45: An Interpolated Episode: Did Dante Intend All These Interpretive Games In COMEDY?
We danced around with the witch Erichtho quite a bit in the last episode with seven interpretive stances toward and over her. (That is, seven possible ways she functions in the text, or seven ways to interpret her presence, all from a single line of medieval poetry).
Which brings up a giant question for us as we walk with the pilgim: Did the poet intend all of this?
Let’s give that unanswerable question a shot!
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The segments to this episode of WALKING WITH DANTE:
[01:29] The medieval answer: Yes, he did.
[04:22] The neoclassical answer: No, the poem's a mess.
[06:07] A more modern answer: No, but he did intend to build the open framework that could allow . . . no, encourage so much more. Here are five ways he built that structure.
FOR DEEPER STUDY
In the episode, I outlined five ways our poet leaves COMEDY open to the games of interpretation. Here they are again with more notes:
The poet intentionally leaves spaces in the poem, even at times telling his readers that he’s not going to explain everything or even that he can’t explain it all. Could he? Yes, it’s his work. But leaving it open like this does a couple things for COMEDY. One, it makes it seem more “real.” After all, who could explain everything on a journey across the afterlife? A weaker writer would try to pin (pen?) it all down. But by leaving us at times in the dark—and intentionally telling us he’s doing that—Dante makes the journey feel more like one we might take with our own questions in tow. And two, those spaces permit his readers access to COMEDY because they let us sit back and breathe for a moment. We can perhaps then come to our own conclusions about the “why” and “what” of the action.
The poet works in an intertextual space. In other words, he’s building his afterlife off of Virgil’s in The AENEID. He’s also using Lucan and Ovid. And he’s definitely quoting the Bible (more and more as we go on). These texts have their own interpretations and contexts. By bringing these texts into his text, he is also implicitly bringing in those interpretations and contexts which at times even run counter to the point he’s making or the moment he’s describing . . . and so give his text greater texture, depth, and even irony. Watch for this sort of thing ahead as more similes arise out of classical literature, getting longer, more intense, and more perplexing as we move along.
The poet most often refuses to close down interpretive games by telling us what it all means. And here perhaps lies the genius of Virgil. If Dante had selected Beatrice as his guide from the get-go, she would have explained everything in detail. If he’d selected Saint Peter, say, the meaning would have gotten even more locked. “Ah, that happens because God. . . .” But Virgil is damned. And limited. And increasingly human. So Virgil’s very character keeps things open right through the end of PURGATORIO. Virgil is definitely smart—he’s just not divinely inspired,
Dante gives his best characters human motivations. They’re not just walking, talking allegories. And they act out their issues, rather than just stating them. Francesca, for example, acts out the problems of an overflow of passion. It even infects the pilgrim! And certainly then lands with the reader. Ahead, we’ll see figures who illustrate their sins . . . but seem to go beyond them, to tell their stories in ways that their guilt doesn’t actually encapsulate who they are. It’s one thing to have a character stand up and lament his suicide. It’s another to have him tell the circumstances that led to his act of self-violence.
Dante moves COMEDY beyond his own learning. In other words, there’s little in COMEDY to suggest “Look how smart I am.” Instead, classical and Biblical learning are (for the most part) subsumed into the plot of the journey. Dante doesn’t need to turn COMEDY into a big bibliography of all he’s read. Is his learning in the poem? Of course! But it’s not in the foreground of the plot.
All of this talk of interpretive games brings up a question of how you can play that game in the poem. Here are a few of the rules:
You have to stay in the text, even when the poet jumps out to other sources. The text forms the boundaries of your interpretation. Some people claim a text can meaning anything. No, it can’t. For example, COMEDY never tells you which vacuum cleaner is the best. That sounds absurd, of course; but that’s one thing COMEDY can’t mean. And if it can’t mean one thing, then it can’t mean everything. The way we limit ourselves is to stick inside the text . . . or to only go outside it when Dante gives us permission, as when he quotes Lucan or the Bible. And here’s another example of how we have to stay inside the text: Someone might say that Virgil chooses to save the pilgrim. Does he? He’s prompted by Beatrice, maybe Saint Lucy, and maybe the Virgin. In Dante’s Christianity, would Virgil have a choice? Probably not, given that Beatrice instigates the desire in Virgil. And we learn in COMEDY that all desire originates from the divine and that said desire is irresistible (but not necessarily “directable”). So it’s always important to ask, Does the text support this interpretation? Interpretation is not free-association.
Interpretation is historically-bound. Yes, to Dante’s early 1300s CE, of course. But also to our historical moment. In fact, we can only access Dante’s moment from our moment. So it’s historically-bound but illusive. For that reason, we must remain tentative and suggestive in our interpretations of a poem as complex as Dante’s. Which is why I often offer multiple meanings to any one passage. We can posit why things are the way they are but we might not ever find ourselves on fully certain ground, even when we’re quoting other of Dante’s works to prove a point about how he uses a specific word in COMEDY. (People use words in very different ways over the course of their lifetimes.)
Interpretations should change. A good reader shifts perspective based on life experiences and even readings done around the poem. But I also hold a rather unique thesis: I believe COMEDY is a poem in process. In other words, Dante didn’t have the whole thing worked out when he started writing it. He may have had a general idea, as in when Virgil tells the pilgrim he’ll lead him to see the ones “content in the fire” (that is, in Purgatory). But I believe Dante is changing the game even as he writes forward into COMEDY. So it’s sometimes easy to read a passage, say, in PARADISO and then jump back to INFERNO and say, “That’s why it’s that way.” And there are moments, particularly toward the end of PURGATORIO, in which Dante seems to invite his reader to do just that. But I’d say he’s rewriting those early passages in INFERNO, Canto I, from the perspective of having finished PURGATORIO. Dante is cueing his reader to reread. I would say that even COMEDY cannot control its open-ended interpretive games.