On Literature

A READING OF THE PARADISO

"As a result, the Paradiso is not read or appreciated very much. Its monotony is particularly tedious: it reads like a series of questions and answers between teacher and pupil." Thus Francesco De Sanctis in his History of Italian Literature (1871). He articulates a reservation many of us had in school, unless we had an outstanding teacher. Whatever the case, if we look through some more recent histories of Italian literature, we find that Romantic criticism downgraded the Paradiso—a disapproval that also carried weight into the next century.

Since I want to maintain that the Paradiso is the finest of the three canticas of The Divine Comedy, let us go back to De Sanctis, a man of his time certainly, but also a reader of exceptional sensibilities, to see how his reading of the Paradiso is a masterpiece of inner torment (on the one hand I say one thing, on the other another), a revealing mixture of enthusiasm and misgivings.

De Sanctis, a very acute reader, immediately realizes that in the Paradiso Dante speaks of ineffable things, of a spiritual realm, and wonders how the realm of the spirit "can be represented." Consequently, he says, in order to make the Paradiso artistic Dante has imagined a human paradise, one that is accessible to the senses and the imagination. That is why he tries to find in light the link with our human potential for comprehension. And here De Sanctis becomes an enthusiastic reader of this poetry where there are no qualitative differences, only changes in luminous intensity, and he cites "the throngs of splendours" (Par. 23.82), the clouds "like diamonds whereon the sun did strike" (Par. 2.33), the blessed appearing "like a swarm of bees delving into flowers" (Par. 31.7), "rivers from which living flames leap out, lights in the shape of a river that glows tawny with brightness" (Par. 30.61–64), the blessed disappearing "like something heavy into deep water" (Par. 3.123). And he observes that when Saint Peter denounces Pope Boniface VIII, recalling Rome in terms that smack more of the Inferno: "he [Boniface] has made a sewer of my burial-place, a sewer of blood and stench" (Par. 27.25–26), all the heavenly host expresses its contempt by simply turning red in color.

But is a change in color an adequate expression of human passions? Here De Sanctis finds himself a prisoner of his own poetics: "In that whirlwind of movement, the individual disappears. [...] There is no change in features, just one face, as it were. [...] This disappearance of forms and of individuality itself would reduce the Paradiso to just one note, if the earth did not come into it, and with the earth other forms and other passions. [...] The songs of the souls are devoid of content, mere voices not words, music not poetry. [...] It is all just one wave of light. [...] Individuality disappears in the sea of being." If poetry is the expression of human passions, and if human passion can only be carnal, this is an unacceptable flaw. How can this compare with Paolo and Francesca kissing each other "on the mouth, all trembling"? Or with the horror of Ugolino's "bestial meal," or the sinner who makes the foul gesture toward God?

The contradiction in which De Sanctis is caught rests on two misunderstandings: first, that this attempt to represent the divine merely through intensity of light and color is Dante's original but almost impossible attempt to humanize what human beings cannot conceive; and second, that poetry exists only in representations of the carnal passions and those of the heart, and that poetry of pure understanding cannot exist, because in that case it would be music. (And at this point, we might well pause to mock not good old De Sanctis but the "Desanctism" of those fools who assert that Bach's music is not real poetry, but that Chopin's comes a bit closer, lucky for him, and that the Well-Tempered Clavier and the Goldberg Variations don't speak to us of earthly love, but the Raindrop Prelude makes us think of George Sand and the shadow of consumption hanging over her, and this, for God's sake, is true poetry because it makes us cry.)

Let us begin with the first point. Cinema and role-playing games encourage us to think of the Middle Ages as a series of "dark" centuries; I don't mean this in an ideological sense (which is not important in the cinema anyhow) but rather in terms of nocturnal colors and brooding shadows. Nothing could be more false. For while the people of the Middle Ages certainly did live in dark forests, castle halls, and narrow rooms barely lit by the fire in the hearth, apart from the fact that they were people who went to bed early, and were more used to the day than to the night (so beloved by the Romantics), the medieval period represents itself in ringing tones.

The Middle Ages identified beauty with light and color (as well as with proportion), and this color was always a simple harmony of reds, blues, gold, silver, white, and green, without shading or chiaroscuro, where splendor is generated by the harmony of the whole rather than being determined by light enveloping things from the outside, or making color drip beyond the confines of the figures. In medieval miniatures light seems to radiate outward from the objects.

For Isidore of Seville, marble is beautiful because of its whiteness, metals for the light they reflect, and the air itself is beautiful and bears its name because aer-aeris derives from the splendor of aurum, i.e., gold (and that is why when air is struck by light, it seems to shine like gold). Precious gems are beautiful because of their color, since color is nothing other than sunlight imprisoned and purified matter. Eyes are beautiful if luminous, and the most beautiful eyes are sea green eyes. One of the prime qualities of a beautiful body is rose-colored skin. In poets this sense of flashing color is ever present: the grass is green, blood is red, milk is white. For Guido Guinizelli a beautiful woman has a "face of snowy whiteness colored with carmine," Petrarch writes of "clear, cool and sweet waters," and Hildegard of Bingens mystic visions show us glowing flames and compose even the beauty of the first fallen angel from gems shining like a starry sky, so that the countless number of sparks, shining in the bright light of all his ornaments, fills the world with light. In order to allow the divine to penetrate its otherwise dark naves, the Gothic church is cut through with blades of light from its windows, and it is to make room for these corridors of light that the space increases thanks to the side windows and rose windows, so that the walls almost disappear in a play of buttresses and climbing arches. The whole church is built on this system of light bursting through a fretwork of structures.

Huizinga reminds us of Froissart the chronicler's enthusiasm for ships with flags and ensigns fluttering in the wind, and gaily colored escutcheons flashing in the sun, the play of the suns rays on helmets, breastplates, lance tips, the pennants and banners of knights marching; and in coats of arms, the combinations of pale yellow and blue, orange and white, orange and pink, pink and white, black and white; and a young damsel in purple silk on a white horse with a saddlecloth of blue silk, led by three men clothed in vermilion and capes of green silk.

At the root of this passion for light there were theological influences of distant Platonic and Neoplatonic origin (the Supreme Good as the sun of ideas, the simple beauty of a color given by a shape that dominates the darkness of matter, the vision of God as Light, Fire, or Luminous Fountain). Theologians make light a metaphysical principle, and in these centuries the study of optics develops, under Arab influence, which leads in turn to ideas about the marvels of the rainbow and the miracles of mirrors (in Dante's third cantica the mirrors often appear to be liquid and mysterious).

Dante did not, therefore, invent his poetics of light by playing on a subject matter that was recalcitrant to poetry. He found it all around him, and he reformulated it, as only he could, for a reading public who felt light and color as passions. In rereading one of the best essays I know on Dante's Paradiso, Giovanni Getto's "Aspetti della poesia di Dante" (Aspects of Dante's Poetry, 1947), one can see that there is not a single image of Paradise that does not stem from a tradition that was part of the medieval reader's heritage, I won't say of ideas, but of daily fantasies and feelings. It is from the biblical tradition and the church fathers that these radiances come, these vortices of flames, these lamps, these suns, these brilliances and brightnesses emerging "like a horizon clearing" (Par. 14.69), these candid roses and ruby flowers. As Getto says, "Dante found before him a terminology, or, rather, a whole language already established to express the reality of the life of the spirit, the mysterious experience of the soul in its catharsis, the life of grace as stupendous joy, a prelude to a joyous, sacred eternity." For medieval man, reading about this light and luminosity was equivalent to when we dream about the sinuous gracefulness of a movie star, the elegant lines of a car, the love of lost lovers, brief encounters, or the magic of old films and love songs, and they read it all with a deeply passionate intensity that is unknown to us. This is anything but doctrinal poetry and debates between teacher and pupil!

We now come to the second misunderstanding: that there cannot be poetry of pure intellect, capable of thrilling us not just at the kiss of Paolo and Francesca but at the architecture of the heavens, at the nature of the Trinity, at the definition of faith as the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen. It is this appeal to a poetry of understanding that can make the Paradiso fascinating even for the modern reader who has lost the reference points familiar to his medieval counterpart. Because in the meantime this reader has known the poetry of John Donne, T. S. Eliot, Valéry, or Borges, and knows that poetry can also be a metaphysical passion.

Speaking of Borges, from whom did he get the idea of the Aleph, that fateful single point which showed the populous sea, dawn and dusk, the multitudes of the Americas, a silver cobweb in the center of a black pyramid, a broken labyrinth that was London, an inner courtyard in Calle Soler with the same tiles he had seen thirty years previously in the entryway of a house in Calle Frey Bentos, bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, steam coming off waters, convex equatorial deserts, an unforgettable woman in Inverness, an exemplar of the first translation of Pliny in a house in Adrogué, and simultaneously every letter on every page, a sunset at Querétaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal, a terraqueous globe placed between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly in a study in Alkmaar, a beach on the Caspian Sea at dawn, a pack of tarot cards in a shopwindow at Mirzapur, pistons, herds of bison, tides, all the ants that live on the earth, a Persian astrolabe, and the shocking remains of what had once been the delicious Beatriz Viterbo? The first Aleph appears in the final canto of the Paradiso, where Dante sees (and, as far as he can, makes us see) "bound with love in a single volume whatever is spread throughout the universe, substances and accidents and their behavior, almost fused together..." (Par. 33.88–89). In describing "the universal form of this bond," with "mind suspended and inadequate language," in "that clear subsistence," Dante sees three circles of three colors, and not, like Borges, the shocking remains of Beatriz Viterbo, because his Beatrice, who had turned into shocking remains some time previously, has come back again as light—and so Dante's Aleph is more passionately rich in hope than the one in Borges's hallucination, which is clearly informed by the understanding that he would not be allowed to see the Empyrean, and that all he had left was Buenos Aires.

It is in the light of this centuries-old tradition of metaphysical poetry that the Paradiso can best be read and appreciated today. But I would like to add one further point, to strike the imagination of young readers, or of those who are not particularly interested in God or intelligence. Dante's Paradiso is the apotheosis of the virtual world, of nonmaterial things, of pure software, without the weight of earthly or infernal hardware, whose traces remain in the Purgatorio. The Paradiso is more than modern; it can become, for the reader who has forgotten history, a tremendously real element of the future. It represents the triumph of pure energy, which the labyrinth of the Web promises but will never be able to give us; it is an exaltation of floods and bodies without organs, an epic made of novas and white dwarf stars, an endless big bang, a story whose plot covers the distance of light-years, and, if you really want familiar examples, a triumphant space odyssey, with a very happy ending. You can read the Paradiso in this way too; it can never do you any harm, and it will be better than a disco with strobe lights or ecstasy. After all, with regard to ecstasy, Dante's third cantica keeps its promises and actually delivers it.

Written as an article for la Repubblica on 6 September 2000, in a series of pieces to celebrate the seventh centenary of The Divine Comedy.