The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
The Divine Comedy marked my fourth trip to the underworld so far this year. The first came by way of Aristophanes' The Frogs, the second through Milton's Paradise Lost, the third through Virgil's Aeneid. (I've taken the works in the order they appear in the Classics, though of course Milton lived well after the others.) Dante famously chose Virgil as his guide through hell, in part because Virgil had already sent Italy's founding father there. In doing so, Dante acknowledges the place of his work within both the trip-to-the-underworld and the epic-national-poem traditions. But as I read the Comedy in its entirety this week -- I had seen Hell and Purgatory before (to use the Anglicized titles of this translation), but this was my first trip to Paradise -- I saw the poem as inaugurating another tradition, one that happens to be close to my heart.
I have always been an especial fan of a particular brand of Modernist novel, the artistic bildungsroman. The most famous examples of the genre -- and my two favorites -- are Proust's In Search of Lost Time and Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Such novels are often largely autobiographical; in some cases, as in Proust, the protaganist even shares the author's name. They tend to focus on the early part of their protaganists' lives, as they struggle to establish their identities both as artists and as human beings. As the books go on, their protaganists' sense of artistic failure grows more acute. Finally, these books tend to close with their protaganists completing or preparing to complete works much like the novels themselves. Sometimes the connection between the fictional work and the actual work is less direct, as when To the Lighthouse ends with the completion of Lily Briscoe's portrait of the Ramsey family. Sometimes, as at the end of the Search, we are left to imagine that the two works are identical. There is also a sort of ironic sub-set to this genre, in which the protaganist is never quite able to complete his task (I'm thinking most especially of Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities, though John Crowley's AEgypt cycle is a wonderful recent example).
Needless to say, The Divine Comedy doesn't conform precisely to all the standards of this genre. For starters, Dante's pilgrim has already reached the midway of this our mortal life
by the time the poem begins. But the choice of Virgil as guide, coupled
with the famous scene in which a series of other poets are introduced
in Limbo, strongly suggests that a theme of poetic development is being
mapped on to the more obvious theme of religious redemption. We are
encouraged to think of the pilgrim as a stand-in for the poet -- he is
expressly a contemporary Florentine -- but it isn't until the thirtieth
canto of Purgatory that Beatrice arrives to call the pilgrim by name:
"Dante! weep not that Virgil leaves thee; nay,
Weep thou not yet: behoves thee feel the edge
Of other sword; and thou shalt weep for that."
As to the prow or stern, some admiral
Paces the deck, inspiriting his crew,
When 'mid the sail-yards all hands ply aloof;
Thus, on the left side of the car, I saw
(Turning me at the sound of mine own name,
Which here I am compell�d to register)
The virgin station'd, who before appear'd
Veil'd in that festive shower angelical.
Why is he compelled at this moment to register his name? Dante stands at the cusp between Purgatory and Heaven. He has been forced to leave the un-baptized Virgil behind. Many poets can create portraits of Hell, but only a Christian poet can do the same for heaven. If Dante is to take his place as the great poet of the Christian era, as the baptized Virgil, he must now announce himself. Throughout Paradise (which, as I've said, was the one part I'd not read before), there is an increasing sense that Dante is being led on this pilgrimage not just for his own salvation but so that he might write about it. The making of the poem becomes the story of the poem, in the fashion of the Modernist works I've described above. In the seventeenth canto, Dante's ancestor Cacciaguido tells him:
The cry thou raisest,
Shall, as the wind doth, smite the proudest summits;
Which is of honour no light argument.
For this, there only have been shown to thee,
Throughout these orbs, the mountain, and the deep,
Spirits, whom fame hath note of. For the mind
Of him, who hears, is loth to acquiesce
And fix its faith, unless the instance brought
Be palpable, and proof apparent urge.
I don't think it's a coincidence that Dante struggles much more in this section to make things palpable.
Some moments in Hell -- e.g., the damned feeding on the brains of the damned -- are famous for their vividness. But at a certain point in Paradise
the beatified figures all become no more than bright lights, unseeable
with human eyes. As he is finally brought into the presence of the
trinity, Dante ends the poem with an expression of inadequacy about his
ability to capture what he's seen with words: O speech!/How feeble and how faint art thou, to give/Conception birth.
The conclusion that the very limits of words may be the most important thing about them -- an idea we tend to think of as particularly modern, as born from Nietzsche and Freud or Wittgenstein and Godel; an idea that greatly troubled both Joyce and Proust -- is just another point to which Virgil and Beatrice led Dante long before our time.
-- CRB, June 19, 2007
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