Introduction: mimesis and literary models

ALTHOUGH all medieval literature in the romance vernaculars may be characterized – even defined – as a sustained, dynamic response to the classical canon, Dante's Divina Commedia is an altogether exceptional case. For, in a variety of fundamental ways, the entire Commedia is built on a series of extended encounters with four Latin poets: Virgil, Statius, Lucan, and Ovid. The Commedia's plot line figures these encounters in four principal (and interrelated) manners: First, Dante-protagonist meets and interacts with all four poets, who are characters in his poem. Second, Dante-protagonist undergoes (and/or witnesses) a series of key experiences that are visibly modelled on narrative events from the Aeneid, the Thebaid, the Pharsalia, and the Metamorphoses. The most important, frequent, and systematic instances of this process involve two alternatives: either Dante-protagonist functions as a new, Christian Aeneas, modeled on the single protagonist of Virgil's epic; or he functions as a corrected version of one of the many protagonists of Ovid's multi-narrative epic.

THAT DANTE PRESENTS Hell as a realm of chaos and confusion, and Paradise as one of harmony and union, a reader of the Commedia recognizes in the first reading. The astonishing variety of settings and of infernal guards in Hell, the rapid shifts from one of the many damned souls to another, their hostility to Dante and to their companions, all contrast sharply with Paradise, where the heavens seem to differ only in intensity of light and joy, where the souls come to meet and to share their joy with Dante, and the movement from one soul to another seems slow and dignified. Purgatory is transitional, with fewer changes in setting, guards who instruct rather than control, souls fixed only temporarily where Dante sees them, trying to be helpful to him and to each other. Perhaps because it is transitional, Purgatory is more given to formal and visual patterns which fix it in the mind if not in reality.

These large differences are suggested by the action of the plot, but are reinforced by a whole range of formal elements. I shall consider a number of these here: the length of individual cantos, the relative proportions of narrative and speech, enjambment, and the varieties of rhyme and of rhyme sounds within and beyond terza rirna.

Allegory and autobiography

Among the last words spoken by Jesus in the Gospel of John are those directed to Peter, predicting the disciple's martyrdom:

In his commentary, St. Augustine explains that these verses mark the passage in Peter's life from youthful self-reliance to humility, from the sin of presumption to confession and contrition. In middle age (for Peter is neither young nor old), he is called upon to demonstrate his love by caring for the Lord's sheep and by being willing to accept crucifixion.

The conversion from presumption to humility is also the theme of Dante's descent into Hell, which likewise takes place in middle age: “nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.” The landscape of the prologue scene borrows several details from book 7 of Augustine's Confessions, where philosophical presumption is distinguished from confession: “it is one thing, from a wooded mountain top, to see the land of peace and quite another to reach it, when one's way is beset by the lion and the dragon.” It is likely that casting off the rope girdle halfway through the Inferno signifies a surrender of self-reliance analogous to Peter's, while the rush with which the pilgrim is girt at the beginning of the Purgatorio is a traditional emblem of humility (“umile pianta”).

IT IS COMMONLY said that the Divina Commedia ends with Dante's vision of the Trinity. This will pass as a generalization, but it is not precisely true; and it is not merely a scholarly quibble to note why. When, as his journey is coming to an end, Dante sees the Trinity in the form of three differently colored circles, he notices that an image of man is depicted on the second circle, and his attention is drawn entirely to that fact; at the last he strains to understand how the circle and the image can be united, how God and man can form a unity. It is when this desire is fulfilled, through the granting of a momentary flash of intuition, that the vision comes to an end and Dante acknowledges finally the inability of his imagination to mediate what he understood.

It is entirely apt that the final vision should end in this way, for it may be said that the central quest of Dante's understanding in the poem, and indeed in his œuvre as a whole, was to grasp how the divine is present in the human. Behind the thirst for that knowledge lay the conviction, permeating all his works, that God is supremely to be discovered in human nature.

DANTE'S ANGRY denunciation of Florence and the Florentines is one of the memorable themes of the Divina Commedia. Repeatedly in the great poem, and in several of his letters, Dante excoriated the Florentines for the violence, factionalism, and instability of their politics, for their excessive pursuit and consumption of wealth, and, worst of all, for their criminal resistance to what he considered the divinely ordained authority of the Roman emperor. Because we know so little of Dante's political views and opinions about Florence before his exile in 1302, it is tempting to use the fact of the exile and Dante's emotional reaction to it as a way of explaining his harsh critique of his own city. While there is no doubt much truth in such an approach, it is equally important to grasp the influence on Dante of the traditions of political and historical thought that emerged in Florence during the course of the thirteenth century, and in particular of the ideas associated with movements of popular opposition to the traditional dominance of the elite of upper-class families.

NO AUTHOR OF a literary work in the western tradition has solicited more critical attention and learned commentary than the Dante Alighieri of the Divina Commedia. And still the problem of explaining the very existence of this poem has remained beyond our reach. In fact, the remarkable critical and scholarly gains of recent years have only made our dilemma plainer. We have increasingly revealed the extraordinarily complex yet orderly structure of the Commedia; yet each advance in understanding of the scope and precise nature of Dante's achievement in a real sense only makes it that much more difficult to understand how such creativity came to be – what made a “Dante Alighieri” possible at that time and in that place (late medieval Europe; communal and feudal Italy; proto-capitalist Florence in the late 1200s and early 1300s).

Recent theoretical and methodological tendencies in the study of literature have taught us to be skeptical about trying to understand literary texts as the products of individual “genius.” They have urged us to see literature as a “system of discourse” – as a set of structural possibilities (and limitations) intrinsic to language in general and to the specific traditions of literary production in particular. They have pressed upon us the need to understand the social and political exigencies (ranging from constructive articulation of cultural “values” to the repressive enforcement of ideological codes) that call forth and determine the creations of individual authors. Finally, they have pushed us to recognize the psychologically “unconscious” forces that work parallel, and yet in opposition, to the conscious designs of the creative imagination of a poet.

IN HIS BRILLIANT little book Dante as a Political Thinker, published forty years ago but arguably still the most stimulating introduction to the subject in English, my old teacher Alessandro Passerin d'Entrèves assigns to Dante's theory of the empire only a limited place. D'Entrèves emphasizes Dante's preoccupation with his Florentine “patria” and the church, as well as his cultural patriotism, while denying his political nationalism. Dante was therefore in the tradition of his family essentially a loyal “Guelf,” even if a troubled one as the Commedia shows (a work begun, d'Entrèves believes, after the collapse in 1313 of Emperor Henry VII's Italian expedition). Dante's “Ghibellinism,” his advocacy of the imperial cause, was an important but passing phase in the evolution of his thought. His treatise on the empire, Monarchia, which d'Entreves dates as c. 1312, was an aberration, indicating how he had been overcome by the hope that a human saviour could take away the sins of the world, forgetting the fundamental Christian idea that from within, and not from without, must mankind be redeemed and saved. D'Entrèves believes that the Commedia was written after the Monarchia and marks a return to a more orthodox view of salvation.

The Paradiso is the continuation and culmination of the earlier canticles, and at the same time a new departure. Refiguring themes, issues, images, and episodes from Inferno and Purgatorio, it nonetheless establishes a new set of conditions for both the poet and the reader. While the poet's memory has hitherto been sufficient to his task, the Paradiso acknowledges the gap between memory and experience in its opening lines, and, even more, the gap between both psychological categories and language itself. The agon of the poet in his attempt to negotiate this space beyond memory and speech is ever more insistently foregrounded as the poem progresses. But the poem also provides a series of investitures by figures of increasing authority, calling attention to its progressive definition as a “poema sacro,”a sacred text “to which both heaven and earth have set their hand.” The reader, too, is repositioned. A series of direct addresses, as well as a number of “tasks”which actively engage imaginative collaboration, implicate the reader in the work of the poem.

THE TRANSLATION, imitation, and contestation of Dante in English shows no signs of abating after six hundred years. The waning of scholasticism, the Reformation, the rise of new nation-states (including Italy, Ireland, and the United States), the two World Wars, the sectarian violence of Northern Ireland, and the struggles of African-Americans have all been articulated through readings and rewritings of Dantean texts. The first part of this history is easy to narrate: the painstaking intelligence with which Chaucer, Milton, and Shelley respond to Dante is easily distinguished from the general ignorance and imaginative feebleness that prevails in the first four centuries. Thereafter things become more complicated: an American Dante comes into being; Pound and Eliot connect American, English, and continental traditions; an Irish Dante (Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Heaney) achieves things that are beyond the grasp of the English or Americans. Interest in Dante has, if anything intensified in the last few years. This survey begins with a secure origin – Chaucer's De Hugelino Comite de Pize – and works forward to an imperfect, Farinata-like vision of our own immediate future.

THE LIFE OF Dante is such a tangle of public and private passions and ordeals experienced over the fifty-six years he lived that it has always been a source of inexhaustible fascination. It is as if everything about his life – its innumerable defeats and its occasional and yet enduring triumphs – belongs to the romantic and alluring realm of legend: a love at first sight that was to last his whole life and inspire lofty poetry; the long, cruel exile from his native Florence because of the civil war ravaging the city; the poem he wrote, the Divina Commedia, made of his public and private memories; the turning of himself into an archetypal literary character, such as Ulysses, Faust, or any of those medieval knights errant, journeying over the tortuous paths of a spiritual quest, wrestling with dark powers, and, finally, seeing God face to face.

Many are the reasons why generations of readers have found the story of Dante ’s life compelling. His relentless self-invention as an unbending prophet of justice and a mythical quester for the divine are certainly two important reasons. The fact that in his graphic figurations of the beyond (rare glimpses of which were available in only a few other legendary mythmakers – Homer, Plato, and Virgil) he was an unparalleled poet also greatly heightens our interest in him.

OF THE THREE otherworldly kingdoms which the Divina Commedia represents, Purgatory is Dante's most original creation. Hell and Paradise were already well established places within the medieval imagination. Each possessed a standard set of topographic and iconographic attributes which, accrued in the course of many centuries of patristic tradition, rendered them instantly recognizable to prince and pauper alike. Hell was a dark, subterranean place where eternal torments were administered by demons under the guidance of Satan, the ruler of the underworld. Paradise was Hell's positive counterpart: a luminous celestial palace where eternal blessings were administered by the angels under the guidance of God, the emperor of the universe. In both cases the author of the Commedia felt called upon less to alter preexisting traditions, than to extend and systematize them: establishing, for instance, a much more precise hierarchy of the degrees of damnation or blessedness endured or enjoyed by souls in the afterlife; and finding a place for specifically Christian categories of error, like heresy, within an Aristotelian moral system.