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 . . .

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.

Proleptic Peripety: The surprise of human feeling in Philoctetes

As Kitto and others have long noted, some of the language of the Philoctetes breathes a common air -- the passages evoking the plight of the main character have a simple, observational naturalness combined with a vivid noticing of another's condition and a pathos that is atypical of the regal, even marmoreal, language of the kings and queens that usually dominate the tragic stage. Even as they suffer, Sophocles' Deianira and Euripides' Phaedra speak with royal temper -- they seem more living statues than hulking, crippled human beings in distress.

See how the chorus describes Philoctetes:

Here, he alone was his own neighbor (πρόσουρος), powerless to walk, with no one in the land to be his companion while he suffered—no one to whom he could cry out a lament that would be answered [695] for the plague that gnawed his flesh and drained his blood—no one to lull with healing herbs gathered from the nourishing earth the burning blood which oozed from the ulcers of his [700] envenomed foot, whenever the torment attacked him. Instead he would then creep this way or that, stumbling like a child without his kind nurse, to any place from where his needs [705] might be supplied, whenever the devouring anguish withdrew.

 . . . 

Ah, joyless was his life, who for ten years never knew the delight of wine, [715] but ever directed his path towards any stagnant pool that he could find as he gazed around him.

 Χορός

ἵν᾽ αὐτὸς ἦν πρόσουρος, οὐκ ἔχων βάσιν, 
οὐδέ τιν᾽ ἐγχώρων κακογείτονα, 
παρ᾽ ᾧ στόνον ἀντίτυπον βαρυβρῶτ᾽ ἀποκλαύσειεν αἱματηρόν: 
ὃς τὰν θερμοτάταν αἱμάδα κηκιομέναν ἑλκέων 
ἐνθήρου ποδὸς ἠπίοισι 
φύλλοις κατευνάσειεν, εἴ τις ἐμπέσοι, 
700φορβάδος ἐκ γαίας ἑλών: 
εἷρπε γὰρ ἄλλοτ᾽ ἀλλαχᾷ 
τότ᾽ ἂν εἰλυόμενος 
παῖς ἄτερ ὡς φίλας τιθήνας ὅθεν εὐμάρει᾽ ὑπάρ- 
705χοι πόρου, ἁνίκ᾽ ἐξανείη δακέθυμος ἄτα:

...

ὦ μελέα ψυχά, 
ὃς μηδ᾽ οἰνοχύτου πώματος ἥσθη δεκέτει χρόνῳ, 
λεύσσων δ᾽ ὅπου γνοίη στατὸν εἰς ὕδωρ, 
ἀεὶ προσενώμα.

The privation of this man, so completely alone that he is "his own neighbor," is compactly rendered with searing images. He's not just alone, but οὐκ ἔχων βάσιν - he does not "possess walking." The word for walk, or step, is βάσιν, the root of our word "basis," and suggests anything that underlies and supports one's ability to move or even stand upright (this is picked up a moment later by the image of the stumbling child.) To lack basis is to not even be "in" the game - you are immobilized and positionless. Unlike those who are supported when they cannot support themselves, Philoctetes has no "social safety net."

The chorus goes on meditate upon this abandoned, purulent life seeking nourishment from stagnant pools: 10 years without wine!

This group of Skyrian friends of Prince Neoptolemus seems to have seen something here. These men have an aroused sense of the limits of bare human existence from acquaintance with this poor creature. Their tone might not be out of place in a journalistic passage from Arundhati Roy depicting the plight of the Dalit.

But we have to indicate two elements of Sophocles' story that decidedly are not to be found in the work of writers like Roy. The first is contained in the verses we omitted in quoting the passage above:

οὐ φορβὰν ἱερᾶς γᾶς σπόρον, οὐκ ἄλλων 
αἴρων τῶν νεμόμεσθ᾽ ἀνέρες ἀλφησταί, 
710πλὴν ἐξ ὠκυβόλων εἴ ποτε τόξων 
πτανοῖς ἰοῖς ἀνύσειε γαστρὶ φορβάν. 

For food he did not gather the fruit of holy Earth, nor anything else that we mortals feed on by our labor, [710] except when on occasion he obtained food to ease his hunger by means of feathered shafts from his swift-striking bow.

In contrast to the meagre, powerless, painfully slow modality of the man, here is the lightning speed and inescapable accuracy of the Bow of Heracles. This instrument comes from the world of high myth, and we need to bear in mind its provenance. Heracles used his bow for many accomplishments - to win Iole; to save Deianira from Nessus; to conquer monsters and cities. In "fact," he used it to kill the eagle that nightly fed on Prometheus's liver! The bow has the aura of a sacred relic combined with the lethal potency of a fleet of weaponized drones.

That Sophocles can smoothly go from such raw "life" to the height of numinal aura without missing a beat is remarkable. It's also is worth bearing in mind as we evaluate the rhetorical thrust of the chorus's speech.

Their rhetoric is the second element that complicates the naturalism of the tale: The chorus is complicit in Odysseus's con game. They have been going along with the elaborate fiction that Neoptolemus, because he's noble and shares the poor man's hatred of Odysseus and the Atreidai, will help Philoctetes get back home.

Right before the choral ode, the matter of trust is ratcheted to a new pitch, as Neoptolemus asks to touch the bow and Philoctetes, in gratitude for his help, agrees to let him hold it, because:

You have raised me up above my enemies
When I was under their feet. (Grene)

A key polarity in the play has to do with the opposition of certain features of Odysseus and of Philoctetes. The wounded man is limited in space and time, he knows nothing of the last decade, and is so filled with need that he hasn't the poise or cleverness (sophos) to be capable of a sophisticated reading of what is happening. He is, essentially, locked in the present, and completely sincere. And he's facing the theatrical chicanery of the cleverest living Greek, and a series of complicit performers who know their parts perfectly.

Yet, it is in this scene that we as onlookers might begin to wonder whether Odysseus's theater piece isn't showing signs of strain. As the chorus beholds this prince reduced to a poor wretch -- not only humbly begging for a berth anywhere on their ship, but also expressing the most sincere gratitude when he believes they are giving him one -- they confront the transformative power of their own wonder:

I truly marvel (θαῦμά) how—how in the world (πῶς ποτε πῶς ποτ᾽) 
—as he listened in solitude to the breakers rushing around him, [690] he kept his hold upon a life so full of grief.

τόδε τοι θαῦμά μ᾽ ἔχει, 
πῶς ποτε πῶς ποτ᾽ ἀμφιπλάκτων ῥοθίων μόνος κλύων, 
690πῶς ἄρα πανδάκρυτον οὕτω βιοτὰν κατέσχεν:

And this man is about commit the ultimate act of trust, handing his bow to Achilles' son. As the chorus witnesses this, something happens to them. They seem surprised by something within themselves, a kind of innocent treason. Their plotted guile appears to be undergoing betrayal by the uncontrollable motion of their hearts.

It is nothing if not Sophoclean to hear in this choral ode the beginning of an unexpected reversal (peripeteia). The friends of Neoptolemus were supposed to sound compassionate, not to be transfixed by human empathy. Yet it is difficult during this choral ode (a separate post will look at its opening) not to detect an undertone of something they weren't meant to have: actual fellow-feeling. The lie of their prepared speech becomes truth as they find themselves meaning, for the first time, what they say. The revolution is not yet overt, but the ode looks ahead to the change of mind (metanoia) Neoptolemus will soon express.

If ever was a ray of hope in Greek tragic drama, it might be here -- if what we are witnessing is indeed the baseless, imponderable power of humanity to usurp the calculated fraud of the cleverest Greek strategist.