On Reading The Undivine Comedy Thirty Years LaterJoan Ferrante

Thirty years ago, I was stunned by the brilliance of this book, a brilliance that was based on the simple but startling approach of focusing not on what Dante says he is doing, but on what he actually does, on how he manipulates us, forcing us to respond in his terms. Rereading the book thirty years later, I am once again overwhelmed by the striking effectiveness of looking so closely at the tools Dante uses to do this, creating tension and suspense where none should exist, using difference to enable a narrative that claims to describe unity. I am still struck by how obvious some of Barolini’s points seem once she has pointed them out, not to say by how readers wrapped up in larger concepts had failed to see the most basic tools with which Dante creates his universe.

It is now impossible to read the Commedia without being aware of those tools. Once Barolini points them out, their importance is obvious, but without her guidance one might easily have overlooked the function of words like ‘più’ and ‘meno’, or ‘l’un’ and ‘l’altro’, to create the sense of difference within the philosophic unity of Dante’s universe, difference without which there could be no narrative. As without paradox there could be no narrative: on the terrace of pride, though humility requires self-effacement, the text requires names and cannot help but celebrate them; in the heaven of the Moon, Piccarda Beginning of page[p. 370] tells us both that divine charity cancels out difference (‘vuol simile a sé tutta sua corte’, ‘that would have all Its court be like itself’; Par. 3.45) and that difference exists (‘beata son in la spera più tarda’, ‘blessed within the slowest of the spheres’; v. 51); in the heaven of the Sun, Thomas claims that the two saints (Francis and Dominic) are equal, that to speak of one is to speak of the other, but the text belies him, for the two lives are very different.11Quotations from the Commedia are from Dante Alighieri: La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. by Giorgio Petrocchi, Società Dantesca Italiana, Edizione Nazionale, 2nd rev. edn, 4 vols (Florence: Le Lettere, 1994). English translations come from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. by Allen Mandelbaum, 3 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980–82).

The basic paradox inherent in Dante’s claiming unity through diversity is sustained by structural techniques like terza rima and enjambement. Terza rima, a rhyme form that at once looks back and moves forward throughout the poem, also moves towards unity in the four triple ‘Cristo’ rhymes that occur in Paradiso. Various forms of enjambement also move towards unity: in Paradiso 23, which Barolini notes has no narrative thread but must jump from simile to simile, enjambement is ‘a rupture that unifies’ creating a ‘circulata melodia’;22Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 228. if in canto 24, the break in the middle of a word (‘differente — | mente’; vv. 16–17) emphasizes the rupture, the jump from canto 32 to canto 33 in the middle of a sentence brings the structural divisions together.

These are but a small sample of the brilliant insights that still strike me. The Undivine Comedy remains the most impressive work on the artistry of a great poet.