"The Form of Our Desire": Arnaut Daniel and the Homoerotic Subject in Dante's Commedia

Fame . . . without it man wastes his life away, leaving such traces of what he was on earth as smoke in the wind and foam upon the water" (Inferno 24.49-51).¹ With these words, echoing both Brunetto Latini's appeal to eternal fame in Inferno 15 ("You [Brunetto] taught me [Dante the pilgrim] how man makes himself eternal" [85]) and Arnaut Daniel's poetic identification with lost labor and the ineffable ("I am Arnaut, who gathers the wind, and chases the hare with an ox, and swims against the rising tide" [29, 10, ll. 43-45]), Virgil urges Dante, the weary pilgrim, into action in Inferno 24.² This filiation, from the Occitan troubadour Arnaut Daniel to Dante's teacher, Brunetto Latini, and ultimately to Dante himself and his fictional pilgrim, traces a literary and emotional genealogy in Dante's Commedia that is either explicitly linked with the sin of sodomy or marked by a dense field of homoerotic imagery. As Bruce W. Holsinger argues so convincingly in a groundbreaking study of the topic, it is about time we take seriously "Dante's own entanglement in this sodomitical web," a web in which pedagogy and desire are inextricably linked.³ If we take up this challenge, I believe that we will find in the Commedia an early attempt (1310-20) to extricate deviant sexuality from its connection with mortal sin, an argument that poetry always already muddles categories and borders, a theory of subjectivity based on borrowing and absorption, and ample evidence that this text, usually considered foundational in the Western canon, can be read as heteronormative only at the expense of several important passages and the debates on natural philosophy within which it was conceived.

One of the most curious, though little studied, features of the Commedia is that sodomy figures twice in Dante's typology of sin: once in the Inferno (15) and then again in the Purgatorio (26). On both occasions Dante uses a derivation of the name Sodom to identify his sinners, but he never explains the difference between them. How is it that the same sin can be both mortal and venial, or that one sinner can be lost to the flames while the other is offered salvation? I argue in this essay that Dante's forked treatment of the same sin allows him to recuperate sexuality in his salvation narrative and that one sign of this recuperation is the erotic charge that his verse retains, even into the highest heaven. The emphasis on power differentials, corporeal transformations, choreography, and metaphors of sight and blindness, so characteristic of the Paradiso text, cannot fail to call to mind the pleasure and pain of incorporation/joining and dismemberment/loss of self, the centrifugal and centripetal forces of subjectivity; and this subjectivity is founded, then refined throughout the poem, through a series of staged encounters with other men. Again, in Holsinger's words:

In a deep sense, the Commedia's always ambiguous representation of gender and desire comes to a head in the Paradiso, where the Godhead is both female and male; where Beatrice performs the simultaneous roles of feminine object of desire and masculine voice of auctoritas; and where the pilgrim's desire to merge completely with God—the fantasy of the Ganymede dream—is figured as both a polymorphously erotic dissolution of self and a paradoxical affirmation of the visceral homoerotics such dissolution entails.⁴

My aim is thus to look more closely at the filiation of male figures that allows for this final dissolution, to investigate the homoerotic language and imagery in which they are framed, then to speculate on the choices that Dante must have made as he composed. Did he consciously choose to give sodomy such a prominent yet ambiguous role in the Commedia? Or were his notions of the sublime and the erotic already so colored by processes of intersubjective merging, male bonding, and the literary heritage of love poetry that what we read as homoerotic and homosocial was for him the very foundation of the self?

The case of...