Finally, in just the way the cello eccentrically converses with itself and wrings from itself questions and answers, Ugolino’s story is interpolated with his sons’ touching and helpless interjections:
. . . ed Anselmuccio mio
disse: “Tu guardi sì, padre: che hai?”
(Inferno, XXXIII, 50–51)
. . . and my Anselmuccio said:
“Father, why do you look so? What is the matter?”
That is, the timbre is not at all sought out and forced onto the story as onto a shoemaker’s last, but rather the dramatic structure of the narrative arises out of the timbre.
VIII.
It seems to me that Dante has carefully studied all speech defects, that he has listened to stutterers and lispers, to whiners and mispronouncers, and that he has learned a good deal from them.
So I should like to speak about the auditory coloring in Canto XXXII of the Inferno.
A peculiar labial music: abbo, gabbo, babbo, Tebe, plebe, zebe, converrebbe. As if a wet-nurse were taking part in the creation of the phonetics. Lips now protrude like a child’s, now are distended into a proboscis.
The labials form a kind of “enciphered bass”—basso continuo, that is, the chordal basis of harmonization. They are joined by smacking, sucking, whistling dentals as well as by clicking and hissing ones.
At random, I pull out a single strand: cagnazzi, riprezzo, quazzi, mezzo, gravezza . . .
Not for a second do the tweakings, the smacking, and the labial explosions cease.
The canto is sprinkled with a vocabulary that I would describe as an assortment of seminary ragging or of the blood thirsty taunting-rhymes of schoolboys: cuticagna (“nape”); dischiomi (“pull out hair, locks of hair”); sonar con le mascella (“to yell,” “to bark”); pigliare a gabbo (“to brag,” “to loaf”). With the aid of this deliberately shameless, intentionally infantile orchestration, Dante forms the crystals for the auditory landscape of Giudecca (Judas’ circle) and Caina (Cain’s circle).
Non fece al corso suo sì grosso velo
d’inverno la Danoia in Osteric,
nè Tanaì là sotto il freddo cielo,
com’era quivi: chè, se Tambernic
vi fosse su caduto, o Pietrapana,
non avrìa pur dall’orlo fatto cric.31
(Inferno, XXXII, 25–30)
All of a sudden, for no reason at all, a Slavonic duck sets up a squawk: Osteric, Tambernic, cric (an onomatopoeic little word—“crackle”).
Ice produces a phonetic explosion and it crumbles into the names of the Danube and the Don. The cold-producing draught of Canto XXXII resulted from the entry of physics into a moral idea: from betrayal to frozen conscience to the ataraxy of shame to absolute zero.
In tempo, Canto XXXII is a modern scherzo. But what kind? An anatomic scherzo that uses the onomatopoeic infantile material to study the degeneration of speech.
A new link is revealed here: between feeding and speaking. Shameful speaking can be turned back, is turned back to champing, biting, gurgling, to chewing.
The articulation of feeding and speaking almost coincide. A strange, locust phonetics is created.
Mettendo i denti in nota di cicogna—
(Inferno, XXXII, 36)
—using their teeth like grasshoppers’ mandibles.
Finally, it is necessary to note that Canto XXXII is overflowing with anatomical lustfulness.
“That same famous blow which simultaneously destroyed the wholeness of the body and injured its shadow.” There, too, with a purely surgical pleasure: “He whose jugular vertebra was chopped through by Florence.”
Di cui segò Fiorenza la gorgiera.
(Inferno, XXXII, 120)
And further: “Like a hungry man who greedily falls on bread, one of them fell on another and sank his teeth into the place where the neck and the nape join.”
Là’ve ‘l cervel s’aggiugne colla nuca.
(Inferno, XXXII, 129)
All this jigs like a Dürer skeleton on hinges and takes us to German anatomy.
After all, a murderer is a bit of an anatomist.
After all, for the Middle Ages an executioner was a little like a scientific researcher.
The art of war and the trade of execution are a bit like a dissection amphitheater’s antechamber.
IX.
The Inferno is a pawnshop where all the countries and towns known to Dante lie unredeemed. There is a framework for the very powerful structure of the infernal circles. It cannot be conveyed in the form of a funnel. It cannot be represented on a relief map. Hell is suspended on the iron wires of urban egoism.
It is wrong to conceive of the Inferno as something volumetric, as some combination of enormous circuses, deserts with burning sands, stinking swamps, Babylonian capitals and mosques heated to red-hot incandescence. Hell contains nothing, and it has no volume, the way an epidemic, an infectious disease, or the plague has none; it is like any contagion, which spreads even though it is not spatial.
Love of the city, passion for the city, hatred of the city—these are the material of the Inferno. The circles of hell are nothing but the Saturn rings of exile. For the exile his sole, forbidden, and for-ever-lost city is scattered everywhere—he is surrounded by it. I should say that the Inferno is surrounded by Florence. The Italian cities in Dante—Pisa, Florence, Lucca, Verona—these dear civic planets—are stretched out into monstrous circles, extended into belts, restored to a nebulous, gaseous state.
The antilandscape character of the Inferno constitutes as it were the condition of its graphic quality.
Imagine that grandiose experiment of Foucault’s carried out not with a single pendulum, but with a multitude of crisscrossing pendulums. Here space exists only insofar as it is a receptacle for amplitudes. To make specific Dante’s images is as unthinkable as to enumerate the names of those who took part in the migration of peoples.
As the Flemish between Wissant and Bruges, fearing the sea’s flood tide, erect dikes to force back the sea, and as the Paduans construct embankments along the quays of the Brenta out of concern for the safety of their cities and bays, and in expectation of spring which melts the snows of the Chiarentana (a part of the snowclad Alps)—such were these dams, albeit not so monumental, whoever the engineer who built them.
(Inferno, XV, 4–12)
The moons of the polynomial pendulum swing here from Bruges to Padua, teach a course in European geography, give a lecture on the art of engineering, on the techniques of city safety, on the organization of public works, and on the significance of the alpine watershed for national interests.
Crawling as we do on our knees before a line of verse, what have we retained from these riches? Where are its godfathers, where its zealots? What are we to do about our poetry, which lags so shamefully behind science?
It is frightening to think that the blinding explosions of present-day physics and kinetics were put to use six hundred years before their thunder sounded: there are no words to brand the shameful, barbaric indifference to them on the part of the sad compositors of readymade meaning.
Poetic speech creates its tools on the move and in the same breath does away with them.