Mimesis (35 page)

(Now here it must be carefully noted that just as in this book there is every division of philosophy, as we said, so there is every division of poetry. So that, if one look narrowly, here is tragedy, satire, and comedy. Tragedy first, because it describes the deeds of pontiffs, princes, kings, barons, and other magnates and great lords, as appears throughout the whole book. Satire, that is reprehension; for it admirably and boldly reprehends all kinds of vice, without sparing anyone’s dignity, power, or nobility. Hence it could be more properly entitled satire than tragedy or comedy. But it can also be said to be a comedy, for according to Isidore comedy begins with sad things and ends with joyous ones. And thus this book begins with a sad subject, that is with Hell, and ends with a joyous one, that is with Paradise, or the Divine Being. But perhaps, reader, you will say: Why do you want to rebaptize the book for me, when the author called it a Comedy? I say that the author wished to call it a comedy because of its low and vernacular style, and in fact, speaking literally, it is low in style, but in its kind it is sublime and exalted. …)

Benvenuto’s temperament cuts right through the thicket of didactic theory: this book, he says, contains every kind of writing just as it does every kind of knowledge; and if its author called it a comedy because its style is low and popular, he was right in a literal sense, but in its way it is a sublime and great style.

The abundance of subjects treated in the Comedy suffices in itself to pose the problem of the elevated style in a wholly new way. For the Provençals and the poets of the “new style,” there was but one great
theme: courtly love. It is true that in his
De vulgari eloquentia
Dante enumerates three themes (
salus, venus, virtus
, i.e., deeds of valor, love, and virtue), yet in almost all the great
canzoni
the two others are subordinated to the theme of love or are clothed in an allegory of love. Even in the Comedy this pattern is preserved through the figure of Beatrice and the role assigned to her, yet here the pattern has a tremendous scope. The Comedy, among other things, is a didactic poem of encyclopedic dimensions, in which the physico-cosmological, the ethical, and the historico-political order of the universe is collectively presented; it is, further, a literary work which imitates reality and in which all imaginable spheres of reality appear: past and present, sublime grandeur and vile vulgarity, history and legend, tragic and comic occurrences, man and nature; finally, it is the story of Dante’s—i.e., one single individual’s—life and salvation, and thus a figure of the story of mankind’s salvation in general. Its dramatis personae include figures from antique mythology, often (but not always) in the guise of fantastic demons; allegorical personifications and symbolic animals stemming from late antiquity and the Middle Ages; bearers of specific significations chosen from among the angels, the saints, and the blessed in the hierarchy of Christianity; Apollo, Lucifer, and Christ, Fortuna and Lady Poverty, Medusa as an emblem of the deeper circles of Hell, and Cato of Utica as the guardian of Purgatory. Yet, in respect to an attempt at the elevated style, all these things are not so new and problematic as is Dante’s undisguised incursions into the realm of a real life neither selected nor preordained by aesthetic criteria. And indeed, it is this contact with real life which is responsible for all the verbal forms whose directness and rigor—almost unknown in the elevated style—offended classicistic taste. Furthermore, all this realism is not displayed within a single action, but instead an abundance of actions in the most diverse tonalities follow one another in quick succession.

And yet the unity of the poem is convincing. It is due to its all-inclusive subject, which is the
status animarum post mortem
. Reflecting God’s definitive judgment, this
status
must needs represent a perfectly harmonious whole, considered both as a theoretical system and as a practical reality and hence also as an aesthetic entity; indeed it must needs express the unity of God’s universal order in a purer and more immediate form than this earthly sphere or anything that takes place within it, for the beyond—even though it fail of perfection until Judgment Day—is not, at least not to the same extent as the earthly
sphere, evolution, potentiality, and provisionality, but God’s design in active fulfillment. The unified order of the beyond, as Dante presents it to us, can be most immediately grasped as a moral system in its distribution of souls among the three realms and their subdivisions. On the whole the system follows Aristotelian-Thomist ethics. It groups the sinners in Hell first according to the degree of their evil will, and within those categories according to the gravity of their misdeeds; the penitents in Purgatory according to the evil impulses of which they must purify themselves; and the blessed in Paradise according to the measure of their participation in the vision of God. This ethical system is, however, interwoven with other hierarchical systems of a physico-cosmological or historico-political order. The location of the Inferno, of the Mount of Purgatory, and of the circles of Paradise constitute a physical as well as an ethical picture of the universe. The doctrine of souls which underlies the ethical order is. at once a physiological and a psychological anthropology; and there are many other ways in which the ethical and physical orders are basically connected. The same holds true for the historico-political order. The community of the blessed in the white rose of the Empyrean is at the same time also the goal of the historical process of salvation, which is both the guiding principle for all historico-political theories and the standard of judgment by which all historico-political events are measured. In the course of this poem this is constantly expressed, at times most circumstantially (as for instance in the symbolic occurrences on the summit of Purgatory, the Earthly Paradise); so that the three systems of order—the ethical, the physical, and the historico-political—always present and always demonstrable, appear as one single entity.

In order to show how the unity of the transcendental order operates as a unity of the elevated style, we return to our quoted text. Farinata’s and Cavalcante’s lives on earth are over; the vicissitudes of their destinies have ceased; their state is definitive and immutable except that it will be affected by one single change, their ultimate recovery of their physical bodies at the Resurrection on the Last Day. As we find them here, then, they are souls parted from their bodies. Dante does, however, give them a sort of phantom body, so that they can be seen and can communicate and suffer (cf., in this connection, Purg., 3, 31ff.). Their only link to life on earth is memory. In addition they have—as Dante explains in the very canto with which we are concerned—a measure of knowledge of past and future which goes beyond the earthly norm. Their vision is hyperopic: they clearly see earthly
events of the somewhat distant past or future, and hence can foretell the future, but they are blind to the earthly present. (This explains Dante’s hesitation when Cavalcante asks him whether his son is still alive; Cavalcante’s ignorance surprises him, the more so because other souls had prophesied future events to him.) Their own earthly lives, then, they still possess completely, through their memories, although those lives are ended. And although they are in a situation which differs from any imaginable situation on earth not only in practical terms (they lie in flaming tombs) but also in principle by virtue of their temporal and spatial immutability, the impression they produce is not that they are dead—though that is what they are—but alive.

Here we face the astounding paradox of what is called Dante’s realism. Imitation of reality is imitation of the sensory experience of life on earth—among the most essential characteristics of which would seem to be its possessing a history, its changing and developing. Whatever degree of freedom the imitating artist may be granted in his work, he cannot be allowed to deprive reality of this characteristic, which is its very essence. But Dante’s inhabitants of the three realms lead a “changeless existence.” (Hegel uses the expression in his Lectures on Aesthetics in one of the most beautiful passages ever written on Dante.) Yet into this changeless existence Dante “plunges the living world of human action and endurance and more especially of individual deeds and destinies.” Considering our text again, we ask how this may come about.

The existence of the two tomb-dwellers and the scene of it are certainly final and eternal, but they are not devoid of history. This Hell has been visited by Aeneas and Paul and even by Christ; now Dante and Virgil are traveling through it; it has landscapes, and its landscapes are peopled by infernal spirits; occurrences, events, and even transformations go on before our very eyes. In their phantom bodies the souls of the damned, in their eternal abodes, have phenomenal appearance, freedom to speak and gesture and even to move about within limits, and thus, within their changelessness, a limited freedom of change. We have left the earthly sphere behind; we are in an eternal place, and yet we encounter concrete appearance and concrete occurrence there. This differs from what appears and occurs on earth, yet is evidently connected with it in a necessary and strictly determined relation.

The reality of the appearances of Farinata and Cavalcante is perceived in the situation in which they are placed and in their utterances.
In their position as inhabitants of flaming tombs is expressed God’s judgment upon the entire category of sinners to which they belong, upon heretics and infidels. But in their utterances, their individual character is manifest in all its force. This is especially striking with Farinata and Cavalcante because they are sinners of the same category and hence find themselves in the same situation. Yet as individuals of different personalities, of different lots in their former lives, and of different inclinations, they are most sharply contrasted. Their eternal and changeless fate is the same; but only in the sense that they have to suffer the same punishment, only in an objective sense. For they accept their fate in very different ways. Farinata wholly disregards his situation; Cavalcante, in his blind prison, mourns for the beauty of light; and each, in gesture and word, completely reveals the nature proper to each, which can be and is none other than that which each possessed in his life upon earth. And still more: from the fact that earthly life has ceased so that it cannot change or grow, whereas the passions and inclinations which animated it still persist without ever being released in action, there results as it were a tremendous concentration. We behold an intensified image of the essence of their being, fixed for all eternity in gigantic dimensions, behold it in a purity and distinctness which could never for one moment have been possible during their lives upon earth.

There can be no doubt that this too is part of the judgment which God has pronounced upon them; God has not only grouped the souls in categories and distributed them accordingly among the various divisions of the three realms; He has also given each soul a specific eternal situation, in that He has never destroyed an individual form but on the contrary has fixed it in his eternal judgment—nay more, not until He has pronounced that judgment has He fully perfected it and wholly revealed it to sight. Here in Hell Farinata is greater, stronger, and nobler than ever, for never in his life on earth had he had such an opportunity to prove his stout heart; and if his thoughts and desires center unchanged upon Florence and the Ghibellines, upon the successes and failures of his former endeavors, there can be no doubt that this persistence of his earthly being in all its grandeur and hopeless futility is part of the judgment God has pronounced upon him. The same hopeless futility in the continuance of his earthly being is displayed by Cavalcante; it is not likely that in the course of his earthly existence he ever felt his faith in the spirit of man, his love for the sweetness of light and for his son so profoundly, or expressed it so
arrestingly, as now, when it is all in vain. We must also consider that, for the souls of the dead, Dante’s journey represents their only chance in all eternity to speak to one from among the living. This is an aspect of the situation which impels many to express themselves with the utmost intensity and which brings into the changelessness of their eternal fate a moment of dramatic historicity. And finally, one more distinguishing characteristic of the situation in which the dwellers in Hell find themselves is their strangely restricted and expanded range of knowledge. They have forfeited the vision of God participated in to various degrees by all beings on earth, in Purgatory, and in Paradise; and with it they have lost all hope; they know the past and the future in the passing of time on earth and hence the hopeless futility of their personal existence, which they have retained without the prospect of its finally flowing into the divine community; and they are passionately interested in the present state of things on earth, which is hidden from them. (A striking case in point is, with Cavalcante and several others, the figure of Guido da Montefeltro in Canto 27. Speaking with difficulty through the flames which shoot from his head, he implores Virgil to stop and speak to him, in a long adjuration, permeated with memories and grief, which reaches its climax in the words of line 28:
dimmi se i Romagnuoli han pace o guerra
!)

Dante, then, took over earthly historicity into his beyond; his dead are cut off from the earthly present and its vicissitudes, but memory and the most intense interest in it stirs them so profoundly that the atmosphere of the beyond is charged with it. This is less pronounced on the Mount of Purgatory and in Paradise, because there the souls do not look back upon life on earth, as they do in Hell, but forward and up; as a result, the farther we ascend the more clearly is earthly existence seen together with its divine goal. But earthly existence remains always manifest, for it is always the basis of God’s judgment and hence of the eternal condition of the soul; and this condition is everywhere not only a matter of being assigned to a specific subdivision of the penitent or blessed but is a conscious presentment of the soul’s previous life on earth and of the specific place it duly occupies in the design of God’s order. For it is precisely the absolute realization of a particular earthly personality in the place definitively assigned to it, which constitutes the Divine Judgment. And everywhere the souls of the dead have sufficient freedom to manifest their individual and particular nature—at times, it is true, only with considerable difficulty, for often their punishment or their penitence or
even the clear light of their bliss makes it hard for them to appear and to express themselves; but then, overcoming the obstacle, self-expression breaks out only the more effectively.