karenika - books

Dante

Looking back on his relationship with Brunetto Latini in these same years. Dante declares his gratitude in a teasingly ambiguous phrase during their exchange in the seventh circle of the Inferno (Inf., xv, 82-87). "For in my memory is fixed and now goes to my heart," he says, bending down reverentially toward the older man -

the dear and kind parental image of you
when in the world hour by hour
you taught me how man makes himself eternal;
and while I live, my tongue, I think
should show what gratitude I have for it.

"How can man make himself eternal" - come l'uom 'etterna. The reference cannot be to immortality through great literary achievement - Latini's literary gifts were not of that highest kind - nor can it be a theological statement; Latini was in no way a religious counselor. Most likely, Dante is acknowledging the inspirational value of the Tesoretto, the long, incomplete, allegorical work that Latini put together during his exile years in France. It is the account of a journey through the next world in search of redemption. In the course of it, the pilgrim must make his way through a dark wood and ascend a mountain where he meets a guide, who begins to teach him the rudiments of astronomy. Here the poem breaks off, probably because Latini heard that the way was clear for him to return to Florence. The Tesoretto was thus in some important ways a model for the Comedy, a work enacting the search for eternal life. (Piero Bargellini has argued the point most persuasively, even when observing that the Tesoretto is literally "insipid.") Dante the pilgrim foresees the moment when, in exile, the poet will compose a drama of redemption for which Latini's poem was the honored predecessor.

So the two of them pace along and talk together, Latini, naked, treading the burning plain that is his eternal agony, and Dante walking in a roadway just high enough to be out of reach of the flames. They have greeted each other in a warm and wondering manner. "What a marvel!" exclaims Latini, and "Are you here, Ser Brunetto?" cries Dante in return. The master foresees Dante driven out of Florence by his political enemies, whom he denounces with all of his old vigor as a people "avaricious, envious, and proud, " descendents of that evil element, the Fiesolans, who were among the founders of the city. He also predicts a shining future for Dante the poet:

If you follow your star
you cannot fail to reach a glorious port if I discern rightly, in the fair life.

The question remains why Dante placed his teacher and role model in Hell, among those guilt of violence against nature and, specifically, of sodomy. Homosexuality was, needless to say, an unredeemable sin in Dante's Catholic world; but there is no evidence anywhere, outside the Comedy, that Latini was homosexual. (For what it's worth, Latini was married and had several sons.) The matter has been endlessly argued by the commentators, with some slight indication that Dante's early readers themselves were astonished at the charge. The literary consequence is certain: a nearly unbearable tension between Dante's love and admiration for Brunetto Latini, and the old man's humiliation and perpetual pain. The moral and religious laws of the universe may not be breached, Dante may seem to be saying, even by one as noble a Brunetto.

But another age-old poetic impulse may also be at work, the one that the critic and theorist Harold Bloom has named "the anxiety of influence," whereby a literary artist, as a mode of self-identification, discounts and denies the influence-even the importance-of a great predecessor. In American literary history, we have the example of Henry James belittling his unmistakable literary forebear Nathaniel Hawthorne. But as such language suggests, there is also somewhere in the downscaling treatment a shadow of the father-killing process.

After having read the Inferno this past semester, when I saw that there was a new biography of Dante, I had to pick it up. This small, compact book was well worth my time.