Dante’s Evocative Night Vision
Dante Alighieri lived seven hundred years ago, and there’s not much point in casting him as a contemporary writer without proper consideration; on the contrary, the ideas in his work differ sharply from modern conceptions of man, society and literature. Add to that his fervent Catholic beliefs, and he seems to be incompatible with the Puritan modernity that, ever since the 1500s, has come to characterise the history of western and northern Europe; it is just that – his incorrigible otherness – which makes him instructive for us.
When I take on the task of saying anything about Dante, it depends on two things; the first is – was – that he was a writer who cannot be reduced to being a spokesman for his contemporaries. Indeed, the British 17th century writer Thomas Carlyle argued that Dante was a vote for ”ten silent centuries”, but this kind of statement is no longer reliable. In modern medieval research, there are neither silent centuries nor dark ages. Dante was just one voice among many colourful contemporaries, and that voice was in several respects peculiar: sharp, controversial and uncompromising. His canonisation came only after his death.
For a long time he was regarded primarily as a theologian, but in the 1700s he moved into the ranks of the classics for good (or perhaps I should say for the time being). The evidence of literary genius was already instilled in his own work, most eloquently in Canto 4 of Hell in TheDivine Comedy, where his alter ego of the same name appears in a famous scene with the group of geniuses who meet eternally in the first circle (”Limbo”). The other five named are: Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan and Virgil.
One thing is clear: Dante was not at all shy! But it was a few centuries before he came to occupy one of the key places within what in recent times (not least since Harold Bloom’s great contributions to the subject in 1994) has become known as the ‘Western canon’. The process is probably more pronounced in the Anglo-Saxon culture, where Dante – not surprisingly – is almost routinely paired with Shakespeare. Even Carlyle highlighted the duo as primi inter pares in his characterisation of them as ”poetry’s saints”.
T.S. Eliot, one of the best ever modern Dante readers, made the oft-quoted statement that ”Dante and Shakespeare share the modern world between them; there is no third”. Bloom, finally, characteristically gives Shakespeare preference (for him, Shakespeare is the Western canon), but it sounds as if Dante, if I understand him correctly, qualifies for an honourable second place.
Just there we find the other reason to review Dante’s relevance in the present. Each epoch has necessarily read him in its own way. Strong readers posit new interpretations and so should it be. You just have to brace against Dante’s originality and individuality, not try to adapt him or put him on trial in accordance with this or that trend, but situate the interpretation in the space between now and then, between authority and right of reply, and between theology and poetry, which is about what hermeneutic-orientated critics, following Hans-Georg Gadamer, usually call a ‘fusion of horizons’.
Often enough it is in fact new readers, rather than archaeological reconstructions, that guarantee the ancient authors’ classic status; Eliot is a shining example of this process. Another would be Jorge Luis Borges who, in his book on Dante, Nueveensayosdantescos (Nine Dantesque Essays) of 1982, highlights that The Comedy was a thoroughly risky and adventurous enterprise.
It’s the episode from Hell’s Canto 26 that gave rise to Borges’ review, where Dante and his companion Virgil meet the Greek hero Odysseus in the guise of a talking flame. The flickering flame begins to talk about how he, after his wanderings around the Mediterranean, left Ithaca again, leaving his home and family for a new voyage, this time beyond Hercules’ statues – the Strait of Gibraltar, and the traditional boundaries of the Mediterranean and the known world – as a model for the westward Atlantic adventurers of later times.
Borges understands this Odysseus – Dante’s redesign of Homer’s hero – as death-defying and suicidal, akin to Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab: with the same undaunted obsession, taking the same journey into the unknown, meeting the same end in the waves. But above all, Odysseus, in this essay, becomes more like Dante himself – the author of an equally risky undertaking, The Comedy, which is in many respects a resounding challenge to the epoch’s orthodox common sense.
Swedish names are not lacking among today’s reckless Dante readers. Olof Lagercrantz’s book Frånhelvetet till paradiset (From Hell to Paradise) of 1964 has been translated into several foreign languages ??and got a new edition just last year, in which empathy, topicality, and recognition are the main things: The Comedy ”belongs to the present moment as much as the rain that falls and the Cold War that endures”. Another excessively strong update of Dante came a few decades later from Giacomo Oreglia, who was active at both the University and the Italian Cultural Institute in Stockholm. His Dante. Liv, verk & samtid (Life, Work and the Contemporary) from 1991 was also printed for the first time in Swedish, and translated by Ingemar Bostrom.
Based certainly on this powerful monograph from Dante’s – coated – Franciscan sympathies and spiritual communion, which in association with the poet’s passion for Florence, could really cater to a strong political- and, in a sense, radical profile. But Oreglia blows up this commitment into a kind of timeless anarchism, which ends up fluttering a long way away from The Comedy‘s hierarchical universe. His Dante is ”the great freedom singer” for all times, not just a precursor but also actually ”first among surrealists”. (!)
Paradoxically, Oreglia thus falls back on a rather mottled Convention, namely the 19th century’s image of Dante. The 19th century’s liberal representatives of the national cause in Italy felt a need to give Italian culture’s famous names from the past a heroic reconstruction. The sculptures of Giordano Bruno on the square where he was burned at the stake – Campo deiFiori in Rome – and of Dante outside the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence bear witness to legends. This romantic picture of Dante has proven surprisingly durable.
In a sense it also rubs off on Ezra Pound’s and T.S. Eliot’s poetic allusions to, and adaptations of, The Comedy’s world. It emphasises Dante as both the craftsman and wordsmith in a refreshing contrast to the Victorian poets’ airy reveries. Hence Eliot’s dedication of The Waste Land (1922) to “ilmigliorFabbro Ezra Pound” (”the better blacksmith, Ezra Pound”). The words are taken from Purgatory’s Canto 26 of The Comedy, where Dante and Virgil encounter a number of prominent poets, among them the Provencal Arnaut Daniel, who ”knew better how to forge the mother tongue”.
The same Daniel gets to immediately use precisely this mother tongue in his meeting with Dante, after which he returns to ”the fire that purifies”; these are the words that are heard in the somewhat chaotic closing lines of The Waste Land: “Poi s’ascosenelFocochegli affine“ (Eliot maintains the original Italian). Thus Dante’s real importance to the groundbreaking poets of the 1900s begins to emerge. Eliot interprets his own time in accordance with The Comedy’s I would probably use ’The Divine Comedy’ throughout the paper, not ’The Comedy’, which isn’t the title.I would probably use ’The Divine Comedy’ throughout the paper, not ’The Comedy’, which isn’t the title.matrix. The post-war era and the value crisis he wants to portray in his 1910s and 1920s poetry are important starting points in Dante’s Hell. While the dream of purification and rebirth that animates The Waste Land – and the subsequent Ash Wednesday (1930), another piece of Dante’s character – owes a debt to the echoes and reflection from Purgatory. Paradise, by contrast, remains largely absent from the double exposure of the contemporary- and The Divine Comedy worlds that gleam throughout Eliot’s writings.
Through Pound’s and Eliot’s auspices, Dante became one of modernism’s great names among the classics. It is against this background that Erik Lindegren came to call an early and concentrated version of his breakthrough collection of the Mannenutanväg – The Man Without a Road, printed in the magazine Horizon in 1941 – ‘Limbo’. The title may at first seem strange. What does Dante’s first circle of hell – where the meeting with the classical poets and philosophers takes centre stage – have to do with these broken sonnets’ desolate scenery? Probably Lindegren misunderstood the meaning of Limbo: he may have confused Canto 4’s simple classical portrayal of the ancient masters’ bellascola with Canto 3’s depiction of Inferno’s vestibule.
There, Dante writes about the dead souls who never took a position in life and, for that reason, were prevented from crossing the Styx and were forced to remain in a grey limbo between life and death. In this canto, Lindegren could well have identified what, after Eliot, one is tempted to call an ‘objective correlative’ – ??a pictorial representation – of Sweden’s neutrality in 1941. In fact, it appears Ingvar Bjork’s Swedish work of 1983 emphasises that particular interpretation. There, Dante points out that this kind of soul, namely the angels who did not rebel against God and were faithful to Him, ”kept themselves to themselves”, per séforo, which Bjorkeson translates as they were ”neutral”.
This modernist picture of Dante is based largely on The Comedy, and it is highly thematic. Dante’s other works have taken a back seat, including the small children’s publication Vita nuova, which the English Pre-Raphaelites had taken to heart in the middle of the century before last. Several of them were painters. Dante Gabriel Rossetti transformed his older namesake’s feverishly sensitive re-creation (or, if you will, design) of the love of his youth, Donna Beatrice, into his own creation in oil and tempera of his own soul mate. His most famous contribution to the genre is probably the Beata Beatrix of 1863, which now is on display at the Tate Gallery in London.
The image reflects undoubtedly Rossetti’s mourning for his wife, the artist Elizabeth Siddal, who died the year before. It is a very strong example of how modern painters, not to mention today’s computer games designers, are happy to leave Dante’s Catholic symbolism to its own devices to transform it into subjectivist, or what might be called ‘gothic’, direction. The woman on the Rossetti painting appears as an almost spiritualised Madonna in the style of the 1800s, rather than symbolically coded ’Nia’ Not sure what this is.Not sure what this is.that she is in the Florentine’s early works.
The image representations of The Comedy are obviously a story in themselves, from Botticelli to Blake, from Delacroix and Doré up to Dalí, but in this context, they can simply be added together as strong evidence for the visual acuity and suggestion that, above all, characterises Dante’s major works, and which was of such fundamental importance to a poet like Eliot. However, there may be reasons why, even in a context such as this, one is reminded of the rhythm, the music of the words, the auditory in Dante.
I happen to know one of his Swedish interpreters, the Professor Emeritus Christina Heldner at Gothenburg University, who is reportedly enjoys walking in the woods with her husband – literary expert Torsten Ronne – to the rhythm of The Comedy in their headphones. This in fact brings to mind some sharp observations of another big name from the ranks of 1900s Dante readers – the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam – who died in Stalin’s prison camps in 1938, and who called Purgatory ”an ode to the time of humanity, to the step’s dimensions and rhythm, to the foot and its shape. For Dante the first phase of phonetics Not sure this is the best translation, but it’s hard to grasp the word ’prosodi’.Not sure this is the best translation, but it’s hard to grasp the word ’prosodi’.is a step that has the rhythm of breath and is saturated with thought”.
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Thus Mandelstam launches what might be called a phenomenological and perhaps also a performative approach to The Comedy’s medieval text, which has its settled interest, a significant departure from the mimetic-thematic tradition that has permeated the modernist reception of Dante, and even dominates an otherwise independent and idiosyncratic Dante Reader: Samuel Beckett. Perhaps that is why, or partly why, Mandelstam – almost in the same sentence – both locates Dante in the present and wants to distance him from modernism: ”It is not possible to read Dante’s cantos without connecting them with our own time. They’re made for it, projectiles fired to meet the future, and they require a comment in the future tense … Dante is anti-modernist. His timeliness is inexhaustible, unpredictable, unquenchable!”
One of the real artistic travesties of The Comedy also breaks with the modernist bending pattern with its treatment of Paradise. It departs from the explorations of the Inferno’s darkness that characterise Dante’s interpretations in the text and images from the early 1800s, which have become even definitive in computer games such as Dante’s Inferno, where the participants can go down through Hell’s nine circles to save Beatrice – a pure inversion, consequently, of the problematic of The Comedy, where it is she who must intervene to save the wanderer who is lost in the woods! In the world there is no Paradise. But it is conspicuous by its inescapable presence in Niklas Radstrom’s ‘A poem in three acts’ from 2004, simply titled Dante’s Divine Comedy, and which performed at the Gothenburg City Theatre in the fall of that year.
There, we meet Dante, Beatrice, Virgil, Francesca, Ugolino with several well-known names from The Comedy. But where we also hear choirs, anonymous voices and speeches by figures such as ‘Greedy’, ‘Horny’ or ‘Furious’. This is a remarkably sensitive rewriting of Dante’s work, where one is not only struck by the variety of contemporary associations but also by the distancing effect, which I think is necessary to bring to life The Comedy in the present.
Just as Dante’s world in Radstrom’s version can echo afar, resound in verse and mobilise old allegories, it burns with a sharp moral criticism that is hopefully palpable on the stage. And it ends in Paradise. That which is really provocative and challenging in Dante, says Radstrom in a postscript, is that he ”condemns the pessimism that is such a close neighbour with modernity. He says that true knowledge is possible and that, whatever we think, love is the principle that envelops the world”.
I hope Radstrom can overlook my quoting a small postcard he sent me after he had read something I had written about this Paradise (in fact the most interesting of The Comedy’s areas of research that is concerned with language- and knowledge-based critique of the work). ”In our dystopian time,” remarks the author in blue ink, ”often paradise draws the short straw, while the paradise that is often offered is hopelessly dystopian”.
Osip Mandelstam had been able to confirm these words through his tortured body in the prison camp. They seem to me to make redundant the matter of Dante’s relevance in the present. Radstrom’s piece from 2004 leaves no doubt about The Comedy’s current relevance, both as an evocative night vision, as a moral correction, and as a manifestation of what a philosopher fifty years ago called the ’principle of hope’.