The Undivine Comedy by Teodolinda Barolini;

Author:Teodolinda Barolini; [Barolini;, Teodolinda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781400820764
Publisher: Princeton UP
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

THE HEAVEN OF THE SUN AS A MEDITATION ON NARRATIVE

Potest etiam hoc, mendacio tollerando, per distinctionem

dissolvi: mitior nanque est in adversarium solutio distinctiva;

non enim omnino mentiens esse videtur, sicut

interemptiva illum videri facit.

(Monarchia 3.4.17)

Since all progress of mind consists for the most part in

differentiation, in the resolution of an obscure and complex

object into its component parts, it is surely the stupidest of losses

to confuse things which right reason has put asunder, to lose

the sense of achieved distinctions . . .

(Walter Pater, Appreciations)

THE THEMATIC project of the heaven of the sun is a replay, in the key of wisdom, of what Dante seeks to represent and promote throughout the Paradiso: a paradise where difference is blended into the one enough to achieve peace and harmony, but not enough to lose what makes it itself, what makes it different. Such a paradoxical project requires from the poet a perpetual balancing, as at one moment he emphasizes the unity of paradise and at another he emphasizes the hierarchy that differentiates—and disunifies—that unity. In the heaven of the sun the balancing that underlies the Paradiso as a whole is focused on the two circles,1 their members, and the reciprocal praise that characterizes the presentations of the two nonpresent saints, Francis and Dominic.2 While the rhetorical structures and imagistic components of the two panegyrics have been analyzed, critics have connected such formal aspects to thematic concerns: if Dante dwells longer on St. Francis, and if the story of Francis's life has appealed to more readers, it is because Dante is partial to the Franciscans and their cause; if the imagery of the two vite is related, it is because Dante is underscoring the fundamental unity of the two saints' missions.3 Although these notions are not necessarily wrong, they fail to take into account Dante's awareness of the representational task he sets himself. Auerbach, in his reading of Francis's canto, makes much of the fact that the poet does not stage an encounter between the pilgrim and one of the most vibrant figures of the age;4 by employing another soul to recount the life of Francis, rather than having the saint speak for himself, Dante breaches his customary narrative mode in an explicit and elaborate fashion. Auerbach proposes that Dante wishes in this way to stress the mission over the man, a thematically oriented explanation that is refuted by the presence of St. Benedict in Paradiso 22, who tells how he founded the Benedictine order and condemns his degenerate followers, thus doing for himself what Thomas and Bonaventure are called upon to do for Francis and Dominic.5

If, as I believe, the heaven of the sun contains a meditation on the nature and constraints of narrative, cantos 11 and 12 have, within the heaven’s economy, a (literally) central role. Having chosen two saints whose lives had already occasioned complex narrative traditions,6 Dante responds to this previous textuality not with the usual fictive reality of an imagined encounter—his own textuality posing as reality—but with an explicitly narrative construct: his own textuality posing as someone else’s textuality.

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