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The Figure of Dante: an Essay on the Vita Nuova

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The Figure of Dante: an Essay on the Vita Nuova The Figure of Dante PRINCETON ESSAYS IN LITERATURE For complete listing of books in this series, see page 151 THE FIGURE OF DANTE fa fa AN ESSAY ON THE VITA NUOVA fa fa fa BY fa fa JEROME MAZZARO PRINCETON έ*, fa fa fa fa UNIVERSITY PRESS Copyright © 1981 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found on the last printed page of this book Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from The Paul Mellon Fund of Princeton University Press This book has been composed in Linotron Aldus Designed by Barbara Werden Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and binding materials are chosen for strength and durability Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey For Angus and Lady Fletcher CONTENTS Preface ix CHAPTER ONE The Vita Nuova and the "New" Poet 3 CHAPTER TWO The Viia Nuova and the Literature of Self 27 CHAPTER THREE The Architecture of the Vita Nuova 51 CHAPTER FOUR The Prose of the Vita Nuova 71 CHAPTER FIVE The "Dante" of the Vita Nuova 95 CHAPTER SIX The Vita Nuova and Subsequent Poetic Autobiography 117 Bibliography 139 Index 147 PREFACE Τ. S. Eliot advises in his long essay on Dante (1929) that readers "for several reasons" approach the Vita Nuova only after the Commedia. Otherwise, he contends, the work will yield "noth­ ing but Pre-Raphaelite quaintness." "It is not," he adds, "for Dante, a masterpiece." Yet Eliot insists that of all Dante's minor work "it does more than any [to] . help us to a fuller understanding of the Divine Comedy." Thus, although he keeps the Vita Nuova separate from the work on which he bases Dante's classic stature, he so links them that "classic" shadows over the minor work as well. For most readers, the flaws in­ herent in the Vita Nuova's composition and structure, the con­ fusion of the book's genre, its digressions and failures to deal with certain key events, its conventionality and vagueness of focus, and its interminable inner analyses of poems work against granting it major status. Still, the appeal of the book is unde­ niable. For the Canzoniere, Petrarch preferred its model to the Commedia, and his preference, in some ways, foreshadows John Dryden's valuing Shakespeare's plays with all their flaws above the more regular plays of Ben Jonson. What follows is, in part, an examination of some of the reasons why flawed—and in the case of the Vifa Nuova less richly conceived—works achieve such strong interest. In this examination, I have built on Victor Turner's work in "liminality" and his belief that "liminality may perhaps be regarded as the Nay to all positive structural assertions." It is "in some sense the source of them all, and, more than that . a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise." I have also built on Angus Fletcher's important formulation of "the pro­ phetic moment." Turner develops his concept of "liminality" from the divisions (χ) PREFACE of status rituals into separation (separation), margin or limen (marge), and incorporation (agregation) in Arnold van Gen- nup's groundbreaking Rites of Passage (1909). Van Gennup proposes these rites with their symbolic representations of death and rebirth as illustrative of the principle of regenerative re­ newal required by societies, and since his study, the divisions have been extended by Roland Barthes to a "structuralist ac­ tivity" comprising decomposition, investment, and recompo- sition. For Turner and van Gennup, a loss of power gained from status, authority, and social structure and a compensatory in­ crease in "sacred" power characterize the middle phase, and for Turner especially, certain intense circumstances generate un­ precedented forms and new metaphors and paradigms. The phase, thus, makes possible what, in The Prophetic Moment (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1971), Fletcher terms a "crit­ ical juncture" in art when historical and apocalyptic forces meet. The common literary expression of this juncture is "divine in­ spiration," though since the Romantics the divinity of the junc­ ture has been reduced to a worldly combination of lengthy and deep meditation and "a more than usual organic sensibility." Not so much the literary content of the Vi'fa Nuova, then, as the union of its novel content with an ongoing new social role is my concern. Using himself, Dante defines for himself and others the qualities that he ventures a "new" poet should have. The Figure of Dante, thus, accords with Turner's recent calls for extending comparative research to matters of ritual and literary form. Its presentation of the autobiographical impulse as an effort to escape determinative models of self-realization helps to explain autobiography's flourishing in periods of great social change. Self-depiction becomes an assertion of new pos­ sibilities, perceived—as Claude Levi-Strauss indicates myth is perceived—as a possibility whose distance must be filled by improvised self-ordination. Often the Tightness of these pos­ sibilities overpowers losses that flaws in the improvisations might otherwise incur, and, thus, The Figure of Dante attacks to some degree the view of those formalists who would make too rigorous a recognition of established form as necessary for PREFACE (χί) aesthetic appreciation. Part of aesthetic appreciation can lie in the ability to perceive and forgive and, by forgiving, to cancel those distances that "perfect" works generate. In dealing with these matters of self-depiction, The Figure of Dante continues a preoccupation that began with two of my earlier studies: Transformations in the Renaissance English Lyric (Ithaca: Cor­ nell Univ. Press, 1970) and William Carlos Williams: The Later Poems (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1973). Dealing with the impulse toward self-definition at a time when, as Leo Spitzer remarks, self-depiction was more ontological than autobio­ graphical, The Figure of Dante may be read as a prologue to those works. Traditional approaches to the Vita Nuova have tended to see the work—either in whole or in terms of its poetry—as tran­ sitional. For a number of readers, the work is the embodiment of a change from the sentiments of Proven$al lyrics to the dolce stil novo of Tuscany and finally to the verses of the Commedia. In order to chart these changes, the poems have often been removed from their places in the Vita Nuova and examined— as the majority of them were unquestionably written—as in­ dividual poems responding to particular conventions, incidents, and individuals and interacting with other conventions, inci­ dents, poems, and individuals that for matters of coherence Dante chose not to include in the final work. These examinations have tended to see the meaning of the work in terms of courtly or sacred love, Guido Cavalcanti, Guido Guinizelli, Beatrice, a circle of "fedeli d'Amore," or various "screen" ladies. While valuably illuminative, such readings have inclined to slight the interaction of poems within the Vita Nuova and, as significantly, the characterization of Dante whose "book of memory" and "new life" are presumably the work's focus. Such readings have accompanied insistences by scholars like Domenico de Robertis that the interaction of the poetry and prose is no less interesting and vital than the work's other dialogues for understanding the whole as an education in "nobility" and the "perfection" of Dante's nature. Coexisting with this tendency to extract the poetry is a second tendency to view independently the stylistic (χίί) PREFACE components and ordering of incidents in the prose and to relate these elements to the subsequent flowering of Italian prose nar­ rative. Nonetheless, the ordering of Dante's poems into a collection of early lyrics serves to remind readers just how willed the construction of the Vita Nuova is. A number of the poems which for one reason or another do not suit the work's purpose are excluded. Others, like the work's opening sonnet ("A cia- scun'alma presa e gentil core"), are forced into statements they did not originally intend. Still others, like "Donna pietosa e di novella etate," appear to have been written precisely for inclu­ sion in the work and composed perhaps after the prose accom­ paniment. The Viifl Nuova, thus, seems to function much as Dante's later glances in the Convivio and Commedia—as a ret­ rospective and sudden crystallization of self. This self-image, as critics have argued, seems to solidify after the book's donna gentile episode (XXXV-XXXIX) and the poet's discovery that the celebration of loves other than Beatrice is now impossible, however much their possibility remains in life. The work's prose which gives shape and a significance to the self-image softens the human dimension of Beatrice and directs readers away from what may have once been no more than a variation on Cicero's sense that reflection and memory nourish, vivify, and aid in­ dividuals in enduring the losses of those who are near and dear (De amicitia XXVII.104). Such a sense, as Etienne Gilson sug­ gests in LA Theologie mystique de saint Bernard (Paris: J. Vrin, 1934), can explain the coexistence and coeval evolutions of such seemingly antagonistic strains as courtly and mystical love. By its emphasis on individual fulfillment, the prose, likewise, re­ directs readers from Dante's debts to contemporary rhetorical, stylistic, and linguistic practices. The contemporary writers mentioned most prominently in discussions of the Vita Nuova are Guido Guinizelli and Guido Cavalcanti.
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