In Praise of DetheologizingElena Lombardi

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 except on its own terms. We read the Commedia as Fundamentalists read the Bible, as though it were true, and the fact that we do this is not connected to our religious beliefs, for on a narrative level, we believe the Commedia without knowing that we do so.11Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 16, emphasis mine, hereafter UDC. Subsequent references given in parentheses in the main text.

In 1992, Barolini’s statement was prophetic. And for us, young graduate students in New York City in the 1990s, it was an extraordinary breath of fresh air. We became, at once, narrative believers, excited readers of that narrative, and delighted critics of our reading. This was liberating, especially for those of us who came from Italy and from a rather rigid and yet rigorous philological training, enlivened, if anything, by an ever-waning Marxist critique.

The Commedia was no longer the revered national poem, so much so that I received a degree in ‘Letters’ at university without needing Beginning of page[p. 286] to study it properly (following Contini’s diktat, our courses comprised ‘Dante senza la Commedia’)22The entry on ‘Dante Alighieri’ in our university textbook, Contini’s Letteratura Italiana delle origini, began like this: ‘Poiché ovviamente nei lettori dell’antologia si presume familiarità con la Divina Commedia, le pagine qui offerte valgono come una presentazione delle opere dette minori (e minori di fatto, ma unicamente rispetto al livello supremo della Commedia), e in qualche misura consentono di giudicare quello che Dante sarebbe nella nostra storia letteraria se non avesse scritto il poema’ (Gianfranco Contini, Letteratura Italiana delle origini (Florence: Sansoni, 1985), p. 297).; in graduate school in New York, it became a playground. The swings and slides for our reading were revolutionary ideas that were unknown to traditional Italian education and were experiencing their heyday in American universities then: feminism, gender studies, cultural studies, deconstructionism — a trust, in other words, in the text’s capacity for endless experimentation, and the production of meaning and counter-meaning. We felt we were going under the surface of a text that we had all along accepted as canonical and undiscussed. The more we dug into the various meanings it produced, the more its lies were eerily looking like the truth.

We gave the ‘poetic assent’ — as T. S. Eliot required — and off we went on the most exciting literary ride of all.33T. S. Eliot, ‘Dante’ [1929], in Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 237–77. There were new poetics, and Never-Before-Travelled-Paths, nonfalse errors and true dreams, problems, oh so many delightful problems, mimeses and paradoxes, closures and incipits, jumps and fits and starts to mark a beautiful, impalpable, lyric textuality; and an ornate, chic, monster, ‘maravigliosa ad ogne cor sicuro’ (‘amazing to the surest heart; Inf. 16.132),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). The English translations are from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. with commentary by Charles S. Singleton, 6 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970–75). who ‘serves as an outrageously paradoxical authenticating device’ (UDC, p. 59) for the poem’s truth claims. To me, and, I am sure to many Dante scholars, ‘Ulysses, Geryon and the Aeronautics of Narrative Transition’ is an essay-wonder. It is the moment when we discover how deeply entangled are fraud and fiction within the body of the monster, and how cleverly Dante, in the most absurdly fictional moment of his poem, both embraces and eschews the peril of invention by dragging us, the readers, into becoming witnesses to an oath: an oath upon a Beginning of page[p. 287] text, one that is normally placed upon a sacred book as we are invited to think. The text, however, is not a written and bound book but simply the sounds (‘note’) of a comedìa. And yet, after avowing our oath and accepting the bet, we the readers are ready to fly (sail?) on Geryon’s opulent back, so involved are we in the making of this non-fraudulent fiction.

With its array of chapters on all the pressing issues of the Commedia, with its firm but not hierarchical point of view, with the finest and yet most piercing style a critic could wish for (in itself, I believe, part of a ‘form’ that ‘is not abstractable as a surface value’; UDC, p. 17), and a strong and rigorous voice that still manages to speak directly to each of its readers, The Undivine Comedy has revolutionized Dante studies in so many ways, many of them surely unpredictable then, and many more in the process of evolving. It has created a ‘school’ in the truest sense of the term, an equal conversation of thinking minds across time and space. Its biggest achievement, to me, is to put at the centre of its grand enquiry, again and for the first time, ‘“only” a fabbro, a maker … a poet’ (UDC, p. 20).

Barolini’s ‘prophecy’, however, had an ominous streak that we failed to appreciate back then. There is indeed a ‘fundamentalism’ in Dante studies which appears to be dictated by the text itself but is, in fact, the consequence of a strange connivance between two logoi — philo-logy and theo-logy — that turns Dante studies into a perfect logo-logy.55I adapt here a term from Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), bracketing it, however, with Dantean irony. In it, excitingly, the author is coextensive to his main text, thanks to the pliable and stretchable avatar Dante-agens, and yet the text is ultimately controlled by a divinity (sometimes strangely similar to a post-tridentine or even protestant God). Eden is a manuscript, an ‘original’ not yet stained by the ‘sin’ of variation, error, or, god forbid, desire. Instead of pondering on the reasons for this rather extraordinary phenomenon and how it occurred in and around a sophisticated and fragile piece of literature, as Barolini invited us to do, we have often relied on the two combined logoi as the bottom-line explanation for nearly every doubt raised by Dante’s work (and/as life). In other words,Beginning of page[p. 288] we have constructed a much more Christian Dante, a more prophetic writer, more of a preacher and a moralist than he probably was. We have constructed a Dante who himself believes the narrative produced by his own work. A self-believer, an auto-prophet, a converter of reading souls, the leader and sole follower of a cult centred around the conviction that a young unknown Florentine woman is no less than Faith herself, the writer of a ‘sacred poem’, and yet, strangely, this madman is also a slick Thomist and the defender of an unspecified Christian orthodoxy.

One could object that the logology on Dante is not new, and that the notion of the consistency of Dante’s life, work and — for lack of a better word — religiosity, solidified as soon as his strange poem started circulating, no doubt due to the puzzlement of the first readers faced with this extraordinary piece of literature that was similar to nothing they had read before, or after. What strikes me is the fact that such conviction, which had settled for centuries into a bland ‘literary history’ kind of narrative, has not budged, unlike countless others have done under the pressure of the late-modern and postmodern concerted attack on authority and on textual consistency. Indeed, if anything, this narrative has become stronger. While other authors were proclaimed dead, and revered texts were flayed open to expose the monsters of the unconscious or flattened to fit more or less congruous contemporary discourses, Dante became an Ur-author, and the Commedia’s consistency has become ever tighter. The only ghost text that the Commedia seems able to produce is its own justification, either that of the controlling, moralist, Christian author or that of ‘God’ himself. I do not advocate impaling the Commedia on the stake of psychoanalytical or cultural studies that are becoming at once more exhausted and more zealous. Personally, I would rather bring the Commedia back into literary studies, mild as they may be, the gentler the better, actually: like Statius and Virgil, I am still convinced that Eden is Parnassus (Purg. 28.139–48). I am simply wondering how all of this came to be. Why such endurance on the part not of a rude text — the scroll of a preacher, the rustic vernacular adaptation of the umpteenth epigone of the Homeric tales (we read those because, remember, ‘Dante did not read Homer’), or the lacklustre treatise on deadly sins claiming that even sweating too much is a form of lust (I read that one, understood Beginning of page[p. 289] why there were so many saunas in NYC, and started frequenting the Tenth Street Baths) — but of a precious, sophisticated, delicate piece of literature: one so adventurous, so visionary (in a stylistic sense), so thin-skinned or no-skinned that it could (and does, and wants to) burst open at every metaphor, at every daring simile; a work suffused with mourning and melancholia, open to the subversive laughter of the comic, to the manic neologism of the finest theo-logy, and to the error, wandering, and variance of real philo-logy.

Dante begs his readers to understand this much at the beginning of the Paradiso, in a proem that always leaves me wondering about the poet’s lack of skin and desire for passivity with respect to literary stimulus:

(O good Apollo, for this last labor make me such a vessel of your worth as you require for granting your beloved laurel. Thus far the one peak of Parnassus has sufficed me, but now I have need of both, as I enter the arena that remains. Enter into my breast and breathe there as when you drew Marsyas from the sheath of his limbs.) (Par. 1.13–21)

This is a perfect reverse-Ovidian moment: while Ovid’s Marsyas, undergoing the ‘classic’ punishment for artistic hubris, asks Apollo ‘why do you tear me from myself?’ (‘quid me mihi detrahis?’, Metamorphoses 6.385), Dante begs the god to tear him from himself — embracing his openness, fragility and excitement as he approaches the last feat.

Still, an insensitive artistic hubris — mostly if not fully condoned by the fact that we are dealing with a Christian writer penning a Christian poem — is what we normally attribute to Dante. Take Dante’s life for instance. Unlike any other writer, medieval or modern, we Beginning of page[p. 290] take bits of information from his works to be factual truth, and we construct a fairly linear biography without acknowledging that this is, actually, a very well curated autobiography.66See Manuele Gragnolati and Elena Lombardi, ‘Autobiografia d’autore’, Dante Studies, 136 (2018), pp. 143–60; and Elisa Brilli and Giuliano Milani, Dante’s Lives: Biography and Autobiography (London: Reaktion, 2023). And yet, since his work is in turn strangely linked to divine narrative, we excise from it any hints of anxiety, misgivings, shortcuts, indecision, and fear, not to mention error. Even his exile — whose tragic effects Dante never tires of telling his readers — becomes some sort of Augustinian moment that makes Dante Dante, that turns his gaze from earth to heaven and, after a short moment of lapse into belligerent politics, wrong loves, heterodoxy, and textual failures sets him on the way to prophecy, global political vision, caritas, preaching, salvation, and textual completion.

Brave and determined like his writing, serious and yet comically virile like the statue that was placed in Piazza Santa Croce for the sixth centenary of his birth, the first in the newly united Italy, Dante becomes a jack-of-all-trades for moral life-writing and for various degrees of Italianness (in Italy) and everyman-liness (abroad).

The sacred poem is a case in point: ‘The sacred poem to which heaven and earth have so set hand’ is so powerful a construct that we fail to notice the hesitation, the fatigue, the illogical optative, the mixed hypothetical clause, (‘se mai continga […] ritornerò’), the tragic sense of the passing of time, the melancholia for lost Florence, the strange overlapping of politician and poet, the absurd image of the lamb enemy to the wolves, and the violence of the cruelty that bans him. At most, Dante’s magrezza becomes a symptom of his increased, ‘divine’ authority. The fact that we know that Dante never came back to Florence, but that his poem did soon after his death, instead of making paranoids of all Dantisti, seems to reassure us even more of the prophetic power of our author.77See the reading by Nicolò Crisafi, Dante’s Masterplot and Alternative Narratives in the ‘Commedia’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 163–67.

(If ever it comes to pass that the sacred poem to which heaven and earth have so set hand that it has made me lean for many years should overcome the cruelty which bars me from the fair sheephold where I slept as a lamb, an enemy to the wolves which war on it, with changed voice now and with changed fleece a poet will I return, and at the font of my baptism will I take the crown.) (Par. 25.1–9)

Had it not been for Barolini, we also would have failed to notice that the ‘sacred poem is forced to jump’ at the sight of his dead beloved’s beautiful smile. The chapter ‘The Sacred Poem is forced to Jump: Closure and the Poetics of Enjambment’ shows the emergence, toward the end of the vision, of a ‘lyrical’ — that is ‘nondiscursive, nonlinear or circular, “dechronologized” and affective’ (UDC, p. 221) — textuality that runs counter to but also inextricably merges with the ‘narrative’ aspect of the poem, that is ‘discursive, logical, linear, “chronologised,” and […] intellective’ (UDC, p. 221). Moreover, this chapter invites us to experience

the end of this poem as being stranded in an eternal present, on a very high peak that was attained by dint of following behind the voice, the all-making voice, that suddenly is no more. The ‘I’ that has led us for so long does not return; it leaves us there, in that vast emptiness, without it. And not all this canto’s fearful symmetry can compensate for that loss, for the fact that this poem too must die. (UDC, p. 256)

And yet, despite Barolini’s warning against ‘hegemonic laws of reading’ that ‘divide and conquer’ (UDC, p. 224), we still tend to read not only the Commedia but all Dante’s work as solely a linear progression, a watertight and coherent story of loving, writing, and being saved that merges in the grand avenue of the Commedia. The parts that do not fit into this narrative are labelled as failures, vagrants, or, at best, objects of palinode. Bad love, heterodoxy, and rubbish writing are one and Beginning of page[p. 292] the same, it seems (one is tempted to agree insofar as the Convivio is concerned).

The author’s propensity for controlling his work does the rest, as shown for instance in Dante’s first great trompe-l’œil, the Vita nuova. Manuele Gragnolati has uncovered the strategies of authorial performance in the Vita nuova, showing how the prose bends the lyric (and tames desire) into a coherent narrative of loving and writing.88Manuele Gragnolati, ‘Authorship and Performance in Dante’s Vita nova’, in Aspects of the Performative in Medieval Culture, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010), pp. 123–40, and Amor che move. Linguaggio del corpo e forma del desiderio in Dante, Pasolini e Morante (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2013). Gragnolati’s stance on the Vita nuova ties in with Barolini’s ground-breaking edition of the Rime, which re-establishes the freedom, equality, and fragmentary nature of Dante’s lyric corpus.99Dante Alighieri, Rime giovanili e della ‘Vita Nuova’, ed. by Teodolinda Barolini, with notes by Manuele Gragnolati (Milan: Rizzoli, 2009). And yet, so powerful is our reception of Dante’s narrative on his own writing that it still sends philology off track to hunt for nonexistent texts and clunky hypotheses.1010See for instance the strange hypothesis of the ‘double ending’ of the Vita nuova, as retold by Barolini in ‘The Case of the Lost Original Ending of Dante’s Vita Nuova: More Notes Toward a Critical Philology’, Medioevo letterario d’Italia, 11 (2014), pp. 37–43. See, for instance, what happens with the ‘cosette per rima’ (‘trifles […] in rhyme’) of Vita nuova 5.4, occasional poems that Dante claims he wrote for the first screen lady and decided not to include in the libello.1111Text from Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, ed. by Michele Barbi (Florence: Società Dantesca Italiana, 1960). English translation from Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova, trans. by Mark Musa, Oxford World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). As Gragnolati has shown, critics still debate which poems among Dante’s Rime could be identified as these ‘trifles’. Trusting the existence of the ‘cosette per rima’, though, we end up believing in the reality of the screen ladies, or at least in the fiction of ‘other loves’ challenging without success the main track that from Beatrice (already) leads to God.

The same goes for other texts that are mentioned but not included in the Vita nuova: the Latin letter to some powerful rulers at the end of the libello (Vita nuova 30.1), and the letter in poetic form bearing the names of the sixty most beautiful women in Florence (Vita nuova 6.2). The only reason I mention it, says Dante, is because Beginning of page[p. 293]‘maravigliosamente addivenne, cioè che in alcuno altro numero non sofferse lo nome de la mia donna stare se non in su lo nove, tra li nomi di queste donne’ (‘miraculously it happened that the name of my lady appeared as the ninth among the names of those ladies, as if refusing to appear under any other number’; Vita nuova 6.2). So, which is the lady who goes on the boat trip with Guido, Lapo, Vanna, and Lagia? ‘She who is number thirty’? And why would you hang out (at sea, of all places) with Number Thirty if you have secured the salvific love of Number Nine, some of us wonder? Luckily, famous as it might be for a certain facility of rhythm, Guido i’ vorrei is an ‘excluded’, ‘extravagant’ poem, not so great now that I think of it, with all that Arthurian plush: so not Dante; a divertissement at best. And so we go about ironing away contradictions and inconsistencies in Dante’s work, with a twofold moral and aesthetic press, to the point of excluding or ignoring the Fiore from Dante’s canon, because ‘he’ would not write something so morally crude (and, therefore, stylistically unrefined). The letter to Cangrande della Scala, though, whose mediocre Latin and utter lack of irony strike me as truly un-Dantean — that one we take as ‘most probably Dante’s’ because it tells the story we want to hear: that of the four levels of reading, of letter and allegory and how well they fit together; of the normalisation of the Ovidian proem; of punishment and reward, and of more reading souls to be saved.

The simplification that occurs in the classroom is even more evident. As we toy with Dante’s truth claims — it is easy, and fun, and rewarding to expose them in class — we do fall sometimes into the trap of the moralist. I still remember fondly the first time I listened to John Freccero’s graduate lecture on canto 10. Raised in Auerbach’s awe for the kind and broken Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti — so consumed with love and concern for his son that he forgets about himself and the Hell that surrounds him, a figure so compassionately drawn by the masterful hand of the poet — I had never contemplated the biting sting of infernal irony; I had never noticed the comic side of the story, drawn by the cruel hand of a bitter poet, in which the old man no longer understands basic grammar (‘dicesti elli ebbe?’ (‘did you say “he had”?’), he exclaims in Inf. 10.68, failing to see that the use of the past tense does not automatically mean one is dead) and is unable to appreciate the difference between physical death and salvation (when Beginning of page[p. 294] he asks about Guido, his question is not ‘is he saved?’, but ‘is he alive?’; l. 68). And indeed, his son is not even a great poet after all, as his slightly imperfect rhyme (‘lume’, ‘come’, ‘nome’, ll. 65–69) plastered all over the end of the canto shows.1212See Erich Auerbach, ‘Farinata and Cavalcante’, in Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 174–202. Traces of Freccero’s lesson on canto 10 can still be found in John Freccero, ‘Infernal Irony: The Gates of Hell’, in Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 93–109, but they are in no way equal to the enchantment of his lectures.

Downstream from that magisterial lecture, however, there is the moralist simplification of considering everything and everyone that Dante places in Hell as inherently bad, corrupt, flawed (yes, they are in Hell), and, worse than that: uncomplicated, uninteresting. Downstream there is the Dantist who, when asked how they would explain to undergraduates the beauty, complexity, and fragility of infernal characters, answered plainly that there was not much to explain and then added, with their eyes going slightly blank: ‘after all, Dante was a just man. If he put Brunetto in Hell, he did so for a reason’. A cruder version of this is a half-jocular response I received during the chit-chat over drinks after a talk on Inferno 5 that ‘dopo tutto, Francesca era una puttana’ (‘Francesca was a whore, after all’). After all.

Hosts of young people — open, modern, gender-savvy, secular, hopefully sexually active young people, that is — chant hymns to the poet’s ‘pure’ love for Beatrice as opposed to Francesca’s lust. ‘What is pure love, pray?’ you ask. ‘Spiritual love’. ‘Which is?’ ‘Chaste’. ‘Mmm?’ ‘Not of the body’. And you are tempted to say: ‘have you ever felt it? A, any, form of love — or friendship or emotion or intellectual excitement or spirituality for God’s sake! — that does not imply a flutter of the gentle heart, pleasure, sweet sighs and doubtful desires, getting pale, looking into each other’s eyes, and feeling utterly overcome?’ But, you are the Dante teacher, and you eventually take the high road of comedy and say, just before leaving the classroom: ‘Guys, do you know that medieval monks had visions about kissing Jesus with their tongue?’

The fundamentalism of Dante studies reaches its acme when, instead of a logology, it turns into a philo-theology, finding that the text’s incontrovertible message is such-and-such because ‘God’ says so.Beginning of page[p. 295]

One example brings me to yet another area of Dante studies that has greatly benefited from Barolini’s contributions: the canto of Francesca da Rimini. Very much like the lustful lovers battered by contrary gales, so too the canto is always at a turbulent cross-wind, with various interpretations pushing it ‘di qua, di là, di giù, di sù’. Barolini’s late-1990s diptych on Francesca manages what centuries of exegesis failed to do: it both historicizes and poeticizes Francesca.1313Teodolinda Barolini, ‘Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love): Inferno 5 in its Lyric Context’, Dante Studies, 116 (1998), pp. 31–63, and ‘Dante and Francesca da Rimini: Realpolitik, Romance, Gender’, Speculum, 75 (2000), pp. 1–28. ‘Realpolitik, Romance, Gender’ brings to us the scant pieces of information on the historical and gendered Francesca, while ‘Inferno V in Its Lyric Context’ helpfully desexualizes Francesca (and the whole canto) and places it (again, gently and intelligently) within aspects of the poetic background from which she originates. The fragments come together, though not seamlessly; the fissures expose the wreckage, pain, and bias that surround the silenced real life and the faltering yet passionate fictional voice of a medieval woman. Thus, Barolini successfully separates Francesca from the future readings of Francesca and leaves it to history and literature to illuminate the fine fragments of a life-turned-poetry.

I would like to add a very small bit of detheologising on this much studied canto. During her opening speech, Francesca agrees to speak to Dante through a series of courteous statement. This courtly conversation, however, is not taking place on a sofa, but in a rough and wild environment: in the midst of a storm. And yet, the characters manage to converse.

(Of that which it pleases you to hear and to speak, we will hear and speak with you, while the wind, as now, is silent for us.) (Inf. 5.94–96, italics mine)

Line 96 is famous for carrying a textual crux: ‘ci tace’ or ‘si tace’? This ambiguity, in turn, allows for several interpretations: ‘the wind is silent’Beginning of page[p. 296] (reflexive si), ‘the wind is silent here’ (ci = ‘qui’, ‘here’), ‘the wind is silent for us’ (ci = ‘for us’), ‘the wind silences us’ (ci = ‘us’). Depending on the choice of variant and its interpretation, this controversial line either suggests that the infernal storm might potentially rest for a moment, or confirms the impossibility of any sort of relief.

Let us embed the various interpretations into the canto. We have just left Limbo, a dimly lit, quietly sorrowful place, where the only sound, creepy as it might be, is that of sighs, and we are now thrown into a place stripped — literally ‘muted’ — of any kind of light: ‘loco d’ogne luce muto | che mugghia come fa mar per tempesta, | se da contrari venti è combattuto’ (‘mute of all light, which bellows like the sea in tempest when it is assailed by warring winds’; Inf. 5.28–30). ‘Dolenti note’ (‘doleful notes’, l. 25) are heard, and ‘molto pianto […] percuote’ (‘much wailing smites’; l. 27) the traveller. The unrelenting storm savages the spirits with its ‘rapina’ (‘rapine’; l. 32) and ‘voltando e percotendo li molesta’ (‘whirling and smiting, it torments them’; l. 33). Unlike an earthly storm, which does eventually settle, the infernal storm never pauses and there is no hope of even a slight remission of pain (‘non che di posa, ma di minor pena’, ‘no hope of less pain, not to say of rest’; l. 45).

And yet, they manage to speak. But what happens to the wind? Aguzza le orecchie, lettor. Does it:

1. die down every once in a while, like in a normal storm, and then pick up again? This is interesting, because it puts pressure and uncertainty on Francesca’s speech. Will she manage to say all she wants to say before the next gust comes in? We can imagine her rushing her lines, trying to get to the fateful end, looking nervously at the next incoming vortex, sounding almost mechanical and ever more frightened.
2. never stop, and the poor souls have to shout to be heard, their beautiful lines butchered and broken by the roaring wind? This is a properly tragic but also ‘romantic’, Wuthering-Heightsy view of the episode.1414Intriguingly, I cannot find any trace of this interpretation (the wind silences us) — which seems to me very plain both in terms of grammar and logic — in the main list of commentaries from the Dartmouth Dante Project or in dedicated essays. I may have read it or heard it somewhere and then forgot (in which case, apologies), but my impression is that I’ve ‘always’ read it like this. In the Italian education system, at least when and where I attended school, pupils started to read and sometimes memorize episodes from the Commedia in primary school at age eight or nine, and then again a more extended reading in middle school at twelve or thirteen, and eventually would read the whole Commedia: one cantica per year would be read in the last three years of high school, in dedicated weekly ‘Dante’ sessions. Therefore, this might be the way little Elena, without much sense of history, language, or poetics (or self, for that matter) read the line for the first time and understood, without doubt or hesitation, that the roaring wind was interrupting the lover’s delicate speech, their voices becoming hoarse and helpless, their precious words mangled by the cruel noise. ‘Amore […] amore […] amore’: maybe this is all one could hear. A misreading? Even better: little Elena would have had a great teacher in misreading in this very canto, the heroine herself. Too young to comprehend at the age of nine? Dante begs to disagree. But before you lean towards accepting the prophetic powers of little Elena’s reading, I must tell you how, around that time, I read the beginning of Alessandro Manzoni’s ode to Napoleon, Il cinque maggio. The ode begins with the announcement of Napoleon’s death — ‘Ei fu.’ (‘He died.’) — and then moves to a complex simile between the leader’s dead body and the shock that paralyses the entire planet at the news of his death (‘Siccome immobile […] così percossa e attonita | la terra’). Too long a simile for my powers of recitation, I rearranged the lines as follows: ‘Ei fu, siccome immobile’: he was dead, because he no longer moved.

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Or

3. have the four actors stopped in a special corner of the circle, less windy than the rest, perhaps near the mysterious ruin or away from the worst of the storm, or actually right at its eye, where they say it is quiet? Is this a ‘corner of paradise’ as one reader put it, where the two souls can momentarily replay their love; or, with less exaggeration, is it a mini-limbo, a mournful but quiet place that allows at least some kind of respite and reflection?

In line with my work on the canto, I see these as possible scenarios with which the text presents us.1515See, in particular, Elena Lombardi, The Wings of the Doves: Love and Desire in Dante and Medieval Culture (Montreal: McGill Queens University Press, 2012). Only a dramatic performance of canto 5 can pin this and many other lines (importantly, the anaphoric lines) to one particular interpretation. Each reader, however, is invited to contemplate and inhabit the various possibilities.

Canto 5, I contend, is a powerful lesson on reading: the Commedia requires present, acute readers, and therefore we are trained, especially at the beginning, to be open, inventive, intelligent readers, but also to notice that we are bound to our time and inclinations and age Beginning of page[p. 298](not always midlife); to our life and its eventfulness, to our present concerns, to the way our teachers taught us and how we dissented (‘Siete ancora qui, Ser Brunetto?’); to our understanding of textual authority and the pleasure we take in language’s hall of mirrors, to the amount of knowledge we have on one specific topic (never enough and yet always presumptuous), and more.

Unless, of course, God comes in to nail down our interpretation. In this case, God is also in a conundrum, though. Do they

4. allow the wind to be silent in that specific place and time in order for Dante to have a conversation with the souls and see for himself what kind of disgusting and deceitful lechers (she, the little whore, in particular) they are, so that this journey, willed from above, ends up converting more readers?

Or do they

5. not allow the wind to be silent because we shouldn’t at any time believe that God has any mercy for the damned? La pietà per i dannati, the most unhelpful concept of all!

Although in this example they are, themselves, perplexed, this is not the sole time in which ‘God’ weighs heavily in the interpretation of the Commedia: that is, an entirely fictional, textualized God, the creation of their own creation, their ontology bound to a minute textual variant, which most likely slipped out of the pen of a yawning scribe.

This is why The Undivine Comedy is as timely and important today as it was thirty years ago, not only as one of the greatest scholarly books on Dante, but also as a continuing source of inspiration, pleasure, and resistance.