Dante Alighieri PDF
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher. Printed and bound in the United States of America. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Applied. ISBN: 0-7910-7658-X Chelsea House Publishers 1974 Sproul Road, Suite 400 Broomall, PA 19008-0914 http://www.chelseahouse.com Contributing Editor: Grace Kim Cover designed by Terry Mallon Cover: © Stefano Bianchetti/CORBIS Layout by EJB Publishing Services Contents Editor’s Note vii Introduction 1 Harold Bloom The Two Kinds of Allegory 11 Charles S. Singleton Figural Art in the Middle Ages 25 Erich Auerbach Epic Tradition and Inferno IX 37 David Quint Manfred’s Wounds and the Poetics of the ‘Purgatorio’ 45 John Freccero Autocitation and Autobiography 57 Teodolinda Barolini Infernal Metamorphoses: An Interpretation of Dante’s “Counterpass” 119 Kenneth Gross The Light of Venus and the Poetry of Dante: Vita Nuova and InfernoXXVII 145 Giuseppe Mazzotta The Otherworldly World of the Paradiso 161 Jaroslav Pelikan Synchronicity 177 María Rosa Menocal Purgatory as Paradigm: Traveling the New and Never-Before-Traveled Path of this Life/Poem 193 Teodolinda Barolini vi CONTENTS Imagination and Knowledge in PurgatorioXVII–XVIII 225 Giuseppe Mazzotta The Strangeness of Dante: Ulysses and Beatrice 247 Harold Bloom Finding the Center 269 John Kleiner Dante’s Interpretive Journey: Truth Through Interpretation 287 William Franke Chronology 307 Contributors 309 Bibliography 311 Acknowledgments 317 Index 319 Editor’s Note My “Introduction” presents an overview of Dante, culminating in the vision of Matilda gathering flowers in the Earthly Paradise of PurgatorioXXVIII. Charles S. Singleton begins the sequence of essays with his argument that Dante follows the allegory of the theologians, and not of the poets, while Erich Auerbach rehearses his celebrated thesis on the Christian trope of figura, and Dante’s supposed relation to it. The thematizing of Inferno, Canto IX, by epic tradition, is analyzed by David Quint, after which John Freccero expounds the poetics of the Purgatorio as a process of Dante’s liberation from his precursor Virgil’s influence. In the first of her two essays here, Teodolinda Barolini also illuminates Dante’s poetic maturation, while Kenneth Gross meditates upon the dialectic of pain and punishment. Guiseppe Mazzotta, in the first of his two essays, brilliantly tracks the Vita Nuovainto Inferno XXVII and shows the fate of the rhetoric of love in Dante. Jaroslav Pelikan, the most learned historian of theology, guides us into the Paradiso, which he views as essentially Augustinian rather than Thomistic, after which María Rosa Menocal sagely comments upon Dante’s cult of Beatrice. In reappearances, Barolini finds in Purgatory something like the literal truth, while Mazzotta praises Dante the Pilgrim’s intuitive cognition of an imaginative knowledge that surpasses rational processes. I myself return in a disquisition upon Dante’s uncanny strangeness in his imaginings both of Ulysses and Beatrice, after which John Kleiner juxtaposes audacity and error in Dante, and William Franke sees the supreme poet as an interpreter in search of truth founded upon belief. vii HAROLD BLOOM Introduction DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265–1321) The life of Dante Alighieri itself can seem a turbulent poem, closer to his Inferno than to his Purgatorio, quite aside from his Paradiso. Biographies so far are mostly inadequate to Dante’s genius, with the major exception of the very first, Giovanni Boccaccio’s, aptly described by Giuseppe Mazzotta as a “self-conscious fictional work akin to Dante’s own Vita Nuova (The New Life) which responds imaginatively to Dante’s steady self-dramatization in his works.” This need not surprise anyone; Dante, like Shakespeare, is so large a form of thought and imagination that individual biographers, scholars, and critics tend to see only aspects of an extraordinary panoply. I always recommend to my students, in preference to all biographies of Shakespeare, the late Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like the Sun, a rather Joycean novel narrated by Shakespeare in the first person. The exalted Dante regarded himself as a prophet, at least the equal of Isaiah or Jeremiah. Shakespeare, we can assume, had no such self-estimate; the creator of Hamlet, Falstaff, and Lear has much in common with Geoffrey Chaucer, the maker of the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath, and Chaucer subtly mocks Dante. One has to be of Chaucer’s eminence, if Dante is to be treated ironically, and even Chaucer clearly admires far more intensely than he dissents. One cannot discuss genius in all the world’s history without centering upon Dante, since only Shakespeare, of all geniuses of language, is richer. Shakespeare to a considerable extent remade English: about eighteen hundred words of the twenty-one thousand he employed were his own coinage, and I cannot pick up a newspaper without finding Shakespearean turns of phrase scattered through it, frequently without intention. Yet Shakespeare’s English was inherited by him, from Chaucer and from William Tyndale, the principal translator of the Protestant Bible. Had Shakespeare written nothing, the English language, pretty much as we know it, would have prevailed, but Dante’s Tuscan dialect became the Italian language largely because of Dante. He is the national From: Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. © 2002 by Harold Bloom. 1
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