Similes in the Purgatorio Essays

Similes in the Purgatorio Essays Similes in the Purgatorio Essay Similes in the Purgatorio Essay Essay Topic: The Aeneid The concept of a plainness held back hints at an absolute meaning: behind the veil of rhetorical language lies a potential exposition. The composer of ornamented rhyme chooses to cover his meaning with ornamentation, but a translation, or an illumination, must be available upon request for the obscurity to have any worth. Dante veils his grief at Beatrices death, in part, by placing it at a linguistic remove: in a book written solamente volgare there is no place for a letter earlier composed in Latin to tell of the worlds new condition. Because of this determined linguistic consistency, the words, Dante pleads, may not be quoted in full (the word he uses for quote, . allegare, also means plead, and this plea replaces the quotation he refuses to make) but a full translation into the vernacular is not raised as a possibility. The excuse is deliberately flimsy, sustaining a sense of the potential for a fuller understanding alongside its being withheld. Videmus nunc per speculum in enigmate tunc autem facie ad faciem nunc cognosco ex parte tunc autem cognoscam sicut et cognitus sum (1 Cor 13, 12). Christianity involves the conviction that all human knowledge is partial, but this requires that a whole be understood to exist. La Vita Nuova dismisses as stupid in their practice those who cannot divest their words of covering, to show the object rather than its reflection. Writing of God involves the difficulty that God may not be unveiled fully, but also the faith that there is a true meaning which might be divested of its veil. It seems crucial that Dante conceive this exposition would be made on being asked: a series of pressing questions, driven by the urgent desire to comprehend more fully, mark Dantes progress through the Purgatorio, so that there are degrees of partial knowledge. It is not enough to wait until you enter into the state of knowing as you are known by God, despite the fact that entering Purgatory secures the knowledge that such knowledge will be enjoyed in a matter of time. Yet God may not be unveiled, and writing about God means that the words may not be stripped of their covering upon demand: faith is required, by the reader as well as the writer, that the ornamentation does not disguise further confusions. Comfort, for the writer, lies in the word Dante uses for meaning in the passage from the Vita Nuova: intendimento is both meaning and intention, so that a full exposition is not demanded of the writer, but only his aim for the shape and plan of the work, the truth as far as it goes. Exposition, in human terms, is conceived as a further stage of rhetorical engagement, recalling Socratic dialogue. TS Eliot wrote of the Commedia that it is not necessary that the allegory or the almost unintelligible astronomy should be understood only that its presence should be justified. (The Sacred Wood). Justification may be a persuasive action, yet Eliots choice of tense allows this suggestion to be sustained alongside an alternative, that something is justified in a set way, and not that the process of justification need take place on a rhetorical level. God need not justify, because he is just. It is the provision of a structure which matters, perhaps, not the confusion of those lost in it. Being lost, or in discomfort, in the Purgatorio may be urgent because of the intensely temporal nature of its activities, and yet it is a place, in its upper slopes, safe from sub-lunar decay, a place which changes without itself being changed. Salvation lies at the end, so any sense of confusion is curiously unthreatening; blanks are deliberately left to be filled in. Often, they are filled in silently by Dante, part of the growth of an understanding partially withheld accio che tu per te ne cerchi (C17) but nonetheless attained. It is a way of conveying the experience, without revealing it, offering points of entry which involve further thought. Dante often tells Virgil he is satisfied with the reply to a question; the reader can only take his word for it, and attempt to make the same leap, confronted with the same explanation, leading to generations glossing passages like the following. e se pensassi come al vostro guizzo guizza dentro allo specchio vostra image, cio che par duro ti parrebbe vizzo People being like something. They were like people who were weary etc etc. Are they it, or like it? Word is God and is with God etc. Relates to thin spirits. Inner and outer stuff: when youre concentrating on something the outside world disappears/ is changed, and your experience of time changes, as a metaphor, being digressive, changes the fabric of the poem by taking up lines. In Canto XVII Dante discusses how the imagination works without any outward stimulus from the senses, having just shown how it may do so. A metaphor is such a stimulus, calling upon memory (ricorditi, lettor ) of a natural event, a common experience brought into relation with the poem, in order to illuminate the situation of Purgatory. Seeing the sun in mountain mist is the conceivable shadow of the experience of emerging from the Purgatorial veil, less a metaphor than an instruction as to how the experience may be glimpsed. Ricorditi, lettor e fia la tua imagine leggera in giugnere a veder There is strikingly little contrast between tenor and vehicle, so that although this passage recalls Classical epic similes in its reference to domestic experience and its sudden transport of the reader from the remote and heroic into the everyday, its appeal to the everyday is to show that everyday things may be imperfect impressions of exalted things. The common experience of seeing the moon in cloud is a conceivable glimpse of what it is like to see the sun through the acrid smoke of Purgatory. Its likeness projects a partial understanding, its unlikeness hints at a whole unencompassed by the span of the comparison, yet it is the same kind of thing, a pattern of the same experience in a different way from that in which Classical comparisons and similes often work, or even others in Dante, people huddling like sheep. It is a way of thinking relatively which recalls the medieval belief that passages from the Old Testament foreshadowed passages in the New Testament, often in obscure and subtle ways. An Old Testament passage is enriched by its relation to the New, just as this close relation of experience, seeing the moon and seeing the Purgatorial sun, enriches the readers appreciation of the everyday sight, as well as unlocking understanding of the purgatorial experience. This quality, a sense of the ways in which texts, and experiences, may illuminate each other, informs Dantes use of Classical sources, rendering his consciousness of the influence of Virgils epic similes one aspect of the workings of an imagined divine love. Canto XV, in its model for love, builds upon similes from the Aeneid, recalling especially the simile of reflected light used in Book 8 to describe the movement of Aeneas agitated mind. There, the hero is alone, with the burden of his race upon his solitary shoulders. Dante recalls this solitude while creating a vision of infinite sharing: the hero responsible for bringing a chosen race into the promised land of Italy is replaced by a wider covenant, of which an infinite number of people may come into possession. In his awareness of his own writing at this point, Dantes Virgil makes a mirror which, in describing how love between people works like an intensifying series of reflections and refractions, also shows that texts may be illuminated, not diminished, by their interrelation. It is a vision which balances the recognition, in the humility of Purgatory, that earthly fame will be swept away, that the renown of one artist will swiftly be usurped by another. Purgatory is a place which exists, in geographical and other terms, in relation to Italy; it is almost a mirror image, familiar constellations moving in unexpected directions in its sky. It is particularly apt that Dante should include such a comparison (between moon and sun) at this point, one which indicates the understanding that the shadows on the walls of a cave are only shadows of the real thing. The infliction of blindness upon the angry in Purgatory is not only the physical manifestation of the effect of their sin, but also a handicap to aid better understanding, complete knowledge reached through the very process of recognising that their knowledge is partial. The seven wounds are healed per esser dolente, another appeal to experience; wounds sting when they are healing. The disk of the sun is more easily seen through the dissipating smoke than in its unveiled dazzle.