Siede la terra dove nata fui
su la marina dove'l Po discende
per aver pace co'seguaci sui.
Amor, ch'al cor gentil ratto s'apprende,
prese costui de la belle persona
che mi fu tolta; e'l modo ancor m'offende.
Amor, ch'a nulla amato amar perdona,
mi prese del costui piacer sì forte,
che, come vedi, ancor non m'abbandona.
Amor condusse noi ad una morte.
Caina attende chi a vita ci spense.
(97–107)
She was born, she says, where the river Po descends ‘to be at peace with its followers’. That natural peace is clearly something she warms to and longs for, and in the next few lines, each terzina introduced by the powerful word amor, she almost manages to leave the impression that she has attained it. Love, here, is almost a god, Amor, who has taken her over. (La Pia, in canto three of Paradiso, will speak of having surrendered herself to the Christian God, ‘who draws our wills to what He wills; and in His will is our peace’ (84–5) — a passage Dante obviously means us to compare and contrast with this one.) This god, she tells Dante, ‘absolves no loved one from loving’, and it is he who ‘brought us to one death’. The oneness is clearly the fulfilment of a profound desire, but how are we to understand the sentence as a whole? Is she blaming or praising the god for what he has done to them? Does she know herself? Is she not in effect allowing an extreme indulgence of the will to pass itself off as a necessity, as a total absence of will or choice? After all, her beautiful and melancholy words make no mention of the actions and decisions which must have been taken by the two lovers, and pass over the fact that she was married to Paolo's brother who, finding them together, killed them both. It is he who has been hurled into the circle of Cain for his deed, but she is too fastidious to spell this out or to admit that it is their own adultery that has brought them here, where Dante finds them — come vedi (as you see).
Yet, despite this duplicity or sentimentality (the two go together, since it is the belief that life has been hard on us that leads to self-pity), her description of the course her life has taken is profoundly moving, not least because of the conflict it makes manifest, and which she herself does not seem to be aware of, or cannot admit to herself, between the longing for the peace known by the river and the need to be with her lover and to keep affirming their innocence. Yet this conflict does come into the open when, pressed by Dante to say more, she admits (echoing Virgil and Boethius): ‘Nessun maggior dolore/ che ricordarsi del tempo felice/ ne la miseria’ [There is no greater sorrow than to recall, in wretchedness, the happy time]. Locked in the prison of her desires, she can only move helplessly between a wretched present and a past which grows more idyllic each time she recalls and retells it, but whose relation to the present she persistently refuses to acknowledge:
Ma s'a conoscer la prima radice
del nostro amor tu hai cotanto affetto,
dirò come colui che piange e dice.
Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto
di Lancialotto come amor lo strinse;
soli eravamo e sanza alcun sospetto.
Per più fiate li occhi ci sospinse
quella lettura, e scolorocci il viso;
ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse.
Quando leggemmo il disïato riso
esser basciato da cotanto amante,
questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,
La bocca mi basciò tutto tremante.
Galeotto fu'l libro e chi lo scrisse:
quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.
(124–38)
Paolo does not kiss her, he kisses her mouth, just as in the story of Lancelot and Guinevere which they are reading it is not the queen who is kissed but the ‘desired smile’. In addiction, as in the mirror, the self is fragmented and bits of the body float free of any unifying responsible self. That is why fetishism and addiction go together. And even here it is the book and its author who are blamed, while Paolo and Francesca remain the helpless victims of circumstances and their passion.
Yet it would be wrong to think we could stand back from Francesca and simply ‘place’ her in some objective scheme of things, for Dante is no more dismissive of her than the narrator in Proust's novel is of his young self. The pity Dante feels for her, culminating in his swooning as she finishes telling her story, may in part be seen as a weakness and worthy of the reprimand Virgil delivers, an importing of purely human values into the immutable world of the afterlife, but Dante's poem does not work by denying human feelings but rather by incorporating them into some larger design. Belaqua Shua, in Beckett's early story ‘Dante and the Lobster’ is quite right to question Virgil's chilling phrase, ‘Qui vive la pietà quand'è ben morta’, which might be translated as ‘Here piety lives when pity is quite dead’ (xx.28), but at the cost of separating out too neatly the two senses of pietà in Dante's Italian. After all, in the Convivio Dante had described pietà as the greatest of the virtues and not simply an unthinking emotional response: ‘Pity, however,’ he says, ‘is not an emotion, but a noble disposition of spirit, ready to receive love, misericord, and other beneficent feelings’ (II.x.). For the truth of the matter is that Francesca is a mirror in which Dante can recognise much of what he most values in himself.
After all, Francesca, as critics have pointed out, speaks the language of the dolce stil nuovo, the language which Dante learned from his older contemporaries, Guido Guinizelli and Guido Cavalcanti and which, in his first great work, the Vita nuova, he made his own. And the important thing to note is that, in writing his mature masterpiece, the Commedia, he does not leave such language behind. After all, as he says to Bonagiunta in Purgatory: ‘I'mi son un che, quando Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo/ ch'e ditta dentro vo significando’ [I am one who when love breathes in me, takes note, and, in that manner in which he dictates within, go on to set it forth] (xxiv.52–4). This is the language in which he discovered himself as a poet and it is still the language in which, as Jill Mann has acutely noted, ‘Dante realises his relationship with Beatrice in Purgatorio and Paradiso.’ ‘It is of course true’, she goes on, ‘that he fills this language with a wealth of spiritual meanings. … But …, whatever the deepening of meaning, a continuity between earthly and divine love is maintained at the level of language; it is the language of the love-lyric that becomes the mould into which the spiritual experience is shaped.’
As with Proust in the little room smelling of orris-root, so here, what is presented to us is far too important, far too central to the narrator's own growth as man and artist, to be simply put to one side. The power of the work of both Proust and Dante stems from the fact that both recognise the immense significance of such experiences, incorporate them into their final works, yet manage, through and in their writing, to escape from their addictive hold back into the world of human choice and responsibility.