14 Purgatorio 24–26
CHAPTER 14
Purgatorio 24–26
The encounter with Dante’s own friend Forese Donati among the gluttonous sinners in Canto 23 signals a shift in the articulation of the literary segment that had begun with the recognition of Statius and Virgil. Poetry will continue to figure centrally, but Dante brackets the classical paradigm of literary history (Virgil/Statius). Virgil’s conception of the “generosity” of poetry will remain a standard against which modern versions will be measured, but the focus shifts to Dante’s own role and place in contemporary poetic history and takes on an autobiographical coloring. The moral landscape of Purgatorio 24 is characterized by the expiation of gluttony, and both sin and punishment (an ascetic purification of gluttony) shed light on the specifically poetic confrontation dramatized between Dante and a poet of an earlier generation, Bonagiunta da Lucca.
Over the conversation with Forese Donati—who was a brother to Piccarda Donati and was related to the family of Dante’s wife, Gemma Donati—there hangs the memory of a series of violent, vituperative sonnets the two had exchanged in life. The tone between them now is one of reconciliation: the follies and abuses of their satirical poems are set aside, and their urbane mode foreshadows the more sustained, demanding encounter with Bonagiunta of Lucca. A reference to the moral virtues of a woman who had been kind to Dante, Gentucca, gives way to a number of pressing questions about Dante’s identity, the novelty of his poetic style, and Dante’s own construction (through the mask of Bonagiunta) of the poetic school known as the dolce stil novo, or “sweet new style.”
Bonagiunta states, “‘But tell me if I see here him who brought forth the new rhymes, beginning: “Ladies that have intelligence of love”?’ And I said to him, ‘I am one who, when Love inspires me, takes note, and goes setting it forth after the fashion which he dictates within me.’ ‘O brother,’ he said, ‘now I see the knot which kept the Notary, and Guittone, and me, short of the sweet new style that I hear. Clearly I see how your pens follow close after him who dictates, which certainly befell not with ours—and he who sets himself to seek farther can see no other difference between the one style and the other.’ And, as if satisfied, he was silent.”1 The passage is replete with allusions and echoes of long-drawn debates, of texts and concerns that have been the object of intense critical controversy. Bonagiunta, in a manner that seems to test Dante’s likely proud claims about his art, cites the opening line of Dante’s song from the Vita nuova, “Ladies that have intelligence of love.” In the Vita nuova Dante had self-consciously introduced the poem as if it marked a radical shift in Dante’s understanding of love and of poetry. He had related how one day he was walking down the banks of the river (the Arno), and the words came spontaneously to him, with the natural ease, one infers, of the smooth waters of the stream.
But the conceptual thrust of the song proceeds from a sharp polemical source. In one of the most famous of Guido Cavalcanti’s lyrical-philosophical reflections on love and poetry, the poem “A Lady begs me . . .,” Guido makes a stark statement: namely, that no relation exists between love and knowledge. Love is born not of intellect but of a violence that darkens and shatters the mind. Dante’s song, to which Bonagiunta makes a reference, counters Guido’s shadowy imaginings. By a radical break with his own lyrical tradition (that assumed the existence of a closed circle of poets), Dante evokes a circle of women, the “ladies who have the intellect of love,” who are cast as the privileged audience for grasping the intellectual essence of love. In short, he challenges Guido’s philosophical presuppositions and holds that love and intellect can go together as they do in a philosophical discourse. Dante’s argument is based on the principle that a passion can become a virtue, and that the rhetoric of praise—a mode that resonates with religious laudes—constitutes the distinctiveness of a new amorous discourse that the Vita nuova pursues.
In another work of his, the De vulgari eloquentia, Dante had distanced himself polemically from Bonagiunta’s (and other Tuscan poets’) practices exactly in terms of their style: style, which Dante understands as a perspective, as a mode of seeing the world. The style of the earlier generation, to which Bonagiunta belongs, evoked a narrow, “municipal” focus: it is a style that relies on prefabricated, abstract technical language of the Scholastics, and thus it misses the radical openness of poetic language that Dante enacts. The question of a different style that Dante (along with Guido Guinizelli and Guido Cavalcanti) had inaugurated presents to us the question of Dante’s historical consciousness, his realization that he and the two Guidos live in a “modern world,” although elsewhere the notion of “modernity” is seen by Dante as synonymous with precariousness and the transitoriness of time (as we remarked in our reading of Canto 11 of Purgatorio).
In what way, then, is Dante’s implicit recognition of a gap between Bonagiunta’s poetic values and his own values to be understood? Let me restate that the new poetry Dante has in mind is the poetry that Guido Guinizelli and he, among others, practiced: the poetry of the “sweet new style.” The two adjectives are highly problematical. “Sweet” evokes the dulcedo, which describes the musical quality of the lyrical language they deploy. In the context of gluttony—a word that resonates with the tavern songs of the so-called goliardic poets (the poets who sing the pleasures of banquets, dice, and women in the tavern)—“sweetness” alludes also to the refinements of a new “taste.” The adjective “new,” on the other hand, conveys the sense of modern, young, and fresh, and so it casts Bonagiunta, Guit-tone, and the Sicilian poets (such as the Notary) as attached to past and unalterable modes of composition. But the genuine sense of Dante’s claim of the novelty of his poetry emerges from the rhetoric he deploys in his self-definition: “I am one who, when Love inspires me, takes note, and goes setting it forth after the fashion which he dictates within me.”
In this account of his poetic inspiration, of a poetry born under the inspiration of love, Dante submits to the authority of the “him who dictates,” or the dictator: a term designating the inner voice of Love as the absolute Master, a figure whose powers are supreme and who governs, like an inner political authority, the mind of the love servant. More precisely, the poet casts himself as a scribe of the dictator: he is one who takes notes and writes down what he has heard. The word noto (“I note down”) resonates, furthermore, with the title used to identify the Sicilian poet “the Notary,” Jacopo da Lentini, who at the court of Frederick II held the office of a scrivener: he would draw up legal papers and administer oaths. Dante’s metaphorical activity of “noting” highlights his sense of poetry as the activity dramatizing what can be called the law of love, a new code of love that replaces that of the Provençal and Sicilian schools.
Unavoidably, this sort of claim must be seen through the prism of contemporary literary history, of a modern poetic tradition, that would be parallel to the classical tradition of Virgil and Statius in Cantos 21 and 22 of Purgatorio. Purgatorio 26, where Dante meets the poet he identifies as his poetic father, Guido Guinizelli, who in turn points out to him the great poet of love, the Provençal Arnaut Daniel, raises this sort of concern with the tradition of the “new.” The poets in Purgatorio 26 are sinners of lust, and their moral condition raises the more traditional topic of poetry and desire. In a sense, the encounter with Guinizelli deliberately recalls the canto of Francesca (Inferno 5) as well as the first canto of the sodomites (Canto 15). I stress this detail not simply because Brunetto’s sin is now rethought: the sin of Guinizelli lacks the tragic finality that distinguished Brunetto’s punishment.
Before considering the sense of the encounter with Guinizelli, mention must be made of Purgatorio 25, which, on the face of it, is constructed as a mere digression from the poetic rhetoric of the surrounding cantos. In reality, appearances to the contrary, Purgatorio 25 raises highly generalized intellectual issues, which obliquely shed light on the questions debated in Purgatorio 24 and 26. I repeat that Purgatorio 25 comes through as a highly technical, doctrinal exposition of the “ontological status of the shades” (the phrase is Étienne Gilson’s). As we have seen, the substance of the explicitly literary cantos, from 21 to 26, ranges from problems of literary hermeneutics, such as the hidden sense of Virgil’s texts, to the violence of interpretation, to the “intention” of the literary author as well as the sense of literary modernity. In Purgatorio 25, Statius explains to Dante how it can be that the shades, who have no bodies, can suffer their punishments. The reason for their suffering lies in their aerial bodies, and to prove his contention Statius gives a sophisticated lecture on the relationship between bodies and souls, embryology and theology.
He begins by dismissing Averroes’ doctrine of the separate existence of substances, such as the possible intellect as a separate faculty, as well as the notion of a metaphysical discontinuity between the vegetative-sensitive powers of the soul. The soul is marked by the coexistence of a threefold activity, and its creation is directed by the “First Mover.” The Prime Mover, so we are told, “turns to it with joy over such art of nature, and breathes into it a new spirit replete with virtue, which absorbs that which is active there into its own substance, and makes one single soul which lives and feels and circles on itself.”2 God’s activity is clearly described thus in order to recall the “spiration of love” in the process of poetic creation advanced in Purgatorio 24. Retrospectively, then, the language about the creation of the soul draws on Dante’s definition of his poetic practice as an analogy to the economy of God’s own production of souls.
Another link holds together Cantos 25 and 26 of Purgatorio. Statius will provide an account for the origin of the soul: its genetic process is described from the sperm of the father to its incarnation, and its life is finally viewed in the eschatological context of the Resurrection. In Purgatorio 26, in short, Dante transposes the doctrine of the process of creation of the soul from its point of origin, the father’s blood, to a genetic perspective whereby he can explain the question of literary generation: the relationship between Dante and Guinizelli is expressed in terms of the organic metaphor of the father-son relationship: “I hear name himself the father of me and of others my betters who ever used sweet and gracious rhymes of love.”3
The literary-theological coherence of this sequence of cantos in what we have called an extended literary segment in Purgatorio does not, however, explain other aspects of Purgatorio 26. As in the two other parallel Cantos 26—those in Inferno and Paradiso—here again Dante raises the issue of language, specifically of foreign languages: in Inferno 26, Ulysses’ rhetorical performance is said to take place in Greek, which he speaks with Virgil. In Paradiso 26 Dante meets the first poet of the human race, Adam. The conversation between them focuses on Hebrew, and the changes in the Hebrew names of God. In Purgatorio 26 Dante has Arnaut Daniel, a love poet whose sestina Dante much admired in his De vulgari eloquentia, speak using Dante’s tercets but in his native Provençal: “Tan m’abellis vostre cortes deman.”4
In short, poetry comes through as the imaginative world of intimacy, one in which, much like in the world of Limbo, different epochs and different voices are bound together. At the same time, however, the poetic experience described over six cantos evokes a heterogeneous space where the unbound and the unbindable counter the bonds of affection and influence the poet. The ambiguous light of these cantos takes the pilgrim and the two poets flanking him, Statius and Virgil, to the edge of the Garden of Eden, where Dante will come face to face with his own history as well as the history of mankind, both of which demand a widening of his theological vision.