Prue Shaw - Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity

For Claerwen and Lucinda

A poem is made of words,
not ideas.

..

MALLARM, IN CONVERSATION
WITH DEGAS

CONTENTS

M OST ENGLISH READERS KNOW THAT DANTE IS A GREAT POET, but few of them have read him. His masterpiece, the Divine Comedy , is an adventure story: a journey into the mysteries of the afterlife, a pilgrimage through hell, purgatory and paradise towards a final, face-to-face meeting with God. Its broader concerns are those of any thinking person, in any time and place. What does it mean to be a human being? How are we to judge human behaviour? What matters in a life or in a death? These themes are explored in a gripping narrative, and in language that is uniquely vital and expressive.

The Commedia , to give it its correct title, is the greatest poem of the Middle Ages and perhaps the greatest single work of Western literature. It was a huge success in its time, quickly becoming the medieval equivalent of a best-seller. It has continued to be read by most educated people up to the present day, and has inspired poets, artists and composers for over seven hundred years. Yet to a modern reader, reading for pleasure, the idea of a poem over fourteen thousand lines long about hell, purgatory and paradise can seem vast, alien and forbidding.

This book aims to introduce the reader to Dantes poem. It is intended for the general reader who loves literature and poetryfor language lovers everywhere, whether or not they know Italian. My main concern is to communicate the power of Dantes poetrythe imaginative power, the emotional intensity, the linguistic brilliance, and the skill with which he orchestrates his themes. Dante had an exceptional capacity to evoke the visual, the visceral; to imagine a world and give it form and substance with incredible verbal economy and precision. By conjuring up the sights and sounds and smells of the familiar world with unparalleled immediacy, he was able to lead his readers through invented worlds that were utterly convincing though infinitely strange. He populated them with individuals whose emotions and moral predicaments are tangible and compelling. Those he encounters speak with eloquence and their interchanges with Dante are full of drama. He expressed the whole range of human feelings in their raw power and endless variety: hope, fear, rage, delight, remorse, nostalgia, yearning, affection, disgust, anxiety, sorrow, astonishment, melancholy, curiosity, despair.

The qualities of imagination and expression, the emotions, come to us in storiesthe story of Dantes journey and the stories of those he encounters on the way. All those he meets have been judged by God: a final and absolute decision has been made about the acceptability of their behaviour during their life, and we know what it is. The counterpoint between this knowledge and the sympathy, or lack of it, we feel for them creates a space in which the ultimate meaning of human behaviour is brought into sharp relief. Anyone who has ever felt the need to think about their own behaviour or somebody elses, and to try to understand its meaning, should find the poem riveting.

The way I have chosen to introduce the poem is unorthodox. I do not offer a digest or summary of the facts of Dantes life, or the stages of his journey to the three realms of the afterlife. Such accounts can overwhelm with detail, especially if the reader is new to the poem, and make it difficult to recognise the power of its central ideas. Each chapter of the book is organised around a theme, and illustrated by key episodes from the poem. I have linked encounters and scenes that are widely spaced in the narrative in order to demonstrate their connections, rather than moving in methodical fashion from one episode to the next.

The way Dante orchestrates his themes is one of the miracles of the poem, and not easy to pick up on a first reading, any more than someone listening to Wagners Ring cycle will immediately appreciate the intricacy and complexity of the way he handles his leitmotifs. One senses that Dante had an extraordinarily rich map of the whole Commedia in his head as he was writing it, and an ear highly attuned to the resonances his stories had with one another. My hope is that these seven chapters will give some sense of this. I do not aim to save you the trouble of reading the Commedia , as handbooks to the poem sometimes seem to do. My aim is to fire you with the desire to pick up a copy and start reading now.

Dantes life and work were shaped by two friends of his youth in Florence. Both friends were poets. One of them, who died young, he meets in purgatory. The other was not someone he could meet in the poem, since he was not yet dead when the journey to the afterlife supposedly takes place. But this other, best friendan atheist, as it happensleft an indelible impression on the poem, and is one of its most haunting presences. The first chapter sets these two friendships against the background of the citys troubled political and social history. The theme is literary friendship and rivalry, but it is also political instability and turmoil.

These two key strands in Dantes formative experiencepoetry and politicsrun in parallel but are quite distinct at this stage of his life. In his thirties, for the best part of a decade, he was a politician as well as a poet, passionately involved in the public life of his city. In 1302 his political activities led to his being exiled when he wound up on the losing side of factional struggles in Florence. The Florentine years are the seedbed of his mature poetry. What brings his poetry to maturity is the experience of exile.

The opening chapter shows where Dante started, and how his failure as a politician is inseparable from his achievement as a poet. A distinguished nineteenth-century Italian said that Florence should have erected a statue not to Dante but to the obscure Florentine official who sent him into exile. Without the experience of exile Dante would notcould nothave written the Commedia.

The second chapter is about art and its relationship to power. Dante calls to account the great players on the world stagepopes and emperorswho have the power to change the way things are but fail to do so. The archvillain is a pope, Boniface VIII, one among many corrupt churchmen Dante attacks with startling directness. The fate of these unprincipled popes in the afterlife is a vision of Brueghel-like intensity and perversion.

The relationship between biography and artbetween lived experience and its imaginative transformation into literatureis the theme of the third chapter. The poem seems richly autobiographical but resists being pinned down in these terms. It lures us towards the dramas of its authors life, but at the same time it speaks of universal concerns, leaving its author partly shrouded in mystery. Just as he is both the writer and the pilgrim making the journey, Dante is himself and everyman.

In the Commedia love offers a key to understanding human behaviour. The fourth and central chapter shows how Dante treated the theme of love as a young poet, and how he developed and explored it in his maturity. Dante was driven by the need to reconcile a sense of the seemingly irresistible power of love, desire and sexual attraction as forces in human life with the notion of free willwith his conviction that human beings are able to make meaningful choices about their lives and actions, and can be held accountable for the choices they make.