On Tue, 20 Nov 2007 03:06:49 +0000
Kevin Farnham <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Just one example of our difficulty: invocation of the muses. To us,
> this looks like artifice; perhaps we even think it "cute". I highly
> doubt Medieval and earlier writers looked at it that way. To them, it
> was a prayer to the actual, literal source of the words that would
> (they hoped) be transmitted to them from the gods, which they would
> then record. They conceived themselves as "scribes". Hence, Dante:
>
> When Love inspires me with delight,
> Or pain, or longing, I take careful note,
> And as he dictates in my soul, I write.
>
> [Purgatorio, Canto 24]
>
> I don't think he was lying to us, or saying this with tongue-in-cheek.
> This is how he felt what we would call "the artistic process" happened,
> how he felt his work was formed, deposited within him. His job was not
> to create (only Love and the gods can create realities out of nothing),
> but rather to sift and sort and select and, ultimately, record/write.
>
One can amplify, I think, on the question of what, within a scribal
culture--Dante's-- constituted inspiration and its report, esp. at this
point in the Commedia's text and in the course of the narrator's
self-presentation, in Purg. 24. Dante may be telling the truth, but of
course his claim about his inspiration is recognizably conventional, which
is to say, fraught with recognizable artifice and design – including the
very literary contrivances of The Comedy itself, as both a narrative and a
"revelation." What follows is a pedantical demonstration of such a point,
and only the brave with time on their hands will bother with reading this
sample of an erstwhile Dantean's prose (which would also be taking time out
for reading lit. crit.) -- Jim N.
---
PEDANTICAL SUPPLEMENT:
[[[ To be pedantic, then, one notes that when the text says "I am one who…"
Dante’s identity has not yet been tied to his name by the text, it one is
reading it seriatim. Again: the narrator-pilgrim’s self-naming has not yet
occurred, within the natural, chronographic order of the narration. So the
"I" of the declaration is a pronoun, without a Proper Noun to refer it to.
Who Dante is is an otherworld mystery that has been mongered at various
places throughout the preceding cantos, in the pilgrim’s encounter with dead
people who recognize him but do not name him, or who ask who is and are not
answered by a definitive self-nomination. Moreover, the author’s mystified
name is only finally uttered at the climax of an extended sequence of poets,
whose own names, in the long run, only the Comedy has rescued from literary
Limbo. In point of chronology the historically latest is Casella, the
wait-listed and newly deceased singer Dante meets in Ante-Purgatory. Asked
to perform for the pilgrims, he picks Dante’s early piece, "Love that
discourses in my mind," and starts rehabilitating the political exile, the
Florentine Dante, from Farinata’s egotistical Hell as a poet in the sweet
new style of Cato’s self-sacrificing Purgatory. This restoration will not
end until Dante is named by Beatrice, after he is specifically identified
with love-lyric by his fellow poet Bonagiunta da Lucca, who recognizes him
as the poet of "Ladies who have intelligence of love"--first fruits of the
decision, precipitated in Vita Nuova xviii, "to take evermore for the matter
of my speech that which should be praise of my lady." The events coincide
with Dante’s critical first-person declaration of identity, "I’ mi son un
che, quando / Amore mi spira, noto, e a quel modo / ch’e’ ditta dentro vo
signifcanto" [I am one who, when Love inspires me, takes note, and, in the
mode it dictates within, goes signifying] (Purg. XXIV, 52-54), thus
surpassing the poets Guittone and "the Notary" (56). This emergent
self-declaration belongs to the more ‘descriptivist’ -- self-definitional
but also vocational -- of two types: I am x who does y, and goes about
doing z. Thus, for another example, Virgil satisfies Griffolino: "I’ son
un che discendo / con questo vivo" [I am one who descends with this living
man] (Inf. XXIX, 94-95). Addressing Virgil at the outset, Beatrice speaks
for both this type and the equation-type, I am N --"I am ([the one] named)
so-and-so": "I’ son Beatrice che ti faccio andare; [...] amor mi mosse, che
mi fa parlare" [I am Beatrice who bids you go; ... Love, which makes me
speak, moved me] (Inf. II, 70-72). Dante can claim Love to be his very
author, not merely his subject-matter: in Vita Nuova xxiv Amor prescribes
Love as the dictatorial lady’s – Beatrice’s – other name.
A more oblique introduction of Dante as lyricist follows on Bonagiunta’s,
via the poet’s only known lines in Provençal; these include "Ieu sui Arnaut,
que plor e vau cantan" [I am Arnaut, who weep and go singing] (Purg. XXVI,
142). The pilgrim has told Arnaut "ch’al suo nome il mio disire /
apparecchiava grazïoso loco" [that my desire was preparing for his name a
grateful place] (137-38); the verses in Provençal then ventriloquize a
singer who repeatedly identified himself as ‘Arnaut’ in his own verses’
terminal lines: most relevantly in "I am Arnaut who hoards the wind, [...]
and swims against the tide." [[ "Anc ieu non l’aic, mas ella m’a" [I never
had her, but she has me]: no. 7 in James J. Wilhelm, ed. and tr., The
Poetry of Arnaut Daniel (1981), pp. 26-29. See also Arnaut’s lines "I shall
make, since Love commands me, / A song ... For nobly she [f., Amor] has
trained me in the arts of her school; I know so much that I cause a stop of
the swelling tide" (from the first stanza of "Ans que cim reston de
branchas," [Before treetops remain all withered of branches]: no. 16, in
Wilhelm, pp. 67-69). Of Arnaut’s 19 surviving poems, mostly spoken in the
first person, 15 name their "I" as Arnaut in their conclusions (typically
commending him), including two poems Dante singles out in De Vulgari
Eloquentia, II.vi, "Sols sui que sai lo sobraffan qe om sorz" [I alone know
the suffering that rises] (in Wilhelm, no. 15, pp. 62-65), and II.ii,
"L’aura amara" [The bitter breeze] (Wilhelm, no. 9, pp. 34-39) which ends "I
contemplate in my heart / Every evening / The one whom I am courting /
Without a rival--I, Arnaut-- / For in other thoughts / My aim’s not strong
for the summit." For Dante the un-erotic summit can be Purgatory’s; his
Arnaut (anent Inf. XXIV, 52-56) has gotten stronger! ]]
Well met in the fires of lust, a founding father of romance love-lyric (=
Arnaut) swims against the universal tide of profane love and purges himself
of an erotic Original Sin--his own private Francesca. For Arnaut is the
last shade speaking before Dante enters the terrestrial paradise, and he
echoes the first and only female shade speaking in the netherworld.
Francesca says she will answer the question Dante puts her "come colui che
piange e dice" [like one who weeps and speaks] (Inf. V, 126). The trope of
utterance common to Francesca and Arnaut, moreover, resonates with the
secular scripture of romance; the two characters echo lovers’ verses in the
Prose Tristram. "I sing and weep," says the "lay" of Tristran; "I weep my
lay, even as I sing," the "lay" of Iseult echoes back. [[ The Romance of
Tristan, tr. Renée L. Curtis (1994), pp. 232 and 258, with Le Roman de
Tristran en Prose, Tome III, ed. Curtis (1985), p. 173 ("Chant et plor en un
moment [...]. / Je chant et plour") and p. 226 ("Liee, triste, chantant,
plorant / Vois Amor [...] / Ves Yselt que chante en morant. // Lay comenz de
chant et de plor, / Ge chant mon lay et si le plor. / Chant et plor m’ont
mis en tel tor / Dont jamais ne ferai retor").] Guinizelli asserts that
Arnaut excelled all others in "Versi d’amore e prose di romanzi" [verses of
love and prose of romances] (Purg. XXVI, 118-19); Francesca’s verses make
her a stilnovistic poet manqúe, but her other metier is her favorite kind of
couples’ reading. Tasso may have understood something of this, when he
attributed a Lancelot to Arnaut; Dante’s Arnaut is "miglior fabbro del
parlar materno" [better maker in the mother tongue] (117)--everything in
vernacular prose, Dante says, is in French. [[ In his Discourses on the
Heroic Poem of 1594. See Wilhelm, Poetry of Arnaut Daniel, p. xxv, for the
spurious attribution, and De Vulgaria Eloquentia, I.x.2 (where Dante avers
that everything in vernacular prose, whether translated or original, was in
French). ]] Thus Francesca’s life-story climaxes in her imitating the
French Prose Lancelot explicitly. Her version is so fraught with the
pilgrim’s own imaginings that he falls into a swoon: as Lancelot himself
did, in the presence of Guinevere.
Thus, to repeat, Dante’s life-story, including the story of his inspiration,
is no less entangled with literary convention and literary precedent or
literary tradition than Francesca's. To wit:
Dante receives his name in the course of a chivalric quest like Lancelot’s.
The mystification of the knight’s name is one of the French text’s most
notable features. A recurring characteristic in twelfth-century romance "is
the identity theme. A young man has to discover who he is, to make his name
(sometimes in the most literal sense) through his exploits as a knight, or
an older knight has to prove his right to a reputation won in the past, or
recover a good name which he has lost. This theme [...] runs right through
the P[rose]L[ancelot]." "The subject of the romance is indeed the gaining
of a name," the name or title that the land-lacking and bashful Lancelot du
Lac often seems to need or want or lack. [[ So Elspeth Kennedy, Lancelot and
the Holy Grail: A Study of the Prose Lancelot (1986), pp. 10 and 47. Cf.
Kenneth Gross and Herbert Marks on "names, naming," in Hamilton, Spenser
Encyclopedia, p. 494: "In the teleological structure of the traditional
quest-romance, a hero must earn or realize his name, which thereby becomes
the celebratory mark of an achieved (and fixed) identity."]] But at the
famous meeting with his lady, Lancelot supresses his name, while confessing
he has loved her, "‘since the day I was called a knight, but was not one’":
when she greeted the new-made chevalier at court as "friend." Like Dante,
Lancelot took the lady’s greeting to heart. [[ Lancelot of the Lake, tr.
Colin Corley (1989), p. 317 and p. 81 (= Fr. Lancelot do Lac, pp. 345 and
165). The queen was asking, "where did this love which you have bestowed on
me come from?" After Lancelot’s love-confession, "since the day I was
called a knight, but was not one," the text says, "it happened that the Lady
of the Hill of Malohaut coughed, quite deliberately, and raised her head,
which had been bowed. He noticed it, immediately, having often heard her;
and he looked at her, and recognized her, and he felt such fear and anguish
in his heart that he could not reply to what the queen was saying. He began
to sigh very heavily, and tears ran down his cheeks in such floods that the
samite in which he as dressed was wet down to the knees" (tr. cit, p. 318).
Dante redeploys the telltale cough, "al primo fallo scritto di Genevra" [at
the first fault writ of Guinevere] (Par. XVI, 15) to describe Beatrice’s
amusement at Dante’s un-recognition of his ancestor Cacciaguida. ]]
In Guinevere’s presence and that of the Lady of Malehaut--who knows the
guilty secret of the knight's devotion--Lancelot is reduced to tears;
Guinevere thereupon accuses him of loving some other lady more dearly. The
chastened equivalents in the autobiography of Beatrice’s friend are clear.
The correspondence lapses when the Queen, at Galahaut’s pandering
intervention, grants the infamous, erotic seal of approval that so
impassioned Francesca. From his old flame, however, Dante gets more of a
cold bath!
Regretful Francesca was a convert TO secular love, repentant Arnaut a
convert FROM it. But Dante has had it both ways: his repute for the sweet
new style is succeeded by a renewed communion with Beatrice -- more
specifically, she of the Vita Nuova. Insofar as that text is a historical
narrative, it tells us its author fell in love with Beatrice at age nine.
At eighteen, she acknowledged the young man with a greeting. He reports he
lived for the sight of her and the supreme mercy of her salutation; when she
failed to bestow her recognition, he grieved. Once she mocked him, another
time she snubbed him. And on one occasion she and her companion passed
close by him. The result was a dream in which Love told him that a lady
named Giovanna--but styled Primavera by a friend who was in love with
her--would precede Beatrice’s appearance: "on the day [she] appears after
the dream of the one who serves her faithfully." * Love’s early predictions
are at last realized in over the course of the Purgatorio, in Purgatory and
the Earthly Paradise: Dante dreams of a flower-gathering Leah, and the next
day he meets Matelda--she reminds him of the time Proserpina lost the
spring. Leah or Matelda or Giovanna prima verrá, "comes first," as Giovan’
Baptista came before Jesus, or the plant-gathering Leah came to her nuptials
before Rachel with the beautiful eyes. The dreamer in the Vita Nuova was
also told Beatrice should be named Love by her poet. Beatrice’s climactic
naming of Dante, in Purgatorio XXX, 55, is Dante’s consolation for the
long-lost greeting, while Beatrice is the Love that dares to speak the
lover’s name: for she is also compelled to speak her own: I be Beatrice,
and am that I am. We have also heard that assertion before: in Exodus
3:14, on the mountain at the burning bush, at the calling of God’s greatest
spokesman. Which I guess brings us back to the question of secondary versus
primary inspiration.
* Vita Nuova xxiv: "E appresso lei guardando, vidi venire la marabile
Beatrice. Queste donne andaro presso di me cosi l’ una appresso l’ altra, e
parvemi che Amore mi parlasse nel core, e dicesse: Quella prima è nominata
Primavera sol per quest enuta d’ oggi; chè io mossi lo impositore del nome a
chamarla Primavera cioè prima verra, lo di che Beatrice si mostrerà dopo l’
imaginazione del suo fedele. E se anco vuoli considerare lo primo nome suo,
tanto è quanto dire Primavera, perchè lo suo nome Giovanna è da quel
Giovanni, lo qual precette la varace luce, dicendo [...]." Temple Classics
edn., p. 92. ]]] END OF SCROLL.
[log in to unmask]
James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121
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