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“Figurando il paradiso”: The Signs That Render Dante's Heaven
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Abstract
The structure of Dante's Paradiso is a mediating sign of “the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” Each time Dante the pilgrim moves to a higher sphere, his visionary power grows, passing through successive formulations of God's love. The growing beauty of Beatrice's smile measures his advance, and at several points (Par. x, xxiii, and xxviii) her words or her reflecting eyes explicate the semantic function of what Dante sees, thus projecting him one step closer to the Beatific Vision, to which all the signs refer. Finally, the pilgrim transcends Beatrice, just when her beauty transcends the poet's power to render it. In the last canti the pilgrim confronts a reality transforming itself in direct response to his visionary power, while the poet and we find vestiges of that reality in the transformations of his language through metaphor. This final dialectic of vision and language suggests themes of modernist poetry.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1975
References
1 I am following the text of the Società Dantesca Italiana, La commedia seconda l'antica vulgata, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi, 4 vols. (Milan: A. Mondadori, 1966–67).
2 In my use of the term “mediation” I have been influenced by certain studies of Geoffrey Hartman, included in his collection Beyond Formalism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), where the term may be consulted in the index.
3 “Paradiso x: The Dance of the Stars,” Dante Studies, 86 (1968), 85, 86. Hereafter cited as Paradiso x.
4 Freccero comments subtly on this image in his introduction to the John Ciardi translation of the Paradiso (New York: Signet, 1970), pp. xii-xiii. A more extensive treatment of this and other aspects of the Paradiso, to which I am indebted, was given by Freccero in “An Introduction to the Poetics of the Paradiso,” a paper read to the Dante Society of America at their annual meeting in Cambridge, Mass., May 1971.
5 “Paradiso x,” p. 85. Joseph Mazzeo comments on Dante's method of introducing differentiation in a “world of light” in Structure and Thought in the Paradiso (Ithaca : Cornell Univ. Press, 1958), p. 151.
6 Cf. Par. x.22–27. The most striking neologisms, besides the famous “trasumanar” (Par. i.70), are verbs involving the prefix “in-” and expressing the union with God that the souls in heaven enjoy and that transcends human experience and thus human language. Examples are “india” (Par. iv.28), “insempra” (x.148), “inluia” (ix.73), “intuassi” (ix.81), “inmii” (ix.81), “invera” (xxviii.39), and others which can be found in A Concordance to the Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, ed. Ernest Hatch Wilkins, Thomas Goddard Bergin, and Anthony J. DeVito (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1965).
7 On the “topos of inexpressibility” see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York: Harper, 1963), pp. 159–62, and Mazzeo, Structure and Thought, pp. 38–49.
8 A polemical statement of this division can be found in Rocco Montano, “Dante personaggio,” in Cultura e scuola, 5, No. 17 (1966), 243–51. The division of poet and pilgrim is central to Montano's Storia della poesia di Dante (Naples: Quaderni di Delta, 1962), and to Nicolae Iliescu, “Inferno xv: 'Se tu segui tua Stella in Essays in Honor of Louis Francis Solano, ed. Raymond J. Cormier and Urban T. Holmes (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1971), pp. 101–15. A similar division is noted by Charles S. Singleton in An Essay on the Vita nuova (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1949), p. 8.
9 A good discussion (in different terms) of this sense of reintegration in the Earthly Paradise can be found in Kenneth Bleeth, “Narrator and Landscape in the Corn-media: An Approach to Dante's Earthly Paradise,” Dante Studies, 88 (1970), 31–49.
10 Examples of this sort of simile can be found in Par. iii.36; iii.91–93; ix.24; xiv.126; xvii.103–05; xxii.25–27; xxiii.49–51 ; xxviii.4–9. The figure is noted in Dante's lyrics and elsewhere by Patrick Boyd in Dante's Lyric Poetry, ed. Boyd and Kenelm Foster (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), ii, 54. Another relevant discussion is C. S. Lewis, “Dante's Similes,” Nottingham Mediaeval Studies, 9 (1965), 32–41.
11 See Natalino Sapegno's note to Par. x.62 in his edition of the Paradiso (Florence: “La Nuova Italia” Editrice, 1957).
12 “St. Francis of Assisi in Dante's ‘Commedia,‘ ” trans. Catherine Garvin, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian, 1959), pp. 79–98.
13 The action of divine love in the Paradiso is characteristically described as a “sealing” or an “imprinting.” The words “imprenta,” “imprentare,” “sigillo,” and “sigillare” appear only in the Paradiso, and they usually refer to God's act of rendering his love visible in the order of the universe or in the receptive human heart. Man's soul is marked as God's and cannot die “perché non si move / la sua imprenta quand' ella sigilla” (Par. vii.68–69). St. Francis, because he showed so clearly the image of his Creator, “da Cristo prese 1'ultimo sigillo” (xi.107). See also Par. vii.109; ix.96; ix.l 17; x.29; xi.93; xviii.114; xx.76; xxiii.85; xxiii.l 10; xxiv.143; xxvi.27; xxvii.52.
14 “A Primitive like an Orb,” in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1954), pp. 440–43.
15 This essay was helped—indeed, rescued more than once—by the constructive criticism of my wife Kristen.