Dante in Purgatory: States of Affect

304 Pages·2010·1.69 MB·English

by  Jeremy Tambling

DANTE IN PURGATORY
DISPUTATIO
Editorial Board
Dallas G. Denery II Bowdoin College
Georgiana Donavin Westminster College
Cary J. Nederman Texas A&M University
Founding Editor
Richard Utz Western Michigan University
Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of this book.
VOLUME 18
DANTE IN PURGATORY
States of Affect
by
Jeremy Tambling
H
F
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Tambling, Jeremy.
Dante in Purgatory : states of affect. -- (Disputatio ; v.
18)
1. Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321. Purgatorio. 2. Emotions in
literature. 3. Deadly sins in literature.
I. Title II. Series
851.1-dc22
ISBN-13: 9782503531298
© 2010, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
D/2010/0095/113
ISBN: 978-2-503-53129-8
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Chapter 1: On Affect 1
Chapter 2: Seven Capital Vices 13
Chapter 3: Virtues and Vices: Convivio to Purgatorio 37
Chapter 4: Purgatorio I and II 61
Chapter 5: The Art of Pride 81
Chapter 6: Envy 103
Chapter 7: Overcoming Anger 127
Chapter 8: Sloth 145
Chapter 9: On Avarice 175
Chapter 10: Greed and Gluttony 197
Chapter 11: ‘Nostro peccato fu ermafrodito’ 219
Chapter 12: Matelda: Love, Narcissism, Fragmentation 241
Bibliography 265
Index of Dante’s Works 285
Index of the Bible and Apocrypha 287
General Index 289

PREFACE
D
ante in Purgatory: States of Affect offers a reading of Dante’s Purgatorio,
perhaps the most beautiful, most haunting, and most affective part
of the Commedia. It is not a complete reading; it concentrates only
on those passages whose focus is on affective states. Analysis of what is meant
by ‘affect’, drawing on psychoanalysis, appears in Chapter 1, which says little
specifically about Dante. Emotional states are called ‘states of affect’, because
the word emotion presumes that the feeling is the product of an individual
subject who knows what he or she feels and moves out to the external world
with recognizable feelings. ‘Affect’ implies that states in which the subject feels
something derive from both inside and outside, including conditions, including
those of language and of discursive formations, which create the subject as feeling
in certain ways. Such constructions meet and contrast with, if they do not
contradict, impulses coming from the self connecting with, desiring, what is
outside. The book argues that what we think of as ‘emotions’ are not ahistorical
products of our sensibilities, but are created historically and discursively; there is
a history of how at different moments, affective states have been created.
A history of such concepts as the passions, the will, and the desire for apatheia,
as these developed from the classical to the early Christian period, is in Chapter
2. Here, it is shown how ‘emotions’ were described, and attacked, and down-
graded, and specifically objectified as ‘capital vices’, in Evagrius of Pontus, in his
disciple Cassian, and, later, in Gregory the Great. Chapter 3, on the soul, shows
how Dante understood the relationship between the appetites, which had been
seen as states of desire emanating from inside, the reason, and the will. This leads
into the question, what does it mean to think of someone as marked by vice, or by
virtue? Dante deliberated on this in Convivio, c. 1304, left incomplete: it was
where he intended to expound virtues, and how they arose from the love of
viii
Preface
philosophy. At some stage, for reasons often explored, but still not wholly under-
stood, he moved from this to the Commedia, and to the distinctions between
vices and sins of Inferno, and then to the seven capital vices. How Purgatorio is
put together comes in the final section, which reads Canto XVII. 82–139, giving
Virgil’s rationale for and order of the vices to be purged, and examines the dis-
cussion of love and free will (Canto XVIII. 10–75).
The sequential reading of Purgatorio starts with Chapter 4, on Cantos I and
II; I have little to say here on Cantos III to IX, which deal with ante-Purgatory, but
from Chapters 5 to 11, concentrate on the purgation of the ‘capital vices’, pride,
envy, anger, sloth, avarice and greed, overeating (overconsuming), and sexual
desire, which I see as affective states, and as linked. The last chapter concludes
Purgatorio, including Matelda, and the Earthly Paradise.
I started thinking about this project after reading Jacques Le Goff’s The Birth
of Purgatory at the end of the 1980s, and considering how it connects Purgatory
as a new state with new forms of narrative, ways of thinking about time, and
liminal forms of identity in process, outside the binary division of ‘saved’ or
‘damned’. Drafts of some chapters that follow began appearing in the 1990s and
I thank the journals’ editors for permission to reprint: Exemplaria, for ‘“Nostro
peccato fu ermafrodito”: Dante and the Moderns’, 6 (1994), 405–27; Modern
Language Review for ‘Getting Above the Thunder: Dante in the Sphere of
Saturn’, 90 (1995), 632–45; New Literary History for ‘Dante and the Modern
Subject: Overcoming Anger in the Purgatorio’, 28 (1997), 401–20; and Forum for
Modern Language Studies for ‘Dreaming the Siren: Dante and Melancholy’, 40
(2004), 56–69. Other material written on Dante from the 1990s onwards, more
loosely relevant to this argument, appears in the Bibliography.
Quotations from the Commedia are taken from the three-volume edition of
Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1999–2001), and for the
Italian minor works, from the Opere minori in two volumes edited by Domenico
de Robertis, Gianfranco Contini, and Cesare Vasoli (Milan: Ricciardi, 1979).
For the Commedia I have drawn freely on the translation and commentaries of
Charles Singleton and on those by Sapegno, by Bosco and Reggio, and by Durling
and Martinez, and on editions of the Vita nuova by Dino S. Cervigni and Edward
Vasta, and of the Convivio by Michael Ryan and Richard Lansing, and the two
volumes of Dante’s lyric poetry in the edition by Kenelm Foster and Patrick
Boyde. Details of all these appear in the Bibliography, and I would like to
acknowledge how all these editions have been formative for insights on virtually
every page of this book.
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Preface
I began the writing after 2003, with the aid of a grant from the Hong Kong
University Grants Council, which enabled me to pursue this research. Three
research assistants have worked at various times on it: Bob Tsang, Pablo Tsoi, and
Ian Fong, and to each of them I am grateful. Paul Fung, Sam Jenkins, and Alfie
Bown have helped materially with the preparation of the manuscript. Colleagues
in Manchester have helped: Spencer Pearce, with good conversations about
Dante, and with reading the manuscript, Kate Cooper with Augustine, and
Jeremy Gregory with other aspects of church history. I thank the anonymous
reader of the book for Brepols. Permission for the reproduction of the cover
photographs has been graciously granted by the Uffizi museum in Florence,
under the auspices of the Ministry for Culture and Environment. To three librar-
ies among others I am particularly grateful: the University of Hong Kong Library,
whose staff and facilities have always been magnificent, the Warburg Institute in
London, and Manchester University. I thank members of my immediate family
for their forbearance during periods of writing. I dedicate this book to three
early teachers of mine whose impact was immeasurable and unforgettable: David
Handforth, the late Michael Fitch, and Brian Worthington.