Virgil the Blind Guide: Marking the Way through the Divine Comedy by Lloyd H. Howard (review)

This book narrows the focus but repeats the methodology of Lloyd Howard’s earlier work, Formulas of Repetition in Dante’s Commedia (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001). In Howard’s reading, Dante inserts ‘signposts,’ that is to say, ‘recurrent linguistic patterns, or formulas, by which we can trace our course through Dante’s verses.’ Specifically, these signposts serve to mark Virgil’s ‘diminishing authority’ over the span of the poem, as he remains ‘a static figure, like all condemned souls,’ while Dante the pilgrim progresses and eventually supersedes his guide and master, both as poet and as a Christian who will be saved. Howard concentrates his attention on those moments in the Inferno and Purgatorio when Virgil reveals his inadequacies as guide and as seer (both literally and metaphorically), and he argues that recurring verbal patterns, often separated by many cantos, reinforce our sense of Virgil’s unchanging blindness.

I think that ‘formula,’ by which Howard gestures to the oral-formulaic theory of epic composition, is a misleading term here, since the signposts he points to have a different and somewhat more complex function. They prod us to consider what has changed and what has remained the same since a phrase’s earlier occurrence. Similarly, at the beginning of Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer says of Criseyde, ‘As she that nyste what was best to rede’ (‘rede’ meaning to ‘say,’ ‘understand,’ and perhaps ‘read’), and precisely the same phrasing appears at the beginning of Book 5, 6,292 lines later. This exact replication of phrasing is not conspicuous – I hadn’t noticed it myself until a student pointed it out to me many years after I started teaching the poem – but it is clearly significant: it signals that everything has changed for Criseyde and that in another sense nothing has changed. Dante is a much more thoroughgoing, even obsessive creator of pattern than Chaucer – many including Howard have noted, for example, that cantos with the same number in each of the three parts of the Commedia are often linked with one another. So Howard’s examples of verbal patterns are always plausible and often convincingly persuasive; and as he says, the feats of memory we hear about in classical and medieval readers make the registering of such patterns all the more likely. Feats of memory are not always required, however. Dante in De vulgari eloquentia singles out ‘mamma’ as a ‘puerile’ word, inappropriate for the illustrious vernacular; when Statius uses it to define his filial homage to the Aeneid and Dante his relation to Virgil himself, the word choice is thus particularly striking and the linking of the two episodes insistent. The title ‘dottore’ is also conspicuous, when transferred from Virgil to Dante’s final guide, St. Bernard, as is the echo of ‘di giro in giro’ (from circle to circle), used by Virgil to describe the journey into hell but by St. Bernard to describe the celestial hierarchy. I am less entirely convinced by Howard’s interest in certain patterns of repeated rhyme words; ‘terra – guerra – erra’ or ‘modo – ch’ i’ odo – il nodo’ or even ‘mamma’ and ‘fiamma’ all seem to be cases where the needs of terza rima rhyming may encourage or even demand repetition, and thus diminish its significance.

Howard’s argument as a whole is in line with much recent Dante criticism emphasizing Virgil’s imperfections and inadequacies. He perhaps gives slightly less time than he might to the anguish Dante makes us feel about Virgil’s fate and the mysteries of divine justice. Statius, who owes everything to Virgil as a poet and whose path to salvation begins with his misreading a verse in the Aeneid, is saved when the far greater poet is not; and the virtuous pagan Ripheus, a minor character from Book 2 of the Aeneid, is given an eternal home among the just in Paradise while the poet who created him has...