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Dear Italian-studies list,

I guess it is time, very soon, to call off this discussion. Otfried and I
seem do be able to go on discussing details here for quite some time, but
I'm afraid that is time I don't really have. I covered some points in
response to Gloria Allaire yesterday, so here are some points to you,
Otfried.

I still see a pattern of alternation in the attitude of the souls of Purg.
3-6 to their prospect of intercession from the living.  Some have a
positive attitude (Manfredi, Iacopo, Pia, as I understand her), others are
laconic or grumpy (Belaqua, Bonconte).  The question is not so much whether
intercession will happen or not, but what their attitude is towards it.  I
see the pattern, (which of course doesn't mean that each soul does not have
an individual identity, of which you, Otfried, say sensible things), you
don't.  Fair enough.

But there is another point about Pia's speech where I will enter a more
detailed discussion:

>All we can
>infer for the case of Pia is that a) she is in need of intercession
>(because she had suffered a violent death, and because she asks
>Dante-pilgrim for his help) and b) she hopes to obtain this intercession
>with Dante-pilgrim's help (because otherwise she wouldn't ask for it). If
>there is really a series of alternation at work -- which I doubt --, Pia is
>a case like Iacopo, but this would not yet tell us anything about the hopes
>she puts into her husband (Iacopo does not refer to his close relatives in
>particular, but to the people at Fano in general). She expects help from
>the "mondo" (like Buonconte), and her husband may or may not be a part of
>this mondo which will pray for her. There is certainly nothing in the whole
>development which supports your assumption that he is already praying for her.

I don't agree with your basic reading here, Otfried. What Pia asks
Dante-wanderer for is that _he_, Dante-wanderer, intercede after he has
returned to the world: "quando *tu* sarai tornato al mondo, ....
ricordi*ti* di me". She does not say that she wants the world in general to
know of her. In that case I think the message would have been spelt out
more clearly.

>Tor, when I say that you make too much **of your understanding** of the
>context I certainly do not say that you make too much of the context as
>such. May I remind you of my paper which you heard last May at Kalamazoo,
>and may I remind you of our private discussions from which you will
>probably remember that I have written one and a half unpublished books
>about the necessity of interpreting individual episodes as being
>constitutive elements of greater compositional units? My papers and books
>argue more specifically that in Dante's Commedia the smallest unit
>appropriate for scholarly treatment is an entire canto. So we certainly
>agree that individual episodes should **not** be understood in isolation,
>although we may disagree in our understanding of the given episode and of
>its context.

Well, yes, I did remember, so I was rather surprised at that particular
objection coming from you.

>In general, I am confident that we have or can have much more
>to work with than only the "subtle ebbs and flows of the poetry". In my
>work on Inf. 28 I believe to have worked out the precise plan of
>composition, a plan based on biblical, exegetical, arithmetical and
>aristotelian sources, and which allows, among other things, to correct the
>established historical understanding of two of the historical allusions in
>the text (the wars of the "Troiani" in v.10, mistaken by most modern
>commentators to be wars of the Romans, and the identity of the "Noarese" in
>v.59, mistaken by early and modern commentators as a synecdoche 'singularis
>pro plurali'). So I am certainly not hostile to attempts of clarifying and
>correcting our historical understanding by analyzing intratextual context.
>Yet it has taken me quite a number of years to work this out for one single
>canto (and with less reliable results for a few more episodes), and so I
>may have reasons to be a bit slower than others in trusting their or my own
>understanding of context in other episodes.

Otfried, you know that I respect your work, and I was very impressed by
your application of number theory(?) to Inferno 28, particularly for your
good sense and restraint in applying your model. But I must confess that
the possibility of working out of "precise plans of composition" for
individual cantos is not central to my conception of the quality of Dante's
poetry.  What attracts me is "the subtle ebb and flow of the poetry", which
compels one all the time to modify any readerly hypothesis, and thus also
undermines any project of fixing too rigidly the schemes that can be
applied to the text. I am most decidedly not saying that the schemes are
not there, the type of research of which yours is an example definately can
show that they are. We differ, however, radically as to how fundamental
this type of construction is to Dante's art. On this point we will just
have to disagree. But the reason I have come to feel so strongly that the
Pia-episode has generally been misunderstood is, as I explained in my
answer to Gloria Allaire yesaterday, that it jars so with what I think goes
on in the poem here.  But I would quite happily accept the traditional
reading if someone could demonstrate how "the sublte ebb and flow of the
poetry" or even a "precise plan of composition" allows for the murder.

>I have equally strong feelings about
>the relevance of extra-textual contexts -- especially contexts in sources
>which Dante himself circumscribes as the "bread of the angels" -- if these
>contexts can be proven to be the ones which Dante wanted to be associated
>by his learned readers.

On this again I'm afraid we must agree to disagree

>I can follow your quantative analysis in the case of Iacopo and Buonconte,
>but there is simply **not one single word** in Pia's brief speech which
>deals with her present state specifically.

"son la Pia".  Present tense, present state

>She wants her present state to
>be known "al mondo", that much is clear from the first three lines.

No.  She wants Dante-wanderer to remember her when he is back in the world.
Nothing about "spreading the word".

>Yet the
>last three lines deal **exclusively** with her past life (and death).

Not exclusively.  134 encompasses her life and death. Between this
reference to her life in its entirety and a single episode are inserted,
very prominently, a verb in the present tense and a pronoun: "salsi colui".
This refers to someone who is still alive and knows something. And the
focus in the remaining 1 1/2 lines is on the precise point of her life
which bound her to he who knows.

Next to the precise meaning of salsi. You say:

>We are dealing with a case of intra-textual deixis. What we have is a
>pronoun "l(o)" referring back to something stated in the text before. It is
>certainly not "impossible", but quite to the contrary it is the least
>farfetched understanding to refer this pronoun to the directly preceding
>statement, "disfecemi Maremma", as most commentators do. It is also still
>possible to include the last but one statement, "Siena mi fe'", although we
>should be a bit more hesitant here, not only because of the strong caesura
>between "Siena mi fe'" and "disfecemi Maremma", but also and mostly because
>Pia's birthplace can be assumed to be a more common knowledge which does
>not need to be stressed as being a particular knowledge held especially by
>her husband. Nevertheless it is possible that "salsi" just means to say:
>'my husband knows about my life and death'. In this case the statement
>would seem to be trivial and one might wonder why it is made at all, but I
>agree -- and I had agreed before -- that this understanding is still
>possible, although it seems less preferable to me. But I cannot follow you
>anymore if you want us to prefer the most farfetched solution by referring
>"salsi" to "Io son la Pia". By this latter statement Pia names herself,
>whereas it is only a guess -- or even less, a second guess, for which you
>have not adduced any reasons -- that it might also imply the meaning "I am
>the pious one".

The sentence "son la pia" _means_ "I am the pious one", no need for any
guesswork there. As to your reasoning on the reference of the pronoun, I
would accept it if we were analysing an oral statement in "natural
language", but in poetry, certainly in Dante's poetry, the general rule of
the pronoun referring to what comes immediatly before has so many exeptions
that, in my view, it ceases to be operational. So we have to look for what
makes poetic sense. First, line 134 has a character of self-sufficency
which gives it the character of a parenthesis. By opening and closing with
two place names, and concentrating the verbs in the past tense around the
caesura marking the central point, it tends to close on itself as a unit
apart. The caesura between "fe'" and "disfecemi" unifies rather than splits
the meaning of the line. The character of a narration of Pia's life and
death opens for a possible expansion of the narrative, but that potential
expansion is cut off by the reversion to the present tense in the verb
"salsi".  The "salsi" is given great weight in that it opens line 135 on an
accented syllable, forcing a pause after "Maremma".  This again strengthens
line 134's character of a parenthesis, and makes "salsi", as it were, seek
out the previous present tense verb, "son" and relate itself to the meaning
of that sentence: I am Pia/I am the pious one.  This reading makes sense
rythmically (try reading the passage aloud to yourself), and semantically,
as it makes the knowledge of the "colui" refer to something which is worth
knowing, to Pia in her life after death.

>Apparently -- but please correct me if I am wrong -- you want us to
>understand Pia's reference in the sense: "I am a pious person, and was
>pious in my life and death, and this can be testified by my husband (who is
>still hopefully praying for me)."

Not quite. Pia's piety in life or death is not touched upon (exept
implicitly - she is after all among the saved, which implies a modicum of
piety before death), nor is her husband's testimony.  Pia explicitly asks
Dante-wanderer for intercession, and when, instead of inserting a plea that
others also intercede for her, she states that one person knows, this seems
to me to imply that this person is praying for her. "I am Pia/the pious
one, Siena made me, Maremma unmade me, this he knows ..."

>But this understanding cannot hinge on
>anybody's "feeling", because it is clearly contradicted by the
>intra-textual context (beginning with "Noi fummo tutti ... peccatori infino
>a l'ultima ora" Pg 5,51s.).

We are talking about the supernatural contact between the living and the
dead. Obviously the dead Pia can have supernatural experience of her
husband's intercessionary prayer. _How_ Pia's husband knows is not an
issue.

>You obviously need to check your understanding of intercession. Members of
>the family have no more and no less power to alleviate the sufferings of
>the deceased than every other living soul has.

Actually, my understanding of intercession is not at stake. I made the
observation, a valid one, that when family and friends, daughters and
wives, are mentioned in this section of Purgatorio it is in connection with
intercessionary prayers. So when a husband is mentioned I expect that to be
the context. Again this is not a definitely verifiable fact, but if it were
otherwise I would expect some sort of indication to that effect in the
text.

>What regards the circumstances under which these persons were killed, there
>is absolutely no reason why death on the battlefield (Manfredi, Buonconte)
>and insidious murder for political motives (Iacopo) -- i.e. motives which
>for Dante are not something which could be seen as relevant only on the
>supra-individual level and disconnected from individual ambition and
>avarice -- should not be followed in Dante's text by a case of insidious
>uxoricide. On the other hand, there is also no reason why this uxoricide
>should not have had political implications, especially if it is true that
>Nello murdered Pia in order to marry Margherita Aldobrandeschi.

Well, the context _is_ overtly political (particularly if we take into
account what follows in Purgatorio 6). I think one would have to posit a
political motivation for the uxuricide to make it fit in. Again an element
which the ancient - or modern - commentators, let alone Dante's text, do
not dwell on.

>Lana is not a "generally unreliable source", but only a source which cannot
>be trusted to give in every single case the exact historical informations
>which Dante himself took for granted or wanted to be taken for granted by
>his readers. Lana gives some correct historical details about Nello's
>person which he (or an earlier gloss which may have been his source) cannot
>have inferred from Dante's text. This does not yet prove that also the
>detail regarding Pia's death is correct (or is at least the one which to
>which Dante wanted to be understood), but as long as there is no
>contradicting evidence I do in fact trust this account more than your
>feelings about the flavour of it.

Fair enough, and a good illustration of the difference between my approach
and yours to reading Dante.

>But in my opinion
>this traditional understanding is still in much better harmony with the
>text of the Pia episode and with its intra-textual context than your
>attempts of reinterpretation.

It is this "harmony" between the "text of the Pia-episode" and the
traditional understanding which I feel that you and the others who have
contributed to this discussion have failed to demonstrate.

>If we have only doubts, but not much or even
>nothing to prove them, some moderation in the use of words like
>"impossible" or "dangerous" might be in place.

Here again we see the difference in our approaches to poetry. This started
out, on my part, a week or so ago, as genuine doubt.  But now it has, in
fact, become "impossible" for me to see how there is an opening in the text
for a story as big as Pia's murder by Nello.  And I am, frankly, frustrated
that no-one seems to be able to see what to me is so obvious.  I'm sorry,
Otfried, the more I look at this text the more I feel passionatly that the
traditional reading is wrong, that it goes too much against the grain of
Dante's poetry. So I don't think there is much point in continuing this
discussion.

In spite of my frustration (and occasional bad tempered exasperation) and
everybody's reluctance to be persuaded, it has been a fruitful discussion,
for which I thank everyone involved.

Tor

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Tor Torhaug
Research fellow
University of Oslo
Department of Classical and Romance Studies
Postboks 1007 Blindern
0315 Oslo
Norway

Phone: +47-22 85 71 28
Fax: +47-22 85 44 52
E-mail: [log in to unmask]




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