Difference in toto: Paradiso 32-33

Top: Birth of Dionysus Below: Triumph of Dionysus

ἢ ὥσπερ Σαπφώ, ὅτι τὸ ἀποθνῄσκειν κακόν·

οἱ θεοὶ γὰρ οὕτω κεκρίκασιν· ἀπέθνησκον γὰρ ἄν.

As Sappho says, death is a great evil

and the gods have judged it so: for they do not die

While reading Paradiso 32 I floated the idea that the two final canti of the Commedia stand in relation to each other, in their poetics as well as in other ways, in much the same manner as the Old Testament to the New:

Canto 32 is unadorned and fails to have an ending because it stands in relation to Paradiso 33 as the Old Covenant to the New. (Wounds of Time)

The thrust of canto 32 is toward the particular and unique. Each unbaptized infant has its own place, and all had been fixed before time began. We are given assorted proper names, individuals, but no clear sense of why these and not others. It displays the seemingly arbitrary predilection that the Old Testament God shows for his chosen people.

As we have seen, Paradiso 33 reaches a crescendo of polymorphic figuration teetering on open-ended linguistic arbitrariness. But there's more.

Canto 33 begins with Bernard's prayer, an act chosen in that moment to pray for Dante's accession to the totality. As when she chose in turn to consent to the wish conveyed by Gabriel, so Mary here chooses to consent to Bernard; Beatrice and all of heaven support the petition.

The freedom of the acts is fundamental: Dante's "wings" carry him upward, his gaze penetrates into the final vision, because they're propelled by the volition of the community of the saved. For one who had lived a life of exile, this vote of communal acceptance brings him into the longed-for fold.

Canto 33 dramatizes inclusion. In contrast, canto 32 has Bernard tracing all the differentiating walls and excluding fissures of divine providence,  the features and fixed destinies of the innocents. It's a discourse chilling enough in its precise fixities to evoke the immobilized denizens beneath the frozen lake of Satan's tears.

The possibility of Canto 33 issues from the Virgin's consent to the divine wish depicted in canto 32. The act of choice links the two canti, and it is choice that enables Dante ultimately to have his desire (il mio disio) moved with the will ('l velle) as the sun and the other stars (Barolini) are moved by l'amor. 

The full assertion of both singularity and totality, I believe, lies behind the charged syntax of the difficult tercet discussed in the previous post about canto 33. The insistence of differentiating oneness is never negated or subsumed -- in fact it betrays a certain trauma, even a frisson of sublime horror, as it beholds the totality:

ma per la vista che s'avvalorava
in me guardando, una sola parvenza,
mutandom' io, a me si travagliava. (112-114)

The vision of a gloria that moves all, yet chooses to allow piu e meno, subtends the Commedia from end to end.

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There is no end to what one could say about this poem. I'll append one suggestion that seems relevant. Dante often echoes ancient myths solely in order to differentiate the nature of his world from that of the ancients. 

For example, the figure of wings recurrent in Paradiso both relates to his name -- ali-ghieri -- and to the power of heaven. The classical myth of Ganymede is all about desire and force -- the boy is so beautiful he's rapt by Zeus to serve the table of the gods.

Ganymede's will is negated in his trip to Olympus. He is prey. Dante has wings because we have will.

Yet that will is insufficient to reach the godhead.

When Dante the pilgrim and the alta fantasia of the poet cannot get there, 

ma non eran da ciò le proprie penne:
 se non che la mia mente fu percossa
 da un fulgore in che sua voglia venne.

The fulgore comes from the other, yet its power fulfills the voglia of Dante.

Yet another myth brings us to a defining irony of the Commedia: When Zeus promised Semele her heart's wish, it meant the fulgore of her own destruction. From that insemination came the god of Tragedy, the anti-Apollo, the obliterator of difference.

The true story for this poet has it otherwise: Mary asks nothing of God. Courtly Gabriel asks her consent to bear the Son of God, and after a bit of questioning, she chooses to say yes. The absolutism of mythic power is not here.

Obliterating all trace of its origin, the fulgore grants a wish that Dante's wings couldn't actualize under their own steam. With the same respect for the other that was apparent at the Annunciation, the illimitable power leaves room for the comedic persistence of a certain Florentine, b.1265 - d.1321.

The birth of Erechtheus

Erechtheus is the strange figure who stands at the root of Athenian culture - born in a most peculiar manner of god(s) and Earth. Erichtheus and Erichthonius are variants of the same character in early accounts, and ought not be confounded with Erichthonius of Dardania, an ancestor of the royal line of Troy.

Erechtheus is said to have taught the people certain key things:

When he grew up, Erichthonius drove out Amphictyon, who had usurped the throne from Cranaus twelve years earlier, and became king of Athens. He married Praxithea, a naiad, and had a son, Pandion I. During this time, Athena frequently protected him. He founded the Panathenaic Festival in the honor of Athena, and set up a wooden statue of her on the Acropolis. According to the Parian Chronicle, he taught his people to yoke horses and use them to pull chariots, to smelt silver, and to till the earth with a plough. It was said that Erichthonius was lame of his feet and that he consequently invented the quadriga, or four-horse chariot to get around easier. He is said to have competed often as a chariot driver in games. Zeus was said to have been so impressed with his skill that he raised him to the heavens to become the constellation of the Charioteer (Auriga) after his death.

The best known version of his birth comes from the Bibliotheca,

Hephaestus attempted to rape Athena but was unsuccessful. His semen fell on the ground, impregnating Gaia. Gaia didn't want the infant Erichthonius, so she gave the baby to the goddess Athena. Athena gave the baby in a box to three women—Aglaulus and her two sisters Herse and Pandrosus—and warned them to never open it. Aglaulus and Herse opened the box. The sight of the infant caused them both to go insane and they threw themselves off the Acropolis,[2] or, according to Hyginus, into the sea.[3]

This blog's title image is from Rubens' illustration of this tale. The Erechtheion in Athens, a temple to both Athena and Poseidon, was named for Erechtheus.

Added: More about Erikthonios and Erechtheus

Hamartia and reversal in the Hippolytus

The stagecraft of Euripides is charged with tremendous compression. From the first moment Phaedra appears to the audience, she mirrors the dying Hippolytus who will be carried on at the end of the play:

Phaedra 

Raise up my body, hold my head erect! My limbs are unstrung. [200] Take my fair arms, servants!

αἴρετέ μου δέμας, ὀρθοῦτε κάρα:
λέλυμαι μελέων σύνδεσμα φίλων.
λάβετ᾽ εὐπήχεις χεῖρας, πρόπολοι. 200

Hippolytus 

Oh! Oh! I beg you by the gods, servants, handle my wounded flesh gently! [1360] Who is standing on my right at my side? Lift me carefully, draw me with muscles ever tensed, me the wretch, cursed by his father's misdeed.

φεῦ φεῦ: πρὸς θεῶν, ἀτρέμα, δμῶες,
χροὸς ἑλκώδους ἅπτεσθε χεροῖν. 1360
τίς ἐφέστηκεν δεξιὰ πλευροῖς;
πρόσφορά μ᾽ αἴρετε, σύντονα δ᾽ ἕλκετε
τὸν κακοδαίμονα καὶ κατάρατον
πατρὸς ἀμπλακίαις.

In response to Phaedra's condition, the nurse suggests that we are all unhappy lovers of the light we have, without experience of a life we yet seem to intimate:

Nurse 

Anything we might love more than life is hid in a surrounding cloud of darkness, and we are clearly unhappy lovers of whatever light there is that shines on earth [195] because we are ignorant of another life, since the life below is not revealed to us. We are borne along foolishly by mere tales (μύθοις).

ἀλλ᾽ ὅ τι τοῦ ζῆν φίλτερον ἄλλο
σκότος ἀμπίσχων κρύπτει νεφέλαις.
δυσέρωτες (sick in love with) δὴ φαινόμεθ᾽ ὄντες
τοῦδ᾽ ὅ τι τοῦτο στίλβει (glitter, gleam) κατὰ γῆν
195 δι᾽ ἀπειροσύνην (inexperience) ἄλλου βιότου
κοὐκ ἀπόδειξιν τῶν ὑπὸ γαίας,
μύθοις δ᾽ ἄλλως φερόμεσθα.

We cannot know, though we conceive, something greater than life to love. We are adrift in stories. The nurse then turns into a midwife/analyst, interrogating Phaedra's story, probing and prodding until she, the analyst, speaks the name "Hippolytus." That "touches" the queen. The nurse's clinical attitude is clear -- better to loosen up, confess your love, even act upon it, than to die from repressing desire. She takes her direction from this view.

Euripides prepares us for the physical and emotional rawness of this revelation scene in the epode of the first choral ode (the parodos), with the strong emphasis the chorus places on the twisted (δυστρόπῳ ) "harmony" of women in the "unhappy helplessness of birth-pangs":

Epode

Women's nature is an uneasy harmony, and with it is wont to dwell the slack unhappy helplessness of birth-pangs and their folly (ἀφροσύνας). [165] Through my womb also has this breath darted.

φιλεῖ δὲ τᾷ δυστρόπῳ γυναικῶν
ἁρμονίᾳ κακὰ δύστανος ἀμηχανία συνοικεῖν
ὠδίνων τε καὶ ἀφροσύνας. 165
δι᾽ ἐμᾶς ᾖξέν ποτε νηδύος ἅδ᾽αὔρα:

The scene between the queen and her nurse, the delivery of the utterance of Phaedra's hidden love is played both as scene of analysis and an act of parturition. Before bringing her secret into the world, Phaedra raves like a woman rendered helpless -- ἀμηχανία -- by the throes of childbirth. Her hysteria centering on Artemis is that of a woman on the edge of madness:

Phaedra
sung
[215] Take me to the mountain: I mean to go to the wood, to the pine-wood, where hounds that kill wild beasts tread, running close after the dappled deer! By the gods, how I want to shout to the hounds [220] and to let fly past my golden hair a javelin of Thessaly, to hold in my hand the sharp-pointed weapon!

Her fixation on the goddess is overdetermined. Artemis is of course the special devotion of Hippolytus, bound up with Phaedra's uncontrollable passion for her stepson. But the virgin goddess also alleviates the pangs of childbirth, as the continuation of the choral epode remembers:

But I called on the heavenly easer of travail, Artemis, mistress of arrows, and she is always—the gods be praised—my much-envied visitor. 165 ff

τὰν δ᾽ εὔλοχον οὐρανίαν
τόξων μεδέουσαν ἀύτευν
Ἄρτεμιν, καί μοι πολυζήλωτος αἰεὶ
σὺν θεοῖσι φοιτᾷ.

For the Greek women of the chorus, the course of love begins in Aphrodite's caresses and ends in the easing interventions of Artemis -- the two goddesses turn out to be as inexorably necessary to a child-bearing woman as they are mutually, radically antithetical.

For Phaedra this symmetry has gotten twisted, tied in a knot. She loves a man who adores the antithesis of love. The chaste goddess who could relieve her pain is linked to her erotic desire. Already wounded by Eros, the queen dreams of being a huntress. She turns to the Mistress of Arrows:

By the gods, how I want to shout to the hounds [220] and to let fly past my golden hair a javelin of Thessaly, to hold in my hand the sharp-pointed weapon!

When the nurse joins the name "Hippolytus" to the birthright of her children, Phaedra's birth pangs become insupportable:

Nurse 

But know well—and in the face of this be more stubborn [305] than the sea if you like—know that if you die you have betrayed your sons, who shall have no share in their father's house, none:
I tell you in the name of that horse-riding queen of the Amazons who bore a master to rule over your sons, a bastard with thoughts of legitimacy, you know him well, [310] Hippolytus. . .

Τροφός 

 ἀλλ᾽ ἴσθι μέντοι — πρὸς τάδ᾽ αὐθαδεστέρα
305 γίγνου θαλάσσης — εἰ θανῇ, προδοῦσα σοὺς
παῖδας, πατρῴων μὴ μεθέξοντας δόμων,
μὰ τὴν ἄνασσαν ἱππίαν Ἀμαζόνα,
ἣ σοῖς τέκνοισι δεσπότην ἐγείνατο
νόθον φρονοῦντα γνήσι᾽, οἶσθά νιν καλῶς,
310 Ἱππόλυτον . . .

Hearing the spoken name, Phaedra emits an involuntary gasp:

Φαίδρα
οἴμοι. 

With the preternatural sensitivity of one used to the labored signs of repression (the poet H.D. called Freud "midwife to the soul"),  the Nurse pounces:

Τροφός

θιγγάνει σέθεν τόδε; - does this touch you?

What has been growing in her must come out. As it does, her dream of holding the pointed weapon - ἐπίλογχον βέλος - turns around. Like Aktaeon, she's no longer doing the hunting, and the barbed arrows will give her no rest.

After this turn, the only pointed weapon Phaedra's hand will hold is a stylus. It will unerringly find its mark in Hippolytus, who will be carried onstage, helpless, like a woman in labor; broken, like a hunted animal brought to ground.

The closely wrought text of the Hippolytus accomplishes an unthinkable reversal: compressing opposed extremes into one tragic act, a queen nobly denying Aphrodite brings down the devotee of Artemis with an arrow forged by Eros. Does the arrow miss the mark (hamartia), or hit it?