The Commedia as a Commentary

As a miniaturized genre system, the Commedia retains everything it can from the range of textual determinations historically available to Dante; at the same time, it assumes them as if they were always on the verge of becoming something else, or of entering a new configuration shaped by the forces of history (human and divine). This pattern of genre evolution, disseminated throughout the poem, characterizes the presentation of the generic tradition incorporated in the Commedia: from epic and courtly love poetry, quoted and revised from start to finish, to other genres treated in a more fragmentary fashion such as

183 The parallel between genus and genre could be tested also in the encounter with Adam in Par. XXVI:

Dante meets the individual from whom humankind descended. Moreover, Adam’s speech on language (correcting De vulgari eloquentia I.7, he says that no language – not even Hebrew – escape from the transformations brought about by time) provides a new variation on the same motive: language is completely contingent (depending on its very transient “uso”) and as such it is celebrated as sacred. The fact that in this context the angels speak vernacular is part of this program. See Brownlee, “Why the Angels,” esp. 600-601 on Adam.

prayer, allegorical pageant, tenzone, philosophico-theological dispute, invective, panegyric, and so on. What earlier on I called a “dramatization of genres” is one of the typical strategies on which Dante relies to write literary history into the Commedia. A series of writers from classical and vernacular literatures appear as characters: everything in their narrative existence represents a statement on genres (e.g., what they say, the place where they are met, the characters with whom they interact, the references they make to other writers’ works). One has only to think of the evolution of Virgil as a guide, for example, or of the program of encounters with vernacular lyrical poets in the Purgatorio, which leads to a profound revision of the notion of “love” as the driving force and subject matter of poetry.

What Dante does with any genre-marked element can be read as a commentary embedded in the poem, though he does not retain the conventional distinction between commenting text and commented text. We will now see a few points that illustrate the importance of commentary as the hermeneutical and temporal structure underlying Dante’s spiral-wise journey towards inclusiveness of the “poema sacro.” Alternatively, with Jauss’

vocabulary, we may say that the commentary as a meta-generic impulse is the “dominant”

generic function. And commentary, as we have seen, is one of the modes of the epic as a meta-genre.

Before the Commedia, Dante made explicit use of commentary as both mindset and form in the Vita nuova and the Convivio, the two works that are repeatedly recalled by the autobiographical palinode performed in the poem. Self-commentary in vernacular was devised and developed by Dante as a way of building his own figure as a new auctor who

is at the same time a lector.¹⁸⁴ Commentary was also valuable to Dante as a discourse built on the combination of different genres: on the one hand, there is the genre of the auctor’s text, and on the other, the commentator’s explanatory prose. More specifically, commentary as a genre is based on “secondary” writing elicited by an already existing piece written in another genre (except for a commentary on a commentary, which is not what one would expect, of course). Two features should be highlighted as crucial to Dante, though: the heterogeneity of the components of the commentary, and the different voices that are organized in the spatial and temporal configuration of the text (the most influential model was that of the Scripture, transmitted as a compound of text and commentary).

First the auctor, then the interpres: so a commentary ordinarily goes. In the Commedia Dante radically counters this dichotomy so that the continuity between one and the other becomes manifest. The conflation of auctor and interpres, as well as the mixing of their languages, creates a common ground on which both figures – with their respective modes - might be seen as coils in the same spiral. One after the other, one into the other:

such a sequencing bears consequence in terms of both writing and exegesis, as the Vita Nuova and the Convivio illustrated well before the Commedia. Conventionally, the genre commented on is invested with the authority of being “primary,” but at the same time, only the commentary – later in time - can bring to light its truth or sententia.¹⁸⁵ This is precisely how the process of inclusion functins by way of quotation, correction, and revision, with the difference that the poem’s self-commentary is part not only of a literary project (new

184 See Minnis, Scott, and Wallace, Medieval literary Theory, 374-387 and Ascoli, Dante, 174-226.

185 See for instance Picone, “Strutture poetiche,” 12, on the interplay between poetry and prose in the Vita nuova.

and revolutionary in itself), but of a far wider dynamics, since what Dante intends to comment on is no less than the teleological history of humankind, in the wake of Scripture.

His “poema sacro,” as the genre that includes and transcends any other genre, cannot but be a commentary.

From this point of view, we should rephrase Ascoli’s contention that with the integration of Dante-lector and Dante-auctor in one persona (the poeta-personaggio of the Commedia) self-commentary is abandoned, while Dante himself becomes auctor for his reader, thus transforming the traditional model.¹⁸⁶ Self-commentary as a genre is abandoned. At the same time, commentary enters the poem and, on a self-exegetical level, becomes the generic dominant. Thus, with an act of practical criticism, Dante elaborated the two-fold legacy of the epic tradition: the combination of text and commentary in the medieval reception of the epic, and the commenting function that the primary text of the tradition exerted on themselves (though none as explicitly and pervasively as the Commedia. No longer relying on the established writing and reading protocols based on the lector/auctor division, the Commedia turns into commentary in re, inseparable and inextricable from the “text” it glosses.

Dante’s figurative use of such terms as chiosa or chiosare shows to what extent commentary turns from a distinct form of secondary writing into a mode of total response to reality. “Ciò che narrate di mio corso scrivo, e serbolo a chiosar con altro testo / a donna che sapra, s’a lei arrivo” (Inf. XV.88-90), Dante says to Brunetto Latini. What the old master obscurely prophesizes to the living poet is part of a growing corpus of predictions,

186Ascoli, Dante, 225.

whose sententia will be transparently exposed only by Cacciaguida, later and in a different realm of afterlife (“Figlio, queste son le chiose / di quell che ti fu detto,” Dante’s ancestor says in Par. XVII.94-95). On the purgatorial terrace of pride, Oderisi warns Dante in a similar fashion: “più non dirò, e scuro so che parlo; / ma poco tempo andrà, che ‘tuoi vicini / faranno sì che tu potrai chiosarlo” (Purg. XI.139-141), thus attributing the role of the lector not to a character in the poem but to the events in Dante’s own life.¹⁸⁷

Like God’s writing – the words recorded in the Bible but also the reality that the

“verace autore” (Par. XXVI.40) continuously writes – the poem is both gloss and glossator.

Unfolding itself only in time, commentary is the dominant (in Jauss’ sense) of the system of genres in the Commedia: not a protocol with specific instructions but an architecture of totality (which is also the totality of genres), it gradually evolves into a non-genre, or a genre that constantly redefines itself and culminates in the “poema sacro.” The latter is the revelation of the potentialities latent in the epic tradition. It seems to originate from an

“impossible” incarnational genre: recapitulation, singularization, and transfiguration of all genera.¹⁸⁸This is the matrix of the epic, and this is how it serves the purpose of establishing a new tradition – local and universal – in the early Italian Trecento.

2.3. Patterns of Transformation: Amplification and Miniaturization