Inferno: Images in Primo Canto

1. Inferno: Images in Primo Canto • The ouverture • Ma poi ch’i’ fui al pie’ d’un colle giunto, la’ dove terminava quella valle che m’avea di paura il cor compunto, • Guardai in alto, e vidi le sue spalle vestite gia’ de’ raggi del pianeta che mena dritto altrui per ogni calle (13-18)

2. Nel mezzo del cammin ……….. • La Selva and Il Pelago • Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura che la diritta via era smarrita (1-3) • E come quei che con lena affannata uscito fuor del pelago alla riva, si volge all’acqua perigliosa e guata, cosi’ l’animo mio, ch’ancor fuggiva, si volse a retro a rimirar lo passo che non lascio’ gia’ mai persona viva (22-27)

3. Il Pelago In Convivio (Conv., I, ix) used to define “Writing” Lo tempo chiama e domanda la mia nave uscir di porto; per che, dirizzato l’artimone della ragione a l’ora del mio desiderio, entro in pelago con isperanza di dolce cammino e salutevole porto (II, I, 1) Work of art as adventurous marine voyage (in Purg. and Par.) Medielval Topos La Selva La selva in Vergil recurs as image of Creative, Poetic Practice Hard and wild forest = a work that could not be written : locus of creative aridity The straight road (way) which was lost = a temporary loss of inspiration Vegetation is linked in Dante to Creativity Ascent to Paradise coincides with ascent to Mount Parnassus (Purg. XXVIII, 139-141)

4. Il Colle Symbolic Apparition = new inspiration The ascent is the attempt to transform the effort in poetic reality = gradus ad Parnassum Si ch’l pie’ fermo sempre era il piu’ basso (Inf. I, 30) Apollo’s power will lead Dante to the poetic objective. Il Sole In Convivio, Sun = God But also = creative project Questo sara’ luce nuova, sole nuovo, lo quale surgera’ dove l’usato tramontera’, e dara’ lume a coloro che sono in tenebre e in oscuritate. . . (Conv. I, xiii, 12) The new work is the new sun of his inspiration God of creativity for the Latins was Apollo (subterranean presence in Inf. but openly addressed in Par.: “O buono Apollo, all’ultimo lavoro/fammi del tuo valor si’ fatto vaso,/come dimandi a dar l’amato alloro. (Par. I, 13-15)

5. The Ascent to the Hill • The pilgrim poet is prisoner of his creative impasse (Convivio) comes to the hill and decides to ascend. He is impeded in his effort by three wild animals: the lonza, the lion and the wolf. • Moral problem (the wolf): difficult aspect to resolve within the creative problem of the work • Dante needs a guide. Why Vergil and not a saint, a confessor? (79-81; 82-87) • The crisis of the selva is motivated by the desire to return to pure poetry, without commentary (as he had proposed in the Convivio). • The second aspect of the new work: the necessity to absorb the moral message within the live corpus of the creative operation, how to face EVIL (to represent it and dominate it) inside one’s own poetic universe

6. Vergil • Vergil: Wisdom and Reason • What is wisdom? The light of knowledge that guides us (Conv.) • The art inherited from the Latins and the Christians: the art of good understanding of the world, which alone will guarantee the soul’s nobility • Horace, in his Ars Poetica: “scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons. (310) Wisdom is the origin of good writing • Who is the great poet: the one who can teach useful things in a pleasant manner : “aut simul et jucunda et idonea dicere vitae” (334) and “lectores delectando et pariterque monendo” (344) • Christianity and theology had indicated in Faith the way to wisdom. Poetry is only functional to theology. Poets were looked upon with suspicion, fraudulent soothsayers (Plato)

7. Dante as Orpheus • Orpheus, the sacred interpreter of the gods, teaches the truth to humankind, establishes cities and with his songs tames the beast, the dyonisiac demon. Dante is afraid of the beasts and falls back where the sun does not shine. • Vergil’s appearance with the accompanying image of the “river of eloquence” indicates the triumph of the word • Poetry must “delectare ut prodesse” • Vergil’s encouragement: “a te convien tener altro viaggio” : you are a Christian, I was not; think of your idea of life, which procedes “ascending and descending” (Conv. IV, xxiii, 6, 8). You will put in a poem all you know, narrating while speculating (unlike Conv.). You will believe in your culture and penetrate it in depth, as Orpheus, mediator between humanity and divinity. If you undertake this trip (work), your exile will have new meaning: your return to God. • You will return to God only if you write a great poem, you will write a great poem only if you return to God. Poet as prophet

8. Conclusion • The idea of the Commedia stems from Dante’s turning to the Latin poets for illumination and guidance. The poets turn the austere commentaries of the Convivio in the vibrant language and tale of the Commedia. • Inventive Originality: to reach the regal status of philosophy and theology through poetry, as if the beauty of the poem were functional to its own truth. Beauty then is not only God’s product, it is also a creation of man. • If faith is needed to accomplish the voyage, its conquest will be attempted in order to complete the work. Dante’s effort appears like the laborious conquest of a certainty that is necessary to his creation • The temerity of the bet: how to transform a poem in a faith and a faith in a poem

9. Comedia: Why This Title • Title as enigma and the Episode of Geryon (XVI-XVII) • Dante’s rope and Vergil’s use of it (XVI - 106-14) • Nature of Fraud: Geryon as personification of moral and poetic fraud: Dante realizes that it was necessary to use fraud on both the moral and literary plane • Dante’s voyage is also the tale of that voyage (voyage and tale are two inseparable issues) • Who is Geryon, description and function (XVII, 10-18) • The knots and wheels symbolize fraudulent tricks, but are aesthetically pleasing and therefore intriguing to Dante, like the elaborate draperies of Turks and Tartars (infidels), or Aracne’s weaving. (Aracne represents, in the myth, the challenge of the artist who wants to surpass, with his creation, god himself) • The richness of poetic elaboration is necessary to continue his tale

10. Both moral as well as poetic fraud are necessary to continue the voyage and its tale • Sempre a quel ver ch’ha faccia di menzogna de’ l’uom chiuder le labbra fin ch’el pote, pero’ che sanza colpa fa vergogna; ma qui tacer nol posso (XVI, 124-27) e per le note di questa comedia, lettor, ti giuro, s’elle non sien di lunga grazia vote (XVI, 127-29) • It is not the first time that Dante describes an incredible vision, but this time he wants to reassure the reader of the veracity of his good faith (and he swears on the work itself!): he is in front of such a surprising truth that it may appear as a lie. Credibility must happen on the poetic level, if he writes well he will be believed. • The Commedia is a trip in the afterworld, in the universe of the divinity: Dante is profoundly aware of the drama of the impossible dialogue with divine reality. The truth he wants to reveal can be expressed only through a myth; God’s word is incomprehensible

11. Dante’s drama is gnoseological as well as representational, • He needs to underline the exigency of a polisemic reading of the work, keeping in mind St. Thomas’ warning: that poetic expression cannot go beyond the literal level, that Christian literature has a literal meaning, as in a parable, not a symbolical or allegorical value, which belongs to God’s word • Dante is alone in front of God: “Et vidit arcana Dei, que non licet homini loqui” (I saw God’s mistery which cannot be expressed in human words • To understand his poem it is necessary then to read it as a great metaphor: in order to reveal the truth, Dante had to use the lies and inventions of the ancient (pagan) poets • Geryon’s appearance reveals this condition: his poem is not “the imitation of god’s word” but one where passion and human intelligence coexist in “mediating” and interpreting divine truth (Dante as Christian Orpheus)

12. Language and the Comedia • Language is for Dante the crux: proof of the human decadence (we need, unlike the angels and God, to speak in order to communicate) as well as “egregium humani generis actum” (De Vulgari Eloquentia, I, iv, 3) • Reason is also ambivalent: Glory of man and symbol of his sinful state, his decadence (the angels do not need reason) • Reason and language contain fraud • The only way to enter in contact with God’s reality is language, but humanity is situated outside this reality • How can one define a work that from its very inception cannot find the appropriate language to its theme, because that language does not exist? • “Comedia” for this reason: work in which language is totally inadequate to express the divine greatness of its content (comedia vs tragedia)

13. Dante and Gerione • When fraud is emerging in Dante’s conscience (and the reader’s), the poet sees his entire work as a weaving of words, a new challenge (like that of Aracne’s against Minerva) • But the difference with Geryon is that the poet serves the truth, speaks in its name: “Despite the appearance, do not doubt, reader: read and comprehend in its depth the meaning of my search that is individual as well as universal” (see Geryon’s emerging and Dante’s descent) • To recognize fraud also means to recognize its absolute necessity, now that Dante is immersing himself in the deepest circles of Inferno, those of the Fraudulent. He is afraid, his fear being also metaphysical: how to face the enemy-ally (he is sitting on Geryon). Dante is sailing on fraud to descend into the Inferno, and his immersion becomes a flight. Geryon arrives to Malebolge without booty: the representation of fraud, is now its victim

14. Dante’s journey is an immersion into the innermost parts of our subconscious. The infernal journey is a descent into the underworld of the human psyche, a world populated by ghosts and monsters that haunt Dante’s exiled days (those demons he represented in the three beasts of the beginning) • In order to ascend, one must first descend and face the demons. Poets have understood this long before psychoanalysis • Geryon’s appearance is like an emersion, expressed through the image of the sailor that appears at the sea surface after he has freed the anchor from the bottom, the anchor that impedes the continuation of the voyage • Geryon himself will become the vessel, “la navicella” that will help Dante to descend from the 7th to the 8th circle of Inferno: one must be able to learn how to take advantage of fraud

15. Dante: a Modern Poet? • Dante has no direct followers. Petrarca has been for long the model to imitate • Dante’s fame crosses the boundaries of Italian literature, but he is and remains an irregular • Giambattista Vico (Neapolitan philosopher of the XVIII century) first defines Dante as a poet of Weltliteratur: world literature postulates a “movement” of artistic and literary creation, a galactic spiral of cross literary and artistic references. It is a recognition of Dante’s idea of a supernational empire (that of literature) • Charles Singleton: presents Dante’s work as the SUMMA of the Middle Ages against a model that can be defined as modern: for Singleton, Dante is the new interpreter of Medieval theology • Erich Auerbach (Mimesis) espouses a different view: “Dante created the man that the European consciousness knows today, both in the figurative arts and in historiography. What antiquity had formed in a totally different way and the Middle Ages had never known: the human being

16. Not in theimage of the legend, or of the abstract formulation of a moral type, but the real man, alive, connected to history. A complete human being. In this Dante was the first.” • Dante inaugurates realism, and with it the representation of “the human identity” in its entirety and complexity • Through the classics (Petronius, Horace, Homer, Apuleius), Dante discovers the possibility to create himself as a literary character • DANTE AND THEOLOGY • Theology was for Dante an irrefutable fact (something like modern science today). We cannot refute science and its progress, it is there, for Dante it was the same for theology. But, like science, how many aspects of the human life has theology not covered! Dante advances thus a different way of thinking and existing, the artistic one. A strategy that (through theology), will lead beyond its realms, to a higher sphere: the territory where the rule is the poet’s • Discovery of the Middle Ages: the opposition between internal and external world and the discovery of the spiritual sphere as uncharted territory. From this derives the invention of psychology as a journey of knowledge and discovery

17. From this discovery originates in Dante, as unexpected consequence, the idea of the reaffirmation of the validity of the artistic endeavor and of its author • Dante validates the status of the poet as he rivals that of the philosopher and the theologian and the certainty of their hermeneutic processes • In Paradise, San Bernard (de Clairvaux) pleads for Dante to the Virgin Mary that he be allowed see God. In reality S. Bernard had affirmed that: “At talis visio non est vitae presentis, sed in novissimis reservatur . . . Non sapiens, non sanctus, non propheta videre illum, sicuti est, potest, aut potuit in corpore hoc mortali.” • In Paradise, the saint that had demonstrated most adversity towards the poet intercedes for DANTE and why is that: because he is a poet. In Canto II of the Inferno, Dante compares his destiny to that of Enea and Paul. This comparison opens the possibility of a heroic destiny for Dante. His investiture to the incredible voyage is given to him by the Virgin Mary, by St. Lucy, Rachel and ultimately Beatrice. However, this destiny will be secured only if Dante accepts Vergil as his guide, and on the agreement that he writes what he sees • Faith is functional to the creation of the poetic work (and not vice-versa), which was anathema at the time. We then understand Dante’s necessity to coat the entire poem with the most traditional and accepted dogmatic doctrines

18. Dante is a writer of strongambiguity: his declarations are replete with meanings and that aspect is inseparable from the attempt to challenge the classical poets on their ground. Dante receives the teaching of the classics that has matured in the Middle Ages. Without them he would have never been able to write the Commedia, because without them he would not have reached this certainty: THE SUPERIORITY OF THE POET IN DESCRIBING THE WORLD • DANTE, MODERN POET • The modern poet differentiates himself from the classical one in the strong perception of the substantial gratuity of his efforts • Only the poet that can free himself of the burden and ties of knowledge and look at the world with the eyes of a child, only through a new ingenuity and a new purity can the poet capture the world. • Study led Dante to poetry. The poet, through study, is able to regain his child-like status . . . Study must make us child-like, exactly like Dante feels when he is in front of Beatrice. Study must purify us from artifice, so that we can return to Nature. It is one of Dante’s discoveries . (Giovanni Pascoli, Il fanciullino)