Prof: We'll begin today with Inferno.
Let me say a few things about the poem in general,
the structure of the poem, the formal structure,
and then we get into the cantos I, II, III, IV which have been
assigned to you.
I already, in passing, in my introductory remarks,
I did say something about the title as you recall,
the title of the poem.
The poem, we refer to it as the Divine Comedy,
it should be "Comedy."
That's what Dante calls it and he called it comedy for a number
of reasons.
The first reason is that it ends in--with--in happiness.
It's a story that begins with a kind of disorder,
catastrophe if you wish; the pilgrim was lost in the
woods and then works himself out toward the light,
toward the truth, toward God.
That's--so comedy describes the thematic trajectory of the poem.
It's going from one condition to another, and from this point
of view, it's literally the opposite of the tragic movement.
In the tragic movement, you always have some kind of
initial state of cohesion or initial state of happiness that
then goes on-- going toward some kind of
fatality or disaster.
There's a second reason for the title "comedy"
and the second reason is stylistic.
Dante, he calls it a comedy because he adopts the
vernacular, first of all.
As opposed to--the possibility would have been writing it in
Latin in a kind of-- the language of philosophy and
the language of great cultural exchanges but he calls it--
instead he uses the Italian vulgar language.
It also means that stylistically he adopts a humble
style.
You know what the theory of styles is coming to us from
ancient Greece and Rome.
There are three levels of styles.
Three levels of style: there is the high tragic style
or the sublime style that describes exactly the events
that involve kings since style is--
must have some kind of aptness to the situation that the story
describes.
Then, there is a middle style or an elegiac style,
and then there is a low style, the style of comedy,
the style that indeed Dante will adopt lowly;
but this is a kind of peculiar implication for Dante to call a
story such as his, a "comedy"
and this is the implication: that,
in effect, he undercuts the idea of a rigid hierarchy of
reality.
There is no such neat separation of the high,
the middle, and the low.
That which is low and humble, such as the experience he is
describing, his own experience--an ordinary
human being of living around the year 1300 who manages to have
this extraordinary experience of going up to see the face of God
and come back-- to return--come back to the
earth to tell us about it.
It's really a sign that the low can become high and the high can
become low.
That this--that the classical distinctions that we read--
of which we read in the Poetics of Aristotle that
Dante did not know, or in Horace's Poetic
Art that Dante did know, are really false,
are really illusory.
This is not the way to proceed, so Dante has a number of items
that he's pursuing in calling this text the
"Comedy."
The other thing I have to say about the formal structure of
the poem, as you all know,
it's divided into three parts: Hell,
Purgatory, and Paradise.
Easy.
Each of them has thirty-three cantos, with the exception of
Inferno.
Inferno has thirty-four cantos, which means there's
one--Canto I, which we are going to read in a
moment, plus thirty-three.
They are neatly separated in that, Canto I represents and
stands for a kind of general rehearsal.
It's a journey that fails.
Dante--the real journey will begin with Canto II.
It has 100 cantos, but the basic unit of his
narrative is the number 3.
In fact, it's written in so-called a style or a metrical
form, but there're key devices,
a so-called terza rima, that I'm sure you recall from
your own readings in high school or in other courses,
the terza rima, which is the rhyme scheme,
it's always going to be A, B, A, B, C, B and so on.
Number 3 once again is the fundamental symbolic number of
division within this text.
What is the reason for this?
There is a large aesthetic reason and the aesthetic reason
that it can be found formulated, crystallized in a verse from
the Book of Wisdom, "You O God,
have created everything according to number,
measure and weight."
And so the Divine Comedy has to duplicate the symmetry
and the order, and the harmony that he thinks
he sees in the universe.
The poem is presented and introduced as a reflection of
that superior, divine order of the universe
and wants to be part of it.
So it's both as this kind of ambivalence to reflect it and
become what we call a metonymy: the part that wants to be
attached to a larger whole.
So these are the--some general concerns that you've got to have
about the poem, some general ideas that will
help you understand the pattern of parallelisms that we're going
to find within the poem.
And I can give you one very quickly now.
Since I'm really asking you that when you read the poem,
you should be aware that it's a kind of linear structure from 1
to 100.
And yet, within the triple--the tri-partition of the poem --
Hell, Purgatory,
and Paradise -- there are cantos that
correspond to one another.
Canto VI of Inferno, it prefigures Canto VI of
Purgatorio and both of them in turn,
will prefigure Canto VI of Paradise,
Canto VII and so on.
It can be done, Canto X, X and X,
it can be done in a fairly systematic way.
If you wish sometimes you could really read I,
II, III, IV and yet I, I, and I which is--
or maybe you wait for the end of the poem when you have read
the whole poem then you can go back and read it horizontally as
it were as much as vertically down.
These are some ideas, general concerns and
implications in Dante's structure of the poem.
We begin now with Canto I; it's a very well-known canto
where the--it's the general preamble--you know how the poem
starts.
It's--I'm just reading the famous lines,
everybody reads and everybody probably remembers.
"In the middle of the journey of our life,
I came to myself."
Those of you who have a different translation will
nonetheless get the gist and the changes, the shifts are really
minimal.
"I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way
was lost.
Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell of that wood,
savage and harsh and dense, the thought of which renews my
fear!
So bitter it is that death is hardly more.
But to give account of the good which I found there I will tell
of the other things I noted there.
I cannot rightly tell how I entered there.
I was so full of sleep at that moment when I left the true way;
but when I had reached the foot of the hill at the end of that
valley which had pierced my heart with fear I looked up and
saw its shoulders already clothed with the beams of the
planet that leads man straight on every road.
Then the fear was quieted a little which had continued in
the lake of my heart during the night I had spent so piteously;
and as he who with laboring breath has escaped from the deep
to the shore turns to the perilous waters and gazes,
so my mind which was still in flight turned back to look again
at the pass which never yet let any go alive."
It's a great beginning.
It begins in a very extraordinary way;
it begins with--in the middle to begin with,
right?
That's--the beginning is in the middle, the beginning is the
present reality of the pilgrim who finds himself lost,
but it's more in that first line.
"In the middle of the journey of our life"--what
is he saying?
I think it's fairly clear the first conceit and the
fundamental conceit of the poem is that life is a journey,
which means that we are always on the way.
I don't know where we are going yet.
He will find out soon, which means that we are
displaced, which means that we are going to have a number of
adventures.
It means that we are not yet where we want to be.
Life is a journey.
In fact, he will go on--not only go in the middle of the
journey; he also calls it our
life.
That possessive, "our"
life, it's his way of establishing one fact,
that this is not really yet a unique experience.
It's something we all share and something which might also
concern us.
That we are also, not only he is in the journey
of his life, but we too are in that journey of--the common
journey of our life.
Then in contrast to that, there is now an
autobiographical focus.
There is a stress of "I found,"
"I came to myself within a dark wood"
and so on, "I,"
so this is going to be very much the story,
once again, very much as the Vita nuova,
an autobiographical story.
It can only be a personal story, but here the self is
going to see the world--is going to see himself through the prism
of the world.
He will enter a public space.
The great difference, I will say, between the Vita
nuova which we just looked at last time,
and the Divine Comedy is the following.
The Vita nuova was destined to fail as a narrative,
exactly because the protagonist went on drawing us and drawing
himself within the solitude, the interiority of his own life;
a life which was completely disengaged from the concerns for
the outside world.
The Divine Comedy starts exactly with that kind of
shipwreck, the shipwreck of some other
intellectual activities that he will go on describing and I will
describe with you.
As soon as we read this first line,
"I came to myself in a dark wood,"
and if you read a lot of traditional commentators,
traditional commentators will tell you,
oh well Dante is here in a state of sin,
the dark wood is really the condition of spiritual--
maybe despair.
He's at an impasse; we know he doesn't know where
to go.
I think that this allegorizing is a little bit too easy and
it's not really--we have no evidence for this in the poem
yet.
We don't know, but what we do know is that
Dante is lost in a landscape that is terrifying.
He is caught within it; he's clueless about how he got
there.
I don't even know how--he goes on to say,
I don't know how I got myself in that situation,
whatever that situation was, but he knows one thing that he
wants to get out of it.
He understands that.
He does not yet know how he to get out of this situation,
but he knows that he has to get out of the entanglement of the
wood.
Then he goes on, oh how hard it is,
etc., "so bitter is that death is hardly more.
But to give account" -- that's the next tercet --
"of the good which I've found there I will tell of other
things I noted there."
In a way, the poem is already over.
He's now shifting from the narrative of events:
I was lost in the dense, savage, harsh wood of the
night.
His gaze rends this night, tries to find out;
he cannot see anything beyond himself, and then immediately
says, but to tell you the good I noted there I have to tell you
other things.
The poem has, right from the start,
the double narrative focus.
The first focus is that he's going to tell us the story of a
pilgrim who is caught in the-- what we call the diachronic,
the time-bound, the daily events--a number of
encounters which he cannot quite decide as to their meaning.
So he's led by Virgil as we're going to find out soon,
but he doesn't understand what's happening to him.
Then there is the second focus and it's the focus of the poet
who has seen it all and enjoys what we would call an omniscient
perspective.
The whole poem really moves around this double axis:
the axis of a synchronic view, synoptic view of the poet who
has seen, who has--he becomes a poet
because the pilgrim has had this experience,
and then he goes on telling us about this experience.
That's what I call a synoptic and omniscient narrator and then
he looks at the--at what the pilgrim did not know.
There's a kind of irony in this discrepancy between the
diachronic viewpoint of the pilgrim and the synoptic
viewpoint of the poet.
It goes without saying that the structure is not that neat,
you will see that there are moments when Dante will go on--
one's point of view will encroach upon the other,
so I will tell you more about this particular structure and
now he starts this narrative.
Let's see what has happened.
"I cannot tell how," this is the second paragraph of
our translation, "I cannot rightly tell how
I entered there, I was so full of sleep at that
moment."
It's a kind of torpid lethargic, the lack of
consciousness, the lack of
any--everything--his faculties are dormant -- let's paraphrase
it like that.
"When I left the true way; but when I reach the foot of
the hill at the end of that valley which had pierced my
heart with fear I looked up and saw the shoulders already
clothed within the beams of the planet that leads men straight
on every road."
What he does -- dawn has come, dawn breaks,
and he looks up toward the sun believing that the natural
sunlight is going to unveil to him the layout of the land and
he may find an escape route from this particular disaster.
I'll tell you one thing, that if this were a Platonic
narrative the poem would come to an end right here,
because this is what happens in a Platonic narrative.
You are in a cave, you know we are all--this is a
famous myth of the Republic;
we see nothing, we only see flickers of light,
it's like being at the movies, flickers of light,
unreal.
They are simulations of the truth;
they are being projected on the side of the cave,
and we mistake those shadows for realities.
If you are really wise and you are a philosopher then you do
know that you can turn your neck around and find out where the
source of true light is and then you are saved.
The whole experience of the cave is predicated on this
premise: that knowledge saves you, that knowledge is virtue.
And knowledge does save you to the extent in which it really
can heal what one could call the wounds of the intellect:
ignorance being the wound of an intellect which knowledge,
learning, education, philosophy, can really cure.
Dante will find out very quickly that that is a false
promise; that in many ways,
there are realities and that his own realities are going to
be a little bit more complex than what one can find in books,
manuals of philosophy, about how we get saved and how
we can save ourselves.
Let's see what he says here and what happens.
So he sees--he turns toward the light,
I saw already that the sunlight and then he feared this passion,
because it's a passion of the soul,
the fear that paralyzes him and paralyzes his discernment.
He cannot--it literally stops him, does not know which way to
go and it's the overpowering passion at this point of the
poem was quieted a little "which had continued in the
lake of my heart during the night I spent so
piteously."
It's a dark night.
Some mystics--Dante is not a mystic, but he's clearly
alluding to the dark night.
This is the dark night of the soul, this is a spiritual
experience that has found now; it's coming to a head,
if you wish.
"And it is he who with laboring breath his escape from
the deep to the shore turns to the perilous waters and gazes,
so my mind, which was still in flight."
Through the whole passage, I have to tell you,
the two paragraphs we read is replete with neo-Platonic
language.
He is talking about himself as if this were a flight of the
soul, flight of the mind.
My mind which was still in flight, this is the idea that we
have experiences which are purely intellectual,
the kind of experiences that we can all find when we are reading
a book, we are studying,
we are thinking.
The mind takes its flight; i.e., this is an intellectual
problem.
There are many other terms here that remind us of the--his use,
his deliberate use of neo-Platonic language.
For instance the word wood which is in the Latin--
in the Italian is selva, which translates the Greek
hyle, which as you know,
is the primal matter out of which the demiurge will form and
shape reality.
Yet, immediately there is a great shift that I want to focus
on briefly.
"After I had rested my wearied frame for a little,
I took my way again over the desert slope,
keeping always the lower foot firm;
and lo, almost at the beginning of the steep,
a leopard light and very swift, covered with a spotted hide,
and it did not go from before my face but so impeded my way
that I turned many times to go back."
He has been just now talking about the flight of the mind;
"my mind was still in flight."
It's an experience of a shipwreck, first of all,
that many epic stories begin like that.
Think of the Aeneid, the shipwreck of Aeneas on the
shores of Africa as he is about to enter the city that Dido is
about to build and that will bring him to a great revelation
and a great love story with Dido.
Here there's no such a relief for him.
It's the shipwreck of the mind, a mind that seems to be
literally unable to define both his whereabouts and his
destination, but as soon as he does this,
as soon as he understands that that's what the problem is,
he shifts the language from mind to body.
"My wearied body," and this is the great
difference between neo-Platonic narratives and Dante's kind of
experience.
The intrusion of body and what is the body--what does the body
stand for?
The body stands for the limit of purely intellectual journeys.
The real journey that he has to undertake is the journey of mind
and body, and the body stands for the irreducible historicity
of one's self.
The body stands for one's own reality, the passions;
it stands for one's own will.
This is the difference between what the Greeks understand as
the great intellectual adventure,
which is one of knowledge, and Dante's idea that the real
problems are problems of the will.
We may know all where we are and we all may understand that
we are not happy with the situation that we find ourselves
with, but we cannot quite solve it by
knowledge because the problems are problems of willing.
What is he doing?
Let me just try to make this very simple.
There are two schemes, I'm really simplifying it too,
because I think this is dramatic enough in and of
itself.
I don't have to overdo it with unnecessary complications.
There is a Socratic scheme whereby all issues are issues of
intellectual sorts.
I know, and therefore I am virtuous.
I know what justice is and the implication is:
I'm just.
That's a false implication because if I go around the room
here and ask you all to give me a definition,
of each and every one of you of justice,
you'll all tell me something: that justice is a justice
within the self, that justice is a way I relate
to my family, or justice is a way I relate to
the city, or justice is a way I take care
of the problems or whatever of the world that I find myself in.
Dante will say this is not the knowledge of what--the
definition of justice cannot make you just.
The issue is one of willing, desire.
The other scheme that Dante opposes to the Socratic idea
that all issues are issues of philosophy or issues of
knowledge is one of the will.
In the Letter to the Romans, St.
Paul writes, "The good that I will do,
that I do not do.
The evil that I would do that I do."
He draws attention to the essential existential problem,
the problem of the self.
My will is divided against itself.
The only way I may know what to do, but I do not know really,
I am not sure that I will, I will it.
That's the fatality of life.
We all know what's good.
How many of us go around choosing and doing what we know
it's not good for us, it's not the best in terms of
our judgment of situations.
So it's willing and the perspective of the will becomes
Dante's perspective in coming to terms with the limitations of
philosophy and intellectual knowledge.
We shall see Dante talks about the will in a number of ways.
Last time, talking about the Vita nuova,
I began mentioning to you that the will is even better of
course for him than unwilling, and yet the best experiences of
life seem to be those of one does not want to happen to us;
such as a dream, for instance,
the dream of falling in love or sometimes in the death of the
beloved.
You don't--he certainly did not want the death of Beatrice.
It's a way of understanding that unwilling is as compelling
as willing.
And yet he understands that as soon as he focuses on Beatrice
as the figure, the real contingent historical
figure of love, that he has to give a direction
to his own desires, that he has to define the
will--it's-- you understand what I'm saying?
He understands that too.
That's already an anticipation of what--of the problems of the
will.
Now he starts exploring other problems,
which we shall see, both as they relate to the
self, to the psychology of the
character, but also as they relate to
politics for instance.
To a vision of the world as an act of and the projection of our
own will; that the world is the way we
want it to be, and that men are too--to the
way in which we relate to problems which are of problems--
necessary problems, the problems of reality,
etc.
For the time being though, Dante takes the will as his
own, or the body, his own perspective.
He finds out that he cannot go up the hill that he has seen.
Three beasts, just paraphrasing the text,
a leopard, a she-wolf, a lion, and the lion and the
she-wolf will block his journey up and so he's going right back
where he finds himself and he's now back into the deepest
despair possible because there seems to be now really no exit.
Then he sees something, "when I was rushing down
to the place below, there appeared before my eyes
one whose voice seemed weak from long silence.
When I saw him in that great waste," and as you know,
because this is the first words that Dante will say,
the pilgrim, "have pity on me whoever
thou art, I cried to him,
shade or a real man."
These are the words taken from Psalms,
"misere" -- he's prostrating -- of King
David, so he's prostrating himself and
I stress this because the voice, the Davidic voice will
constitute an important strain in this narrative.
How does Dante talk?
That's one of the ways and we shall see how discretely it will
appear further down in the poem and now the conversation what he
meets is-- the fear he meets is Virgil.
"Not man, once I was a man."
Look at what--we can stop a little bit to reflect on what
this experience here has been like and can we define it in
some ways.
Dante finds himself lost in the landscape.
He does not know how he got there.
He mistakes the sunlight, the natural sunlight,
as the light of truth by following which he thinks he can
reach the plain of truth, up to the top of the hill,
the top of the mountain from which he can survey the land and
find the exit, find an escape,
find a transcendence, we'll call it.
Let's call it a way of getting out of that disentanglement.
Then he comes right back.
He sees the three beasts that we don't know what they are.
Are they sins?
Are they dispositions to sins?
They are animals and therefore they stand for animal
projections of our desires, of his desires,
the she-wolf, the lion and the leopard,
that's all we can see about them.
Then he meets a figure that can't even know if it's a shade
or a man.
He's dramatizing what a medieval thought,
a medieval literature; it's called the land of
dissimilitude, the land of an unlikeness.
He finds himself in a world where things are not what they
seem.
Where there seems to be a disparity between,
let's call it--let's use the literary language,
with the signs and things--signs and their
meanings, things and what they stand for
and part of this effort is to literally stitch this to,
this break between signs and symbols,
meanings and signs, stitch them together.
First meeting then is with this figure by the name of Virgil,
who will become his guide.
No man, you know who he is.
He's the author of the Aeneid, but look how he
presents himself.
I think it's crucial you pay attention: "Not man;
once I was man, and my parents were Lombards,
both Mantuan by birth.
I was born sub Iulio,"
meaning Caesar, which is true,
"though, late in his time and I lived in
Rome."
And he gives a biography of himself, a self-presentation in
terms of his life, the historical circumstances
and also his works.
That's what we call a miniature biography: a sense that I came
into this world and somehow.
This is what it all comes down to, this is really the sense of
my birth, and he speaks about his own birth.
"I lived in Rome under the good Augustus in the time of the
false and lying gods.
I was a poet, and sang of that just son of
Anchises," Aeneas, "who came from
Troy after proud Iliam was burned.
But you?
Why are you returning to such misery?
Why dost thou not climb the delectable mountain which is the
beginning and cause of all happiness?"--
meaning the Mountain of Purgatory that will take him to
Eden-- which is really what all things
according to the biblical version of cosmology,
all things started.
He'll say, "art thou then that Virgil the fountain which
pours forth so rich stream of speech?
I answered," etc., "O glory and light
of other poets, let the long study and the
great love that has made me search thy volume avail me.
Thou art my master and my author.
Thou art he from whom I took the style whose beauty has
brought me honor."
This is Virgil, clearly, the poet.
And the extraordinary recommendation,
which I can tell you as a teacher, every teacher really
would love, years after the students have
been studying with the teacher, to give them this kind of great
acknowledgement: how I remember your teaching.
That's what he does, very rhetorical;
we'll call it the rhetoric of capturing the benevolence of the
interlocutor.
It's clear that the exchange between them and the recognition
of Virgil is as a poet, and therefore I have to take a
few minutes to tell you a little bit about this.
It's--because Virgil, we know, he's the poet of
the Aeneid, clearly the story of a journey,
of a grand epic journey by Aeneas.
We'll talk a lot about it; I hope you've been reading that
poem, if you haven't already.
That's not the way he was known.
Virgil was not known this way in, what we call the
twelfth-century Europe, in the culture immediately
preceding Dante's time.
He, Virgil, more than as a poet, was known as a
philosopher.
He was a neo-Platonic philosopher.
That is to say, a neo-Platonic philosopher is
one who had written a poem, but the substance of the poem
was not the fiction about the burning of Troy,
the journey of Aeneas to--as an exile who could go around
looking for a new land with his father on his back and the kid--
the Ascanius by his hand; it was nothing like that.
It really had some philosophical depth.
It was a way of acknowledging that poetry is capable of
providing philosophical illumination.
What was the philosophical message?
I call it neo-Platonic, because it was just very much
like what they thought was the Odyssey in that same
time: the Odyssey, the story of Odysseus or
Ulysses, who goes from Ithaca to Troy,
and then after ten years of the war in Troy goes back to Ithaca.
It takes him ten more years to do that.
The neo-Platonists, the allegorizers,
were viewing that poem as the metaphor for the journey and the
experience of the soul.
It was the story of the soul that goes from the point of
origin, one's home, one's home is
always--we call once home a place of one's--
where one's soul is--when one can find oneself somehow and one
is familiar, comfortable, whatever.
He leaves Ithaca, goes to Troy,
goes through life, and then he has to purify
himself in order to go back, as in a circle,
a neo-Platonic circle back to the point of origin.
This is the neo-Platonic allegory of the Odyssey.
They will do the same thing in the twelfth-century France.
I could give you names if you wish: Bernard Sylvester,
Fulgentius a little bit earlier, John of Salisbury who
was an Englishmen of the twelfth century,
who will go on writing about the Aeneid is the story
of a hero who is born in Troy and then goes through the stages
of life.
Each book represents a stage of life: childhood,
youth, maturity, with all the temptations of the
flesh that happened with Dido and then he goes back to--
arrives in Italy and that's the Book VI.
They would never really bother reading the other book.
The Aeneid was viewed as a philosophical text
illustrating the pattern and the movement of life.
It was really telling us, and that's really the promise
of philosophical knowledge, that we all,
like Aeneas, are born,
but with care and prudence can reach the Promised Land.
Dante changes this interpretation and he changes
this interpretation by making and insisting that you--that
Virgil is a poet.
He replaces the philosophical promises with the idea of poetry
in the belief that poetry is better than philosophy.
That philosophy cannot quite reach the depth of immense light
that makes two general promises for everybody.
It tells that we can all be like Aeneas, going from Troy to
Latium.
And Dante says no; this is not really saying much,
but saying at all about the reality and the individuality of
my life.
Poetic language is for him, the language that addresses
these issues, and therefore,
poetry here is seen as a version of history.
This is--you are the writer, he says to Virgil,
who wrote the poem dealing with Roman history.
Poetry and history--they deal with the world of contingency
and not the world of universal, and therefore,
potentially empty promises.
That's the great change, the great new interpretation
that Dante's advancing about Virgil.
What Virgil will tell him is that the--they go on talking
about--Dante will call him master and author,
this is--and great sage and all that.
And Virgil says to him, this is very simple,
you must take another road; you are going the wrong way.
This is the--that's what I call the idea that Canto I is a
rehearsal to the whole poem.
It gives the story of a journey, a journey that fails,
a journey that is aborted, that's not the way you go.
It's not--you find yourself lost, what do you do?
You try to go quickly up to the destination, you climb up the
hill and you think you can make it.
No, no, no.
Virgil replies that he has to go in a different way.
He may reach the same point, the same destination,
the world of justice, the vision of God,
the idea of love, the good as he calls it,
but he must go down.
That the way up is down, he has to go through the whole
spiral, through the horrors and the
suffering of Hell, then reemerge through Purgatory
in order to be able to reach the beatific vision.
That's very simple.
The way up is down and this is something that marks the
difference between philosophical presumption and the notion of a
spiritual Christian humility that he has to pursue and wants
to pursue.
This is--the conversation between them goes on with this
prophecy of the so-called hound, page 27, line 100.
It says, the world is in such a disarray,
and yet now there's very mysterious and enigmatic
prophecy that we'll come to and discuss by the time we come to
the end of Purgatory and so now the journey begins,
"then he set out and they came on behind him."
That's the end of Canto I and we come to Canto II,
where now it's--what's the time of the year?
If this has to be a historical, a reducible,
and essentially a biographical experience, Dante has to be very
careful.
He will give us the time, the precise time and place of
this experience.
We are--the poem starts on Good Friday, on the evening of Good
Friday of the year 1300.
These are the--so it's a very Christo-mimetic we call it,
an imitation of Christ-like experience,
because he will emerge to the light of Purgatory on Easter
Sunday.
Dante says, why should I take this journey to
extraordinary--you here--this is the whole brunt,
the whole substance of Canto II.
"I'm not Aeneas," he says, "I'm not
Paul."
"Why should I go there?"
Why should I go on?
"You poet" -- I'm on line 10,
"you guidest me, consider my strength,
if it is sufficient...
You tell us of the father of Sylvius as he went,"
meaning of course Aeneas, etc., and then you also tell us
about the Paul and he concludes, "but I,
why should I go there," line 32.
"Who grants it?
I'm not Aeneas, I'm not Paul."
First of all, these are the coordinates,
the imaginative coordinates for his own journey.
Aeneas, the hero who brings about the foundation of Rome and
then Paul, the Apostle to the Gentile,
the thirteenth Apostle who really brings about--
who also goes to Rome, but he was also the spiritual
domain of the Church.
So these are the two--so who is he?
That's the first question he must answer.
"I'm not Aeneas, I'm not Paul."
The implication is who am I?
This whole part of this story is to find out who he is and
part of this journey is indeed to find out--
the beginning of this journey at least,
is to find out that the poem is written in order to bring some
degree of redemption and clarity to the world.
He really believes in this, in what we call
"salvific" role of his own voice.
Not without irony, not without discouragement,
not without a sense that this may indeed be a proud arrogant
kind sort of posture.
This whole idea about who he is, is immediately countered by
a reflection on his own divided will.
I just want to read this thematically,
"and as one who one wills what he willed,
and with new thoughts changes his purpose,
so that he quite withdraws from what he has begun,
such I became on the dark slope; for by thinking of it I brought
to naught the enterprise that was so hasty in its
beginning."
It would take me really too long to give you a sense of an
appropriate gloss to these lines.
They are lines about the limitations of willing.
Dante begins by claiming the importance of the will in the
act of knowledge and we do see that he so aware of it--
there's one detail that I did not mention.
You realize how the pilgrim moves throughout in Canto I and
he will move in the same way but he'll never talk about it again.
He hobbles in--toward the light, he goes around hobbling
and that hobbling is part of his being wounded,
having a wounded will that he must somehow heal.
Someone will say, good, Dante's a voluntarist,
not quite.
Dante doesn't believe in philosophy and intellect,
not quite.
He believes that the two faculties of the soul,
intellect and will, are like the feet of one's
body.
They got to--if you really want to walk fast,
at least, and safely, you got to be using both.
You got to use the intellect and the will.
As soon as he claims the importance of the will,
which the Socratic experience had somehow neglected,
he goes on reflecting about the limitations of the will.
What are the limitations?
One of it is that the will can be divided against itself.
The second one is that the will needs something to regulate it,
because I can will anything, I can will this and that,
how do I order what I will?
The third limitation of the will, and we'll talk more about
the-- some of these aspects but
there's a third limitation of the will is that I can never
really go faster than my own will.
I'm a prisoner of my--if I believe that that's all I have,
my will -- I can't go faster than it.
If the will is weak and slow, and divided,
that's what I am.
I can't go past it, some of the difficulties.
Here he goes, Canto II, trying to think about
the identity and the purpose of this journey--who am I?
"I'm not Aeneas, I'm not Paul,"
then who am I?
That's the great question and as soon as he does this,
he admits--he sheds light on the first internal issue that he
must cure, the internal issue is the
divided will.
We come to Canto III, I'm sorry that we go a little
fast but that's the way -- our will moves fast.
This is now Dante enters into the gate of Hell,
the famous inscription, "Through me the way,"
pretty scary and that scares him quite a lot.
Dante meets--the first sinners that he meets are the so-called
neutral angels, Canto III, around lines 30 and
following, "And I,
my head encircled with horror, said: 'Master what is this I
hear, and who are these people who seem so mastered by their
pain?'
And he said to me: 'This miserable state is borne
by the wretched souls of those who lived without disgrace and
without praise.
They are mixed with that caitiff choir of the angels who
were not rebels, nor faithful to God,
but were--'my text says, "for
themselves."
The right translation is, "by
themselves," because if you are for
yourself, you are for someone.
These are the angels called neutral who in the great cosmic
battle with which the world begins between God and the
satanic forces, just became spectators,
just watching.
The translation is per- in Italian it says "per
se stessi," which we translate as "by
themselves," sort of taking a separation.
In other words, Dante begins by dramatizing
that which to him is the most serious of sins,
not--being disengaged, not taking sides,
in the belief that somehow you wait and see what the outcome is
and then you can go on taking sides.
That's the start of this experience and then he goes on--
why are they--he responds, "They have no hope of
death, etc., pity and justice despise
them.
Let's not talk of them but look at them and pass."
He doesn't even name them, he won't even name them because
to name them would be to bring them into reality and the
neutrality stands and is a sign the way in which they de-realize
the world.
They reduce the world to a pure show of their own--for their own
spectatorship.
So, he goes on from here and now the second action is that he
sees Charon the famous-- he goes into the ferry,
Charon who will ferry all the souls and gives an extraordinary
description of this figure and the souls who blasphemed God and
the parents, the humankind.
And then there is an extraordinary image that I want
to read with you when Dante describes the souls and what he
sees are souls that go on the boat of Charon.
This is toward the end of Canto III, lines 112 and following.
"As in autumn the leaves drop off one after the other
until the branch sees all it spoils on the ground,
so the wicked seed of Adam fling themselves from that
shore, one by one at the signal as a
falcon at its recall.
Thus, they depart, of the dark water and behold of
the land on the other side a fresh crowd collects again on
this.
'My son, said the courteous master,
'all those that die in the wrath of God assemble here from
every land and they're eager to cross the river,' etc."
I really want to focus on this image of the autumn leaves,
whereby Dante describes the dead souls as the leaves in
autumn that have fallen from the tree.
The conceit is that the souls are leaves, and it's an image
that Dante takes straight from the Aeneid of Virgil.
In Book VI, also Virgil describes--Book VI of the
Aeneid, focuses on the descent of
Aeneas into Hades and there he also waits and he sees the souls
waiting for reincarnation, the famous theory of
metempsychosis.
You may have heard of this term, which means the
reincarnation of the souls.
The souls are waiting to be reincarnated and come back in an
endless cycle.
Dante--Virgil himself had taken this image from Homer,
of course.
Dante changes Virgil's, the thrust of Virgil's image,
because in Virgil it's quite accurate since he has a
Pythagorean understanding of existence.
That is to say, life is a continuous circle,
the wheel of becoming, Plato's wheel of becoming.
Time goes on and on returning on itself.
We always witness these circles and cycle of the seasons,
and this is also what happens with human life.
There is nothing really unique about us because we die and then
we can wait for the reincarnation of our soul.
Death in Virgil is an elegiac experience: it's never really
tragic and cannot be tragic, because it lacks that edge of
the uniqueness, the edge that something
particular and special has been happening to the world because I
am here, certainly to my world,
because I am here, and then I may disappear.
Dante changes this idea of this circularity, the elegiac quality
of death and life that we have in Virgil.
Why do I call it elegiac?
Because you die and yet you can come back, because we're really
like leaves: and just as leaves fall in the autumn,
you just wait for the spring.
We might not be the same leaves, but leaves very much
like those that have just fallen will return.
Look what Dante does.
Dante goes on focusing on the idea of uniqueness of every
leaf.
"As in autumn, the leaves drop off one after
the other until the branch sees all its spoils on the ground,
so the wicked seed of Adam," we--
there is already some kind of--some evil being acknowledged
at the root of our own existence,
"the wicked seed of Adam,
fling themselves from the shore one by one at the signal,
as a falcon at its recall.
Thus, they depart over the dark water and before they have
landed on the other side, a fresh crowd collects again on
this."
For Dante, this image shows not that leaves are--
our souls are like leaves, but that a leaf can be
described as a soul only if you insist on its own uniqueness and
the fact that it will never return.
There is one fairly contemporary poet who understood
this and I really want to quote to you a few lines.
I don't know that I remember them all, it's Gerard Manley
Hopkins.
Some of you will have read--who read English literature remember
this, you may remember this.
He writes his famous poem, called Goldengrove
Margaret.
Do you know the poem?
Do you know what I'm talking about?
"Margaret, are you grieving of a
Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves like the things of man you ...
care for, can you?
As the heart grows older it will come to such sights
colder," etc.
and continues.
What is--Hopkins really is reading this image.
What is he really saying?
He's saying he understands that leaves,
like the things of man you care for,
can you--what comes back that's not the life of human beings,
but comes back are the things that human beings may use and
waste and those things.
So the right analogy for Gerard Manley Hopkins,
in a sense, really in the wake of Dante,
is between the things of man, the things that we have,
the things that we can produce and leaves, not souls.
In formal terms, this really means that Dante is
replacing the notion of epic circularity that you find in the
classics, the classics of Homer,
the classics such as the Aeneid,
with an idea of linear novel.
The life of human beings is best described formally by a
novel in the sense that we are caught in a journey that goes
on.
It's unique and will reach its destination whatever it will be.
We don't know yet, at this point,
of the poem.
Now Dante enters into a circle, into the garden,
the first experience in Canto IV.
I will--I want to give you some time to--I will have to deal
with Canto IV and then I will stop.
I'll have to come straight to the point about Canto IV.
Dante comes to what is called "limbo"
the-- a word that comes from Latin,
in Latin it-- that's what limbo is,
this is the edge, that's what it means,
lembos.
In Italian you speak of the lembo,
the edge of a dress or a jacket and so on;
comes to the area of Hell which really is outside of Hell.
In fact, it's very much like the Virgilian after-life of the
virtuous.
And he meets a lot--it's described as a garden,
one of the gardens, one of the three,
four gardens we find a sort of pre-figuration of the--
in many ways of the earthly paradise and gardens in
Purgatory, but it's also pre-figuration of
the world of Paradise where the city,
Jerusalem, is described as a garden.
The first thing about this: it's called the locus
amoenus in case you want to know what the technical term,
locus amoenus, the kind of idyllic place,
and this is a term, a phraseology that belongs to
very much the epic world.
And in the world, for instance,
later in the Renaissance whether it's--
it could be Spencer or Tasso, or Milton,
there is always the story of the hero who reaches this
idyllic bucolic place and-- to relax.
It's really a place of the breakdown of the errancy of the
hero, of the adventurous spirit,
and always shows, or maybe it's just the irony in
literary structures, that whenever heroes seem to
look for a pause to the quest by reaching the garden and
relaxing, that's where they find out they
are in the most dangerous situation.
That whenever you think that you are safe and you can disarm,
and there's the running cool water of the river.
There is the shade; there is the fragrance of the
landscape, this is the way that we're--the
wherewithal, the description of these
bucolic gardens, that's exactly when the snake
will appear.
That's exactly when the enemy will be capable of reaching you
and overwhelm you.
This is also--in other words there are all these places of
temptation and that's what happens here.
Dante here, arrives and he sees the poets,
Canto IV, it's an extraordinary--they're all
virtuous heathens, he sees the poets,
and the great poets that he will see--
the first poets that he will see are--
first of all he sees all the figures from--
he will enumerate the characters, scientists,
philosophers from the Greek and Roman world,
but put a little bit at the edge.
They really don't seem to have much impact on the situation
here.
But then the dramatic situation is when here,
lines 80 and following, "O you,"
he sees the poets, the classical poets from Homer
to Horace and Ovid, "O you who honored both
science and art, who are these to have such
honor that it sets them apart from the condition of the rest?'
And he said to me," Virgil speaking,
"their honorable fame which resounds in thy life
above, gains favor in Heaven, etc.
'Honor the lofty poet, his shade returns that left
us.'
When the voice has paused and there was silence...
I saw four great shades coming to us;
their looks were neither sad nor joyful."
As befits limbo.
It's clearly like life here.
That's what the after-life is in Dante's conception.
It's only an extension of what we choose to do on this earth.
If you really think that life, the beauty of life,
which is not a bad idea, is talking about having endless
seminars of aesthetics or poetry,
as these poets do, that's what your after-life is.
You sit down, sit on the grass and go on
talking about beautiful things, he says.
"The good master began: 'Mark him there with sword in
hand who comes before the three as their lord.
He is Homer, the sovereign poet.
He that comes next is Horace, the moralist.
Ovid is the third, and the last,
Lucan," famous epic poet whom Dante
will again celebrate in Purgatory,
"Since each shares with me in the name the one voice
uttered they give me honorable welcome and in this do well.'
Thus I will assemble the noble school,"
school in Greek means-- it's also leisure,
the leisurely life, scholar, the world of play and
the world of leisure, " the lord of loftiest
song who flies like an eagle," Homer,
" above the rest."
And the irony, of course, is that he's blind
and the eagle to have the sharp view, the sharp vision,
but that Homer's vision is an inner vision.
He looks--he's blind because he's looking inward in order to
know what the song he is to sing will be about.
"After they had talked together for a time,
they turned to me with a sign of greeting and my master smiled
at this; and then they showed me still
greater honor, for they made me one of their
number, so that I was the sixth among those high intelligences.
Thus, we went on as far as the light, talking of things which
were fitting for that place and of which it is well now to be
silent."
Here is Dante.
He inscribes himself in the history of Western poetry;
from Homer to Dante, he counts himself as sixth
among them.
Here's Virgil, here's Lucan,
here's Ovid, here's Horace,
and of course, the master of them,
all Homer.
We go from Homer to Dante, it's a little history,
if you wish, of Western poetry and Dante
thinks that he belongs to it.
We could say a number of things about what they are talking
about.
He says he doesn't say.
We talk about beautiful things which we--I infer we can easily
infer they talk about poetry: they talk about their craft.
There may be a little link that I would like you to reflect on,
on your own, between the garden and the kind
of poetry, the kind of beauty that they
are really talking about.
This is the way Dante's imagination works.
You have to pull together things that don't seem to be
described.
So this is the garden, there's some kind of
self-absorption about this.
There seems to be a kind of self-enclosure about this kind
of poetry.
It's a little scene that reflects on what the spiritual
condition may have been like, but what is the most surprising
and what constitutes the temptation of this canto,
the temptation of the scene for the pilgrim's own spiritual
pilgrimage; he's involved in the spiritual
descent which turns out to be an ascent.
He says at one point "I was sixth among such
genius."
Do you see the discrepancy?
Do you see how this is jarring?
Can you hear it?
He is going down for redemption.
He is descending in humility, and yet now he talks as a poet,
his poetic voice is one that elevates itself.
There seems to be a kind of discrepancy between the two,
that's the great temptation of Dante.
To believe that as a poet he has been claiming that poetry is
better than philosophy, that poetry is like history,
and the first concern Dante has is to reflect on the wholeness
of this claim.
How this kind of claim about the importance of poetry can
turn out to be a temptation for him.
It's a hubris and I focus on it, as I have focused on it,
because in effect what we're going to discuss next time.
Canto V, it is an extended reflection,
a way for Dante to reflect on this claim,
an extended reflection on the dangers of such a claim and the
responsibility of writing poetry.
Dante will meet the great heroine of all love stories,
Francesca.
Everybody knows about this fantastic figure,
a lovely figure Francesca who dies for love,
but Dante's actually encountering a reader of his own
poetry and he witnesses the kind of traps and risk that reading
implies.
We are going to go on next time thinking about this whole
question of reading and responsibilities of writing.
Canto IV, by the way, I cannot leave without saying
something about the epic quality because I have been just talking
about-- I have been defining the poem
really as a novelistic vis-à-vis the
circular structure of an-- of Virgil's understanding of
the reincarnation, and therefore,
the great notion of what an epic is and now I will say--
actually Dante goes on mixing his genres.
As soon as you formulate something, Dante has a way of
undercutting that formulation.
Canto IV ends with a miniature representation of the epic
quality of this text.
It goes on enumerating all the souls that he can see,
which is really as you know, if you remember from your
Iliad on the Gates of Ilion,
at one point Helen will go on numbering all the ships of the
Greeks to the old Priam.
You remember that scene?
Some of you may remember that, and this is the way Canto IV
ends with lines 124 and following:
"There before me on the enamelled green were shown to me
the great spirits by the sight of whom I am uplifted in myself.
I saw Electra with many in her company, of whom I knew Hector
and Aeneas and Caesar..
.I saw Camilla, Penthesilea on the other side,
and I saw the Latian king who sat with his daughter Lavinia;
I saw Brutus who drove out Tarquin, Lucrece,
Julia, Marcia, and Cornelia;
and by himself ...
I saw Saladin," a great sign of honor,
Saladin who sits by himself as a kind of lofty state and,
" when I raised my eyes a little higher I saw the master
of them that now sitting amid a philosophic family...
Socrates...
Plato," the other one was Aristotle,
"Democritus, Diogenes..."
all the Greek philosophers and then Orpheus,
Cicero, Linus, Seneca, Euclid,
Ptolemy.
A version of the classical encyclopedia:
all of the knowledge is gathered here,
and yet Dante has a way of saying that traditional
encyclopedias, these formal structures as he
wanted to organize the world of knowledge,
there is something wanting about them.
Why?
What's wanting about them?
They never tell you how you can really educate yourself.
They never describe the process of education.
To know that to describe the process of education you go to
have an encyclopedic poem where you are showing the phases and
the stages of learning; as the pilgrim will it was the
second thing that I have to say is that,
in any enumeration as you have here,
an epic enumeration, and I will close my remarks for
the day.
Enumerations always imply the wish of a narrative such as an
encyclopedia, because it's as little bit of
an encyclopedic form I say, to encompass the whole of
reality: that's what encyclopedias want to do.
The reality of it, the intellectual reality,
and yet enumerations by their virtual being enumerations will
tell you that no totalization is possible.
There is something that always escapes the formal ordering that
the encyclopedias want to reach.
And for now I stop with my remarks and we have a few
minutes in case there are questions, as I hope there are.
I welcome questions.
I will repeat your questions, by the way, for the benefit of
the videotape.
Please.
Student: So when Dante talks about the first group of
sinners who work for themselves who didn't take a side,
so you think that was also political commentary?
Prof: Yes.
The question is, Dante talks about the neutral
angels.
He calls them "for themselves"
and we say it's "by themselves"
and the question then really is,
is that also a political commentary?
Before I could rephrase, I could repeat this--the
question--I said yes, absolutely.
Dante will use the very same experience for himself later in
Paradise where he will say that in many ways being by oneself,
there are times when that can become an act of virtue where
the notion of neutrality is going to be redefined.
Dante doesn't like clearly neutrality, all right.
Why is he--does he find neutrality?
Because it's a language of privation for him,
it's really way of--it's the decision not to take decisions
because you are always making a decision even when we think that
we are not making a decision, so you really are.
To him that is the sign of a great cowardice.
He explains that in cosmic terms.
This is the metaphysics the great war in Heaven,
which by the way, enables me now to say that it
gives the whole of Hell a kind of symmetrical structure because
it clearly begins with the neutral angels and ends with the
encounter-- with Lucifer at the end.
So you that this is really the kind--what frames the narrative
of Hell.
To go back to your question, when Dante is going to talk
about politics, he also believed,
for a while, that he had to take sides.
He did, and he did by going back now to the few remarks
about his language, his political involvement,
on the first class, the first seminar.
He was banned, he was sentenced to exile,
and then he removed himself from all partisan politics.
How did he do this and why did he do this?
For a while he was a Guelf being thrown out of Florence
with many others, also as an act of punishment
for a decision he had made to throw out the Ghibellines,
among whom his own best friend, Guido Cavalcanti,
who died in exile.
He's thrown out, and we do know these historical
happenings.
They spend the first few years of their exile plotting and
making, and going on through
machinations as to how to get back to Florence and damn it,
really make them pay.
He realizes very quickly the wickedness of this plan.
He realizes that his own party is no better than that of the
Ghibellines and so he removes himself from them,
the act of removal from the criminal violence that he and
his other accomplices were for a while thinking about,
turns out to be madness and so he decides in this act of
virtue, absolute solitude and that is
by himself.
There is a kind of judgment, but let me refine that,
how can you go on really describing that the act of
neutrality is bad.
And yet there is a way in which there are times where neutrality
can become nothing less than a virtuous decision as he will
make.
Other questions?
Please.
Student: I have a question from last Tuesday's
lecture.
Prof: Last--yes please.
Student: Last Tuesday--you talked about
friendship and love, love and
>.
There was no conversation about lust,
and we know from this history that both of them,
Beatrice and Dante were married and that he had children and I'm
wondering if the physical aspect above is irrelevant for the
poet.
Prof: The question refers to the remark I made
about-- that was picked up by a student
also, another student,
the remark about love and friendship as the two are
dramatized in the Vita nuova.
It refers--wants to know, wants me to explore more the
role of lust, since we know that Dante was
married and what does lust have to do with love.
I take, that's really the question.
Let me just say that it's a very complicated question and I
will talk about this next time when we deal with Francesca,
who is of course, the heroine of lust,
if there was ever one.
Then we'll see what Dante means by that.
I mean the--it clearly is an issue related to love,
fundamentally related to love.
But to believe and I'm really--probably have confused
some of you here, but don't be confused,
to believe that Dante's judgment of Francesca is limited
to the representation of Canto V,
where he describes the relationship between lust and
love, lust and love,
would be a grand mistake.
Dante understands that without physicality there could be no
love, that there's no soul which is not connected to a body.
In fact, some of the remarks that I made today are really
about-- can be construed--I did not
make the point but it can be construed as his sense of the
inevitability of the body, that the intellect in and by
itself, the soul in of and by itself,
without materiality, without some degree of being
wedded to the body, is really not part of the human
experience.
This is what I was saying today about the fact that the journey
is not only just an intellectual journey.
It has to be done in the body; it's part of the sense of the
inevitability of the body.
After all, this is really what his Christianity is about:
it's about the incarnation.
It's about the being embodied, about the divinity being
embodied and therefore entering our human condition.
Let me also say that Dante goes on thinking about Francesca.
He condemns her and Francesca is always circling around in
this state of permanent desire with power,
in other words by moving around, they're really
describing their unquiet hearts.
If you are--when you are at peace you just stop and sit.
She just goes on moving around and around;
that's their punishment and yet, he remembers her.
When Dante reaches the Heaven and metaphysics in Paradise and
he has to talk about the kiss of creation,
how creation--God creates the world by imprinting a kiss on
the material that he had at his disposal.
The language that he will use is going to be the language of
Francesca and that to me means that the kiss of Francesca can
also be construed as the existential encounter to God's--
;the--God's kiss on creation.
It's a way--I don't think that he's redeeming her,
there's no such thing as the redemption for the infernal
souls, and yet there is an idea--there
is something that may have gone wrong,
and we'll have to see what it is, and it's not the lust.
We have to see what the situation is;
it's not lust.
I don't think it's only lust and that is part of--there's
something even larger about her.
What--the mistake that she seems to be making is of a
different sort and I'll keep you hanging until next time so
that--otherwise what's the point?
We have to look at Canto V.
Let's read Canto V for next Tuesday, but before you go,
there's some time so in case there are-- we have a couple of
minutes, other questions?
Please.
Student: In Canto I, when he is talking to Virgil
and he says, "you're the only one from
whom my writing drew the noble stuff of which I have been
<<inaudibl e>>."
It's really kind of a lie isn't it?
Prof: It--he says-- Student: So he's saying
that he's-- that he's taken his style from
him and that's the style for which he's been--
for which he's gained honor, but he's not honored as an epic
poet, he's not--that's not--what are
the implications of what he's saying because it's really not
actually true.
Prof: Okay, the question is,
a reference to the encounter between the pilgrim and Virgil
in Canto I of Inferno where Dante--
in what I called the captatio benevolentia,
what are captured in the benevolence of Virgil,
the only living-- he doesn't even know if it's a shade or a
human being, turns out that he is a human
being, he says, well you are the poet
from whom I took the style that has honored--
has made me honor.
The sort of--the real question is, this is a little bit of a
lie isn't it, because Dante by this time is
not really known as an epic poet.
I would really say--call it a lie, say it's part of the
simulation, rhetorical simulation of--captured in the
benevolence of the listener.
At the same time it's really an acknowledgement of Virgil's
mastery, and what is Virgil's mastery?
Dante really thought that his own poetry is--
that Latin is not a dead language, that the vernacular is
really the way Latin has become in time,
so the continuity between Virgil and him is real,
so there's a kind of continuity of poetic continuity.
You're quite right that it's literally--literally it's not
true.
At that point, Dante's more of a provincial
poet or the poet who follows the stilnovisti,
the poets of the Sweet New Style from Bologna and Florence
and then Virgil.
Thank you so much; we'll see you next time.