Mimesis (33 page)

Within the brief space of about seventy lines we thus have a triple shift in the course of events; we have four scenes crowded together, each full of power and content. None is purely expository—not even the first, a comparatively calm conversation between Dante and Virgil, which I have not included in the passage given above. Here, it is true, the reader, and Dante too, are being acquainted with the new setting which is opening before them, i.e., the sixth circle of Hell; but the scene also contains its own independent theme, the psychological process in which the two speakers are involved. Contrasting most sharply with the theoretical calm and psychological delicacy of this prelude, there follows an exceedingly dramatic second scene, initiated by the sudden sound of Farinata’s voice and the abrupt appearance of his body raising itself in its tomb, by Dante’s alarm and Virgil’s encouraging words and gestures. Here—erect and abrupt as his body—Farinata’s moral stature is developed, larger than life as it were, and unaffected by death and the pains of Hell. He is still the same man he was in his lifetime. It is the Tuscan accents from Dante’s lips which have made him rise and address the passing figure with proudly courteous dignity. When Dante turns toward him, Farinata first inquires into his ancestry, in order to learn with whom he is dealing, whether with a man of noble descent, whether with friend or foe. And when he hears that Dante belongs to a Guelph family, he says with stern satisfaction that he twice drove that hated party from the city. The fate of Florence and the Ghibellines is still uppermost in his mind. Dante replies that the expulsion of the Guelphs did not profit the Ghibellines in the long run, that in the end it was the latter who remained in exile; but he is interrupted by the emergence of Cavalcante, who has heard Dante’s words and recognized him. His peering head comes into sight; it is attached to a much slighter body than Farinata’s. He hopes to see his son with Dante, but when he looks in vain, he breaks into anxious questions which show that he too continues to have the same character and the same passions that he had in his lifetime, though they are very different from Farinata’s: love of life on earth, belief in the autonomous greatness of the human mind, and above all love and admiration for his son Guido. As he asks his urgent questions, he is excited, almost beseeching, thus differentiating
himself sharply from Farinata’s imposing greatness and self-discipline; and when he infers (wrongly) from Dante’s words that his son is no longer alive, he collapses; whereupon Farinata, unmoved and without reference to the intervening episode, replies to the last remark Dante had addressed to him, and what he says characterizes him completely: If, as you say, the banished Ghibellines have not succeeded in returning to the city, that is a greater torment to me than the bed on which I lie.

More is packed together in this passage than in any of the others we have so far discussed in this book; but there is not only more, the material is not only weightier and more dramatic within so short a space; it is also intrinsically much more varied. Here we have the relation not merely of one event but of three different events, the second of which—the Farinata scene—is interrupted and cut in two by the third. There is, then, no unity of action in the ordinary sense. Nor is this comparable with what we found in the scene from Homer discussed in our first chapter, where the reference to Odysseus’ scar occasioned a lengthy, circumstantial, episodic narrative which carried us far from the original subject. In Dante’s case the subject is changed abruptly and in rapid succession. Farinata’s words interrupt Virgil’s and Dante’s conversation
subitamente
; the
allor surse
of line 52 cuts without transition through the Farinata scene, which is just as precipitately resumed by
ma quell’altro magnanimo
. The unity of the passage is dependent upon the setting, the physical and moral climate of the circle of heretics and atheists; and the rapid succession of independent episodes or mutually unrelated scenes is a concomitant of the structure of the Comedy as a whole. It presents the journey of an individual and his guide through a world whose inhabitants remain in whatever place is assigned to them. Despite this rapid succession of scenes, there is no question of any parataxis in Dante’s style. Within every individual scene there is an abundance of syntactic connectives; and when—as in the present instance—the scenes are juxtaposed in sharp contours without transition, the confrontation is managed by means of artistically varied devices of expression which are rather changes of approach than parataxes. The scenes are not set stiffly side by side and in the same key—we are thinking of the Latin legend of Alexis (pp. 116f.) and even of the
Chanson de Roland
—they rise from the depths as particular forms of the momentarily prevailing tonality and stand in contrapuntal relation to one another.

To make this clearer we shall more closely examine the points at
which the scene changes. Farinata interrupts the conversing pair with the words:
O Tosco, che per la città del foco vivo ten vai
. … This is an address, a vocative introduced by O, with a succeeding relative clause which, in comparison with the vocative, is decidedly weighty and substantial; and only then comes the request, which is again weighted down with reserved courtesy. We hear, not, “Tuscan, stop!” but “O Tuscan, who …, may it please thee to linger in this place.” The construction, “O thou who” is extremely solemn and comes from the elevated style of the antique epic. Dante’s ear remembers its cadence as it remembers so many other things in Virgil, Lucan, and Statius. I do not think the construction occurs before this in any medieval vernacular. But Dante uses it in his own way: with a strong adjuratory element—which is present in antiquity at most in prayers—and with so condensed a content in the relative clause as only he can manage. Farinata’s feeling and attitude toward the passing pair are so dynamically epitomized in the three qualifiers,
per la città del foco ten vai, vivo, così parlando onesto
, that had the master Virgil really heard those words, he might well have been more dismayed than Dante in the poem; his own relative clauses after a vocative are perfectly beautiful and harmonious, to be sure, but never so concise and arresting. (See for example
Aeneid
, 1, 436:
o fortunati quibus iam moenia surgunt!
or, still more interesting because of its full rhetorical swell, 2, 638:
vos o quibus integer aevi / sanguis, ait, solidaeque suo stant robore vires, / vos agitate fugam
.) Note also how the antithesis “through the city of fire” and “alive” is expressed entirely, and therefore the more effectively, through the position of the word
vivo
.

After these three lines of address comes the tercet in which Farinata identifies himself as Dante’s fellow countryman, and only then, after he has finished speaking, the statement: Suddenly this sound issued, etc., a statement which one would normally expect to find introducing a surprising event, but which here—where it follows the event—produces a comparatively quiet effect as a mere explanation of what is occurring. So that, in a recitation of the entire passage, these lines would have to be read more softly. There is no question, then, of any straightforward paratactic attaching of the Farinata scene to the conversation of the two travelers. On the one hand we must not forget the fact that Virgil vaguely announced it beforehand in the course of the conversation (lines 16 to 18); on the other hand, it is so strong, so violent, so overpowering an irruption of a different realm—in the local, ethical, psychological, and aesthetic senses—that its connection with
what precedes is no mere juxtaposition but the vital relationship of counterpoint, of the sudden breaking in of something dimly foreboded. The events are not—as we put it in connection with the
Chanson de Roland
and the Legend of Alexis—divided into little parcels; they live together, despite their contrast and actually because of it.

The second change of scene is managed through the words
Allor surse
, in line 52. It seems simpler and less remarkable than the first. What, after all, is more normal than to introduce a sudden new occurrence with the words, “Then it befel …”? But if we ask ourselves where in pre-Dantean medieval vernacular literature we might find a comparable linguistic maneuver, interrupting the action in course by a dramatically incisive “then,” we should, I think, have a long search before us. I for one know of none.
Allora
at the beginning of a sentence is naturally quite frequent in Italian literature before Dante. It occurs for instance in the stories of the
Novellino
but with much less force of meaning. Such sharp breaks are in keeping with neither the style nor the time-sense of pre-Dantean narrative, not even with those of the French epics, where
ez vos
or
atant ez vos
occurs in a similar though much weaker sense (for example,
Roland
413 and elsewhere). That even extremely dramatic turnings of the tide of action were handled with stiff circumstantiality may be observed for example in Villehardouin when he relates the intervention of the Doge of Venice at the storming of Constantinople. When his men hesitate to land, the aged and blind Doge orders them upon pain of death to set him ashore first, with the flag of Saint Mark. This the chronicler introduces with the words:
or porres oir estrange proece
. This is just as though Dante, instead of
allora
, had said, “And then something quite extraordinary happened.” The Old French
ez vos
may serve to point the way as we try to find the correct Latin term for this abruptly intervening “then.” For it is not
tum
or
tunc
; in many cases it is rather
sed
or
iam
. But the real equivalent, which gives the full force, is
ecce
, or still better
et ecce
. This is found less frequently in the elevated style than in Plautus, in Cicero’s letters, in Apuleius, etc., and especially in the Vulgate. When Abraham takes the knife to sacrifice his son Isaac, we read:
et ecce Angelus Domini de caelo clamavit, dicens: Abraham, Abraham
. I think this linguistic maneuver, which effects so sharp an interruption, is too harsh to stem from the elevated style of classical Latin; but it corresponds perfectly with the elevated style of the Bible. And furthermore, Dante uses the Biblical
et ecce
verbatim on another occasion where a state of affairs is interrupted by a sudden, though not
quite so dramatic, occurrence (
Purg
., 21, 7:
ed ecco, sì come ne scrive Luca … ci apparve …
after Luke 24: 13:
et ecce duo ex illis …
). I am not prepared to state as a certainty that Dante introduced the linguistic maneuver of this abruptly interrupting “then” into the elevated style and that it was a Biblical echo with him. But this much would seem to be certain: at the time Dante wrote, the dramatically arresting “then” was by no means as obvious and generally available as it is today; and he used it more radically than any other medieval writer before him.

But we must also consider the meaning and the sound of the word
surse
, which Dante uses in at least one other passage with telling effect to describe a sudden emergence (
Purg
. 6, 72-73:
e l’ombra tutta in se romita / surse vêr lui …
). The
allor surse
of line 52, then, has hardly less weight than the words of Farinata which bring in the first interruption; this
allor
is one of those paratactic forms which establish a dynamic relationship between the members they connect. The conversation with Farinata is interrupted—once he has heard part of it, Cavalcante cannot wait for it to end, he simply loses his self-control. And the part he plays—his peering expression, his whining words, and his precipitate despair when he sinks back—forms a sharp contrast with Farinata’s weighty calm when he resumes speaking after the third shift (ll. 73ff.).

The third shift,
ma quell’altro magnanimo
, etc., is much less dramatic than the first two. It is calm, proud, and weighty. Farinata alone dominates the scene. But the contrast with what precedes is thus only the more striking. Dante calls Farinata
magnanimo
, employing an Aristotelian term which may have come to life in his vocabulary through its use by Thomas Aquinas or, more probably, by Brunetto Latini and which is applied in an earlier passage to Virgil. This is doubtless a conscious contrast to Cavalcante (
costui
); and the three identically constructed cola which express Farinata’s aloofness (
non mutò aspetto, nè mosse collo, nè piegò sua costa
) are undoubtedly designed not only to describe Farinata himself but also to contrast his attitude with Cavalcante’s. This is aurally apparent from the regularly constructed clauses which come to the listener while he is still conscious of the irregular and plaintively thronging questions of the other. (The wording of these questions, ll. 58 to 60 and 67 to 69, Dante may well have modeled after Andromache’s appearance,
Aeneid
, 3, 310, that is, after a woman’s lamentations.)

Abruptly, then, as these events succeed one another, this is no paratactic
construction. The most vital continuity of movement vibrates through the entire passage. Dante has at his disposal an abundance of stylistic devices which no European vernacular before him could equal. And he does not use them singly; he connects them in an uninterrupted relationship. Virgil’s encouraging words (ll. 31-33) consist exclusively of principal clauses without any formal connection by conjunctions. There is a short imperative, a short question, then another imperative with an object and an explanatory relative, and a future clause of adhortative import with an adverbial qualifier. But the quick succession, the concise formulation of the individual parts, and their mutual balance exhibit to perfection the natural vitality of spoken discourse: “Turn around! What are you doing? etc.” Withal there are semantic connections of the most subtle kind. There is the ordinary causal relation (
però
), but in addition to it we have the connective
onde
hovering between temporal and causal value, and the hypothetically causal
forse che
, which some early commentators consider to be courteously softening. There are the most varied temporal, comparative, and graduated hypothetical connections, supported by the greatest possible elasticity of verbal inflections and verbal order. Note, for instance, the ease with which Dante keeps syntactic control of the scene of Cavalcante’s appearance so that it runs smoothly on through three tercets to the end of his first speech (l. 60). The unity of the construction here rests upon three verbal pillars,
surse, guardò, disse
. The first supports the subject, the adverbial qualifiers, and, in addition, the explanatory parenthesis
credo che
; the second,
guardò
, carries the first lines of the second tercet with the as-if clause; while the third line of this same tercet points toward the
disse
and Cavalcante’s direct discourse, which marks the climax of the whole movement from an initial forte through a decrescendo to a renewed crescendo beginning with line 57.