The most formidable opponent any theorist of Dante’s allegorical structure has to face is Erich Auerbach, whose doctrine of figura marked an explicit attempt to replace traditional medieval allegorical schemes with what he characterized as “a realism of the created” (kreatürliche Realismus): the term was meant, not only to affirm a certain solidarity with the Thomist tradition, but also to emphasize everything physical and “earthly” (another useful term for Auerbach)—everything nonotherworldly, nonspiritualistic—about Dante’s characters.1 This attack on allegorical meaning was not meant to be a modern or postmodern attack on meaning as such: the wisdom of the implicit or explicit spiritual judgments, the truthfulness of the syntheses of the Thomist system, remain intact here; but rather, the three-dimensionality of these spiritual realities was to be affirmed, as it was indeed articulated in the original meaning of his key term—figura—as a three-dimensional or sculptural shape, and not some mere two-dimensional or schematic image. Meanwhile, it is to the canonical Letter of Dante to his patron Can Grande della Scala—a letter whose authenticity has often been put in doubt—that Auerbach attributed the wilder misreadings of Dante that he stigmatized as “allegorical,” a word not inappropriate for this particular text, which sets out the traditional fourfold scheme of the levels as unabashedly as any of the Church Fathers.
I doubt if a materialistic age is as susceptible to such now academic glosses and to the quarrels among specialists that they once inspired. Not only are our contemporary medievalists a good deal more “modern” and theoretical than Auerbach’s colleagues, but in a postliterate age the approach to an author like Dante will as likely make its way through fantasy literature as through the canon, while the latter will tend to be anthologized in the form of the most readable and exciting, the most “realist” excerpts, with the ample footnotes of the more scholarly editions replacing the absent content.
At any rate, what I want to argue in the following pages is that Auerbach’s figura is a mediatory concept rather than a structural one; and that his authority is not to be invoked against the revivals of allegory such as this one unless it is restaged in a contemporary semiotic arena in which questions of meaning and reference are measured against the philosophical problems of immanence and of representation in general. Thomism is certainly a Christian version of immanence, in which God’s creation is suffused with meaning, even in its imperfections; but its aesthetics do not extend much further than classical notions of beauty and harmony.
In fact, however, Christian typology has solved this philosophical problem for us in advance: for in its Biblical form it is a kind of prophecy. The fulfillment of the “type” is the foretelling of the future, Moses being fulfilled by Jesus. History therefore here becomes the mediation, and Dante will ingeniously preserve this temporal function of his “method” by way of the future of the poet–narrator himself, whose textual revelation precedes his biographical exile. The historical mediation is thereby constructed within the text, and its formal problem is transformed into a solution in the very content.
Not all previous cultures have known this eschatological relationship to the future, but it is only in the twenty-first century that the future has actually arrived: for the right, who own more than 80 percent of the planet’s value and confront the ultimate contradictions of the world market; for the center, which now enjoys “freedom and democracy” in a henceforth unexportable system; for the left, which now tries to find its way within those enormous collective monopolies Marx saw developing within capitalism’s “integument”; along with an unparalleled mass mobilization of a politically awakened but cynical and passive population. Prophecy no longer has any place in this kind of situation; or rather, it becomes the process of attempting to detect that real present–future within the appearance of a commodified present of infinitely proliferating simulacra—which is to say, that prophecy in our time has become interpretation, and interpretation the reading of hidden figures and undiagnosable symptoms.
My working premise (here and elsewhere) has always been to search for the internal divisions of a work—its gaps, its multiple tensions, its contradictions—rather than for the rather obvious unity it seeks, in the name of whatever genre, to display. Obviously the allegorical genre—when allegory has taken a generic form, as in the three canonical works considered in these chapters—will display its external unity in the form of separation, juxtaposition, a well-nigh spatial division; and it is therefore for the internal conflicts and contradictions of those divisions that we must search today. Laying my cards on the table first, I will propose to find that deeper and more ultimate rift in the political philosophy the poet outlines in De Monarchia, namely that between pope and emperor, but it remains to be seen how that particular opposition could have poetic or formal consequences.
Nor will I take sides, except implicitly, on the debate Auerbach famously initiated, between critics who took the Letter to Can Grande literally and scanned the poem for its fourfold structures, and Auerbach’s promotion, in the name of “figura,” of that “earthly” realism he found everywhere in the work and rightly took as the grounds for its extraordinary value. But Auerbach could not have overlooked the stylistic and formal inconsistency between what we may call the Commedia’s allegorical flourishes and decorations—I have already discussed the three allegorical beasts of Canto I in some detail in the previous chapter—and the persistently vivid realism with which its multiple human characters are conveyed. But for support in his argument he might well have pointed, as I suggest, to the bodily and well-nigh muscular evocation of the individual beasts in question as living material creatures.
Realism is, as I have said elsewhere, a slippery concept, whose meaning depends very much on the aesthetic term with which it stands in opposition. I prefer to begin with narrative as such and with its dual structure in Dante: reminiscent of the modern detective story, we here confront two superimposed narratives quite distinct from one another: the story of the detective and his investigation on the one hand is the present journey on which Virgil leads the protagonist, and on the other the narrative material, the encounters that make up the journey; these constitute the crime to be solved, the victims or perpetrators to be identified. So from the outset we may observe a form invented to reconcile or better still to combine these two very different types of raw material, one experiential and in the first person, the other anecdotal and taking the form of what might later on be called objective historical fact. This, double structure prefigures a later differentiation within the novel itself between what its practitioners, under various terminological forms, called the roman and the récit dimensions of their production.
But we have not yet chronologically reached the moment of the novel, that is to say, the moment in which the contradictions and form problems of the traditional genres proved so extreme as to motivate the invention of that wholly new and as it were postgeneric form. This is, indeed, the formal history Georg Lukács sets out to tell in his Theory of the Novel, and so it will be instructive to see where he positions Dante in that influential chronology.2 Indeed, there is something blasphemous and also quite unsurprising in his juxtaposition of the Commedia with Dante’s younger biographer and exegete Boccaccio: for Dante’s poem is indeed, like the latter’s Decameron, a collection of tales and from that perspective quite discontinuous.
To get a sense of his kinship with Boccaccio, or with comic storytelling in general, readers have only to witness the spectacle of the devils in Malebolge (Inferno XXI–XXIII), who are divinely assigned to punish the fraudulent but of whose reliability Virgil and Dante have some reasonable doubts. That these devils relish their duties is obvious enough (pushing the sinners back down into their lake of burning pitch “come i dalfini, quando fanno segno / a marinar come l’ arco de la schiena”; “like dolphins when with their arching backs they give sign to mariners that they should prepare to save their ship”; XXII, 19–20, 224); but whether they can be trusted to comply with the divine instructions for the pair of travellers, indeed whether they will even take the time to understand them, is another story.3 The devils are certainly not infallible: witness the glorious scene in which a malefactor has been allowed to tell Dante his story and then takes the opportunity to dive back into the pitch in order to escape further individual torture. It is precisely this triumph of the sinner over his jailors that causes the alarmed pilgrims to escape, fearing the wrath of the devils on themselves; and indeed, they glimpse a flying group of angry infernals searching for them as they flee down into another bolge. It is a cinematographic masterpiece and miniature, at the same time that it richly illustrates in two ways what I call transversality: the sin for which these victims are being punished is not anger but rather “barratry” (“groundless litigation,” which we might more quaintly render as pettifogging); and yet little in the mode of punishment, save for the lawyerly cunning of the escapee, conveys this particular “sin” symbolically. Meanwhile, if rage and fury are the central ground-tone of this canto, it is notable that the guards and executioners feel it even more strongly than its victims and also that Virgil is himself contaminated by it—so suprapersonal is this “named emotion” and so allegorically susceptible to expression in either active or passive forms. The farce of the devils then comes as a kind of supplement to the fungibility and free-floating detachment of the allegorical emotion.
Dante’s is however a far more numerous compendium, and not many of these single-verse destinies take on an even anecdotal, let alone a narrative, form. Is the fate of Francesca, for example, even as diegetically organized or narratively fashioned as in Browning’s “Last Duchess,” which is evidently based on it? Yet in this last, we started out with a courteous host who is in Dante dispatched with a summary judgment “Caina attende” (“Cain awaits”), so that Browning’s monologue offers the kind of unexpected reversal we have become accustomed to expect in the short story or récit, or even in the fait divers, which must always, as Barthes and others have shown, contain some element of paradox. Still, it would be possible to take an inventory of these destinies that followed a different taxonomy than Dante’s religious or doctrinal one: victims and criminal agents, to be sure, but also life choices (poor Ciacco’s gluttony), unhappy accidents (the defeated Manfred), legendary betrayals, the passive and the active, the anonymous and the world-historical. The multiplicity of these potential “subjects” (as Henry James might have called them) then slowly wheels our attention back in the direction of the journey, the other narrative level.
Still, Lukács pays homage to that totality the Christian cosmos still preserves (and perpetuates in the form of Dante’s geography) even as he seems to rank these multiple tales, this collection of stories, among those smaller “epic” forms or unities that survive the break-up of the larger epic form or narrative as such. Here one may draw theoretical profit from the otherwise obfuscatory ambiguity of the German term, which as an adjective—“episch”—simply means narrative, while it continues a nominal life [Epos] as the “epic” of epic poem: Lukács suggests that the smaller forms—short story, joke—are still “episch” in the sense in which their narrativity retains its formal unity—as with Georg Simmel’s enclave “forms” but on an even smaller scale.4 They represent, in other words (and very much in Simmel’s spirit), little unities of life experience that have been spared from the universal fragmentation of modernity but that have not yet passed over into the epiphanic and lyric instant. In that sense, perhaps Dante’s micrological destinies are the smallest surviving units of a traditional narrativity, the atomic temporalities of whole lives lived under the Medusa’s gaze of God’s eternal judgment. In that sense, even the other narrative level—that of the poet–protagonist’s journey—is also subject to this violent miniaturization, this seemingly irrevocable and absolute reduction to a single fate and single-sentence confession. This would then greatly reduce the poem’s multiplicities and efface its fault lines, and one might well discover a unity of the microcosm in place of its macroscopic distances and varieties. (An inspection of Purgatorio will, however, discover that this is not exactly the case, and that a “destiny” is always in some sense compound.)
Let us now, however, shift perspectives and examine the poem from that of the operations required by its line-by-line reading. I have already mentioned geography in passing: it is a place to start from, inasmuch as the reader is here necessarily called on to perform a mental spatialization no less complex than what one has to summon up in reading Balzacian descriptions. Everyone presumably already knows the shape of Hell from the diagrams included in the various editions, as well as the extraordinary invention that allows the mountain of Purgatory to be extracted from the funnel-pit of Inferno, just as the moon was extracted from the earth billions of years ago, or more recently South America from Africa. But, some forensic or prosecutorial critic might ask us, where does Dante actually say this? Quote me the verses in which this geography is laid out for some more abstract understanding. We must ourselves deduce it, we must mentally construct it along with the various bolge. (How many of them? and which one are we on right now?) The mental faculty appealed to here surely remains the traditional one of the Imagination, the faculty of forming images; yet it is put to the test of then exploring its own images and internally constructing something whose outlines it does not know until it begins to deduce them on the basis of its own internal limits. Meanwhile, as some second unexpected consequence, any intelligible reading will have to take into account an up and a down, or in other words, reckon, inside the language somewhere, with a force of gravity that is not normally a component of our daily speech, nor is it necessarily present in the poem’s narrative sentences. But the pilgrim protagonist Dante will have to climb downward, painfully, awkwardly, and with some trepidation (and not without the occasional help of his divinely sponsored adjudant): and he will just as laboriously, but far more ponderously, have to climb the sometimes even steeper inclines of the mountain of Purgatory. (I note in passing that its base is one of those loci of the inconsistencies of allegorical isotopies—in the beginning an impenetrable wood, peopled with dangerous predators, later on in the next canticle a shore of the sea, marshalled by the illustrious Cato himself.)
But this contingency of weight and gravity, of a peculiarly unique property of our material existence (still unexplained by the scientists), will here also acquire a narrative, indeed an allegorical meaning; the human body will itself be endowed with a kind of spiritual sense. For with Minos’s judgment, the individual souls will fall to their appropriate level in Inferno as if on their own, and by their own weight. (Even more mysteriously beforehand, we witnessed the way in which the recently deceased souls on their own are driven by an irresistible force and desire to crowd upon Chiron’s boat and to hasten toward Minos’s terrible and definitive judgment: how to get them on board otherwise?) Meanwhile, in Purgatory, the opposite effect: the soul that has purged its sin is suddenly lightened and flies upward toward its place in the Empyrean (just as Dante himself, on the inspection of the respective sin and a consciousness of his own complicity with it, finds himself lightened, his climb upward becoming ever less strenuous, ever more effortless and light-headed, as though flying in a dream).
This theme of the body’s spiritual weight accompanies the reader throughout the poem, therefore, like an overtone or an undertone in music, always ready to precipitate an overt effect, as when, at the very beginning of his journey, Dante confronts the outcome of his metaphysical sublimation of love in the very concrete fate of Paolo and Francesca (joined together like dogs in heat throughout eternity): “E caddi come corpo morto cade” (“and fell as a dead body falls”; V/142/56–57). The toll of falling bodies in the Commedia is considerable, and even though its dead souls are not yet really physical (they will only take on their physical dead bodies again at the Last Judgment), it is not only the living Dante who feels the effects of this imaginary geography. In the next Canto, for example, the bodies of the dead sinners are pressed face down into what must only euphemistically be called mud, compounded by a “piova / eterna, maladetta, fredda e greve” (“rain / eternal, accursed, cold and heavy rain”; V/7-8/58-59). As it is with this physical mud that Virgil stuffs into the mouth of Cerberus, the gatekeeper, one assumes that the punishment appropriate to these particular sinners (they are the gluttons) is to eat it.
The subliminal gravity we have identified as the poem’s ground-bass does not yet seem associated with any of the conventional senses, but rather with something like spatial orientation, vertigo, dizziness, and the like, yet it fleshes out our reading experience just as surely as any sensory memory and thus functions as an analogon. Here, however, the reader confronts the subliminal presence of a specific bodily “sense,” that of taste, and it will be useful to practice a kind of phenomenological analysis of the immediate reading process in order to detect the variety of other subliminal features it is called upon to combine.
The sinner who exemplifies this punishment—Ciacco—blames his self-indulgence on the rich luxury of Florence; and inasmuch as he is called upon to pronounce himself on its politics, we may imagine his life as that of a privileged and obese observer in a cafe, grousing about the political situation (a veritable Florentine civil war) without doing anything about it and only too willing to furnish a list of the illustrious party leaders responsible. He blames three great sins for this civil discord: “Pride, Envy, and Avarice” (VI/74/62). The reader may conjecture that they refer back to the three beasts of Dante’s first approach—thereby activating our textural memory—just as the sufferer asks Dante to “recall him to men’s memories” when the poet returns to the world of life. So remembering is a process touched on here, the memory of remembering is as it were initially yet still very faintly activated but has not yet become what we might call an outright “theme” (nor is remembering a sense exactly, even though it can cause pain—“nessun maggior dolore”). Yet it contributes its note to the phenomenological thickness of this reading (whose temporal organization and unification by terza rima must also be noted, along with the purely musical effect of the word sounds and rhymes themselves).
Tactility is obviously omnipresent in the cold rain and mud, but there comes a moment when the contact is broken off: Ciacco falls silent with a pronouncement “più non ti respondo” (“nor do I answer you more”), of which it is indeterminable whether it results from his own decision or simply foretells and confirms the effect of some external force, like a jailor breaking up a conversation in the visitors’ room. And then something extraordinary fulfills this warning:
Li diritti occhi torse allora in biechi;
Guardommi un poco e poi chino Ia testa:
Cadde con essa a par de li altri ciechi.
Thereon he twisted his straight eyes asquint,
looked at me for a moment, then bent his head
and fell down with the other blind ones.
(VI/91–93/64–65)
This is the very center of the Canto, a return to an extraordinarily vivid and grotesque corporeal gestus: Ciacco’s eyestrings break, a cross-eyed grimace still seems to focus the Pilgrim for a moment, and then all sense is lost (the sinners being for the first time characterized as “blind”: a punishment, if it is not simply a figure of speech, that seems superfluous under the circumstances). Singleton glosses this abrupt symptom by way of the medieval association of gluttony and hebetude; and it is certain that Cioccho’s final stare might express the latter as something like an event, yet one quickly cancelled and replaced by the sightless glare of the unconscious. The allusion would be very much in keeping with Dante’s practice of associating each sin with a specific corporeal symptom. Finally at the end, with Virgil’s explanation, sound enters this picture with the Angel’s trumpet on Judgment Day (which is described unexpectedly as resounding “for all eternity,” as though another feature of the end of time were this unending assault on hearing).
It is tempting to associate the quite unexpected visual grimace that meets us at the moment when the senses of its victim are broken off with the whole de Manian (and Paxsonian) rhetoric of the “face” of personification (prosopopeia) and its “defacing” in the silencing of the speaking “face” or mask.5 At any rate it marks yet another abrupt turn in the reading process from dialogue to description and also from explanation to sense experience; and thereby intensifies the temptation of “allegoresis” or in other words a sudden reactivation of the interpretive operation itself. We begin to ask ourselves about the possible (and meaningful) relationship or connections between this particular sin and what breaks off contact with Ciacco (for other episodes are terminated in quite different ways—Farinata returns to the grave in which he has been lying, Brunetto Latini takes up the eternity of his jogging once again, and so on). Does gluttony somehow collect the pleasures of the other senses (including conversation) and concentrate them in a single “blind” obsession? Or is the intelligibility too faint to read here, so that we must ourselves break off the interpretive exploration, swept forward irreversibly by the overlapping rhythm of a prosody that only knows a relative pause at the end of each canto?
In any case, the preconditions for both structure and interpretation (allegory versus allegoresis in Teskey’s argument)6 are these: a differentiation of the various senses and other phenomenological levels of “experience” and a mobile seemingly random yet properly transversal play of attention back and forth, which seems to dwell in turn and without any particular order on point-to-point relations between individual strands.
It is a peculiar process that can now be examined more closely in one of the most famous and abundantly commented episodes of Inferno, namely that of the hero Farinata, who alone stands out in Hell with something of the glamor of Milton’s Satan: “com’ avesse l’inferno a gran dispitto” (“as if he had great scorn of Hell”; X/36/100–101). He is the heroic leader of Dante’s political enemies: a positioning that lends even greater vividness to Dante’s apparent admiration and even more strikingly dramatizes the paradox of this apotheosis of the rebel in a poem dominated by ideal images of order, harmony, and submission. But this is not the question that interests us here.
Rather, it is the intersection of this confrontation with another one—Dante’s questioning by the dead father of his friend Cavalcanti: a crux that occasioned a famous commentary of Gramsci on Croce’s aesthetics7—and an interruption that raises even more dramatically the problem of the thematic cross-references or transversalities that lie at the very center of allegorical structure as such. The contingency of interruption is everywhere in the Commedia underscored, precisely in order to awaken or exacerbate our interpretive questions about the thematic relations which bridge such gaps.
In this instance, a political discussion, a rather reflective one, not yet sharpened into argument or mutual insult, is arrested by the elder Cavalcanti’s question about his son, and his misunderstanding of Dante’s use of the past tense of the verb, which he takes to mean that the younger Cavalcanti is no longer alive: “non fiere li occhi suoi lo dolce lume?” (“does the sweet light not strike his eyes?”; X/69/102–103).
The two discussions then merge in an account of the peculiar temporality of the damned, who can see future and past but not the present; and certainly it was be possible for readers like Croce himself to conclude that this—one of the most powerful episodes of the poem—is little more than a pretext for another one of those boring doctrinal expositions (here, on posthumous temporality) that it is normally the task of Virgil to administer but which here Farinata himself undertakes. (Virgil limits himself to the rather odd injunction to Dante that he not forget this encounter: it is true that it contains a prophecy by Farinata about Dante’s own unhappy fate, so that we are free to read it internally as well.) But I prefer to underscore the recurrence in yet a fourth voice (Virgil’s) of the theme of memory (“la mente tua conservi quel qu’udito”; “let your memory preserve what you have heard against yourself”; X/127/106–107), which can now serve as the random thematic connector between any number of representational details. Art even enters the picture in the form of political strategy, the “arte” of the two sides of the civil conflict, a veritable premonition of Machiavelli’s epistemological invention several centuries later. So it is that a thematic homophony (the “seme” of art reappearing in different contexts under different lexical auspices) randomly lights up spatial coincidences between various levels: but these vertical “stylistic events” are not to be confused with the thematics that emerged in post–New Critical theory, where a Wilson Knight, for example, discovers thematic clusters in Shakespeare, often unique to individual plays, metallic imagery emerging everywhere in Coriolanus, while that of nausea and corruption seeps through the verbal texture of Hamlet. (Later, in the absence of any adequate instruments for dealing with the novel—inasmuch as the New Critics had concentrated their attention on poetic language—this emphasis on recurrent themes and thematic clusters became a staple of narrative criticism in general and of the novel in particular.)
But thematics still foreground the content of their material and essentially work with recurrence or repetition, with what will later be called redundance: the method is horizontal and tends to substitute the construction of this or that “phenomenological world” for the form and shape of the novel’s events. It looks for homologies between different kinds of content: thus, in the episode that concerns us here, we may be tempted to see in the allusion to Dante’s best friend, the poet Guido Cavalcanti, a kind of rivalry, in which Dante opposes his own transformation of lyric into narrative or epic (“episch”) to Guido’s sublimation of it into the philosophical and the theory of love (something which long interested Ezra Pound). The supposition is, however, gratuitous until we remember that in the political realm too, rivalry has become a crucial form; the old ideological struggle between Guelph and Ghibelline (the priority of pope or emperor, their struggle for sovereignty in the Italian city states) has in Dante’s Florence been transformed into a rivalry between two currents within the triumphant Guelph party (“the one going into two”). Farinata therefore is identified no longer as the absolute ideological enemy, but rather as the leader of a rival clan among the enemies, so that this whole structure can be taken as homologous with the poetic rivalry of the two friends, Dante and Cavalcanti, within a properly poetic politics, the dissensions within what used to be the unified avant-garde of the “dolce stil nuovo.” This approach then turns “rivalry” into a doubly political theme and presumably inspires us to hunt for its presence elsewhere in the Commedia.
An allegorical method, however, would read this parallelism as an event, as the punctual intersection of two fundamental levels of the poem: the political and the poetic. For one brief moment, something new happens in this crossing of the lines, which is neither a metaphorical transfer nor an addition to a thematic inventory; but rather a conjuncture, a striking of sparks and the ephemeral activation of a specific occurrence in the reading process, a narrative event on the level of form (rather than, as in conventional narrative, in the content). Such purely formal “events” then characterize allegory better than the parallel occurrences in this or that purely representational storytelling: they are short circuits within the structural system of levels, whose interactions—seemingly random either from a thematic or a narrative logic—constitute a reading experience utterly unique and quite distinct from that of either conventional narrative or pure lyric.
Meanwhile we must return to the critical comments of Antonio Gramsci on this same Canto of Inferno, Canto X, which here become something of a crux or touchstone. In his letter of September 20, 1931, to Tatiana he raises the issue—it is directed against Croce—of the discursive heterogeneity between the affecting scene of Cavalcanti’s (erroneous) mourning for his son and Farinata’s scholastic lesson on the temporality of the Inferno. For Croce—master of a properly modernist differentiation and as keen on distinguishing poetic “expression” from other kinds of language as were the New Critics in their own search for the essence of poetic language—it was the exercise of his trademark judgment on “what is living” and “what is dead” (in Hegel, Marx, Dante, and others) that the offending canto called into action: clearly motivating the radical separation of Cavalcanti’s poetic pathos from the rhymed prose of Farinata’s disquisition.8
My point is simply that in quite properly defending Dante and demonstrating the functional role of Farinata’s explanation in that larger effect of pathos, Gramsci has retained an unspoken literary value—that of unity or of the isotopie—that he shares with his master and which we need not retain today, in an age of fragmentation, heterogeneity, and indeed of allegory itself. No dramatist would indeed object to Farinata’s variations in tone—from the haughty to the politically intent, from regret to avuncular instruction—but this is merely to reinstate a unity of multiple tones from a different and now more theatrical perspective. What I want to suggest is not only that heterogeneity of raw material—the political struggle, paternal grief, the geographical situation—on which Gramsci’s Althusserian critics always insisted (as over against his “humanism”); but also the differentiation of mental operations called into play by these distinct elements, which it is the function of terza rima not only to reunify but also to designate as an act of reunification in the process.
All this is today easier enough to grasp thematically: and it is enough to suggest that the whole canto, with its personal prophecies (Dante will shortly be exiled from Florence) and its political perspectives (the fate of the factions), along with the trumpet of doom that seals these graves forever, is staged under the overarching thematics of temporality and memory. But I think we lose something of the rugosity of the thing in this complacent flattening out into mere themes (themselves at best those very “bad allegories” we have been intent on denouncing in “humanist” readings).
Better to insist on, and hold fast to, a disruptive movement of attention back and forth between these varied “intentional objects,” in the process making ephemeral connections between them. Thus, the Florentine civil war has its poetic counterparts. Nor is it itself any unified event: for to the struggle between the Ghibellines and the Guelphs, which concludes (at least in Dante’s lifetime) with the triumph of the latter, there succeeds (as I have already noted) another struggle within the Guelph party itself, to which Dante will, a few years after this encounter in the afterlife, himself fall victim. It is to this last, far more fraternal conflict (the One into the Two) that his sectarian opposition to Farinata is referred. Meanwhile, in a kind of alternation of voices and operatic duets, their conversation is interrupted by the reminder of Dante’s friendship with his great fellow-poet Cavalcanti, whose father wonders why the latter is not eminent enough to accompany him on this extraordinary journey. This is the point at which a determined yet subtly malicious Dante observes, indicating Virgil, that his friend and poetic comrade perhaps chose the wrong path, that of philosophy rather than of Virgilian epic. This is an argument no less politically fraught than the overtly political one, which it parallels, designating a similar rift in the poetic avant-garde of the Dolce stil novo. At which point old Cavalcanti collapses and the exchange with Farinata continues as though without a break.
I would like to suggest that two allegorical levels are here activated and intersect with one another in the fashion of a musical composition in which two distinct instruments—flute and oboe, say—project a single note in unison. The political level is itself allegorical of the grandest of the fourfold levels, namely the anagogical one, the future of the human race as it progresses, slowly or swiftly, but with historical inevitability, toward the Last Judgment. Dante is of the Emperor’s party (see below) but has been raised among its opponents, until a splinter group of the latter turns again to oppose the pope (the ideological complexities of modern Trotskyism might well convey something of this political ambivalence).
Meanwhile, although the internal dramas of any avant-garde are in and of themselves political, I will assign these debates on poetics and on individual style and creation to the “moral” level, or in other words, the fate of the soul (the construction of subjectivity). For this is a poetic production that formally inquires into the very nature of sublimation and seeks to transform desire into a new kind of drive (the classical description of the process being Plato’s Symposium). Something of this process was apparent in Spenser: it is a lateral operation and cannot be conducted by way of the direct taboos (in the ten commandments, for example, although Lacan’s analysis of them is instructive),9 nor is it representational, in the sense in which the model of the subjectivity to be produced is the very soul whose purification is described in the content of the poem itself. Rather, it must consist of the aftereffects and habitus of those effects and that reading, something far more difficult to register. Here, Dante’s smug satisfaction at having chosen “the right path” suggests that Cavalcanti’s method, a rather psychoanalytic and introspective exploration (well known to Poundians), will not be satisfactory; and it implies that narrative has constructional powers that introspection and philosophy necessarily lack. Still, inasmuch as a psychoanalytic framework is the only satisfactory one we currently have for representing psychic change, we may identify the well-nigh telepathic Virgil as a kind of analyst, whose function is there to warn and to prompt and in this canto to insist on memory.
So in what way does this canto, laterally, form our sense of temporality? A formative pressure is to be found in the way we are asked to imagine the future. The inhabitants of this circle have and do not have a future: blind to the present, they can see our future as long as they themselves have one, all the while knowing that they are without a future, that the lids of the coffins, like those of the eyes, will be nailed down definitively upon them, that they will then only exist in an empty present, a darkness without content. This is a training in a duality of time which simpler groups only knew, at best, in the form of the family and ancestor worship, immortality being its most satisfactory replacement in a spatially expanded age. (There must have been much celebration in ancient Egypt on that memorable day on which immortality was extended to the dead of the common people!)
Dante offers us a particularly challenging model in which the eternal present is not one of action, while a future that transcends our individual biological life is itself potentially blocked and finite. The two types of temporality here express a dawning historicity, as Christianity first began to develop it, a universal history of which Farinata sees consequences that Dante himself can only hear from him in prophetic form, locked as he is in his own present of time, even on this day of Jubilee and its dream vision.
What transcends individual biographical existence is then twofold: it is the universal time established by scripture and chronicle, and the world space of the Roman (and Christian) empire and of Dante’s wanderings in exile. Both dimensions are to be interiorized so as to assign the individual “subject of desire” its modestly restricted position. In our own time, no doubt, they correspond to the absent omnipresence of globalization on the one hand and on an inconceivably scientific projection about the duration of the galaxies on the other: transcendencies we have probably not yet assimilated into our more traditional phenomenological psychic structures.
This particular axis—between phenomenological time and history as such—is, however, only one set of the coordinates that construct subjectivity in Dante’s work (and presumably in one way or another in his cultural moment as well). The other weighs on the very structure of the Commedia itself as well as on Dante’s politics: it is the dual power outlined in De Monarchia, which opposes the spiritual authority of the pope to the temporal order of the imperial monarchy (Rome constituting the ideal image and historical embodiment of their unity): soul and body, private and public, the two levels of the moral and the anagogical.
What I have hitherto examined is the way in which the moral level (or psychoanalytic one, if you prefer) projects its divided structure onto the anagogical one (that of the collectivity) in the form of an impossible consciousness of history. Now we must proceed in the other direction and try to grasp the way in which the collective or political level intersects with the moral or psychological one and leaves its traces in private or personal destiny.
It is natural enough for modern people to find the problems of Dante’s political theory and commitments rather antiquated in the light of a history from which the Empire and its emperors have long since vanished, and in which the pope is scarcely the claimant for that universal authority for which he once fought in a parochial Western middle ages (before Protestantism). But systems like those of the Islamic Republic of Iran, with its supreme spiritual leader on the one hand and its political apparatus (complete with a president) on the other, suggest that the problem is not altogether obsolete in modern times. Meanwhile the stewardship of the communist parties in a now older socialism (as they operated in a kind of duality or parallelism with the bureaucratic mechanisms of the state and the economy) can also be read in this fashion: at least in principle, in both systems, the “spiritual” center was to serve as a guide or check, a kind of moral guidance, for the secular operations of administration and production. It is only the army, treason, warfare, or civil unrest that disturbs this seemingly reasonable scheme, this dual sovereignty, about which it remains uncertain where the “monopoly of violence” is to be housed. In Dante’s Italy, indeed, the popes have armies and rule territories, while the Emperor is far away, often weak, and at best a kind of “regulative idea.”
But if the dualistic scheme is to be complicated by other questions, such as those of freedom and elections (both pope and emperor are actually elected in some sense of the word), then it must be interpreted in a different way. No mode of production willingly disappears; social structure has its Spinozan conatus, just like living organisms; the freedoms a given socioeconomic system specifies, or even encourages or forbids on the order of incorporating their specific infringencies into state law, never extend to the freedom to change the system as a whole. Revolt can be tolerated not only because it can be put down but also because it changes nothing: dynastic successions, the coup, and the seizure of power are tolerable to the degree to which “power” as such remains “the same” under the new regime. But revolution as a wholesale transformation of the system as such can have no place, either in monarchies or dictatorships, oligarchies or democracies: the anti-systemic (as Wallerstein termed it) must be rooted out, whether it takes the form of Spartacus, the Confederacy, or the Paris Commune.
So now the concrete function of the “supreme” or spiritual leader becomes much clearer: it is to prevent the transformation, modification, or even suppression of the system, a fragile system, surrounded by powerful systemic alternatives (to which it is perhaps better to say that it is itself the alternative, isolated and in permanent danger from without and from within as well). In the socialist countries it was only too clear that the function of the party was first and foremost that, to secure the permanence of the revolution, to prevent its dissolution and its reab-sorption into world capitalism—a mission that overrides all more immediately “socialist” concerns or “communist” ideals, any possibility of achieving which will obviously be extinguished by the disappearance of the system itself.
The contemporary parallels are therefore still available in various embodiments; but if they no longer take this starkly classical form—primitive Christianity versus the Roman road, the imperial networks—then it is perhaps for another reason that also plagued Dante himself. For there is a third center, alongside the pope and the emperor, and that is Florence itself: commerce, nascent capitalism, finance, money, and greed—phenomena that make their presence felt on every page of the Commedia. To be sure, individual popes also fall into this third category and take their punishment for corruption, simony, treachery, and gluttony like all the rest: but the papacy as such is not in question here, and Dante’s theorizing turns on the preservation of this duality of the cross and the eagle and on how it is to be imagined to function properly. What was not to have been part of the vision was what Florence so preeminently stands for, not just a sinkhole of sins, but a wholly different system, a commercial one, for which there is as yet no place within the older world order, nor any proper conceptual or theological category, either. Dante’s fury at Florence seethes through the Commedia and is given vent eloquently on every available occasion; but neither pope nor emperor is really capable of dealing with the historical dilemma it constitutes, namely the emergence out of feudalism of a wholly new social dynamic, a wholly new and untheorized mode of production. Indeed, one is tempted to suggest that it is precisely this form dilemma that is the driving force behind the Commedia itself and its well-nigh infinite inventiveness.
As for the framework, then, it is already laid in place by a dualism that is itself a juxtaposition of two incommensurate dimensions rather than some easy parallelism. The proof is to be found in the genealogy of the virtues and the vices themselves, which are not symmetrical: the virtues are not simply cancellations of the system of sins, the latter not merely the infringements of the former. As we have shown in an earlier chapter, the theological virtues have little to do with the cardinal sins, nor the venial ones, either (we remember that even Aristotle had trouble with his own attempts at mediation): each system comes from a different world, a different set of preoccupations.
And this is how the Commedia is able to construct its fundamental architecture: the sins will be individual, they will house the individual narratives, the anecdotes, the concrete acts. They are, so to speak, the domain of the papacy; and what the pope stands for, in his authority, is the empirical judgment on individual characters; theology provides the categories according to which their stories can be collected and the distinctions that govern their classifications and their punishments. As for the empire, it is the very space of the afterworld itself, particularly as it culminates in the astronomical system, as but one form of a palpably centered and hierarchical space. That space is not geographic in the sense in which the individual sinners in this afterworld are at one with their landscapes and their dialects: imperial space is a kind of absent totality, as witness its dual forms in Paradiso—in the constellations and various spheres and their attendant virtues and the great unity of the rose into which they all dissolve, as so many appearances, with the approach of the beatific vision. Sovereignty is nonphysical and nonmaterial, even though it exists in a concentration somehow beyond representation: it is indeed, as Schmitt explained, very much a state of exception. I am both situated somewhere within its hierarchy and dissolved with it into an indistinguishable collective consciousness. Such is then Dante’s unique representational solution to the problem—both political and aesthetic—of the incommensurability between the individual and the group, between phenomenological experience and the totality as such. Yet like all such solutions, Paradiso is an imaginary one, a triumph of picture-thinking over the inconceivable contradiction.
It is therefore time to take an inventory of such levels within the reading present insofar as we can abstract them from this, the most elaborate allegorical structure ever devised. We might well begin with that subliminal level we have already touched on, namely the establishment of a kind of phenomenological verticality embodied in the effects of gravity, in the sensations of weight and of lightness. That conceptuality is present in this virtually unconscious (and seemingly natural) phenomenon can be demonstrated, not only in its motivation of the geographical system—descending, climbing, and then rising—but also in the relationship between verticality and the sublime, which can for the moment be considered a kind of amplificatio or sublimation of that verticality. Clearly, however, this virtuality of gravity, this permanent possibility of its punctual registration as an event, will depend on its intersection with any one of the other levels virtual within the poem’s historical aesthetic.
The sensory levels are then clearly no longer unconscious but rather the media for specific perception: the stench of the bolgi, the effects of light (as in the blinding illumination that causes Dante to swoon, much like the effects of light-bombs in modern military technology), the shadow and ominous blood-darkened color of a watery landscape, sounds of wailing, and the like. All of these make an immediate appeal, if not directly to our sense experience, then at least to our memory of it (which often brings with it subliminal experiences of its physical effects); but (in the spirit of Lukács’s great essay on description versus narration) we need to be aware of the degree to which this level of static sensation is transformed into perception by what I will call the level of the kinetic and of narrative.
Mere sensations, taken by themselves, are simply invitations to the decipherment of a purely symbolic meaning; an older kind of bad allegory deploys them as so many signs, of which a symbolic table might be laid out. The kinetic, on the other hand, transforms them into events in their own right: thus the “lonza” of the beginning is not merely particolored, like an exotic and decorative rug or skin, it is also “leggiera”—which could by itself remain a static attribute—but with the adjective “presta molto” the beast becomes visualizable in the supple play of its muscles as it arouses alarm, it becomes something like the essence of a mobility that fascinates and also awakens danger signals (“a leopard light-footed and very fleet, covered with a spotted hide”; I/32–33/4–5).
Meanwhile it can be asserted that these moments—in which the poem breaks into narrative, as it were, and returns to the “isotopie” of sequentiality, of following the segments of an action, a reaction, a continuation—are essentially kinetic ones, driven on by Virgil’s constant admonitions and interrupted by “pauses” that are no less kinetic for bringing a momentary stillness or rest to the bodies they follow. Dante’s geography thereby reveals its formal “motivation”: it necessitates and ensures the reactivation of the kinetic at every moment. This is the difference between this journey and the traditional allegorical ones of the Roman de la rose or of Bunyan: this cosmos not only, like theirs, has a meaning, it also determines a corporeal content, a complex of physical reactions that not only transcends static perception but also provides material for that sublimation into the various “spiritual” or allegorical senses I have been touching on here (in what is misleadingly called interpretation).
But geography then determines new levels in its own right: and they can be distinguished from one another as explanation and exploration, respectively. Explanation activates that mental function sometimes loosely identified as Imagination or picture-thinking, in which we are called on mentally to construct spaces of various kinds and to combine them with one another in ways that draw on that land surveying which Husserl considered to be the basis and foundation of mathematics itself and of which the most mysterious and contingent is that of left and right. (Who has not laboriously attempted to follow Balzac’s interminable accounts of a building or Parisian apartment, only to find, at its end, that we have put all the left-hand rooms of an enfilade on the right and thus completely misconstrued what will turn out to be the scene of a drama to come?) The cosmological explanations of Virgil are then something like a ground zero of theology, on which all the later elaborate lessons in the economy of sins and virtues, for example, or the levels of paradise, build. Pedagogy here takes the form of geography, and this lends the otherwise sterile abstraction of Dante’s scholasticism its materiality; indeed, it could be argued that it is precisely this spatial structure of Dante’s theology that saves it from didacticism and turns its seeming lessons into maps, its abstract argumentation into travel guides for the soul.
Exploration then repeats these formal imperatives on the more seemingly physical level of emulation, when we attempt to reproduce in our reading minds what the difficulties of Dante’s narrated body might approximate as it navigates asperities of the journey downward (often assimilated, with an exile’s eye, to distinctive places in the Italian landscape) or struggles upward, distinguishing the steep and the gradual inclines, the chasms and the relief of a path.
We often distinguish explanation and exploration as appealing to the mind on the one hand and the body on the other, forgetting that it is the task of the poem to overcome such distinctions: sometimes even by insisting on them, as when Virgil’s nonmaterial shape eludes the material obstacles that Dante’s living body has to face. But it is precisely in such moments—which exemplify one of those intersections between the levels we have in mind here—that materiality itself and corporeality are most strongly affirmed and intensified for the reading mind. I have conjectured that it was this bias toward the physical that Auerbach meant to emphasize when he repeatedly used words like earthly or kreatürlich and attacked “allegory” in the process, reinventing a new and for him more Christian or Thomist version of “figural” realism of the type stressed by André Bazin and Kracauer in their postwar film theories. This “knight’s move” from literature to cinema, from language to a mobile visuality, can perhaps be explained by the increasing skepticism about representation in literary modernism, and the moment in which film seemed to offer the more appropriate opening onto a visual sense for the moment still capable of saying everything that henceforth abstract literary realism used to say.
But in all this we have not yet reached that other level which is speech itself: for the geographical explanations as well as the physical evocations are all necessarily conveyed in language, and by way of another fundamental opposition, that between the speeches and dialogues and the first-person narrative—the two then reunited in the flow and discipline of terza rima as a form.
There is an argument to be made about allegory and syntax that would seem in direct contradiction to Auerbach’s strenuous efforts to disable traditional allegorical readings of Dante (particularly as they are based on the Letter to Can Grande). I want to show a way through this stark opposition between “allegory” and what Auerbach called figura; but it must start by correcting the conventional reading of Mimesis, which reads the opening juxtaposition of Homer and the Bible as one between hypotaxis and parataxis, associating the latter, as illustrated by the biblical texts, with the sermo humilis, that is to say the vernacular language, as opposed to the high-flown and artificial rhetorical one in which our hypotactic traditions flourished, nourished on classics that were for the most part, from the Greeks and Cicero on down, oratorical. In fact, the opening chapters of Mimesis play with a fourfold set of coordinates, simple versus rhetorical along with parataxis versus hypotaxis: the winning combination is that of a hypotactic sermo humilis, which amounts to a conquest of complex syntax in the vernacular language, and which obviously, for Auerbach, reaches its climax in Dante.
Sonorities to be sure have their own autonomous level, what Lacan called llalangue (ingeniously translated as language), the babbling sound of the various tongues into which human language is divided and which can then revert back into meaningless sound in the noises of an idiosyncratic patois or a reversal to sheer wailing and outcry. This level is then a return to the more purely sensory, leaving behind it the empty frameworks of meter and rhyme to be deployed in the service of a kinetic forward-driving verse itself and used to buttress and reinforce narrative movement and temporality.
Sentence structure is however something else, something which has its own peculiar autonomy; and it was the unique contribution of Auerbach to have singled out syntax as the central exhibit of his theory of “realism” in Mimesis and above all in his studies of Dante. The philosophical background of this linguistic and stylistic position needs some initial clarification. It should, for example, be added that Auerbach’s frequent denunciations of allegory as artificial and decorative were in fact so many attacks on Neoplatonism and what he considered an idealistic transcendence of matter toward the Idea: this is the sense in which Auerbach’s closet Thomism can be considered a kind of transcendent materialism, an attention to “worldly” or “earthly” detail that glorifies even the most imperfect created phenomena in the name of an immanent transcendence, a perspective in which the imperfect thing or character can be seen against the background of its own implicit perfection. This is, of course, precisely the perspective of the Commedia, and according to Auerbach it is this inner movement of the phenomenon toward its entelechy which secures the movement of its evocation and as it were the “event” of its unfolding (“as a bud opens”).10 Such an inner movement governs the form of the three canticles as a whole, developing toward the beatific vision; but it also governs the microcosmic narratives of the episodes, as the souls move toward their ultimate fates: we have already witnessed static fates of the condemned, for example, dramatized not only by the coffin lids that will close forever on Judgment Day, but also by the temporality of their knowledge of earth, which still allows them to see the future even though the present is now no longer visible, but which will obviously lose even that prophetic power when, after Judgment Day, the future no longer exists. They are therefore (in a very Sartrean fashion) nothing but their own pasts, their own life histories, which can no longer change: they have become in other words (those of Mallarmé) their own destinies.
Auerbach’s position is that it was Dante’s conquest of the periodic sentence that put him in a position to model or represent this complex and “realist” combination of Aristotelian ontology and Christian temporality. Only Auerbach could have dared to publish the following remark (on one of Dante’s earlier lyrics): “no sentence of that kind was written in the Middle Ages before Dante”11 ; and although the poet had no relationship with the as yet unrecovered Greek classics, his commentator sees his stylistic achievement as a reinvention of Greek rather than Latin linguistic power, a rediscovery of the “language that created men and de.”12
Dante’s own classification of sentences is to be found in De vulgari eloquentia (II, 6); but Auerbach’s is most powerfully articulated in the very structure of his Mimesis, which opposes the paratactic sentence—the “and,” the accumulation of simple sentences and static or descriptive details—to the “hypotaxis” that gradually overcomes it and makes of the sentence a complex instrument of clauses and subclauses, along with a rising and falling inner movement (from the men to the de), a structure capable of capturing the multiple perspectives of the reality we have just described. Mimesis tells the story of a laborious ascent of the vernacular to a first climax in Dante’s style; and then another slow recovery through Western literary practice to the stylistic achievement of Zola (the book’s second “climax”): what may seem a mysterious or even paradoxical analogy between Thomism and naturalism is explained by the centrality for both of the body as such (and the syntax able to do it justice).
But there are intermediary steps here as well: for example, the kind of periodic sentence Auerbach has in mind, in which a statement or proposition is filled in by all kinds of appositions, qualifying and dependent clauses, and logical connectives of all kinds in a linguistic construction which becomes capable of touching a range of aspects of the topic including the temporal perspectives and its rhetorical relationships to speaker and listener. But Auerbach necessarily conveys this extraordinary structure (Proust might have been a better reference for him than Zola) by comparison, first with the respective syntax of Dante’s other poetic comrades in the dolce stil nuovo, and, then, in Mimesis, with earlier and later literary generations. This gives us a feeling for Dante’s linguistic innovation, which we cannot take from a direct reading, against the background of all those variant possibilities (or the absence of them, the failure to follow up on the new syntactic possibilities of the vernacular). We can get a sense of his style as a uniquely signed idiom, but not of the syntactical history on which it is embedded.
The argument is not that the periodic sentence is all by itself an instrument of realism: for the mere periodic sentence as such, as an oratorical structure, simply becomes an instrument in an elaborate rhetorical arsenal, as in the bombast of the later Roman Empire. The argument here is that its medieval recovery from the parataxis of the vernacular then allows a true “verse paragraph” to come into being—that is, a multiplicity of individual sentences, which, in their syntactic variety, put to use the hypotaxis elaborated by the period and its subordinations, dependencies, modalties, modifications, and repetitions. These now fan out into a larger text and sequence of which the sentences are so many intricate articulations.13
This is why the mediation of verse is required: to serve as an analogon, in the present of reading, to this synchronous system of relationships, which the prosody echoes as a dialectic of identity and difference (in a Jakobsonian projection of the syntaxical axis onto the temporal one, each reflecting a shared yet distinct form of closure in time).
What then dialectically parallels this strenuous touching of all the walls in the microcosm of syntax is what we will call thick narrative in the macrocosm of the events: namely the presence of the levels and the multiplicity of their intersections. Narrative goes transversally from one to the other, unexpectedly setting them in unpredictable contact with each other—by juxtaposition, by metaphoric identification, by repetition of dialectically ambiguous words—in a touching of all the bases, which replicates the operation on the dimensions of the individual sentence. Indeed, it seems to me that this conception of thick narration as a value—that it is somehow more interesting and admirable than the simplified dual levels of traditional allegory, or the one-dimensional sentence of a merely contingent or private story—holds the key to the deeper function of the levels as a literary phenomenon. I’ve said elsewhere that it seemed to me the advantage of a Marxist criticism, far from being “reductive,” lay in the fact that it includes more, it expands the phenomenon of the text to greater and more multiple dimensions of both reference and signification, making of the literary work an act in history and time as well as an inert and static objective structure. I would now say that those possibilities of expansion are internally predicated on the existence within the text of the four levels themselves, which allow and develop just such a complex of multidimensional relationships. Thus, in an allegory like this one (but there really are no other allegories like this one of Dante), the articulations of the periodic sentence have as their correlative the practice and pulsation of the four allegorical levels.
In a more modern realism, to be sure, all this will have been reabsorbed into narrative in a very different way and according to a historically distinct aesthetic. The theological institutions of interpretation are gone, and it is meanwhile a more subjectivized and individualized narrative itself which will have to assume the twin processes of articulation that we found in the allegorical levels and their sentences, reducing them to a universal isotopie. But literary history is itself a sequence of just such distinct paradigms, the story of each demanding interpretation in its own right.
One may perhaps rewrite this priority of the periodic sentence and of syntax as such in terms of verse by insisting on the function of rhyme here: the rhymes not only ensure that progression forward in time imposed by terza rima, they also stand in tension and opposition to the meter of the verses they interrupt, intersect, or bring to closure. The opposition is itself symbolic, or better still allegorical: it dramatizes, on the level of art or poetry itself, the way in which a present of time punctuates a moving temporality. The return of the rhyme demonstrates that the absolute present can be reconciled with the radically different temporal system of past–present–future, even though that reconciliation cannot be conceptualized in philosophy or abstract thought: showing how the static object of description can be set in motion by the kinetics of narration. But for the demonstration to work, the sentence, in all its complexity, must retain the natural movement of ordinary speech, which it must not interrupt with artificial or rhetorical flourishes or decorations. Its regular punctuation by rhyme is enough to secure its status as something more than ordinary speech; and this is why the impact of Dante on his still emergent vernacular can be matched only by a Baudelaire in French or a Yeats or a Rilke in English or German: a speaking voice that is miraculously formed into verse as it follows the logic of its own sometimes tortuous syntax.
Were one, however, to adopt as a stylistic guide not Auerbach but rather Leo Spitzer, the weight of the analysis would certainly fall elsewhere: perhaps on that peculiar construction of effacement—the verb and its unmaking in un- or dis- “Siena mi fé, disfecemi Maremma” (“Siena made me, Maremma unmade me” (Purgatorio V/134/52)—which we may take as a final or micrological version of epic paraphrase. Spitzer might well have taken this stylistic tic as an entry point into his famous “hermeneutic circle” as it winds itself through all the levels of the work’s meaning. His debate with Auerbach (who declared, “my purpose is always to write history”) turned on the specificity of the detail (which Auerbach is alleged to have submerged in his larger historical story); but from our perspective here—that of the intersection of contradictions, or of “the identity of identity and non-identity” (Hegel)—there is no need to sacrifice either the detail or the historical narrative, and indeed the reinforcement of each can only bring the central tension and contradiction out more sharply. In the case of the example or detail I have selected—effacement by the prefix—this peculiar stylistic mannerism would be best understood as the linguistic reinforcement of an organic view of phenomena, which avoids death or negation by folding it back into the temporal and evolutionary process as the latter’s simple undoing.
The dualities themselves (caricatured in the twin bodies of Inferno XXV) remind us of the invisible omnipresence of Ovid in Dante’s imagination, for which the temporality of language and the sentence has elective affinities with change and metamorphosis, rather than with static description. In thought and conceptuality, however, alternation seems at first limited to that between active and passive: the “turbulence” in question varying from a literal passion to an action and a source of contagion. In Inferno, the “sins” must be distinguished from one another in order to furnish the stops on the journey, the episodic structure of a story collection like Boccaccio’s. But we have seen how this impossible pressure determines a kind of laterality, in which the qualities of the individual sinner (and of his Canto) tend to slip away from their official classification and to gain a kind of autonomy, a contagion of the abstract. It is this initial discordance that triggers the allegorical reading (as at the very beginning of the history of allegoresis in Alexandrian times) and makes for an interrogation for which the intersection of multiple levels becomes visible.
In Purgatorio, however, as Tambling has shown with great detail and acuity,14 the very conception of a possible purgation and purification, the prospect of a cleansing away of that specific sin which has hitherto defined a character’s identity, makes for a much more fluid interaction between the sins themselves, which he identifies as that protean and ambiguous category, the chiasmus. “The divisions, between Dante and the souls he addresses, may be crossable: at moments, a chiasmic reversal seems near.”15 But this kind of transfer also takes place between the various sins themselves (and their shelves or places), in a far more open display of what we have called transversality than anything in Inferno. For in a sense (the seven P’s incised on his forehead), Dante must himself symbolically purge the whole scale of sins on his way to the Garden and its rivers (and in particular, the river of Lethe, which in a far more beneficent way than in Faust determines a healing forgetfulness of all the sins hitherto accrued: as it were itself a jubilee, a wiping clean of the slate, a forgiveness of debts). The doctrinal question is then whether all the souls passing through Purgatory do not need in the same way to purge the gamut of sinfulness of which Adam’s children are guilty, or whether their own specific offense is serious enough to take all the others with it in its final release. If so, then in a sense all the sins are somehow related and combined into a single comprehensive flaw or category, so that, as realized in Paradiso, we already have avant la lettre a kind of virtual duality in which the degrees of Difference are at one and the same time folded back into one stupendous Identity.
Meanwhile, as Tambling significantly notes, the whole canticle is the site of an enormous release of affect, as opposed to the named emotions, a relief which is the sign of the latter’s dissolution and a place of a kind of Christian apatheia or ataraxia, and at the same time a place of heightened spiritual concentration: thus, for example, he demonstrates that the various figures of the poem receive their perceptions with heightened intensity and heightened attention and curiosity, as an index of their progress.16 He himself insists, quite rightly I think, on the crucial role here of that ambiguous emotion named anger, about which we have already seen Aristotle’s perplexity, his hesitation to posit its opposite number. Here, however, Christian peace will come to fill that empty semiotic space. In contrast to the omnipresence of anger in Inferno, where even its witnesses (Virgil, in the example I have cited, Dante himself on the lake of blood) are contaminated by the power of this central named emotion, the figures of anger in Purgatorio are purely aesthetic representations (in this case, visions) and therefore at some second remove from the thing itself: they constitute its spectacle, rather, or at best its simulacrum. When we reckon into this observation the omnipresence of poets in this canticle, as well as the striking role of the multisensory frieze and other artistic representations (owed, no doubt, to God himself as the artist or at least to his explicit intentions), we will not be far from making a fundamental link between aesthetic sublimation and the nature of the purification that Purgatorio offers. The sins are transformed into their own images. They cannot be literally expunged, inasmuch as they are either part of some original nature or inherent in our original sin; there is no room, in a paradise thickly peopled with concrete virtues of various kinds and types (which to be sure are also capable of folding back into the unison of the celestial rose), for the kind of ataraxia or apatheia envisioned by the ancients. Meanwhile, the calm through which Dante sees these images of a now neutralized wrath is not a void either, but in its aesthetization of the named emotions, something closer to an affect, and one that has its own kind of psychic influence on Dante’s ascension, which is thereby that much more “lightened.” We do not, therefore, need to appeal to the biographical, and Dante’s legendary irascibility and intolerance, his documented fits of rage, to appreciate anger’s centrality in this scheme of things.
It is proper to conclude these observations about Dante’s allegory with some final remarks about the new terms we have found useful in characterizing it. The word thick is chosen, not merely for its anthropological overtones (Geertz), but also, more literally metaphorical (if I may put it that way), in view of the levels that thicken the narrative material. That Dante also grasps it in this way may be argued on the basis of one of the most controversial verses in Purgatorio, where he explicitly addresses the reader and foregrounds the matter of interpretation:
Aguzza qui, lettor, ben li occhi al vero,
Che’l velo è ora ben tanto sottile,
Certo che ‘l trapaasar dentro è leggero.
Reader, here sharpen well your eyes to the truth,
for the veil is now indeed so thin,
that certainly to pass within is easy.
(Purgatorio VIII/19–21/76)
The episode that follows, and to which our interpretative sense is so strongly directed, is a regression into the older form of a purely symbolic allegory, with the serpent—“Vedi là ‘l nostro avversaro” (“See there our adversary!”; VIII/95/82)—attempting its entrance into the Valley of the Princes and being put to flight by guardian angels. The recurrent (nightly) onslaught of the enemy is generally taken to be the temptations of pride and power that routinely assail such great and virtuous (if failed) leaders; but the very fact that the image is a personification that can be assigned a meaning as such (whichever one is chosen) thereby marks it as a different type of discourse from the narrative in which it is embedded. This is symbolism of the type of the three beasts (or of the later triumphal progression in the earthly paradise), and Dante’s interpolation confirms our distinction and warns us that it is easier to deal with (“sottile”) than the complexity of the “thick” and fourfold narrative.
This characterization then sets a certain distance between Dante’s practice and what it has been traditional to call allegory; but this distance is misleading, I think, inasmuch as we have associated the traditional view with a threefold system of one-to-one parallels (on the order of personification), rather than the fourfold scheme advocated here. It is in order to reinforce the structural differences at stake that I have proposed the term transversal or lateral for the relations of the levels of the fourfold scheme to one another—a term which seems to me to allow more randomness and freedom (in the sense of the clinamen) than our static image of levels: fitful connections and intersections suggestive of a flitting of consciousness from one form of attention to another, a slippage in niveau, a perception by distraction analogous to what Benjamin ascribed to our awareness of architecture as we move through it on our way elsewhere, or of those unhappy souls who have too many ideas at once and try vainly to marshal them like sheep the shepherd risks “now losing in one direction and another in another” (as Manzoni puts it).17 For, as Dürer showed, if we want a full pictorial representation of allegory, it can only be as random or broken objects (and lifelike figures) scattered about, some in intelligible clusters, others simply abandoned in the midst of some unknown activity or failed construction project. Yet in Dürer’s Melencolia, there is still the continuity of space against which this junkyard is registered: and the greatness of Dante, as opposed to the more openly allegorical allegoricists, is that he keeps the thread, whether temporal or geographical; and secures a homogeneity—perhaps one could call it some properly allegorical isotopie?—against which such extreme divagations can safely be indulged.
Yet laterality has some first far more concrete meaning here: it is the deliberate gap between intention and act, or meaning and exemplification, which first keeps the invitation to such mind-wandering attention open. Thus, the sinners in Hell are not punished for the sins we are directed to see in them: the poem avoids these simple-minded correspondences and rather fixes our poetic attention on the distraction itself.
This is the sense in which Farinata’s juridical or divine judgment has little or nothing to do with what he is presented to us as embodying: his invulnerable pride and refusal to bend either to argument or to divine punishment, his factionalism as a leader who has led his followers into disastrous triumphs (“another victory like that and we’re done for,” said Pyrrhus), and who continues to foment civil war and bloody discord after his death. Those would surely, particularly when they characterize the enemy, be material for moral and even theological condemnation—and indeed, we are happier when our narrator (who is otherwise intermittently fearful, obsequious in his pleas to Virgil either for enlightenment or help, or finally unpleasantly righteous and full of a dislikable rigor in his denunciation of the fallen sinners) is at least sufficiently mature to respond to both characters in this Canto with a becomingly polite and yet unyielding opposition (“maybe that art your side forgot”), which is the only truly appropriate one for the protagonist of the lofty poem.
Yet Farinata is not punished for any of that, what our legal system would describe as “incitement to violence” or perhaps “hate crimes” or more quaintly, “sedition”—but rather for a purely theological heresy, namely the Epicurean conviction that there is no life beyond the grave. Now the geography of this level certainly defines the sin for us, by assigning them permanent graves for all eternity in a mirror image of their belief. But the figures themselves ignore this destiny—indeed, it seems possible that it is this very willful disregard of their eternal fate, which constitutes the heresy in the first place (in which case my observation is not exactly disproven but only intensified to a second degree, in a laterality of the very laterality itself). In any case, it is this discrepancy between the ostensible topic of the pedagogical journey and the characters chosen to act it out which institutes some initial allegorical gap, that initial separation between the levels that makes their allegorical reconnection by way of interpretation necessary.
But lateral transversality, and the fate of the fourfold system, also allows us to gain some more concrete sense of the movement from one canticle to the next, and their profound differences, which are not merely stylistic, but which one would also not wish to characterize in any evolutionary one (and not even some biographical heightening of self-consciousness or developing spirituality of the author–protagonist).
What happens, I think, as I have already hinted here and there, is a shifting of the literal level of Inferno from that bodily and “kreatürlich” level insisted on by Auerbach to the “moral” or psychic one in Purgatorio: this does not mean the abandonment of the other levels but rather their reorganization and rearrangement around a new allegorical center, a new isotopie that solicits commentary and interpretation at the same time that it brings with it its own characteristic system of overtones and undertones, which are distinct from the preceding set. The result, as has been noted by Tambling, is a release of affect (in its new sense as the unnamed and free-floating protean opposite number of the named emotions and the codified sins).
Affect, then, at least in this historical instance, provides a propitious new laboratory for a significant transformation in the content, one that has multiple consequences for the form itself and in particular for the allegorical system. This is the simultaneous grasping of spiritual purgation as what we would call sublimation, and the latter’s effectuation by way of what would now be identified as aesthetization, aesthetic distance, “derealisation” (Sartre), the transformation into the image, and so on. Sublimation in any case implies that the initial drives (which here inevitably result in sin) are not eliminated but rather transformed and spiritualized: this is not even a changing of the valences, from negative to positive, even though the Christian theological tradition (including Dante himself) is suffused with the idea that all human action is an attraction to the divine (love), which can be deviated and deformed by unworthy terrestrial objects. Rather, here the act has become the image of the act, and an artistic image at that (whether, as in Purgatorio’s elaborate decorations, God himself is the artist or simply a human poet or artist—albeit a genius, as Dante likes to insist in his persistent yet not intrusive self-esteem). The mountain of purgatory is a mountain of poets, and if laterality still persists (so it is that Arnaut undergoes purgation for sodomy, but not for his essential poetic talent), it would seem that somehow the process of making is capable of displacing the inevitable (and fatal) pride of the great political leaders onto a fashioning of objects, which thereby frees their makers from it. The same process can be observed for the other sins, in which the very displacements of laterality themselves offer the hope and promise of some eventual “purification”: so it is, for example, that Statius, the great example of a soul redeemed virtually before our very eyes, has been in fact expiating the sin of avarice, something astonishingly alien to the character we have just met. But it is that very oddness and pettiness of the official “sin” which allows it to be figuratively purged from our attention and thereby from the reading of the poem itself.
What then of Paradiso? I have maintained that theology is essentially a picture thinking which, like Lévi-Strauss’s pensée sauvage, elaborates its complexities without the aid of abstraction and is able to develop into the most complex forms of intellection (and of quasi-philosophical debate) according to its own autonomy. It touches on the play of categories that are the raw material of philosophical abstraction and no doubt deploys many of them, but in wholly different and sometimes unrecognizable forms and with quite different yet still essentially narrative outcomes.18 Or at least that is how one is tempted to characterize theological elaboration from the standpoint of a henceforth irretrievably abstract and secular, “philosophical” conceptuality, it being understood that “visual” cannot mean exactly what it does after the differentiation and scientific and aesthetic establishment in modernity of an autonomous (or semi-autonomous) “visual field.”
Paradiso is then the locus of such an extraordinary play of figuralities: it remains allegorical in our expanded sense of the word, but its “literal level” has now once again shifted position and has come to redefine itself as what one might today call a self-consciousness of representational language and its dilemmas and antinomies, which stand for the meanings of the other levels as well, the Job-like incomprehensibilities of soul and judgment, of texts, of some ultimate “end of history.”
But were one to undertake some fuller exploration of this ultimate canticle (which will not happen here), it would also be crucial to introduce an aesthetic concept I have not yet had occasion to invoke in the present work, namely the idea and the experience of the Sublime, which has its relevance in the upward movement of the poem, as well as in the Kantian premise of an incomprehensible mass and force (“mathematical” and “dynamic” at one and the same time), which one can nonetheless represent by way of its nonrepresentation, and thereby at least poetically “master.” The sublime transforms the entire Commedia into a single instant, after which it vanishes.
So it is that by a remarkable formal leap over the centuries, Dante’s three canticles speak with and against one another by way of modal variations beyond mere style. The very complexity of their transversalities—allegorical entanglings that separate the levels at the same time they fuse their meanings—yields what one may call modal colorations—fiery, blued, and blindingly luminous—whose qualitative successions themselves yield the allegorical message.