Open road: Purgatorio 3 on reading

Corpo, the word for "body," appears four times in Purgatorio 3 -- more than in any other canto of the canticle, commentators note. (The word appears nine times in Paradiso 2.) The first half of this canto, with its play of light and shadow, has to do with sensory intelligence -- what later came to be called aesthetics, often elaborated in relation to our experience and judgment of perceptible form -- e.g., art and beauty.

At sunrise, Dante sees that he doesn't see Virgil's shadow, and leaps from that to the fear that Virgil has left him alone. This produces an ironic effect: Not seeing the figura of Virgil causes Dante to not see that Virgil is in fact right next to him, which Dante easily could have seen had he not been fixated on the level of figura.

On the narrative level, this can be seen as a cautionary tale about the differences between a sign and that which the sign stands for. If we remain just with the sign, as Casella's listeners did --

Noi eravam tutti fissi e attenti

                 a le sue note;  
(2.118-19)

we face the possibility of never turning toward that which the sign stands for -- its meaning, or referent.

The introduction of aesthetics brings in its solar train a concern with signs, and thus with language and reading. The Purgatorio is making a "note" that has to do with reading, including the reading of the Purgatorio.

There's a sharp contrast here, in fact, with the mode we found in canto 3 of the Inferno. There we read the identical eternal text that Dante and Virgil encountered. The mouth of hell promised nothing -- to enter is to abandon hope -- it's a gate of no promise, no futurity, no meaning beyond its own self-referencing enunciation.

No such writing stands at the entrance to Purgatory; the only song we hear is soon disrupted. It's worth thinking about the writing that does appear further up the mountain: penitential "P's" are inscribed on Dante's forehead only to be erased, one at a time, as he spirals up the terraces. Here, even writing is not fixed.

Prof. John Freccero, who viewed Dante as profoundly in debt to St. Augustine, long ago noted that within the Augustinian view of reality, there is the human being, who is love; the only question is whether that love is directed toward self, or toward the other, on the way toward the Ultimate Other. If one loves fine dining, for example, this love stops at the meal, which ends up back in the self -- a form of self-idolatry. Love that is not idolatry doesn't fix upon every sign, every desire, every beautiful thing, but moves through all things seeking that in which all live, and move, and have their being. Such love by nature rises to its true home, as Beatrice will explain in the Paradiso.

Here at the base of Purgatorio, in the thick of his own shadow, the pilgrim receives a lesson in signs and reading. And Virgil, after composing himself, speaks in a most Augustinian way:

He's mad who hopes our intellect

can rapidly run that infinite way

kept by one Substance in three Persons.

Matto è chi spera che nostra ragione

possa trascorrer la infinita via

che tiene una sustanza in tre persone.  
(3.34-36)

The pathos here, as Virgil reflects upon the disiar . . . sanza frutto -- the "fruitless longing" of the greatest minds of antiquity -- is justly famous. As readers we now might want to ask how this concern with body, with signs, with reading and aesthetics relates to the unexpected appearance of Manfred and the tale he tells.

Dawn of error: Seeing and disbelieving in Purgatorio 3

The beauty briefly experienced in Purgatorio 2 is intimately interwoven with this canticle's concern with the Aesthetic. We saw how the power of Casella's song captured the attention of the listeners. That motif continues in cantos 3 and 4, and it's worth considering why this concern with attention to sensory appearance -- with its aesthetic and epistemological implications -- surfaces here, and how it is played off against other elements in the text.

Whatever else attention to attention yields, it offers a self-reflexive mode of heightened clarity -- almost transparency. Attention in these cantos is represented as something that can be fixed upon some particular thing, then loosed; it can focus exclusively on one object, as when Dante looks intently at the boat propelled from far to near by the Angel, or when the newly arrived souls focus on Dante's breathing because it signals that, unlike them, he is a living body.

In canto 3, Dante and Virgil, scolded by Cato, have been running like frightened doves after having stood motionless, fixated upon Casella's song. As Dante ceases running, his mind's gaze begins to expand:

la mente mia, che prima era ristretta,
    lo 'ntento rallargò, sì come vaga,
e diedi 'l viso mio incontr' al poggio
che 'nverso 'l ciel più alto si dislaga.

my mind, which was -- before -- too focused, grew 

more curious and widened its attention;
I set my vision toward the slope that rises
most steeply, up to heaven from the sea.*

Note that in Dante's terms, the mind has gone from ristretta to vaga -- from a limited, specific focus to a more open, fluid, indeterminate state. (Vaga in this passage rhymes with dislaga -- almost certainly a word created by Dante: the mountain "dis-lakes" itself from the sea, much as the pilgrim in Inferno 1 barely escaped from the lago del cor.)

Vaga is rooted in the verb vagare, wandering, vague, even "going around without knowing where or why":



What happens next keeps us attuned to the motif of attention. It all turns on the sun's rising from the sea behind the poets. This is the first natural light in the Commedia. As the red flame appears over the horizon, Dante's body casts a shadow; Virgil's does not, and this precipitates a crisis:

Lo sol, che dietro fiammeggiava roggio,
rotto m'era dinanzi a la figura,
ch'avëa in me de' suoi raggi l'appoggio.

Behind my back the sun was flaming red;
but there, ahead of me, its light was shattered
because its rays were resting on my body.*

As C.H. Grandgent points out, the Italian is convoluted. Literally, it's: "The sun . . . was broken before me in that shape which the stoppage (or leaning) of its rays had in me."

The oddness underscores the specular relationship between Dante's body and the figure (figura) it produces (sort of like Lacan's mirror stage). An image of his body unexpectedly appears before him -- it is seen at this point because the sun is just now introducing the mode of visibility. We might want to ask why the first thing the sun reveals to the pilgrim is a mediated image from which he can infer that he himself is in the way -- an obstacle to pure transparency.

The shadow of Dante's body next to the suddenly realized absence of any shadow of Virgil leads to the fear that Virgil has abandoned him. But here, the appearance of Virgil's disappearance is, in fact, mere appearance.

We think of the aesthetic as that which is simply apparent via the senses. Here with the sun's rise, there is light, and with light the eye begins to function. But the functioning is closer to that of the prisoners in Plato's cave than to simple sensory perception.

What Dante sees -- thanks to the big Eye coming up behind him -- is his shadow, the image or representation of a presence. In the same moment, he realizes he does not see Virgil's figura (i.e., he "sees" the absence of any representation of Virgil's presence) and in a panic, he leaps to a false conclusion. Optics, which we thought was our reliable guide to the world, has opened a minefield of representation (a theatre), and proves to mislead the very first chance it gets.

Before the sun rose, Dante had no possible way of making this error: the question of whether Virgil was by his side (or "there for him") never came up. At the very first opportunity, the aesthetic modality of the visible enables Dante to err in believing that Virgil is no longer there.

In a coherent and nuanced way, the handling of seeing and believing here goes considerably beyond popular USian nostrums such as, "what you see is what you get," or the Missourian "seeing is believing." The light of dawn is the moment that the poem complicates the relation of perception and apperception -- what one believes one knows and what one sees, presence and representation, image and substance.

The apparition of the visible (i.e., of apparition) so arrests Dante the pilgrim's attention that he is misled into confusing appearance with knowledge grounded in something beyond appearance. In doing so, he fails to "see the bigger picture." Whatever else is going on here, this canto is thinking through some of the complications of visible appearance, basic to the category of the aesthetic, with critical rigor.

We'll see where this leads in the second half of Purgatorio 3, with the appearance of Manfred.

*Translation by Allen Mandelbaum

Waking to interpretation

Gerry forwarded two notes from a Finnegans Wake List, which draw on the difficulties of grappling with the Wake to address the larger question of how to read literature:

1. (From Jack Kolb) March 11, 2010
Finnegans Wake, Chop Suey

On this day in 1923, James Joyce wrote to his patron, Harriet Weaver, that he had just begun "Work in Progress," the book which would become Finnegans Wake sixteen years later: "Yesterday I wrote two pages -- the first I have written since the final "Yes" of Ulysses. Having found a pen, with some difficulty I copied them out in a large handwriting on a double sheet of foolscap so that I could read them. . . ." Though increasingly plagued by eye problems -- ten operations, and counting -- Joyce's lifestyle had improved from the Ulysses years, thanks to Weaver's continued support, and money given by Sylvia Beach against future royalties. He and his wife, Nora, were able to get new clothes, a new flat, even new teeth: "The dentist is to make me a new set for nothing," wrote Joyce to Miss Weaver, "as with this one I can neither sing, laugh, shave nor (what is more important to my style of writing) yawn. . . ."

Nora was not fond of her husband's style of writing, and not usually content with a yawn. When she discovered that he was "on another book again," just a year after the misery of Ulysses, she asked her husband if, instead of "that chop suey you're writing," he might not try "sensible books that people can understand." Although she did not tighten her purse, Weaver was also unimpressed by those sections of "Work in Progress" which Joyce sent her, and by his explanation that he was attempting to go beyond "wideawake language, cutanddry grammar, and goahead plot":

I do not care much for the output from your Wholesale Safety Pun Factory nor for the darknesses and unintelligibilities of your deliberately-entangled language systems. It seems to me you are wasting your
genius.

Ezra Pound agreed with her -- "nothing short of a divine vision or a new cure for the clap can possibly be worth all the circumambient peripherization" -- but Samuel Beckett did not:

You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read.... It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself.


2. (From Richard Stack:) Many thanks to Jack for bringing this remarkable sentence from Beckett to light:

"You cannot complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read.... It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something. It is that something itself."

Over the past year I have returned to teaching, and have become increasingly convinced of the truth of this view. My students have great difficulty reading poetry, and the reason, I have come to believe, is not that they read badly, but too "well", that is, too fluently, too habitually. Confronted by the difficulty of the poetic text, it is their fluency as everyday readers which becomes an almost insurmountable obstacle.

They seem to find rereading, pondering, working through a difficult text almost impossible to imagine doing. I have found myself trying to get them to imagine the text as great food - something to be chewed, savored, something which sets the mouth to work:

while the nigh thatch / Smokes in the sun-thaw;

(Coleridge Frost at Midnight)

rather than something to be merely "understood".

By the same token, I have found that the text of the Wake - or at least the handful of bits I know well - is best approached in the same sort of manner, not as something to be "understood" but rather as a wonderful piece of "music, something to be rehearsed, played, enjoyed, learnt by heart perhaps. I performed Anna Livia once, and by the time I knew it by heart I could not remember what it was that was supposed to be so difficult about it.

==

Can we relate their discussion to Milton, and more generally, to our experience of classic works? Below is a rudimentary first stab:

 Beckett's description, marvelous as it is, evokes the idea of the poem as end in itself - not unlike the tradition of "art for art's sake," which, since Kant, has brought to the fore the notion that art (poetry, sculpture, painting etc.) need not be about something - need not be burdened with a message that aims to inform, persuade, teach, or inspire. In Kant's memorable formulation in the Critique of Judgment, pure art stems from an activity that can be described as "purposiveness without purpose."

The idea of the art object as "autotelic" -- from the Greek, telos, cause or end -- is particularly associated with Modernism. In earlier periods, art was conceived to serve various purposes, and to bear various messages. For Aristotle, tragedy was a mode of medicine, a purgation of civic ills; for the Greeks, Homer was the teacher of civilization; for Lucretius, whose poems intended to teach the findings of science, his poetry was also a mode of medicine, in which beauty made more palatable the bitter truth:

Lucretius compares his work in this poem to that of a doctor healing a child: just as the doctor may put honey on the rim of a cup containing bitter wormwood (most likely Absinth Wormwood) believed to have healing properties, the patient is "tricked" into accepting something beneficial but difficult to swallow ... WP

The Old Testament similarly stages scenes that provoke, move, and entertain, but also dramatize the act of interpretation -- as when Joseph's life turns upon dreams and his explication of them, or when David, falling for Nathan's parable, discovers that the story he's been hearing works on a different level, and carries a potent bit of news aimed directly at himself.

These are texts that don't just invite interpretation; they incorporate acts of interpretation into their narratives. They demand it.

Where does Milton stand (or, fall) along this spectrum? Insofar as his stated aim is "to justify the ways of God to man," he's declaring his purpose. Yet the poem is also full of rich sound, structural complexity, allusive richness, varied levels of style, musicality, and rhythm. It's difficult to quickly absorb, or to read "too habitually." These lines too are "to be chewed, savored, something which sets the mouth to work."

We are considering the artistic meaning of Milton's poem, but what about art in Paradise Lost? One might well ask, as we join Satan on the backside of the Universe, what purpose is served by the glorious art of the gate of heaven:

 farr distant he descries
Ascending by degrees magnificent
Up to the wall of Heaven a Structure high,
At top whereof, but farr more rich appeer'd
The work as of a Kingly Palace Gate [ 505 ]
With Frontispice of Diamond and Gold
Imbellisht, thick with sparkling orient Gemmes
The Portal shon, inimitable on Earth
By Model, or by shading Pencil drawn. P.L. III

Milton evokes a rare image of a human artist making art in order to deny that what he's describing could be imitated; (interestingly, Dante also gives us a vignette of himself writing his poem at the very end of Purgatory -- and running out of space -- before he ascends to Il Paradiso) -- yet in the next "breath," we're given the vision of Jacob:

The Stairs were such as whereon Jacob saw [ 510 ]
Angels ascending and descending, bands
Of Guardians bright, when he from Esau fled
To Padan-Aram in the field of Luz,
Dreaming by night under the open Skie,
And waking cri'd, This is the Gate of Heav'n [ 515 ]


From the moment of seemingly pure, disinterested aesthetic beauty, the scene has shifted to something far more disturbing, even terrifying: the moment in Genesis 28 when Jacob wakes to the  shock of the meaning of his dream:

16	And Jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, Surely the LORD is in this place; and I knew it not.
17	And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful  (Grk: φοβερός; Latin: terribilis) is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.

It's worthwhile remembering Jacob's terror -- at the advent of his dream's meaning -- as we observe Satan's apparent lack of interest at the foot of the ladder, despite the fact that

Each Stair mysteriously was meant,