Prof: Last time I
finished--
we finished on a little note,
as you'll recall,
that the detail of the garden
where the pilgrim finds himself
and meets the other poets.
 
And he declares,
in a way that seems to be
really prideful,
on his place in this
trajectory, this literary poetic
tradition.
I was emphasizing last time
that this is a detail that opens
for us--
opens our eyes to the ambiguity
of gardens,
the ambiguity--as Dante will go
on dramatizing this idea of this
ambiguity of gardens throughout
Purgatory especially,
and in other areas,
in an oblique way.
 
It's not necessarily
monotonously bucolic language,
this idea of the ambiguity of
gardens.
What are some of these
ambiguities in Canto IV?
We are drawn naturally to
gardens and we are drawn to
gardens because they reflect for
us some image of order,
especially if you're traveling
through Hell,
then you do want this sort
of--you explore,
you enter willfully this place
that bears the fingerprints of
the human hand,
has this--it's something which
had elaborated by human beings.
 
This is a divine place,
nonetheless gardens mean that
for us.
 
But at the same time they give
us a sense of security and in
its enclosure,
also a sense of a lordship over
them.
 
It's something we can control,
it's something that we see and
where we feel we belong.
 
This is exactly the temptation
that the pilgrim experiences in
Canto IV.
 
He relaxes, and this happens to
all the heroes in the epic
tradition, when they enter
gardens they even set aside
their arms.
 
They get disarmed in more ways
than one.
That is to say,
they come to understand that
they are--
this is a place of shelter,
a place which is so peaceful
and idyllic that one is no
longer--
or need not fear that one is in
danger.
 
In effect, that's where the
danger is most powerful.
Dante experiences a danger,
the danger he experience is
that of a poetic hubris.
 
He is descending into humility,
that's the trajectory of his
journey,
and there he rests with Homer,
Virgil,
Lucan, etc.,
and he just says he feels that
he belongs--
that his high genius allows him
to be right there with them.
I remind you of this little
detail exactly because it allows
me to say more precisely what
the problems are that a
presentation of gardens,
but especially to emphasize
that Canto V and the drama that
is unfolded in Canto V,
a drama ostensibly of desire.
 
It's a story of the great
passion of a woman,
one of the most famous women in
literature, Francesca,
has with her brother-in-law
Paolo.
But, the point is that that
drama stems directly from the
crisis in the pilgrim's mind in
Canto IV of Inferno.
In what way?
 
It is as if the experience of
hubris, about the celebrating
one's own power and prowess as a
poet, now has to confront the
consequences of that claim.
 
Now Dante comes literally face
to face with a reader of his
poetry,
and the reader of his poetry
who understands his poetry in a
way that was not necessarily the
one intended by its author.
 
You have now in Canto V the
confrontation of reader and
poet,
and we shall see Francesca is,
of course,
as you remember from your
reading, having read Canto V,
is a great reader of text.
She goes on quoting Lancelot,
not in the version of
Chrétien de Troyes,
but it's a parallel version.
It's the same romance,
she goes on quoting from The
Art Of Courtly Love,
this text about the art of love
by Andreas Capellanus,
and you may remember I alluded
to at least one of the earlier
talks,
and goes on actually quoting to
Dante,
Dante's own poem in the Vita
nuova,
which we shall go and look at
in a while.
Let's start with Canto V.
 
Where are we in the poem?
 
Where are we located?
 
We are in the second circle.
 
This--your notes will tell you.
 
We're in the larger area of
so-called incontinence and I
really should emphasize to you
something about--
we shall look at it in more
detail further on,
but something about the
topography,
the moral topography of Hell.
 
What is the disposition?
 
What is the distribution of
sins and sinfulness?
What is actually sin?
 
What are we to understand for
sin?
For the time being I'll tell
you that for Dante,
it's the will which is the
locus of sin.
You cannot really sin
intellectually;
you cannot have--commit sins
with your mind.
You can have your mind which
partakes and becomes an
accomplice of the will,
but it's primarily in the will,
in the voluntary action that
you find sinfulness.
That's the first thing.
 
Where are we now?
 
In the area of incontinence.
 
What does that mean?
 
Well one thing,
a way of making it very simple,
you probably should know that
the shape,
the diagram of the soul for
Dante is very classical,
very ancient,
it's really Aristotelian,
it's the idea of its more or
less figured as a triangle
which--
on the left side you have,
because it's always the left--
the will--the area of the will
and then on the right side you
have the area of reason.
Where the two faculties of the
soul,
there are two faculties,
like two feet of the body--
there are two faculties of the
soul that where they meet it's--
well in the Middle Ages,
using a classical term they
call, synteresis.
 
This is the area where free
will--in other words,
in free will you have a
conjunction of both will and
reason and that's the beginning
of the moral life.
It's not the end of it at all,
it's really when--
only when you are really free,
your will is free,
that you can start making
decisions and getting engaged in
the world around you.
 
Now the soul is divided into
three parts.
It's a tripartite structure and
begins at the bottom,
it's so called--I should put it
on this side because it's a
will.
 
The concupiscent appetites,
which is really what Francesca
experiences,
the incontinence lost in this
form later will be gluttony,
etc., avarice,
prodigality.
 
In the middle area here,
you would have the sensitive
appetite,
which is really the middle
ground of Dante's Hell,
violence, the kind of
bestiality that takes over the
human mind,
and then the third is the
rational.
The order, the geometry of
Hell, in a way,
is patterned on the order of
the soul, the idea of the soul,
in of course--in an inverted
form.
We begin in the area of
concupiscence,
the area of lust.
 
Someone was asking me what was
lust last time;
I think that we're going to
have some kind of understanding
about this.
 
This is where we are in the
area of incontinence,
the first one is lust,
or what Dante will call with a
formula: it's the area of the
sinners who have inverted the
order,
the hierarchical order of the
reason and the will.
 
They have made pleasure--they
have invested pleasure with
supreme lordship over the order
of rationality.
So, reason, though somehow
dimmed, is always going to be
used as a rational to explain--
as a kind of way of creating
alibis for the passion of
Francesca.
This is the way the canto
begins.
The second thing that I have to
mention as we read here,
is the particular landscape
that Dante evokes.
It's a landscape of souls that
go around, swirling around in a
kind and sort of circular
structure.
Let me tell you a little detail
here, that you have to be
careful as you read the poem
even about the directions of the
pilgrim.
 
For instance,
if I were to ask you which way
is Dante descending into this
spiraled Hell?
When you move into a spiral,
it's very difficult to see if
you're really going left or
right of course,
but he's going out of the way
that he's always going leftward.
Because he's descending--and as
soon as we get to Purgatory,
he goes out of the way to tell
us that he's now going
rightward,
which is to say,
that Hell is the inverted
cosmos of Purgatorio.
So it's really--he's always
going the same way,
only that as he goes into Hell
it's--he's going down and he's
inverted.
 
When he has to go from Hell to
Purgatorio,
the operation is going to be
that of turning upside down in
order to go finally in the
straight way,
the right way.
 
The other detail is that the
symbolism of the circle,
which as you know,
is very ancient,
very old.
 
There are a number of ways of
understanding direction in the
Middle Ages.
 
For instance,
the linear direction implies
that of human beings were caught
in time and they are going to
some kind of purpose or precise
destination.
The angels are those who circle
around the throne of God so that
the circle implies the
plentitude and perfection of
movement.
 
Clearly, Francesca is involved,
who is caught in a world of
love,
in the passion of love,
she's giving a kind of parodic
version,
a caricature of the circular
perfect movement of the mind,
and of the angels around the
divinity.
The spiral, which is the
movement of the pilgrim,
combines line and circle;
implies that Dante is
really--the mind is going in a
circular way around the
divinity, but he also has a
purpose, has an aim to reach.
Here the two are--Francesca and
Paolo are going around in
circles, circles that will
have--and they will experience
no rest.
 
I think that the principle
behind this representation of
desire is displacement;
desire is always a part of
displacement.
 
Something that Dante valorizes
greatly, that's the ambiguity of
Dante's thinking.
 
Desire is displacement because
in this case,
Paolo and Francesca--they get
nowhere and yet it's exactly
this displacement that makes us
aware that we are never where we
should be,
that our hearts are always out
of place.
 
It's what Augustine says in
the Confessions that
the--
he begins the
Confessions with the
awareness of his heart,
he says, is unquiet,
that the idea of the
unquietness of the heart out of
place,
so that's where he's enacting.
 
Dante's moving within the
larger pattern of Augustine's
thinking about desire and there
will be a lot of talk about
that.
 
You know what the word
"desire"
by the way,
which is in English as the same
as it is in Italian or Latin,
you know what it means?
It's linked to the stars,
to have desire is to know that
you are not quite sidera,
at the end de sidera,
we are sort of a removal,
removed from the world of stars.
It's a word that is linked,
usually its
"consideration,"
another word that implies that
the mind moves alongside,
now you consider-- when I
consider how I like suspense,
when you consider is a way of
moving with--
along the mind manages to move
with the circularity and
perfection of the sun.
All of this irrelevant to the
point that's at hand here.
Dante meets--so we are in the
world of--begins this canto with
a number of metaphors of birds.
 
You realize that,
first of all,
he starts around lines 30,
about the "hellish
storm."
 
It's the externalizing of the
storm inside,
the inner storm,
"never resting,
seizes and drives the spirits
before it;
smiting and whirling them
about," etc.
It continues,
"As in the cold season,
their wings bear the starlings
along the broad,
dense flock,
so does that blast the wicked
spirits.
 
Hither, thither,
downward, upward,
it drives them;
no hope ever comforts them,
not to say of rest but of less
pain."
And then the cranes.
 
And Dante asks Virgil,
"Master,
who are these people whom the
black air so scourges?"
And now we have an enumeration,
another application of the
epic--an epic device,
enumerating.
The epic that has--it's always
driven by the desire for
totality to include all things
within the compass of its
representation.
 
It always has the enumerative
style and now here we have a
number of figures that Dante
points out--that Virgil points
out.
 
And they're all queens at the
beginning.
They are founders of cities.
 
Keep this in mind because I
think that part of the issues
that Dante is raising,
and you can think about it,
we can talk about it if you
wish,
is the relationship between
eros and politics.
Pleasure and the city.
 
Where does pleasure--what is
the place of pleasure in the
economy of the city?
 
Let's see who they are,
one is the "Empress of
peoples of many tongues,
who's so corrupted by
licentious vice that she made
lust lawful in her law to take
away the scandal into which she
was brought."
And the emphasis of the line is
this lust becoming lawful,
lust becoming public and
accepted.
And "she is
Semiramis,"
of Assyria, "of whom we
read she succeeded Ninus."
Then the next one is Dido,
who is both Virgil's invention
in many ways,
where Virgil in the
Aeneid;
this is a reflection on the
Aeneid as a poem of love
too.
Dante can not but think about
the place of how Rome,
Rome's conquest would appear to
be libido of power,
libido dominandi and
yet--and he's really playing
with the idea that the--
Rome or Roma as you know
is the--
what we call the--I'm going to
have to use this term because I
can't think of an English term,
boustrophedon.
 
You know what it means,
the boustrophedon,
right?
 
A boustrophedon,
it's very easy,
it's a Greek term meaning a
reversal.
Roma,
as in a mirror,
becomes Amor,
but it's--Venus is the mother
of Aeneas.
 
So there is this idea again,
of a link and inner link
between love,
or love and politics and the
city.
 
And Virgil writes the
Aeneid, literally,
as a love poem.
 
That is to say,
that the ideology of Rome is an
ideology of--based on--of Rome,
is an ideology based on desire.
The idea, which Augustine will
counter by saying,
yeah this is not really love,
this is lust for power and the
distinction that someone was
raising here,
the gentleman was raising last
time about how lust is related
to love.
 
You already start seeing the
antagonism between the two of
them.
 
Augustine, a Roman,
an African, but a Roman
thinker--was really writing
about and belongs and reflects
on the great myths,
on the mythology of Rome.
And for him this is true in
the Confessions,
but it's especially true in
The City of God, where he
juxtaposes the earthly city,
Rome to the heavenly city,
the heavenly Jerusalem.
 
The two cities are opposed to
each other.
There he reflects on Rome as a
city based on lust for power,
and from that point of view,
really not different from any
other empires.
 
They're all Rome,
like say the Persian Empire,
the Greek claims for empire,
and what not,
are all part of a long sequel
of violence and imperial
fantasies.
 
Dante is thinking along these
lines and we shall see where
that will take him in a moment.
 
Then there is Cleopatra of
Egypt, Helen and the story of
the fall of Troy.
 
Then finally,
the story of Tristan,
who as you know belongs--is
really a medieval invention:
Tristan and Isolde.
 
We are going to see now
Lancelot and Guinevere in a
moment.
 
The presence of Tristan shows
one thing, that all the heroes
and heroines of antiquity are
viewed through the lenses of
medieval romances.
 
They may belong to the grand
epics of the classical world.
Dante will see them through
that optic of romances,
the literature of desire.
 
"And he showed me more
than a thousand shades,
naming them as he pointed,
whom love parted from our
life."
 
This is the catalog of--the
epic catalog.
"When I heard my Teacher
name the knights and ladies of
old times, pity came upon me,
and I was as one
bewildered."
 
Now this is really the first
time that Dante introduces the
notion of pity in the poem.
 
And we shall see by the end of
the canto, that he is going to
be overwhelmed by pity and he is
going to faint after he hears
the story of Francesca.
 
He was so overwhelmed that he
fell, he says,
"like a dead body"
falls.
It's a fainting. It's sympathy;
maybe it's a little bit of a
self-recognition,
maybe it's--we shall see that
it's a way of coming to grips
with his own responsibilities,
maybe some of his
responsibilities.
The point I want to make there
with this pity is that you do
know,
but Dante does not know the
the Poetics of Aristotle,
but he knows whatever is
available through Horace and he
knows quite a lot.
The point here is that Dante
goes on reflecting--
it could become a paper topic
for some of you enterprising
spirits,
for some of you maybe--on the
relationship within pity and
justice.
Throughout the poem he goes on
thinking about these two terms.
Does justice necessarily need
pity or is there some kind of
justice that must learn how to
be pitiless, that has no place
for this kind of compassion.
 
Are they two necessarily
antagonistic or is there some
way of thinking of a meeting
point between them?
This is the first time he
introduces this idea of pity,
a kind of recognition;
a sense that it could be he who
is in that position.
 
And he begins,
"Poet I would fain speak
with these two that go together
and seem so light upon the
wind."
 
He doesn't talk to any of the
major classical figures.
He chooses two people from his
own time,
two people from the ordinary
life around him,
two people in the--by this time
Dante may very well be living in
that area of Italy which is
Ravenna,
not quite Ravenna,
but in that area of Ravenna.
"'Thou shalt see when they
are nearer us,
and do thou entreat them then
by the love that leads them,
and they will come.'
 
As soon as the wind bent...
 
'Oh wearied souls,
come and speak to us--
and speak with us,
if One forbids it not.'"
You realize that the name of
God is never mentioned here in
Hell,
if not as a discourse that
takes place here on Earth,
but the souls in Hell will
always use periphrastic
constructions,
terms or phrases;
as if it would be highly
improper for Dante to allow
them,
or even for them,
to acknowledge that which they
never really acknowledged:
"now if One forbids it
not."
 
Then, "as doves summoned
by desire,
come with wings,
poised and motionless to the
sweet nest,
borne by their will through the
air,
so these left the troop where
Dido is."
 
Again, the presence of Dido
that--the Virgilian myth of Dido
and also the other possibility
of Rome: Virgil is writing about
the great battle between
Carthage and Rome as two ways of
choosing a civilization,
two ways of deciding how one
should organize one,
how should one experiment with
cities.
 
"Coming to us through a
malignant air;
such force had my loving
call."
Now listen to how Francesca
speaks,
"Oh living creature,
gracious and friendly,
who goes through the murky air,
visiting us who stained the
world with blood."
 
She's killed,
she was killed,
by the way,
by her husband,
who caught Francesca and his
brother Paolo in a tryst,
so it's--that's what the
allusion to the blood is.
"If the King of the
universe were our friend,
we would pray to Him for thy
peace, since thou hast pity of
our evil plight.
 
Of that which thou pleased to
hear and speak,
we will hear and speak with you
while the wind is quiet as here
it is."
 
Now she begins the description
of her life, where she was born.
Most of the narratives in
Inferno begin with this
idea of birth.
 
You saw that in the case of
Virgil and you see it once here
in the case of Francesca.
 
They begin with birth for a
number of reasons,
but because birth is for Dante
the event that somehow could
potentially have changed and
have imparted a different
direction to the world,
or could end in nothing,
as in the case of Francesca.
 
Hence a great piece of
literature, but she herself did
not really achieve much.
 
Now she talks about her city,
in terms that clearly contrast
with this movement of the souls
caught in the storm.
There they go endlessly in the
air and now she evokes the place
of what she really wants is
rest,
"The city where I was born
lies."
That's the image of the
stability of a city she has
lost.
 
"Where the Po,
with the streams adjoin it,
descends to rest."
 
Now three tercets in Italian
all beginning with the word
love.
 
Love made into kind of
transcendent divinity.
It is the great subject of her
experience, look at this.
"Love which is quickly
kindled in the gentle heart,
seized this man for the fair
form that was taken from me,
and the manner afflicts me
still.
Love, which absolves no one
beloved from loving,
seized me so strongly with his
charm that, as thou seest,
it does not leave me yet.
 
Love brought us to one
death."
What is she saying?
 
Well, a number of things,
and I really have to give this
to you.
 
First of all,
she's really quoting important
literature.
 
The first line "Love
which," the translation is,
"Love which absolves no--
love which is quickly kindled
in the gentle heart,"
and you know that this is
really a quotation from one of
Dante's sonnets in the Vita
nuova that you read,
Chapter XX.
"Love,"
that's how Dante starts,
"Love and the gracious
heart are a single thing,"
and Dante quotes the poetics of
a sweet new sound.
It's when it's early he says,
tells us in his poem,
one can more be without the
other, one can no more be
without the other than one that
then can the reasoning mind
without it's reason,"
etc.
It's clearly meant for
Francesca to flatter the
sensible authorship of the poet
himself.
It's part of a seductive
strategy also that she can use.
The second image,
but love that does not allow
anyone who loves from returning,
reciprocating the love,
it really comes from the
so-called ruse of love that
Marie de Champagne dictates in
Book III of The Art of
Courtly Love and I
want to read this.
It's--the translation is not
quite--all that accurate but I
think--I'm sorry I got the wrong
one, the wrong book.
The Art of Courtly Love,
Book III, and these are the
famous--it ends with the rules
of love.
I will--I'll explain what they
are and Rule 9 says--I can
really read some of them to you
so you have an understanding of
what courtly love is.
 
This is the mind of--which
applies very well to Francesca.
Francesca imagines herself as
really a courtly love heroine.
She lives in the world of
kings, the God is the king of
the universe,
she's in the court of the king
of love maybe.
 
These are some of the concerns
of the rules of love and The
Art of Courtly Love.
 
"Marriage is no real
excuse for not loving."
It's a way of saying adultery
is the law of courtly love.
"He who is not
jealous,"
number 2, "cannot
love."
No one can be bound by a double
love than the boys do not love
until they arrive at the age of
maturity.
It leaves that very unclear
what the age of maturity can be;
7, "when one lover dies,
a widowhood of two years is
required of the survivor."
 
Number 8, "no one should
be deprived of love by the very
best of reasons."
 
Number 9, "no one can love
unless one is impelled by
somebody else's love,"
which is exactly the line that
Francesca mentions,
number 9.
Why these rules of love?
 
What are they?
 
What is she saying?
 
What Andreas,
first of all,
is doing by having these rules
of love and having--
and reducing love to an art,
is a way of acknowledging that
love is the most transgressive,
disruptive of all experiences
and therefore it needs to be
formalized.
It needs to be contained.
 
It may be part of a game,
as is perhaps the thrust of
Andreas Cappellanus' thinking,
or made to be part of an
acceptable ceremony,
which is the possible reading
of what is happening.
 
Francesca falls completely,
squarely within this tradition
of believing that she lives in a
world of love where there is no
other possible resistance.
 
In effect, these tercets with
which I read to you above love,
love, and love:
they are really meant to cast
love as a transcendent force
that no one can really--
that she at least,
cannot withstand.
What she is doing is abdicating
the power of her will to the
irresistible,
omnipotent, presence of this
love.
 
It's part of a strategy,
of not acknowledging any
responsibility.
 
It's part of a strategy to
instead find for herself an
alibi: I was made to do that.
 
The literature of yours and the
literature of Andreas
Cappellanus' were filters of
love.
You understand what I mean--how
in romances you always have
filters of love.
 
No one is going to take the
responsibility saying well
the--I had too much to drink or
I read the great poem or
whatever, and so I was doing
that.
It's a way for Dante to show
the blindness of Francesca to
the reality of her situation,
and this--where she is,
a kind of unwillingness to give
up that which is really the
quality of sin and the trait of
sin: habit.
Is sin in the measure in which
it has become a habit,
a way of clinging to it and not
acknowledging that there may be
some kind of alternative or
something different to it.
So Dante goes on now,
entertaining the arguments.
"When I answered I began:
'Alas, how many sweet thoughts,
how great desire,
brought them to the woeful
pass!'...
 
Then 'Francesca,
thy torments make me weep for
grief and pity,
but tell me,
in the time of your sweet
sighing how and by what occasion
did love grant you to know your
uncertain desires?'
And she answered:
'There is no greater pain than
to recall the happy time in
misery and this thy teacher
knows;
but if thou has so great desire
to know our love's first
root," which is a way of
almost--
even that metaphor of the root
of love,
the origin of love,
she calls it the root of love
as if the passion,
her passion were the flower of
love,
"I shall tell as one may
that weeps in telling.
We read one day for pastime of
Lancelot, how love constrained
him.
 
We were alone and had no
misgiving.
Many times that reading drew
our eyes together and changed
the color in our faces,
but one point alone it was that
mastered us;
when we read for that the
longed-for smile was kissed by
so great a lover,
he who never shall be parted
from me, all trembling,
kissed my mouth.
 
A Galeotto was the book and he
that wrote it.
That day we read in it no
farther.'
While the one spirit said this,
the other,"
Paolo--
whose name means
"little"
in Latin,
as you know paulus,
small, "wept so that for
pity I swooned as if in death
and dropped like a dead
body."
 
And that's the end of the canto.
 
Well, we could say it's an
amazing story and we will talk
about a number of things.
 
The first thing is that this is
a scene represented through
reading, a story of reading.
 
You are aware of that, right?
 
This is clearly,
she reads, they read--he says
that when one day they were
reading for delight,
that's probably part of the
concerns that Dante has.
How should we read if we read
for delight?
They read for delight.
 
Is there some other way of
reading?
Is delight--clearly it's the
constitutive elements of reading
literally text,
but is there something else
that we could do along the way?
 
What is our problem really?
 
Let's continue with this idea
of reading.
She's reading the story of
Lancelot,
Lancelot and Guinevere,
you do know the story,
it's not the story of
Chrétien de Troyes,
but you could easily go on,
if you want to write about
Chrétien de Troyes
Lancelot and Canto V,
you can.
 
Dante does refer to the stories
of Chrétien de Troyes
often in his theoretical works.
 
The story of Lancelot is the
story of adultery at court.
Lancelot is the secret lover of
the queen;
clearly out of the desire and
that says something about the
nature of desire,
to really supplant the king,
Arthur.
 
There's a triangle here at
stake, a triangle of desire,
and Francesca imitates this
triangle and we'll talk about it
in a moment.
 
The story of Lancelot is a
story of--let me go a little bit
into that.
 
It's the story of--like all the
stories Chrétien de
Troyes, they begin on the great
feasts of Christianity.
It's, I think,
usually the Ascension,
Easter, the Pentecost,
one of the great feasts.
And the heroes are sitting
around boasting about
themselves.
 
Not one of them is doing
anything heroic,
but they all talk about how
great they were.
It's a little bit like the
parodic version that you have of
the battle of the argument
between Ulysses and Ajax in the
last book of the
Metamorphosis where they
talk about who is the hero
worthy of inheriting the arms of
the great Achilles.
 
And they talk about not the
present prowess now but what
they were.
 
In the story of Chrétien
clearly the idea is that the
heroic age is over and done
with.
And the whole romance goes on
exploring, and pondering about
that which the reasons why the
heroic age may have come to an
end.
 
What it is, is that the secret
love affair between Lancelot and
Guinevere.
 
The story starts,
it goes on where they're
sitting around drinking ale,
and talking,
a mysterious figure comes from
the outside and kidnaps the
queen.
 
The knights who were sitting
around don't move and
everybody's expecting Lancelot
to get up and go and rescue the
queen,
but he won't out of fear that
if he were to impetuous,
it would be the secret affair
that he has with the queen would
probably be discovered.
That hesitation,
that moral hesitation of
Lancelot is really the cause
of--it's the emblem of the
falling from aristocratic
virtues.
There is now the intrusion of a
time,
a temporal wedge between the
thought and the action,
and then of course Lancelot
would have to go on that famous
cart of shame,
exposed to the ridicule of the
whole town,
before he can go on really
trying to rescue the queen.
 
This is--but if you think about
it, then Chrétien is
already reflecting on the crisis
of the city in terms of the
private passion.
 
Something is really gnawing at
the heart of the city and it's
really the question of desire.
 
The inability to distinguish
between the public and the
private,
the inability to separate
somehow the two,
or find some sort of a
heart--threading the line
between those two concerns.
In Canto V this is really what
Francesca does.
Dante's exploring reading,
so she is reading the text of
Lancelot and lapses into an
imitative strategy of reading.
She wants to be like the
heroine that she reads about.
She refuses to take an
interpretative distance from
whatever specular image:
she wants to feel like a queen.
And she thinks of Paolo can be
like Lancelot,
and this is exactly what we
call the mimetic quality.
It's not my term,
it's the term René
Girard who has written about
this question of the imitative
structure of desire.
 
Between us and the object of
desire there is always the
presence of a mediator,
and in this case the mediator
is Lancelot for Paolo,
and it is Guinevere for
Francesca.
 
But there's more to this story.
 
For instance,
you cannot read the story
without thinking about how Dante
frames the experience of
Francesca with the language of
time.
Do you see how many references
there are to time?
There's no greater grief than
remembering happiness,
a past happiness,
and this, your doctor,
meaning Virgil,
knows very well.
Then she starts talking about
her adventure,
"we were reading one
day," remember,
"that day we read no
further."
It's all about time,
about the question of time as
if an experience--so what is the
problem with this idea of time?
Why is Francesca understood?
 
Why is her story represented in
terms of time?
In effect, I think Francesca
want--there's one great passion
that she has and her passion is
to do away with time.
She's expressing the desire
that her happiness that last
year,
very briefly,
a brief instance may really
last an eternity,
or maybe, just maybe,
she may be expressing the wish
that--
or the idea,
the insight more than the wish,
that one moment of happiness is
well worth an eternity of pain.
 
Or maybe she's just saying that
it's not too bad that the love
story I had only lasted the
briefest possible time.
At any rate,
all this shows is that
primarily Francesca not only
abdicated choice and not only
thought that her own will was
powerless,
vis-à-vis,
the irresistible force of this
transcendent idea of love,
but above all,
she has betrayed the order of
necessity and time.
Her passion violates the order
of time.
Above all, from this point of
view,
Dante goes on reflecting about
his responsibilities of an
author--
as an author when he's
confronted with the reader.
 
What have I done?
 
What have I written?
 
That what I write has been
understood in a way that is not
necessarily the one that he
meant,
the meaning that he meant to
assign to the Vita nuova.
These are some of the concerns
and we can find some others.
Let me just pass onto Canto VI,
which is really not completely
unlike what we have been
describing here.
Now we go into canto--Dante
goes--that's another part of
this other strategy.
 
Whatever Dante has found out
about passion,
about desire,
about this in the world of
appetites and whatever he has
decided about himself and the
meaning that this may have for
him as a poet,
and that scene of fainting at
the end,
he will go on--this will become
the premise for other concerns
raised in Canto VI,
which as you know,
is a political canto.
 
This is the strategy of Dante.
 
Let me see, I found out certain
things about me,
my responsibility,
I found some things about the
disruptive quality of desire,
vis-à-vis,
the political order,
now let me find out--let me see
if--
let me find out how authentic
this finding may be.
 
Let me move into a public
realm, so we go from the world
of the court,
the private world of Francesca,
now to literally the world of
the city,
the world of Florence where we
are still talking about
incontinence in a different
form: the question of gluttony
and politics.
 
And let's see--so he takes
elements that he has already
anticipated here in Canto V,
the political,
and goes on thinking about
politics in Canto VI.
Here we go then with Canto VI,
the third circle,
the gluttonous.
 
"With return of my mind,
with the return of my mind that
was shut off when the piteous
state of the two kinsfolk,
which was quite confounded me
with grief,
new torments and new souls in
torment I see about me,
wherever I move and turn and
set my gaze."
I find first of all the
presence of the word mind,
in Italian it is mente,
in line 1, very suggestive.
We are dealing here now with
bodies.
Canto VI is all about bodies:
it's all about gluttonous souls
who were bodies who took care of
the bodies.
Dante uses as a counterpoint
the question of mind,
as if the sin of these bodies,
the sin of these gluttonous has
also been the sin of not
thinking in terms of mind.
The mind is a necessary
counter, a necessary compliment
to the presence of bodies.
 
The word mind,
of course as you know or in
Italian--
in English we have
mental,
in Italian it's mente,
Latin mens,
really comes from the Latin for
measure.
 
The mind is that which measures
things, the mind is that which
gives a sense of the measure of
even our own desires.
The metaphor of mind appears
throughout Canto VI.
We are asked to think of that
which is missing in this
biological reflection,
a reflection about the--what I
call the biology of politics.
 
Politics now reduced to the
question of appetites of bodies.
It's not--normally we have the
pride of minds when we think
about all the people who have
whatever fantasies,
whatever megalomanias,
whatever desires,
but mental above all when we
talk about politics,
but here it's really a question
of politics in terms of the
inexhaustible appetites of
bodies.
We are going to talk about
politics and gluttony,
politics and bodies.
 
Dante here meets the figure
that is presiding;
the mythological figure that is
presiding over this canto,
this area of gluttony is the
classical figure of the
three-headed Cerberus,
a way of hinting about the
voraciousness,
the many mouths of this
monstrous animal.
 
"Cerberus,
a beast fierce and
hideous"
and so on.
And we do know that the
landscape is stinking under an
endless rain;
there are hints that this is
really one of--some kind of
repulsive form of waste and
food.
 
"The rain makes them howl
like dogs, and the profane
wretches often turn themselves,
of one side making a shelter
for the other.
 
When Cerberus,
the great worm perceived us,
he opened his mouths and showed
us the fangs,
not one of his limbs keeping
still and my Leader."
And so on.
 
"As the dog that yelps for
greed and becomes quiet when it
bites its food,
being all absorbed and
struggling to devour it,
such became these foul visages
of the demon Cerberus...
 
We passed over the shades that
were beaten down by the heavy
rain, setting our feet on their
emptiness which seemed real
bodies."
 
This is actually the great--the
description and figuration of
gluttony.
 
Bodies that are always empty
and they are empty now.
They are punished to be empty,
as empty forms;
and they seem--they are not
bodies, they seem real bodies.
"They were all lying on
the ground except one who sat up
as soon as he saw us passing
before him.
'O thou who art led through
this hell,' he said to me,
'recall me if thou canst;
thou wast begun before I was
ended.'"
Another little reference to
birth, the birth of Dante and
the death of--it's part of a
cycle.
 
There's no necessary connection
between the three heads.
The death of--the name is
Ciacco, meaning a pig,
that's the way he was surnamed
in the streets of Florence and
the death--
and the birth of the pilgrim.
"I said to him,
'The anguish--
the anguish thou hast perhaps
taken thee from my memory,"
and the word is mente,
the mind, "so that I do
not seem ever to have seen thee.
 
Tell me who you are,
put in a place of such misery
and under such a penalty that,
if any is greater,
none is so loathsome.'
 
And he said to me,
'thy city,"
we are talking about Florence,
this is the politics of the
city.
 
"Thy city,"
it doesn't say our city,
your city.
 
He's already--Ciacco views
himself as outside of it,
not really occupying a place
within the city,
"which is so full of envy
that already the sack runs over,
held me within it in the bright
life,
when you citizens,"
once again the distance of
Ciacco from the city of
Florence,
"called me Ciacco.
 
For the damning fault of
gluttony, as thou seest,
I lie helpless in the rain;
and in my misery I'm not alone,
for all these are under the
same penalty for the same
fault.'
 
And he said no more."
 
Okay here I have to stop a
little bit to tell you what--
something that you already
caught of course,
what the basic metaphor,
what the basic conceit is in
this canto,
and it's the conceit of the
city and the body.
 
You--in the classical world
you're used to the conceit
between--
of the correlation between the
soul and the city,
but for Dante this is a
soulless city.
 
The only way to talk about is
through this image which is very
ancient,
very Roman actually,
the story of the city as a
corporate,
as a body, as a corporate
structure.
The image, some of you readers
of Shakespeare you may remember
your Coriolanus,
where Coriolanus makes the same
speech about the city and the
body.
But it really goes back to a
historian of the classical world
that Dante absolutely loves.
 
He's not the only one,
all the way Augustine is
using--
the name is Livy who wrote this
famous book about from--
about the--from the foundation
of Rome,
a Roman historian who tells the
history of Rome.
 
One of the stories he tells is
that of the famous civil war in
Rome: the civil war between the
patricians and the plebeians.
The plebeians,
the workers,
were so tired of what was
happening in the city.
They were doing all the work;
that's the way they complained,
but they had few of the
pleasures coming from living in
the city that they decided to
secede.
It is the famous secession
whereby they go--
it's a kind of schism,
they go on the--
they retreat on the Aventine
Hill, one of the seven hills of
Rome,
and the patricians,
the city is paralyzed as you
can imagine,
it's a strike,
the patricians send one of
their--
an emissary,
a man by the name of Menenius
to convince the plebeians to
return to the city.
 
Menenius manages to do this by
telling the plebeians a famous
fable which called,
is still known as The fable of
Menenius.
 
What does he tell them?
 
He said, look,
the city's really like a body.
When you have a body the hands
work.
Yes, it seems that the mouth
enjoys and savors the great
pleasures of foods and so on.
 
It seems that the stomach can
be full,
but actually whatever they
produce and take in and they
ingest,
they redistribute to the body,
to the rest of the body,
to the hands, the feet, etc.
The city is like a body.
 
That's the analogy.
 
Between the corporate structure
of the city,
the idea that the city is a
corporation and--
which by the way we carry on a
reminder of this,
how vital this is,
we carry on a dime.
I don't have a dime with me,
but if you have a dime you can
read e pluribus unum.
 
And it says one body out of
many limbs, out of many members,
still an image that we carry.
 
It's still a conceit that we
have, right?
The idea is that the city is
like a body and plebeians are
convinced and they go back to
order and they recompose the
order of the city.
 
This is the fundamental
structure here.
I said something else which is
really is going to--does Dante
believe in the corporate
structure of the city?
Can it really hold together and
I go on submitting to you that
he no longer believes in this.
 
If you--when you read the canto
you will see that all the body
parts are literally littering
the city, they're all mentioned.
The nails, the hands,
the heart, the beard,
the hair, etc.,
the mouth are sort of spread
all over,
and as if to imply the
impossibility of constituting
these body parts into an organic
unified totality.
 
There's another little issue
here that is being raised and
that I want to talk about before
the end of the hour:
the question of civil war and
what Dante understands by civil
war because Dante's political
thought,
the reality of his political
thinking is always the civil
war.
 
Let me just give you some
textual evidence and then we'll
go on.
 
"I answered him Ciacco,
thy distress so weighs on me
that it bids me weep.
 
But tell me if thou canst,
what the citizens of the
divided city,"
this is now Florence,
"shall come to and whether
any there is just,
and tell me the cause of such
discord assailing it."
An amazing image discord
because it's a musical metaphor:
accord,
discord but it really comes
from--it makes the 'heart,'
that's where the word comes
from;
discord makes the heart the
place, the receptacle where all
the envy, all these jealousies
that destroy the city are
placed, are located.
"He said to me,
'After a long strife this shall
come to blood and the party of
the rustics shall drive out the
other with much offense;
then by force of one who is now
maneuvering,"
meaning the Pope,
"that party is destined to
fall."
This is the Guelfs and
Ghibellines that--within which
the city is divided.
 
"To fall within three
years and the other to prevail,
long holding its head high and
keeping the first under grievous
burdens,
for all their tears and shame.
Two men are just and are not
heeded there.
Pride, envy and avarice,"
these are the cause,
these are "the
sparks" he calls them.
"'These are the causes
that have set these hearts on
fire.'
 
Here, he made an end of his
grievous words."
And then Dante goes on
literally evoking a street scene
in Florence, goes on asking
about some other characters in
the city.
 
"I would still learn from
thee and I beg thee to grant me
further speech.
 
Farinata,"
he mentions about whom we shall
see next Thursday in Canto X of
Inferno,
"Tegghiaio,
men of such worth,
lacopo Rusticucci,
Arrigo, and Mosca and the rest
whose minds were set on
well-doing,
tell me where they are and give
me knowledge of them;
for I'm pressed with a great
desire to know whether they
share in Heaven's sweetness,
or the bitterness of
Hell."
 
I would like to point out to
you the presence of this--of the
language of gluttony throughout:
sweetness, bitterness,
pleasant, unpleasantness.
 
This really runs through the
canto and gives its--and links
together gluttony and the
politics.
It's the body:
you can see the body metaphor,
but also these other
experiences.
What is happening here he asks,
as Dante asks about these other
famous Florentines,
the "men of such
worth"?
 
He says, where are they?
 
They achieved so much worth,
so set on well-doing in the
city and the English cannot
quite render the ambiguity of
the Italian.
 
The ambiguity of the Italian is
benfare which is really
very difficult to translate,
which you don't know if it
means "doing well"
or "doing good,"
and that impossibility of
deciding what the sentence
really means is exactly what
Dante's dramatizing here.
What he's dramatizing is the
distance between human
perspective,
the judgments that we make as
human beings,
and the divine judgment on the
dealings and doings of these
famous people;
the discrepancy between them
here on earth when they judge
one way,
then the real--the reality of
the worth and value of these
other people that can be
different.
 
We are talking about--he's
talking about them,
the black souls,
that is to say they're further
down in the fire and different
faults weigh them down to the
depth.
 
What an extraordinary metaphor,
the weight, the burden of sin,
but it's really an image that
goes back, the gravity,
the question of gravity.
 
This is--we speak of civic
gravity, but here it's a
different kind of gravity.
 
It's an idea of--it's an old
idea.
When you want to talk about the
weight that we carry within us,
the gravity we have within us,
that gravity is love.
The way of deciding,
the way of understanding this
line: there's a passage in
the Confessions of
Augustine,
where Augustine says,
that he wants to exemplify why
some people go up,
other people go down,
and he says it's like the
gravity of objects around us.
 
A stone, you drop a stone and
the stone goes down out of its
own gravity, its own specific
weight.
A fire, he says,
goes up out of its own specific
weight.
 
We are carried wherever our
love carries us.
We are--our love is our own
gravity, inner gravity,
and whether we go up or down,
it depends according to the
direction of our desires.
 
Let me just go back to--this is
to give you a sense of all the
resonances of this canto,
but at the heart of it all,
there is the question of civil
war.
Between Guelfs and the
Ghibellines,
between patricians and
plebeians: Dante sees the whole
of history,
Roman history,
whether he is going to read
Virgil,
or will read Lucan,
or he will read Statius,
which actually deals not with
Roman history in this great epic
the Thebaid.
 
He reads--he's really
reading Greek history,
the story of Oedipus and
Eteocles and Polyneices.
They view history from the
point of view of the civil war.
Let me just formulate the
question of the political
understanding Dante has.
 
For those of you who may have
read a little bit of
Monarchia,
for instance,
which is the treatise about the
desirable form of a universal
confederation of states,
under the one emperor:
that's the grand vision that
Dante has in Monarchia.
He thinks about the needed
unity of all states,
a kind of sort--we could call
it today,
a confederation of states,
very much patterned on the
Roman Empire.
 
The idea of the--in fact the
Roman Empire becomes the model
for this kind of unification.
 
That's really what most of us
think that Dante's political
vision is.
 
In effect, Dante sees history
especially as--and it's kind of
inevitable--a satanic form of
civil war.
So harsh is he going to be
about the realities of the
cities,
that you really wonder how can
he go on elaborating a theory
of,
a constructive theory,
of politics.
You see what I'm saying?
 
Once you are so harsh about the
reality of politics,
then you really wonder how can
one go around really thinking
that politics can be necessary.
 
It's necessary that you can
explain, that it's somehow
useful, that it's feasible.
 
Where does it say--where does
this understanding of Rome come
to him?
 
Dante does not really agree
with Virgil.
And Dante does not agree with
Virgil's greatest critic who is
Augustine in The City of
God. For Virgil,
Rome is the providential
empire, an empire that can
really bring about,
unify the whole world.
Augustine writes against Virgil
and says,
no because even Rome,
as I just indicated to you a
little earlier,
even Rome is part of the
history of violence.
 
Dante comes along and pulls
together within the Divine
Comedy the question of Rome
and the needed empire and the
question of the civil war.
 
What do they have in common?
 
What is it that connects them?
 
Dante's argument is the
following: you,
Virgil, are right in believing
in the unity of all mankind,
a Stoic idea that we all live
in a cosmopolis,
in a city which is the city of
the world where we all find a
place.
 
And you, Augustine,
are right in claiming that the
empire is all built and based on
the libido and lust.
You're right;
you are both right,
and yet you are both wrong,
precisely because you
contradict each other.
 
What Dante says to Augustine,
if there is no empire,
then we are living in a world
of disorder and lawlessness.
The empire becomes the
necessary remedy to the evils of
the civil war.
 
The civil war is the condition
where my own brother,
my own neighbor,
can become my own enemy.
Augustine does not acknowledge
the reality of civil war.
To him, it's just empire and
the empire is evil.
And we'll finish with the
famous line: what do I care who
governs me, provided that they
don't make me sin?
It's the famous Christian
response to the idea of the
evil, the historical evil of
empires.
Let me retreat into myself and
find within myself some kind of
comfort and some kind of
shelter.
And Dante will respond to him,
says no that's not enough
because once you think that you
have retreated into yourself
then there is the reality of the
civil war that will reach into
you.
 
What I have been explaining to
you and I will stop because I
want to talk about something
else before we go,
Canto VII.
 
What I've been trying to
explain to you is that the
movement from Canto V to Canto
VI of Inferno,
it's a movement from the
internal world of desires that
seem to be so private and so
personal.
Then, I said,
Dante has to go outside of
himself to test,
to find out what the
authenticity is of what he has
found out in Canto V.
In Canto VI,
the political canto will tell
them there is no such comfort
zone of one soul in the world,
that the inner world is
necessarily part of the outside
world and the outside world will
encroach upon it and it will
enter one's own inner world.
 
The terms for this kind of
movement between the inner and
the outer are really Virgil and
Augustine.
Virgil with the idea of the
defense of the empire,
Augustine with his undermining
of the notion of the necessity
of the empire.
 
Dante will go on harmonizing
the two visions.
He will endorse the idea of the
empire, aware that that's the
only possible best response to
the tragedy of civil wars.
Let me say just a few things
about Canto VII and then I'll
give you a chance to ask some
questions,
there should be two or three
minutes for questions.
Canto VII also is a canto that
can be read symmetrically with
the other Canto VII of the
Divine Comedy,
Purgatorio VII,
just as Canto VI.
I neglected to mention it,
but Canto VI of Inferno
is about the city and
politics;
Canto VI of Purgatorio
about the nation;
Canto VI of Paradise
about the empire,
so they're really connected;
the same thing with Canto VII.
This is the only canto that's
not individualized sinners.
He meets avaricious,
the avaricious and the
prodigals,
and they are sort of taken in a
kind of--
they have no--there's no
individual figuration for them.
 
It is as if this became a kind
of an anonymous,
therefore a more collective
kind of problem,
avaricious and prodigality,
which he represents in terms of
the counter movement of Scylla
and Charybdis,
and here we have the great
figuration of Fortune.
You remember as I call her the
Vanna White of the time,
the lady who is at the Wheel of
Fortune,
turning blindfolded and let me
say something about this
figuration.
 
Dante describes it as--what is
it?
It's a great--an idea that
I--what is it about the
avaricious and the prodigals who
could turn around,
so one against the other,
how can this be possible?
What is--why are we so attached
to the things of the world?
And then Dante goes on
explaining on Canto VII,
lines 80 and following,
he will say,
"He ordained them,"
He meaning God,
"for them for worldly
splendours,
a general minister and guide
who should in due time change
vain well from race to race,
and from one to another blood
beyond the prevention of human
wits,
so that one race rules and
another languishes according to
her sentence...
 
She foresees,
judges, and maintains her
kingdom as the other heavenly
powers do theirs.
Her changes have no respite.
 
Necessity makes her swift,
so fast men come to take their
turn.
 
This is she who is so
reviled,"
meaning Fortune,
"by the very men that
should give her praise,
laying on her wrongful blame
and ill repute.
 
But she is blest and does not
hear it.
Happy with the other primal
creatures she turns her sphere
and rejoices in her bliss."
 
It's Fortune at the wheel,
but it's a figuration that in
many ways it needs some
explaining.
How can Dante believe in God as
Fortuna?
How can he go on talking about
this pagan deity,
she is Roman deity,
Lady Luck, how is he doing
this?
 
How can that--do you see how he
lives in a world of
providentiality where there is
well--and he does say that
Fortune is an intelligence of
God.
That is to say,
not the--though she's
blindfolded;
there is also a kind
of--there's some criteria,
there is an intelligence,
there is a will,
and a meditation behind it.
What it means is that what is
up will inevitably turn down to
go down, it's an endless
rotation of fortune.
In a certain way when you are
down you only--the only--it's
the best time to be at,
because you only get to--you
can only go up.
 
We are always though on
the--precariously poised on
this--on the curve.
 
We are never quite stable in
our own achievements.
How can Dante relate this
fortune--idea of fortune to the
providential scheme that
he--that regulates and shapes
his own vision?
 
What I would have to tell you
is that the--two things.
The first thing is that as you
see, Canto VII begins with an
illusion to the great war in
Heaven.
The angels, the primal struggle
that disrupted the order of the
cosmos,
in other words,
Fortune is for Him the divinity
that rules over the world,
this sublunary world of
generation of corruption.
That is to say,
she is a minister within the
world of the fall,
first thing.
There is still a fallen world
and that's how perception of all
the changes that take place.
 
And the other thing is,
that Dante is intimating that
the only way to conquer Fortune
is to really give up.
It's a kind of mystical idea.
 
Mystical in the sense of a
spiritual idea,
that is, give up the attachment
to the things of this world.
Let's stop here with the
briefest summary of Canto VII.
Let me see if there are
questions about some of the
weighty issues that I raised in
Canto V and VI.
And there is much more that we
can say, but let me,
if you want to ask questions
and maybe I can qualify things
that were left in the
background.
Please?
 
Student:  In Canto V,
>?
Prof: The question is a
very good question,
what is the significance of
Francesca doing all the talking
and not Paolo,
I guess.
I take the significance is that
this is--
to me is that this is a canto
where Dante understands some of
the elements that he had put
forth in the Vita nuova.
You remember where we discussed
the Vita nuova?
There I indicated that the
great poem,
"Women who have intellect
of love,"
where the--
he discovers that they are the
interlocutors about love.
 
Not only are they the
interlocutors about love,
there are also those--the
privilege of interlocutors
because they know how to
combine;
because they understand the
necessary independence of
intellect and love.
 
They are not two separate
entities,
they are not two separate
aspects, and therefore,
now he has Francesca as a woman
who can become indeed his own
interlocutor.
 
That's one aspect,
the other one is that medieval
romances had made this
extraordinary discovery and I
think that it's the most
revolutionary change that has
taken place in the consciousness
of--
in the imagination of the--in
the Western world in modern
times.
 
That is to say,
before it became a sociological
issue,
before it becomes a
philosophical problem,
the dignity and worth of the
woman was already retrieved and
vindicated by romances.
It's there that the woman
becomes either the figure in
charge or the partner,
or friend of the man.
Does that answer your question?
 
Student: 
>
Prof: By the way the
answer was yes.
That could not be picked up by
the video.
Other questions?
 
Well, okay thank you,
we'll see you next time with
Canto IX, X, and XI,
I guess.
