SOME TIME IN THE LATE 1980S, the Canadian magazine Saturday Night sent me to Rome to report on a curious story. Two Quebecois sisters in their mid-fifties, the younger a widow with a son and a daughter, the elder unmarried, had traveled together from their village in Quebec to India, on what they insisted was an exotic holiday. During a stopover in Rome, they were found to be carrying several kilos of heroin in one of their suitcases and were detained by the Italian police. The sisters explained that the suitcase had been given to them in India by a friend of the daughter, the man who had arranged for their travel and had taken them on a guided tour of several Indian cities. The police, however, were unable to trace the man; the daughter explained that he was a casual acquaintance who had kindly offered to help her mother and her aunt to arrange the holiday of a lifetime.
In Rome, I was allowed to interview both sisters. They had been spared the prison cell and had been lodged in a religious residence under the supervision of Benedictine nuns. Both gave a coherent, believable account of their ordeal, saying that they had been completely unaware of the fact that the suitcase given to them had contained drugs. After all the man had done for them, they felt that they couldn’t very well have refused his simple request to take a suitcase back to Canada. In Quebec, the daughter confirmed their story.
During the interviews, conducted in the Benedictine residence under the supervision of a smiling nun, I noticed in the older sister a puzzled look and a tone of voice that I read as disbelief or anger. There was something in her attitude that made me think that perhaps she suspected her sister of having had a hand in the plot, maybe with the help of the daughter. Or that she suspected the daughter of having set them up, and that now the mother was protecting her child by not telling the full story. Or perhaps I misinterpreted the look and tone, and both the sisters were guilty. Perhaps they had planned the smuggling together, perhaps the daughter knew nothing about it. Or perhaps they were both innocent, and they were telling the simple truth. The older sister’s attitude meant something that I was unable to decipher. What had really taken place? It was impossible to know.
In the end, after a somewhat chaotic trial, the judge found both women not guilty, and they were allowed to return to their village. Nevertheless, the doubt remained. Several years later, the younger sister declared that their lives had become unbearable because so many people still suspected them of a crime they had not committed.
We all know that the events we experience, in their fullest, deepest sense, escape the boundaries of language. That no account of even the smallest occurrence in our life can truly do justice to what has taken place, and that no memory, however intense, can be identical to the thing remembered. We try to relate what happened but our words always fall short, and we learn, after many failures, that the closest approximation to a truthful version of reality can be found only in the stories we make up. In our most powerful fictions, under the web of the narrative the complexity of reality can be discerned, like a face behind a mask. Our best way of telling the truth is to lie.
“What is truth?” said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.
—FRANCIS BACON, “Of Truth”
According to the seventeenth-century Kabbalist Nathan of Gaza, the light that bursts from the everlasting flames of the deity is twofold, like the forked tongue that holds Ulysses and Diomedes: one is a light “pregnant with thought,” the other is “void of thought,” and both qualities are present in the same fire, in dialogue one with the other. “This,” wrote Gershom Scholem, “is the most radical and extreme affirmation of the process of dialectical materialism in God Himself.”1
The light of Dante’s God embodies as well this apparent opposition. This becomes clear when, guided by Virgil, Dante arrives at the brink of the second cornice of the seventh circle of Hell. After circling the incandescent sands where the violent against nature are punished, Virgil leads Dante close to a loud waterfall. There Virgil has Dante loosen the cord from around his waist (the same cord with which, he says now, he tried to catch the leopard that first crossed his path outside the dark forest) and casts it into the abyss. On that signal, from the depths of the abyss rises the emblem of fraud, the winged monster Geryon.
The significance of this cord has worried commentators from the first. Most of the early readers of the Commedia understood the cord to be a symbol of fraud, but the explanation is not convincing: fraud is not capable of subjugating lust (the leopard) but rather is used to incite it (because lust entails deceit, just as false promises are part of the art of the seducer). Virgil must employ something good to counter evil, not a sin against another sin. The critic Bruno Nardi suggested that the cord has a twofold biblical symbolic meaning: in both the Old and the New Testaments, the cord is the girdle of justice worn against fraud and a chastity belt worn against lust.2
Whatever its symbolic significance, Dante realizes that Virgil’s gesture will bring up a “novità,” something new, in response to the “nuovo cenno,” the new sign given by his guide. And Dante adds this warning to the reader:
Geryon conveying Dante and Virgil down towards Malebolge, one of the 102 watercolors produced by William Blake between 1824 and 1827 to illustrate the Commedia. (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, Felton Bequest/Bridgeman Images)
Ah, how cautious ought men to be
with those who not only perceive the deed
but see also the thoughts, with their sense!3
About to enter the circle of fraud, Dante reminds the reader that though the enlightened Virgil can read his thoughts, most ordinary people judge others by their actions only, and are incapable of seeing the thought behind the deed. Too often, actions that are taken to be proof of a truth are shown to be false.
Summoned from the abyss, the monster Geryon appears as the incarnation of fraud, a creature with the face of an honest man,4 hairy paws, a body covered with whirls and circles like an Oriental carpet, and a scorpion’s deadly tail. But before describing this prodigious vision to the reader, Dante pauses, and says:
Always about the truth that has an air of falsehood
A man should seal his lips, as far as he is able,
For even blameless, he’ll be put to shame;
But here I can’t be silent; and by the notes
Of my Commedia, Reader, I do swear,
So that they may not be deprived of lasting fame,
I saw . . .5
And then Dante tells us about Geryon.
The reader who has followed Dante’s story up to this point and heard about many prodigies and marvels (not the least being the journey of Dante himself) is, for the first time, faced with a marvel so great that the poet feels the need to stop and swear by his own work that what he will now tell is true. That is to say, almost exactly halfway through Hell, Dante swears by the truth of his poem, indeed of his fiction, that the forthcoming episode in the poem truly happened. In a vertiginous logical circle, Dante informs the reader, his accomplice in this elaborate fabrication, that the poetic lie he will tell has the weight of a factual truth, and he offers as proof of this the very fictional edifice: the web of poetic lies from within which he addresses the reader. Whatever belief the reader has accorded the poet up to this point is now put to the test: if the reader has felt that there really was a forest, and a lofty mountain in the distance, and a ghostly companion, and a dreadful, eloquent portal leading into the circular landscape of Hell (and few are the readers who have not felt, verse after verse, the solid reality of Dante’s story), then now that same reader must admit the truth of what the poet is about to tell or forfeit everything. Dante is not demanding from the reader the kind of faith demanded by the Christian religion; he is demanding poetic faith, which, unlike the tenets of divinely revealed truth, exists merely through words.
However, Dante allows both truths to coexist in the Commedia. When at the summit of Purgatory, accompanying the divine pageant, Dante sees the four beasts of the Apocalypse advancing towards him, he describes their appearance—“each was plumed with six wings”—and adds, for the benefit of the reader: “read Ezekiel, who depicts them,” “except . . . as to the wings, / where John and I differ from him.”6 Dante claims for his side the authority of John of Patmos, who said that the wings were six (Rev. 4:8), while Ezekiel, in his vision, claimed they had four (1:6). Dante is not shy of placing himself in the same authorial plane as the author of the Apocalypse: he, the poet of the Commedia, certifies John’s divine authority.
And Virgil certifies the authority of Dante. When first encountering the shade of Virgil come to guide him, Dante addressed the author of the Aeneid as “my master, and my author,” confessing, “You alone are he from whom I took / the sweet style that has brought me honor.”7 From Virgil’s poetry Dante learned to express his own experience, and “mio autore” carries the double sense of “writer of the book I admire most” and “the one who made me.” Words, syntax, music: all lies through which the reader’s mind receives and reconstructs an experience of the world.
One of Dante’s most lucid commentators, John Freccero, asks whether “a human author can imitate theological allegory . . . by imitating reality.” He goes on: “In fact, mimesis has the opposite effect, short-circuiting allegory and transforming it into irony. Instead of reaching out for meaning allegorically, realism turns significance back on itself by repeatedly affirming and then denying its own status as fiction. In Dante’s terms, we might say that realism is alternately truth with the face of a lie, and a fraud that looks like the truth.”8
In his famous letter to Cangrande della Scala, Dante, explicitly quoting Aristotle, notes that according to how far from or how near its being something is, we can say that it is far from or near the truth.9 He is referring to the literary form that Freccero mentions, the allegory, whose truth depends on how close the poet has managed to bring the image to the subject allegorized. Dante compares the relationship to one of dependency: son to father, servant to master, singular to double, a part to the whole. In all these cases, the “being” of something depends on something else (we can’t know what a double is if we ignore the singular), and therefore the truth of that something is dependent on something else. If that something else is fraudulent, the thing considered is also infected by fraud. Deceit, as Dante keeps reminding us, is contagious.
Saint Augustine, in the earliest of his two long treatises on lying (with which Dante may well have been familiar), argued that a person who says something false is not telling a lie if the teller believes or is convinced of its truth. Augustine distinguishes between “believing” and “being convinced”: those who believe may recognize that they don’t know much about what they believe in without doubting its existence; those who are convinced think that they know something without realizing that that they don’t know much about it. According to Augustine, there is no lie without an intent to lie: lying is a question of the difference between appearance and truth. A person, he says, can be mistaken in supposing that a tree, for instance, is a wall, but there will be no fraud unless there is a will to commit it. “Fraud,” says Augustine, “lies not in things themselves but in the senses.” Satan, the arch-deceiver, “liar and father of lies” (as Virgil is reminded by a condemned soul in Hell), was aware of committing fraud when he deceived Adam and Eve, whose sin was to choose what they knew was forbidden. Our forefathers, through their willing senses, could have chosen not to be accomplices in the fraud; instead, they distanced themselves from the truth, and used their free will to take the wrong path. Every traveler can choose the path he will take. Dante, who had lost his way in the dark forest, which Augustine had called “this immense forest, so full of snares and dangers,” chose to follow Virgil’s advice and is now on the true path.10
The source of Augustine’s argument on the question of lying is a controversial passage in Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians. “Now the things which I write unto you, behold, before God, I lie not” (1:20), says Paul, to establish a vantage point for his arguments. And as an example of deceit, Paul then tells a story drawn from his own experience, describing a moment when he was confronted with the peculiar behavior of a fellow apostle. Saul (as Paul was then called) had been a zealous Jew, notorious for his determined pursuit of Jews who had converted to Christianity. On the way to Damascus, he saw a blinding light and heard the voice of Jesus asking why he was persecuting him. Saul fell to ground and found that he could no longer see. After three days, his sight was restored by Ananias, who baptized him with the name of Paul (Acts 8:9). Following his conversion, Paul divided his missionary efforts with the apostle Peter: Peter would preach to the Jews while Paul would address himself to the Gentiles.
Fourteen years later, the leaders of the Christian church, gathered in Jerusalem, decided that Gentiles were not required to be circumcised (that is, to become Jews) before converting to the faith of Jesus. After the conference, Paul went to Antioch, where Peter joined him some time later. At first, Peter ate with the Gentiles of the Antioch church, but when Jewish members from the Jerusalem church arrived, he withdrew from the Gentile table, because “them which were of the circumcision” (the Jewish members) had insisted that Gentile Christians observe Jewish dietary laws. Paul, upset at Peter for not recognizing that the only thing that was required to sit at Christ’s table was faith, “withstood him to his face, because he was to be blamed”: “If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of Gentiles, and not as do the Jews, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews?” (Gal. 2:12, 11, 14).
Saint Jerome, in his commentary on Paul’s epistle, as well as in a letter to Augustine written in the year 403, argued that this passage did not represent an authentic dispute between the two apostles. Without going so far as to say that the two leaders staged a didactic scene for the benefit of their audience, Jerome refused to see a doctrinal opposition between them. According to Jerome, the dispute was a question of different points of view in which neither of the apostles acted deceitfully but merely took opposing stances in order to illustrate the argument.11 Augustine thought otherwise. To admit that even a slight dissimulation had taken place during the meeting at Antioch, would be, he says, to admit a lie in the exposition of religious dogma, and therefore in Scripture. Furthermore, Paul’s criticism of Peter was well founded because the old Jewish rites had no significance for a convert to the new faith; therefore it would have been useless for either man to dissemble. What happened, according to Augustine, was that Peter was not aware of his dissemblance until Paul exposed the truth to him. A deceit, under whatever circumstance, is never justified in the behavior of a true Christian.
In that light, are the lies of fiction really disguised truths? Or are they fraudulent stories that distract us from the truth that should be our main concern? In the Confessions, Augustine says that, in his adolescence, reading the Latin classics in school, “I was obliged to memorize the wanderings of a hero named Aeneas, while in the meantime I failed to remember my own erratic ways. I learned to lament the death of Dido, who killed herself for love, while in the midst of these things, I was dying, separated from you, my God and my Life, and I shed no tears for my own plight.” The young Augustine, if he were forbidden to read these books, “was sad not being able to read the very things that made [him] sad.” The old Augustine thought that the curtains hung over the entrance of the classrooms where literature was taught were “not so much symbols in honour of mystery as veils concealing error.”12
When Dante first sees Geryon, the monster’s appearance seems to him “marvelous to every steadfast heart.” Only when Virgil has explained to him who the monster really is does Dante understand the truth of Geryon’s being.
Behold the beast with the sharp pointed tail,
That crosses mountains and breaks through walls and arms!
Behold him who pollutes the entire world!
Virgil’s references are historical: through deceit, Tomyris, queen of the Massagetae, crossed the mountains and defeated Cyrus, king of the Persians; through deceit, the Greeks breached the walls of Troy. But the deceit of Geryon is worse. Legend has it that he was an Iberian king with three gigantic bodies united at the waist, who welcomed travelers in order to despoil and then kill them. Dante retains the name but changes his shape: Geryon is made to resemble the serpent from the Garden of Eden, who deceived Eve and thus caused the fall of all humankind.13
A discussion of the relation of fiction to truth takes place on the third cornice of Purgatory: Dante meets a learned Venetian courtier, Marco Lombardo, who is cleansing himself of the sin of wrath in a cloud of suffocating smoke. Lombardo lectures Dante on the problem of free will. If everything is predetermined, then a sin cannot be judged right or wrong, and wrath is simply a mechanical response to an unavoidable situation. But however fully things may be ordained in advance by universal laws, within this framework human beings are free to choose. The stars may have some influence on our conduct, but they are not responsible for our ultimate decisions.
You, the living, refer all causes
only to the heavens, as if they alone
must move everything in their course.
If it were this way, free will would
be destroyed and it would not be fair
that good be joyous and evil mournful.
The heavens set your impulses in motion;
I don’t say all, but suppose I said it,
a light is granted you to know good and evil,
and free will, if it endure
its first struggles with the heavens,
wins everything, if it is nourished well.
To a better strength and a better nature
you are subject in your freedom, which in your mind
creates what the heavens are unable to control.14
What Marco Lombardo is arguing is that the universe is almost indifferent to our actions: we create in our minds the laws that we are constrained to follow. If this is so, then fiction (the world created by our imagination, that of the Aeneid for Augustine and Dante, and that of the Commedia for us) has the power of shaping our vision and our understanding of the world. And language, the instrument through which imagination presents itself to us and communicates our thoughts to others, not only assists our efforts but re-creates the very reality we attempt to communicate.
Four centuries after Dante, David Hume (whom we encountered at the beginning of this book) would reconsider the question from the viewpoint of the Enlightenment. In his Treatise of Human Nature he argued that human beings invented the “fundamental laws of the nature, when they observ’d the necessity of society to their mutual subsistence, and found, that ’twas impossible to maintain any correspondence together, without some restraint on their natural appetites,” but then he went on to say that we could not have invented other laws but these: these are the laws required to explain the universe we inhabit.15 Like any law, the laws of nature can be broken, but they can’t be broken indiscriminately, or at any arbitrary time.
Hume’s reasoning concerns the matter of truth. Truth is like a law that can be disregarded, but it is impossible for someone to disregard it continually. If I disregard the truth by saying “white” every time the truth is “black,” my “white” will eventually be interpreted as “black,” and the words with which I lie will simply change their meaning through my constant usage. In the same way, moral laws must stem from a perception of what is true, rooted in our consciousness and expressed in a commonly accepted way: what Hume calls “any natural obligation of morality.”16 Otherwise, morality is nothing but a relative concept, and arguments in favor of torture, for instance, according to the particular “natural law” of a Stalin or a Pinochet, would be as valid as the arguments against it. Free will allows for the question of whether an action is good or bad based on the “natural obligation of morality,” and is independent of whether the person committing the action is guilty or not guilty.
The question becomes more complex in the case of an act that can be judged bad in itself but is committed for a cause that is deemed good. When Nelson Mandela died, on 5 December 2013, politicians all over the world praised the man who had ended apartheid in South Africa and had stood for a moral law common to all. A handful of conservative British MPs, however, recalling that Margaret Thatcher had described Mandela’s African National Congress as “a typical terrorist organisation” that wanted to establish “a Communist-style black dictatorship,” refused to mourn Mandela and continued to argue that Mandela had been a terrorist who had thrown bombs from speeding motorcycles. And the Tory MP Sir Malcolm Rifkind declared that “Nelson Mandela was not a saint, as we have heard” but “a politician to his fingertips. He actually believed in the armed struggle in the earlier part of his career and perhaps to some degree for the rest of his career.” Saints, in the opinion of Rifkind, who had obviously never heard of Saint Francis Xavier or Saint Joan of Arc, could not be politicians.17
In 1995, five years after the official abolition of apartheid, the people of South Africa set up what was called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a judicial body assembled to allow victims of human rights abuses to give testimony. Not only were the victims called to testify; the abusers as well could defend themselves and request an amnesty from both civil and criminal prosecution. In 2000, the Commission was replaced by the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation. The change in nomenclature was seen to represent an evolution from the establishment of truth to the establishment of justice. Recognition of guilt without a system within which it can be judged was deemed a sterile exercise. “Guilt,” declared Nadine Gordimer in 1998, “is and was unproductive.”18
Mandela had said at his 1963 trial that he wanted to live for and achieve the ideal of a democratic and free society, but it was also an ideal for which he was prepared to die. “I, who had never been a soldier, who had never fought in a battle, who had never fired a gun at an enemy, had been given the task of starting an army,” he wrote in his autobiography.19 With a warrant out for his arrest, Mandela went underground, learning how to make bombs and moving through Africa in disguise. After he was caught and sentenced to prison in 1963, he rejected offers of freedom until the South African government had removed all obstacles to a proper judicial hearing. He later said that what sustained him throughout the ordeal was “a belief in human dignity.” The activities that the conservative MPs called “terrorist acts” were necessary for the attainment of this dignity. To break an unjust law, to commit the so-called terrorist acts, was for Mandela a just act and a moral obligation.
Gordimer, whose fiction offers a long and profound record of the injustice of the apartheid regime, argued that in a society of unjust laws, crime and punishment (as well as truth and deceit) become aleatory moral concepts. “If you’re black,” she said, “and you’ve lived during apartheid time, you’re accustomed to people going in and out of prison all the time. They didn’t carry the right documents in their pockets when they went out. They couldn’t move freely from one city to another without acting against the law and being subject to imprisonment. So that there’s no real disgrace about going to prison, because you didn’t have to be criminal to go to prison.”20 But are terrorist-like acts committed under a criminal regime themselves criminal?
The question is not a simple one, as Dante knew. When Dante takes part in the torture of Bocca degli Abate in the frozen pit of Hell, is he morally justified in his action merely because Dante is contaminated by Bocca’s sin of treason, and by the inscrutability of divine judgment? Or has he been tempted into an immoral action by a setting in which betrayal of those one trusted has rendered all social conventions arbitrary, and language is no longer able to communicate what is true? Is Dante acting truthfully within the natural moral laws of humankind, or is he breaking those laws as the now suffering sinners had done before their punishment?
Free will is, for Dante, an intellectual choice based on a given reality, but a reality that is transformed by our intelligence, imagination, dreams, and physical senses. We are free to choose, but at the same time we are bound by the acquired knowledge of the world translated into our understanding. To understand this paradox, Dante offers the metaphor of civil law, which necessarily curbs a citizen’s absolute freedom but allows simultaneously a choice of how to act within the terms of that law. Because the soul, as an infant, indulges at first in the pleasures offered to it and then, unless guided by a teacher, seeks them out with the avidity of a spoilt child, a certain restraint must be placed on human desire. Ulysses and Nimrod are chastised examples. On the third cornice of Mount Purgatory, Marco Lombardo explains:
Therefore laws are necessary as a curb;
necessary to have a ruler who might discern
at least the tower of the True City.21
The Celestial City is unattainable in this life, but a just ruler might help the polis live by its tenets by having even a distant glimpse of it, a notion of that ideal. Laws, then, and good government will back our moral choices. Unfortunately, according to Dante, no such government existed in his time (and no such government exists in ours). Between the hopeful city founded by Aeneas and the divided Rome of the fourteenth century, with a corrupt pope who demeaned his holy office to preside over the base kingdom of this earth, Dante claimed our natural right to a society that does not foster deceit.
A century after Hume, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that, against a deceitful society, what we must do is “to hope, till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.”22 This too, was Mandela’s conviction.
Five centuries after Dante, another Italian sought to inquire into the nature of truth and the art of lying. Of all the adventures that Carlo Collodi imagined for his wooden puppet, one in particular has become part of universal folklore: when Pinocchio lies to the Blue Fairy, his nose grows longer. After Pinocchio has been taken down from the oak tree where he had been left hanging by the wicked Cat and Fox, he is put to bed by the kind Blue Fairy, who asks him what happened. But Pinocchio is too afraid or ashamed to tell the truth, and, as we all know, after each lie his nose grows a little longer. “Lies, my dear boy,” the Fairy explains to him, “are quickly discovered; because they are of two kinds. There are lies with short legs, and lies with long noses.”23 Pinocchio’s are obviously of the latter variety.
But what does the Fairy’s distinction mean? Pinocchio’s long-nosed lies are stubborn means to avoid confessing something he has done. As a result, his extensive nose becomes an impediment to moving freely, and even prevents him from leaving the room. These are the lies of the status quo, fibs that nail him to one spot, from which, because he won’t acknowledge the truth of his own deeds, he is forbidden to go forward and advance in his life story. Like the lies of politicians and financiers, Pinocchio’s lies undermine his own reality and destroy even that which he is supposed to treasure. As Pinocchio’s adventures and Dante’s Commedia make explicit, the acknowledgement of our reality leads us on, from chapter to chapter, and from canto to canto, towards the revelation of our true self. The denial of that reality renders any true telling impossible.
Of the short-legged lies, the Blue Fairy gives us no examples, but we can imagine what they might look like. In Canto V of Paradiso, in the inconstant Heaven of the Moon, Beatrice explains to Dante the way in which charity proceeds, “moving its foot to the apprehended good.” Freccero noted that Thomas Aquinas, in one of his commentaries to Peter Lombard’s Sentences, argued that the mind must move to God through intellect and affection, but because of our fallen state, our intellect is stronger in understanding than our affections are in loving. And since our ability to see the good has outdistanced our ability to do good on our own, we travel through life with one foot lagging behind. That is exactly how Dante describes his own progress at the beginning of the Commedia, after leaving the dark wood and seeing the mountain peak lit in the dawn light:
After I had rested a little my weary body
I took again the path along the desert strand,
So that the firm foot was always the lowest.24
Boccaccio, in his commentary on the Commedia, lends a literal explanation to this limping advancement, describing merely the process of an ascent that naturally causes one foot to be always lower than the other. However Freccero, in his learned discussion of the symbolic function of the parts of the body, reads Dante’s image as depicting the soul advancing on the twin “feet” of intellect and affect, just as our feet of flesh and blood allow us to move forward. Following the Scholastic thinkers of Dante’s time, who thought that the strongest foot (pes firmior) was the left, Freccero associates the right foot with intellect (“the beginning of choice, the apprehension, or the reason”) and the left one with affect.25 Rooted still to the earth, the left foot prevents the traveler from advancing properly, from disengaging himself from earthly concerns and setting his mind on higher things.
Unable, without the help of divine grace, to reach the good perfectly, the poet struggles on, hobbled by the eager love of his left foot, which wishes to remain attached to the world of sensation, and urged by the intellect of his right to press ahead with the journey of metaphysical discovery; Dante must, as best he can, use his intellect to fashion something coherent out of his blurred perceptions and uncertain intuitions. He knows he sees now “through a glass, darkly, but then face to face,” in the words of Saint Paul, and believes in the promise that “then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Cor. 13:12). Saint Paul’s words are from his discourse on charity, the same charity that Beatrice described with the image of the moving feet and that now binds Dante to earthly things. To be faithful to what he has been allowed to see and understand, Dante must, on one hand, not be distracted from the charity, the “warmth of love” that has been granted him, and, on the other, sharpen his intellect to put the forthcoming vision into words. Beatrice tells him:
I see distinctly how in your intellect
the eternal light shines brightly,
which once seen, kindles love forever.26
As he approaches his intended goal, Dante’s love will have to turn to the ineffable Supreme Good, and his intellect will have to reach down to his fellow pilgrims on earth. And both to embrace the vision and to report it, Dante understands that he must lie, lie truthfully, admit “non-false errors,”27 construct a monster much like Geryon, but one that will exalt and not betray its matter. And so, like all true poets who acknowledge their faulty intellect and their restraining affect, Dante offers us, his readers, short-legged lies so that we too can share something of the journey and follow hopefully our ongoing quests.
The knowledge writers seek, through both affect and intellect, lurks in the tension between what they perceive and what they imagine, and that fragile knowledge is passed on to us, their readers, as a further tension between our reality and the reality of the page. The experience of the world and the experience of the word compete for our intelligence and love. We want to know where we are because we want to know who we are: we magically believe that context and contents explain one another. We are self-conscious animals—perhaps the only self-conscious animals on the planet—and we are capable of experiencing the world by asking questions, putting our curiosity into words, as literature proves. In a continuous process of give-and-take, the world provides us with the puzzling evidence that we turn into stories, which in turn lend the world a doubtful sense and an uncertain coherence that lead to further questions. The world gives us the clues that allow us to perceive it, and we order those clues in narrative sequences that seem to us truer than the truth, making them up as we go, so that what we tell about reality becomes for us reality. “By the very fact that I get to know them, things cease to exist,” says the Devil in Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony. “Shape is perhaps an error of your senses, substance a fancy of your thoughts. Unless, since the world is in a constant flow of things, appearance, on the contrary, is the truest of truths, and illusion the only reality.”28 Illusion is the only reality: this is perhaps what we mean when we say that a writer knows.
