Possible Worlds and Reading Dante’s CommediaSuspension of Disbelief (Coleridge, Horace, Tolkien, Cecco d’Ascoli) and the Solvents of Narrative and HistoryTeodolinda Barolini

In 1817, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian, published an autobiographical treatise on aesthetic theory in which he coined the now canonical phrase ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. Outlining a project undertaken by him and William Wordsworth, in which Coleridge was assigned supernatural topics and Wordsworth everyday topics, he describes his own task thus:

My endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.11Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 1817, Chapter 14, §1. See the edition Biographia Literaria, ed. by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), ii, p. 6, now in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 16 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969–2001), vii (1985), pp. 1–856 (p. 6).Beginning of page[p. 16]

The issue of how a poet transfers ‘a semblance of truth’ to the ‘shadows of imagination’, in order to procure for those shadows ‘that willing suspension Beginning of page[p. 17] of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’, is deeply relevant to the study of Dante. The issue of ‘poetic faith’ speaks directly to Dante and to the history of Dante criticism, which has traditionally responded to Dante’s poem as though what it describes were empirically real.

Coleridge’s essay on Dante in his ‘Lecture X’ shows considerable knowledge of Inferno and enthusiastic appreciation of Dante’s poetry.22See Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. by Thomas Middleton Raynor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), pp. 131–90, hereafter ‘LX’. Subsequent references given in parentheses in the main text. The ‘Dante’ section of ‘Lecture X’, dated to 1818, encompasses pp. 145–57. While on the one hand he does not think that Dante effects the combination of poetry with doctrine ‘nearly as well as Milton’ (‘LX’, p. 150), on the other hand he has great praise for Dante’s poetry, which excels Milton’s in matters of ‘Style’: with respect to Dante’s ‘Style — the vividness, logical connexion, strength and energy of which cannot be surpassed’, writes Coleridge, ‘in this I think Dante superior to Milton’ (‘LX’, p. 151). Coleridge continues to enumerate ‘Dante’s chief excellences as a poet’ (‘LX’, p. 151), proceeding to Dante’s ‘Images’, ‘taken from obvious nature’ (‘LX’, p. 152), his ‘profoundness’, exemplified by Inferno 3 (‘LX’, p. 152), his ‘picturesqueness’, in which ‘Dante is beyond all other poets, modern or ancient’ (‘LX’, p. 153). To Dante’s picturesqueness Coleridge connects a further category, ‘the topographic reality of Dante’s journey through Hell’ (‘LX’, p. 155). The features of Dante’s poetic craft highlighted by Coleridge, in particular its ability to create the ‘topographic reality’ of Hell, focus on precisely those elements used by Dante to trigger the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ with respect to the supernatural.33Coleridge goes on to discuss ‘Dante’s power, — his absolute mastery over, although rare exhibition of, the pathetic’ (‘LX’, p. 156) and concludes his list of Dante’s excellences by stating: ‘As to going into the endless subtle beauties of Dante, that is impossible’ (‘LX’, p. 156). Coleridge read Inferno attentively: while the example of Dante’s mastery of the pathetic leads him to the obvious choice of Francesca in Inferno 5, his example of one of the ‘endless subtle beauties’ is the far-from-obvious first tercet of Inferno 29 (‘LX’, p. 156).

Whether or not Coleridge was conscious of being drawn toward features of Dante’s poetry that aid in creating the willing suspension of disbelief with respect to the supernatural, I am unequipped to say. I can say that the history of Dante scholarship has not taken Coleridge’s remarkable formulation to heart, or even into consideration. Although the years have passed and the phrase first published by Coleridge in 1817 has become ubiquitous in the Anglophone context, it has not successfully migrated from the English literary tradition to that of other national literatures.

The English poet’s phrase has become a well-worn trope among English speakers. As Michael Tomko writes in his book Beyond the Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith from Coleridge to Tolkien: ‘The “willing suspension of disbelief” is a phrase, like Freudian slip or Pavlovian response, that has made the rare transition from high intellectual discourse to pop culture, appearing everywhere from television commercials to the floor of the US Congress’.44Michael Tomko, Beyond the Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Poetic Faith from Coleridge to Tolkien, New Directions in Religion and Literature (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), p. 1. The ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, now accepted among English speakers as a commonplace, is nourished particularly in discussions among the makers of films and television shows and video games, in the context of their efforts at ‘worldbuilding’. An interview with a director or a game creator will frequently produce Coleridge’s phrase, along with a reference to ‘worldbuilding’, a term that, according to Wikipedia, ‘was first used in the Edinburgh Review in December 1820’,55See ‘Worldbuilding’, Wikipedia, 5 April 2025 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldbuilding> [accessed 11 April 2025]. shortly after the publication of Coleridge’s ‘suspension of disbelief’. Likewise, entertainment magazines contain advice on how to produce the suspension of disbelief in one’s audience.66See, for example, an instruction to the would-be director in Suzy Woltmann, ‘How to Make Audiences Suspend Their Disbelief’, Backstage, 18 April 2023 <https://www.backstage.com/magazine/article/suspension-of-disbelief-75754/> [accessed 11 April 2025].

Another text frequently cited along with Coleridge’s ‘suspension of disbelief’ is Roland Barthes’s 1968 essay ‘L’Effet de Réel’.77Roland Barthes, ‘L’Effet de Réel’, Communications, 11 (1968), pp. 84–89. Barthes’s article on the reality effect is, alas, also a classic example of the silo effect, for it does not mention Coleridge. The concrete detail that makes Beginning of page[p. 18] the reader experience the ‘real’ is exemplified with a detail from a novel of Flaubert and a brief discussion of the Alexandrians and their cultivation of ekphrasis. The semiotician’s is fundamentally a rhetorical approach, and he never cites Coleridge’s more philosophical discussion. None of this is surprising; we are all drawn to what we know best. In Beyond the Willing Suspension of Disbelief, Tomko minutely discusses responses of literary theorists and scholars of English literature to Coleridge’s formulation, focusing in particular on scholars of Shakespeare and drama: ‘Finally, aesthetic illusion raises pressing political questions. What are the dangers of believing in an aesthetic illusion, of being charmed by Prospero?’.88Tomko, Beyond, p. 7.

To a Dante scholar, much of what these critics discuss seems far more relevant to Dante than to Shakespeare. The idea that ‘the poet or dramatist has the powers not of a creator, but of the Creator’99Ibid., p. 9. reminds me of how I end the first chapter of The Undivine Comedy: ‘What follows is an attempt to analyse the textual metaphysics that makes the Commedia’s truth claims credible and to show how the illusion is constructed, forged, made — by a man who is precisely, after all, “only” a fabbro, a maker … a poet’.1010Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 20, hereafter UDC. Subsequent references given in parentheses in the main text. We will come back to the issue of the author-creator when we reach Tolkien’s theory of the ‘sub-creator’. For now, let us note again the results of the silo effect. Despite a note in which Tomko says, à propos a comment of Walter Abrams, that ‘Dante is a locus classicus of this debate’,1111Tomko, Beyond, p. 16, note 6. there is no engagement in Tomko’s book with Dante or with a debate on Dante. Given that the reception of the Commedia shows that its critics succumb to the ideological premises of the poem in an acritical fashion, a more sustained infusion of the willingness to suspend the suspension of disbelief, to engage in what Tomko calls ‘the willing resumption of disbelief’, would be helpful to the progress of Dante studies.1212Tomko’s third and final chapter is titled ‘The Willing Resumption of Disbelief’, pp. 109–44.Beginning of page[p. 19]

It did not occur to me when I was writing The Undivine Comedy in the late 1980s that I should overtly stipulate the importance of Coleridge’s formula for my interpretive practice. Rather, I took it for granted and embedded it in my analysis. The first use of Coleridge’s phrase in The Undivine Comedy hails from the theoretical first chapter, ‘Detheologizing Dante: Realism, Reception, and the Resources of Narrative’. The importance of Coleridge’s formula for my thinking is clear, because this sentence is a manifesto regarding the basic premises of the book: ‘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). My second reference to the suspension of disbelief occurs in the context of a discussion of what I dub ‘the Geryon principle’.1313For the Geryon principle, see UDC, pp. 15, 60, 90, 98, and 271, note 33. Noting that the episodes featuring the hybrid monster Geryon are ‘the most exposed weapons in a massive and unrelenting campaign to coerce our suspension of disbelief’ (UDC, p. 61), I comment that this is ‘a campaign that the history of the Commedia’s reception shows to have been remarkably successful’ (UDC, p. 61). My last reference to Coleridge’s formulation belongs to chapter 7’s discussion of visions:

But Dante differs from other medieval visionaries in at least one fundamental respect, namely, the immensity of his poetic gift: a gift that, paradoxically, induces subconscious suspensions of disbelief in his readers on the one hand and prevents them from taking him seriously as a visionary on the other. (UDC, p. 143)

Given that dreams and visions are one of the most obvious ‘supernatural’ elements in Dante’s poem, the context indicates again the degree to which Coleridge speaks to the core issues of reading and interpreting the Commedia.

Horace’s Ars Poetica offered Dante a handbook on writing fiction, a narrative primer that openly and immediately tackles the topic of readerly belief. Horace begins his little treatise by emphasizing the Beginning of page[p. 20] need to avoid writing about things that are so unnatural they cannot command audience belief, such as a human head on a horse’s neck:1414Zygmunt Barański notes that ‘by the fourteenth century any reference to or excerpt from the description of the monster at the beginning of the Ars Poetica would have been associated with the basic rules of poetic composition, in particular, “quid vitandum, deinde quid tenendum sit” (“what to avoid, then what to adhere to”)’; see ‘Magister satiricus: Preliminary Notes on Dante, Horace and the Middle Ages’, in Language and Style in Dante, ed. by John C. Barnes and Michelangelo Zaccarello (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2013), pp. 13–61 (p. 19).

(If a painter chose to join a human head to the neck of a horse, and to spread feathers of many a hue over limbs picked up now here now there, so that what at the top is a lovely woman ends below in a black and ugly fish, could you, my friends, if favored with a private view, refrain from laughing?) (Ars Poetica, 1–⁠5)1515Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, ed. and trans. by H. Rushton Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library, 194 (London: William Heinemann, and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970).

These verses must have hit Dante forcibly; they are, indeed, the Roman author’s version of the Geryon principle. Dante’s monster Geryon is a hybrid of a just man’s head on a serpent’s trunk with a lion’s hairy arms and paws and a scorpion’s tail: he is as unnatural and unbelievable as Horace’s evocation of a human head on a horse’s neck that is covered with multi-coloured plumage and ends in the tail of a black fish.

There are clear points of overlap between Horace’s unbelievable monster with its fish’s tail and Dante’s unbelievable monster with his scorpion’s tail. Most notable to me is Horace’s reference to ‘varias […] plumas’ (‘feathers of many a hue’) in verse 2, which finds an echo in Dante’s description of the colourful textile designs — the rhetorical colours — that embroider Geryon’s flanks:

Returning to the same point about artists and authors who insist on outrageous and unnatural — ‘supernatural’ — elements in their works, Horace repeats his earlier admonition with new examples: ‘The man who tries to vary a single subject in monstrous fashion, is like a painter adding a dolphin to the woods, a boar to the waves’ (Ars Poetica, 29–30).

Horace and Dante, however, describe themselves quite differently with respect to reader response. Dante presents himself as hyper-sensitive to potential readerly criticism while Horace displays an urbane and somewhat callous wit. Thus, the arrival out of the abyss of the unbelievable monster Geryon leads not to the imagined laughter of Horace’s readers but to a very Dantean meditation on the imagined shame — vergogna — that will necessarily be incurred by an author who insists that he is telling the truth when what he is saying cannot be believed:

Perhaps the most important for Dante of Horace’s lessons is ‘Either follow tradition, or invent what is self-consistent’ (Ars Poetica, 119). Dante chose to invent consistently. And he does so realistically, thus hewing to another Horatian precept: ‘Fictions meant to please should be close to the real’ (Ars Poetica, 338).

Coleridge’s famous formulation has been applied far beyond the ‘supernatural, or at least romantic’ category for which it was designated, but it has not been systematically invoked with respect to Dante, who actually describes the supernatural. In the context of the interpretation of the Commedia, a text that deals precisely and realistically with the supernatural, we need to be more persistent in modelling, for new generations of readers, what it is to read critically, using critical tools that include Coleridge’s suspension of disbelief. While, as Tomko shows, scholars of English literature engage in a discussion of the perils of suspending disbelief, a suspension that can make one more gullible to political propaganda, scholars of Italian literature have traditionally not given the matter much thought, certainly not with respect to Dante’s poem. Thus, the article ‘Worldbuilding’ in English Wikipedia begins its ‘History’ section with Dante (‘One of the earliest examples of a fictional world is Dante’s Divine Comedy, with the BBC’s Dante 2021 series describing it as “the first virtual reality”’), and then moves on to English authors who discuss fantasy and to Tolkien’s essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’.1717‘Worldbuilding’, Wikipedia. It is noteworthy that the article ‘Worldbuilding’ in Italian Wikipedia follows the English version precisely until it comes to ‘History’ (‘Evoluzione del worldbuilding’), where it omits Dante Beginning of page[p. 23] completely and moves directly to the English fantasy authors and to Tolkien’s ‘On Fairy-Stories’.

Many have seen points of contact between Dante and Tolkien, but this group does not include Tolkien himself, who does not mention Dante in his much-cited essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’. To both Tolkien’s essay and his omission of Dante I will return, because I believe there is much we can learn from Tolkien’s failure to acknowledge his medieval precursor. We see a willingness to acknowledge the general kinship between Dante’s work and that of fantasy writers in a project like The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible, a work to which I was invited to contribute in May 2021. The charge was to examine ‘how your topic relates to the possible/possibility’, and the result was my essay on ‘the possible Divine Comedy’.1818Teodolinda Barolini, ‘The Possible Divine Comedy’, in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible, ed. by Vlad P. Glăveanu (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), pp. 437–44. Very suggestive was the working Table of Contents that the editor had included with his invitation, showing me a world in which many of the subjects listed were rich in Dantean themes (e.g., Counterfactual Thinking, Determinism, Dialogism, Dreams, Ecstasy) and in which Dante was included alongside fantasy writers like Asimov and Tolkien. However, the finished Encyclopedia was disappointing in this regard, since it contains almost no authors, omitting even the essential poet of the possible, Ovid. Coleridge is not mentioned, and the phrase ‘suspension of disbelief’ appears only in my essay.

Although I was unacquainted with the field of possible studies, I was primed to accept the invitation to contribute to The Palgrave Encyclopedia of the Possible by my familiarity with the concept of possible worlds. Indeed, I had recognized the value of this concept for Dante studies in The Undivine Comedy, which refers nine times to the ‘possible world’ that Dante is creating, three times in the methodological first chapter.1919The expression ‘possible world’ occurs in UDC on pages 15, 16, 18 (chapter 1), 22, 35, 46 (chapter 2), 98 (chapter 4), 188 (chapter 8), and 219 (chapter 10). The most significant of the usages in chapter 1 is another manifesto moment, like the one cited above for ‘suspension of disbelief’: ‘The Commedia makes narrative believers of us all. By this I mean that we accept the possible world (as logicians call it) that Dante has invented; we do not question its premises or assumptions Beginning of page[p. 24] except on its own terms’ (UDC, p. 16). All art in all time is engaged in creating virtual realities, but not all art is equal, in this respect as in others. Ovid writes that art conceals its own art — ‘ars adeo latet arte sua’ (Metam. 10.252) — and in the Commedia Dante masterfully conceals his artfulness, building his possible world through manifold and continuous narrative micro-strategies that conceal themselves and surreptitiously take hold of the reader’s mind. For the genius of Dante’s poetry is (also) ‘its ability to construct a textual metaphysics so enveloping that it prevents us from analyzing the conditions that give rise to the illusion that such a metaphysics is possible’ (UDC, p. 20).

Chapter 1 of The Undivine Comedy’s ten chapters is titled ‘Detheologizing Dante’ and explains detheologizing as a method of reading (I shall elaborate on detheologizing as a method further on). The subtitle, ‘Realism, Reception, and the Resources of Narrative’, focuses on what we must take into consideration in order to suspend the suspension of disbelief and thereby to arrive at a proper appreciation of how Dante forged his realism: ‘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 readers of Dante’s poem: How are we to respond to the poet's insistence that he is telling us the truth?’ (UDC, p. 4). In the spirit of that query, the first chapter analyses the major twentieth-century criticism devoted to Dante’s modes of signifying, explaining why I consider the issue of truth claims to be the common denominator that subtends previous discussions and pointing to the parallelisms in the positions of two scholars from different critical traditions, the Italian Nardi and the American Singleton: ‘it is my belief that Nardi’s contributions regarding “Dante profeta” and Singleton’s regarding the Commedia’s use of the allegory of theologians are essentially complementary. […] These two traditions are in effect parallel ways of discussing the one central issue of the poet’s truth claims’ (UDC, p. 5).

Revolving around the ancient dichotomy of Dante-poeta versus Dante-theologus, the first chapter of The Undivine Comedy offers an expansive examination of critical theories regarding Dante’s modes of signifying, moving from Nardi and Singleton to Auerbach, Hollander, Padoan, Spitzer, and Freccero, among others, and invoking Augustine along the way: ‘Augustine discredits the common misapprehension that a “prophet” cannot also be a “poet”, that one who is inspired Beginning of page[p. 25] need not also attend to the “how” of language and rhetoric’ (UDC, p. 11). The discussion lingers on the so-called allegory of poets versus the allegory of theologians because this terminology dominated the twentieth-century debate on Dantean allegory in North America. The critical lexicon derives from the Convivio’s terminology for allegorical signifying: on the one hand, allegory of poets is man-made and invented, what we call personification allegory; on the other hand, allegory of theologians is intrinsic, historically based, and divine, what we — following Auerbach — call figural allegory. This issue is reprised in chapter 7, which turns to the Commedia’s relationship to vision literature and discusses Dante’s dense interweaving of both modes of allegory — personification allegory and figural allegory — in the procession of the earthly paradise (see UDC, p. 158).

The successive nine chapters seek to analyse what Dante created, focusing on the particular tools in the poet’s toolkit of realism. These tools are necessarily made of language: tropes, elements of rhetoric, as in the chart appended at the end of chapter 9, ‘The Heaven of the Sun as a Meditation on Narrative’, where I show how Dante balances the rhetorical tropes used to create the illusion of equality in the eulogies of Saints Francis and Dominic (Paradiso 11 and 12). Dante’s toolkit is massively metapoetic, including addresses to the reader (the classic essays by Auerbach and Spitzer are discussed in chapter 1) and ekphrasis, most evidently on display in Purgatorio 10–12 and analysed in chapter 6, ‘Re-presenting What God Presented: The Arachnean Art of the Terrace of Pride’. The Table of Contents below shows the trajectory from the theoretical first chapter to three chapters devoted to Inferno (chapters 2–4), three chapters devoted to Purgatorio (chapters 5–7), and three chapters devoted to Paradiso (chapters 8–10). The Undivine Comedy thus proceeds through the Commedia thematically and chronologically, following the order of the poem itself:

The Undivine Comedy is at the core a narratological and rhetorical study, a book that analyses the poet’s narrative techniques and his techniques of verisimilitude. Thus, it offers a sustained analysis of what I present as two alternating narrative modes. The narrative or default mode is discursive (encompassing philosophical expositions), logical, linear, ‘chronologized’, and intellective; it is the narratological backbone of the Commedia as a ‘realistic’ journey that presents ‘le vite spiritali ad una ad una’ (‘the lives of spirits, one by one’; Par. 33.24). The anti-narrative or lyrical mode, on the other hand, is non-discursive, non-linear or circular, ‘dechronologized’, and affective; it is used for the oneiric, the visionary, and the mystical. This mode is labelled by Dante as the ‘jumping’ poetics that provides the title of chapter 10 of The Undivine Comedy (‘The Sacred Poem Is Forced to Jump: Closure and the Poetics of Enjambment’) and that is announced in Paradiso 23: ‘e così, figurando il paradiso, | convien saltar lo sacrato poema’ (‘And thus, in representing Paradise, | the sacred poem has to leap Beginning of page[p. 27] across; Par. 23.61–62). These two narrative modalities, each aligned with a particular set of tropes, together constitute the narratological skein of the Commedia. The poet alternates between them, in varying degrees according to cantica, as explained in this passage from the end of chapter 7:

Looking at the Commedia as a whole, we could say that the Inferno is composed mainly in the straightforward ‘realistic’ manner, with the significant exception of the first part of canto 1; it is important to remember that Dante chooses to begin his narrative journey with a harbinger of alternatives to his dominant mode. The Purgatorio introduces longer ‘nonrealistic’ passages, concentrated in the sections devoted to the dreams, the reliefs, the visions, and so forth; while in the Paradiso the ecstatic visionary mode comes into its own, and the proportion of text devoted to it increases. (UDC, p. 164)

Paradiso is the cantica in which the anti-narrative mode comes to the fore. Recently I synthesized, unpacked, and expanded The Undivine Comedy’s reading of the alternating narrative modes of Paradiso in the essay ‘The One and the Many as Philosophical and Narratological Key to Paradiso’, where I included the following chart:2020Teodolinda Barolini, ‘The One and the Many as Philosophical and Narratological Key to Paradiso’, in Letteratura permanente. Poeti, scrittori, critici per Giorgio Ficara, ed. by Igor Candido, Chiara Fenoglio, Raffaello Palumbo Mosca, Giulia Ricca, and Daniele Santero (Milan: La nave di Teseo, 2022), pp. 127–51. In Italian: ‘L’Uno e i Molti quale chiave filosofica e narratologica alla lettura del Paradiso’, in Barolini, Il vento di Aristotele. Saggi danteschi (Milan: La nave di Teseo), pp. 103–26.

Perhaps the most important use of ‘possible world’ in The Undivine Comedy belongs to chapter 8, the first of the Paradiso chapters, ‘Problems in Paradise: The Mimesis of Time and the Paradox of più e meno’. In this passage I equate the ability to step outside of the possible world of the Commedia with the act of ‘detheologizing’: while the idea that the blessed souls stage the hierarchy of the heavens for the pilgrim’s benefit ‘is acceptable within the possible world of the Commedia (i.e. at the level of its plot), if we step outside of that world — if we detheologize our reading — then we realize that the hierarchy is a means of allowing the last canticle to exist’ (UDC, p. 188). This sentence from chapter 8 takes us back to chapter 1, where we find a straightforward explanation of what I mean by ‘detheologizing’:

The chapters that follow propose a detheologized reading of the Commedia. This is not to say that they eschew theology. Detheologizing is not antitheological; it is not a call to abandon theology or to excise theological concerns from Dante criticism. Rather, detheologizing is a way of reading that attempts to break out of the hermeneutic guidelines that Dante has structured into his poem, hermeneutic guidelines that result in theologized readings whose outcomes have been overdetermined by the author. Detheologizing, in other words, signifies releasing our reading of the Commedia from the author’s grip, finding a way out of Dante’s hall of mirrors. In order to accomplish this, I privilege form over content […]. (UDC, p. 17)Beginning of page[p. 29]

Some of the critical misprisions engendered by the title The Undivine Comedy might have been avoided had readers with strongly religious views taken seriously the above passage, with its accurate and sincere insistence that ‘detheologizing is not antitheological’. No one who reads the Paradiso chapters of my book could believe that the author of The Undivine Comedy, who builds so much of her argument on Thomas Aquinas’s ‘distinctio et multitudo rerum est a Deo’ — ‘the difference and multiplicity of things come from God’ (Summa Theologiae 1a.47.1) — could be ‘against theology’.

Detheologizing is a method, a way of reading. It should not be controversial, as, very surprisingly to me, the title of The Undivine Comedy became. The Undivine Comedy is a witty title, one that I gladly accepted when it was suggested by the Editorial Board of Princeton University Press. It neatly captures a key point of the book: the Commedia is a text written by a man, not by God, and we can best honour the extraordinary man who wrote it by unravelling how he did it. Let us put to one side those who took umbrage at what they apparently took as the anti-religious nature of the title, a position that displays a lack of intellectual openness and also, very likely, a willingness to criticize what one has not read. My own critique of the English title is that it does not do enough to inform the reader that detheologizing is a method, the pars destruens — the solvent — that then allows one to construct a new way of reading. Moreover, the new way of reading, the pars construens, not at all represented in the English title, embraces nine of the ten chapters of the book. This, in my view, is the major deficit of the English title: both parts of the title speak to the pars destruens, the method, and no part of the title speaks to the nine-tenths of the book that are devoted to showing what we can discover when we apply the method — when we detheologize our reading.

The structural economy of my book is better communicated by the Italian translation of 2003,2121La ‘Commedia’ senza Dio. Dante e la creazione di una realtà virtuale, trans. by Roberta Antognini (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2003). and in particular by the balance of the two parts of its title: the main title, La ‘Commedia’ senza Dio (‘The Commedia without God’), offers a faulty statement of the pars destruens, and the subtitle, Dante e la costruzione di una realtà virtuale (‘Dante and the Beginning of page[p. 30] construction of a virtual reality’) offers an accurate statement of the pars construens. I do not at all care for La ‘Commedia’ senza Dio, a title chosen by the press, Feltrinelli, as The Undivine Comedy was chosen by Princeton. Shorn of the English edition’s play on words, La ‘Commedia’ senza Dio is too stark and does in fact seem to be making an argument that is not at all mine. I did what I could, without success, to resist the choice. I am very proud, on the other hand, of my contribution of the Italian subtitle, Dante e la costruzione di una realtà virtuale, which to my knowledge is the first articulation of the now obvious fact that Dante constructed our premier virtual reality.

However, there lies a huge and irreducible chasm between the Commedia and fantasy fiction, between Dante and today’s creators of virtual realities. A virtual reality that is explicitly couched within and based upon the tenets of one the world’s great revealed religions poses a much more complex critical problem than that posed by most fantasy fiction (or indeed by Shakespeare), given that in such a case the response to the work of art — the suspension of disbelief that it provokes — is inescapably conflated in the minds of many readers with their actual belief in their actual religion. The result of the combined synergy of possible world with actual religion is a ‘reality effect’ that is far beyond what literature on its own can conjure. The religious content of the Commedia has thus understandably produced a massive challenge to the reader’s critical ability to manage the poem’s fiction, indeed to accept that the poem is a fiction. It is immeasurably more difficult to read a text critically, to suspend one’s suspension of disbelief, when that text connects itself authoritatively, and in manifold compelling ways, to the reader’s real lived religious experience.

We now turn to Tolkien and his essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’, which has garnered a remarkably acritical treatment from its readers, who seem to treat it more like Tolkien’s fiction than like a critical essay. I find quite unpersuasive, and also quite ungenerous, Tolkien’s discussion of the suspension of disbelief, in which he never names Coleridge. He cites Coleridge’s precept in quotation marks and uses it as a foil against which to construct his own arguments in defence of ‘Fantasy’: ‘Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker’s art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called Beginning of page[p. 31]“willing suspension of disbelief”’.2222J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘On Fairy-Stories’, The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), pp. 31–99 (p. 60), hereafter ‘OFS’. Subsequent references given in parentheses in the main text. For the record, as a lover of Tolkien’s fantasy fiction in my youth, I was taken aback by his lack of generosity toward Coleridge when I discovered it in writing this essay. It is interesting, too, that Tolkien never mentions Dante in ‘On Fairy-Stories’, given that he, a medievalist, obviously knew of Dante, a writer who was so important to his friends and fellow Inklings C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams. Why might Tolkien choose not to mention the Divine Comedy? In my view, Dante’s work fits Tolkien’s critical categories about the ‘creator’ and ‘sub-creator’ much too well.2323Tolkien, who was averse to allegory and a champion of history, was in fact far closer to Dante as a narrator than he was to Lewis. See p. xv of Tolkien’s ‘Foreword to the Second Edition’ of The Fellowship of the Ring, in J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, 2nd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966). Here is the full passage that immediately follows Tolkien’s citation of Coleridge’s ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, where Tolkien outlines the relationship between what he calls the Primary World and the Secondary World:

That state of mind has been called ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator’. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. (‘OFS’, p. 60)

Tolkien downgrades the work of art — and the suspension of disbelief that the work of art generates, both belonging to what he calls in the above passage ‘the little abortive Secondary World’ — in comparison to what he goes on to call ‘the genuine thing’: ‘But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed’ (‘OFS’, p. 61).

Dante likewise downgrades the human work of art in comparison to God’s art. We know this, and we understand that such downgrading Beginning of page[p. 32] is built into Dante’s ideological premises. Dante is actually more open than Tolkien about both his ideological premises and about the ways in which he himself, as creator, is likely to flout them. This flouting takes shape as the Ulysses theme of the Commedia, analysed first in chapter 3 of The Undivine Comedy, ‘Ulysses, Geryon, and the Aeronautics of Narrative Transition’, and subsequently never absent from my reading. Chapter 6, ‘Re-presenting What God Presented: The Arachnean Art of the Terrace of Pride’, is particularly relevant to this part of our discussion, since it analyses Dante’s wilful transgression of the medieval mimetic hierarchy to which he offers explicit allegiance. At the top of the hierarchy is God, the creator. Under God are, first, nature, which imitates God, and, second, human art or techne, which imitates nature.2424For Dante’s articulations in the Commedia of the mimetic hierarchy — comprising God, nature, and art, in that order — see Inferno 11.99–105 and Purgatorio 10.32–33. An earlier statement, very similar in its expression of the hierarchy to that found in Purgatorio 10, is in De vulgari eloquentia: ‘So uncurable man, persuaded by the giant Nimrod, presumed in his heart to surpass with his art not only nature, but also nature’s maker, who is God’ (Dve 1.7.4). For the original text with Italian translation see Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. by Mirko Tavoni, in Opere, dir. by Marco Santagata, 3 vols (Milan: Mondadori, 2011– ), i: Rime, Vita nova, De vulgari eloquentia (2011), pp. 1067–1547 (p. 1086). English translation mine.

Discussions of Tolkien’s critique of Coleridge seem to shy away from acknowledging Tolkien’s ideological premises, and therefore from acknowledging that Tolkien’s religious belief results in self-servingness about his own authorial enterprise, and that this self-serving element ultimately distorts Tolkien’s argument. For Tolkien’s demotion of the Secondary World — the work of art and the feelings that it generates — with respect to the Primary World — ‘the genuine thing’ and the feelings that it generates — occurs not in a neutral venue but in the context of an apologia for ‘Fantasy’, the one kind of writing that according to him has access to ‘the genuine thing’: ‘Fantasy is made out of the Primary World’ (‘OFS’, p. 78). While most artists can at best create ‘a little abortive Secondary World’ (‘OFS’, p. 60) that will pale in comparison to the ‘genuine thing’ (‘OFS’, p. 61), and that will therefore result in disenchantment and awakening to disbelief at the inevitable failure of the magic spell (‘You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary Beginning of page[p. 33] World from outside’; ‘OFS’, p. 60), ‘Fantasy’ is different, for ‘Fantasy is made out of the Primary World’ (‘OFS’, p. 78).

What is ‘the genuine thing’, for Tolkien? His designations of the Primary World and the Secondary World are precise analogues to Dante’s hierarchy of God the creator imitated by nature and art, which in Tolkien’s system would be called sub-creators. Tolkien’s genuine thing refers therefore to that which is created by the only true creator, God. Tolkien overtly states the religious basis of his thinking in the latter portions of his essay. When he claims that ‘Fantasy is made out of the Primary World’, Tolkien is giving himself as a fantasy writer a more direct conduit to the primary world and to the genuineness and realness of the original creator than that possessed by other kinds of writers. When he claims that fairy-stories must have happy endings (‘eucatastrophe’, ‘OFS’, p. 85), he is aligning them with Christianity, as he ultimately clarifies: ‘I would venture to say that approaching the Christian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt making-creatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature’ (‘OFS’, p. 88). God thus arranged for the Gospels to contain a fairy-story: ‘The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories’ (‘OFS’, p. 88). It is worth noting that all of these features that Tolkien claims for himself and for his own writing are also claimed by Dante, a ‘scribe’ who takes dictation with respect to the ‘genuine things’ he saw.2525This ongoing trope is perhaps most emphatically stated in Paradiso 10.27, where Dante refers to ‘quella materia ond’ io son fatto scriba’ (‘that material of which I am the scribe’). Dante’s authorial stance, analysed in The Undivine Comedy, proves useful for understanding Tolkien’s authorial stance in ‘On Fairy-Stories’.

The feeling that I get from reading or witnessing great art may or may not be, as Tolkien says, a substitute for the genuine thing. It is certainly a substitute, in some way, for the natural thing, but is it less genuine? I do not understand why Tolkien’s grounding of his concept of the genuine thing in religious belief goes unmentioned, and why his essay’s findings are cited so often as evident and obvious truths. Why is there so little critical resistance or reference made to Tolkien’s own Beginning of page[p. 34] religious belief as the explicit context of his arguments? At any rate, the feeling that great art produces in me feels true, and fulfilling, and does not accord with Tolkien’s condescending and tendentious description of suspension of disbelief as ‘somewhat tired, shabby’: ‘This suspension of disbelief may thus be a somewhat tired, shabby, or sentimental state of mind, and so lean to the “adult”’ (‘OFS’, p. 61). Tomko paraphrases Tolkien on this point, explaining that the suspension of disbelief ‘is not only the result of bad creating in poorly constructed art whose flaws inevitably disenchant, but also of bad believing’.2626Tomko, Beyond, p. 54.

Bad believing? This extraordinary phrase brings us to the crux of the matter as I see it (though not discussed by Tomko). It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Tolkien’s condescending attitude toward Coleridge, an author whom he uses as a foil for his whole argument, derives directly from his own position of simultaneous superiority in and defensiveness about his religious belief. Indeed, he does not hesitate to claim that this religious belief endows his fantasy and fairy-stories with a direct connection to the Primary World itself: ‘The “fantastic” elements in verse and prose of other kinds, even when only decorative or occasional, help in this release. But not so thoroughly as a fairy-story, a thing built on or about Fantasy, of which Fantasy is the core. Fantasy is made out of the Primary World […]’ (‘OFS’, p. 78). Was Tolkien dismissive of Coleridge because Coleridge was a fellow believer who, in his view, did not believe well enough? Was Coleridge, for Tolkien, a bad believer? Because Coleridge was, like Tolkien, a thorough-going believer, whose work is imbued with religious and theological thought, he is the more worthy of our respect and gratitude for having formulated what Tomko calls ‘an attempted via media’.2727Ibid., p. 44.

Suspension of disbelief is, in any case, unavoidable; nor would we want to avoid it. Quite the opposite, for suspension of disbelief is pleasurable: it is the great gift of art, the essential mechanism that allows the reader to experience the pleasure of existing mentally in possible worlds different from her own. Suspension of disbelief is what allows us to be ‘entertained’, in the etymological sense of ‘held’, from Latin tenere: we are held in a frame of mind that allows us to succumb to Beginning of page[p. 35] the pleasure of possibilities not otherwise available to us. When Dante tells us, his readers, ‘e ritegna l’image, | mentre ch’io dico, come ferma rupe’ (‘hold onto that image | while I speak, like a steadfast rock’; Par. 13.2–3), he is using ‘hold onto that image’ in precisely this sense: he is giving instructions in visualizing and holding onto the elements of the very abstract possible world of paradise that he is endeavouring to narrate.2828See Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Paradiso and the Mimesis of Ideas: Realism versus Reality’, SpazioFilosofico, 8 (2013), pp. 199–208, repr. in Barolini, Dante’s Multitudes: History, Philosophy, Method (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2022), pp. 121–36 (esp. pp. 133–34). But it is also of the utmost importance to be able to suspend suspension of disbelief, if we are to engage in critical analysis of a work of art and of how it procures its effects upon its audience.

In The Undivine Comedy I use the tools of narratology and rhetoric along with a running consideration of the Commedia’s reception in order to expose the ways in which the poem’s basic thematic grid — damnation versus salvation, bad versus good — conditions our hermeneutic responses. Let me illustrate by once again sharing a personal experience, this time an anonymous reader’s report commissioned in 1977 by PMLA with respect to my essay ‘Bertran de Born and Sordello: The Poetry of Politics in the Divine Comedy’.2929This became my first published work on Dante: Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Bertran de Born and Sordello: The Poetry of Politics in Dante’s Comedy’, PMLA, 94.3 (1979), pp. 395–405. In my memory I conserved the relevant part of the report as follows: ‘Why doesn’t the author state that Bertran is in hell because he’s bad, and Sordello is in purgatory because he’s good?’ Recently, because of the conference on The Undivine Comedy that led to the creation of this volume, I dug up the dossier of correspondence devoted to the PMLA article, and I discovered that my memory was not so far off. The report, dated October 31, 1977, forcefully declares a requirement of full suspension of disbelief when it comes to the Commedia. Nothing less than full allegiance to the possible world constructed by Dante is acceptable:

Not once does the writer of the essay state that Bertran de Born is in Hell because he freely selected to do evil things, mortal sins, and that Sordello is in Purgatory, among the saved, because he freely selected to put God before the deification of the world. Had the author taken into consideration this Beginning of page[p. 36] simple fact stressed by both Aristotle and St. Thomas he would not have had any reason to believe that Dante ‘enlarges’ or ‘diminishes’ the figure of a poet in the treatment of the two characters.

Nowhere in this reader’s response is there any acknowledgement that the Commedia is a fiction. Instead, it is treated as self-evident that the Commedia is not a fiction, that it tells truth. Singleton’s famous formula that ‘the fiction of the Divine Comedy is that it is not a fiction’, had made no inroads into the reader’s consciousness, although Singleton’s book containing that phrase was published in 19543030Charles S. Singleton, ‘Commedia’: Elements of Structure (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), p. 62. (in fairness, as I have learned, it is very difficult to reroute a deeply entrenched centuries-old critical tradition). This is why an approach that focuses on the nature of narrative is the first, primary, solvent of my book. The comment from the above reader’s report may seem too crass and simplistic to serve as a useful index of the critical zeitgeist, but in fact its utility lies in the honesty with which it reveals a critical mindset that is still pervasive. It was very useful to me because it taught me that if one discusses critical problems that are not fully coordinated with the plot’s overdetermined grid of damnation and salvation, one may encounter resistance, or indeed hostility. That fact in itself seemed worth studying.

That PMLA reader’s report from 1977 did not cause me to realize that I would write The Undivine Comedy. It did, however, begin to crystallize a set of insights that eventually led to a method of reading I call ‘detheologizing’, a word that has definitely engendered hostility. My coinage ‘detheologizing’ was a riff on Derridean ‘deconstruction’, whose vogue we had just lived through when The Undivine Comedy was published in 1992; indeed, in my persistent naïveté, I worried that I would be critiqued for so obvious a calque. Far from advocating the removal of theology, I instead advocated not adhering to the template provided by theology in analysing the text: ‘my point is that on the representational front the poem is neutral; in the mimetic realm collocation does not imply value, as it does in the thematic sphere’ (UDC, p. 19). I was advocating a more formalist — narratological —Beginning of page[p. 37] approach, because I was interested in focusing on how ‘The Commedia makes narrative believers of us all’ (UDC, p. 16).

Narratological analysis is the key solvent applied in The Undivine Comedy, and we have not yet exhausted its capacities for adding depth to our readings. Here I offer in example a new analysis of the narrative flashback in which Virgilio narrates Beatrice’s previous arrival in limbo and urgent solicitation of aid for the pilgrim. This event, narrated in Inferno 2, occurred at the same time as the pilgrim’s attempt to bypass the she-wolf, an event narrated in Inferno 1. The temporal coincidence is noted in instalments in Inferno 2: Virgilio tells Dante that Beatrice described him as ‘impedito | sì nel cammin’ (‘so impeded in his path’; Inf. 2.62–63) that he required aid immediately, referring in the present tense to ‘questo ’mpedimento ov’ io ti mando’ (‘this impediment toward which I send you’; Inf. 2.95). Subsequently, Virgilio confirms that he arrived just in time to save Dante from ‘quella fiera’ (‘that beast’), namely the she-wolf: ‘d’inanzi a quella fiera ti levai | che del bel monte il corto andar ti tolse’ (‘I snatched you from the path of the fierce beast | that barred the shortest way up the fair mountain’; Inf. 2.119–20).

A diagram of these events requires two narrative lines that converge. One line represents the events that Dante-pilgrim experiences first-hand, starting in Inferno 1, as they are recounted to us by Dante-narrator. The other line represents events that the pilgrim does not experience first-hand, but that nonetheless occur in the possible world of the poem. Thus, the second narrative line includes all the events that occur within the possible world of the Commedia, including the ‘off-screen’ meeting of Virgilio and Beatrice as narrated in the flashback of Inferno 2. The opening up of possibilities not previously accounted for within the possible world that the poet narrates is a genial move on Dante-author’s part: his possible world is not foreclosed by the narrative, and is always capable of revealing new possibilities. Our poet will later affirm that there are things that his poem does not care to narrate: ‘altro parlando | che la mia comedìa cantar non cura’ (‘talking of things | my comedy does not care to sing’; Inf. 21.1–2).

These two narrative lines converge when the pilgrim and Virgilio meet in Inferno 1. To aid readers in visualizing my narratological Beginning of page[p. 38] analysis, I offer the below timeline, which illustrates the relationship between these two sets of events and the moment of convergence:3131My thanks to Laura DiNardo for her subtle rendering of the narrative analysis in her design.

The outcome of all this narratological complexity is that the pilgrim and the readers have access to a crucial piece of the pilgrim’s pre-history. But why choose to narrate in so complex a fashion? I believe that Dante chooses this method because it suggests a possible world of apparent infinite lifelike density: a possible world full of before times, after times, and lateral times — of possibilities that the poet has simply not chosen to narrate.

In the wake of The Undivine Comedy I began reflexively to distinguish between theologized and detheologized readings. Expressions that make use of the shorthand ‘theologized’ and ‘detheologized’ became more common in my writing: in my commentary on Dante’s early lyrics, it became natural for me to write of the ways in which Dante created the theologized texture of his poems. For instance, in discussing the canzone Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore, I explain that ‘I prefer to speak of the canzone as “theologized” rather than “theological”, because Dante is endowing his courtly discourse with a theologized patina, not engaging in a careful use of theology’.3232Dante Alighieri, Dante’s Lyric Poetry: Poems of Youth and of the ‘Vita Nuova’ (1283–1292), ed. by Teodolinda Barolini (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), p. 178. Similarly in the Italian edition of 2009: ‘È preferibile parlare di canzone “teologizzata” invece di canzone “teologica” perché non si tratta dell’uso accurato di un discorso teologico quanto della volontà di teologizzare un discorso cortese’; see Dante Alighieri, Rime giovanili e della ‘Vita Nuova’, ed. by Teodolinda Barolini, with notes by Manuele Gragnolati (Milan: Rizzoli, 2009), p. 303. More recently, I Beginning of page[p. 39] have become even more synthetic, referring in essays to ‘theologized eros’ or to ‘the logic of theologized courtliness’.3333The phrase ‘theologized eros’ belongs to my essay ‘Archeology of the Donna Gentile’, in Dante’s Multitudes, pp. 225–42 (p. 235); ‘the logic of theologized courtliness’ belongs to ‘The Case of the Lost Original Ending of Dante’s Vita Nuova: More Notes Toward a Critical Philology’, in Dante’s Multitudes, pp. 287–97 (p. 295). Similar language moves into Il vento di Aristotele, the Italian translation of Dante’s Multitudes. These are shorthand ways of conjuring historical movements like the creation of the stil novo and the signifying practices of a canzone like Donne ch’avete or of a book like the Vita nuova.

History has always been present in Dante commentaries, but I was interested in the historical vistas that open up after detheologizing, as I explained in the essay ‘Only Historicize’ (whose title is based on E. M. Forster’s ‘Only connect’):

Of course, Fredric Jameson’s ‘always historicize’ dates back to 1981. But fields have their own histories. As has been pointed out in the context of African American literary studies: ‘At a time when theorists of European and Anglo American literature were offering critiques of Anglo-American formalism, scholars of black literature, responding to the history of their own discipline, found it “radical” to teach formal methods of reading’. There are good reasons that Dante scholarship, following its own particular trajectory, has been slow to reach this point: lack of historicizing has been an abiding feature of Dante exegesis, an essentializing tradition in which the entry ‘Inferno’ in the Enciclopedia Dantesca does not even gesture toward the history of the idea of hell.3434Teodolinda Barolini, ‘“Only Historicize”: History, Material Culture (Food, Clothes, Books), and the Future of Dante Studies’, Dante Studies, 127 (2009), pp. 37–54 (p. 37).

The essentializing nature of Dante studies is manifest in the article ‘Inferno’ in the Enciclopedia Dantesca,3535Enciclopedia Dantesca, ed. by Umberto Bosco, 6 vols (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 1970–1978). where hell has no history prior to Dante (or after him). The article discusses only Dante’s Inferno, situated in a historical vacuum. Contrary to that essentializing tendency, I explain how detheologizing allowed me to see new possibilities of Beginning of page[p. 40] historicizing: ‘We have to find ways to get traction in dealing with an overdetermined hermeneutic template engineered by the author to prescribe our readings. For me this traction came through “detheologizing” — a narrative approach that cleared the way for historicizing’.3636Barolini, ‘“Only Historicize”’, Dante Studies, pp. 37–38. When I reprinted the essay ‘Only Historicize’ in my book Dante’s Multitudes, I extended the discussion, taking the opportunity to emphasize ‘the binary damnation/salvation that conditions our readings’ and to illuminate detheologizing as a method that ‘works by detaching our interpretive practice from the theologized thematic grid of hell versus heaven, thus allowing us to make connections that the overdetermined template occludes’.3737Teodolinda Barolini, ‘“Only Historicize”: History, Material Culture (Food, Clothes, Books), and the Future of Dante Studies’, repr. in Barolini, Dante’s Multitudes, pp. 3–21 (p. 4).

Forster’s ‘Only connect’ is evoked in the last clause above, ‘thus allowing us to make connections that the overdetermined template occludes’. Yet — and this is the crucial point — however much we as a critical tradition have accepted the occlusion, the limitation imposed by the overdetermined template of the otherworld binary of damnation and salvation, the Commedia itself is not and never has been so limited. The Commedia contains worlds of possibilities beyond that basic binary template of good versus bad. Detheologizing allowed me to see some of those worlds of possibility, the untapped potential for historicizing.3838A list of possible future topics is included in ‘Only Historicize’, in Barolini, Dante’s Multitudes, p. 16; some are already being treated by former students. All human ideas have histories, a truth whose relevance to Dante studies I experienced again recently, when I wrote an essay on Dante’s limbo, a theological concept that was effectively ‘reformed’ out of existence in 2007, when John Paul II commissioned a report titled in English The Hope of Salvation for Infants Who Die Without Being Baptized. As a result, we witnessed a significant historical and theological change in real time, nothing less than a second harrowing of hell.3939The orthodox Catholic limbo ceased to exist because unbaptised infants are no longer denied the possibility of salvation. Dante’s heterodox limbo needs to continue existing in order to provide a mitigated damnation for the virtuous pagans whom he alone included in that space. See ‘Dante’s Limbo and Equity of Access: Non-Christians, Children, and Criteria of Inclusion and Exclusion, from Inferno 4 to Paradiso 32’, in Barolini, Dante’s Multitudes, pp. 58–81.Beginning of page[p. 41]

Historicizing also uncovers worlds of historical nuance, worlds of human frailty and social injustice. Detheologizing my reading of Francesca da Rimini was a key turning point in my critical practice. In the essay ‘Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, Gender’, I relocated the interpretive discourse, detaching it from the theologized grid of damnation and salvation.4040Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, Gender’, orig. Speculum, 75 (2000), pp. 1–28, repr. in Barolini, Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), pp. 304–32. I analysed Francesca’s history and the place of the poet Dante Alighieri in her history, building a historicized reading that takes into consideration her status as a dynastic wife in a ruthless political game. As a result of studying historians’ research on Francesca, I was able to bring to prominence information which Torraca and other historians of Romagna long knew, but which had never been factored into mainstream literary criticism on Inferno 5, namely that Dante is the first to tell Francesca’s story, that he is her historian of record. All this is irrespective of her place in the poem. Once we have established that Francesca would have been lost to history were it not for Dante (a fact not present in commentaries), one wonders: why is being damned in the fiction more important than being ‘saved’ — kept alive — in the consciousness of generations of human beings? To me the fact that Dante brought Francesca to life in our minds and in our cultures (we think of the unstaunchable flow of cultural artifacts inspired by Inferno 5) is infinitely more worthy of note than the fact that he places her in hell in his fiction. This interpretive possibility, and the need to historicize not only Francesca the person but also the story that Dante tells about her, became visible through detheologizing.

These remarks are rooted in ancient problems, and are inherent in the ancient dichotomy of Dante-theologus versus Dante-poeta. I have come to believe that one of Dante’s contemporaries understood these hermeneutic problems as well as anyone in our Dantean critical history. I refer to Cecco d’Ascoli, the astrologer and professor in Bologna’s faculty of medicine who was the Salieri to Dante’s Mozart. Cecco was not a poet, although in some way he aspired to be one; his Acerba is philosophy in crude vernacular verse, showing that he did have Beginning of page[p. 42] aspirations to communicate in something other than Latin treatises. He openly resents the fact that Dante wrote poetry that entertains his readers while simultaneously daring to engage authoritatively in philosophy and theology. I have written on Cecco d’Ascoli’s attacks on Dante, in which he denounced Dante as a flawed believer, a follower of determinism who was insufficiently committed to free will, and as a flawed practitioner and philosopher of love.4141See both essays now in Barolini, Dante’s Multitudes: ‘Contemporaries Who Found Heterodoxy in Dante: Cecco d’Ascoli, Boccaccio, and Benvenuto da Imola on Fortuna and Inferno 7.89’, pp. 45–57; ‘Dante and Cecco d’Ascoli on Love and Compulsion: The Epistle to Cino, Io sono stato, the Third Heaven’, pp. 243–65. Cecco also denounced Dante as a dishonest and untruthful poet.

Cecco’s battle with Dante was quixotic in the extreme, for he achieved no public recognition as a rival of Dante during his lifetime; the rivalry seems to exist mainly in his own head. Nonetheless, Cecco’s analysis is astute. Perhaps his intense resentment and feelings of rivalry rendered him hyper-intuitive regarding the nature of Dante’s project. Thus, when Cecco misogynistically derides Dante for respecting the intellect of women and thereby thinking that he can find the Virgin Mary in the streets of Ravenna — ‘Maria va cercando per Ravenna | chi crede che in donna sia intellecto’ (‘He who believes that there is intellect in women is searching for Mary in Ravenna’; Acerba 4.9.4401–2])4242For these verses and Cecco’s misogynist attack on Dante’s desire to instruct women, as expressed in his canzone Doglia mi reca, see Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Sotto benda: The Women of Dante’s Canzone Doglia mi reca in the Light of Cecco d’Ascoli’, Dante Studies, 123 (2005), pp. 83–88. For the Acerba, I cite Cecco d’Ascoli (Francesco Stabili), L’Acerba (Acerba etas), ed. by Marco Albertazzi, 3rd edn (Lavis: La Finestra, 2016). Translations are mine. — he understands Dante’s project in ways that few did before the critical advances of the first half of the twentieth century. For Dante’s bold embrace of an incarnational and figural poetics tells us that, pace Cecco, we can find the divine (Maria/Beatrice) in the quotidian (Ravenna/Florence):

To search for the Virgin Mary — the transcendent — in the streets of Ravenna is, in effect, Dante’s project. From the time of the Vita Nuova, Dante’s endeavor was to search for the divine in the quotidian, for Christ in his lady, and to imbue his lyric poetry with this quest. When Dante was searching for Christ in the streets of Florence, when he was finding the divine in Beginning of page[p. 43] a young Florentine woman named Beatrice, ‘she who gives beatitude’, he was doing the equivalent of searching the streets of Ravenna for the Virgin Mary. We have only to exchange ‘Beatrice’ for ‘Maria’ and ‘Firenze’ for ‘Ravenna’ to see how profoundly Cecco d’Ascoli understood Dante’s project.4343Barolini, ‘Contemporaries’, p. 47.

Cecco believed that Dante had used deeply unfair methods to win his status and fame. Close to the end of Acerba, in the thirteenth and final chapter of book 4 (the final book 5 contains only two capitoli), Cecco returns to Dante, defining his philosophical poetry as the opposite of Dante’s Commedia. Dante’s poem is nothing more than the singing of frogs, writes Cecco, the singing of a poetic fantasist engaged in feigned — fictional — vanities:

(Here one does not sing in the way of frogs! Here one does not sing in the way of the poet who feigns, imagining, vain things.) (Acerba 4.13.4669–71)

In the next two stanzas of Acerba, the philosopher goes on to list characters from Inferno, compiling a catalogue of names and events that belong to canti ranging from Inferno 5 to Inferno 33:

(Here I do not see Paolo nor Francesca, I do not see Alberigo of the Manfredi clan, who plucked bitter fruit with sweet bait.Beginning of page[p. 44] Of the old and new Mastiffs of Verrucchio and what they did to Montagna, here I do not speak, nor of the French and their bloody heap.

I do not see the Count who, in anger and bitterness, holds tightly to archbishop Ruggero, taking from his head a cruel feast; I do not see here the figs being flashed at God. I leave gossipy talk and return up to the truth. Fables were always my enemies.) (Acerba 4.13.4675–86)

Cecco’s list contains not only names mentioned in Inferno, but also precise echoes of Dante’s text, taken from Inferno 25–33.

In the order of Cecco’s presentation, we find the following names and textual references in the above stanzas: the lustful Paolo and Francesca from Inferno 5; the traitor Alberigo dei Manfredi, with the echo of Dante’s ‘frutta del mal orto’ (‘fruit of an evil garden’; Inf. 33.119) in the ‘amari fructi’ (‘bitter fruit’; Acerba 4.13.4677) which Alberigo used to kill his guests (Inf. 33.118–20); the Malatesta tyrants of Rimini, both the original founder of the dynasty, Malatesta da Verrucchio and his first-born son Malatestino, called ‘mastiffs’ by Dante and now by Cecco, who also echoes Dante in denouncing their treatment of Montagna di Parcitade (Inf. 27.46–48). Immediately following, in verse 4680, Cecco cites Inferno 27.43–45 and the carnage wrought by Guido da Montefeltro upon French forces in the siege of Forlì: Dante’s ‘di Franceschi sanguinoso mucchio’ (‘and made a bloody heap out of the French’; Inf. 27.44) is cited verbatim by Cecco with ‘di franceschi lo sanguigno muchio’ (Acerba 4.13.4780). In the next stanza, Cecco devotes three verses to the infamous story of Count Ugolino, the traitor from Inferno 32–33, who is pictured holding the head of his enemy Archbishop Ruggieri and indulging in the ‘fiero pasto’ (Acerba 4.13.4683) of the first verse of Inferno 33: ‘La bocca sollevò dal fiero pasto’ (‘That sinner raised his mouth from his fierce meal’; Inf. 33.1). Ugolino is followed by Cecco’s one-verse compression of the first tercet of Inferno 25, where, in language used by Dante and copied by Cecco, the thief Vanni Fucci flashes God with an obscene and blasphemous gesture called ‘le fiche’ (‘the figs’; Inf. 25.2; Acerba 4.13.4784).

Because of his flagrant use of precise textual echoes from Inferno, Cecco d’Ascoli shows us that he has read Dante’s poem very well. He Beginning of page[p. 45] finds particularly galling the charismatic nature of these characters whom he takes the trouble to name and to cite — characters who in their polysemous and infinitely variable speech are, in my opinion, precisely the croaking frogs whose song he has just indicted as the song of the Commedia.4444The Malatesta tyrants of Inferno 27 are the only characters in Cecco’s list who do not speak in Inferno. In other words, Dante wrote in the manner of frogs because Dante gave life in his verse to various and diverse characters, each endowed with a voice. The Inferno’s genial ability to ventriloquize these many and diverse human voices is what Cecco condemns as the ‘modo de le rane’ — the ‘manner of the frogs’ (Acerba 4.13.4669).4545In a reading that I find fully compatible with mine, Giuseppe Ledda takes ‘il modo de le rane’ as attacking Dante’s prophetic claims. He follows Gorni in considering the frog reference an echo of the Apocalypse on false prophets: ‘Cecco, di contro, gli attribuirà in modo memorabile proprio l’emblema metaletterario delle rane, colpendo in particolare le pretese profetiche e salvifiche della poesia di Dante, attraverso un’allusione, opportunamente messa in luce da Guglielmo Gorni, al passo dell’Apocalisse in cui il sintagma “in modum ranarum” è attribuito al falso profeta’; see Giuseppe Ledda, Il bestiario dell’aldilà: gli animali nella ‘Commedia’ di Dante (Ravenna: Longo, 2019), p. 154. Diverse as they are, these characters are all Italians of some notoriety who populate Dante’s text, and who (Cecco might think) exert an unfair fascination on potential readers, much like that exerted by celebrities featured in gossip magazines today. Cecco notes that he, unlike Dante, does not engage in gossip: ‘Lasso le ciance’ (Acerba 4.13.4685). Characters of this sort do not populate Acerba, a poem that here he characterizes both for what it does not do — it does not sing like a frog and is not based on the fictions of a fabulist — and what it does do, which is to tell the truth: ‘Lasso le ciance e torno su nel vero: | le fabulle me fôn sempre inimiche’ (‘I leave gossipy talk and return up to the truth. | Fables were always my enemies’; Acerba 4.13.4685–86).

In Cecco’s scathing caricature, Dante is said to write poetry in the way of frogs, and to use his imagination to write fictions about vain things, while he, Cecco, leaves behind frivolous talk and fables and dwells in the truth. Dante’s sin is to write fiction, while also daring to claim that he tells truth. Cecco fiercely resents Dante’s ability to entertain his readers with charismatic characters who converse with the poet-narrator so compellingly and so variously: one after another, ‘le Beginning of page[p. 46] vite spiritali ad una ad una’ (‘the lives of spirits, one by one’; Par. 33.24) speak and reveal their different characters to the poet as he undertakes his journey through a fantasy universe. It is the Inferno’s brilliant and fictional dialogism that Cecco indicts in the phrase ‘modo de le rane’: the way of the frogs is poetry that ventriloquizes the utterances of a multitude of charismatic characters, all devised by the fiction-mongering but truth-claiming ‘poeta | che finge, imaginando, cose vane’ (‘poet who feigns, imagining, vain things’; Acerba 4.13.4670–71).

Dante, in other words, has the unfair advantage, and the protective cover (alas, poor Cecco was burned at the stake in 1327), of writing fiction. Dante was not a theologus, Cecco is saying; he was merely a poeta.4646For the idea that Dante’s fictions protected him from the charge of heresy, see UDC, pp. 6, 143. Cecco’s attack on Inferno is a highly sophisticated recognition of what Dante has in his toolkit that advantages the poet over the philosopher-theologian. Dante’s unfair advantage, Cecco is saying, is that he writes fiction and employs dramatic narrative in order to cause readers to engage in the willing suspension of disbelief. For all that Dante writes fictions and Cecco instead writes truth (in his view), Cecco has realized that Dante’s readers respond to his fiction as though he wrote truth. And Cecco shows us in this very passage that he, too, responds to the power of Dante’s fiction (although with greater self-awareness than most of Dante’s readers): by internalizing Dante’s poetry, remembering and citing Dante’s language, Cecco indicates that he experiences the pull of Dante’s narratives, the pull of the ‘real’.

The Undivine Comedy seeks to analyse Dante’s genial ventriloquizing fiction and its brilliant methods of procuring ‘that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’. I hope in this essay to have given you some idea of what I thought I was doing when I wrote The Undivine Comedy, why I thought it was important, and how it changed my subsequent critical practice. I confess to some nostalgia for the brash thirty-something person I was when I wrote that book, which, like my son (by far the greater of the two mirabilia), entered the world in my long-ago fortieth year. I was indeed brash, even militant. But it makes me happy to read The Undivine Comedy now, in this more prudential and somewhat cynical time, and to see that I was Beginning of page[p. 47] so fully committed to what I took to be my mission as a scholar and a humanist. My goal was to discuss why Dante scholars suspended their disbelief all too well, and then to embrace the how of the Commedia, analysing the narratological and rhetorical tools that Dante employs in order to bring his characters, and his possible worlds, to life.

In making connections to Coleridge and to Tolkien, to Horace and to Cecco d’Ascoli, I have endeavoured to throw some fresh light on the deep and murky methodological abyss into which, at the end of Inferno 16, Virgilio throws the knotted cord with which he summons the fantastic, the unknown, the supernatural. It is the very cord with which the pilgrim had been girded, with which he had attempted to snare the lonza, thus adding even more mystery to the cryptic passage. Obeying his master’s command, Dante passes the cord to Virgilio; Virgilio then summons Geryon and the whole issue of belief palpably into the Commedia (here called for the first time by its name). It is no coincidence that, much textual time and space later, in Purgatorio 27, Virgilio conjures the full measure of their journey together with a carefully chosen synecdoche. He exhorts Dante to remember Geryon, the supernatural beast on whose back (‘sovresso Gerïon’) the travellers flew down into the abyss:

In Geryon the poet summons the textual mystery at the heart of the Commedia: ‘ciò ch’io attendo e che il tuo pensier sogna’ (‘what I await and what your thought is dreaming’; Inf. 16.122). It is a mystery that still inspires awe in me, awe for a very genuine thing, and a desire to understand, to the best of my ability, how it was made.