Not satisfied with this truly miraculous demonstration of the transformability of poetic material, which leaves all the associative process of modem European poetry simply nowhere, and as if in mockery of his slow-witted reader, Dante, when everything has already been unloaded, used up, given away, brings Geryon down to earth and benevolently fits him out for new wanderings as the nock of an arrow sent flying from a bowstring.
V.
Dante’s drafts have of course not come down to us. There is no possibility of our working on the history of his text. But it does not follow from this, of course, that there were no rough copies full of erasures and blotted lines and that the text hatched full grown, like Leda’s brood from the egg or Pallas Athene from the brow of Zeus. But the unfortunate gap of six centuries, and also the quite forgivable fact of the nonextant original, have played us a dirty trick. For how many centuries now has Dante been talked and written of as if he had put down his thoughts directly on the finest legal parchment? Dante’s laboratory—with this we are not concerned. What has ignorant piety to do with that? Dante is discussed as if he had had the completed whole before his eyes even before he began to work and had busied himself with the technique of moulage—first casting in plaster, then in bronze. At the very best, he is handed a chisel and allowed to carve or, as they love to say, “sculpt.” Here they forget one small detaiclass="underline" the chisel very precisely removes all excess, and the sculptor’s draft leaves no material traces behind, something of which the public is very fond. The very fact that a sculptor’s work proceeds in stages corresponds to a series of draft versions.
Draft versions are never destroyed.
In poetry, in the plastic arts, and in art generally there are no readymade things.
We are hindered from understanding this by our habit of grammatical thinking—putting the concept “art” in the nominative case. We subordinate the process of creation itself to the purposeful prepositional case, and our thinking is something like a little manikin with a lead heart who, having wavered about in various directions as he should and having undergone various jolts as he went through the questionnaire of the declension—about what? about whom? by whom? and by what?—is at the end established in the Buddhist, schoolboy tranquillity of the nominative case. A finished thing, meanwhile, is just as subject to the oblique cases as to the nominative case. Furthermore, our whole doctrine of syntax is a very powerful survival of scholasticism, and when it is put into its proper subordinate position in philosophy, in the theory of cognition, then it is completely overcome by mathematics, which has its own independent, original syntax. In the study of art this syntactic scholasticism has the upper hand and hour by hour it causes the most colossal damage. In European poetry those who are furthest away from Dante’s method and, to put it bluntly, in polar opposition to him, are precisely the ones who are called Parnassians: namely, Heredia, Leconte de Lisle. Baudelaire is much closer to him. Still closer is Verlaine, and the closest of all French poets is Arthur Rimbaud. By his very nature Dante shakes the sense and violates the integrity of the image. The composition of his cantos resembles the schedule of the air transport network or the indefatigable circulation of carrier pigeons.
Thus the conversation of the draft version is a law of the energetics of the literary work. In order to arrive at the target one has to accept and take account of the wind blowing in a different direction. This is also the rule for tacking in a sailing vessel.
Let us remember that Dante Alighieri lived at the time when navigation by sail was flourishing and the art of sailing was highly developed. Let us not disdain to keep in mind the fact that he contemplated models of tacking and maneuvering. Dante had the highest respect for the art of navigation of his day. He was a student of this supremely evasive and plastic sport, known to man from the earliest times.
Here I should like to call attention to one of the remarkable peculiarities of Dante’s psyche: his dread of direct answers, occasioned perhaps by the political situation in that most dangerous, intricate, and criminal century.
While the whole Divina Commedia, as we have already shown, is a series of questions and answers, every direct utterance of Dante’s is literally squeezed out of him through the midwifery of Vergil or with the help of the nursemaid Beatrice, and so on.
Inferno, Canto XVI. The conversation is carried on with that impassioned haste known only to prisons: to make use at all costs of the tiny moment of meeting. The questions are put by a trio of eminent Florentines. About what? About Florence, of course. Their knees tremble with impatience and they dread to hear the truth. The answer, lapidary and cruel, comes in the form of a cry. At this, even though he has made a desperate effort to control himself, even Dante’s chin quivers and he tosses back his head, and all this is conveyed in nothing more nor less than the author’s stage direction:
Così gridai colla faccia levata.21
(Inferno, XVI, 76)
Dante is sometimes able to describe a phenomenon in such a way that there is absolutely nothing left of it. To do this he makes use of a device which I should like to call the Heraclitean metaphor, with which he so strongly emphasizes the fluidity of the phenomenon and with such a flourish cancels it altogether that direct contemplation, once the metaphor has done its work, is really left with nothing to live on. Several times already I have had occasion to remark that the metaphoric devices of Dante surpass our notions of composition, since our critical doctrines, fettered by the syntactic mode of thinking, are powerless before him.
When the peasant, climbing to the top of a hill
At that time of the year when the being who lights the world
Least conceals his face from us
And the watery swarm of midges yields its place to the mosquitos,
See the dancing fireflies in the hollow,
The same one where he, perhaps, labored as a reaper and as a plowman;
So with little tongues of flame gleamed the eighth circle,
All of which could be surveyed from the height where I had climbed;
And as with that one who revenged himself with the help of bears,
Seeing the departing chariot of Elijah,
When the team of horses tore headlong into the sky,
Looked with all his might but saw nothing
Save one single flame
Fading away like a little cloud rising into the sky
So the tongue-like flame filled the crevices of the graves
Stealing away the property of the graves, their profit,
And wrapped in every flame there lay hidden a sinner.22
(Inferno, XXVI, 25–42)
If you do not feel dizzy from this miraculous ascent, worthy of the organ of Sebastian Bach, then try to show what is here the second and what the first member of the comparison. What is compared with what? Where is the primary and where is the secondary, clarifying element?
In a number of Dante’s cantos we encounter impressionistic prolegomena. The purpose of these is to present in the form of a scattered alphabet, in the form of a leaping, glistening, splashed alphabet the very same elements which, according to the rule of the transformability of lyric poetry, are later to be united into the formulas of sense.