebastiano: accomplice of Bosone, 518 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 273, 282, 285–86, 289 Seducers 188, 352–53 self: alienated, 384; as closet–prison, 271; as fragile subject–position, 275, 384, 462; as God, 227–28, 432; as poetic/artistic subject, 397–98, 424, 435, 478–79; creation/fashioning, 454, 462; dispossession, 189, 193–94, 200, 202, 211, 213, 228, 231, 240; embryonic, 299; erotic quest of, 184, 228, 276; imaging myth, 390, 397, 435; knowledge, 374; possession, 184, 190, 200, 211, 240; un-wholed, 454 semen: as pure blood, 255–57, 260–61, 300 semiotics 9, 106–107, 118, 259, 308, 420, 534; embryological, 293, 296–97, 300, 303; of Gay Liberation, 282; of Hell, 193; of human sacri-
fice, 241; signifier/signified, 507; sign making, 291–92, 300, 303, 307, 353, 460, 507 Seneca 441, 449 Servius Grammaticus 204, 206, 312, 322, 325 sex: Bataillean view, 186, 189–190, 207–208, 215, 218, 226; between men, 260–62, 277; Butlerian view, 286; infernal, 199–200, 215–16, 218; metamorphic, 199, 215–16, 491; paradisial, 280–81, 490–91; procreative, 255–57, 260, 491; purgatorial, 259–63; Statius’s lecture, 255–57, 259–60, 263, 269, 277, 291–95, 297–99, 302, 304–305, 399. See also desire, eroticism, erotics, sexuality Sextus Empiricus 441, 449 sexuality 8–9, 22, 31, 262, 275, 280, 282, 286, 291; and language, 127; and mysticism, 350; and politics, 275; animal, 199; female, 127, 132, 195, 255–60; male, 196, 200–201, 205, 255–60, 262; polymorphously diverse, 282; premodern, 286 sexual orientation 261–62; Dantean allegory of, 271, 275 sexual plethora 201, 205 Shakespeare, William 368 Shankland, Hugh 308–309 Shapiro, Marianne 144, 150 Shaw, Alexa–Frances 481–82 Shaw, George Bernard 336 Shedden, Jim 391, 393 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 350 Shepard, Matthew 272–73, 285 Shirt, David 143, 150 shit (merda) 200–201, 205, 212, 214, 217, 230, 235, 353 Shun 361 Sicari, Stephen 339, 345 Sichaeus 123–25, 140, 147 Siegfried 528 Siger of Brabant 59, 89, 293 Signorelli, Luca 31, 58 silence 1–2, 217, 229–30, 234, 418. See also ineffability topos Simonists 210, 352 simony 39 sin 73, 151–52, 170, 175, 193, 285, 405, 445, 457, 477, 514, 522; against Nature, 38–39, 59, 252, 257, 270, 278, 511; chain of, 155, 161, 163–64, 166; deadly (mortal, cardinal), 66, 77, 131–32, 153–54, 158, 161–63, 403, 494; hermaphrodite, 261; of omission, 70; original, 65–66, 70–71, 76, 78; sexual, 201; venial, 66, 76, 352; verbal, 352, 400 Sinclair, John 302 Singer, Irving 124–25, 143, 150 Singleton, Charles S. 6, 15, 38–40, 56, 59–60, 102, 104–105, 118–19, 143, 148, 165, 167, 171, 180–81, 189, 191–92, 201, 204–206, 243, 245–47, 263, 266, 280, 282, 286–87, 302, 308, 323–24, 363–64, 390, 392, 437, 446, 483, 486, 503–504 Sinon 352
INDEX Siren 244, 266–67, 284; dream, 217–218, 229–30 Sirocco 378 Sistine Chapel 25, 30–31 Sitney, P. Adams 376, 378–81, 390–91, 393 Sixtus IV 26–27 skin viii, 9, 187, 193, 228; burned, 182–83; clothes substituted for, 218; flayed/peeled, 182–85, 187–88, 197, 202, 261, 277, 490, 502; infernally altered, 184, 197, 494, 502 sloth: see accidie Slothful 8, 151–53 smarrimento 34–35, 180, 268, 377, 452. See also via snake 30–32, 184, 193–99, 215, 234 social credit 352, 459, 484 Socrates 315, 406, 439 Sodom 38–39, 182–83, 261–62, 271 Sodoma 219, 244 Sodomites 9, 14, 20, 22, 38–39, 57, 182–185, 187–88, 197, 216, 218, 252, 270, 273, 275, 278, 284, 349, 353, 500, 511; penitent, 38–39, 43, 45, 88, 261–62, 267, 271–74, 278, 284–85, 291; modern, 272, 286, 354 sodomy 38, 59, 270, 276–77, 286, 511; and sacrilege, 285; medieval invention, 280, 287 Sojo, Toba 359 Solomon 132 Sommer, H. Oskar 145, 150 Somnus 115 Soothsayers 457. See also prophets Sophia: see wisdom Sophocles 213 Sordello 70, 241, 246, 248, 355, 358, 428 Soros, George 353, 364 soul: and body, 250, 253, 260, 265–66, 291–92, 304–305, 339, 394, 408–10, 440; Aristotelian, 283, 408–409, 422, 440; as book, 406; creates post–mortem body, 183, 224, 258, 267, 283, 291, 305; creation of individual, 292–93, 295, 297–98, 300, 302–304, 306–307, 399; diseases, 184, 208–209; faculties/operations, 320, 406, 411, 425–26, 434; immortality, 176, 177–78, 295; lost, 367; Platonic, 339, 406–407, 422, 439–40; Pseudo–Dionysian, 484; re–embodiment of, 267, 291; re–engendering of, 313–14, 323. See also body, spiration Sowers of Discord 223, 240–41, 352 sparagmos 217 space/spatiality: abstract expressionist, 373; and Paragone, 498–99; cinematic, 373, 383–84; Dantean, 370, 374; dynamic, 373; embryological, 292 speech act 396. See also performative utterance Spencer, Herbert 477 Spendthrifts 9, 87, 353 Spenser, Edmund 34 Sphinx: discourse of, 118 Spinoza, Baruch 377, 408, 439, 457 spira/gira rhyme 296–97, 301, 304, 306 spiration 10, 257, 291, 293, 295–301, 303, 399
561
spirituality: affective, 311; ascetic, 158, 208; Bataillean, 186, 207–209; Cistercian, 311, 322; Dantean, 327–28; Swedenborgian, 337 St. Boniface, Richard 355 Stanza della Segnatura 25–31, 39 Star Trek 250 Statius 9, 88, 117, 254–61, 263, 269, 277, 283, 290–300, 302–305, 343, 399, 438, 452, 471–72, 486 Steinberg, Leo 58, 62 Stellatum: see Heaven sterility 183 Stock, Lorraine Kochanski 325 Stonewall 261, 271, 285 Stracuzza, John x Straight Street 268–269 Streamer, Volney 346 stripping: as iconoclasm, 189, 193, 196–97, 200, 202, 217–18, 229; as infernal humiliation, 189–90, 194, 197; as sign of holiness, 183; flaying as, 202 Styx 94, 110–12, 151 subjectivity 406, 410–12, 435, 437, 439, 443, 464; abstract expressionist, 371–72, 375; Brakhage’s, 369–70, 372–73, 417–26, 435; Dante’s, 275–76, 417, 442; dynamism of, 422, 425, 442; Elder’s, 454, 462 sublime 347–48, 410 Sufism 333 Suicides 9, 45, 47, 88, 92, 124, 143, 188, 250, 253, 283, 356, 501–502, 513, 519 Summa theologiae 21, 38–39, 59, 77–78, 80, 83, 103–105, 165–67, 442, 446 Surette, Leon viii, 10, 13, 327–45, 534; Light from Eleusis, 534; Pound in Purgatory, 534 Surrealism 200; art movement, 220, 225, 232; mysticism, 213, 237–38; religion, 207–12, 219–20, 226, 228 suspension: of belief, 40–42; of disbelief, 40–42, 59–60; of suspension of disbelief, 44, 46 Sutton, Walter 341, 345 Swabey, Henry 329, 338 Swedenborg, Emanuel 335–38, 343; doctrines, 343 Swinburne, Algernon Charles 353, 364, 473–74, 486, 488 Swing, T.K. 145, 150 Syberberg, Hans–Jurgen 383, 385; Our Hitler, 383, 385 Sybil 96, 109–15 Symbolistes 328, 444 synecdoche 466 taboo 15–16, 31, 57, 184–87, 190, 193, 199–200, 204, 232, 339, 519; gender inversion, 195, 198–99; imagining gay salvation, 273; immodesty/impurity, 266; incest, 314; intergenerational sex, 281; lust of the eyes, 217; mutilation of bodies, 205, 217–18, 239; nakedness, 188–91, 199, 218; rhetoric of, 198–201,
562
INDEX
234; secret knowledge, 266; sex and violence, 220; sex with the dead, 218; soiling underwear, 200, 205; viewing the dead, 210, 213 Tambling, Jeremy 437, 449 Tanselle, G. 339, 345 Tarkovsky, Andrei 368; Andrei Rublev, 368; Nostalghia, 368 Taylor, Mark 393 Tellus 474 temperance 122, 154, 261 Tempier, Etienne 39, 59 Temple/Templars 330, 332, 340, 342, 437 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 328 Terrell, Carroll F. 366 Tertullian 142 terza rima 91; invented by Dante, 495; mimesis of cosmogony, 373; mimesis of time, 306–307; mimesis of Trinity, 305–306; modern, 495, 520; thematic, 300, 306 Testa, Bart viii, 10, 367–93, 417, 484, 534; Spirit in the Landscape, 534; Back and Forth, 534 text: and world, 46–47, 49, 400, 423. 467; as route, 438; dynamism of, 404, 420–21, 425, 430 textuality 48, 87, 235, 400, 404, 467; and subjectivity, 462 Thamus 439 The Book of All the Dead 11, 56–57, 367–68, 438, 451; addresses history, 455, 468–69; and consciousness, 455–56, 459, 464, 466–68, 478–79, 483; and film language, 462; and love, 458–59; and modernity, 468–69, 477–78; and Nothing, 467, 481; and Pound’s Cantos, 453–55, 459–62, 464–66, 468–69, 474–82; and Wagner, 481; artist–protagonist in, 383–85, 453, 457–59, 462–63, 470, 477–78; Art of Worldly Wisdom, 384, 388, 391, 455, 459, 484; as archeological project, 466–67; as archive, 383, 399, 455, 462, 466; as critique of technocracy, 458; as Inferno, 381, 384–86, 388, 452–53, 457–58; as meta–work, 467–68; as palimpsest, 434, 453, 470; as Paradiso, 381, 388, 389–390, 452–53, 464; as Purgatorio, 381, 387, 389, 452; as pilgrimage/quest, 384–85, 387, 452, 457, 459, 463, 478; as re–creation of Nekuia, 467–68, 470, 477; as visual epic, 382–83, 386, 455, 472; Azure Serene, 456, 479, 482–83; baroque design, 388, 455–56; Body and the World, 456, 482; compared to Dante Quartet, 444, 451; computerized images, 389–90; Consolations, 381, 386–88, 390–91, 456, 461, 481–82; contrasted with Commedia, 457–58; Dantean design, 381–82, 384, 390, 399, 451–53, 455–56, 458–60, 466, 468, 470, 477–79, 483; Dream of the Last Historian, 386, 455; elliptical action, 461, 472; erudite character, 382–83; Exultations, 381, 388–89, 456, 479, 482–83; Fool’s Gold, 382–83, 455, 481; Flesh Angels, 456, 482–83; fractal imagery, 389; Fugitive Gods, 386, 456, 482; ideogrammic form, 480, 484; Illuminated Texts, 384–85,
387–88, 455–58, 461; Lamentations, 385–88, 391, 457–58, 461, 467, 477–78; Lighted Clearing, 456, 458, 482; Love Is an Art of Time, 381, 467, 478; lyrical aspects, 453, 463, 472; making of, 451, 453–454, 463, 467, 476, 481–82; meditative rhythms, 387, 452, 461, 474–77; montage, 460; Monument to the Dead World, 467; musical design, 382–84, 387–89, 452, 461, 474–76, 481; Newton and Me, 456, 464, 482–83; open form, 464; paratactical method, 460, 461, 464–65, 472; personal significance, 470; play of meanings, 461–62; postmodern fragments, 382–83, 385, 387, 389–90, 452–54, 461–62, 466–67, 483; pulsework, 474–76; running times, 482; screening, 56–57, 452; serial form, 388–89; spiral trajectory, 457; Sublime Calculation, 456; System of Dante’s Hell, 381; temporality, 455–56, 459, 464, 466–67, 472, 476, 478–79; thematic overview, 455–56, 459, 462, 464, 466–67, 478–79, 482; totalizing vision, 479; transcendent ambition, 451, 459, 469, 478–79; tumult of sounds/voices, 453, 461–63, 469, 477–78, 480–82; unfinished form, 382, 388; use of “picture” in, 438 The Cantos 7, 10–11, 346, 350–51, 360–61, 364, 382–83, 399, 434, 452–54, 457, 459, 464, 470, 473–74, 480–82, 484; as cento, 356, 359, 361–62; as collage, 401, 470; as fugue, 477, 481; as rhythmic vortex, 480; I, 470; II, 470; XIV, 352, 354, 484; XV, 352–54, 484; XVI, 354; XXIV, 469; XXV, 469; XXVI, 469; XXIX, 355; XXXI, 356; XXXVI, 330; XLV, 363; XLVII, 473–74; LXII, 474; LXXII, 356, 364; LXXIII, 356, 364; LXXIV, 357–59, 468–69, 475, 485–86; LXXVII, 361; LXXXIII, 479, 486; LXXXIV, 357; LXXXVI, 474; LXXXIX, 361; XCII, 484; XCIII, 362; XCV, 360; XCIX, 484; CV, 475; CX, 359; CXV, 404, 438; CXVI, 480, 486; CXX, 404, 439, 485 The Dante Quartet 11, 367–75, 377, 381–82, 390–91, 401, 406; and artistic subjectivity, 417–19, 422–23; anti–discursive, 399–400, 419; as analogue of cosmopoesis, 373–74, 430, 436; as miniature, 370, 394, 398, 428, 430; colour scheme, 395, 427–31, 445; compared with Commedia, 398–400, 419, 426–28, 433, 436, 443, 445, 451; creation of, 394–95, 400, 451; dramatic tension, 428–29; “existence is song,” 369, 372, 375, 380, 395, 431–34, 436; film formats, 394, 400; fire imagery, 433–34, 436; “Hell Itself,” 394–95, 426–29; “Hell Spit Flexion,” 369, 372, 394–95, 402, 427–28, 437, 445; lyrical character, 399–401, 419, 431–32; musical form, 375, 422; open form, 401, 422; painted forms, 394–95, 418, 426–34, 445; palimpsest, 428, 434, 446; “Purgation,” 369, 372, 395, 419, 428–31, 433; spatiality, 370–71, 417, 428; structure, 394, 399, 401, 431, 433; synchronicity, 371–72; totalizing experience, 375, 379
INDEX The Lugubrious Game 200–201, 203, 205, 208–209, 219, 234, 239–40, 242, 245 Theocritus 294 theodicy 9, 108–109, 185, 514 Theodotion 156 theology: and painting/art, 374, 435; and philosophy, 86, 176–78, 186, 258, 293, 387, 399, 403, 411–12, 437; and politics, 8, 171, 172, 174–76, 178, 270, 316, 387; and poetry, 70–72, 74–75, 79, 88, 171, 177, 238, 267, 286, 296, 322, 328, 331, 399, 434–37, 491; as discourse, 5, 41–42, 53, 272, 437; Catholic, 2, 8, 89, 208, 238, 272, 312, 328; devotional, 312; gay, 271–72; moral, 158–59, 162, 184, 322; mystical/ negative, 1–3, 5–7, 134, 186, 208, 210, 221–23, 238, 243–44, 276, 383, 387, 417, 426, 429; pastoral, 311; vernacular, 45, 89 The Open Man 211, 220, 243 Theseus 317 Thieves 31, 197–99, 215–216, 233, 260–61, 352 Thomas, Edward 347, 363, 366 Thomas Aquinas, St. 19, 21, 27, 35, 38–39, 58–60, 66–71, 73, 79–80, 83, 85, 103–105, 108, 154, 162–63, 165–68, 238, 257, 272, 292–93, 297–98, 305, 323, 328, 399, 411–15, 418, 422, 424–25, 436, 439, 442–43, 446, 468, 514; Being and Essence, 412, 446. See also Summa theologiae Thorp, John vii, ix–x, 8, 12, 151–69, 534; Free Will, 534 Thoth 439 time/temporality: abyss of, 367–68, 371, 375, 377–78, 383, 386–387, 478; and Paragone, 498; as aesthetic problem, 368, 373–74, 379, 477–78; Augustinian, 370; cinematic, 375–77, 381, 383, 429, 432, 472, 476–79; cyclical/revolutionary, 347, 370, 381, 385–86; European, 368, 477; Heideggerian, 387, 467, 484; in–between, 377–79, 381, 386–87, 389, 429; intensified lyrical, 431–32, 434, 451; millennial, 377, 385; modernist, 382, 384–85, 387, 478; narrative/poetic, 292, 296, 298, 303, 306–307, 347, 358, 362, 370, 374, 387, 400, 402–404, 425, 431, 452; Neoplatonic, 370; purgatorial, 376–77, 379, 381, 387, 389, 429, 478; ruined, 383; sacred/divine, 370, 377, 379, 385, 387, 432, 507; spatialized, 371, 374, 379, 477; suspended, 377–378, 381; synchronous, 370–71, 382, 400, 402, 477, 507; womb, 301. See also history, modernity, postmodernity Tiresias 194–95, 198 top: and bottom, 276–77, 286; as saintly subject–position, 281; butch, 182, 197, 204; Dante as, 203, 276–77; Virgil as, 197 Torczyner, Harry 248 torture 182–85, 187–88, 197, 202, 207–208, 212–14, 218–20, 223–25, 231, 235–36, 277; of Gubbio martyrs, 496; of the Hundred Pieces, 219–20, 222–26, 244 totalism/totality: aesthetic vision of, 367, 369–74, 382–83, 390, 435–36, 453; Dantean, 372–73,
563
382–83; modernist yearning for, 382–83, 385, 435–36, 453; postmodern homage to, 390, 479; mythic vision of, 435–36 Touring Club Italiano 504 Toynbee, Paget 340 Tradition: as energy pattern, 467–68, 475; as Order of Being, 475 tragedy 73–74, 94, 125–26, 138, 213, 267, 283, 318, 497; of necessity, 79, 86, 109, 124; of possibility, 79; tragedìa 8 Traitors 9, 83, 511 Trajan 45, 71, 84, 88–89, 94–96, 102, 104–105, 109, 492; and widow, 94–95, 104; column, 94 tralucere viii, 7; title for Part Five, 367–488 transcendence 6, 41–43, 243–44, 276, 376; of art, 399; of being, 226, 228, 412, 419; of gendered self, 221, 276, 313–14; of narrative, 452; of orthodoxy, 311; of speech, 398; of textuality, 48; of time, 374 transcendentalism 327–29, 435–36; Emersonian, 399 Transcendent Form 43–44, 339, 398, 419, 435–36, 452 transgender 39, 193–94, 312; youth, 284 transgression 3, 57, 107, 179, 184–86, 188, 192, 292; aesthetics of, 5, 13, 15–16, 30–32, 35–36, 43, 57, 87–88, 185, 190, 192, 196, 199, 202–204, 212–13, 218, 222–25, 238–39, 266, 291, 303, 306–307, 318, 336, 351, 371–72, 398–99, 419, 435–36, 450–51, 459, 490–91, 499, 502–503, 506; as boundary–crossing, 193–96, 199, 204, 291, 295, 303, 306–307, 313–14, 499, 500–502, 506–507; as metamorphosis, 193, 225, 336; as Paragone, 501–502; Bataillean notion, 193, 233, 238; bodily, 276; Dante’s vocabulary of, 6–7, 233; economic, 10; etymology, 193; poetics of, 307; political, 10, 12, 238; religious/ mystical, 272, 292, 336; sexual/erotic, 12, 196–97, 238, 314, 320–21, 491; textual, 87, 238–39 transsexual 193–194, 245; Mohammed as, 225 transubstantiation 25 transvestism 312, 315; ritual, 315 trapassar vii, 6, 399; del segno, 88, 92, 99, 108, 116, 292, 303, 307, 371, 398, 501; title for Part One, 63–120 traslatar viii, 7; title for Part Four, 327–66 trasmodar v, viii, 7, 17; title for Part Six, 489–29 trasmutar vii, 6, 336, 388, 398, 456; title for Part Two, 121–48. See also metamorphosis trasumanar (transhumanization) viii, 6–7, 9, 20, 50, 55–56, 233, 238, 261, 270, 275, 278, 282, 291, 299–301, 304, 323, 451; title for Part Three, 249–25 Trinitarianism: orthodox 14, 55. See also God, heresy, Trinity Trinity 3, 7, 26, 53–54, 69, 119, 134, 187, 210, 243, 301, 305–306, 414–15, 432; threesome as parody of, 197 tropology: see reading
564
INDEX
Troubadours 10, 144, 225, 235, 238, 241, 296, 329–30, 332–34, 340, 342, 346, 348, 350, 433, 437, 479 Troy 136–37, 312 truth 93, 130, 147, 439, 442; and beauty, 49; and poetry/rhetoric, 423, 438, 526; as orthodoxy, 25, 32, 35, 53, 72, 250, 265–67, 268–69, 319, 425, 495; as persistent meaning, 466–67; mathematical, 425; visual/visionary 371, 373, 423, 425 typology: see reading Ubaldo, St. 493, 496, 517; cult in Alsace, 517 Ugo: Antonioni character, 376, 378, 380 Ulysses (Odysseus) 47, 104, 179, 376, 380, 438, 458, 463, 468, 470 Una 34 unbelief 69–70 Underworld: Bataillean, 241; biblical, 130; Dantean, 307; Homeric, 468; Poundian, 477–78; Virgilian, 68, 73–75, 84, 93, 109, 111, 118, 124, 267, 470. See also Hell, Inferno union/unity: divine, 210, 212, 228, 232, 299–300, 302, 307, 313, 319–321, 349, 370, 377, 427, 435, 438, 445, 452; goal of mystical theology, 221, 277, 311; heteroerotic, 380; homoerotic, 277; mating of opposites, 430; of mind/world, 444; sacred wholeness, 385, 430, 435, 445. See also anagogy, androgyny, Sacred, God University 45, 293: Catholic, 335; Concordia, 532; of California (Berkeley), 532; of London, 332; of Ottawa, 534; of Paris, 35, 39, 59; of Pennsylvania, 327–28, 342, 505; of Rome, 332; of Toronto, 13, 483, 505, 531–34; of the Universe, 52; of Western Ontario, ix–x, 13, 56, 363, 489, 498, 506, 531–32, 534; Oxford, 13, 505, 534; St. Thomas, 252; Trent, 534; Yale, 335 unknowing 3; infernal parody of mystical, 203 unmanning 198, 215, 225, 234 Unorthodox 6, 14, 19–22, 35–36, 40, 43, 46, 138, 186, 283, 349 unorthodoxy 2, 4–5, 21–22, 185, 211, 285; as boundary–crossing, 193–96, 199, 204, 291, 295, 303, 306–307, 313–14, 499, 500–501; as critical category, 348–49, 357, 362; as marginality, 7, 35, 43, 49, 63, 74, 86, 187, 250, 259, 332; as political resistance, 22, 240, 496–98; as secularism, 8–9; as wandering, 34–35; Dantean, 6–8, 10, 14, 19–20, 23, 25, 33, 35–40, 43, 45, 48, 51, 56, 64–65, 67–69, 71–75, 77, 84–85, 88–89, 209, 254, 259, 261–64, 267, 269, 271, 311–12, 320, 323, 349, 350, 355, 493–96, 500, 506; erotic, 15, 184–85, 262, 323, 519; hermeneutic, 398, 404, 519; hermetic, 437; modern, 10, 15, 187, 250, 262, 276, 348–49, 377, 398; paradoxical relation to orthodoxy, 348–49; Poundian, 350, 355–56, 437. See also orthodoxy, transgression Usher, Jonathan 289
Usurers 349, 353–54 usury 349–350, 352, 474, 484 vagina 225, 227–30, 245, 260–61, 277, 491 Valdameri, Rino 504, 528 Valerio: Antonioni character, 376, 378, 380 Valesio, Paolo 146, 150 Valli, Luigi 331–35, 338–41, 345 Vallone, Aldo 483, 488 Vanni Fucci 199, 233–34 Vasari, Giorgio 31, 58, 62 Vatican 20–21, 25–31, 38–39, 57, 262, 266, 335, 341 Vecchi, Pierluigi De 58, 62 Velia 94, 110 Venus: armed, 323; bearded, 323; biformis, 323; birth of, 313, 459; Cyprian, 310, 312–13, 318, 321–22, 323; goddess, 115, 121, 123, 135, 140, 281, 310–13, 315, 318–19, 321–22; Morning/ Evening Star, 318; planet, 10, 140–41, 147, 274, 310–12, 318–19; Platonic, 279; Queen of Heaven, 318; Third Heaven, 269, 279, 286, 310; influence, 310, 318–19, 322, 491 Verdenal, Jean 470–71 Verdi, Giuseppe 55 Verdicchio, M. 180–81 Verga, Giovanni 368, 533 vernacular 75, 89; illustrious, 351 Vernani, Guido 37, 58, 76, 82, 263–66, 268–69, 284, 289 Verona: women of, 87 vessel 24, 33, 37, 250, 254–58, 260–61, 268, 277; image of poem, 265–66, 268, 277, 284; of fraud, 269 via: Alighieri, 376, 379–80; allegory of the way, 34–36, 90, 97, 131, 192, 268, 296, 379–81, 398, 402–403, 431, 438; diritta, 34, 269; negativa 2, 276; verace, 34, 192 vice: see accidie, avarice, envy, gluttony, lust, pride, sin, wrath Vickers, Nancy 104, 106 Villani, Giovanni 286, 289 Vincent, E.R. 341, 345 Vincent of Beauvais 72 violence: against God, 38, 59, 270; against Nature, 38, 59; Bataillean erotics of, 184–86, 195, 213, 221; eroticized, 188, 190, 192, 194, 197, 200, 229; ritualized, 186, 189, 193, 213; sexual/erotic, 15, 17, 38, 59, 184, 199, 202–203, 205, 229, 276–77, 319, 389, 496, 526; textual, 388 Violent 183, 513 Violently Slain 92, 94 Virgil viii, 5, 11, 15, 25, 38, 58–59, 67, 73, 106, 119, 121–22, 143, 150, 180, 188, 289, 311, 325; as androgyne, 317; as Christ figure, 117, 317; as damned soul, 257; as dream figure, 217–18; as epic poet, 92, 121–23, 126–27, 132, 134, 136, 138–39, 195, 267, 290, 299, 304, 307, 310–12,
INDEX 318, 451, 470, 495, 531; as father figure, 84, 88, 95–96, 102, 105, 116, 276, 290, 299–300, 307, 312, 317; as friend, 290; as glossator/reader, 107–108, 113–14, 118, 125, 140, 154, 195, 217–18, 222; as guide, 63–64, 84–86, 90, 92–93, 95–101, 107–108, 115, 118, 125, 127, 138, 141, 151, 174–75, 177, 185, 191, 202, 217–18, 244, 264, 269, 273, 290–91, 314, 358–359, 370, 428, 431, 438, 452, 471, 493, 511, 516; as literary creation, 87; as master–teacher, 107–109, 111, 118, 218, 254, 290, 304, 321, 387; as mother figure, 95, 312, 317; as Old Adam, 117; as partner, 100–101; as pastoral poet, 101; as poet–maker, 299; as pederast, 273, 281; as prophet, 92–93, 109–10, 113, 118; as reason figure, 175, 217; as rhetorician, 437; as rival, 90, 92, 99–100, 116; as shade, 290, 300; as Sodomite, 183, 204, 218, 244; as top, 197; as victim, 118; costume, 204; damnation, 7–8, 45, 70, 83–84, 86, 89, 91, 100, 107, 109, 113, 116–18; dark side, 113; Eclogues, 92, 101, 113, 204, 284, 289, 438, 449; salvation, 7–8, 44–46, 83, 85–89, 91–92, 94–95, 97, 99, 101–105, 108–109, 114, 118; statue, 521. See also Aeneid Viriathus 157 Virtues 32–33, 49, 179, 257–58, 314, 417, 429, 457–58, 492; aristocratic, 178; Aristotelian, 154; as virtù, 417, 443; lady’s, 128–29; theological, 70, 86, 320; Roman, 97 Visconti: Galeazzo, 529; Matteo 529 visio: corporalis, 424, 440; intellectualis, 440; spiritualis, 217–18, 418, 440, 442 vision 2, 4, 50, 97–100, 187, 319, 384, 403, 410, 418, 437, 439; abstract expressionist, 371; amorous, 29, 319–21, 323, 329, 418, 456; anal, 200; Aristotelian, 439–40; Augustinian, 440; beatific/mystical, 66, 71, 79, 108, 141, 313, 320–21, 337, 374, 379, 383, 403, 417–19, 424, 429, 433, 437–38, 456; heretical, 173–74, 424; holistic, 398; hypnagogic (closed–eye), 369, 372, 375, 377, 382; infernal, 174, 177–78, 375–76; line of, 292; Plotinian, 442; pornographic, 224; redemptive, 370, 456; Sadean, 224, 229; spiralling, 292; subjective, 424; Surrealist, 221, 228–29; tearful, 268–269; totalizing, 367, 369–71, 382–83, 435; transgressive, 214, 216, 221 visual arts 11, 322, 339, 368, 450, 491–93, 499, 501, 507, 509; Archaic, 499; architecture, 492, 518, 528; bookworks,12, 497; divine, 296; drawings, viii, 12, 239, 401, 475, 489, 497–98, 501–502, 513–15; iconography, 374; ideographic character, 394; illuminations/illustrations, 73, 225–27, 235, 318, 374, 401, 491, 497, 503; installations, viii, 12, 489, 498, 515–16; Inuit, 499; mosaics, 72; paintings/frescoes, 25–31, 73, 132, 200, 209, 211, 225, 242, 245, 359, 368, 370–71, 373–75, 394, 401, 405, 418, 427–29, 437, 439–42, 485, 492, 497, 499, 506,
565
508, 533; postmodern, 391; photography, 214, 218–19, 222, 244, 395, 400, 435; printmaking, 506–507, 533; sculpture, viii, 12, 245, 312–13, 317, 323, 368, 401, 412, 485, 489, 492, 495, 498–501, 505, 510–13, 521, 533; stained glass, 73; television, 229; video, 498, 506 See also film, Paragone, word visual thinking 11, 369, 398; moving, 371–72, 375, 394, 400, 417–18, 421–422, 462 Vita Nuova 140, 142, 144, 228, 232, 295, 319, 399, 402, 420, 458; 19.1–2: 128; 19.4: 128–29; 19.9: 129; 20.1: 129; 20.3: 127; 20.5: 127; 21.15: 458; 24.20, 362 Vitti, Monica 376 Voegelin, Eric 390, 393 Vorticism 452–53, 468, 472, 483, 485 vulgare illustre 351–52, 420 Wagner, Richard 481; Wagnerians 328; and medievalism, 328 Walker, James Bernard 76, 82 Walsh, P.G. 150 Walter, Prio 56 Wan 361 Ward, Caroline 341 Warnhof, Pat x water code: see marine code Way: see via Weil, Simone 387; as Beatrice, 387, 452 Wellek, René 181 Wenzel, Siegfried 166, 169 Westboro Baptist Church 273, 285, 289 Wessley, Stephen 323, 325 Whatley, Gordon 104, 106 whirlwind: biblical, 137; of lust, 123, 125–26, 137, 143, 249, 279, 318, 512; of divine love, 279 Whitehead, Alfred North 419–20, 432, 437, 444–45 Wicksteed, Philip H. 364 Wienpahl, Paul 439, 449 Wilde, Oscar 533 Wilhelm, James J. 339, 345, 363, 366 Wilkin, V. 76, 82 will: artist’s, 419; Dante’s, 321, 416, 457, 459; demonic, 175–76; divine, 74, 86–87, 102, 105, 111, 113 119, 133, 211, 258, 281, 319, 321; fallen human, 152, 164, 211, 224, 305, 321; free, 72, 112, 118–19, 224, 319–21, 405, 457; ill, 175–76; of Dante’s readers, 103 Williams, R.D. 123, 142 Williams, Stephen 243, 248 Williams, William Carlos 462; Paterson, 462 Wilson, Sarah 242–44, 248 Winchester Psalter 318 Wind, Edgar 323, 325 wisdom 33–34, 102, 119, 140, 233, 255, 298, 429; allegorical, 238; mystical, 213, 320, 334, 342, 419, 480; pagan, 118, 174, 439; SapientiaSophia, 130–31, 133–34, 138, 190, 319, 444
566
INDEX
Wise 5, 17, 20, 26, 50, 89, 278, 286, 293, 298 witches 20, 22 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 400 wolf: she (lupa), 203; pope as, 316 Woman 500; and fickle passion, 123, 125, 127–28, 130, 136, 139; and garrulity, 126–27, 130, 132, 135–36, 138–40; as poet, 129; fallen, 229–30; natural, 277; orifices of, 127, 130, 132, 136, 138, 227–30, 256, 260; Phallic, 231; Pound’s ideal, 355; salvation through, 323; stereotypes of, 127–32, 136, 142, 195–96, 217, 229, 316; Vaginal, 230 womb 9, 19, 50, 195, 227–28, 230–31, 255–57, 277, 283, 291–93, 298–302, 304–306; as aquatic/oceanic space, 294–96, 303–304, 306–307, 377, 434; Mary’s, 318. See also Rose Woods, Gregory 273–75, 285, 289 Woolf, Virginia 142, 147, 150 word: and image, 405–407, 410, 412, 416–18, 422, 435, 437, 439–44, 461–62, 470, 472, 476, 485, 497, 509; and mind/subjectivity, 411–12, 418, 439, 444, 462; and rhythm, 474–76; and silence, 418; as Logos, 133, 140, 301, 411, 435–38, 440, 491; as pigment, 460–61. See also image, Paragone
wound 9, 48, 189, 223, 231, 243, 246, 254, 258, 385, 398; erotic, 137, 139, 200–201, 211–12, 219–24, 230, 260, 458; cathected, 215, 220–21, 235–36, 241 wrath 8, 97, 101, 122, 124, 129, 270, 432; and accidie, 152–55, 158, 163–65; as religious experience, 210 Wrathful 99, 101, 151–52, 317 writing 441–42; and memory, 439; as overwriting, 470; Chinese, 485. See also language, palimpsest, Paragone, rhetoric, text, textuality, word Xanthus 157 Xantippe 526 Yates-Thompson Codex 503 Yeats, William Butler 347, 534 Zeus 198, 313 Zola, Emile 368 zombie: body of, 236
