Performing Salvation in Dante s Commedia

Transcription

1 Performing Salvation in Dante s Commedia Albert Russell Ascoli Dante Studies, Volume 135, 2017, pp (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: For additional information about this article No institutional affiliation (11 Mar :52 GMT)

2 Performing Salvation in Dante s Commedia Albert Russell Ascoli The second canto of Purgatorio has, over the years, received considerable scholarly attention in the ongoing quest to define Dante s conception and practice of poetic authorship and signification. In a dominant strand of North American criticism the canto has, from this perspective, been treated as perhaps the most important in the entire poem. This privilege is all the clearer when canto 2 is paired, as the poem urges, with Dante s response in canto 24 to Bonagiunta da Lucca s inquiries about whether he is the author of a dolce stil nuovo. After revisiting the reasons for according the canto such importance, and reaffirming its status in general terms, this essay will suggest that a key aspect of the canto s intra- and inter-textual dynamic has been significantly undervalued.1 I refer to the question of performance, broadly understood as the point of intersection between authorship and readership, as between Dante-poet and his narrative projection as Dante-personaggio and pilgrim.2 I will argue that when considered from this angle, canto 2, together with 24, effects a radical, deliberate recantation of the definition of poetic authorship in De Vulgari Eloquentia, book 2, chapter 8, a text whose pivotal place in Dante s self-construction as poet has rarely been given its due, and whose importance for this canto has been entirely ignored. In conclusion, I will argue that for the Dante of the Commedia the dramatization of the performance of poetic song ultimately reveals a process of performative becoming in which poet- singer enacts and embodies the substance of his composition. In the process, I expect to shed some new light on the perennially Vol. 135: Dante Society of America

3 Performing Salvation in Dante s Commedia Ascoli problematic relationship between theology and poetry, truth and fiction, in the Commedia.3 I begin with a brief, selective description of the canto and its immediately preceding context. In the first canto, as we know, Dante-pilgrim undergoes a figurative rebirth under the severe gaze of Cato Uticensis,4 immediately following the exordial declaration of Dante-poet that he is ready to enter into a new poetic mode ( ma qui la morta poesì resurga / o sante Muse [Purgatorio 2.7 8]).5 Canto 2 concludes the interactions with Cato, and sees the pilgrim begin the first part of this second stage of his journey, through the so-called ante-purgatorio, where four forms of negligenza [negligence, from nec-eleggere: not to choose ], must be expiated before purgation proper begins. As we will see, canto 2 also ostentatiously offers some possibilities for understanding what more precisely is meant by the image of poetry reborn under the auspices of Holy Muses. The second canto is articulated around the arrival of a boatload of redeemed souls who have come to the otherworld by the normal route (as against Dante s passage through the center of the earth) a sea-voyage from the mouth of the Tiber river conducted by an angelic galeotto, that is, sailor or helmsman.6 The exceptionalness of Dante s own journey is thus put in relief, especially in the inauguration of a recurrent contrast between his living, embodied presence and the shadowy existence of the dead souls.7 At the same time, his ongoing dialogue with this new category of soul begins on a highly personal note as he discovers that one of the newly arrived is an old and dear friend, the minstrel Casella. What really makes the canto at once so extraordinary and yet so central to scholarly understandings of the Commedia s poetics, however, is the performance of two very different songs, both of which have a separate existence external to and independent of the world of the poem, and each of which is evoked by quoting its incipit or first line. The first, cited at line 46, is the singing of the psalm In exitu Israel de Aegypto (Vulgate 113; in modern Bibles) by the newly arriving souls: In exitu Israel de Aegypto cantavan tutti insieme ad una voce con quanto di quel salmo è poscia scripto. ( ) 75

4 Dante Studies 135, 2017 The singing of a psalm is very much in keeping with the prayerful, liturgical character of the second realm, which is redolent with citations, paraphrases, translations and dramatizations of Scripture.8 It focuses the consistent imagery of risky sea-voyage (Inf. 1 and 26) as metaphor of spiritual error and deliverance, constitutes a narrative alternative in bono to Charon s (and Phylegias s) transportation of the damned (Inf. 3 and 8), and provides a key focal point for the poem-long thematics of exile and repatriation.9 The second performance is the singing by Casella, at Dante s request, of the pilgrim s own canzone, Amor che nella mente mi ragiona, one of those interpreted in the prosimetrum philosophical treatise, the Convivio, written after Dante went into exile but before he began composing the Commedia: E io: Se nuova legge non ti toglie memoria o uso a l amoroso canto che mi solea quetar tutte mie doglie, di ciò ti piaccia consolare alquanto l anima mia, che, con la sua persona venendo qui, è affannata tanto!. Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona cominciò elli allor sì dolcemente, che la dolcezza ancor dentro mi suona. Lo mio maestro e io e quella gente ch eran con lui parevan sì contenti, come a nessun toccasse altro la mente. ( ) The pairing of these two songs one sacred, one profane may be understood as mediating the development of Dante-pilgrim into Dante-poet over the course of the poem.10 Before turning to my own reading of the relationship between the two (and of both with the second of Dante s explicit self-citations, in Purgatorio 24), let me briefly rehearse the most influential prior account, that of Charles Singleton and Robert Hollander, according to which Purgatorio 2 marks a definitive turn to a theological, quasi-biblical allegory of theologians from the allegory of poets expounded in prior works, most notably the Convivio itself. In 1959, Singleton published his seminal essay, In exitu Israel de Aegypto, which made the powerful and accurate claim that Dante-pilgrim s journey as everyman is structured to a significant 76

5 Performing Salvation in Dante s Commedia Ascoli extent as a rehearsal of the typological understanding of the Jews exile in and Exodus out of Egypt as figure of the individual soul s turning away from sin in this life while moving toward salvation in the next.11 By implication, Dante s whole poem constituted, analogically, a repetition of Exodus and particularly of its poetic rehearsal by David in Psalm 113. For Hollander this analogy became the basis for substantiating Singleton s claim that Dante was imitating God s way of writing in the Commedia, in the process coining the term theologus-poeta to characterize the author s stance.12 Singleton s and Hollander s arguments were, and are, apparently bolstered by two passages in other works presumed to be by Dante, one earlier, one later, in which In exitu is used specifically to illustrate the fourfold model of exegesis employed by medieval theologians in interpreting the Bible in (uncertain) relation to Dante s own poetry. In Convivio, the model is being specifically and idiosyncratically adapted to the purposes of an interpretive strategy distinct from that employed by teologi. 13 There, In exitu is used to characterize only the third of three allegorical senses, the anagogical or eschatological (the other two being the allegorical proper or Christological-ecclesiological and the tropological or ethical), and no attempt is made to show how this model might be applied to the canzoni being expounded in the prose pane of the treatise ( ).14 Then in the accessus or prefatory section of the so-called Epistle to Cangrande the fourfold model is exemplified in toto with reference to In exitu in such a way as to illustrate the polysemous nature of the poem s allegory and, according to Hollander at least, serve as a guide to reading the sacro poema as if it were Holy Writ:15 Nam si ad litteram solam inspiciamus, significatur nobis exitus filiorum Israel de Egipto, tempore Moysis; si ad allegoriam, nobis significatur nostra redemptio facta per Christum; si ad moralem sensum, significatur nobis conversio anime de luctu et miseria peccati ad statum gratie; si ad anagogicum, significatur exitus anime sancte ab huius corruptionis servitute ad eterne glorie libertatem.16 (Epistle, par. 7) (If we consider the letter alone, the thing signified to us is the going out of the children of Israel from Egypt in the time of Moses; if the allegory, our redemption through Christ is signified, if in the moral sense, the conversion of the soul from the sorrow and misery of sin to a state of grace is signified; if anagogical, the passage of the sanctified soul from the bondage of the corruption of this world to the liberty of everlasting glory is signified). 77

6 Dante Studies 135, 2017 Coming as it does, chronologically, after Convivio, but before the Epistle, the use of the Psalm in Purgatorio 2 has often been seen as a major step forward in Dante s use of the Biblical text as a model for his own writing, and has been interpreted far more often in relation to the standardized exposition of the four-senses model in the Epistle than to the anomalous illustration of anagogy in Convivio 2.1. In fact, as we are about to see, the singing of the Psalm by the souls in Purgatorio 2 does implicate, as it literalizes, all three of the polysemous meanings attributed in the exegetical tradition and in the Epistle to the Exodus of the Jews: Christ s sacrifice (allegory proper), which enables a conversion from sin to grace (tropology), resulting in the passage of the sanctified soul from the bondage of the corruption of this world to the liberty of everlasting glory (anagogy), precisely the liberty that is identified in Purgatorio as the fundamental motive of Dante s journey. The related claim that the singing of In exitu is specifically a figure of Dante-poet s writing in the Commedia is favored by the fact that the Biblical text is indeed the transcription of a song composed by the Bible s most poetic human author, David (with whom Dante is compared several times, especially in the Paradiso),17 and that, as will be discussed below, the language of singing in both Latin and Italian ( cantio ; canto ; canzone ) is Dante s preferred metaphor for both poetic composition and its performance, sung or otherwise. Also suggestive is the fact that it is performed under the auspices of a heavenly galeotto (Purg. 2.27) with evident recall of the damnable galeotto both book and author that Francesca blames for her lamentable fate and that of Paolo (Inf ), and which is so often taken to be an example in malo of what Dante s own writing may have risked doing to its readers in the past and what the present work is striving to remedy.18 Most important, and here we come back to our point of departure, is the fact that the canto concludes with the performance of another song, this one Dante s own canzone of love for a donna gentile, glossed in the third book of the Convivio as a hymn to its author s love of wisdom (Filosofia): Amor che nella mente mi ragiona. 19 That the two songs are meant to be compared, and then contrasted, is obvious. Both are, to belabor the point, musical performances of verbal constructs. The first, however, is a collective performance of a Biblical text, the second is a solitary performance of a poetic text.20 The first is of dual authorship, written by God through his human amanuensis 78

7 Performing Salvation in Dante s Commedia Ascoli or scriba Dei, David; the second is written by a human author, Dante himself. The first, literally recalling the Exodus of the Jews in search of the Promised Land, accompanies, as it typologically figures, a spiritual journey, marking a dynamic movement from our world to the next, and from sin to salvation. The second, as Cato harshly reminds the group, leads to a deplorable stasis, and to an initial exemplification of the problem of negligenza whose purgation takes place in cantos 3 8 ( ). One celebrates God s justice and grace; the other, either love for an extraordinary donna gentile (if taken at the letter) or human reason (if understood in the light of Dante s allegorization in Convivio, book 3). The opposition thus delineated, it seems no wonder that the Singleton-Hollander line in conjunction with the strong interpretation of The Epistle to Cangrande, paragraph 7 has claimed that the re-born poetry of Purgatorio and indeed of the poema sacro as a whole, is modeled on the former performance rather than the latter. Moreover, the performance of Amor che nella mente has not only been seen as contrapuntal with respect to In exitu, but has also, and perhaps even more often, been taken to constitute a specific palinodic recantation of the poetics of an earlier Dante, thus reinforcing the assertion that the Commedia has adopted a new, theological, quasi- Biblical perspective and mode of writing. Two widely influential essays from the mid-1970 s, by John Freccero and Robert Hollander, explored the function of Dante s explicit auto-citationality in the Commedia, providing a model for the many palinodic readings of the poem which followed.21 In this account, the insertion into Purgatorio 2 of Amor che nella mente recalls and supersedes either the philosophical interpretation given to it in Convivio or its literal celebration of his (ennobling?) love for a donna gentile or both. The alternative is a faith-based mode of knowledge, in which both Amor and ragiona potentially take on new meanings. On this view, the personified god of Love from Vita Nova and the Love of Lady Philosophy yield to the Johannine God is Love ; while ragiona, which initially indicated the rational speech of the human intellect now refers to an inspired language infused from on high.22 Finally, from this perspective, if the singing of Amor che nella mente contrasts immediately with In exitu and suggests a temporary relapse into an earlier moment in Dante s moral-spiritual and poetic evolution ( l amoroso canto / che mi solea quetar tutte mie doglie ), 79

8 Dante Studies 135, 2017 it also prepares the way for the second great auto-citation of the canticle,23 this one explicitly attributed to Dante and explicitly positive, namely Bonagiunta da Lucca s recall of Donne che avete intelletto d amore the pivotal canzone of the even earlier Vita Nova in canto 24 of Purgatorio, line 51. This in turn opens the way to Dante s newly overt positioning of himself as a Scriba Dei, copying out the dictates of Love as the Holy Spirit moves him (the passage is quoted at the end of this essay).24 Canto 24 would, in other words, constitute proof that Dante is now openly asserting the comparability of his writing, perhaps in Donne ch avete, 25 but also, more importantly and certainly, in the Commedia itself, to a Biblical text like In exitu, and his own role to that of a Biblical author like David. Put schematically, to the thesis/ antithesis of the songs of canto 2, canto 24 might be seen as operating a transcending synthesis, an issue to which I will return at the end of this essay.26 I now turn to a critique of this critical complex and thence to my supplement/alternative to it. In the broadest terms, the interpretation just outlined the Singleton-Hollander interpretation, let us call it and in fact most interpretations with which I am familiar, are concerned with two interrelated questions. First is the authorship of the two songs: God (and David) on the one hand, Dante on the other. Second is their meaning, their content : the multiple senses of theological allegory associated with In exitu; the amorous and/or philosophical implications of Amor che nella mente. But in the context of the canto, authorship and the meanings determined by authorial intention are not what is foregrounded. Rather, in both cases the explicit stress falls on the performance of the song, and on the meanings produced in its reception by an audience.27 As is commonly observed, in the first case the song is performed chorally in its entirety ( tutti insieme ad una voce / con quanto di quel canto è poscia scripto ) by the souls whose presumed, multiple, audience since they are as we soon discover unaware of Dante s presence is themselves, God s angelic minister, and God Himself. In the second, the song is performed by a single individual at the request of another,28 and rather than experience the song as a whole and its content, all of the hearers become rapt in a sweetness that removes thought of anything else, including the fact that the journey to a promised land about which they were so recently singing is not yet complete. Dante-pilgrim s primary role in both cases is that of audience, 80

9 Performing Salvation in Dante s Commedia Ascoli though of course the fact that he was the original author of Amor che ne la mente and that he initiated Casella s performance of it is of no little consequence. To amplify the implications of this last point: the criticism, which more often than not assumes or argues that the episode represents the active reinterpretation and recantation of the work of a younger Dante by an older one (see again notes 21 22), has never fully come to grips with the fact that Dante-poeta (poet of the Commedia, that is) stages a scene in which his younger self also, obviously, a poet becomes the passive audience of a poem which he himself wrote when he was younger still.29 And yet, if to the intrinsic peculiarity of this configuration we add the earlier Dante s obsessive staging of himself as reader of his own work (in the self-commentaries of Vita Nova and Convivio; and, in a different way, in the use of his own poems as evidence in De Vulgari Eloquentia), together with the apparent departure from that structural model in the Commedia,30 Dante s doubled role as writer and reader of the canzone sung by Casella must appear as extraordinarily fraught, and in need of carefully nuanced explication. In order to make sense of both the performative nature of the scene and its complex intervention in the author/reader dialectic, I now direct attention to the revisitation in the episode of another Dantean pre-text, one which has rarely been taken into due account in Dante criticism generally, and, as concerns this episode in particular, is cited almost exclusively to clarify questions concerning the oral and musical performance of a written canzone (see again note 27). That pre-text is book 2 of De Vulgari and, more specifically, that part of it, chapter 8, where Dante sets out to define the poetic form which alone is worthy of the noblest, illustrious vernacular, the cantio, which we usually translate as canzone, but could as easily be rendered as canto, or song, or, given the emphasis on performativity, as a singing. As we will see shortly, this passage is also the immediate precursor to the passage, later in the same chapter, where the author of the treatise first explicitly identifies himself as the exemplar of the poet who writes such poems: Est enim cantio, secundum verum nominis significatum, ipse canendi actus vel passio, sicut lectio passio vel actus legendi.... [C]antio dupliciter accipi potest: uno modo secundum quod fabricatur ab autore suo, et sic est actio et secundum istum modum Virgilius primo Eneidorum dicit Arma virumque cano -; alio modo secundum quod fabricata profertur vel ab autore vel ab alio quicunque sit, sive 81

10 Dante Studies 135, 2017 cum soni modulatione proferatur, sive non: et sic est passio. Nam tunc agitur; modo vero agere videtur in alium, et sic tunc alicuius actio, modo quoque passio alicuius videtur. Et quia prius agitur ipsa quam agat, magis, immo prorsus denominari videtur ab eo quod agitur, et est actio alicuius, quam ab eo quod agit in alios. Signum autem huius est quod nunquam dicimus Hec est cantio Petri eo quod ipsam proferat, sed eo quod fabricaverit illam ( ).31 (A cantio, according to the true meaning of the word, is an act of singing, in an active or a passive sense, just as lectio means an act of reading, in an active or a passive sense..... [C]antio has a double meaning: one usage refers to something created by [its] author [and in this sense it is an action] and this is the sense in which Virgil uses the word in the first book of the Aeneid, when he writes arma virumque cano ; the other refers to the occasion on which this creation is performed, either by the author or by someone else, whoever it may be, with or without a musical accompaniment and in this sense it is passive. For on such occasions the cantio itself acts upon someone or something, whereas in the former case it is acted upon; and so in one case it appears as an action carried out by someone, in the other as an action perceived by someone. And because it is acted upon before it acts in its turn, the argument seems plausible, indeed convincing, that it takes its name from the fact that it is acted upon, and is somebody s action, rather from the fact that it acts upon others. The proof of this is the fact that we never say that s Peter s song when referring to something Peter has performed, but only to something he has written.) The prima facie relevance of this passage to my re-reading of Dante- personaggio s re-hearing of Casella s re-cantation of Dante- poeta s canzone, Amor che nella mente mi ragiona, should be evident.32 However, before exploring the passage in more detail, let me take yet another necessary detour by describing its immediate context within De Vulgari, which will further reinforce and clarify its pertinence to the issues at hand. Chapter 8, in fact, lies at the heart of a technical discussion of the vernacular poetic form suitable to the noblest, tragic style, and to the three exalted subjects (2.2.7: salus; amor; virtus [well-being; love; virtue]) which are to be represented in it. That form, the cantio or canzone, is, Dante says, to be written in the vulgare illustre, the illustrious vernacular, as defined in the first book of the treatise. Chapter 8 is immediately preceded by a chapter dedicated to the vocabulary suitable to the noblest subjects treated in the noblest poetic form, and before that by a long chapter illustrating the kind of constructio, or syntactical construction, appropriate to those subjects and that form. Of particular 82

11 Performing Salvation in Dante s Commedia Ascoli note in the latter case is that this chapter, the sixth of book 2, begins with a thematically charged list of examples of prose constructions, culminating with an example of the most beautiful and exalted kind, the only kind suitable to the cantio, which just happens to recall an experience of exile from Florence caused by the invasion of Charles of Valois, very much like that of Dante himself (2.6.5).33 More directly to the present point, Chapter 6 then continues with a list of vernacular poetic examples of this type of construction, which leads from the troubadours (Girhault, Folquet and Arnaut), through one representative of the Sicilians (Guido da Colonna) to the dolce stil poets Guinizelli, Cavalcanti, Cino da Pistoia, and Cino s unnamed friend, Dante: Hoc solum illustres cantiones inveniuntur contexte, ut Gerardus: Si per mon Sobretots non fos; Folquetus de Marsilia: Tan m abellis l amoros pensamen; Arnaldus Danielis: Sols sui che sai lo sobraffan che m sorz; Namericus de Belnui: Nuls hom non pot complir addreciamen; Namericus de Peculiano: Si com l arbres che per sobrecarcar; Rex Navarre: Ire d amor que en mon cor repaire; Iudex de Messana: Anchor che l aigua per lo foco lassi; Guido Guinizelli: Tegno de folle empresa a lo ver dire; Guido Cavalcanti: Poi che di doglia cor conven ch io porti; Cynus de Pistorio: Avegna che io aggia più per tempo; amicus eius: Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona. Nec mireris, lector, de tot reductis autoribus ad memoriam: non enim hanc quam supremam vocamus constructionem nisi per huiusmodi exempla possumus indicare. Et fortassis utilissimum foret ad illam habituandam regulatos vidisse poetas, Virgilium videlicet, Ovidium Metamorfoseos, Statium atque Lucanum... Subsistant igitur ignorantie sectatores Guictonem Aretinum et quosdam alios extollentes... ( ) (Illustrious canzoni are composed using this type of construction alone, as in this one by Girault: Si per mon Sobretots non fos. Folquet de Marselha: Tan m abellis l amoros pensamen. Arnaut Daniel: Sols sui che sai lo sobraffan chem sorz. Amerigo di Belenoi: Nuls hom non pot complir addrechamen. Amerigo di Peguhlan: Si com l arbres che per sobrecarcar. The King of Navarre: Ire d amor que en mon cor repaire. The Judge of Messana: Anchor che l aigua per lo foco lassi. Guido GuinizeIli: Tegno de folle mpresa a lo ver dire. 83

12 Dante Studies 135, 2017 Guido Cavalcanti: Poi che de doglia cor conven ch io porti. Cino da Pistoia: Avegna che io aggia più per tempo. and his friend: Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona. Nor should you be surprised, reader, if so many authorities are recalled to your memory here; for I could not make clear what I mean by the supreme degree of construction other than by providing examples of this kind. And perhaps it would be more useful, in order to make the practice of such constructions habitual, to read the poets who respect the rules, namely Virgil, Ovid in the Metamorphoses, Statius, and Lucan... So let the devotees of ignorance cease to cry up Guittone d Arezzo and others like him...) This list, by far the longest string of examples in the treatise (11 the runners-up both in book 2, chapter 5 have 7 each), culminates with the one and only reference in De Vulgari to Amor che nella mente mi ragiona, which thus becomes, at least temporarily, the ne plus ultra of vernacular writing.34 The exemplary list, a literary history in miniature of romance vernacular poetry, is followed by, with the implication that it is the reason for, a highly unusual reference to the vernacular writers as autores, one of the very rare instances in Dante s oeuvre where he seems willing to use that word of himself and other modern poets.35 The chapter concludes with a reference to parallel examples, which might have been adduced, from classical poets and prose-writers, beginning with Virgil, who are ostentatiously not identified as autores.36 In other words, the chapter not only celebrates the achievement of vernacular poets, but also tacitly challenges the strict hierarchy first laid out in Vita Nova, in the chapter formerly known as 25, between the classical poete and the vernacular dicitori. The final slam at claims of Guittone d Arezzo and his followers to have initiated an illustrious vernacular literature serves, as it were, to attribute to them and them alone the presumed inferiority of modern versifiers, a polemic famously continued in cantos 24 and 26 of Purgatorio.37 We are, in short, presented with one of the high water-marks, to that date, of Dante s project of appropriating the classical designation of auctor for the vernacular in general and for his own work in particular and Amor che nella mente, again, serves as the poster-child for the success of that appropriation, at least at the level of constructio. On this evidence alone one might argue that the auto-citation in Purgatorio 2 is designed to recall an earlier and superseded moment in Dante s quest for poetic auctoritas perhaps aimed at highlighting the 84

13 Performing Salvation in Dante s Commedia Ascoli oft-noted shift from the tragic cantio to the comic style and terza rima in the Commedia. The possible relevance of this chapter to the auto-citationality of Purgatorio is reinforced, but also somewhat complicated, if we note that the very next poetic example presented in the treatise, coming late in chapter 8 (after the passage cited above), is the first of two references to Donne che avete intelletto d amore, that is, to the very poem, so central to the Vita Nova, which will then constitute the second and last auto-citation of the canticle.38 That the order of reference already implies a hierarchy of value between the two poems, even a supersession of one by the other, in De Vulgari, as it later does in Purgatorio, might be inferred from the fact that, as I have argued elsewhere, a radical shift in self-presentation takes place between the two examples.39 Throughout the treatise to that point a clear separation had been made between the third-person singular friend of Cino (a phrase repeated five times), who is the prime example of the illustrious vernacular and the poetry written in it, and the first-person plural nos who writes the treatise and deploys those examples. In other words, from the outset, the Latin author of the treatise had coyly refused to identify himself with the privileged author of poetry in the language that is the subject of the treatise, creating a doubled Dante analogous to the more overt split between poetic and prosaic Dantes in Vita Nova and in Convivio (see again note 30). Now, soon after Dante has referred to vernacular poets with the prestigious designation of autores and immediately following his definition of the cantio as the handiwork of an active auctor, that clear separation suddenly vanishes, as the nos of the treatise openly identifies himself as the author of Donne ch avete even as he offers the definitive description of the cantio: Dicimus ergo quod cantio, in quantum per superexcellentiam dicitur, ut et nos querimus, est equalium stantiarum sine responsorio ad unam sententiam tragica coniugatio, ut nos ostendimus cum dicimus: Donne che avete intelletto d amore. (2.8.8) (We say that the cantio [or canzone], in so far as it is so-called for its pre-eminence, which is what we too are seeking, is a connected series of equal stanzas in the tragic style, without a refrain, and focused on a single theme, as we showed when we wrote Donne ch avete intelletto d amore. ) 85

14 Dante Studies 135, 2017 This shift is emphasized by the use in a single period of four verbs in the first person plural and by the repetition of dicimus, once used of the treatise s author and once of Dante-poet. It clearly anticipates the move from a Dante divided into poet and commentator upon that poet, as in the earlier prosimetrum works, to the I who is openly identified as both poet and character in the Commedia, a text that dispenses altogether with the extrinsic apparatus of the treatise or commentary.40 And, as such, this textual event also opens the way to the sort of retrospective reflection on the phenomenon of authorial self-reading which we find, mirabile dictu, in Purgatorio, canto 2. As just noted, between the citation of Amor che nella mente and that of Donne ch avete falls the definition of the cantio as an act of singing, in an active or a passive sense, active singing referring to the song s creation by a poetic author, passive singing referring to its subsequent performance by the author or someone else with or without a musical accompaniment (2.8.3). Dante then goes on to specify that a cantio, though it requires the harmonization of words, is called such even in the absence of a performer or of music, while, on the other hand, a piece of music by itself may not be called a cantio. And it seems to me no coincidence that this focus on the cantio as the verbal product of an active author s making ( fabricatur ab autore suo ), which we have seen was prepared by the preceding reference to the vernacular poets as autores, opens the way to the prose nos identifying himself explicitly at chapter s end with the person who wrote Donne che avete intelletto d amore. 41 It should now be absolutely clear why it is that I have turned to De Vulgari 2.8 as a key inter-text for the Casella episode. Casella fits precisely the description of the performer of the passive cantio, while his friend Dante was the active author of the poem being performed.42 What is most curious, as I have already begun to suggest, and what requires additional consideration, is that within the economy of the canto, Dante appears not as active author, but as passive audience, the someone upon whom the song itself acts. Dante-personaggio, in other words, has here become the audience/ reader of his own poem and, as Cato s outrage suggests, either the song was not a very good one to begin with, or there is something wrong with this mode of experiencing it, or both. 86

15 Performing Salvation in Dante s Commedia Ascoli For Hollander and Freccero, as for most other readers, the culprit is decidedly the content of the canzone. For Hollander it is a demonically seductive siren song anticipating Dante s second dream in canto 19 of Purgatorio which threatens to interrupt the pilgrim s mission just as it seems to have taken a quantum leap forward.43 For Freccero, perhaps more persuasively, the song stands for an earlier moment of the author s intellectual development, the moment in which the love of rational wisdom, the sentiment allegorically expressed in Amor che nella mente according to Convivio, book 3, took the place of Christian faith, the evidence of things unseen. Thus the canzone specifically rebukes the concupiscent love of Francesca, but is itself now rebuked in favor of a higher Love.44 Both, in any case, take Dante-personaggio s passive reaction to the poem as an oblique figure of the intentions of an earlier version of Dante-author in his active making of it, as reinterpreted, and re-canted, by the definitive Dante-poeta who is now writing the Commedia. And neither they nor anyone else, to my knowledge, has tried to account in any detail for the peculiar spectacle of an author staging an experience of his own creation as a passive descent into a pleasurable, thoughtless, stasis. Needless to say, I will now consider this last-mentioned phenomenon in some detail both by explicating its debts to the formulation of the active and passive modalities of the canzone in De Vulgari, and by noting how that formulation has been significantly recast, palinodically as it were, in Purgatorio 2 specifically and in the Commedia more generally. In De Vulgari 2.8 the cantio is primarily discussed in terms of its making and, secondarily, its performance. At first blush, it would seem that the experience of the reader/hearer is either ignored entirely or mentioned ambiguously in passing as a passive experience of being acted upon, without further elaboration. But that is not quite true: as we have seen, the prose nos of the treatise begins his discussion of the meaning of cantio, which will come to mean the action of an author, by comparing it to the meaning of lectio: A cantio, according to the true meaning of the word, is an act of singing, in an active or a passive sense, just as lectio means an act of reading, in an active or a passive sense [sicut lectio passio vel actus legendi] (2.8.1) I begin with an inference that the choice of the example of lectio is not a casual one, since singing as Dante then defines it, especially in the 87

16 Dante Studies 135, 2017 passive sense of the secondary performer of a work, implies the subsequent experience of the made object by an audience or reading public.45 This inference seems all the more probable given Dante s insistence that musical performance is not an intrinsic and essential feature of the cantio, with the implication that it might as well be read as heard, notwithstanding the apparent association between song and orality.46 He does not, however, go on to specify further what either an active or a passive lectio might be, or even what the word literally means. The question of what lectio and cantio have to do with one another is further complicated, if we consider more closely both the grammatical tradition upon which Dante is drawing for his distinctions between active and passive senses and the way in which he has forcefully reconfigured, by resemanticizing, that tradition, as well as, perhaps, contaminating it with reference to meanings assigned to the word lectio in another available context, that of Scholastic philosophical and theological education. In grammatical handbooks, lectio is simply used as an example to illustrate the inherent fungibility of the genitive case, which may refer either to the person performing an action on an object or to the object on which the action is performed: in the active form, e.g., lectio Petri, Peter s reading, the stress falls upon the agent of reading, the person who reads; in the passive form, e.g., lectio libri, the reading of a book the stress falls upon what is being read, the object of the action. As Mengaldo has shown, however, Dante immediately wrenches the traditional active/passive opposition to his own very different purposes.47 Where traditionally the active sense of cantio in the genitive form would be Virgil s singing [of the Aeneid], and the passive the singing of the Aeneid [by Virgil], Dante instead distinguishes between the authorial composition of the song and the later performances of that song by the author or someone else. He further muddies the waters as he explains that in the passive sense the cantio itself acts upon someone or something, a formulation that might suggest the impact of the song on an audience (or, again, reader, since it does not literally have to be sung to be a song ), though what is apparently meant is that the song acts upon the person who is performing it in the somewhat abstract sense that it supplies the material to be performed. If one then returns to apply the active/passive formulation of cantio as Dante has elaborated it to lectio, we find ourselves in a bit of a quandary, for more than one reason. First of all, the traditional active reading 88

17 Performing Salvation in Dante s Commedia Ascoli of lectio, Peter s reading of a book [more often than not written by someone else], actually corresponds to the passive meaning Dante gives to cantio, the later performance of a song by someone [usually someone other than its author]. What then would lectio in a passive sense be? Logically it would mean the effect of such a performance upon someone else, that is, an audience. And at this point one might be further tempted to think of the ways in which lectio figures into the late medieval discourse concerning the transmission of knowledge, where we find another distinction which could be mapped onto the active and passive senses, namely the distinction between the lectio or prelectio of the teacher-commentator and the lectio of the student who experiences that teaching either as an auditor or a reader. Moreover, this distinction is typically accompanied by the further observation that the ambiguity of lectio is double, in the sense that it can refer either to the oral teacher-student relationship or to the silent reading of a book; in other words, it anticipates the way in which Dante stretches the sense of cantio from sung/heard to written/read.48 Why speculate about the possible active and passive senses of lectio when Dante himself does not do so in this passage? Because, I would argue, the re-cantation of De Vulgari in Purgatorio seemingly invites us to do so. In the first instance it re-proposes the active/passive song distinction by juxtaposing the original auctor or faber of the song, Dante, with a performer of that song. In the second instance, however, it inverts the active/passive relationship by showing the performance of a song by one person acting upon other people, surprisingly and significantly including the original author of that song. In this sense Casella s performance much more closely resembles the hypothetical active definition of lectio, while the reception of that performance by Dante and the crowd of shades gives content to the passive form of lectio as construed on analogy with the bi-partitite definition of cantio in De Vulgari. At the very least, reading De Vulgari 2.8 together with Casella s Song focuses our attention on the fact that where authorship was the focal experience of the treatise, performance, the repetition and re-experiencing of a text, is the key to Purgatorio 2, all the more so because of the earlier singing of In exitu by the souls in transit. Moreover, the singing of Amor che nella mente dramatizes a conceptual ambiguity that we have seen was implicit in De Vulgari, inasmuch as Casella is at once passive (he merely repeats a cantio someone else wrote) and active, inasmuch as his 89

18 Dante Studies 135, 2017 performance, his lectio of the cantio one might say, has a profound effect on its audience. As we are about to see, that ambiguity can be heuristically mapped onto what seems to be Dante s new-found concern for the relationship between two contrasting but also intricated notions of linguistic performance (passive) performance as staged repetition of a text before an audience and (active) performance as enactment and embodiment of that text. From this perspective, the failure of Amor che nella mente is determined not by its original content, which although it does provide, from its first line forward, for the active engagement of the mind in philosophical reasoning, also insists that reason is ultimately subordinate to and in aid of Christian faith.49 If anything, the reception of Casella s singing of Dante s song suggests the inadequacy of the pedagogical model advanced in the Convivio, which depends upon the presence of the author-turned-commentator to explicate the meaning of his verses, to furnish a lectio of them as it were, rather than allowing for dynamic readerly exegesis.50 That failure is rendered all the more acute by the recognition that, as we have repeatedly observed, the poem s active author has been reduced to the status of the most passive of auditors/readers, one who allows himself to be caught up in an experience of performance without attempting to understand the significance of what he is hearing, a significance for which he himself was originally responsible. At this point, we face a series of difficult questions. If the performance of Amor che nella mente dramatizes the threat presented by a passive lectio of a song, what is the alternative: what would an active reading look like? And if at the same time the song implicitly casts a long shadow over the positive figure of the active author, why does it do so and what is the remedy? In other words, what is wrong with the concept of creative authorship presented in De Vulgari book 2 and, in another sense, in Convivio? And what is the alternative embodied in the reborn poetry of Purgatorio? What differentiates Dante-poeta in the Commedia from his earlier avatars? A partial answer comes if we recognize that, from the palinodic perspective of the Commedia, De Vulgari and Convivio are fundamentally works addressed by Dante to himself, to the end of elaborating a concept of authorship, and of an illustrious language and attendant poetics with which he will then be identified. This is a claim that I have argued at length elsewhere and will not rehearse here. I do note, however, two 90

19 Performing Salvation in Dante s Commedia Ascoli basic points that underpin it: the one rooted in interpretation, the other in the historical facts as they have come down to us. The first is that both works break off at precisely the point when they have covered the topics necessary to support Dante s philosophical and technical-poetic ambitions, respectively, and before they enter into projected areas that might be of more general pedagogical benefit, but of less immediate relevance to Dante himself. Second is the fact, increasingly noted of late, that neither work appears to have had any significant circulation among readers while Dante was alive.51 By contrast, the Commedia parts of which had already begun to circulate during the poet s lifetime for all that it places Dante -personaggio at the center of its representations, is deeply concerned with the (moral; spiritual) effects it will have upon its readers. This is expressed, notably, in several explicit addresses to the reader suggesting interpretive possibilities and warning of interpretive dangers in other words, encouraging him to an active generation or regeneration of textual significance.52 And it is also, as most notably in Inferno 5 and in the Statius episode, dramatized in terms of failed and successful readings, which also implicate Dante himself as reader (or perhaps witness is a better word). In other words, to return to the episode at hand, the experience of Dante-personaggio and the newly arrived souls of Amor che nella mente leaves aside the question of what the author of the poem originally intended it to mean and directs attention instead to a readerly reception which is passive rather than active, which dwells on the captivating sweetness of form rather than truly probing what the ethical-spiritual meaning of the poem might be, thus distracting them if only momentarily from continuing their purgatorial journey and fulfilling their anagogical destiny, the one they earlier claimed for themselves in singing In exitu Israel de Aegypto. At the same time, when Dante turns an earlier version of himself one who was an active, auto-exegetical reader of his own poetry into a passive experiencer of that same poetry, he is in some sense acknowledging, perhaps even poking fun at, the inevitable failure of those obsessive attempts to control the meaning of his work, not only in his original making thereof but in the ways that they will be subsequently experienced. What in Convivio appeared as a positive self-reflexivity might here, instead, seem to have been a narcissistic self-absorption, tending toward moral-spiritual stasis.53 91

20 Dante Studies 135, 2017 Not, of course, that we should forget that the Casella episode and everything else in the Commedia are products of perhaps the most controlling authorial consciousness to be found in the Western tradition. But, and this is crucial, that Dante, the Dante-poeta of the Commedia, actually is at some pains to qualify or even to eliminate the figure of the autonomous author-maker of De Vulgari, generator of authoritative models and possessed of extraordinary freedom in his role as writer. In the remaining pages, I will suggest that alternative, performative models of both readership and authorship can be deduced by looking again at the two songs which bracket Amor che nella mente the immediately preceding In exitu Israel (readership) and the much later, but clearly symmetrical Donne che avete (authorship). In the case of the psalm, there are two complementary ways in which the model of De Vulgari its radical distinction between human authors and performers, on the one hand, and between authors and readers, on the other is clearly inadequate. First of all, like all of the Bible, the song has two authors God and his human amanuensis, David a relationship in which the active, human, auctor of De Vulgari is turned into a passive performer (except, of course, insofar as he imposes linguistic and poetic form on the materials he is to transmit). That fact, however, remains in the background, though perhaps the phrase poscia scripto serves as a hint that it should be taken into account, since it does refer to writing, though more immediately to the copied words on a page than to the original, divinely-inspired, act of writing. Central, on the other hand, and as we noted near the outset, is the choral performance of the psalm by the souls in transit. In the terms of De Vulgari these would be the negligible passive authors of the song. But, in the first instance, they are also the audience (along with God and his angelic minister) of what is being sung, what it is acting upon. More importantly still, as they chant, they are, in fact, describing themselves: singing of exodus out of spiritual captivity to the liberation of a promised land, even as they travel to that promised land because of an arcane convergence between their own merits while they lived and God s prevenient Grace. They are enacting, embodying, the tropological and anagogical senses of the psalm as traditionally interpreted (as we have seen in the Epistle to Cangrande, par. 7) they are the meaning of what they sing. Performing the text they are inscribed typologically within it, as part of God s cosmic poem. To put it yet 92

21 Performing Salvation in Dante s Commedia Ascoli another way, as the souls perform the song, they transform performance in the traditional sense of a recital for the benefit of others by themselves performing the action they describe.54 In the larger context of canto 2, the juxtaposition of the simultaneously active and passive singing of the In exitu Israel by the souls further reinforces the subsequent failure of those same souls, plus Dante, passively absorbed in a piece of secular poetry. Based on this canto alone, then, the performance of salvation seems to be restricted to Biblical texts and the liturgical repetitions of them, and to leave little if any space for a poem, like the Commedia itself, composed by a human author alone. Nevertheless, in turning to Purgatorio 24, and Dante s second self-citation, Donne ch avete intelletto d amore, in the company of Forese Donati and at the behest of the poet Bonagiunta da Lucca, we find that Dante has seemingly overcome the binary opposition of the Bible to human poetry, presenting us with a version of himself as author that carefully adapts the problematics of authorial and readerly performance to another of his own poems.55 That we are encouraged to view the relationship between the two cantos in this light is obvious: the mere fact that the canticle contains two self-citations, one on the threshold of Purgatory, one as Dante- personaggio is nearing the end of this part of his journey, is sufficient to suggest this. The imperative to take them together is further marked by the fact that the two citations come during the only two episodes in Purgatorio where Dante encounters personal friends Casella and Forese both of whom are linked to him, among other things, through poetry (in the case of Forese I refer, obviously, to their tenzone, which I take to be authentic). As their incipits by themselves reveal, of course, the cited poems are linked by the problem of how Love can be known and understood, and then expressed poetically. Critics have long stressed the thematic and prosodic connections between the two cited poems, including shared rhyme schemes, that suggest that they may have been written in dialogue with one another to begin with.56 And, as we have seen above, it is clear that as early as the De Vulgari Dante had paired the two, in the same order, with, apparently, the same hierarchical ranking of lower to higher (which however reverses the order of composition). And it has been pointed out, most forcefully by Martinez, that, in fact, Donne che avete, like its sister canzone, is also preceded and thematically paired with the singing of a psalm, in this case Labia 93