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Dante's 'Strangeness': the Commedia and the Late Twentieth- Century Debate on the Literary Canon

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Dante's 'Strangeness': the Commedia and the Late Twentieth- Century Debate on the Literary Canon This is a repository copy of Dante's 'Strangeness': The Commedia and the Late Twentieth- Century Debate on the Literary Canon. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/74716/ Book Section: Pich, F (2010) Dante's 'Strangeness': The Commedia and the Late Twentieth-Century Debate on the Literary Canon. In: Gragnolati, M and Camilletti, F, (eds.) Metamorphosing Dante. Appropriations, Manipulations, and Rewritings in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries. Turia + Kant , Berlin , 21 - 35 (14). ISBN 978-3-85132-617-8 Reuse See Attached Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ .&5".031)04*/(%"/5& "113013*"5*0/4 ."/*16-"5*0/4 "/%3&83*5*/(4 */5)&58&/5*&5)"/%58&/5:'*345$&/563*&4 &%*5&%#:."/6&-&(3"(/0-"5* '"#*0$".*--&55* "/%'"#*"/-".1"35 VERLAG TURIA + KANT WIEN–BERLIN Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Bibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISBN 978-35132-617-8 Cover Design: Bettina Kubanek © by the authors © for this edition: Turia + Kant, 2010 VE RLAG TURI A + KANT A-1010 Wien, Schottengasse 3A/5/DG1 D-10827 Berlin, Crellestraße 14 [email protected] | www.turia.at $0/5&/54 .&5".031)04*/(%"/5& Fabio Camilletti, Manuele Gragnolati, Fabian Lampart . *$"/0/*;"5*0/4 '&%&3*$"1*$) Dante’s ‘Strangeness’: The Commedia and the Late Twentieth- Century Debate on the Literary Canon 1*&30#0*5"/* Irish Dante: Yeats, Joyce, Beckett /*$0-"("3%*/* Dante as a Gay Poet **&4$)"50-0(*&4 "/(&-".&35&3"/,*/ Dante’s Inferno and Walter Benjamin’s Cities: Considerations of Place, Experience, and Media '-03*"/53"#&35 ‘Il mal seme d’Adamo’: Dante’s Inferno and the Problem of Literary Representation of Evil in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and Wolfgang Koeppen’s Der Tod in Rom 53*45"/,": ‘Una modesta Divina Commedia’: Dante as Anti-Model in Cesare Pavese’s La luna e i falò 3"$)&-+"$0'' Reclaiming Paradiso: Dante in the Poetry of James Merrill and Charles Wright &3.*/*""3%*44*/0 ‘Perché mi vince il lume d’esta stella’: Giovanni Giudici’s Rewriting of Dante’s Paradiso for the Theatre '3"/$&4$"4065)&3%&/ ‘Per-tras-versioni’ dantesche: Post-Paradisiacal Constellations in the Poetry of Vittorio Sereni and Andrea Zanzotto ***46#+&$5*7*5*&4 '"#*0$".*--&55* Human Desire, Deadly Love: The Vita Nova in Gide, Delay, Lacan 3&#&$$"8&45 Wives and Lovers in Dante and Eugenio Montale +".&4.*--&3 Man with Snake: Dante in Derek Jarman’s Edward II ."/6&-&(3"(/0-"5* Rewriting Dante after Freud and the Shoah: Giorgio Pressburger’s Nel regno oscuro *753"/4-"5*0/4 5&3&4"136%&/5& ‘Misi me per l’alto mare aperto’: Personality and Impersonality in Virginia Woolf’s Reading of Dante’s Allegorical Language /*$,)"7&-: ‘Hell on a Paying Basis’: Morality, the Market, and the Movies in Harry Lachman’s Dante’s Inferno (1935) ."/6&-"."3$)&4*/* From Giorgio Agamben’s Italian Category of ‘Comedy’ to ‘Profanation’ as the Political Task of Modernity: Ingravallo’s Soaring Descent, or Dante According to Carlo Emilio Gadda %&//*4-00/&: Literary Heresy: The Dantesque Metamorphosis of LeRoi Jones into Amiri Baraka "/50/&--"'3"/$*/* Transferring Dante: Robert Rauschenberg’s Thirty-Four Illustrations for the Inferno %"7*%&-6(-*0 ‘Anziché allargare, dilaterai!’: Allegory and Mimesis from Dante’s Comedy to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La Divina Mimesis 30/"-%%&300: A Cardboard Dante: Hell’s Metropolis Revisited Bibliography Illustrations Notes on the Contributors Index of Names Index of Passages from Dante’s Works %"/5&µ4´453"/(&/&44µ 5IF$PNNFEJBBOEUIF-BUF5XFOUJFUI$FOUVSZ%FCBUF POUIF-JUFSBSZ$BOPO 'FEFSJDB1JDI A reflection on Dante and the literary canon may appear tautological since nowadays his belonging to the canon seems a self-evident matter of fact and an indisputable truth. It is for this very reason, though, that a paradigmatic role has been conferred on Dante in the contemporary debate both by those who consider the canon a stable structure based on inner aesthetic values and by those who see it as a cultural and social construction. For instance, Harold Bloom suggests that ‘Dante invented our modern idea of the canonical’,1 and Edward Said, in his reading of Auerbach, seems to imply that Dante provided foundations for what we call literature tout court.2 While his influence on other poets never ceased, the story of Dante’s explicit canonization through the centuries revolved around the same critical points we are still discussing today: his anti-classical ‘strangeness’ in language and style, the trouble he occa- sions in genre hierarchies and distinctions, and the vastness of the philo- sophical and theological knowledge embraced by the Commedia (and, as a consequence, the relationship between literature and other realms of human experience). Dante’s canonicity is also evinced by the ceaseless debates that he has inspired and the many cultural tensions of which he is the focus. What I will try to do in the next few pages is to reflect on the features that make the Commedia central both to the arguments of the defenders of the aesthetic approach, such as Bloom and Steiner, and to the political claims of the so-called ‘culture of complaint’. As I went through the materials for this paper, I realized that most of the essays I considered relevant to my point had something in common: in a crucial turn of their argument, they mentioned or analysed the episode of Fari- nata and Cavalcante. Was this simply due to the persistent influence of Auerbach’s choice of this canto in Mimesis (1946), or was it related to some crucial thematic or stylistic matter at stake in Inferno X? 21 I will start from the outstanding voice in the debate on the canon, namely that of Harold Bloom. Significantly enough, in The Western Canon the pages devoted to Dante follow the chapter on Shakespeare, right after Bloom’s ‘Preface and Prelude’ and ‘An Elegy for the Canon’. This structural choice suggests that the fate of the canon is largely the fate of Dante and Shakespeare. In Bloom’s opinion, what makes authors canonical is their ‘strangeness, a mode of originality that either can- not be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange’.3 In an evaluative canon, Dante comes immediately after Shake- speare (the centre of the canon), but in a neutral, synchronic perspec- tive, they are paradigms of two different forms of originality: Dante makes the reader feel strange at home, Shakespeare makes us ‘at home out of doors, foreign, abroad. His powers of assimilation and of con- tamination are unique’.4 We’ll come back to this distinction later on. But where does Dante’s originality dwell? Bloom’s answer is implied in the title of his Dante chapter, ‘The Strangeness of Dante: Ulysses and Beatrice’, from which my own title comes: as Dante’s greatest and most audacious inventions (or re-inventions), Ulysses and Beatrice repay his creative effort by making him ‘strange’, and, as a consequence, canoni- cal. At the same time, Dante’s canonicity saves Beatrice from religious censorship: ‘Beatrice would be an offense to the church and even to lit- erary Catholics’ if Dante had not won ‘his wager with the future within a generation after his death’.5 Bloom depicts Dante as irredeemably wild, proud, conservative, and politically incorrect, totally devoted to his poem and its immortality, cruel to his political enemies and anything but generous to his poetic rivals – as the absence of Guido Cavalcanti in the Farinata and Cavalcante episode shows.6 As a consequence, in 1994 Bloom predicted an imminent attack from the ‘school of Resentment’ on Dante, an attack similar to the ‘onslaught’ led by New Historicism against Shakespeare: The New Historicists and allied resenters have been attempting to reduce and scatter Shakespeare, aiming to undo the Canon by dissolving its center. Curiously, Dante, the second center as it were, is not under similar onslaught, either here or in Italy. Doubtless the assault will come, since the assorted multiculturalists would have difficulty finding a more objection- able great poet than Dante, whose savage and powerful spirit is politically 7 incorrect to the highest degree. 22 Bloom goes further and blames the most distinguished interpreters of Dante in the twentieth century, including Curtius and Spitzer, because they approached Dante’s greatness either in relation to the theological and philosophical tradition (Eliot, Singleton, Freccero) or in relation to the real world he so powerfully represented (Barolini). In Bloom’s opinion, both the perspectives, the theological and the secular, could be charged with the same critical crime committed by New Historicism and gender and cultural studies: that of deliberately discarding the aesthetic challenge any great author imposes on critics, reducing the Commedia to mere theology or down-to-earth mimesis. In his violent argument Bloom goes so far as to criticize the most influential Dante scholar of the twentieth century, Erich Auerbach, to whose interpretative achieve- ments he seems completely blind. Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt (1929) and ‘Figura’ (1939) brilliantly reconciled heaven and earth, life and afterlife, and provided an unrivalled explanation for the radical intermingling of the human and the eternal in the Commedia.
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