Heavenly Paradoxes and Their PleasuresManuele Gragnolati

I began graduate school at Columbia University in 1994, when The Undivine Comedy was still hot off the press. Teodolinda Barolini’s book had marked my intellectual life more than any other. I was coming from a degree in Classical Philology with a specialization in Greek and Latin grammar from the University of Pavia, and my encounter with the concept of ‘detheologizing’ as ‘releasing our reading of the Commedia of the author’s grip, finding a way out of Dante’s hall of mirrors’11Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 17, hereafter UDC. Subsequent references given in parentheses in the main text. Just prior, Barolini explains that ‘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.’ UDC, p. 17. had been both revolutionary and empowering. I could recognize in it the importance given to the rigorous handling of the text, which was at the core of my previous formation, while I could also finally find an inspiration, and a justification, for interpreting literature and appreciating its beauty and power.

In this essay I will not linger on the personal details of my encounter with The Undivine Comedy and with Barolini as a teacher and an academic mentor. I will simply mention that I came to graduate Beginning of page[p. 300] school at Columbia University to write a dissertation on twentieth-century literature, but it only took a few of Barolini’s classes on Dante’s Commedia for me to switch to Dante, and indeed I ended up writing a dissertation on the relationship between body and soul in medieval eschatology.22Manuele Gragnolati, Identity, Pain and Resurrection: Body and Soul in Bonvesin da la Riva’s ‘Book of the Three Scriptures’ and Dante’s ‘Commedia’ (doctoral thesis, Columbia University, 1999). After being substantially reworked, the dissertation became the monograph Experiencing the Afterlife: Soul and Body in Dante and Medieval Culture (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2005). In these pages I share some reflections on the chapters that The Undivine Comedy dedicates to Paradiso, in particular chapters 8 and 10, focusing on three questions: what does it mean to be in heaven, how can a poet describe the encounter in words, and how does a reader experience that description. I will begin with chapter 8, entitled ‘Problems in Paradise: The Mimesis of Time and the Paradox of più e meno’, which opens by pointing to the impossible task that Dante as a poet faces when writing the Paradiso. What is it that makes the writing of Paradiso more difficult than Inferno and Purgatorio, and ultimately impossible?

As Barolini explains, this difficulty has to do with time and with the incompatibility between the rootedness of language and narrative in time on the one hand and, on the other, the fact that heaven is outside of time. Remembering, with Paul Ricoeur, that ‘The world unfolded by every narrative work is always a temporal world’, Barolini asks: ‘What happens when the world unfolded in narrative is supposed to be a world outside of time? What happens if the author of such a world is fully aware of the temporality of language and takes steps to counter it? What are the steps an author can take to counter what is finally not counterable?’ (UDC, pp. 166–67).

Through Aristotle, Dante knows that time ‘comports otherness, difference, non-identity, nonsimultaneity’ (UDC, p. 167), and he also knows, with Augustine, that language is bound to time, is a function of time. Language is therefore a differential medium, unable to express simultaneity. However, God is precisely sameness and simultaneity. He is by definition eternal and, like heaven, outside of time. With Boethius, Barolini explains that God’s eternity is not simple endlessness, perpetual addition of time, never-ending duration, which is the Beginning of page[p. 301] temporality of hell.33One can think of infernal endlessness also in terms of useless repetition: see the section ‘Ripetizioni infernali’ in my book Amor che move. Linguaggio del corpo e forma del desiderio in Dante, Pasolini e Morante (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2013), pp. 79–83. Rather, the dimension of God and heaven is that of the totum simul, a contemporaneous simultaneity that, unlike time, consists not of a linear addition of before and after but, we could say, is like a single thick point, an instant where everything is simultaneously co-present, where everything is the same at the same time. Dante’s problem with writing Paradiso is that of rendering ‘a condition defined as beyond space and time in a medium [language] that is intractably of space and time’ (UDC, p. 169).

After setting out the formal problem of the Paradiso, which will be treated mainly in the following chapters and to which I will return later, chapter 8 turns to exploring its thematic correlative, namely the philosophical paradox of the one and the many, which is already present in the first tercet of the canticle: ‘La gloria di colui che tutto move | per l’universo penetra, e risplende | in una parte più e meno altrove’ (‘The glory of the One who moves all things | permeates the universe and glows | in one part more and in another less’; Par. 1.1–3).44Quotations 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 obsessive question of the Paradiso, which is constantly reformulated throughout the canticle, is ‘how can the universe be one and yet receive God’s light in different degrees?’ (UDC, p. 172). In other words, how can God’s heaven accommodate difference while remaining one? In fact, what is striking in Dante’s concept of heaven is the paradoxical way in which it combines what cannot logically be combined: a sense of unity, whereby everything is merged with God in a state of sameness and undifferentiation, and an appreciation of multiplicity, difference and singularity. Barolini writes (and shows) that Dante, in his understanding of heaven, is less of a monist than commonly assumed and actually reveals an enormous — and striking — ‘dedication to the cause of difference and pluralism: to the individual, the specific, the many’ (UDC, p. 173).55Barolini has devoted much of her subsequent scholarship to exploring Dante’s commitment to multiplicity and difference: see her recent volume Dante’s Multitudes: History, Philosophy, Method (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2022). According to Barolini, paradox, and particularly Beginning of page[p. 302] the paradoxical coexistence of unity and multiplicity, is the cipher of Dante’s heaven, and the Paradiso will repeatedly articulate this paradox, striving to ‘create a text that encompasses the illusion of the one and the many as coexistent and simultaneous’ (UDC, p. 174).

The rest of the chapter brilliantly analyses the first nine cantos of Paradiso and shows that the main strategy which Dante deploys to render heaven’s paradoxical coexistence of unity and multiplicity is that of alternation. For instance, in canto 1 the poet stresses unity, while in canto 2 he stresses difference, ‘and so on from one to the other, in the hope that the diachronic package he offers us will convey some idea of the synchronic reality he experienced’ (UDC, p. 176). The chapter is full of many insightful and genius points, as for instance the analysis of Paradiso iv, where Barolini shows that the souls’ ‘condescension’ — their showing themselves to the pilgrim in the different Heavens while actually all being in the Empyrean — occurs not only for the sake of the pilgrim, who wouldn't otherwise understand how the blessed can all be perfectly happy and yet enjoy different degrees of happiness, but also the poet, who is to compose not a ‘mystical haiku’ but a third canticle that, like the previous ones, is composed of thirty-three cantos (UDC, p. 188).

Rather than reviewing the chapter point by point, I will engage with it from the perspective of my research on the concepts of ‘experiencing the afterlife’ and ‘eschatological anthropology’, namely what it means to live in the otherworld and what it tells us about Dante’s understanding of the human being.66See Gragnolati, Experiencing the Afterlife, and Manuele Gragnolati, ‘Eschatological Anthropology’, in The Oxford Handbook of Dante, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 447–63. In particular, I will take a cue from Barolini’s observation that Dante’s dedication to the notions of difference and pluralism causes him to repudiate, in canto 25 of Purgatorio, Averroes’s doctrine of the common intellect insofar as it denies the immortality of the individual soul.

The passage to which Barolini refers is part of Statius’s embryological elucidation in Purgatorio 25, where he aims to explain how the individual separated soul can continue to have an experience of the afterlife, and in particular to feel the physical pains of hell and purgatory,Beginning of page[p. 303] while being separated from its body in the eschatological time before the resurrection. Dante imagines that when the soul separates from its body at physical death and proceeds to the afterlife, it contains the structure of the body as a sort of DNA and can unfold itself into a body of air that is endowed with all the senses and has an individual form. As I have shown in my dissertation and first book, Dante’s theory combines the principles of different and logically incompatible scholastic doctrines on the relationship between body and soul in a way that allows the aerial body to ‘function’ as a paradox in the Commedia.77See especially Gragnolati, Experiencing the Afterlife, pp. 139–60. In what sense as a paradox? In the sense that the aerial body stands at once for the fullness of experience of the separated soul and the need for the resurrection of the body; in other words, the aerial body symbolizes both the intensity of the separated soul’s experience and its imperfection.

In the following part of this essay, I will look at experience in the afterlife from the perspective of the paradox between the one and the many, sameness and difference, which The Undivine Comedy posits as the cipher of Dante’s heaven. First, I will return to purgatory, whose function would seem to solve the paradox in favour of sameness and detachment from particularity.88I have explored this topic over the course of many years. Here I am drawing on Gragnolati, ‘Eschatological Anthropology’. See also Manuele Gragnolati, ‘Ombre a abbracci. Riflessioni sull’inconsistenza nella Commedia Dante’, Chroniques italiennes web, 39 (2020), pp. 30–43. I will begin with a scene on the shores of Mount Purgatory — the pilgrim’s encounter with the shade of his old friend Casella — which rewrites the Virgilian motif of the failed embrace between a living person and a dead one. When Casella leaves his group of shades and moves forward to embrace Dante, words such as ‘abbracciarmi’ and ‘affetto’ charge the scene with a sense of intimacy and affection: ‘Io vidi una di lor trarresi avante | per abbracciarmi, con sì grande affetto, | che mosse me a far lo simigliante’ (‘I saw one of those spirits moving forward | in order to embrace me — his affection | so great that I was moved to mime his welcome’; Purg. 2.76–78). Dante-pilgrim attempts to embrace the shade in front of him, but fails three times because, as the poet laments, shades in the otherworld are ‘vane’ or empty, insofar as they have an appearance but no substantiality:Beginning of page[p. 304] ‘Ohi ombre vane, fuor che ne l’aspetto! | tre volte dietro a lei le mani avvinsi, | e tante mi tornai con esse al petto’ (‘I saw one of those spirits moving forward | in order to embrace me — his affection | so great that I was moved to mime his welcome’; Purg. 2.79–81). The two friends have both just arrived in purgatory, and it is important to note that, as Casella indicates, they are still attached to their past desires as represented by their mortal bodies: ‘Così com’io t’amai | nel mortal corpo, così t’amo sciolta’ (‘As I loved you when I was | within my mortal flesh, so, freed, I love you’; Purg. 2.88–89). The same affection is shown by Dante, who relapses into nostalgia for earthly pursuits, asking his friend to sing as he often used to do in their youth (Purg. 2.106–11). Casella performs Dante’s canzone Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona so beautifully that all the souls are completely enchanted by the sweetness of the performance and forget that they are in purgatory to embark on a journey of purification which will eventually lead them to heaven (Purg. 2.112–17).

The remainder of the episode (Purg. 2.118–33), which revolves around Cato’s return and rebuke of the lingering souls, shows that the mutual affection that the two friends still feel for each other is wrong and that attachment to the body, affection for friends and loved ones, and nostalgia for the past are also deemed improper and must be remediated in purgatory. Indeed, the moral structure of Dante’s understanding of purgatory prescribes that the souls in this realm learn to detach themselves from anything transient and re-direct all their desires towards God. According to what Barolini has identified as Dante’s Augustinian paradigm of desire, attachments to one’s mortal body and its symbolic expression of nostalgia for earthly affections are considered distractions that the soul must abandon in purgatory if it wants to attain the complete love for God necessary to reach heaven.99See especially chapter 5 of UDC: ‘Purgatory as Paradigm: Travelling the New and Never-Before-Traveled Path of This Life/Poem’, pp. 99–121.

This Augustinian discourse of desire, introduced with the pilgrim’s arrival at the shores of Mount Purgatory, is reiterated with Beatrice’s reproach in the garden of Eden at the mountain’s summit. Beatrice confirms that, albeit beautiful, the earthly body is mortal, and one should neither be too attached to it nor replace it with some other Beginning of page[p. 305] mortal good, as the pilgrim did after her own death (Purg. 30.127–32 and 31.49–57). Like the episode of Casella, Beatrice’s words frame Dante’s concept of purgatory with the idea that, in order to redirect their desire towards God and gain heavenly bliss, the purging souls must relinquish their nostalgic attachment to the mortal body and the earthly affections it represents. The temporal, linear process of purgatory is an experience of what I have called ‘productive pain’ that transforms the souls’ desires and teaches them to love in the same selfless and gratuitous way in which Christ did on the cross, allowing them to recuperate their original similitude with Christ that sin had erased, and thereby making them ready to ascend to heaven.1010Gragnolati, Experiencing the Afterlife, pp. 89–137. See also Manuele Gragnolati, ‘Gluttony and the Anthropology of Pain in Dante’s Inferno and Purgatorio’, in History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person, ed. by Rachel Fulton and Bruce W. Holsinger (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 238–50.

Once in heaven, the souls need not wait for the resurrection of the body in order to enjoy the full vision of God, and the Paradiso is filled with passages indicating that upon arrival in heaven, the blessed have immediate access to the beatific vision and are granted perfect bliss — a state that the poem calls ‘pace’ and which corresponds to having all one’s desires satisfied: ‘Lume è là sù che visibile face | lo creatore a quella creatura | che solo in lui vedere ha la sua pace’ (‘Above, on high, there is a light that makes | apparent the Creator to the creature | whose only peace lies in his seeing Him’; Par. 30.100–02).

The sign of the souls’ happiness in heaven is the light surrounding them, which is proportional to the degree of their visio Dei:

Beginning in the Heaven of Mercury, shades disappear from the poem and the pilgrim can only see featureless lights, which can be taken as a sign of the extent to which, in line with the Augustinian and Christological paradigm of purgatory, heavenly souls have indeed learned to detach from their past and to transform personal and individual attachments into caritas, i.e. absolute and unconditional love for God that opens the self and is also gratuitous love for everyone else.

This condition achieved and manifested by heavenly souls corresponds to a merging with God which radically opens the self. Thus, for instance, Lino Pertile and Steven Botterill have indicated that Beatrice, who can be considered the symbol of the pilgrim’s personal and individual attachments, must eventually depart to be replaced by Bernard of Clairvaux before the pilgrim can reach ultimate union with God. Robin Kirkpatrick likewise has spoken of a ‘spirit of dispossession’ that characterizes the condition of being in heaven, while Christian Moevs has indicated that the redirection of desire from mortal to immortal goods can be understood as a ‘spontaneous crucifixion of the self’ and that ‘love is selflessness, and self is lovelessness’.1111Lino Pertile, La punta del disio: semantica del desiderio nella ‘Commedia’ (Fiesole: Cadmo 2005), pp. 235–46; Steven Botterill, Dante and the Mystical Tradition: Bernard of Clairvaux in the ‘Commedia’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 64–86; Robin Kirkpatrick, ‘Polemics of Praise: Theology as Text, Narrative and Rhetoric in Dante’s Commedia’, in Dante’s ‘Commedia’: Theology as Poetry, ed. by Vittorio Montemaggi and Matthew Treherne (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), pp. 14–35 (p. 23); and Christian Moevs, The Metaphysics of Dante’s ‘Comedy’ (New York: Oxford University Press 2005), pp. 89–90. See also Heather Webb, Dante’s Persons: An Ethics of the Transhuman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). Regarding Barolini’s analysis of unity and multiplicity, one could say that the luminosity surrounding the souls in heaven and hiding the features of their aerial bodies represents the side of oneness, whereby the soul has dissolved the boundaries of the ego and merged with God.

However, if we move to Paradiso 14, we can also appreciate the other side of the paradox: that of singularity, difference, multiplicity. The pilgrim and Beatrice are in the Heaven of the Sun when, reading Beginning of page[p. 307] the pilgrim’s mind, Beatrice asks what will happen to the blessed souls’ luminosity when the fleshly body resurrects at the end of time. Solomon explains that the resurrection of the flesh and the material reconstitution of the person will allow for an increase of beatific vision, happiness, and luminosity:

Solomon then adds that the luminosity of the resurrected body will be stronger than that of the soul:

By suggesting that in heaven the person’s features will be visible again when the earthly body resurrects, the poem points to that element of Beginning of page[p. 308] singularity, plurality, and difference that seemed to have been put aside by the soul’s merging with God but that, nevertheless, continues to be a crucial component of the experience in/of heaven.

This idea is confirmed in the following verses describing the joy and enthusiasm with which souls react to the prospect of reuniting with their fleshly bodies — the same mortal bodies that have remained on Earth as corpses — thus revealing an intense nostalgia for what has been left behind (‘disio d’i corpi morti’):

Unlike many other passages in Paradiso that highlight the souls’ current state of happiness, contentment, and ‘pace’, here the poem emphasizes the intensity with which these souls long to recuperate their bodies and increase their happiness. As Kirkpatrick notices, the presence of words belonging to the ‘low’ register like ‘amme’ (the vernacular form for the Latin amen) and ‘mamme’ is striking in such a highly theological passage.1212In Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, ed. and trans. by Robin Kirkpatrick, 3 vols (London: Penguin, 2006–07), iii: Paradiso (2007), p. 389. If these words are typical of that sermo humilis modelled upon the Bible that the Commedia, according to Auerbach’s well known interpretation, takes as the model for its linguistic variety, the specific use of the word ‘mamma’ is, as Barolini writes, the passionate ‘expression of their desire to love fully in heaven what they loved on earth’.1313UDC, p. 138; Erich Auerbach, ‘Sermo humilis’, in Auerbach, Literary Language and its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages, trans. by Ralph Manheim (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), pp. 25–66. See also Jennifer Rushworth, Discourses of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch, and Proust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 47–53. This Beginning of page[p. 309] aspect exemplifies the singularity that the souls continue to express in heaven as well as Dante’s particular and striking appreciation of difference. It is indeed significant that the souls’ desire for the return of their dead body thus expresses a relational sense of the self, moving beyond the concerns of contemporary theologians who focused on the exclusive relation of the individual to God and who were less interested in the idea that personal attachments continue among the blessed.

Thus, there seems to be an unresolved tension, or a paradox, between the blessed souls’ desire for their dead bodies and the Augustinian paradigm of detachment that characterizes the process of purgatory as an education in selflessness and dispossession. Dante’s poem underscores that, no matter how luminous and happy in their union with God, even in heaven the fleshless souls are but incomplete fragments lacking something tightly connected to their intimate affections, and that ultimate happiness is only possible with the final return of their fleshly body and the recovery of their full singularity.

Paradise as imagined by Dante is thus marked by the paradoxical co-existence of a desire to lose oneself in God (unity) and of a desire to regain one’s own history carried in the materiality of one’s own body (difference/singularity). In recent years my interests have leaned toward the connections between the persistence of the souls’ individuality and historicity in heaven, Auerbach’s concept of the figura as that which maintains both an allegorical and historical meaning, and most importantly his notion that the Commedia’s mixing of styles and use of sermo humilis invert the movement of the figural interpretation so that, ultimately, the earthly pole prevails over the eschatological one.1414Manuele Gragnolati, ‘Insegnare con un classico. La complessità di Dante e lo spirito critico’, in In cattedra. Il docente universitario in otto autoritratti, ed. by Chiara Cappelletto (Milan: Cortina, 2019), pp. 177–214. Before I conclude by returning to the final chapter of The Undivine Comedy, I would like to suggest that the paradox between unity and plurality also informs Dante’s much-debated relationship with Beatrice. As we have seen, several critics have argued that at a certain point in the narrative Beatrice must withdraw so that the pilgrim — with the help of Bernard of Clairvaux and Mary — can unite with God, and this withdrawal is understood as a sign that there is no place for eros or the Beginning of page[p. 310] lyric mode in Dante’s heaven. However, while Beatrice’s withdrawal indicates that even in heaven she continues to convey something not fully compatible with God and connected instead with eros, her lyric past, and embodiment, the Commedia also suggests that even after the souls have attained the beatific vision, their desire for their earthly bodies carries the trace of their individual memory and history, which in Dante’s case will arguably continue to include his love for Beatrice.1515See Manuele Gragnolati, ‘Paradiso xiv e il desiderio del corpo’, Studi Danteschi, 78 (2013), pp. 285–309.

I will now move to the last chapter of The Undivine Comedy, entitled ‘The Sacred Poem is Forced to Jump: Closure and the Poetics of Enjambment’. This extraordinary chapter is perhaps the one that has most profoundly marked me, insofar it has shown me what textuality is and how it can be read. The chapter returns to the formal problem introduced in chapter 8, which is Dante’s impossible task of representing the totum simul of paradise through the medium of language, which is necessarily bound to temporality and multiplicity. In particular, the chapter focuses on ‘high paradise’ and shows that, towards the end of the canticle, Dante deploys the strategy of alternating two different textual modes: on the one hand, a properly ‘narrative’ mode based on the Aristotelian sense of time as duration and continuum that is ‘discursive, logical, linear, “chronologized” and […] intellective’ and that corresponds to the traditional way in which narrative operates; and, on the other, a ‘lyrical’ mode based on the Augustinian sense of time as an indivisible instant that is ‘the opposite, i.e., nondiscursive, nonlinear circular, “dechronologized”, and affective’ (UDC, p. 221). As Barolini exemplifies through her astounding reading of cantos 23, 30, and 33, the lyrical mode resists subdivision and logical explanation and is instead characterized by ‘apostrophes, exclamations, heavily metaphoric language, and intensely affective similes’ (UDC, p. 221). It ‘represents nothing less than Dante’s attempt to forge an oxymoron, an adynaton, a paradox: namely linguistic/diagetic uguaglianza, “equalized” language’ (UDC, p. 221). Referring to the metapoetic tercet ‘e così, figurando il paradiso, | qui convene saltare lo sacrato poema, | come chi trova suo cammin riciso’ (‘And thus, in representing Paradise, | the sacred poem has to leap across, | as does a man who finds his Beginning of page[p. 311] path cut off’; Par. 23.61–63), Barolini calls it a ‘jumping’ textuality and shows that through its fragmented and fractured nature it bends the linear temporality of narrative and logical intellection, while through the insistent use of affective images and metaphors it approximates circularity and thereby the equalized condition of heaven. Let us think for instance of the concluding canto of Paradiso and, in particular, of the portion that follows Bernard’s prayer to Mary and describes the pilgrim’s final ascent towards the beatific vision and unity with the Divine (Par. 30.46–145). As Barolini shows, the poet weaves this story into three circular movements (Par. 30.46–75, 76–105, and 106–45) and arranges the three ‘textual building blocks’ of which they are composed — brief moments of plot describing what happened to the pilgrim or what he saw; metapoetic statements on the impossibility of describing what the poet has experienced or seen; and apostrophes to the Divine asking for help in doing so — in such a way that the text prevents the emergence of any narrative line and keeps jumping like a firework. And if the jumping style of canto 33 represents ‘Dante’s supreme attempt to engage the fractured, circular, equalized mode of eguaglianza’, it is not anti-mimetic insofar as it ‘seeks to approximate the circling, surging, orgasmic approach of the soul to the fulfilment of its heart’s desire’ (UDC, p. 252).

In the book Amor che move, where I have provided a ‘diffractive reading’ of Dante’s works with those of twentieth-century authors Pier Paolo Pasolini and Elsa Morante, I have further developed Barolini’s intuition that the Paradiso’s jumping textuality conveys the desire of the blessed souls in the Empyrean. In particular, I have read Dante’s text through the lens of two twentieth-century aesthetic theories arguing that in its fragmentariness and resistance to linearity, poetic textuality is imbued with desire.1616Gragnolati, Amor che move, and ‘Diffracting Dante’s Paradiso: Transformation, Identity, and the Form of Desire’, in Cultural Reception, Translation, and Transformation of Italian Literature: Essays in Honour of Martin McLaughlin, ed. by Guido Bonsaver, Brian Richardson, and Giuseppe Stellardi (Oxford: Legenda, 2017), pp. 352–66. My reading of Dante and Morante relies on collaborations with Sara Fortuna, especially: ‘Between Affection and Discipline: Exploring Linguistic Tensions from Dante to Aracoeli’, in The Power of Disturbance: Elsa Morante’s ‘Aracoeli’, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati and Sara Fortuna (Oxford: Legenda, 2009), pp. 8–19; ‘Allattamento e origine del linguaggio tra la Commedia dantesca e Aracoeli di Elsa Morante’, in Parole di donne, ed. by Francesca Maria Dovetto (Ariccia: Aracne, 2009), pp. 271–303; ‘Attaccando al suo capezzolo le mie labbra ingorde: corpo, linguaggio e soggettività da Dante ad Aracoeli di Elsa Morante’, Nuova Corrente, 55 (2008), pp. 85–123. First, Julia Kristeva’s concept of the Beginning of page[p. 312]‘revolution of poetic language’ links a corporeal and desirous mode of signification to the experience of suckling at the mother’s breast and claims that this pre- or proto-linguistic mode, which is subsequently lost in the fully symbolic language of the adult subject, can be reactivated through a poetry that subverts the ordinary order of language at all levels (morpho-syntactic, semantic, and phonologic), as in the case of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century vanguard works that Kristeva considers in her essay.1717Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique: l’avant-garde à la fin du xixe siècle. Lautréamont et Mallarmé (Paris: Seuil 1974); in English: The Revolution of Poetic Language, ed. by Leon S. Roudiez, trans. by Marguerite Waller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). Second, Leo Bersani’s reformulation of the concept of ‘artistic sublimation’, understood as a form of sexuality within the movement of the text, which — in the case of fragmented texts that frustrate comprehension, progress, and closure — expresses, enacts, and invokes the reader to experience the paradoxical and indeed masochistic pleasure of what Bersani argues to be sexuality in its ontological state, before its domestication and sanitization by the teleology of reproductive sexuality.1818Leo Bersani, The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

While in Experiencing the Afterlife I had focused on the unexpected and paradoxical conflation of incompatible eschatological emphases that takes place in the Empyrean, where the pilgrim is allowed to see the blessed with features that will only become visible after their bodily return,1919Gragnolati, Experiencing the Afterlife, pp. 139–78. in Amor che move I argued that Dante’s poem not only stages the resurrection of the body before the end of time but also conveys this experience in its textuality. Drawing on Gary Cestaro’s book on the ‘nursing’ and maternal texture of the vernacular,2020Gary Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2003). I proposed the concept of ‘forma del desiderio’ (‘the form of desire’) and suggested that in the cantos devoted to the description of the Empyrean, the jumping textuality identified by Barolini can be understood in terms of a complex combination of a ‘revolution of poetic language’ à la Kristeva Beginning of page[p. 313] that reactivates the corporeal and affective dimension of the vernacular, and an ‘artistic sublimation’ à la Bersani that replicates the paradoxical pleasure of being in heaven: a pleasure that, as we have seen, consists of both losing and finding oneself.2121See Gragnolati, Amor che move, pp. 149–61.

I will conclude this essay with one additional proposition that moves from looking at the content and the form of Paradiso to considering the experience of reading it. In fact, while rereading The Undivine Comedy for the preparation of this chapter, I was intrigued by the attention it devotes to the affective experience of reading and writing. For instance, Barolini notes that humans enjoy linear narratives made of disugguaglianza and ‘stories with beginnings, middles, and ends’, and when readers are confronted not with a sustained narrative that they can grasp but with the disruptions of the jumping textuality, as for instance in canto 23 of Paradiso, they feel challenged and experience a setback, frustrated that the canto resists their ‘attempts to make sense of it, to conquer it’, as though they were plunged in a textual ocean which they are unequipped to navigate (UDC, p. 224). Similarly, from the perspective of the poet, the final cantos of Paradiso are said to be informed by an anxiety: ‘the anxiety of the impending end, the anxiety of having to end without delivering the satisfaction that only God could deliver’ (UDC, p. 240). The chapter seems to imply that the pleasure of reading the text consists in the progression that the poem achieves despite its fragmented, non-linear, jumping textuality. Indeed, as I have mentioned before, the chapter indicates an orgasmic movement in the final canto, approaching and backing off, approaching and backing off again, then finally arriving, to the extent that the void in which the readers find themselves at the end of the poem seems to correspond to the little death following orgasmic arrival and its jouissance. However, I wonder whether one could also consider with Bersani and with much of queer theory that pleasure is not necessarily linear or teleological but can also be masochistic as an enjoyment, for instance, of the meandering of errancy and deferral, the intensity of suspension and repetition, or the bewilderment of confusion.2222Bersani, The Freudian Body. See also Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011); and Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Queer Texts, Bad Habits, and the Issue of a Future’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 17.2–3 (2011), pp. 243–63. Allowing for such paradoxical Beginning of page[p. 314] pleasure, which for Bersani is at the core and nexus of sexuality and aesthetics, suggests that through its mobilization the text succeeds in conveying to the reader what is logically impossible — the totum simul of unity and plurality, mystical abandonment and retained identity. Supporting this paradox through an equally paradoxical enjoyment may not measure up to ‘the satisfaction that only God could deliver’, but it does provide a properly literary, undivine pleasure.2323For another reading that emphasizes the nonnormative pleasure characterizing the poem’s ending, see Bruce W. Holsinger, ‘Sodomy and Resurrection: The Homoerotic Subject of the Divine Comedy’, in Premodern Sexualities, ed. by Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 243–74.