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
