Tristan Kay - Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy

Forming what might be regarded as the central column of the three cantiche of Dante’s Commedia, the Seventeens are cantos of considerable, even pivotal, narrative and philosophical importance, yet they do not form an obvious triad. From the dramatic descent on the monster Geryon in the Inferno, to Virgil’s disquisition on love in the Purgatorio, to Cacciaguida’s prophecies in the Heaven of Mars, we are, in each case, on very different thematic and stylistic terrain. In preparing this reading, I have nonetheless been struck by a number of threads, symmetries and oppositions that can be traced across this sequence. At the very least, these connections can help us to bring three distinctive cantos into a productive and revealing conversation, and in certain cases are so pronounced as to make us entertain the possibility of a conscious ‘vertical’ strategy on the part of the poet himself. In particular, these three ‘halfway’ cantos share a strongly metapoetic focus, featuring metatextual imagery and important statements of purpose, and, in this light, I shall ultimately consider how the Seventeens together contribute to Dante’s definition of his poem as a ‘comedy’. I shall begin, however, by briefly reviewing the content and some of the most important ideas that emerge from the Seventeens, before highlighting the structural prominence

1 I would like to thank George Corbett and Heather Webb for inviting to me to participate in the Vertical Readings series and for their generosity and hospitality during my visit to Cambridge. As well as to George and Heather, and the anonymous peer reviewers, I wish to offer my thanks to David Bowe, George Ferzoco, and Simon Gilson for their helpful and thoughtful comments on my chapter.

accorded to the three cantos and reflecting upon some of the imagery, themes and intertexts that might be seen to connect them.

Inferno xvii represents a key moment of transition in the first cantica. It begins in the third and final section of the circle of violence, the seventh circle of Hell, and ultimately recounts the dramatic descent of Dante-pilgrim and Virgil into Malebolge, the circle of fraud. Dante and Virgil descend on the back of the beast Geryon, who had been described in classical literature, including by Virgil, as a monster with three bodies.² The opening description of Dante’s Geryon as ‘quella sozza imagine di froda’

[that filthy image of fraud] (Inf., xvii. 7) presents him as the embodiment of the sin punished in the eighth circle. His benign ‘faccia d’uom giusto’

[face of a just man] (l. 10) distracts us from his hairy forepaws and his serpentine body and tail, as do the vivid colours and extravagant patterns that adorn his flanks. For Robert Hollander, this tripartite form renders him ‘the counterfeit of Christ, three-in-one rather than one in three’.³ As has been widely noted by commentators, Geryon’s monstrous body maps out the way in which fraud unfolds: the righteous countenance and seductive colours, whether visual or rhetorical, lure in and distract the victim until the fraudulent deed (represented by his tail’s ‘venenosa forca’ [poisonous fork], l. 26) is done. Geryon, indeed, has fascinated critics not only as an embodiment of fraud but also as what Teodolinda Barolini describes as the

‘locus classicus for textual self-awareness in the Commedia’,⁴ a daring and supremely self-reflexive creation highly attuned not only to the linguistic dimension of fraud, but also to aspects of the poem’s own unique textuality.

Following the introduction of Geryon comes Dante-pilgrim’s encounter with the usurers. Their charging of interest upon loans, an activity strongly associated with Dante’s native Florence, defied the natural law whereby reward should follow corresponding toil. The usurers in Hell are accordingly static, ‘unmoved movers hunched over their desks in pursuit

2 See Aen., vi. 289. Durling and Martinez detail various sources for Dante’s description of Geryon, from the Book of the Apocalypse to Brunetto Latini and Franciscan discussions of the Antichrist. See Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, ed., trans. and notes by Robert M. Durling and Ronald L. Martinez, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), I, p. 268.

3 Dante Alighieri, The Inferno, trans. by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (New York: Doubleday, 2000), p. 322 (later cited as Hollander). Hollander also notes that the expression ‘Ecco la fiera’ [Behold the beast] (Inf., xvii. 1) recalls the Biblical ‘Ecce homo’

(John 19.5).

4 Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 58.

of gain’.⁵ This is a group depicted by the poet with contempt, taking on the sort of subhuman characteristics that become increasingly common in Malebolge.⁶ While the pilgrim goes to speak to the usurers alone, Virgil prepares Geryon for their descent to the circle below. The descent itself takes up the third and final phase of the canto. Dante describes the hair-raising flight and the fear it aroused within him with reference to the ill-fated flights of two errant Ovidian figures, Phaeton (Met., i. 747-ii. 332) and Icarus (Met., viii. 183–259). Through these similes, he reflects upon his protagonist’s submission to authority and highlights the opposition between a tragic, pagan world view, lacking an underlying principle of salvation, and the redemptive Christian vision of his own Comedy.

Like its infernal counterpart, Purgatorio xvii is a transitional canto that straddles two zones of the realm in question. Here we move from the terrace of the wrathful, the last terrace devoted to sins of misdirected love, to the terrace of sloth, a sin of love lacking vigour. We can again divide the narrative into three distinct phases. Firstly, the pilgrim experiences a series of ecstatic visions in which he perceives three exemplars of destructive anger.⁷ In the middle of the canto, Dante receives the blessing from the angel of meekness, before he and Virgil stop wearily in a liminal space between the terraces. This pause in the narrative provides the opportunity for Virgil, who is accorded here an extraordinary degree of theological insight, to offer one of the most important philosophical discourses of the poem, taking up the last fifty-four lines of the canto, on the nature of love and its role in informing the moral order of Purgatory. Virgil presents ‘amor’ [love] as present in every being, encompassing both creature and creator, but draws a distinction in humans between ‘natural’ love, always directed towards the highest good, and ‘elective’ love, which is subject to free will and thus able to err in its chosen object or its degree, thereby leading us to sin. We learn that the seven deadly sins, punished on the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory, fall into three broader categories: misdirected love (pride, envy,

5 Hollander, Inferno, p. 324.

6 See, for example, the comparison of the sinners to flea-ridden dogs in lines 49–51 and the usurer Renigaldo’s bestial gesture: ‘Qui distorse la bocca e di fuor trasse / la lingua, come bue che ’l naso lecchi’ [Here he twisted his mouth and stuck out his tongue, like an ox licking its snout] (ll. 74–75).

7 Hollander notes the way in which the experience of these visions serves as a ‘trial run’ for the visionary poetics of the Paradiso and especially for the beatific vision of its final canto, anticipated in the use of ‘alta fantasia’ (l. 25), which reappears in the poem’s concluding lines (Par., xxxiii. 142). See Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, trans. by Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander (New York: Doubleday, 2003), p. 380.

wrath), insufficient love (sloth), and the excessive love of secondary goods (avarice, gluttony, lust). This doctrine of love is further developed in canto xviii, especially in relation to free will, and its importance is underlined by its situation at the very core of the Commedia.

Paradiso xvii, the third canto of a triptych dedicated to Dante’s encounter with his great-great-grandfather, the crusader Cacciaguida, constitutes one of the poem’s truly climactic episodes, forming the apex of the poem’s

‘historical’ dimension.⁸ While the previous two cantos in the Heaven of Mars had focused primarily upon Cacciaguida’s personal history and the former glories and current vicissitudes of the city of Florence, canto xvii contains two vital messages delivered by Dante’s ancestor. First, Cacciaguida gives the definitive prophecy of Dante’s painful exile from Florence. He explains with clear words and precise language — ‘con chiare parole e preciso latin’ (l. 34) — what had formerly been articulated through ‘ambage’ [ambiguities] (l. 31).⁹ He tells of the pain, poverty, and humiliation that await Dante, the patrons who will protect him, and the former political allies who will betray him. Yet this experience of exile will prove bittersweet, for Cacciaguida spells out explicitly that Dante’s journey has had a dual purpose. Not only has it been a salvific one from Dante’s individual perspective, but it has served as the basis for a divinely sanctioned poem to be written for the edification of the ‘mondo che mal vive’ [world that lives ill] (Purg., xxxii. 103). We learn, indeed, that the

‘anime che son di fama note’ [souls who are known to fame] (l. 138), whom the pilgrim has encountered on his journey, have been selected to provide the most potent examples to his future readers. Thinking ‘vertically’, we might contrast the ‘fama’ described here with the marked infamy of the

8 See Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, ed. by Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (Milan: Mondadori, 1997), pp. 469–70. Chiavacci Leonardi notes that while Virgil’s Aeneid (evoked here through Dante’s comparison of Cacciaguida to Aeneas’s father Anchises) can only conceive of such a historical apex, the true climax of Dante’s poem comes in the vision of God in the Paradiso’s final canto.

9 Durling and Martinez note that the hapax ‘ambage’ evokes the oracles of the pagan gods. See Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, ed., trans. and notes by Robert M. Durling and Ronald L. Martinez, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996–2011), vol. I (later cited as Durling and Martinez). As Hollander comments, ‘Set off against pagan dark and wayward speech is Christian clarity of word and purpose’. See Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, trans. by Robert and Jean Hollander (New York: Doubleday, 2007), p. 468. Cacciaguida’s prophecy is widely seen as ‘fulfilling’ that provided by his infernal correlative Brunetto Latini (Inf., xv), similarly fashioned as a paternal figure: see, for example, Jeffrey T. Schnapp, ‘Dante’s Ovidian Self-Correction in Paradiso 17’, in The Poetry of Allusion: Virgil and Ovid in Dante’s ‘Commedia’, ed. by Rachel Jacoff and Jeffrey T.

Schnapp (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 214–23 (p. 216).

dehumanized usurers, of whom Dante stated: ‘non ne conobbi alcun’ [I recognized none] (Inf., xvii. 54). The pilgrim is told that, in reporting his experience, he must foreswear all falsehood, must not fear the consequences of his poem’s provocative content. Indeed, exile becomes the requisite platform for Dante in writing this uncompromising poem. Now detached from civic and party-political allegiances, he may speak with a unique candour. Like the descent on Geryon, this encounter with Cacciaguida in canto xvii also features conspicuous allusions to Ovidian figures, as Dante again compares himself to Phaeton as well as to the unjustly exiled Hippolytus. Each figure ostensibly appears as a kind of figura dantis, but, as in the Inferno, Dante is asking us to consider situational contrasts between his Christian protagonist and his pagan alter egos.

It is immediately apparent that, in addition to their thematic heterogeneity, the Seventeens are characterized by very different kinds of poetry: from visceral narrative drama in the Inferno, to philosophical disquisition in the Purgatorio, to intensely personal and prophetic dialogue in the Paradiso. All three cantos are nonetheless pivotal with respect to the development of the narrative as a whole, each representing a different kind of watershed. Inferno xvii marks the passage into Malebolge, a circle distanced in moral, spatial and poetic terms from the previous seven circles;¹⁰Purgatorio xvii sees Virgil elaborate upon a principle that is the foundation of Dante’s Christian ethics and key to the structure of his second realm;¹¹ and Paradiso xvii features the conversation between the pilgrim and his forebear that finally renders his exile from Florence and the very purpose of his journey explicit.¹²

It is no coincidence that the Seventeens feature these episodes, concepts, and revelations of decisive importance, for they are structurally privileged cantos. Purgatorio xvii and Paradiso xvii are the central cantos of their respective cantiche, preceded and followed in each case by sixteen cantos.

Indeed, it is at the centre of his central cantica that Dante situates Virgil’s exposition of what Robert Durling and Ronald Martinez describe as ‘the

10 Barolini describes Inferno xvi–xvii as ‘a land of transition, and proximity to the boundary between old and new is stressed’. See Barolini, Undivine Comedy, p. 72.

11 Charles Singleton describes this as ‘the central pivot of the whole poem’. See Charles Singleton, ‘The Poet’s Number at the Center’, Modern Language Notes 80 (1965), 1–10 (p.

12 John Logan describes this revelation as being ‘as important to the pilgrim as was the 6).

great exposition of love at the centre of the Purgatorio’. See John L. Logan, ‘The Poet’s Central Numbers’, Modern Language Notes 86 (1971), 95–98 (p. 97).

central principle of all things, as well as the central problem of human life’.¹³ The discourse is thereby placed on a pedestal, and the exact centre of the Commedia (Purg., xvii. 125) falls at the precise midpoint of Virgil’s speech.¹⁴ The centrality of Inferno xvii is, of course, less pronounced, since the Inferno features thirty-four rather than thirty-three cantos. Accordingly, the midpoint of the cantica falls between cantos xvii and xviii — the point of transition from the circle of violence to Malebolge and an undoubted watershed in the first cantica.¹⁵ Rather than as representing a ‘central’

episode, we might thus consider Dante and Virgil’s flight upon Geryon as the climactic episode in a demarcated first half of the Inferno.¹⁶

This impression that Dante himself was highly attuned to the centrality associated with the Seventeens is reinforced in the Purgatorio and Paradiso by some intriguing structural and numerological patterns. In his essay ‘The Poet’s Number at the Center’, Charles Singleton notes the symmetrical disposition of the number of lines belonging to the seven cantos that surround Purgatorio xvii:

xiv: 151 xv: 145

xvi: 145 xvii: 139 xviii: 145 xix: 145 xx: 151

Singleton claims his identification of a cluster of seven cantos is supported by the sevens we are given by adding together the digits 151 at either end of the sequence. Furthermore, at the centre of cantos xvi and xviii, either side of our canto, we find corresponding references to the vital concept of

‘libero arbitrio’ [free will]: xvi. 71 and xviii. 74.¹⁷ Each of these is preceded and followed in the canto by twenty-five terzine, with the numbers two

13 Durling and Martinez, II, p. 287. See also Singleton: ‘Thus Love, as the central concern and argument, is seen to inform both God’s world and the poet’s world, there at the centre of both—and this we shall hardly view as an accident’ (p. 1).

14 See Durling and Martinez, II, p. 611, citing Manfred Hardt, ‘I numeri nella poetica di Dante’, Studi danteschi 61 (1989), 1–27.

15 On Malebolge as a narrative and stylistic watershed, see Barolini, Undivine Comedy, pp.

74–76.

16 Hollander describes the successful flight, often seen as microcosmic of the poem as a whole, as a ‘provisional comic ending’ at the midpoint of the first cantica (Inferno, p. 326).

17 Singleton, p. 2.

and five again combining to give a seven. The number seven is, argues Singleton, the ‘number of Creation’,¹⁸ while Durling and Martinez note its numerous resonances in medieval culture, encompassing the seven planets, the vices and virtues, the sacraments, the ecclesiastical orders, and the liberal arts.¹⁹ Additionally, it corresponds in the purgatorial context to the seven terraces that make up the second realm. Singleton regarded this highly contrived numerological sequence as a kind of ‘signature’ at the very core of the poem, marking its completeness and perfection, and serving as an affirmation of divine order that corresponds to the reordering of errant desire that is the essence of the second cantica.

Paradiso xvii, too, is framed by a numerological pattern that highlights its structural, as well as narrative, centrality. John Logan traces a similar symmetrical pattern in the number of lines in the cantos ‘framing’ Paradiso xvii.²⁰ He focuses not on the totals themselves, as had Singleton in the case of the Purgatorio, but rather on the sum of their constituent digits (for example, 139 lines = 1 + 3 + 9 = 13):²¹

x 148 = 13

--xi 139 = 13 ******

xii 145 = 10 *****

xiii 142 = 7 ****

xiv 139 = 13 ***

xv 148 = 13 **

xvi 154 = 10 *

xvii 142 = 7 Centre xviii 136 = 10 *

xix 148 = 13 **

xx 148 = 13 ***

xxi 142 = 7 ****

xxii 154 = 10 *****

xxiii 139 = 13 ******

xxiv 154 = 10

--18 Singleton, p. 8.

19 Durling and Martinez, II, p. 610.

20 See Logan. On the centres of all three cantiche, see Riccardo Ambrosini, ‘Canto XVII’, in Lectura Dantis Turicensis. Paradiso, ed. by Georges Güntert and Michelangelo Picone (Florence: Cesati, 2002), pp. 243–64.

21 As well as in the essays in question, both Singleton’s and Logan’s sequences are usefully set out by Hollander on the Princeton Dante Project site (www.princeton.edu/dante:

note to Purgatorio xvii, 133–39). I have followed Hollander’s helpful formatting of the two sequences here.

Indeed, while one must be circumspect with respect to numerological patterns in the Commedia, Logan identifies an analogous pattern in the Purgatorio, thereby reinforcing Singleton’s argument and all but confirming an authorial intention (symmetries of this particular kind are found nowhere else in the poem).²² The Seventeens, probably more than any vertical sequence, thus underline the extraordinary attention to structure and numerology characteristic of the Commedia, whose architectural intricacy and harmony is intended as a manifestation of the perfection of God’s creation. They confirm, moreover, Dante’s own sense of their ‘centrality’, their place as a structural pillar at the heart of his poem, thematically divergent but containing concepts and episodes that are decisive both in the reader’s experience of the narrative and the pilgrim’s experience of the journey.

In addition to their structural and architectural prominence, the Seventeens are also connected by a number of thematic and lexical threads that invite interesting comparative readings and illuminate facets of the relationship between the three cantiche.²³ Firstly, motion, and in particular images of vertical ascent and descent, play an important role in all three cantos. In the inter-cantica section of their edition of the Purgatorio, Durling and Martinez note the ascent followed by the descent of Geryon in Inferno xvii and the ecstatic visions in Purgatorio xvii that fall like raindrops into Dante’s fantasy — ‘piovve dentro a l’alta fantasia…’ [there rained into my lofty fantasy…] (l. 25) — before breaking up like rising bubbles (‘a guisa d’una bulla / cui manca l’aqua sotto qual si feo, / surse in mia visïone…’

[like a bubble losing the water beneath which it formed, there arose in my vision…], ll. 32–34).²⁴ We might add to this the toilsome ascent of Virgil and Dante up Mount Purgatory itself and, in Paradiso xvii, the image of Dante forlornly ascending and descending the staircase of his patrons in exile:

22 Logan, p. 98.

23 Like other contributors, I must stress that we cannot know whether the correspondences I set out in the next few paragraphs were intended as ‘vertical’ connections by the poet or whether they are merely some of many correspondences based on core semantic fields that could be traced across numerous combinations of cantos. As noted by the series editors, the thorny question of intentionality is not of decisive importance: a vertical

Im Dokument Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy (Seite 142-166)