Yes, I guess so.  Only when the interior self is fully established and 
furnished -- i.e., in Western parties from the Age of Rousseau -- can poets 
think of themselves as producing poems out of an inside, like a morbid 
secretion of self-ish genius -- hence the importance of the spider in such 
individualistic poets as Whitman and Dickinson.  It is probably significant 
that the first word of our earliest poem is related to mania.  (Quote:  "The 
exhaustion of Achilles' fury exhausts the poet's principal inspiration, 
which Plato was later to call a 'fury' also.  So ends the rhapsody of 
wrath." --jcn in Seidel and Mendelson, Homer to Brecht)  A poem like the 
Iliad was given the poet by tradition, by a poets' guild, by an addressor 
generations old, by the musical offspring of a Memory gray before his or her 
protege/e "Homer" was born.  Homer may have been blind, but he cannot have 
been deaf.  Tragic Thamyris, in the catalogue of ships, had lost his memory, 
just as unheroic Thersites seems to have lost his genealogy, in the same 
book.

On Tue, 27 Nov 2007 06:07:05 +0000
  Kevin Farnham <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi James,
> 
> I very much appreciate your "Pedantical Supplement." Indeed, most of
> the criticism I have read (as well as many new original works) in the
> past several years has been suggested by people from this list. I don't
> abhore literary commentary, I just have limited time and very specific
> objectives regarding what I want to write in the remaining time allotted
> to me. 
> 
> It is delightful (though not surprising) to see (through your
> explanation) how Dante carefully raised his poet-self onto the
> pedestal in Purgatory. He was indeed very studious and the Commedia is
> a pinnacle of poetic craftsmanship -- the greatest literary work ever
> created, in my opinion.
> 
> I do still think, however, that Dante saw himself as a master artisan,
> more like a sculptor who worked with raw materials that were external
> to himself (provided by the muses, who lived someplace outside of his
> body, not within) -- he took these raw materials, studied them,
> arranged them, evaluated the arrangements, tried to come up with words
> to represent his experimental arrangements of the materials that were
> presented to him -- all attempts to construct an image of objective
> reality, since the raw materials provided by the muses are
> representations of objective reality. 
> 
> I don't believe Dante was trying to create a "Dantesque vision" of
> reality. He was trying to mimic reality more completely and more
> thoroughly than had ever been done before. He was trying to portray the
> reality provided by those external muses who lived somewhere outside of
> himself as succinctly (using his knowledge of history and of his own
> time and of philosophy and religion) as possible. He was not (in my
> view) trying to create an image that could be titled "This Is Dante" --
> something we today might easily (and "correctly") do when we look at the
> works of a modern artist, for example Joyce or Beckett.
> 
> Kevin
> 
> ----------------------------
> 
> 
> On Tue, 20 Nov 2007 12:32:28 -0500
> "James C. Nohrnberg" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
>> > 
>>   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

[log in to unmask]
James Nohrnberg
Dept. of English, Bryan Hall 219
Univ. of Virginia
P.O Box 400121
Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121