Mimesis (34 page)

Should this analysis find any readers but little versed in medieval vernacular literature, they may well be surprised that I here emphasize and praise the extraordinary character of syntactic constructions which are today used by every halfway talented literary man and indeed by many who, though they write nothing but letters, have had a modicum of literary training. But if we start from his predecessors, Dante’s language is a well-nigh incomprehensible miracle. There were great poets among them. But, compared with theirs, his style is so immeasurably richer in directness, vigor, and subtlety, he knows and uses such an immeasurably greater stock of forms, he expresses the most varied
phenomena and subjects with such immeasurably superior assurance and firmness, that we come to the conclusion that this man used his language to discover the world anew. Very often it is possible to demonstrate or to conjecture where he acquired this or that device of expression; but his sources are so numerous, his ear hears them, his intellect uses them, so accurately, so simply, and yet so originally, that demonstrations and conjectures of this sort can only serve to increase our admiration for the power of his linguistic genius. A text such as the one we are considering may be approached at any point, and every point will yield a surprise, something unimaginable in the vernacular literatures at an earlier date. Let us take something as insignificant-looking as the clause,
da me stesso non vegno
. Is it conceivable that so short and yet complete a formulation of such a thought in particular, that so incisive a semantic organization in general, and a
da
used in this sense, should occur in the work of an earlier vernacular author? Dante uses
da
in this sense in several other passages (
Purg
., 1, 52:
da me non venni
; also
Purg
., 19, 143:
buona da sè
; and
Par
., 2, 58:
ma dimmi quel che tu da te ne pensi
). The meaning “of one’s own motion,” “of one’s own free will,” “by oneself,” would seem to have been a further development of the meaning “(coming) from.” Guido Cavalcanti writes in the canzone
Donna mi prega:
[
Amore
]
non è vertute ma da quella vene
. It is of course not possible to claim that Dante created this new semantic turn, for even if no single passage of the sort could be found in earlier texts, that still might mean no more than that no such passage happens to be extant; and even if nothing of the sort was ever written before his time, it still may have been current in spoken language. Indeed, the latter possibility strikes me as likely, because a scholarly background would more naturally have suggested
per
. What is certain, however, is that in adopting or creating this short expression, Dante gave it a vigor and depth previously inconceivable—the effect, in our passage, being further enhanced by a twofold opposition: on the one hand to
per altezza d’ingegno
and on the other to
colui ch’attende là
, both rhetorical circumlocutions avoiding the real name, haughtily in one instance and respectfully in the other.

The
da me stesso
perhaps stems from the spoken language; and elsewhere too it may be observed that Dante by no means scorns colloquialisms. The
Volgiti: che fai?
, especially from Virgil’s mouth and coming immediately after Farinata’s solemnly composed apostrophe, has the ring of spontaneous and unstylized speech, of everyday conversation among ordinary speakers. The case is not very different
with the harsh question
chi fur li maggior tui?
unadorned as it is with any of the graces of circumlocution, and with Cavalcante’s
Come dicesti? elli ebbe?
etc. Reading further through this canto, we come, toward the end, upon the passage where Virgil asks,
perchè sei tu si smarrito?
(l. 125). All these quotations, detached from their context, could well be imagined in any ordinary conversation on the familiar level of style. Beside them we find formulations of the highest sublimity, which are also stylistically “sublime” in the antique sense. There is no doubt that the stylistic intent in general is to achieve the sublime. If this were not clear from Dante’s explicit statements, we could sense it directly from every line of his work, however colloquial it may be. The weightiness,
gravitas
, of Dante’s tone is maintained so consistently that there can never be any doubt as to what level of style we find ourselves upon. Nor is it possible to doubt that it was the poets of antiquity who gave Dante the model of the elevated style—which he was the first to adopt. He himself acknowledges in many passages, both in the Comedy and in the
De vulgari eloquentia
, how much he owes them in regard to the elevated style of the vernacular. It may well be that he does so in the very passage we are discussing, for the much-disputed line about Virgil “whom perhaps … Guido held in disdain” permits this interpretation among many others; almost all the early commentators took it in an aesthetic sense. Yet there is no denying that Dante’s conception of the sublime differs essentially from that of his models, in respect to subject matter no less than to stylistic form. The themes which the Comedy introduces represent a mixture of sublimity and triviality which, measured by the standards of antiquity, is monstrous. Of the characters which appear in it, some belong to the recent past or even to the contemporary present and (despite
Par
., 17, 136-138), not all of them are famous or carefully chosen. Quite often they are frankly represented in all the humble realism of their spheres of life. And in general, as every reader is aware, Dante knows no limits in describing with meticulous care and directness things which are humdrum, grotesque, or repulsive. Themes which cannot possibly be considered sublime in the antique sense turn out to be just that by virtue of his way of molding and ordering them. His mixture of stylistic levels has already been noted. One need but think of the line, “and let them scratch wherever they itch,” which occurs in one of the most solemn passages of the
Paradiso
(17, 129), in order to appreciate all the immense difference between Dante and let us say Virgil.

Many important critics—and indeed whole epochs of classicistic taste—have felt ill at ease with Dante’s closeness to the actual in the realm of the sublime—that is, as Goethe put it in his
Annals
for the year 1821, with his “repulsive and often disgusting greatness.” This is not surprising. For nowhere could one find so clear an instance of the antagonism of the two traditions—that of antiquity, with the principle of the separation of styles, and that of the Christian era, with its mingling of styles—as in Dante’s powerful temperament, which is conscious of both because its aspiration toward the tradition of antiquity does not imply for it the possibility of abandoning the other; nowhere does mingling of styles come so close to violation of all style. During the later phases of antiquity the educated saw in the Bible a violation of style. And the later Humanists could not but have precisely the same reaction to the work of their greatest predecessor, the man who was first to read the poets of antiquity again for the sake of their art and to assimilate their tone, the man who was the first to conceive the idea of the
volgare illustre
, the idea of great poetry in the vernacular, and to carry it out; no other reaction was possible for them, precisely because Dante had done all that. The mixture of styles in the literary works of the earlier Middle Ages, as for instance in the Christian drama, seemed pardonable because of their naïveté; those works could not lay claim to high poetic dignity; their popular purpose and popular character justified or at any rate excused their being what they were; they did not really enter the realm of things that need be taken into account and judged seriously. With Dante, however, it was impossible to speak of naïveté and the absence of higher claims. His numerous explicit statements, all his references to Virgil as his model, his invocations of the Muses, of Apollo, and of God, his tensely dramatic relationship to his own work—so clearly apparent from many passages—and finally and above all, the very tone of every line of the poem itself, bear witness to the fact that the claims he makes are of the highest order. It is not surprising that the tremendous phenomenon which the Comedy represents should have made later Humanists and men of humanistic training ill at ease.

In his theoretical utterances Dante himself betrays a certain indecision in regard to the question of the stylistic category in which the Comedy might fall. In his
De vulgari eloquentia
—a treatise on the
canzone
, which would still seem to be wholly uninfluenced by the Comedy—the demands which Dante makes upon the elevated and tragic style are very different from those with which, in the Comedy, he later
complies—they are much narrower in respect to choice of subject matter, and much more puristic and concerned with separation of styles in respect to choice of forms and words. He was then under the influence of Provençal poetry and of the poetry of the Italian
stil nuovo
—both excessively artificial and intended for an initiated elite; and with these he connected the antique doctrine of the separation of styles which the medieval theorists of the art of rhetoric refused to let die. Dante never freed himself completely from these views; otherwise he could not have called his great work a comedy in clearest opposition to the term
alta tragedia
which he applied to Virgil’s
Aeneid
(
Inf
., 20, 113). He seems, then, not to claim the dignity of the elevated tragic style for his great poem. And here we must also consider the justification he adduces for his choice of the designation comedy in the tenth paragraph of his letter to Cangrande. There he says: Tragedy and comedy are distinguished firstly by the course of their action, which, in tragedy, progresses from a noble and quiet beginning to a terrible conclusion, and, in comedy, inversely from a bitter beginning to a happy conclusion; and secondly (a point of greater importance to us) by their style, their
modus loquendi: elate et sublime tragedia; comedia vero remisse et humiliter
; and so, he says, his poem must be called a comedy, on the one hand because of its unhappy beginning and happy conclusion, and on the other hand because of its
modus loquendi: remissus est modus et humilis, quia locutio vulgaris in qua et muliercule communicant
. At first one is inclined to assume that this is a reference to his use of the Italian language. In that case the style would be low simply because the Comedy is written in Italian and not in Latin. But it is difficult to attribute such an assertion to Dante, who defended the noble dignity of the vernacular in his
De vulgari eloquentia
, who was himself the founder of the elevated style in the vernacular through his
canzoni
, and who had finished the Comedy at the time when he wrote his letter to Cangrande. For these reasons several modern students have taken
locutio
to mean not language but style. In that case Dante merely wished to say that the style of his work was not that of an elevated Italian or—as he himself described it (
De vulg. el
., 1, 17)—of the
vulgare illustre, cardinale, aulicum et curiale
, but of the common everyday language of the people.

In any event, here too he does not claim for his work the dignity of an elevated tragic style, it is at best an intermediate style; and even this he does not express very clearly but merely quotes the passage from Horace’s
Ars poetica
(93ff.) where Horace says that comedy too
sometimes makes use of tragic strains and vice versa. On the whole he classifies his work as being of the low style—although, shortly before, he had discussed its multiplicity of meanings (which certainly does not agree with the idea of the low style); and although he more than once describes that portion of it which he sends to Cangrande with his dedicatory letter, that is, the
Paradiso
, as
cantica sublimis
, and qualifies its materia as
admirabilis
. This uncertainty persists in the Comedy itself, but here the consciousness that both subject and form may claim the highest poetic dignity predominates. Within the poem itself he continues to call it a comedy, but we have already had occasion to enumerate the various points which indicate that he was fully conscious of its stylistic character and rank. Yet although he chooses Virgil as his guide, although he invokes Apollo and the Muses, he avoids ever referring to his poem as sublime in the antique sense. To express its particular kind of sublimity, he coins a special phrase:
il poema sacro, al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra
(
Par
., 25, 2-3). It is not easy to see how Dante, after having found this formula and after having completed the Comedy, could still have expressed himself upon its character with the pedantry exhibited in the passage from the letter to Cangrande just referred to. However, so great was the prestige of the classical tradition, obscured as it still was by pedantic schematization, so strong was the predilection for fixed theoretical classifications of a kind which we can but consider absurd, that such a possibility cannot be gainsaid after all. The contemporary or rather immediately succeeding commentators likewise took up the question of style in a purely pedantic vein. There were, to be sure, a few exceptions: Boccaccio for example, whose analysis, however, cannot satisfy us, since it avoids facing the question squarely; and especially the extremely vivid Benvenuto da Imola, who, having explained the threefold division of classical styles (the elevated tragic, the intermediate polemico-satiric, the low comic), continues as follows:

Modo est hic attente notandum quod sicut in isto libro est omnis pars philosophiae [“every division of philosophy”], ut dictum est, ita est omnis pars poetriae. Unde si quis velit subtiliter investigare, hic est tragoedia, satyra et comoedia. Tragoedia quidem, quia describit gesta pontificum, principum, regum, baronum, et aliorum magnatum et nobilium, sicut patet in toto libro. Satyra, id est reprehensoria; reprehendit enim mirabiliter et audacter omnia genera viciorum, nec parcit dignitati, potestati
vel nobilitati alicuius. Ideo convenientius posset intitulari satyra quam tragoedia vel comoedia. Potest etiam dici quod sit comoedia, nam secundum Isidorum comoedia incipit a tristibus et terminatur ad laeta. Et ita liber iste incipit a tristi materia, scilicet ab Inferno, et terminatur ad laetam, scilicet ad Paradisum, sive ad divinam essentiam. Sed dices forsan, lector: cur vis mihi baptizare librum de novo, cum autor nominaverit ipsum Comoediam? Dico quod autor voluit vocare librum Comoediam a stylo infimo et vulgari, quia de rei veritate est humilis respectu litteralis [sic], quamvis in genere suo sit sublimis et excellens. … (
Benvenuti de Rambaldis de Imola Comentum super D. A. Comoediam … curante Jacobo Philippo Lacaita
. Tomus Primus, Florentiae, 1887, p. 19.)