I [had] fixed my gaze upon him
And he drew himself up to his full height
As though [he were] insulting Hell with his immense disdain.9
(Inferno, X, 34–36)
And then, like a powerful tube, the past breaks upon us in the question of Farinata: “Who were your ancestors?” (Chi fur li maggior tui?) [line 42]. How the copula, the little truncated form fur instead of furon, is stretched out here! Was this not the manner in which the French horn was formed, by lengthening the valve?
Later there is a slip of the tongue in the form of the past definite. This slip of the tongue was the final blow to the elder Cavalcanti: he heard Alighieri, one of the contemporaries and comrades of his son, Guido Cavalcanti, the poet, still living at the time, say something—it does not matter what—with the fatal past definite form ebbe.
And how remarkable that it is precisely this slip which opens the way for the main stream of the dialogue. Cavalcanti fades out like an oboe or clarinet that had played its part, and Farinata, like a deliberate chess player, continues the interrupted move and renews the attack:
e sè continuando al primo detto,
“s’elli han quell’arte,” diesse “male appresa,
ciò mi tormenta più che questo letto.”10
(Inferno, X, 76–78)
The dialogue in the tenth canto of the Inferno is an unexpected clarifier of the situation. It flows all by itself from the space between the two rivers of speech.
All useful information of an encyclopedic nature turns out to have been already furnished in the opening lines. The amplitude of the conversation slowly, steadily grows wider; mass scenes and throng images are introduced obliquely.
When Farinata stands up in his contempt for Hell like a great nobleman who has landed in prison, the pendulum of the conversation is already measuring the full diameter of the gloomy plain, broken by flames.
The notion of scandal in literature is much older than Dostoevsky, but in the thirteenth century and in Dante’s work it was far more powerful.
Dante runs up against Farinata, collides with him, in an undesired and dangerous encounter exactly as the rogues in Dostoevsky are always blundering into their tormentors in the most inopportune places. From the opposite direction comes a voice—whose it is, is so far not known. It becomes harder and harder for the reader to conduct the expanding canto. This voice—the first theme of Farinata—is the minor Dantean arioso of the suppliant type, extremely typical of the Inferno.
O Tuscan who travels alive through this city of fire and speaks so eloquently, do not refuse my request to stop for a moment. By your speech I recognize in you a citizen of that noble region to which I—alas!—was too great a burden.11
Dante is a poor man. Dante is an internal raznochinets [an intellectual, not of noble birth]12 of an ancient Roman line. Not courtesy but something completely opposite is characteristic of him. One has to be a blind mole not to notice that throughout the Divina Commedia Dante does not know how to behave, he does not know how to act, what to say, how to make a bow. This is not something I have imagined; I take it from the many admissions which Alighieri himself has strewn about in the Divina Commedia. The inner anxiety and the heavy, troubled awkwardness which attend every step of the unself-confident man, the man whose upbringing is inadequate, who does not know what application to make of his inner experience or how to objectify it in etiquette, the tortured and outcast man—it is these qualities which give the poem all its charm, all its drama, and they create its background, its psychological ground.
If Dante were to be sent out alone, without his dolce padre, without Vergil, a scandal would inevitably erupt in the very beginning, and we should not have a journey among torments and remarkable sights but the most grotesque buffoonery.
The gaucheries averted by Vergil systematically correct and straighten the course of the poem. The Divina Commedia takes us into the inner laboratory of Dante’s spiritual qualities. What for us are an unimpeachable capuche and a so-called aquiline profile were, from the inside, an awkwardness overcome with torturous difficulty, a purely Pushkinian, Kammerjunker struggle13 for the social dignity and social position of the poet. The shade that frightens old women and children was itself afraid, and Alighieri underwent fever and chills all the way from marvelous fits of self-esteem to feelings of utter worthlessness.
Up to now Dante’s fame has been the greatest obstacle to understanding him and to the deeper study of him and it will for a long time continue to be so. His lapidary quality is nothing other than a product of the huge inner imbalance which found its outlet in the dream executions, the imagined encounters, the exquisite retorts, prepared in advance and nurtured by biliousness, calculated to destroy utterly his enemy, to bring about the final triumph.
How many times did the loving father, preceptor, sensible man, and guardian silence the internal raznochinets of the fourteenth century, who was so troubled at finding himself in a social hierarchy at the same time that Boccaccio, practically his contemporary, delighted in the same social system, plunged into it, sported about in it?
Che fai?—“What are you doing?”—sounds literally like the shout of a teacher: “You’ve gone crazy!” Then one is rescued by the playing of the organ pipes, which drown out shame and cover embarrassment.
It is absolutely incorrect to conceive of Dante’s poem as a single narration extended in one line or even as a voice. Long before Bach and at a time when large monumental organs were not yet being built, and there existed only the modest embryonic prototypes of the future marvel, when the chief instrument was still the zither, accompanying the voice, Alighieri constructed in verbal space an infinitely powerful organ and was already delighting in all of its imaginable stops and inflating its bellows and roaring and cooing in all its pipes.
Com’avesse l’inferno in gran dispitto.14
(Inferno, X, 36)
—the line that gave rise to all of European demonism and Byronism. Meanwhile, instead of elevating his figure on a pedestal, as Hugo, for example, would have done, Dante envelops it in muted tones, wraps it about in grey half-light, hides it away at the very bottom of a dim sack of sound.
This figure is rendered in the diminuendo stop; it falls down out of the dormer window of the hearing.
In other words, the phonetic light has been switched off. The grey shadows have been blended.
The Divina Commedia does not so much take up the reader’s time as intensify it, as in the performance of a musical piece.
In lengthening, the poem moves further away from its end, and the end itself arrives unexpectedly and sounds like a beginning.
The structure of the Dantean monologue, built on a system of organ stops, can be well understood with the help of an analogy to rocks whose purity has been violated by the intrusion of foreign bodies. Granular admixtures and veins of lava point to one earth fault or catastrophe as the source of the formation. Dante’s lines are formed and colored in just such a geological way. Their material structure is infinitely more important than the famous sculptural quality. Let us imagine a monument of granite or marble the symbolic function of which is not to represent a horse or a rider but to disclose the inner structure of the very marble or granite itself. In other words, imagine a monument of granite which has been erected in honor of granite and as though for the revelation of its idea. You will then receive a rather clear notion of how form and content are related in Dante.