A few notes . . . part 2

This is the second in a series of posts about the opening of the Paradiso. 

Part 1     Part 2     Part 3     Part 4     Part 5

The somewhat detailed look into Paradiso 2 in the most recent post served to interrupt the effort to trace a pattern begun a few days earlier, but it was quite helpful. How so should become clear if we go slightly ahead.

Let's look again that scene in Paradiso 3 where Dante says he made an error opposite to that of Narcissus, thinking the faces appearing to him in the moon were specchiati sembianti - mirrored semblances. Turning around to see the source of the images, he says, e nulla vidi - and I saw nothing.

The error here is not simply the opposite of that of the boy who fell in love with his own image; it is also the exact reversal of what happens in at sunrise in Purgatorio 2: Dante, expecting to see Virgil's shadow next to his own, and seeing nothing, turns to where Virgil should be, and in fact still is. Virgil reproves him for mistrusting -- he doesn't cast a shadow because he is one. 

Io mi volsi dallato con paura
d'essere abbandonato, quand' io vidi
solo dinanzi a me la terra oscura; 

e 'l mio conforto: “Perché pur diffidi?”
a dir mi cominciò tutto rivolto;
“non credi tu me teco e ch'io ti guidi?

Unto one side I turned me, with the fear
Of being left alone, when I beheld
Only in front of me the ground obscured. 

"Why dost thou still mistrust?" my Comforter
Began to say to me turned wholly round;
"Dost thou not think me with thee, and that I guide thee?

These scenes in the third canto of each canticle set up mini-paradigms that resonate with the nature of each world the pilgrim is experiencing. For Dante in Purgatorio, it is a matter of trust -- submitting to an authority that is not immediately visible but which, from past experience, one knows to be reliable. (This is also why the Muses in Purgatorio are led by Calliope -- they are on a mission to rhetorically demolish false guides.)

Here in Paradiso 3, the mode is no longer the shadowy realm of expectation, belief, or trust, but of increasingly brilliant surprise. The seemingly mirrored semblances are not images or shadows, but in fact the very beings they appear to be.* The substance of things hoped for is given before it can be hoped for, and this is "revealed" as becomes clear in the nothingness (nulla) the poet turns to see.

This surprise reversal has the structure of hysteron proteron, as used by the poet in the image of the arrow that strikes the target in canto 2:

e forse in tanto in quanto un quadrel posa
e vola e da la noce si dischiava,

And in such space perchance as strikes a bolt
And flies, and from the notch unlocks itself

This figure that reverses cause and effect, completion and beginning, is the challenging narrative trope of Paradiso -- "challenging" because it violates the sequential order of ordinary quest narrative. It also reverses the prefigurative mode in which the Christian Middle Ages read the Bible. The Old Testament was read, as in the superb title of a book on Milton, as "shadowy types" that prefigured the truth (logos) of the New Testament. Once revealed, the Word obviated quest.

If one looks at the three cantos 3 from the perspective of poetics, we can add to the order of the three canticles we began once before:

Inf: hope forever lost                                    -- the letter: "abandon all hope"
Purg: hope actively propelling one ahead       -- shadowy types: guide to truth
Par.: hope substantiated                                -- truth

One could go on ticking off attributes of each canticle that fall into something of this order, but the last thing I want is to overschematize the Commedia. The poem complicates itself as it goes along, and that's more interesting.

How does canto 2 help with the effort to discern a pattern? Consider what we found: When Dante the pilgrim enters the moon, he bogs down his journey by asking Beatrice about the man in the moon, a fabled figure dreamed of by men who can't see him face to face.

But even as Dante is asking Beatrice about this shadowy type, he is himself a man in the moon incarnate. In Par. 3.43-45, the poet explicitly relates the co-joined human and moon to the Incarnation, which will be self evident when we finally get to see it.

Lì si vedrà ciò che tenem per fede,
non dimostrato, ma fia per sé noto
a guisa del ver primo che l'uom crede.

There will be seen what we receive by faith,
Not demonstrated, but self-evident
In guise of the first truth that man believes.

The "spirit" of this scene, its wit, playfully gives us a lunatical misdirection of a quester who asks about distant spots and signs when he in fact is the very thing (a sort of loony λόγος) about which he is asking. This bewilderment tickles, and Beatrice's smile conveys full awareness of what fools these mortals be. Within this frame, laughter can be relaxed and even medicinal -- to see one's own error, even among the wise, will now and again occasion a cathartic spasm of self-debunking laughter.

While the poem is registering esprit on several comedic levels, it never loses sight of the reader, whom it warned about venturing too far out to sea. Dante's bark (legno) is heading for the deepest waters, and those who fail to see their own folly are most at risk of becoming the drowned man the poet of Inferno 1 nearly was.

*This point will be looked at in more detail when we discuss canto 4 in the continuation.

This is the sec in a series of posts about the opening movement of Dante's Paradiso. Here are the other parts: 

Part 1     Part 3     Part 4   

to be continued . . .

The torque of Pride

When Dante crosses the threshold into Purgatory proper and hears the door swing shut, he speaks of the one thing that could never be excused - looking back:

Poi fummo dentro al soglio de la porta
che 'l mal amor de l'anime disusa,
perché fa parer dritta la via torta,

sonando la senti' esser richiusa;
e s'io avesse li occhi vòlti ad essa,
qual fora stata al fallo degna scusa? 

When we had crossed the threshold of the door
Which the perverted love of souls disuses,
Because it makes the crooked way seem straight, 

Re-echoing I heard it closed again;
And if I had turned back mine eyes upon it,
What for my failing had been fit excuse?   (Purg. 10.1-6)

No possible excuse for someone who has been advised not to look back, no matter how strong the temptation. Dante, the new Orpheus, passes the threshold safely and successfully. This is only one of several thresholds, however - instead of assuring the safe return of his Eurydice to mortal life, obeying the order to not look back gives Dante hope of seeing his Beatrice at some future moment, when he is fit to experience her transhumanized form.

One way of understanding a constitutive difference between the canticles, then, could be one's relation to hope:

Inferno:       hope forever lost.
Purgatorio:  hope actively propelling one ahead
Paradiso:     hope substantiated

This small scheme will be subject, of course, to our reading of the Paradiso, which is about to begin. I want to bring up one other thing about the Purgatorio as we get to that new threshold, and it's contained in the snippet quoted above.

che 'l mal amor de l'anime disusa, 

perché fa parer dritta la via torta,

 the threshold (soglia) . . .

that souls' bad love disuses
because it makes the crooked path seem straight.

Entering the terrace of Pride, the poet lays down an apparent law of the human condition: when we desire wrongly, that causes us to see as direct what is in fact crooked, or indirect.

The narrator here posits a turning, or torque, of the soul by which what it sees, and how it sees - cognition - is skewed by what (and how) it wants. Where Plato's soul just needed to be turned around and ascend to see the Good in order to want it, this offers a more Augustinian view. One cannot see straight until one's love (will) has turned toward the Good. The will is what is bound, imprisoned, and the terraces of penitence are about liberating it from its false and deviant loves.

The complex path of discipline, edification, and challenge that the pilgrim goes through before Virgil can "crown and mitre" him as a freely willing self over himself should be kept in view as one enters Paradise.

It's a path with its own complications. I'll just briefly point to one. In the same canto (10) of Purgatorio, before they encounter the Proud souls bearing their pedestals, Dante and Virgil see three narratives depicted on the terrace wall, famously described as visibile parlare: The three tales are the Annunciation, the story of Uzzah and David and Michal, and the tale of Trajan and the widow.

Contemporary commentators including Robert Hollander and Nicola Fosca have noted some complications of the tales -- for example, that the angel's appearing to Mary, which bears the hope of salvation to everyone born after Christ, carries a sense of doom to Virgil, the poet of the 4th Eclogue, whose prophecy of a savior to be born did not save him from Limbo.

Hollander also wonders whether the Proud souls, crushed under the weight of their stones, can even see these storied walls - are the walls inclined so one can see from a very low angle, he and others ask.

Another point that seems relevant is that the first sin, the one upon which all other sins feed, requires those carrying their pedestals to read from their low and oblique angle, over and over again, three tales that, in a very real sense, defy easy understanding. One might quite easily see an image of the Annunciation, but does that mean that one in fact understands it? What would "understanding" mean here?

And if the Annunciation is problematic, the tale of Uzzah poses its own difficulties. Here's a guy leading the oxen that are bearing the Ark of the covenant, and the Ark totters, seeming about to fall. He reaches out his hand - one can easily presume it's an automatic reflex - and is struck dead for presuming to do something he was not tasked to do. Is this readily comprehensible? Or must one go round the mountain several thousand times before it begins to make sense? This is of course about the automatonic nature of our drives, desires, and thoughts - these things we are persuaded we simply control.

The tale of Trajan also runs counter to common sense (as does, of course, the spectacle of David) and all military protocol.

If we gloss over these tales (as I'm doing here), it could be at our peril. If we presume we have read them aright, we might be submitting our qualifications for spending a good amount of time on this very terrace.

Why point this up with emphasis? Let's remember that these works, Dante avers, are produced by an Artist that surpasses Polycletus and Nature itself - making the question of distinguishing real from fake, fact from fiction, a real, not a rhetorical, question. And let's remember that the basic element of Pride is in fact to think something is straight that is not. The torque of Pride and the torque of simplistic reading are not, in this canto, unrelated. In a very real sense, Dante has engaged the full web of rhetoric, the textual deviousness of tropes, mimesis, figuration and narration, in his analysis of Pride. To sin is to be trapped in trope. The presumption of reading -- in the sense of some unmeditated, direct apprehension of a text -- puts one fairly far along the path of error.

One can hope that the challenges of Paradise, however daunting, leave us less prone to tie ourselves in knots.

An unnoticeable lightening of being: Purgatorio 10-12

L'arte non riproduce ciò che è visibile, ma rende visibile ciò che non sempre lo è.

- Paul Klee

As John Sinclair points out in his note for Purgatorio 12, Dante reports that he did not know a P had been removed from his forehead until Virgil told him, a fact he confirmed with his own fingertips. Not only is the first and greatest sin effaced, but the rest are "all but effaced."

The canto has much about art, and much art, which is so real that it seems, he says, "visibile parlare." The phrase captures what would be the pinnacle of proud achievement for any mortal artist: the fusion of the most powerful sensory faculty with the intelligence of speech. What if all the invisible powers of language were so wedded to the realm of the eye that one didn't need to hear sentences unfold themselves in time? Their full meaning would strike at the speed of light.

The hallucinatory superreality of the figures of the terrace of pride, so vivid that

                           non pur Policleto,
           ma la natura li avrebbe scorno

                                  not only Polycletus
                  but nature would be put to shame there (10.32-33),

crosses a threshold that Dante the poet, who for all his fiction of how this is not a fiction (poetry as bella menzogna), has the hubris to depict. It's one thing to slyly nod to the reader when speaking of surpassing the Guidos in poetic accomplishment -- this is how Dante confronts head on any reader's thought that he might have some issues with regard to artistic pride. But that is purely a matter of human fame in the eyes of men.

To dare to create in words a work of art that speaks of divine visibile parlare (10.95), and to insert a visual image, in canto 12, through the repeated letters

V 

O 

M 

would seem to venture into dangerous artistic territory. Here Dante is not far from the famous mythological figures whose thefts from the gods got them in serious trouble -- Tantalos, for one, and Prometheus.

According to Robert Hollander, this has not gone unnoticed by certain readers. Here's one (Barolini) he cites:

"The exaltation of divine art at the expense of human art paradoxically leads to the exaltation of that human artist who most closely imitates divine art."

It's fair to say that while canto 10 opens up the topic of Pride, it seems far more engaged with the language of and about art -- an emphasis that will continue in canto 11 with Oderisi's discussion of how Giotto is superceding Cimabue. Perhaps implicit: God's visibile parlare is to human representation as Giotto's is to Cimabue's. There is no question that with Giotto, a whole new dimension of mass and human gravitas enters painting. The analogy fits, and is lovely, but Cimabue and Giotto are brought in to illustrate the passing of style, the endlessly ephemeral quest for the new. Presumably the divine Artificer's work is not equally subject to artsy fashionistas.

Something here is pointing toward a deep link between the hyperbolic sense of self in pride and the potency with which art renders the world to us. Perhaps the proud are artists with bad ideas, like Arachne.

After all the fascination with a fusion of showing and telling, image and thought, the two appear to be distinct near the end of canto 12. Here as the angel's wing removes the first (and most serious) P from Dante, he is unaware of it. He too is a work of divine art, and the visible speech on his forehead, undergoing erasure, has the effect of lightening the pilgrim. This movement towards levity is another dimension of comedy in the poem. Even as Bevilacqua sat heavily beneath his stone, he managed to transform the mood with his few brief barbs. He too will "lighten up" as he ascends.

Virgil understands what's happening here. Just as canvas doesn't feel the brush, or paper the pen, so the soul doesn't feel the erasure of its sins. Instead

"fier li tuoi piè dal buon voler sì vinti,
che non pur non fatica sentiranno,
ma fia diletto loro esser sù pinti.”

Virgil says:

"Thy feet will be so vanquished by good will,
That not alone they shall not feel fatigue,
But urging up will be to them delight." 

"Vanquished by good will" is a remarkable phrase - it's a happy sufferance of conquest, which in fact will be achieved by Dante when he is "crowned and mitered" over himself at the top of the mountain.

What's notable here is that being overcome by good will seems to happen on its own -- one doesn't fashion it, or will it. The soul, working, continually grows lighter. Good will conquers as one is in process of becoming the butterfly. Pride will suffer, crushed beneath heavy stones.

Once in Purgatory, the course is set by the Artist -- to levity:

on v'accorgete voi che noi siam vermi
nati a formar l'angelica farfalla,
che vola a la giustizia sanza schermi?

Do ye not comprehend that we are worms,
Born to bring forth the angelic butterfly
That flieth unto judgment without screen.

Comic Relief: Palinurus renewed

(Written with time in short supply - a future post might be warranted.)

Before a favoring wind
the fleet sped on. The line in close array
was led by Palinurus, in whose course
all ships were bid to follow.

ferunt sua flamina classem.
Princeps ante omnes densum Palinurus agebat agmen;
ad hunc alii cursum contendere iussi. Aeneid V.832-34

When Dante fails to see Virgil's shadow in Purgatorio 3, he leaps to the conclusion that Virgil is not there. Why does he do this? Because he assumes, or believes, that the same rules apply to Virgil that apply to him. He doesn't entertain the idea that certain rules are unique to him alone here with all these souls.

In his final moments, Manfred could similarly have assumed he was a dead man -- the second death of hell -- and not have asked for forgiveness because he was too outrageously bad. But instead, in tears, he begs. And enters the ship of the angel.

Nothing prepares us for Manfred. If Dante is the unexpectedly live soul among the dead, Manfred is the soul saved despite all the theocratic power of the popes, the unburial and scattering of his remains along the Verde river. Both play against the figure of Palinurus, Aeneas's helmsman whose death, as Jupiter decrees, enabled the Trojan leader's ship to reach the promised land.

One only sinks beneath th' engulfing seas, —
one life in lieu of many. Aen. 5.

Without burial Palinurus's spirit cannot cross the Cocytus to rest. His failure to arrive (he is suspended -- sospesi -- as Virgil says of all the ancients including himself, who are in Limbo), and this failure is bound up with Aeneas's successful arrival to Cumae with the remnant of Troy.

For a pilgrim such as Dante, arriving on the shore of Purgatory is the equivalent of Aeneas's arrival to Latium. Only here Dante arrives early, and cannot stay. But he finds Manfred, who according to all official accounts ought to be an outcast soul like Palinurus, yet instead not only is assured eternal life, but seizes this opportunity to speed up his way to it.

Throughout the Commedia, the irreducible incalculability of Revelation (the Christian dispensation) is juxtaposed again and again with the ancient Greek and Roman sense of Nature, man, and the divine. As it is here.

Capo Palinuro

On one hand, there are the baleful words of the Sybil, who consoles Palinurus with the notion that his name will be remembered, as it is even today, in the name Capo Palinuro, but who speaks of a threshold that bars his spirit from rest:

desine fata deum flecti sperare precando 

Cease to dream that heaven's decrees may be turned aside by prayer.
                                                        Aen. VI.376

On the other hand, compare the words of Manfred:

Orribil furon li peccati miei;
   ma la bontà infinita ha sì gran braccia,
   che prende ciò che si rivolge a lei.

Horrible my iniquities had been;
   But Infinite Goodness hath such ample arms,
   That it receives whatever turns to it.  (Purg. 3. 121-23)

Canto 3 moves from the cognitive difficulties that arrive with the dawn -- the errors of shadow and light -- to a singular act of salvation, which comes when si rivolge - one turns oneself.

Of course, this turning is both an act and a mode of directionality -- the performance of a navigator who finds his way not via the angle of sun or star, but spontaneously, profoundly, an instant before annihilation.

It is precisely "wrong-way Manfred" who divines the way, metamorphosed into a saved Palinurus. The latitude of the gran braccia brings what can only be termed "comic relief," so long as we take that term of art with a new literalness.

Enter Manfred: Purgatorio 3

biondo era e bello e di gentile aspetto ...

Before we look at the role of Manfred in detail in Purgatorio 3, his entrance is worth noting.

Dante and Virgil have just realized that the mountain seems unscalable, when they encounter a slow-moving group of souls:

As sheep come issuing forth from out the fold
By ones and twos and threes, and the others stand
Timidly, holding down their eyes and nostrils, 

And what the foremost does the others do,
Huddling themselves against her, if she stop,
Simple and quiet and the wherefore know not; 

So moving to approach us thereupon
I saw the leader of that fortunate flock,
Modest in face and dignified in gait.  (Longfellow)

Imagine now that one from this tame little flock comes forward, who turns out to be a combination of Mohammed Ali, John Kennedy, and Mick Jagger. That's basically the level of incongruity presented after this unhurried extended simile by the appearance of Manfred, the Ghibelline chieftain who challenged and was excommunicated by three Popes; who commanded Saracens, Greeks, Italians and Germans against the Papal forces, and, wagering all on one great battle at Beneventum, lost all.

So a key element here is humor -- the canto slyly sets up a detailed image of the least contumacious-looking group imaginable, then springs its comedic trap: out walks the love child of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Smiling, Manfred will speak of his body's brutal disfigurement, death and spiteful exhumation on orders of the Pope. He is Dante's counter-image to the figure of Palinurus, Aeneas's unburied helmsman in Aeneid V and VI.

The web of ironies in Manfred's story is rich, and we'll look at the interplay with the figure of Palinurus in another post. This first moment of surprise strikes the comedic note for what follows. It's the shock of the impossible made possible.

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

Purgatorio 2: No time for Orpheus

There is so much going on in each canto of the Commedia as to confound exposition. The Purgatorio can seem more straightforward. It's certainly less spectacular than either the Inferno or the Paradiso (at least until its climax), but the apparent simplicity is belied by the care with which Dante interweaves thematic motifs and suggestive allusions into the bare bones narrative.

Purgatorio 2 for example offers a simple "plot":  The new souls, fresh from the Angel-driven boat, ask Dante and Virgil which way to go. Virgil frankly tells them that he and his companion are just as new -- the band of newcomers then notices Dante's breathing, and stares hard at his face (viso)

as if forgetting to go and make themselves beautiful.
quasi obliando d'ire a farsi belle.

At this moment a shade breaks from the crowd seeking to embrace Dante, who tries to reciprocate, but Casella is a shade. When he speaks, Dante knows him, and a moment later Casella is singing a song he once composed with Dante's words. At this point Cato shouts at them,

Che e cio, spiriti lenti? 

What is this laggard spirits?

At which the souls including Dante and Virgil scatter like a flock of frightened doves.

One motif that clearly comes into play is that of deviant attention. The souls become fixated upon Dante's breathing - his presence as a living man arrests them. A moment later, they are all equally fixed upon Casella's song:

Lo mio maestro e io e quella gente  

ch'eran con lui parevan sì contenti,  

come a nessun toccasse altro la mente.

My master and I and those people
that were with Casella appeared so satisfied
as if no other thing touched our minds. 

In the most casual way, Dante introduces the motif of the enchantments of art -- of music and poetry, and continues the motif of surprise. The delight in the note of the song, and in Casella's voice, captures the attention of all who hear it, not unlike the creatures and even the trees that used to crowd around Orpheus.

Noi eravam tutti fissi e attenti 

a le sue note

       We were all motionless and fixed upon
       his notes

Notice the wit of this poetic "performance": Casella recognizes his old friend, who is in fact, improbably, here in the afterlife in the flesh. It's the dream of Orpheus, except in reverse -- here it's the singer whose body eludes the vainly seeking arms. The song now is not an enchanting device to recall Eurydice from the dead, but the celebration of reunion with a loved one who is unexpectedly alive.

But such motionless attention to earthly things, no matter how beautiful, is out of place here. As Casella sings, he is performing an Orphic act -- recalling the plenitude of living fullness from the past. But here at ground zero of Purgatory, neither a return to some past good nor the stasis of mere aesthetic pleasure is what's called for. The song does not enchant Cato. By the time they reach the garden atop Purgatory, these souls will understand why the old man prods them into running.

The disorientation of the soul at the base of Purgatorio makes it possible for the sinners to err and to be corrected, not damned. The beauty they will make themselves (farsi belle) is not the narcissistic bellezza of artistic form -- as least as far as Cato is concerned. Broken from the poise of perfect aesthetic balance, they scatter like birds -- in contrast to the Angel who powered the boat that brought them there, and who wastes no time:

ed el sen gi, come venne, veloce.

and he took off as he had come - swiftly. 

This scattering dissonance will eventually chase these doves to a new kind of beauty.

Disorienting dawn: Early surprise in the Purgatorio

When Dante and Virgil return to the "chiaro mondo" from hell, they are on the shore of Purgatorio where Dante looks out at the waters where Ulysses drowned. The pilgrim had met the hero a short time before, and now has to ponder how he, a Florentine of no particular epic abilities, has managed to arrive where Ulysses, despite Herculean efforts, did not.

The poets have just climbed down the hairy trunk of Satan, turned at the vermo reo's pelvis, and climbed back to the surface of Earth. Not exactly the heroic setting for a poem of Homeric glory.

From the start, Purgatorio presents things that seem slightly "off." Instead of a triumphal arch, a handshake and a happy meal, there's a beach by trembling waters, simple rushes grow near the shore. An old man with fierce eyes looks back at you from beyond his own suicide.

Professor Mazzotta of Yale makes many fine points in his first lecture on Purgatorio, including the observation that normally in poems of renewal or rebirth, one meets a young person -- their youth betokens their role as emblems of new life. Dante gives us old man Cato -- who less fit to signal the beginning of new, burgeoning, hopeful life than one who ended his existence by force of will?

We soon meet Casella, who is still sufficiently in love with his songs to sing beautifully until Cato scolds him and his auditors into making better use of time. Here, unlike in Inferno and Paradiso, time is of the fabric of the place, and with time, change. But can newly saved souls, who have been ferried across the world by an angel, be so blasé? And if Casella is blasé, what of Belacqua in Purgatorio 4, who sits toadlike under a rock and mocks the efforts of Virgil and Dante to understand the science of what they are seeing?

The first thing to notice is how unexpected everything is. Where we thought we'd regained our bearings, we are thrown. Where's the glory of eternal life and the torments of penitence? Where are the solemn nuns, the flagellant monks, the incense-toting priests and breast-beating penitents that one would expect in a story about Purgatory? Cato? Casella? Manfred? Belacqua? What are these curmudgeons, aesthetes, rock star warriors and slackers doing here? Did we miss our exit?

It takes supreme confidence to do what Dante is doing here.

In the vestibule of Eternal Salvation, we are meeting oddly regular people, the sort we've all known. None of them have anything on Plato, Odysseus, Julius Caesar, or Virgil, all of whom are damned, while the likes of Belacqua and Casella are saved. Before we think we've got a handle on all this, the poet wants us to stew for a while. The poem is disorienting us -- it would be a disservice to rest assured that we know the way.

Calliope and the magpies: Purgatorio 1

As we've noted, the invocations in Dante's Commedia progress. The invocation of Purgatorio 1 goes into greater detail in addressing the Muse than we saw in the first canto of the Inferno.

Dante's choice of theme -- the rise, or renaissance, or resurrection of poetry -- and specific figural language -- the mythic contest of the Muses with the Pierides -- sets up a complex constellation of relationships involving love, death, rebirth, and the nature and quality of poetic inspiration.

A few notes about the scene in Ovid to which Dante points us are below, and they are far from comprehensive -- there's much more to think about with regard to Ovid's tale, and Calliope's tale within the tale, which makes for a rich poetic relationship between Dante's launch of the Purgatorio and his source. The whole of Metamorphoses 5 is suggestive in this regard.

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.

But let dead Poesy here rise again,
O holy Muses, since that I am yours,
And here Calliope somewhat ascend, 

My song accompanying with that sound,
Of which the miserable magpies felt
The blow so great, that they despaired of pardon.

The setting of the contest is, as always in Ovid, complex. Athena is visiting Helicon; she encounters the Muses and, suddenly, hears magpies. The Muses explain how they were challenged by the daughters of Pierus. Athena asks them to relate the whole story:

The Muse was speaking: wings sounded in the air, and voices in greeting came out of the high branches. The daughter of Jupiter looked up, and questioned where the sound came from, that was so much like mouths speaking, and thought it human, though it was birdsong.

Nine of them, magpies, that imitate everything, had settled in the branches, bemoaning their fate. While she wondered, the other began speaking, goddess to goddess, ‘Defeated in a contest, they have been added only recently to the flocks of birds.

Pierus of Pella, rich in fields, was their father, and Paeonian Euippe was their mother. Nine times, while giving birth, she called, nine times, to powerful Lucina. Swollen with pride in their numbers, this crowd of foolish sisters came here, to us, through the many cities of Achaia and Haemonia, and challenged us to a singing competition, saying “Stop cheating the untutored masses with your empty sweetness. If you have faith in yourselves, contend with us, you goddesses of Thespiae. We cannot be outdone in voice or art, and we are your equals in numbers."

After the daughters of Pierus sing their song, Calliope takes up the challenge, and sings a long tale that is primarily but not entirely about the rape of Proserpina and Ceres' search for her. When she finishes, the nymphs who are judging award the prize to the Muses, who are immediately mocked by Pierus's daughters. The contest ends with the Pierides metamorphosing into magpies:

as they tried to speak, and, attack us with insolent hands, making a great clamour, they saw feathers spring from under their nails, and plumage cover their arms. Each one saw the next one’s mouth harden to a solid beak, and a new bird enter the trees. When they wanted to beat their breasts in sorrow, they hung in the air, lifted by the movement of their arms, magpies now, the slanderers of the woods. Even now, as birds, their former eloquence remains, their raucous garrulity, and their monstrous capacity for chatter.’ 

Well worth pondering why, at the beginning of his second Canticle, Dante invokes this Ovidian context.

The imagination of lust in Inferno 5

 
Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende,
    prese costui de la bella persona
    che mi fu tolta; e ’l modo ancor m’offende.
Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona,
    mi prese del costui piacer sì forte,
    che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona.
Amor condusse noi ad una morte.
    Caina attende chi a vita ci spense».
    Queste parole da lor ci fuor porte.

Love, which quickly kindles in noble hearts,        100
    Seized him for that fair body which from me
    Was torn—what grief the manner still imparts!
Love, which makes each loved one pay love’s fee,
    So seized me with the beauty of my friend
    That yet it does not leave me, as you see.
Love led us both to one death in the end.
    Caïna waits for him who quenched our lives above.”
    Thus did these words from them to us descend.*

In Inferno 5, Francesca speaks of Amor as if ironclad rules - like those of courtly love - applied at all times. That is, Amor is not merely a human experience, but it has the force of law, of science, of a system. Her fate is the inevitable result of an inescapable logic before which one -- especially one of the refined sort -- helpless.


The crowds of lovers Dante sees as he enters the circle of Lust are compared to starlings driven by a hurricane:

That hellish tempest roars incessantly;
    It grasps and draws the spirits in its train,
    Spinning and thrashing souls in agony.

As these victims of Love are carried past the ruina - the place where the structure of Limbo was broken by the advent of Christ, they curse:

Each time that they whirl past the ruined terrain,
    Loud shrieks and moans and lamentations spill
    From them—it’s there they curse God’s might in vain.

Quando giungon davanti a la ruina,
    quivi le strida, il compianto, il lamento;
    bestemmian quivi la virtù divina.

Now it's one thing to be "carried away" by an overpowering force; it's another to choose, at a certain moment, to curse divine power. Yes, it's a repetitive process - they utter their imprecations every time they pass the ruina - but to curse requires an act of speech, a decision, a judgment and act of will, quite unlike what it takes for a human body to be propelled by cyclonic winds.

What's more, they are cursing the evidence of a power greater than the forces of nature - a power that liberated certain souls from nature and endless desire, in fact from death. These lovers are cursing the traces of a Love strong enough to break the ultimate rule, the final law, a Love that might have saved them had they not bowed to an ideology that defines mortals as the slaves and playthings of inescapable Love.

One can easily multiply examples of this, irony, this comical disjunction. Essentially the ideology of inescapable Love relies on a model of mechanics. All is determined by measurable forces that cause predictable effects. The very first lines of the canto summon a mathematical relation:

From the first circle I thus went below
    Into the second, which girds a smaller round
   And so much greater grief that stings to woe.

This might well be the most uninspired opening of any canto in the poem - so obviously so that it's best to assume it was deliberate. Numbering, inverse proportionality, going from up to down, it's a dull way to introduce the realm of love and lust. It's mechanical, and the mechanicality gets cruder right away as we encounter the judge:

There horrid Minos makes a snarling sound,
    Examines the offenders that come in,
    Then dooms and sends them as his tail is wound.
I mean, the soul of evil origin,
    Approaching him, confesses all its past;
    And that discerner of the grades of sin
Determines where in Hell it should be classed,          10
    Then wraps his tail around himself to show
    How many circles down he wants it cast.

As a parody of confession, the scene is rich enough - instead of leading to absolution, the Confessor listens, gets an interesting sort of erection, which in turn produces a number indicating where the soul is to be thrown.

Dante and Virgil have just left some of the greatest judges and minds of all time - supple intellects who would have listened, judged with nuance, and invoked insightful reason in the service of justice. But no such luck after Limbo: every soul beyond this point - including Francesca - got treated to the same robotic reflex, the same absence of meditation, the same catapult.

Canto 5 is rich in exempla of a sort of Hobbesian world in which desire simply rules. There is no stopping it, as the souls there know - because for them, desire demands instant capitulation. There is no suspension of cause and effect that would allow understanding, will, and resolve to enter in.

The imagination of Lust will be turned on its head on the Mount of Purgatory -- no time to get into that here. But it's worth a quick look. Compare the lovers buffeted by the whirlwind of Inferno 5 with the newborn soul described in Purgatorio 25 -- the Terrace, not by chance, of the Lustful who are regaining their freedom.

We find a circling there, but one not driven by any natural force outside itself. Statius describes for Dante the new soul, which has just been breathed joyously into life:

                      . . . un alma sola,
che vive e sente e se in se rigira.            74-75

                                 . . . a single soul
that lives and feels and itself revolves upon itself.

However one ultimately chooses to see this model of the psyche, it is not going to be found in Hobbes. Comedy in Dante derives in part from the ironies it finds and probes within the fallen world. As the voyage progresses, it springs more from the delights that come with leaving that world behind.

*All tranlations from Inferno are from an unpublished version by Peter D'Epiro. Purgatorio is from John D. Sinclair's prose edition.

Invocations Infernal and Purgatorial

Prof. Giuseppe Mazzotta of Yale speaks of reading the Comedia "horizontally," that is, with attention to the interaction between similar moments across the three canticles.

If we look for example at the invocations that the poet employs in the three poems, suggestive differences among them can be noted. Each invocation addresses a distinct source of inspiration, from which other potentially significant differences flow in turn. The poem is telling us something about how it is to be read. The invocations of the three canticles can be found here.

The shortest invocation, in the Inferno, addresses the Muses as alto ingenio - this can mean high genius, but ingenium was an ancient Latin term for one's own innate character or nature. From there it extended to the idea of natural capacity, talent, or genius, evolving into a rich and complex sense (see, for example, here and here.)

Dante moves quickly to address mente -- a faculty that scrivesti ciò ch'io vidi -- wrote that which I saw -- hence a form of memory, of notation, faithful to the pilgrim's experience. The poetry of Inferno will be faithful to what the pilgrim saw and heard -- poetry in the mode of representation, mimesis, but thanks to alto ingenio, one that will show its nobilitate.

By contrast, the invocation of Purgatorio invokes the sante Muse, who are asked to let poetry, which is dead, rise again (risurga). This already is more than natural. What's on offer here is not merely recording, but transformative action:

And let here Calliope rise up for a while

and accompany my song with that strain

which smote the ears of the wretched magpies

so that they despaired of pardon.

Calliope, the Muse of Epic, is called upon in particular to rise up alquanto -- perhaps not just for a while, but to an extent, somewhat. Calliope is needed to smite the daughters of Pierus, a "crowd of foolish sisters" who, according to Ovid, were turned to magpies after inanely challenging and losing a competition with the Muses. To accomplish this, it seems, Calliope needs not rise to the highest level of style. That will be sought and needed in Paradiso.

The tale of the battle of songs, taken from Metamorphoses 5, stages the competition, and the contrast between the two performances couldn't be more marked. Calliope, singing of the Rape of Persephone, wins. The judges were the nymphs of Helicon; Athena heard the whole story of how the daughters of Pierus were turned into mimicking magpies.

The invocation of Purgatorio enlists the Muses in a struggle. This is poetry with an active purpose in this world, and it means business. Actually, it means unfinished business, as Purgatorio takes place in time, in the realm of human desire, engagement, choice. Unlike Inferno, things on this mountain are not settled by any means, nor are they fixed in stone. All is in motion. The Purgatorio is quite simply a poem of metamorphosis, like that whose tale of the magpies inspired its invocation.

We'll leave the invocation of the Paradiso for a later moment, for it again calls upon a different source, calling forth yet another mode -- other than pure mimesis or performance - to actualize itself.

Invocations for three canticles

Inferno 2. 7-9

O muse, O alto ingegno, or m'aiutate; 

O mente che scrivesti ciò ch'io vidi, 

qui si parrà la tua nobilitate.

O Muses, O lofty genius, aid me now!

O memory that noted what I saw,

here shall be shown thy worth!

Botticelli: Dante's Inferno

Purgatorio 1. 7-12

Ma qui la morta poesì resurga, 

o sante Muse, poi che vostro sono;

e qui Caliopè alquanto surga, 

seguitando il mio canto con quel suono 

di cui le Piche misere sentiro 

lo colpo tal, che disperar perdono.

But here let poetry rise again from the dead,

O holy Muses, since I am yours;

And let here Calliope rise up for a while

and accompany my song with that strain

which smote the ears of the wretched magpies

so that they despaired of pardon.

Botticelli: Mountain of Purgatory


Paradiso 1. 13-27

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 Marsia traesti
de la vagina de le membra sue.
O divina virtù, se mi ti presti
tanto che l'ombra del beato regno
segnata nel mio capo io manifesti,
vedra'mi al piè del tuo diletto legno
venire, e coronarmi de le foglie
che la materia e tu mi farai degno.

O good Apollo, for this final task

Make of me such a vessel of your power

As you require for your beloved laurel.

Up to this point, one summit of Parnassus

Has served me well, but now I need them both,

Entering on the arena that remains.

Come into my breast and, there within me, breathe,

As once, on that occasion when you drew

Marsyas from the scabbard of his limbs.

O power divine, but grant me of yourself

So much that I may figure forth the shadow

Of the blest realm imprinted in my mind,

And you shall see me come to your chosen tree

And crown myself beneath it with those leaves

Of which my theme and you will make me worthy.

Peter D'Epiro's translation

Human Comedy

Canto 19: Geomancy

Just before the pilgrim has his second dream, he offers a time indication via a reference to geomancy - the ancient art of using figures to tell the future. He refers specifically to the figure of fortuna maior, seen below, second row down, left hand side:



More on astrological geomancy can be found here.

Dore and Dante

This is Gustave Dore's version of the encounter with Marco Lombardo in Canto 16. Numerous scenes from the Commedia as reimagined by Dore can be found here.