First-Person Participation in Dante's Commedia Katherine Lucy Powlesland Pembroke College

215 Pages·2017·2.12 MB·English

First-Person Participation in Dante’s Commedia
Katherine Lucy Powlesland
Pembroke College
August 2018

This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
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Contents
Contents ................................................................................................................................................... i
Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................................ iii
Abbreviations, Editions, and Translations ............................................................................................. iv
Preface ................................................................................................................................................... vi
Chapter 1: Reading I nteractively ................................ ................................ ................................ ............ 8
1.1 Narratological approaches to the Commedia ................................ ................................ .............. 12
1.2 Bernard’s interaction manquée ................................ ................................ ................................ ... 17
1.3 Focal view switching ................................ ................................ ................................ .................. 22
1.4 Bernard’s object ................................ ................................ ................................ .......................... 27
1.5 Bernard’s double frame violation ................................ ................................ ............................... 29
1.6 From immersion to presence: a new framework for reader response criticism .......................... 32
1.7 Structure of the thesis ................................ ................................ ................................ .................. 39
Chapter 2: Embodiment in Context ................................ ................................ ................................ ...... 40
2.1 A fresh return to embodiment ................................ ................................ ................................ ..... 40
2.2 Medieval theory of mind ................................ ................................ ................................ ............. 45
2.3 Approaches to medieval cognitive theory: rhetoric, gesture, memory ................................ ....... 48
2.3.1 Rhetoric ................................ ................................ ................................ ................................ 48
2.3.2 Gesture ................................ ................................ ................................ ................................ . 49
2.3.3 Memory ................................ ................................ ................................ ................................ 52
2.4 Medieval affective piety ................................ ................................ ................................ ............. 56
2.4.1 New medieval models of reading ................................ ................................ ......................... 56
2.4.2 Affective piety ................................ ................................ ................................ ..................... 59
2.5 The embodied reader ................................ ................................ ................................ ................... 66
2.6 Personal response and subjectivity ................................ ................................ ............................. 69
Chapter 3: Spatial Presence ................................ ................................ ................................ .................. 72
3.1 ‘Tu non se’ in terra’: being transported ................................ ................................ ...................... 72
3.2 Literary setting versus spatial presence ................................ ................................ ...................... 76
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3.3 A mortal human body in a virtual space ..................................................................................... 78
3.4 ‘Being there’: Geryon ................................................................................................................. 80
3.5 Creating ‘here’: the celestial ladder ............................................................................................ 94
Chapter 4: Social Presence .................................................................................................................. 104
4.1 Readable bodies in the Commedia ............................................................................................ 110
4.2 Narration through kinaesthetic empathy ................................................................................... 116
4.3 Progression in Purgatorio and Paradiso .................................................................................. 123
4.4 Coda: The language of praise ................................................................................................... 128
Chapter 5: Self-Presence ..................................................................................................................... 131
5.1 Narrative perspective ................................................................................................................ 133
5.1.1 A new model of narrating instances for the Commedia ..................................................... 137
5.1.2 Directing line of sight: narration through mobile camera view ......................................... 149
5.2 Narrative mediation: the continuum of invitations to participate ............................................. 157
5.2.1 The direct addresses to the reader ...................................................................................... 157
5.2.2 Narrative training ............................................................................................................... 163
5.2.3 Narration through gaps in the text: similes and ellipses ..................................................... 172
Chapter 6: First-Person Participation .................................................................................................. 188
Bibliography ....................................................................................................................................... 198
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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to the Keith Sykes Fund for the gene rous funding of this research, and to
Pembroke College for hosting my studentship. I also thank the Italian Department at t he
University of Cambridge for providing such a supportive, good-humoured, and enriching
community in which to work. I also wish to thank Keith Sykes personally for his unfailing
kindness and interest in my work, and for doing so much to foster community amongst Italian
scholars at Cambridge.
I was exceptionally lucky that my doctoral study coincided with the Vertical Readings in
Dante’s ‘Commedia’ lecture series in Cambridge, so have been privileged to listen to and
enjoy inspiring discussions with many scholars from the Dante community. In this regard, I
especially wish to thank Zygmunt Barański, Peter Hawkins, Elena Lombardi, Simone
Marchesi, Christian Moevs , Vittorio Montemaggi , and Matthew Treherne .
I offer my deepest thanks to Robin Kirkpatrick for instilling in me a love for the Commedia
in 1987.
I am very grateful to Alan Blackwell, my advisor from the Faculty of Computing .
Finally, I wish to thank my supervisor, Heather Webb, who has provided constant
encouragement and suppo rt, and always took my ideas seriously, including when I didn’t.
This thesis would never have found a home in the first place without her extraordinary
support.
I dedicate this thesis to my parents , and to my dear friend Bill Marshall.
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Abbreviations, Editions, and Translations

The following editions, translations, and abbreviations are used throughout:
Bible The Holy Bible, Douay/Rheims Version, available at
<http:www.drbo.org> [last accessed 2 September 2017]

nd
Commedia La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. by Giorgio Petrocchi, 2
edn, 4 vols (Florence: Le Lettere, 1994)

Inf. Inferno, in La Commedia
Par. Paradiso, in La Commedia
Purg. Purgatorio, in La Commedia

Commentaries on the Commedia:
The following commentaries on the Commedia are cited according to the Dartmouth Dante
Project <http://dantelab.dartmouth.edu> [last accessed 30 July 2018]:
Jacopo Alighieri (1322)
L’Ottimo Commento (1333)
Francesco da Buti (1385-1395)
Anonimo Fiorentino (circa 1400)
Natalino Sapegno (1955-1957)
Umberto Bosco and Giovanni Reggio (1979)
Ernesto Trucchi (1936)
Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (1991-1997)
Robert Hollander (2000-2007)
Nicola Fosca (2003-2015)

The following commentary is cited from the Project Gutenberg e-book
<http://www.gutenberg.org/files/30766/30766-h/30766-h.htm> [last accessed 30 July 2018]:
Jacopo Alighieri, Chiose alla cantica dell’Inferno di Dante Alighieri
v

The following commentaries are cited from the printed editions below:
The Divine Comedy, trans. by Robert M. Durling, introduction and notes by Ronald L.
Martínez and Robert M. Durling, 3 vols (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996-2011)

The Divine Comedy, trans. and ed. by Robin Kirkpatrick, 3 vols (London: Penguin, 2006-
2007)

The Divine Comedy, trans., with a commentary, by Charles S. Singleton, 3 vols (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press/Bollingen, 1980)
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Preface

This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of
work done in collaboration. This dissertation is not substantially the same as any that I have
submitted, or is being concurrently submitted, for a degree or diploma or other qualification
at the University of Cambridge or any other university or similar institution. I further state
that no substantial part of this dissertation has already been submitted, or is being
concurrently submitted, for any such degree, diploma or other qualification at the University
of Cambridge or any other university or similar institution. This dissertation does not exceed
80,000 words.
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Image of one of the seven artists who contributed new work for Dante’s Paradise: Imagining the Divine,
a participatory event involving sixty members of the public, organised by the writer of this thesis
and held at Robinson College Chapel, 25 October 2014 as part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas.
<https://www.facebook.com/imaginingthedivine/>
Image © Martin Bond
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1
Chapter 1: Reading Interactively

This thesis sets out a new model of reader participation in Dante’s Commedia, exploring how
participation may be invited through mechanisms of narrative transmission, such as
immersion, world creation, narrative perspective, narrative mediation, and narrative
indeterminacy (the similes, ellipses and other ‘gaps’ in the fabric of a narrative text that invite
2
individual cognitive work and serve to render a text ‘open’ to a greater or lesser extent). The
question of reader involvement is not new in Dante studies, with work on the so-called ‘direct
3
addresses’ to the reader perhaps its most visible narratological face to date. However, recent
advances in two discrete fields that both foreground the role of the body in constructing
meaning – cognitive neuroscience and the young field of videogame critical theory – offer us,
I propose, new tools to consider in textual literary theory, inviting fresh perspectives on the
centrally important question of how to read Dante’s poem.
The subject of modes of reading is powerfully evoked in Gianfranco Contini’s 1965
essay, Un’interpretazione di Dante , in which he asks a ‘semplice e drastica domanda ’:
whether anyone today actually ‘reads’ the poem, ‘se si legga ancora la Divina Commedia’:

Questo è il sincero esame di coscienza di uno a cui è stata attribuita qualche
responsabilità, o magari custodia, di cose dantesche; e che perciò deve cominciare dalla
semplice e drastica domanda: se si legga ancora la Divina Commedia. Non,
naturalmente, per obbligo scolastico o per dovere culturale; ma per la libera e ilare
scelta di chi s’induca a ripercorrerne il racconto da un capo all’altro, concedendo la sua

1
An earlier version of this chapter has been published as ‘Invitations to Participate: Bernard’s
Sign’, Le Tre Corone, 4 (2017), 97-115.
2
Wolfgang Iser’s indeterminacy hypothesis proposes that ‘[t]he written part of the text gives
us the knowledge, but it is the unwritten part that gives us the opportunity to picture things;
indeed, without the elements of indeterminacy, the gaps in the text, we should not be able to
use our imagination’. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in
Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p.
283.
3
As Simone Marchesi writes: ‘That Dante’s text is inviting an active hermeneutic
engagement on the part of its readers and, in so doing, negotiates its fictional status, are all
stable acquisitions of the current critical discourse .’ Simone Marchesi, Dante and Augustine:
Linguistics, Poetics, Hermeneutics (Toronto; New York: University of Toronto Press, 2011),
p. 4. My interest is in extending this debate through d efining some of the central narrative
mechanisms through which such active engagement may be invited.
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fiducia al narratore, prestandosi al suo gioco, combaciando con le sorprese preparate,
come si fa tutti i giorni per i poemi omerici e l’Eneide, per il Furioso e il Chisciotte, per
i Promessi sposi e ogni grande romanzo dell’Ottocento, per la Recherche du temps
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perdu e Ulysses.

‘Reading’ the poem, it becomes clear, means from end to end, ‘da un capo all’altro’,
respecting its mechanisms ( ‘concedendo la sua fiducia al narratore, prestandosi al suo
gioco’), exactly as one would with any other of the great European literary narratives.
In narrative theory, this experiential mode is usually described in broad terms as
immersive (although there are important differences between types of immersion ); an
experience of such deep absorption in an alternative reality that the ‘real’ or physical world
5
fades from conscious awareness. This is an experience Dante describes in Purgatorio XVII
when he writes of our deafness to even a thousand trumpets in the midst of an imaginative
transportation:

4
Gianfranco Contini, Un’idea di Dante: saggi danteschi (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), p. 69.
Contini’s essential shift of focus is away from Benedetto Croce’s famous formulation of two
elements that are both within authorial production – ‘[la] problematica crociana di “struttura”
e “poesia”’ (p. 71) – and instead towards the responsibility of the reader to read as directed by
the text, asking ‘[s]e dunque l’opposizione, piuttosto che tra supporto e oggetto poetico, è tra
modo e modo di leggere’ (p. 72, my emphasis); a binary not within artistic production alone,
but that integrates production and reader reception.
5
For a discussion of different types of immersion (spatial, epistemic, temporal, emotional),
see: Marie-Laure Ryan, ‘From Narrative Games to Playable Stories: Toward a Poetics of
Interactive Narrative’, Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 1 (2009), 43-59. The
differences between Ryan’s four categories of immersion might crudely be summarised as
follows: spatial immersion depends on ‘sense of place’ (p. 54); epistemic immersion on ‘the
desire to know’ (p. 55); temporal immersion on ‘curiosity, surprise, and suspense’ (p. 5 5);
and emotional immersion on ‘empathy’ (p. 55). Ryan is a media theorist and leading
authority on digital narrative theory and immersion, arguably best known for her 2001
monograph, Narrative as Virtual Reality, revised and republished in 2015 as Narrative as
Virtual Reality 2: Revisiting Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media,
nd
2 edn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015). Other key publications include
Avatars of Story (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Possible Worlds,
Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991);
the co-edited volumes, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, with Lori Emerson and
Benjamin J. Robertson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), andS toryworlds
Across Media: Towards a Media-Conscious Narratology, with Jan-Noël Thon (Lincoln;
London: University of Nebraska Press, 2014); and numerous articles on narrative theory in
digital media, including ‘Transmedial Storytelling and Transfictionality’,P oetics Today, 34,
3 (2013), 362-88.