The reading prescriptions set out by Dante in his famous letter to Can Grande della Scala explaining how his Commedia was to be understood are too constringent. They argue for a divided or graded reading (literal, allegorical, analogical, anagogical), when in fact, as Dante no doubt knew, no reader proceeds in such an orderly fashion. All or none of these levels takes priority in the act of reading. By saying or implying “I,” the first words of a text already draw the reader into a murky place in which nothing is absolute, neither dream nor reality, and in which everything told is at once what it purports to be and something else, and also the mere words that make it up. The Earthly Paradise at the end of Purgatorio is the stage that Dante reaches after all seven initials of sin have been wiped from his forehead, and also the garden in which we lost our innocence, and also the grove from which Proserpine was taken, and also the starting place of our ascent to Heaven, and also the lighted counterpart of the dark wood of the beginning of Dante’s voyage, and also the musical words “humming/a continuo under their rhyming” (Purgatorio, 28.17–18, trans. W. S. Merwin). But the Earthly Paradise is also the solid pine forest of Chiassi near Ravenna where Dante wrote the last cantos of Purgatorio when the sea still came up to its borders, and also the threadbare plantation that now stands far inland, a few steps from the church of San Apollinare.
To help the reader agree to believe and play the game of exchanged pretences, the writer offers his excusatio propia infirmitatis, the confession of his own weakness, a rhetorical device common in the literature of the Middle Ages. Over and over, Dante tells us that words do not suffice, that memory cannot translate experience into speech, that even memory cannot at times hold the unspoken act, and that the knowledge of certain experiences can only be granted by grace, “for these whom grace hath better proof in store.”
Words may not tell of that transhuman change;
And therefore let the example serve, though weak,
For these whom grace hath better proof in store.
[Paradiso 1.70–72, trans. H. F. Cary]
Not only what is “transhuman” and lies beyond the human realm: all attempt at communication, all literature born from the dialogue between writer and reader, every artifact made of words suffers from this essential poverty. And by declaring language’s inability to convey experience, the poet forces the reader, who shares language’s shortcomings, to acknowledge not only the honesty of the writer’s declaration but also, implicitly, the truth of what the writer confesses cannot be said. All means are valid to try and sharpen the imprecision of words.
“Take note of my words just as I say them,
and teach them to those who are living,”
[Purgatorio, 33.52–53, trans. W. S. Merwin]
says Beatrice to Dante, and later, seeing that Dante’s mind is tough as stone, she concedes:
“I would also have you carry it away
within you, painted even if not written.”
[Purgatorio, 33.76–77, trans. W. S. Merwin]
Images, though lesser tools than words, sometimes must serve where words fail, and even the divine Beatrice must, on occasion, fall back on images. One example should suffice. At the beginning of Paradiso, in order to explain to Dante why God’s brilliance is equally distributed in the heavenly bodies, Beatrice asks him to imagine an experiment involving three mirrors and a common source of light. Two of the mirrors are set at an equal distance from the viewer and the third farther away: even though the light appears smaller in this third mirror, the brilliance of all three reflections is the same. In this way, concrete experience becomes a metaphor for the otherwise ineffable: if what is seen or felt cannot at times be put into words, the impossible words can at times be put into action, for the reader to see and feel what cannot be told.
As Dante repeatedly tells us, truth (the experience of truth) recedes from human expression and understanding, plunges beyond language, beyond remembrance into an essential depth where things are known unto themselves, in their pure untranslatable essence, as that which is carried untouched from language to language in the act of translation.
Dante wants us to admit that it is he, the story’s “I,” who has journeyed through the three terrible realms, but the reader knows that Dante’s experience is not entirely that of the “I” on the page nor that of the “I” who put him there: that it belongs to yet another “I” whom the reader must rescue from the page, pronouncing the word and yet understanding that it is speaking for somebody else. The reader knows that the voice that says “I” names itself and at the same time several others, since the writer creates by mirroring his creations. Into this game of mirrors, the reader must step in, in order to get to know the reality of words and to pronounce this “I” that he is not. Through the reader’s goodwill, Dante can visit Hell and Purgatory and Heaven so that the reader can say at last, “I too was there.”
The shock I received on first discovering that literature invents and that the world peopled by words is not that which the bureaucratic world of fact proclaimed has not entirely passed, more than half a century later. I’m still bewildered by the realization that if the writer who invented an adventurous narrator for the enjoyment of his stepson was not (or only partially) that narrator, and if the poet who conjured up the traveler in the realms to come was not (or not entirely) that traveler, then I, their diligent reader, was not the boy, am not the man on the other side of the page. At least not entirely, at least only partially. I don’t know whether to rejoice or despair at this conclusion.
More than five centuries after Dante, on 15 May 1871, another traveler in Hell drafted the following report:
“If the old fools hadn’t uncovered only the false meaning of ‘I’ we’d not have to sweep away those millions of skeletons that, since time everlasting, have accumulated the fruits of their one-eyed intellect, claiming to be its authors!”
So wrote the seventeen-year-old Arthur Rimbaud to his friend Paul Demeny, two years before composing Une Saison en enfer, beginning the letter with the inevitable conclusion: “Car JE est un autre” — “Because I is someone else.”
This is the truth that the reader must always bear in mind.
Final Answers
“May it please your Majesty,” said Two, in a very humble tone,
going down on one knee as he spoke, “we were trying—”
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 8
A la mémoire de Simone Vauthier
ON 19 APRIL 1616, THE DAY after having been given extreme unction, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra penned a dedication of his last book, The Labors of Persiles and Segismunda, to Don Pedro Fernández de Castro, Count of Lemos, a novel which, in his opinion, “dares to compete with Heliodorus.” Heliodorus was a Greek novelist, once famous and now forgotten, whose Aethiopica Cervantes much admired. Three or four days later (historians remain undecided) Cervantes died, leaving his widow in charge of publishing the Persiles. His Quixote, if we can credit at least in part the modest disclaimer placed at the beginning of the first volume, was for Cervantes something lamentably minor. “What could this barren and ill-cultivated spirit of mine produce but the story of a dry, wizened son, whimsical and full of all manner of notions never before conceived?” he asks the reader. On his deathbed, intent on judging his own labors, Cervantes concludes that the Persiles, or perhaps his long, poetic unfinished Galatea, is to be his literary testament. Readers have decided otherwise, and it is Don Quixote that lives on as our contemporary, while the rest of Cervantes’s work has largely become fodder for scholars. Don Quixote now stands for the whole of Cervantes’s work, and perhaps for Cervantes himself.