> There may be some historical utility in
> analyzing a literary text that contains numerical patterns that the
> author intentionally wove into the poetic pattern, but I doubt there is
> any 'value' to the exercise for aesthetic analysis and evaluation.
> Having read most of the studies listed above and many more--there's a
> handy bibliography of numerology at Bar Ilan University listed
> below--and having had some aspects of it forced down my graduate school
> throat, I have never found a single case where it enhanced my immediate
> or long-term enjoyment of a work. That judgment, I must add, also
> applies mutatis mutandis to Dante.
Apologies if I'm taking us too far afield of Sidney and Spenser, but in
the case of Dante--the only poet I've approached in these terms in any
depth--I think that there's something to be said for numerical
analysis.
It might be worth distinguishing between two different kinds of
numerical animals. "Numerology" I take to mean the study of numbers as
possessed in and of themselves of occult powers or meanings: certainly
a crackpot science, as Steven Willett suggests. Dante almost dares us
to give his poem this kind of occult signifying power, calling Beatrice
a "nine" and such. But I'm not sure how invested the poem or the poet
actually is in that kind of stuff. Most truly numerological analyses of
the poem come not from the poet, but from D's early (and not-so-early)
critics who bought into the Commedia's most hubristic claims: that the
poem was divinely inspired; that the beatific vision gave him an
eschatological perspective on the mathematical structure and perfection
of the universe; &c. &c. &c.
On the other hand, Dante certainly did build numerical architectonics
into the poem: in terza rima; in the 100 cantos, 33 each in hell,
purgatory, and heaven, plus one in the selva oscura, and so on. Does
any of these features on its own enhance our appreciation of the work?
Maybe not. But the fact of this elaborate architecture does, I think,
offer another perspective on the ways in which Dante was working to
arrogate to himself the prerogatives of the classical auctores and of
the divine. Men can only signify with words, the medieval exegetes
insisted, but God can signify with words and things--which is why the
Old Testament can prefigure the New. I think that structuring a poem
numerically might have made it seem more thingly, more like an object
in the world that could signify, allegorically, than like a merely
Platonic shadow of the worldly Real.
Kasey Evans
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