DANTEAN REVERBERATIONS: FOUR READERS OF DANTE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY. A STUDY ON THE DANTES OF PRIMO LEVI, EDOARDO SANGUINETI, SAMUEL BECKETT AND SEAMUS HEANEY By RENATA SPERANDIO A thesis submitted to The University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Italian Studies School of Humanities The University of Birmingham May 2009 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT The purpose of the present research is to investigate the presence of Dante in four authors of the twentieth century and to discuss in what ways these authors contribute to our perception of Dante. This study begins with the analysis of Primo Levi’s reaction to Dante, and the first two chapters deal respectively with Levi’s troubled relationship with the monumentality of Dante in Levi’s personal culture and with the modern writer’s attempts at rejecting that very monumentality. In the third and fourth chapters, the focus is on the inclusion of Dante within Edoardo Sanguineti’s poetry, and on the issue of ideologically oriented exploitation of Dante both in Sanguineti’s novels and plays and in his critical analyses of the Comedy. The following chapters are about the presence of Dante in Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney. In Beckett, a network of Dantean inclusions shows how Dante’s presence can be fertile, controversial, and yet apparently discarded. The last chapter discusses Seamus Heaney’s Dantisms and especially the question of translation as both a technical and a cultural issue. The result is the perception of a vital Dantean presence, which generates approaches and revalidations in spite of its apparent distance and of its cultural diversity. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 PRIMO LEVI AND DANTE 1 DANTE IN LEVI 17 2 DISTANCING DANTE 45 EDOARDO SANGUINETI AND DANTE 3 FROM THE MAGMA OF LABORINTUS 82 4 THE CREATIVE GAME OF CRITICISM 119 SAMUEL BECKETT 5 BECKETT’S ABANDONED PURGATORY 165 SEAMUS HEANEY 6 HEANEY’S JOURNEY INTO DANTE 205 CONCLUSIONS 251 BIBLIOGRAPHY 255 1 INTRODUCTION Dante’s presence, not only in scholarly criticism but also in the world of fiction and even in that of daily communication, offers constant evidence of shared background knowledge. Dantean notions such as limbo, journey in the underworld, poet guides, have become part of the cultural landscape, and have reached the realms of pop culture, and certainly not only in Italy. As Zygmunt Baranski put it, ‘The going on a journey, certain acts of barbarity, particular landscapes, characters, encounters, etc., words such as Inferno, Purgatorio, even limbo, all tend to evoke irresistibly the presence of Dante whatever an author’s more specific intentions might be’1. Dante reception is part of the history of culture and of literature, while Dante studies are more and more involved in looking for and into Dante’s texts, beyond seven centuries of readings, obviously and necessarily conditioned, historically biased, and culturally oriented. In order to explore the question of the presence of Dante in the creative literature of the twentieth-century, I have chosen to limit the research to a series of authors in whose works the Dantean presence is unquestionable, but not necessarily dominating, and whose production can be seen as a meaningful example of twentieth-century literary context: Primo Levi, Edoardo Sanguineti, Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney are all – for different reasons – deeply and controversially central in the cultural literary debate of the twentieth-century. In all these authors, who have themselves become canonical presences not only in their respective literatures, the function of memory, the purpose of culture, and the role of language are central. In these authors 1 Zygmunt Baranski, ‘The Power of Influence: Aspects of Dante’s Presence in Twentieth-Century Italian Culture’, Strumenti Critici, n.s. a. I, n. 3, September 1986, 343-376 (p. 343). 2 Dante is often a hidden reference and never an obvious or uncritical occurrence. The choice of authors and of texts depended, also, on a preliminary consideration of the aspect that I considered most likely to produce a fruitful analysis: that is, the controversial nature of the authors’ relationship to Dante: it seems to me that wherever the Dantean presence is hidden, misplaced, or even overtly denied, the modern author is in fact making a more interesting statement about his belonging to that very tradition. On the other hand, the text and the plot of the Commedia, and, perhaps surprisingly, even that of Dante’s less known works, have journeyed into the imagination of modern men and women and contributed to shaping their artistic production. In this direction, works such as Pasolini’s Divina Mimesis 2, a text that should have become a modern version of Dante’s Inferno and that, through its very failure, shows the vitality of Dante’s ‘plot’, the persistence of what Gianfranco Contini called the ‘libretto’ (or of what we could call the narrative texture of the Commedia and its memorability): ‘Il ‘libretto’, dunque, non tiene piú? Conveniamo che tiene troppo, come un filo che si smaltisce ma non si assimila’.3 Influence is one of the essences of writing; what appears new in modern texts is a definite focus on ideas such as citation, allusion, evocation and their deliberate inclusion as a conscious, ideological, and often provocative, move4. The texts we read are in any case, and necessarily, ‘encrusted’ and much of their fascination depends on the perception of their implied multiplicity. 2 Pier Paolo Pasolini, La Divina Mimesis, (Torino: Einaudi, 1975). 3 Gianfranco Contini,‘Un’interpretazione di Dante’, in Un’idea di Dante (Torino: Einaudi, 1976), pp. 69-111 (p. 69). 4 My points of reference have been, in relation specifically to the question of ‘influence’, the studies of Harold Bloom and Gérard Genette. In particular: Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York-Oxford: Oxford University Press,1997) Gerard Genette Palimpsestes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1982). 3 Peter Kuon’s study on the creative output of Dante as a source of inspiration in modern world literature 5 and Luigi Scorrano’s collection and analysis of the Dantean lexical impact on twentieth-century Italian literature 6, show two approaches to the question of Dante’s actual presence in today’s culture: the strong creative and narrative potential of the medieval poet, on one side, and the objective, lexical evidence of his influence on modern Italian writers on the other. Both Kuon’s and Scorrano’s approaches show that the perception of Dante’s presence tends to derive either from the general assumption of his cultural availability or from specific instances of textual re-use. In my research I collected and compared texts in which a Dantean presence is detectable - either as a direct quotation or as a reference to a recognisable Dantean situation - and then I looked at both the linguistic and the literary horizon of this intertextual dimension. I tried to focus first on the verbal level, and then develop a network that might define the cultural relations between the modern authors and Dante’s works. Among the possible paths, I considered recognition, detachment and concealment. Recognition implies an explicit reference to the Dantean pre-text, its relevance, and the modern author’s acceptance of this relevance. This seems to be the case of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound among the writers of English or of Mario Luzi and Eugenio Montale among the Italians. In these authors the creative manipulation of the Dantean heritage often produces a totally unexpected, almost unrecognisable Dante, if one considers the image of Dante in modern scholarship. Yet, in their case, the reference is outspoken and consciously focussed. What I decided to examine is the opposite direction, that is the path of 5 Peter Kuon, Lo mio maestro e’l mio autore. Die produktive Rezeption der ‘Divina Commedia’ in der Erzählliteratur der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1993). 6 Luigi Scorrano, Presenza verbale di Dante nella letteratura italiana del Novecento (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1994) 4 detachment and concealment. I assumed that in the authors I chose to consider, Dante operates in subtle and controversial ways, and determines an interesting network of possible interpretations, creating in the meantime a further dimension of meaning in the modern texts. Researches into the sources, such as Luigi Scorrano’s work on the actual presence of ‘stilemi danteschi’ in the works of twentieth-century Italian writers, show the two main ways in which Dantisms have pervaded Italian literary production in the last century: that of D’Annunzio on the one hand, with explicit, loud, and theatrical appropriations; and that of Pascoli on the other, in which there is a constant attempt to present not only the Dantean source but also its tormented afterlife, a sort of half-achieved cancellation. The example chosen by Scorrano is Gloria, from Pascoli’s Myricae: Al santo monte non verrai, Belacqua? – Io non verrò: l’andare su che porta? Lungi è la Gloria, e piedi e mani vuole; e là non s’apre che al pregar la porta, e qui star dietro al sasso a me non duole, ed ascoltare le cicale al sole, e le rane che gracidano, Acqua acqua!7 7 Scorrano, p.