The Undivine ComedyDante One and MultipleRoberto Antonelli

In chapter 1 of The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante, Teodolinda Barolini starts from Bruno Nardi’s position, according to which ‘those who consider Dante’s vision and the poet’s rapture to heaven as literary fiction distort the sense’.11Bruno Nardi, quoted in Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 4, hereafter UDC. Subsequent references given in parentheses in the main text. She then evaluates the critical controversies that have resulted from Nardi’s claim, in all their articulations and consequences, both in Europe and in North America:

In this chapter I will trace, in broad outline, the history of our recent handling of what I take to be the fundamental question for all the readers of Dante’s poem: How are we to respond to the poet’s insistence that he is telling us the truth? Logically prior to this query stands another that we cannot answer, but on which we may speculate: Did Dante himself believe in the literal truth of those things for which he claims literal truth? (UDC, p. 4)

Barolini first of all underscores how ‘the American querelle regarding the allegory of poets versus the allegory of theologians’ had led to ‘an impasse in which the question of Dante’s truth claims has been Beginning of page[p. 66] effectively put to one side’, also due to an ‘acritical assumption of allegiance to Charles Singleton’s teachings’ (UDC, p. 5). Singleton had claimed, on the basis of the presumed authenticity of the Epistle to Cangrande, that Dante followed the allegory of theologians in the Commedia.

Barolini, however, was convinced ‘that Nardi’s contributions regarding “Dante profeta” and Singleton’s regarding the Commedia’s use of the allegory of theologians are essentially complementary’ (UDC, p. 5). Indeed, as she notes:

Since Singleton, in the wake of Erich Auerbach, emphasizes the validity of the literal sense as historically true, and the issue of Dante as profeta ultimately goes beyond the specific prophecies within the text to encompass the much larger problem of the poet’s view of himself as a teller of truth, these two traditions are in effect parallel ways of discussing the one central issue of the poet’s truth claims. (UDC, p. 5)

At this point, the parallels between Nardi and Singleton become more evident […] Nardi is as determined a defender of the literal sense of the Commedia as is Singleton; like Singleton, he is deeply aware of the significance of the Epistle to Cangrande as a hermeneutic document. But their approach to the document could not be more different. While Singleton grounds his defense of the Commedia’s literal sense in an appeal to the Epistle to Cangrande — ‘The allegory of the Divine Comedy is so clearly the “allegory of theologians” (as the Letter to Cangrande by its example says it is) that one may only wonder at the continuing efforts made to see it as the “allegory of poets”’ — Nardi refuses to acknowledge the Dantesque paternity of much of the Epistle because he thinks that it treats the poem’s literal sense as mere fictio. (UDC, pp. 6–7)

Personally, I do not believe there is the slightest doubt about the authorship of the Epistle, and, like Singleton, I am astonished at the inane perpetuation of the querelle. In my opinion, critical response to the Epistle qualifies as an example of the phenomenon, studied by Barolini in a recent book, of an apparently philological debate that in fact is not philological but hermeneutical.22Teodolinda Barolini, ‘La Vita nuova e il caso del finale originario perduto’, in Barolini, Il vento di Aristotele. Saggi danteschi (Milan: La nave di Teseo, 2024), pp. 349–59 (first publ. as Barolini, ‘The Case of the Lost Original Ending of Dante’s Vita Nuova: More Notes Toward a Critical Philology’, Medioevo letterario d’Italia, 11 (2014), pp. 27–44), and ‘Filologia critica e le Rime di Dante’, in Barolini, Il vento di Aristotele, pp. 361–83 (first publ. as Barolini, ‘Critical Philology and Dante’s Rime’, Philology, 1.1 (2015), pp. 91–114). Barolini (believing Beginning of page[p. 67] the Epistle to Cangrande to be by Dante, but all in all indifferent to the question) did not include the debate over the Epistle among her examples (all well chosen, in my opinion) of faux-philological debates that demonstrate the need for ‘Critical Philology’: a philology that privileges first and foremost what exists over what does not exist.

Dante certainly considered himself a poet-prophet. He says so himself, several times, and legitimizes the claim through Cacciaguida (Par. 15–17) and then through Saint Peter (Par. 27) after his preparatory investiture as poet-theologian thanks to his successful exams with Saints Peter, James, and John (Par. 24–26). But this claim, which Benedetto Croce rejected for fear of introducing ‘into Dante’s genius too great an excess of dementia’,33Benedetto Croce, La poesia di Dante, 2nd rev. edn (Bari: Laterza, 1921), p. 6. is in reality the very foundation of the Commedia: precisely for the purposes of the self-legitimization of the truth of the text, Dante could never have done without it, as Singleton himself brilliantly put it in a now iconic phrase: ‘the fiction of the Divine Comedy is that it is not a fiction’.44Charles S. Singleton, ‘Commedia’: Elements of Structure (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), p. 62. It is a formula shared by Barolini who, however, once again following Nardi, does not extend the consensus ‘to the suggestion that Dante himself thought his poem a fiction in any simple sense’ (UDC, p. 11). For Barolini, ‘Dante self-consciously used the means of fiction — poetic and narrative strategies — in the service of a vision he believed to be true, thus creating the hybrid he defined a “truth that has the face of a lie” — “un ver c’ha faccia di menzogna”’ (UDC, p. 11). In other words, Dante championed the use of rhetorical techniques in the service of a divinely inspired message. As Barolini points out, Augustine had clearly stated this in the De doctrina christiana, citing the authority of Saint Paul to legitimize its use: ‘In other words, Augustine discredits the common misapprehension that a “prophet” cannot also be a “poet”, that one who is inspired need not also attend to the “how” of language and rhetoric’ (UDC, p. 11).Beginning of page[p. 68]

How. This is the basis of all research in The Undivine Comedy, which is completely original and new (not by chance do I use one of the key terms that Barolini privileges in Dante’s poetic construction): ‘In sum, I suggest we accept Dante’s insistence that he is telling the truth and move on to the consequences, which we can only do by accepting that he intends to represent his fiction as credible, believable, true’ (UDC, p. 13). There is one condition, however. We must not read the poem

through the lens of its own fiction treated as a dogma. When we approach the poem in this way, treating its fiction as objective reality, we neglect to remember that Dante is a creator and that his system of classification, for all its apparent objectivity, is a representation (and a rather arbitrary and idiosyncratic one at that) designed to promote the illusion of objectivity. […] Once more, the conniving specularity of the ‘ver c’ha faccia di menzogna’ has cast its spell, leading us to pay its creator the ultimate compliment of forgetting that he is indeed creating the world he describes. (UDC, pp. 15–16).

All literary works, great and small, are always based on a tacit pact of verisimilitude between author and reader. But there is also a hierarchy between one work and another, based on the degree of verisimilitude achieved by the reader: the level of interpenetration and therefore of aesthetic results. The Commedia, a work created in a particular historical environment and with particular religious beliefs quite distant from us, has achieved a sort of miracle:

The Commedia makes narrative believers of us all. By this I mean that we accept the possible world (as logician call it) that Dante has invented; we do not question its premises or assumptions except on its own terms. We read the Commedia as Fundamentalists read the Bible, as though it were true, and the fact that we do this is not connected to our religious beliefs, for on a narrative level, we believe the Commedia without knowing that we do so. The history of the Commedia’s reception offers a sustained demonstration of our narrative credulity, our readerly incapacity to suspend our suspension of disbelief in front of the poet-creator’s masterful deployment of what are essentially techniques of verisimilitude. (UDC, p. 16, italics mine)

This is an outcome that was explicitly and emphatically foreseen and desired by the author Dante himself, not for nothing a poet-prophet in Beginning of page[p. 69] his aspirations and scriptural achievements. Implicitly, and with great caution but ultimately with great clarity, he establishes himself as a new Savior, well beyond any previous vision or journey into the afterlife, and he proposes his work as a new book for the salvation of humanity, right from the second canto of the Inferno. In contrast to all — or almost all — other Dante scholars, Teodolinda understood this well: she understood that to say ‘Io non Enëa, io non Paulo sono’ (‘I am not Aeneas, not Saint Paul’; Inf. 2.32) is to say exactly the opposite, to say that he is the new Aeneas and above all the new Paul.55Quotations from the Commedia are from Dante Alighieri: La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. by Giorgio Petrocchi, Società Dantesca Italiana, Edizione Nazionale, 4 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1966–67). English translations, with modifications at times for clarity, come from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. by Allen Mandelbaum, 3 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980–82). And even more: he is chosen by God to resolve the crisis of his time and to save humanity, undertaking the path that would lead him to surpass every pagan author (starting with his own guide, Virgil), and every other literary genre, including that highest, the epic, in order to found a new genre, the ‘poema sacro’ (Par. 25.1).

If we therefore want to understand the poem more fully, we must try to understand its creative mechanisms, the said and the unsaid, the rhetorical choices, the form:

Therefore, the formal reading that follows differs from earlier formal readings, essentially stylistic, in that, in my reading, form is never disengaged from content; it never slips the traces of the ideology it serves. It is precisely in the ideology of the form that we can perceive the means through which Dante controls his readers and shapes their readings, and that we can locate the wellsprings of his mimetic art. (UDC, p. 17, italics mine)

It is necessary, we could also say, to break down the text as a complex system to understand how it was made in its multiple appearances and textures. Or, in Barolini’s terminology, it is necessary to ‘detheologize’ it:

We must detheologize our reading if we are to understand what makes the theology stick. For the final irony of our tradition of Dante exegesis is that, as a direct result of our theologus-poeta dichotomy, and frequently in the name of preserving the Beginning of page[p. 70] poetry, we have obscured its greatness by accepting uncritically its directives and its premises, its ‘theology’. To the extent that we read as the poet directs us to read we have not fully appreciated the magnificence of his direction. To the extent that we hearken always to what Dante says rather than take note of what he has done, we treat him as he would have us treat him — not a poet, but as an authority, a ‘theologian’. (UDC, p. 17, italics mine)

Mutatis mutandis, we can follow Barolini in considering what Gian Biagio Conte called ‘a philology of the narrative structure’.66Gian Biagio Conte, Il genere e i suoi confini (Turin: Stampatori, 1980), p. 112. Conte was, not coincidentally, one of the first to write about poetic memory and the relations among poets as ‘allusive art’, according to the formula of Giorgio Pasquali, or, better, to use the prevailing terminology of intertextuality. This is another of the methodological motors with which Barolini has journeyed across the Commedia, arriving at original discoveries thanks to a formal interpretation in which, as compared to her predecessors, the ‘form is never disengaged from the content’ (UDC, p. 17).

Is it possible to extend Barolini’s method by focusing on other aspects of a ‘philology of the narrative structure’ (UDC, p. 17)? This will be my endeavour here. For instance, we might consider further analyses of the ways in which Dante constructs the poetic text, so that, as in Barolini’s proposal, we can recognize other forms of ‘camouflaging’ through which Dante diverts our attention, causing us to lose fundamental elements of the discourse and its modalities of developing. I will try to do so by examining two aspects of the text that are parallel but in reality strongly interconnected: the function of the great characters of the poem (Dante, Virgil, Beatrice) and the function of intertextual relations, seen not episodically but as a great structural machine producing a further meaning, a second meaning parallel to the first, but hidden.

First of all, who are Dante, Virgil and Beatrice, really? In ‘Dante’, we have come to distinguish two ‘functions’ for some time now (thanks to the intuitions of Charles Singleton and, more specifically, of Gianfranco Contini in terms of encounters with the poets)77Gianfranco Contini, ‘Dante come personaggio-poeta della Commedia’, in Contini, Un’idea di Dante (Turin: Einaudi, 1976), pp. 33–62.: the author Beginning of page[p. 71] and the character. However, the notable consequences of this critically important distinction regarding the structure, the narration and the formalization and dramatization of the discourse have not been fully developed, since it has never been systematically analyzed throughout the poem, along with the identity and function of Virgil and Beatrice. The result of the failure to analyze systematically this narrative function is to lose the necessarily dialectical and changeable development of the characters, from canticle to canticle. Here, therefore, is a gap between what Dante says and what he instead sets in motion in the poem.

Right at the beginning of the poem he says ‘I’. This I-character, in addition to representing itself as a ‘we’ (‘nostra vita’) and thus speaking on behalf of all human beings, is also revealed at the same time as the one who narrates, the I-narrator. From a narratological perspective this distinction is as important as the one between ‘existential I’ and ‘transcendent I’, better known and more often discussed but not fully developed in its narratological function:88Ibid.

The narrator is evidently the protagonist of the story, though playing two roles: he is the character and at the same time the representative of Beginning of page[p. 72] all human beings (and therefore, in some way, the representative of all readers of the work), as well as the narrator: ‘per trattar […] dirò’ (Inf. 1.8–9). The fact that the character also represents all humanity adds a further element to the dialectic between the two functions since it places the reader, as represented by the I-character, in a structurally interactive position with the text, especially in relation to the dialectic between the I-character and the I-narrator. Because of this dialectic, the work is not closed or circumscribed in a religiously-based vision, but is rather open to the life experiences of the ‘existential’-I, to the contradictions of the characters he meets, and above all to the readers. While the I-narrator knows everything about the journey and describes the situations and the characters according to the divine judgment already known to him, the I-character and actor (who is representative of all of us) can — and does — express emotional or intellectual positions different from those of the narrator (and different, therefore, implicitly, from divine judgment). The two perspectives often place before the reader a dilemma or a question.

The reader is the third fundamental interlocutor of the poem, along with the character and narrator, because she or he is often called upon to take a position — indeed, to cast the deciding vote. The narrator often addresses the reader to admonish her or him, to call her or him as a witness, but above all to involve the reader directly in the production of the text and in its truth, both explicitly and implicitly, when a difference of opinion emerges between the penitent traveler and the narrator. It is for the reader that the Commedia was written and also organized structurally in its dialogic form and its dramatization or actio: a dramatization that is a necessary tool to distinguish the poem from a moral treatise or sermon. It is on the reader that the future destiny of the work will depend, and Dante-auctor is perfectly aware of this.

Consequently, through the institutionalization of differences of opinion and through the structural use of dialogism and dramatization, the Commedia always calls to its readers, even today, and it will continue to call to them in the future. It calls to its readers quite aside from their ideology or affiliation. It calls on us to think and to make decisions about the punishments and merits apportioned by God in the afterlife — punishments and merits that have obviously been allocated Beginning of page[p. 73] by the narrator — and to hold opinions on good and evil. This is an author who, rooted as he is in a well-defined historical time and space, nonetheless has found a way to address problems that are still current. If it is true that a key of Dante’s construction is, as Auerbach proposed, the idea of figura as a truthful completion in the afterlife of what has appeared and appears to the world, it is equally true that if Dante had not ‘theatricalized’ his journey and his encounters with the damned, the saved, and the blessed through the dialectic between narrator and character, the reader would not have been placed in a position to react in such an active way.

As a result of the theatricalized journey, every encounter with the souls is in fact a dialectical encounter between the consciousness of the individual historical I-character, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, his placement in the afterlife according to divine judgment, as decided by the auctor (Dante-narrator), and as acted out and experienced by Dante-character. The contrapasso is the knot that visually connects the two moments, making them memorable, sometimes in a spectacular way. Dante in this way creates the conditions for an organically interactive reader, a reader who is implicitly forced, subtly but inexorably, to take part and to question herself and the world. The I-character becomes a penitent pilgrim on the path to salvation in exactly the same way, interactively, through the encounters with souls, with their vices and virtues, and with the punishments and rewards decided by God.

On the one hand, Dante-narrator scripts for his Dante-character the stages of a long penitential journey (today we could say a psychoanalytic journey), with respect to his own history and that of the world. On the other hand, the reader is also constantly and strategically summoned to the same self-analytic journey with respect to the various punishments and rewards. The reader is summoned in a subtle and implicit way, not narratively declared but, in reality, extremely open, precisely because of the co-presence, quite often, of two possible judgments: that of God and that represented by Dante-character. The polysemy in the Epistle to Cangrande and according to Christian biblical exegesis, which Dante rightly and necessarily claims for the interpretation of the Comnedia, should not be applied only to the coexistence of a literal and an allegorical meaning, but also to the possible Beginning of page[p. 74] plurality of value judgments that are ‘objectively’ offered to the reader, precisely because each figura includes a before and an after, an earthly man and a soul that represents the completion rather than the cancellation of that earthly man, even after the divine judgment.

Whether or not Dante consciously foresaw it or pursued it, this is in any case the inevitable result of his culture and his structural choices, which make the Commedia an open work, infinitely rereadable and reinterpretable, whatever its literal meanings: according to divine justice, the individual character’s previous historicity and his eternal destiny come to coincide and determine a constant co-presence of possible interpretations by the reader (‘quidquid recipitur ad modum recipientis recipitur’ states a famous scholastic proverb, certainly known to Dante). If we look closely, it is a system of an implicit verisimilitude inherent in the fictio, precisely because the same fictio is continuously and almost inadvertently placed before us to judge, its values inevitably experienced as our own.

Dante’s idea of ​​justice, one of the fundamental cornerstones of the Commedia,99Roberto Antonelli, ‘In limine, tra auctor e agens: Francesca da Rimini’, in Dante poeta-giudice del mondo terreno (Rome: Viella, 2021), pp. 85–103. is therefore almost always presented as highly problematic, even in the text’s most definitive and straightforward statements, as it is always filtered through the ultimate goals of the work. Among these goals the narrator's affirmations with respect to the injustices of the world are certainly central. Indeed, the question of justice is always problematic because it too is always entrusted to the reader’s point of view.

Let us take one of the most famous and studied cases, the canto of Paolo and Francesca in Inferno 5.1010Ibid. Since the time of Francesco De Sanctis, there has been discussion about Dante’s attitude towards Francesca. Here we must apply the distinction discussed above, between Dante-character and Dante-narrator. We should specify, as has not often been done, that we are interested in the attitude of Dante-narrator, given that Dante-character, who is at the first stage of his penitential journey, is so emotionally involved in the encounter, right from the beginning — ‘pietà mi giunse, e fui quasi smarrito’ (‘pity Beginning of page[p. 75] seized me, and I was like a man astray’; Inf. 5.72); ‘affettüoso grido’ (‘loving cry’; Inf. 5.87); ‘c’hai pietà del nostro mal perverso’ (‘you have pitied our atrocious state’; Inf. 5.93) — that at the end he falls ‘come corpo morto cade’ (‘as a dead body falls’; Inf. 5.142). If attention had been paid to the distinction between Dante-narrator and Dante-character, many conflicting interpretations could have been avoided, for they are interpretations entirely tainted by the idea that there is only one ‘Dante’ in the poem.

In this case, it is particularly evident, as Contini proposed, that the historicity of the Dante-character and the historicity of the Francesca-character, both followers, albeit in different ways, of the doctrine of courtly love, overlap for much of the encounter (Francesca speaks with the words of Guinizzelli and Dante).1111Contini, ‘Dante come personaggio-poeta’. The result is to leave Dante-traveller no other solution than to faint before the fatal consequences of the love poetry he had so dearly loved — and in whose tenets he had believed so thoroughly. And it is equally evident that Dante-narrator plays a completely different role, as does Virgil.

That Francesca maintains a strong relationship with her ‘beautiful body’ and is at the same time well aware, through the ‘tortures’ that she suffers, of the sin by which her destiny is eternally fixed, is evident throughout canto 5: verse 135, ‘questi, che mai da me non fia diviso’ (‘this one, who never shall be parted from me’), is certainly to be interpreted as ‘the eternal and tragic duration of that moment [i.e. the moment of the kiss on the mouth] […] in which they chose their destiny’.1212For Chiavacci Leonardi’s commentary see Dante Alighieri, Commedia, ed. with commentary by Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, 3 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 1991–97), i: Inferno (1991), p. 164. However, it is significant that the reading sia (rather that fia) was already ‘widespread’ (as Petrocchi notes) in the manuscript tradition (in fact, it is found in 72 of the 150 manuscripts examined by Edward Moore).1313Edward Moore, Contributions to the Textual Criticism of the ‘Divina Commedia’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1889), p. 290. The variant sia introduces a further element of attachment to Francesca’s ‘earthly’ thought process, which we encounter in the Lectura Dantis of the great Italian actor Roberto Benigni, who with sia glossed the correct reading, fia (‘sarà’). The variant sia is, in any Beginning of page[p. 76] case, not so strange as it has seemed to some, since even fia or ‘sarà’ can be interpreted, and has been interpreted, in two contradictory ways.

I do not think that all the above confusion, manifesting itself even at the textual and exegetical level, should be considered a coincidence: the confusion results from the double exegetical level entrusted on the one hand to the figura and on the other to the auctor-agens of the poem. We encounter the same issue in other very famous episodes that critics have racked their brains over (from Farinata to Ulysses and beyond), where Dante’s judgment seems to be torn between the magnanimity and greatness of the damned souls on the one hand and the harsh divine judgment on the other. This doubleness places before the reader an impossible and perpetually amphibological choice, which occurs because the text exists within a double register of values that are ultimately compressed into a unitary but structurally distinct figure: the narrator/character.

This is also what happens, mutatis mutandis, with respect to those characters whose divine destinies Dante, covered by the exceptionalism of being a traveler by grace and divine investiture, diverts from the normative point of view. The author removes some characters from the divine destinies that were considered most obvious, had the author wanted to conform to the legal criteria of fama/infamia accepted by his contemporaries. This is the case of Buonconte da Montefeltro, Cunizza da Romano and many others, perhaps also Brunetto Latini, certainly Boniface VIII. Unexpected clemency or unexpected punishment, in other words, are the dictates of a divine justice that reaches us solely through the word of Dante-narrator. These unexpected judgments overturn the judgments of men and implicitly take us back to the construction of Dante-character and to the legal condemnations that Dante Alighieri himself suffered — condemnations that he considered unfounded and unjust.

The ‘lagrimetta’ that saves Buonconte from hell, the revelation of Pope Nicholas III regarding the future damnation of Pope Boniface, and the many occurrences of ‘forse’ (perhaps) that hang over the narrative: these are all features of the poem that have a distinct function and purpose. Like the characters Francesca, Farinata, Cavalcanti, Ulysses and so many others, although certainly for different reasons, these features all have a common purpose, which is the narrator’s need to have Beginning of page[p. 77] at his disposal both a clear set of rules (the moral order of the three kingdoms) and the possibility of the exception.1414Gennaro Sasso, ‘L’ananke di Ulisse’, in Sasso, Ulisse e il desiderio (Rome: Viella, 2011), pp. 15–120 (p. 38). This is the judicial freedom that he grants himself, ordinarily as auctor but sometimes also as agens (think for example of the anger manifested by the penitent traveler against Filippo Argenti or Bocca degli Abati and Branca Doria). This judicial freedom extends at least as far as human free will, in its struggles with divine justice.

Are we discussing what holds for Dante, or what holds for us today? In fact, it is unnecessary to decide between these hermeneutic possibilities. In all literary texts these hermeneutic possibilities are always co-present and are a guarantee of timeless vitality, as well as the reason that a work succeeds in remaining a constant presence in the global canon. The concept of figura renders this co-presence even more a factor in the Commedia: it is the doubleness that, from a Christian perspective, is inherent in every human being and therefore in the meaning of every human’s existence. This doubleness is in fact already to a certain extent foreseen by the author. The author-character and the reader are surprisingly equal in the Commedia, for the reader is also called to judge and to act freely, according to the example provided by the work itself and by its author, beyond what is expressed by the narration in the literal and linear sense.

Thus, in addition to freedom and justice, the Commedia also generates a sort of equality that is both moral and critical: if for Dante and his system it was possible to throw popes into hell and save those who were pre-convicted in the court of public opinion, why is the same not possible for the reader, or for the contemporary student? For this reason, if we look closely, the Commedia is defined in the Epistle to Cangrande with resolute self-awareness as belonging to the genus phylosophie — the genus of philosophy — that practices ‘morale negotium, sive ethica’ (the business of morals, namely ethics; Ep. 13.16).1515All quotations from the Epistle to Cangrande are from Dante Alighieri, Epistola XIII, in Dante, Opere minori, ed. by Giorgio Brugnoli, 2 vols (Milan and Naples: Ricciardi, 1979–88), ii (1988), pp. 598–643. English translations from Dante Alighieri, Dante to Cangrande: English Version, trans. by James Marchand <https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/cangrande.english.html> [accessed 21 May 2025]. The Epistle in Beginning of page[p. 78] this instance as well shows an extraordinary acuity and relevance with respect to the meaning of the text.

Dante made his fiction a work of individual and collective self-analysis but also, and above all, he made his fiction a work of (self-)reparation: a reparation that he grants himself as narrator (and author) for the in-justices of Florence and the world, and for the in-famy that had been heaped upon him.1616Justin Steinberg, Dante and the Limits of the Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). With his writing, he creates the conditions for his own just fame in the city of God, and he overcomes the politics of the city of men, creating an alternative world, one that is moreover guaranteed by God (thus anticipating, in fact, the romantic notion of the writer-creator). At the same time, he has brought into being a reader who is programmatically summoned (sometimes even explicitly, in the course of the poem, with literal appeals to the reader) to participate in the same narrative mechanism: the reader too is part of the program that intends to ‘removere viveres in hac vita de statu miserie et perducere ad statum felicitatis’ (‘remove those living in this life frome the state of misery and to lead them to the state of bliss’; Ep. 13.15). This is a constant human desire, not only in times of historical crises (as in the age of Dante, and in our own), but also in individual crises — which is to say it is a desire that exists always.

From the narratological point of view, special attention should also be paid to the male deuteragonist, Virgil, the Latin poet born ‘sotto ’l buono Augusto | nel tempo de li dèi falsi e bugiardi’ (‘under the good Augustus | in the time of the false and lying gods’; Inf. 1.71–72), as he presents himself. Virgil is immediately recognized by the I-character as his own auctor. But who is Virgil really, as a narrative function?

As he immediately proposes, and as is universally recognized, Virgil is Dante's guide — ‘io sarò tua guida’ (‘I shall guide you’; Inf. 1.113) — in the journey to escape from the wild forest (ll. 91–93). He is at the same time also the one who knows; he is the ‘famoso saggio’ (‘famous sage’; Inf. 1.49). He is wise not only as a historical figure, and as the ‘altissimo poeta’ (‘most high poet’; Inf. 4.80), the author of the poem that the Commedia will have to surpass, but as the one who knows the first two kingdoms in which Dante-penitent will have to travel. His Beginning of page[p. 79] function, according to Cesare Segre’s terminology,1717Cesare Segre, ‘Viaggi e visioni d’oltretomba fino alla Commedia di Dante’, in Segre, Fuori dal mondo (Turin: Einaudi, 1990), pp. 25–48 (pp. 31–32). is certainly that of the ‘Adiuvante-accompagnatore’ (‘helper-companion’) who has been sent by God with plenipotentiary powers (or almost plenipotentiary powers, given some of Virgil’s misadventures along the way), as in other journeys and visions of the afterlife. In reality, Virgil represents much more. He is an agent-character who on the one hand represents the narrator, but who can also announce the future of Dante-character, as well as his own replacement by a successor guide who will lead Dante to the blessed folk: ‘un’anima [...] più di me degna’ (‘a soul more worthy than I’; Inf. 1.122).

As the author of the greatest pagan epic poem, singer of the Empire through which ‘Cristo è romano’ (‘Christ is a Roman’; Purg. 32.102), and predecessor of Dante in the narration of the afterlife, it is obviously no coincidence that Virgil represents the narrator in the action and the unfolding of events, while also playing the role of ‘God’s plenipotentiary’. Virgil is immediately declared by Dante-character, with perfect and almost ludic correspondence to the narrative facts, to be ‘mio autore’ (‘my author’; Inf. 1.85): Virgil is representative of the narrator and of the ultimate Auctor, God, as well as of himself as auctor of the Aeneid.

The figure of Virgil offers, therefore, a rather complex tangle, one that is difficult to manage by Dante-author and difficult to understand even for the reader, beyond the simple literal meaning. Endowed with multiple narrative and dramatic possibilities, Virgil is a real and polysemic character, completely new. On the one hand, Virgil is the deuteragonist, participant and supporter in the vicissitudes of Dante-character (even to the point of showing his own weaknesses), a guide on whom the attention of critics has justly concentrated. On the other hand, Virgil is also a teacher and — as a representative of the narrator — the first judge and critic of the traveler’s behaviour. Most importantly, he is a participant, minor with respect to Dante but equally fundamental, in the implicit dialectic that runs through the entire poem. This is the dialectic between Dante-character and Dante-author, a dialectic present in all the episodes — and they are many —Beginning of page[p. 80] in which we see a conflict between the experience, desires, and implicit attitudes of Dante-character and the final judgments of God.

Only in this way will Dante-character be able to respond to the special divine grace that granted him this extraordinary journey to the afterlife; whether it was a vision or a dream is obviously of no importance — God knows, as St. Paul had already said. Dante-character therefore inevitably participates in a conflict in which he is the loser, he must be the loser, regardless of the opinion of Virgil himself, who at times seems to share the feelings of his charge (as in the episode of Paolo and Francesca, see below, especially verses 78–79). But this situation objectively creates a problem and a possible gap with respect to the reader’s reactions, which are inevitably open, as demonstrated by the reactions of critics over the centuries. And, in any case, such a gap is a sure guarantee of the verisimilitude of the story.

It is through Virgil that the narrator can continuously communicate essential elements of the story and of the souls encountered. Because of Virgil, he can do so without intervening in the first person, as happens instead with the addresses to the reader (not coincidentally all of a metatextual nature). We can see this use of Virgil starting from the first great encounter, the one with Paolo and Francesca:

The names of the great lovers of the protagonist’s literary world can only be recognized through the guide. It is the guide, too, who understands Dante-penitent’s distress and indicates to him the modality of communication that he should employ. It is precisely through a direct question from Virgil that the reader learns what could not be perceived otherwise except through a direct intervention by the narrator. In this way, the reader learns of the deep distress caused in Dante-character by the sudden death of the two sinful lovers, a death that — because it was sudden — was therefore without remedy: ‘’l modo ancor m’offende’ (‘how it was done still wounds me’; Inf. 5.102). Such a death is very far from the penitential journey that Dante-character is experiencing through encounters like the one with Paolo and Francesca and the recognition of their common emotional journey:

Through Virgil, the narrator can avoid boring explanations regarding the order of Inferno (canto 11) and Purgatorio (canto 17), as well as many other necessary explanations, giving the afterlife of the Commedia a completely original structure and legitimacy. The law that regulates the penalties of the sinners, the contrapasso (Inf. 28.142), fits as if into a perfectly clear and transparent machine, offering the reader an easy means to understand the whole process and a further sense of participation in the events. Through Virgil, Dante-narrator can allow himself to correct implicitly Dante’s experience as a lyric poet, as in the discourse on love of Purgatorio 18; it is also through Virgil that the author clarifies to the reader the difference between the various types of love. Through Virgil, Dante-narrator will be able to penetrate Beginning of page[p. 82] Dante-character’s desires (even beyond his explicit requests), without the narrator’s or the character’s direct intervention: ‘Però a la domanda che mi faci | quinc’ entro satisfatto sarà tosto, | e al disio ancor che tu mi taci’ (‘And so the question you have asked of me | will soon find satisfaction while we’re here, | as will the longing you have hid from me’; Inf. 10.16–18). Further on, Virgil adds: ‘Volgiti! Che fai? | Vedi là Farinata che s’è dritto: | da la cintola in sù tutto ’l vedrai’ (‘Turn round! What are you doing? | That’s Farinata who has risen there — | you will see all of him from the waist up’; Inf. 10.31–33). This procedure occurs elsewhere as well, as long as Virgil is present.

Precisely because Virgil is the auctor of reference, master and ‘father’, Dante-narrator implicitly places himself as the one who will surpass his father and his guide. For his guide is just a guide, albeit a very high one, chosen precisely because he is the greatest pagan poet (‘altissimo poeta’; Inf. 4.80). Statius, the Christian Virgil, has many of the functions previously allotted to Virgil. For Dante-character, Statius is the new master, the one who incorporated all the epic and pagan poetry through Virgil, and thus goes beyond Virgil. The Commedia will therefore not be epic like the pagan Aeneid, ‘l’alta mia tragedìa’ mentioned by Virgil in Inferno 20.114, nor even comedìa, as the poet immediately after calls his own poem in Inferno 21.2 (confirming the use of comedìa in Inferno 16.129). These are two terms that significantly are used only in the Inferno; ultimately, in Paradiso the poem will instead be designated a ‘poema sacro’ (Par. 25.2), a ‘sacrato poema’ (Par. 23.62): a new genre which incorporates all previous genres and draws from contemporary sacred representations, in the same way that the journey-vision, as Segre points out, has certainly drawn from similar, much more modest previous works of journeys and visions.1818Segre, ‘Viaggi e visioni’, p. 40.

The Commedia boasts a remarkable theatricality that is organic to the structure and narration of the poem, although little noted and discussed by commentators. Thanks to the dialectic between character and narrator, and between character and guides (above all Beatrice, then of course Virgil, but also Statius and the various saints of Paradiso), theatricality provides a fundamental narratological grid of the Commedia, in which are progressively situated all the other dramatis Beginning of page[p. 83] personae of the great theatre of humanity: consisting of humanity both historical and contemporary to Dante-narrator and Dante-character.

The Commedia’s use of theatricality includes very subtle nuances in which, for example, Virgil is a guide, the ‘highest poet’, the author of the ‘highest tragedy’, and at the same time a veiled competitor. He is one to whom Dante-character addresses himself with almost excessive deference, immediately followed by an implicit surpassing of his guide and master:

In quoting his own work in response and declaring that Dante had carefully read it — ‘e così ’l canta | l’alta mia tragedìa in alcun loco: | ben lo sai tu che la sai tutta quanta’ (‘a certain passage | of my high tragedy has sung it so; | you know that well enough, who know the whole’; Inf. 20.112–14) — Virgil confirms his own role as an active deuteragonist in a dialectic with the primary narrator and protagonist, Dante. And he does this just before his protégé distances himself from the ‘high’ tragedy of his auctor by defining his own work as a comedìa at the beginning of Inferno 21.

Once again, here we find a complex interplay that thickens the poetic text while at the same time establishing precise theological implications: two travellers, coinciding with two narrators, who at the end of Inferno 4 resume their journey together, leaving behind all the other great pagan authors. But only one will make the journey to the end. The narrator will reserve for Virgil the task of proclaiming Dante’s purification, not by chance after meeting Statius (the ‘Christian’ Virgil), the classical ‘comic’ authors of the second classical canon Beginning of page[p. 84] in Purgatorio 22, and the vernacular poets who are friends or in some way interconnected with the travelling protagonist:

At that same moment Virgil announces the imminent arrival of Beatrice, whose beautiful eyes will replace him as celestial guide, and who appears to Dante first in ancient guise, as an ‘antica fiamma’ (‘ancient flame’; Purg. 30.48), just at the moment in which Virgil completes his function within the poem. From pagan philosophical wisdom and the cardinal virtues we pass to divine wisdom and the theological virtues:Beginning of page[p. 85]

But Beatrice is also the very first narrative element in the poem; she is the promoter of the whole story, the one who had requested Virgil’s intervention through the intercession of the Virgin. At the same time Beatrice is the one who will bring the poem’s meaning to its conclusion. She is the woman whose death in the Vita nuova had initiated a decisive Beginning of page[p. 86] process,1919Roberto Antonelli, ‘La morte di Beatrice e la struttura della storia’, in Beatrice nell’opera di Dante e nella memoria europea (1290–1990), Atti del Convegno internazionale, Napoli 10–14 dicembre 1990, ed. by Maria Picchio Simonelli, Amalia Cecere, and Mariarosaria Spinetti (Florence: Cadmo, 1994), pp. 34–56. one that was then interrupted and resumed in the Commedia, and whose presence will ensure the protagonist’s repentance and therefore his success and ascent to the heaven of the Empyrean up to God. But now Beatrice also takes on a new function, which goes well beyond the functions of guide: ‘Everyone realizes that Beatrice is she and is not she. It is she, the ancient one, as the trembling of Dante’s veins at the mere feeling of her presence demonstrates; but she is also distant, veiled, wrapped in clouds of flowers thrown by angelic hands, welcomed by sacred songs’.2020Dante Alighieri, Commedia, commentary by Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi, ii: Purgatorio (1994), p. 877, translation mine.

In the three final cantos of Purgatorio, the narrative path and the allegorical meaning are intertwined in an almost inextricable way, generating a particular density of the text, which calls the reader to that exegetical effort that Augustine had already indicated as strongly aesthetic in one of the books most meditated on by Dante, the De doctrina christiana (2.6.7–8). Beatrice clearly represents divine wisdom when she arrives dressed in the colors of the three theological virtues: ‘sovra candido vel cinta d’uliva | donna m’apparve, sotto verde manto | vestita di color di fiamma viva’ (‘a woman showed herself to me; above | a white veil, she was crowned with olive boughs; | her cape was green; her dress beneath, flame-red’; Purg. 30.31–33). Beatrice’s fundamental function in the Commedia is to carry the banner of Love, maintaining a significance that she possessed throughout Dante’s literary life (a literary life that she herself sums up in Purgatorio 31.52–63). She states this function explicitly to Virgil right from the beginning: ‘I’ son Beatrice che ti faccio andare | vegno del loco ove tornar disio: | amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare’ (‘For I am Beatrice who send you on; | I come from where I most long to return; | Love prompted me, that Love which makes me speak’; Inf. 2.70–72).

Beatrice is organically linked, as we know, to the very foundational principles of the poem and of Dante’s spiritual and poetic life. But above all she is an essential narrative connection between before and Beginning of page[p. 87] after, a fundamental narratological element that allows the character and the reader to begin to understand more clearly the meaning of the life and the penitential journey of a man who represents all humanity (the famous ‘nostra’ in the first verse) but who is above all himself. He is the poet whose life and literary career Beatrice recalls at the decisive moment, when she leads him to complete repentance and therefore to salvation:

Beatrice is therefore also the one who will have to assume the role of harsh judge (Purg. 30.58–81); unlike Virgil, she anticipates for the living protatgonist the final judgment of God. In this way she underlines once again one of the fundamental aims of the poem, the affirmation of justice. Above all, she also supports the fundamental truth claims of the Commedia, as the direct witness of the earthly history of the protagonist and his path to salvation:

Beatrice will thus supervise Dante’s decisive liberation from sin, leading him to reflect on and repent for everything that had distanced him from her (Purg. 30.118–41 and 31.43–60) and appearing to him in her new and even more stunningly transformative guise (Purg. 31.82–90). She also completely recapitulates the internal story of the Commedia, through the contrast between the penitential ‘ch’io caddi vinto’ (‘I Beginning of page[p. 90] fell, overcome’) of Purgatorio 31.89 and Inferno 5’s ‘caddi come corpo morto’ (‘I fell as a dead body’; l. 142):

Because of the multiplicity of roles and thematic aspects that she embodies, Beatrice still represents perhaps the most debated and mysterious critical node of the Commedia. She is a woman who reveals to Dante, thanks to her own death, the love-charitas that he follows from the Vita nuova to Paradiso; she is also revealed wisdom and guardian of divine justice in the world (Purg. 31.86–87). Finally, she is the first of the commissioners of the poem, alongside Cacciaguida and Saint Peter, part of the necessary completion of the journey:

Precisely because of her polysemy, because of the multiplicity of her functions, which are apparently so transparent but at the same time so elusive, Beatrice is the necessary link to Dante’s introspection and self-awareness throughout the poem, not only at the top of Purgatorio. She is perhaps the highest literary representation of the paradise-woman in all romance lyric poetry, although Beatrice herself denies that identity in a gently ironic statement to Dante, who has just been overcome by the light of her smile: ‘Volgiti e ascolta; | ché non pur ne’ miei occhi è paradiso’ (‘Turn to him and listen — for | not only in my eyes is paradise’; Par. 18.20–21). Here he refers to her new function as guide in Paradiso: a woman not of this world. The narrator therefore proposes her as the ultimate aspiration to the divine, since paradise includes Beatrice as part of its ‘forma general’, to which she returns after having exhausted her function as a poetic and theological guide:

The other (‘altro’) of verse 58 signals the absence of Beatrice, now distant but very close in spirit. In this way Dante is able also to affirm her function as the guarantor of his hope for future salvation; for the protagonist, this is certainly the essence of the character of his lady. She was also the guarantor of the faith with which he had declared himself filled at his examination by Saint Peter in Paradiso 24, a faith that has supported him up to this point:Beginning of page[p. 92]

The other — Beatrice’s successor in the guiding and narrative function, Saint Bernard — will be the one who will pray to the Virgin Mary, from whom the help for the sinner lost in the dark forest had originally come: ‘Donna è gentil nel ciel che si compiange’ (‘In Heaven there’s a gentle lady who weeps’; Inf. 2.94). The special function of the Madonna is remembered agaom at the end of the poem: ‘La tua benignità non pur soccorre | a chi domanda, ma molte fïate | liberamente al dimandar precorre’ (‘Your loving-kindness does not only answer | the one who asks, but it is often ready | to answer freely long before the asking’; Par. 33.16–18). The special function of the Virgin Mary thus concludes the penitent’s journey in a circular fashion, before the final vision of God: of that Love that had moved and continues to move Beatrice along with the sun and the stars.

The role and literal and allegorical function of the great co-protagonists (Dante, Virgil and Beatrice, but the discussion could be extended at least to Statius and Saint Bernard), therefore constitute the Beginning of page[p. 93] plot of a narration that also leads to the less superficial layers of the text. But there is also another systematic narrative plotline, perhaps even more important, which builds a second level of meaning throughout the poem, thanks to dense references that connect characters, themes and situations — ones that are close by, and also very distant. This is the real challenge addressed to the reader, who is called upon to identify those characters, themes and situations, to reconstruct their logic and to participate in a higher exegetic and aesthetic level. Dante also establishes a sort of hierarchy among the readers, as revealed in the famous prologue of Paradiso 2, beginning ‘O voi che siete in piccioletta barca’ (‘O you who are within your little bark’; Par. 2.1).

All the episodes and the hundreds of figures that populate the poem are in fact united, memorized and strengthened thanks to a technique, the memoria verborum, called the ‘allusive art’ by some Italian critics and by others intertextuality, to whose importance Barolini has repeatedly called attention. Together with the memoria rerum, it constitutes a principle that is not only structuring but also narratological and aesthetic. It contributes powerfully to creating a denser meaning of the poem, detaching it from common language and establishing a second level of narration, beyond the literal one.

For particularly important speeches and themes, Dante frequently uses not only numerological correspondences and the three ‘appointed’ places of a work: that is, the beginning, the middle and the end of each canticle and of the various cantos (as rhetoric taught). He also uses the golden ratio of the poem and of the individual cantos for the same purpose. He establishes correlations and interpretative references between corresponding cantos of each canticle, reserving, as is well known, the sixth and seventh cantos for political argumentation (Ciacco in the Inferno, the negligent princes in Purgatorio, Justinian in Paradiso), the fifteenth and sixteenth cantos for the poem’s fundamental ethical-political principles (Brunetto Latini in Inferno, Guido del Duca/Marco Lombardo in Purgatorio, Cacciaguida in Paradiso), and the twenty-seventh cantos — this last case being particularly interesting because Dante uses these cantos to highlight the progressive affirmation of himself as a poet-prophet.

In Inferno, canto 27 is dedicated to Boniface VIII, inventor of the Jubilee, a simoniac journey as opposed to the true spiritual journey Beginning of page[p. 94] of the traveller Dante, who in Paradiso 27 is sacredly invested with the function of poet-prophet by Peter and set to work against ‘quelli ch’usurpa in terra il luogo mio’ (‘He who on earth usurps my place’; Par. 27.22), that is, Boniface himself. The last example in particular can be full of further allusive and semantic meanings, since it seems evident that Dante’s true Jubilee journey is precisely a journey in and of memory, an interior journey, as opposed to the Jubilee, an entirely exterior journey, which for Dante is moreover heretical. The Jubilee was proclaimed by Boniface in his Rome, which in the eyes of Saint Peter had become a sewer, ‘cloaca’ (Par. 27.25). The rhyme -aca, as in cloaca, is used, throughout the entire poem, only in Paradiso 27 and Paradiso 16, at the moment of the celestial investiture by Saint Peter and, earlier, at the moment of the earthly investiture in Dante’s meeting with his ancestor Cacciaguida, in the three central cantos of Paradiso (cantos 15–17). Moreover, Cacciaguida in Paradiso 17.51 uses a rhyme, -erca, of which there is only one other occurrence in the Commedia, in the previous canto (Par. 16.61), with repetition of the same rhyme series (noverca: merca: cerca). In this way, Dante connects the mercantile and corrupt infernal city of Florence to simoniacal and corrupt papal Rome, which in Paradiso 27.46–60 will be a cloaca precisely because it is a place where the Christian people experience division and where the sacred is subjected to corruption and commerce.

Dante also uses the retrograde principle: for instance, the treatment of Fortune-Providence in the seventh canto of the Inferno is repeated in Paradiso 27, which is seven cantos from the end of the poem. Further subtle correspondences also occur, which might appear to be fantasies of modern criticism if they did not correspond perfectly to a rhetorical art that was learned at school during the medieval period and continued to be practiced throughout life in continuous ruminatio. Memory-work became almost second nature, even in the creative phase of the dispositio: ‘Dandi sunt certi quidam termini, ut contextus verborum, qui est difficillimus, continua et crebra meditatio, partis deinceps ipsas repetitus ordo coniungant’ (‘It is necessary to provide secure points of reference so that the coherent connection of words, which is very difficult, is aided by continuous and assiduous Beginning of page[p. 95] meditation, and that the order of words, recalled from memory, connects the various parts’).2121Inst. or. 11.2.28. All quotations from M. Fabi Quintiliani, Institutionis oratoriae libri xii, ed. by Michael Winterbottom, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Translation mine.

What is the purpose of so many symmetries and correspondences? Through such references, as well as through intertextual allusions, which are based on echoes provided by memory-work, Dante directs the reader to connect his journey and his encounters into a unitary vision. The recalls and the allusions offer him the thread to retrace his thought and his musical resonances,2222In De vulgari eloquentia Dante defines poetry as ‘fictio rethorica musicaque poita’ (‘a verbal invention composed according to the rules of rhetoric and music’; 2.4.2). Quotes and English translations from the De vulgari eloquentia are from Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, trans. by Steven Botterill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). well beyond the purely literal or episodic meaning, and not limited to individual cantos. The poem is stratified in a network of references each of which strengthens the other, also at a subliminal level. Not all readers will be able to grasp the individual echoes (and even today new ones are continually being discovered), but in many cases the phonic reference activates the semantic one (and vice versa), as Contini had intuited.2323Gianfranco Contini, ‘Filologia ed esegesi dantesca’, in Contini, Un’idea di Dante, pp. 133–42. Contini did not, however, connect the discovery and theorization of ‘verbal criticism’ to the memoria verborum and to procedures already technically known to Dante through rhetoric, and therefore critically verifiable beyond the divinationes of individual critics.2424On the fundamental role of rhyme and rhyming series in the construction of the poetic text (but in this case still without connections to the ars memoriae), see Roberto Antonelli, ‘Rima equivoca e tradizione rimica nella poesia di Giacomo da Lentini, i. Le canzoni’, in Bollettino del Centro di studi filologici e linguistici siciliani, 13 (1977), pp. 20–126; and Roberto Antonelli, ‘Tempo testuale tempo rimico. Costruzione del testo e critica nella poesia rimata’, Critica del testo, 1 (1998), pp. 177–201. An in-depth analysis of serial rhyme used in the Commedia can be found in the introduction of Arianna Punzi, Rimario della ‘Commedia’ (Rome: Bagatto, 2001), pp. 13–52, the first rhyming dictionary organized by rhyming series. Relevant and anticipatory analyses on Dante’s rhyming series (Reimbildungen) are found in Giorgio Brugnoli, ‘Ancor che fosse tardi’, in Brugnoli, Studi danteschi, 3 vols (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 1998), i, pp. 133–39.

Verbal references and correspondences will not always be events due to programmatic choices and to the intentional use of the procedures of memoria verborum; there are numerous places in which the Beginning of page[p. 96] rhyming correspondence does not have significant value and refers to an interdiscursive or intermemorial situation.2525Roberto Antonelli, ‘L’intertestualità contesa: intertestuale, interdiscorsivo, intermemoriale’, in Mélanges en l'honneur de Mariella Di Maio, ed. by Valentina Fortunato (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2019), pp. 15–24. At the same time, it cannot always be a coincidence that in corresponding cantos of the same canticle Dante rhymes the same word or the same series of rhymes or that in approximately ninety cases in the Commedia the same rhyming word is used in the same verse, exactly as each canticle is closed by the rhyme word ‘stelle’.

For example, in a famous verse in Purgatorio 24, Dante uses the rhyme-word ‘penne’: ‘Io veggio ben come le vostre penne | di retro al dittator sen vanno strette, | che de le nostre certo non avvenne’ (‘I clearly see how your pens follow closely | behind him who dictates, and certainly | that did not happen with our pens’; Purg. 24.58–60). It is not unlikely that in a very close canto, Purgatorio 27, where we find the same word in rhyming position — ‘al volo mi sentia crescer le penne’ (‘I felt my wings was growing for the flight’; Purg. 27.123) — Dante reuses the rhyme-word ‘penne’ with allusive purposes, given the apparent discursive continuity: from the superiority of stilnovistic and Dantean poetry over its predecessors in Purgatorio 24, we move, in Purgatorio 27, to the poet’s ascent to the earthly paradise and to earthly happiness, and therefore to his superiority over all his predecessors. Almost as a culmination of a journey centered on feathers and wings, we find ‘penne’ again at the end of the poem, in Paradiso 33.139, where it also serves as a reminder of the wings of Ulysses’s impossible ‘folle volo’: ‘de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo (‘we made oars into wings for the mad flight’; Inf. 26.125) in the last verses of the Commedia. Dante again uses the rhyme that throughout the poem had emphasized the superiority of his own poetic experience (‘penne’), now to recognize his own momentary inadequacy in the face of the difficulty of fully representing the mystery of God:

Dante sometimes uses the same series of rhymes in interrelated episodes within the Commedia, or between the Commedia and the works of the characters involved. The most striking case of the second type has long been noted and is found in Inferno 10, with respect to the rhyming series nome: come: lume, which intertextually refers to Guido Cavalcanti’s canzone Donna me prega.2626For terminology and critical use see Roberto Antonelli, ‘Rima equivoca e tradizione rimica’; and Roberto Antonelli, ‘Tempo testuale tempo rimico’. However, it should also be noted that they are significantly surrounded by other series of equal intratextual value (the adjacent ingegno: vegno: disdegno and meco: cieco: teco).2727Gianfranco Contini, ‘Filologia ed esegesi dantesca’ and ‘Cavalcanti in Dante’, in Contini, Un’idea di Dante, pp. 113–42 and 143–57; Giorgio Brugnoli, ‘Ancor che fosse tardi’, pp. 133–39; Roberto Antonelli, ‘Tra Farinata e Guido Cavalcanti’, in Antonelli, Dante poeta-giudice del mondo terreno (Rome: Viella, 2021), pp. 93–96. The same will happen in other places that are fundamental to the relationship between Dante and his romance predecessors, that is to say between Dante and his own work, revisited in the light of the memorial and penitential journey represented in the poema sacro.

Here we see an art of memory that is extended even beyond the traditional limits of ancient rhetoric, since Dante was able to insert into the ancient ars techniques of the new romance poetry, at the service of a discourse that aspired to unite ‘cielo e terra’ (‘heaven and earth’; Par. 25.2). He therefore needed poetry, not prose, and he needed the bond that united poetry and theology. This bond existed not only for Dante, but from the time of the first prophets, according to a famous definition of the contemporary yet distant Albertino Mussato: ‘Quisquis erat vates, vas erat ille Deus’ (‘Whoever was the prophet, the vessel was God’).2828Mussato, Epistola 7.15–21, in Albertino Mussato, ‘Épîtres métriques sur la poésie’, in Écérinide, épîtres métriques sur la poésie, songe, ed. and trans. by Jean-Frédéric Chevalier (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2000), pp. 37–39. Translation mine.Beginning of page[p. 98]

The choice of poetry and not prose, which seems so obvious to us in hindsight (like the choice of the vernacular over Latin, which was not obvious at the time either, as we are reminded by the controversy with Giovanni del Virgilio), in fact responds to a strategic and far-sighted choice. That choice reflects the logic of taking on a prophetic voice (that of the poet-theologian, as Boccaccio will immediately recognize) and taking on the role of custodian of cultural memory. Let us remember Quintilian again: ‘Even well-composed speeches will guide the memory with their structure. In fact, just as we learn verses more easily than a prose speech, so of prose speeches we learn better those that are well connected to each other than those that are not. Thus, it happens that even speeches that seemed improvised can be repeated word for word’.2929Quintilian, Inst. or. 11.2.39: ‘Etiam quae bene composita erunt memoriam serie sua ducent: nam sicut facilius versus ediscimus quam prorsam orationem, ita prorsae vincta quam dissoluta. Sic contigit ut etiam quae ex tempore uidebantur effusa ad uerbum repetita reddantur.’ Translation mine.

The Commedia is also this: the reduction of earthly time, of all history, to text and memory, to the long short-circuit in which past, present and future, the I-We/Dante, figura of all humanity, are arranged according to an a priori path of which Dante-author is the responsible director and creator, but above all, as he wanted, the Poet.