Cari Dantisti: I Very Much Enjoyed Our First Session Together on 9/30 And
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Cari Dantisti: I very much enjoyed our first session together on 9/30 and am grateful to those of you who’ve written with your own reactions. There was nothing tentative about our beginning; we are already well on our way. That said, I know from Sharon Small that there were raised hands that were not acknowledged. Also, because text largely occupied the screen, you were not able to see one another. And we were only looking at snippets of text rather than the entire canto under discussion. So, I’d like us to try something different on 10/7. Please have your Durling-Martinez text available so that we can work from it: can read from the text, paraphrase it, comment on it, draw your attention to this or that line. All of this by way of setting you up for Q&A and discussion. A great additional resource is Columbia University’s dedicated Dante website (https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/). where you can find for each canto the text (along with Longfellow and Mandelbaum translations), a written commentary by Teodolinda Barolini, a taped hour-long lecture by Barolini (select “video”), and a reading of the poem in Italian by a native speaker (“audio”). This site is a treasure trove. Another treasure is Lino Pertile’s “Introduction to the INFERNO” in the Cambridge Companion to Dante, 2nd ed. I’ve just gotten a pdf of the chapter and attach it to this email. It’s comprehensive and beautifully written. All of these are extras, which I draw your attention to while we are proceeding at a leisurely pace compared to our velocity in the succeeding weeks, Although you may not have time or inclination to pursue them now, I want you to know that they are there if and when you are interested in going further. I will send you a prompt for INF 1-2 on Monday. Please feel free to send me any questions or suggestions as to how to make our sessions better. Peter 5 LINO PERTILE Introduction to Inferno A dark and menacing forest dominates the Comedy’s opening scene: In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. The character who says “I” does not tell us how he got there. He himself does not seem to know; indeed he only suddenly becomes aware of the alien, nightmarish reality that surrounds him. But who is this character? He is both the protagonist of the story and its narrator, a character who has survived his adventure and is now in the process of writing it down: a character- poet. Unlike Homer and Virgil who always say “he,” never “I,” and unlike Ulysses and Aeneas who went to Hell but did not write the stories of their own journeys, the protagonist and the narrator of the Comedy are one and the same. They are one but they undertake separate journeys within the poem: the journey of the character from the dark forest to the Empyrean heaven, where God dwells with all the blessed; and the journey of the narrator through the one-hundred cantos of the poem, from canto 1 of the Inferno to canto 33 of the Paradiso. The first journey lasts one week; the second, to the best of our knowledge, took at least a dozen years (circa 1307–20). In fact, we are given to understand along the way that, whereas the experience of the journey was willed and facilitated by Divine Providence, the poem, the work of the narrator, is in a sense a far more difficult undertaking, a task that costs him “hunger, cold and vigils” (Purgatorio 29, 37–38): the poet’s daunting task is to find words adequate to his experience, “so that the word may not be different from the fact” (Inf. 32, 12). Not until Purgatory 30, line 55 will we discover that the protagonist and narrator of the journey is called “Dante.” Indeed the poem leaves us with no doubt that he is the Florentine poet Dante Alighieri. The character Dante, the narrator Dante, and the historical Dante are all intertwined and overlapping, 67 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Harvard-Smithsonian Centerfor Astrophysics, on 30 Sep 2020 at 16:47:15, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, availableCambridge at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms Collections Online © Cambridge University. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521844304.005 Press, 2007 lino pertile but we cannot assume that they are identical. Nor are they three discrete entities. Dante’s identity in the poem is ultimately an irresolvable ambiguity, an interlacing the poet fully exploits. The journey Dante does not say “In the middle of the journey of my life,” but “In the middle of the journey of our life.” This sentence denotes both a point in time and a point in space. The question of time is easily resolved: the ordinary duration of an individual life in Dante’s culture was believed to be the biblical “threescore years and ten” (Psalms 90:10). Therefore, “in the middle of our life” indicates the age of thirty-five, that is for Dante in the year 1300, a date that will be confirmed later in Inf. 21, 112–14. At the same time, by placing his awakening in the context of the journey of our life, Dante stresses the universal value of his experience. Not by chance, 1300 was also the first Jubilee Year, and a time in which Dante believed that the church was led by an unworthy pope, while the empire had no leader at all – a time of grave crisis, therefore, not just for Dante the character, but for the entire world. The issue of space is more complicated, for the journey of our life is a jour- ney only in a metaphorical sense. This metaphor, however, is one which, for Christian culture, defines the most intrinsic meaning of life, the quintessence of the human condition. Ever since Adam and Eve were banished from the earthly Paradise, we live in a state of exile in a land that was not meant for us. In this “region of unlikeness,”1 we are travelers, or pilgrims, longing to return home. What drives us is our desire to recover our lost happiness – an innate desire, good in itself, but capable also of leading us astray. The journey in the middle of which Dante wakes up at the beginning of Inferno is this metaphorical journey. The magic of Dante’s poetry is that, as he wakes up, the metaphor becomes literal, the journey real. In one week Dante will travel from the dark forest to the Empyrean; from exile to his spiritual home. Intriguingly enough, Dante was actually in exile from Florence when he wrote the story of his journey home, and it is to this double exile, from heaven and from Florence, that we owe the Comedy. Virgil At the beginning of the story, Dante does not see beyond the forest, nor does he know what direction to take in order to get out of it. He is prey to a crisis whose nature robs him even of the minimum of knowledge necessary to free himself. If it depended on him, the forest would swallow him up again and forever. Only an outside agent can save him. 68 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Harvard-Smithsonian Centerfor Astrophysics, on 30 Sep 2020 at 16:47:15, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, availableCambridge at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms Collections Online © Cambridge University. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL0521844304.005 Press, 2007 Introduction to Inferno And just as he is fleeing in despair from three fearful beasts, the figure of a man appears before him in the waste land. “Miserere on me,” he cries, “whatever you may be, whether shade or true man!” (Inf. 1, 65–66). The for- est, the hill, the three wild animals were stylized figures, suspended between nightmare and reality; this apparition, however, though he presents himself as a “shade,” is a real man. He is the Latin poet Virgil, who, on Good Friday of the year 1300, more than thirteen centuries after his death, materializes out of nowhere: Virgil, the author of the Aeneid and the master of poetry and wisdom revered by Dante and by the entire Middle Ages. He is the outside agent who now invites the hopeless wayfarer to “hold to another path,” a third way that opens, paradoxically, downwards, between the she-wolf and the forest. It is he who will guide Dante to safety. Not an angel, a saint, a philosopher, a scientist or a theologian, but a poet – the poet of the Roman empire. But first, something far more astonishing occurs to faze the naive reader: the very same Virgil speaks of the she-wolf, confirming that the beast is indeed alive and real and invincible to all save to a mysterious greyhound who will one day come “to make her die in pain,” and, better yet, drive her back to Hell, “whence envy first sent her forth.” And, as if that were not enough, Virgil adds that, in so doing, the greyhound will bring salvation to the whole of Italy, “for which the virgin Camilla died of her wounds, and Euryalus, Turnus, and Nisus” (1, 107–08). But aren’t the virgin Camilla – we may ask – and Turnus, Euryalus, and Nisus all legendary pagan characters in Virgil’s poem? Why then does Dante make Virgil treat them as if they were historical figures who died for Italy? Before Dante has even entered the world beyond, we are fascinated and disoriented by a poetic texture involving both dream and reality, legend and history, personal story and world events.