Quaderni D'italianistica : Revue Officielle De La Société Canadienne
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DANTE EDITED BY AMILCARE A. lANNUCCI QUADERNISPECIAL SPRING a- FALL VOLUME d' i t a I ia nist ica Official Journal of the Canadian Society for Italian Studies Revue officielle de la société canadienne pour les études italiennes ei EDITOR — DIRECTEUR Massimo Ciavolella {Toronto) ASSOCIATE EDITORS — DIRECTEURS ADJOINTS Antonio Alessio {McMaster) Antonio Franceschetti {Toronto) Amilcare A. lannucci {Toronto) Giusi Oddo de Stefanis {U.B.C.) BOOK REVIEW EDITOR — RESPONSABLE DES COMPTES RENDUS Pamela D. Stewart {McGill) BUSINESS MANAGER — DIRECTEUR ADMINISTRATIF Francesco Guardiani {Toronto) ADVISORY BOARD — CONSEIL CONSULTATIF D. Aguzzi-Barbagli {U.B.C.) I. Lavin {I.A.S. Princeton) K. Bartlett {Toronto) J. Molinaro {Toronto) S. Ciccone {U.B.C.) H. Noce {Toronto) G. Clivio {Toronto) J. Picchione {York) A. D'Andrea {McGill) M. Bandinelli Predelli {McGill) D. Della Terza {Harvard) O. Zorzi Pugliese {Toronto) G. Polena {Padova) W. Temelini {Windsor) J. Freccerò (Stanford) P. Valesio {Yale) H. Izze {Calgary) C. Vasoli {Firenze) S. Gilardino {McGill) E. Zolla {Roma) COPY EDITING — RÉVISION: J. Douglas Campbell {Carleton) Salvatore Bancheri {Toronto) DIRECTOR OF — DIRECTEUR DE BIBLIOTECA DI Quaderni d'italianistica: Leonard G. Sbrocchi {Ottawa) Executive of the Society — Executif de la Société 1987-1989 Président/Président: Gabriele Erasmi {McMaster) Vice-PresidentA'^ice-Présidente: Valeria Sestrieri Lee {Calgary) Secretary-Treasurer/Secrétaire-Trésorier: Gabriele Niccoli {St. Jerome's) Past Président/Présidente sortante: Maria Bandinelli Predelli {McGill) Quaderni d 'italianistica is the official journal of the Canadian Society for Italian Studies / est la revue officielle de la Société canadienne pour les études italiennes. Cover: H. Fudemoto Typeset by Humanities Publishing Services, University of Toronto DANTE TODAY EDITED BY AMILCARE A. lANNUCCI SPECIAL SPRING AND FALL VOLUME QUADERNI d'italianistica Volume X. No. 1-2. 1989 Tish Sass. "Dante Steps into the Computer Age. Foreword When the Comedy first appeared, it was what we now call an instant best seller. The literate read it, copied it, and passed it on to friends. Those who couldn't read gathered eagerly in public squares to hear the latest news from the other world. The poem was immediately and widely known, and soon became both an object of study and a source of creative inspiration. Anyone who attended the centenary celebrations of the Società Dantesca Italiana in November of 1988 must have been struck by how little the situation has changed. As scholars debated fine philo- logical points in the Palazzo Vecchio's magnificent Salone dei Cin- quecento, a steady stream of visitors filtered into the foyer to enjoy wicked caricatures of Italian political figures in an exhibit called "La Divina Repubblica: L'Inferno di Giorgio Forattini." Dante is big business. The exhibit's sponsor, the Italian daily La Repubblica, was cashing in on the general population's familiar- ity with Dante to launch the Florentine edition of the paper. And it worked. Dante has become part of our collective unconscious, with the result that his image is used to sell everything from oil to facsimile machines. Of all the cultural industries fuelled by literary figures, perhaps only Shakespeare surpasses Dante as a draw. As the bibliography in this volume indicates (it lists over 1500 entries for the 5-year period 1984-1988), this industry is still print-oriented, driven by the lucrative educational market in Italy and North America. The new Zanichelli school edition of La Divina Commedia, for instance, sold almost 200,000 copies in its first three years on the market. But not all of Dante's readers are scholars and students. He also enjoys a large reading public outside academe, as the success of such intelligent but decidedly non-academic books as Roberto Fedi's E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle and Giampaolo Dossena's Storia confidenziale della letteratura italiana: Dalle origini a Dante shows. First published in 1987, Dossena's entertaining and unorthodox re- QUADERNI ditalianistica Volume X. No. 1-2. 1989 iv Foreword construction of literary history is already into its third printing. And in Holland, a new translation of the Comedy quickly sold out its initial print run of 6,000 deluxe copies. Moreover, in the new "oral- ity" of our electronic environment (McLuhan, Understanding Media; Ong, Orality and Literacy; etc.), Dante is reclaiming his traditional audience of "listeners" through radio, television and other electronic media. On this subject, more in a moment. How does one explain Dante's enduring popularity, and that of his harsh eschatological masterpiece in particular? The answer, I believe, lies in his poem's distinctive textual characteristics. The Comedy is neither an open nor a closed text (Eco, The Role of the Reader); it is neither writerly nor readerly (Barthes, SIZ). Rather it is more like what Fiske, in Television Culture, calls a "producerly" text. A producerly text is polysemous and combines the easy accessibility of the readerly with the complex discursive strategies of the writerly. These peculiar textual qualities allow the poem to produce meaning and pleasure in audiences which run the gamut from the uneducated to the most sophisticated and discerning. The Comedy's uncanny ability to generate meaning derives not so much from its formal, hierarchical allegory as from the allusive density of its literal narrative. Our cover acknowledges the former but also suggests that much of the energy of the text lies in the latter, which Contini refers to as the Comedy's "altra polisemia." Dante's Comedy generates a number of possible readings, all of which flow naturally from the literal narrative. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that the Comedy's polysemy is boundless and structureless, as some today would argue. Rather the text defines the terrain within which meaning may be made. Where exactly the boundary between a possible reading and an "aberrant" one (Eco) lies is the subject of much theoretical debate. In the world of practi- cal Dante criticism, the problem is not so much "aberrant readings" as not treating the text with sufficient delicacy, of giving undue emphasis to one meaning to the detriment of others packed into Dante's "other polysemy." This is true at both ends of the criti- cal spectrum: erudite and theoretical. But perhaps reductionism is inescapable when one is dealing with a "producerly" text like the Comedy. "The good old text always is a blank for new things." So begins I'orcword v Peter Grecnaway and Tom Phillips' stunning video recreation of In- ferno 5. And what are some of the most interesting "new things" that Dante has managed to produce in the past few years? I make no effort here to survey the state of Dante criticism to- day. Several recent studies have attempted in varying degrees to do precisely that (e.g. Baranski, Kleinhenz, Robey, Vallone) and I refer you to them. (Precise bibliographical references may be found in the "Rassegna bibliografica 1984-88"). Rather I shall focus on those "new things" at the edge of scholarship. My list is necessarily partial and personal. One of the highlights of such a catalogue must be Tom Phillips' engaging "visual commentaries" on the Inferno, which often go to the heart of Dante's purpose, exposing the text's subtle metaliterary discourse. At the other end of the readerly-writerly dichotomy are Achille Incerti 's illustrations to the Comedy, published posthumously last year (1988). Perhaps best described as "existential-naif," they suggest an almost unmediated sense of identification with the text. With little formal education, Incerti began to paint while recovering from tuberculosis in a sanatorium, and to read Dante shortly there- after. He executed his paintings with the spectre of death before him, and it shows. Let us swing back to the "writerly" pole and the staging of the Comedy by an avant-garde director. Federico Tiezzi, as an exercise to train young actors. The first installment. La Commedia dell'Inferno, was presented last June (1989) in Prato. Purgatory and Paradise will follow in the next two years. The scriptwriter, Edoardo Sanguineti, has actually written nothing. Rather he has fragmented and rear- ranged Dante's text, inserting bits of commentary from Boccaccio and Benvenuto, along with occasional citations from other sources from the Provencals to Ezra Pound's Cantos. With its plurilinguistic text, chanting delivery of lines, musical effects, and simultaneous action, the production approximates a 14th century oral performance of Dante's poem. The Middle Ages have been made contemporary, a phenomenon which returns me to the new "orality" of our electronic environment, to which 1 referred earlier. One of the most significant recent developments in the study and appreciation of Dante has been the attempt (conscious or uncon- scious) to "retrieve" electronically the aural/oral dimension of his vi Foreword major work, which had largely disappeared. I am thinking particu- larly of Vittorio Sermonti's scintillating radio broadcasts of the In- ferno (the transcripts of which are now available in book form), and the various attempts to translate Dante from print into video, as well as (on the scholarly front) the Dartmouth Dante Project and other lesser attempts to computerize Dante. (The latest edition of the Zanichelli Commedia comes equipped with a floppy disk.) I shall not linger over this subject, since I treat it extensively in my paper. As for the Dartmouth Project, now in operation, it is described by Robert Hollander in the "Note e Rassegne." With a computer, modem, and password, one can access the database in Dartmouth College's central computer, which will eventually hold over 60 commentaries. Time and space contract, and scholarship becomes immediately accessible. Type "[coloro] che la ragion som- mettono al talento," and watch the screen fill with commentary, like a page in a medieval manuscript. The two illustrations, "Dante Steps into the Computer Age" and "Dante Produces for TV," commis- sioned especially for this volume, visually gloss these technological developments.