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c h a p t e r 5 Why Did Dante Write the Commedia? Dante and the Visionary Tradition T he straightforward answer to the question ‘‘Why did Dante write the Commedia?’’ is Dante’s own: ‘‘Però, in pro del mondo che mal vive, / al carro tieni or li occhi, e quel che vedi, / ritornato di là, fa che tu scrive’’ (Therefore, on behalf of the world that lives evilly, keep your eyes now on the chariot, and once you have returned over there be sure that you write what you see) (Purg. 32.103–5). Exchanging the chariot with any of the other sights that the pilgrim encounters on his journey, any of the other cose nove he sees along the way, we get an answer to our query: on behalf of the world that lives evilly, keep your eyes on what is in front of you, and that which you see— once you return to earth—be sure to write down. Beatrice here echoes many visionary texts, which commonly contain an obligation of denuntiatio : in the Apocalypse the Lord instructs John to ‘‘write the things which thou has seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter’’ (1:19); in St. Paul’s Apocalypse (fourth century ), the angel says ‘‘I will show you what you must describe and tell openly’’; in his ninth-century vision, Wetti, a monk of Reichenau, is reluctant to reveal what he has learned and is scolded by his angel guide, ‘‘What God wishes and commands you to do, through me, do not dare put off,’’ eventually telling his fellow monks that ‘‘I was commanded with so much obligation to declare this in public that I am afraid I will be condemned without pardon if I am struck silent and cannot reveal what I saw and heard.’’ Thurkill, an Essex peasant whose vision occurred in 1206, requires a second vision to remind him to reveal his first: ‘‘In his great simplicity, however, he hesitated to relate his vision, until on the following night St. Julian appeared to him and gave him orders to reveal everything he had seen, because he said he had been taken from his body for the purpose of making public Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture 126 all he had heard.’’1 These injunctions, from texts that are, with the exception of the biblical, not great masterpieces, nonetheless all touch on that complex node where originary presence encounters the belatedness of representation, where vision collides with language. One of the goals of my book The Undivine Comedy is to suggest that the time has come for us to rehabilitate the Commedia as a vision, not making the positivist error of seeing earlier visions as straightforward sources of the Commedia, but reengaging Dante’s text in a dialogue with the visionary tradition. While dantisti continue to debate whether or not to consider the Commedia a vision, scholars in other disciplines have been working to understand the common ground that underlies all vision literature.2 If we wish our more nuanced sense of the Commedia to have any impact on such discussions, we must remove it from its isolated high-culture peak and come to terms with it not only as a literary artifact but also as the record of a visionary experience. Dante’s own suggestions regarding what is clearly a mystical experience have been handled with an excessive timidity that has its roots in our susceptibility to Dante’s narrative realism and our desire to keep poets safely segregated from prophets, as though our tradition were not replete with the complex contaminatio (already theorized by Augustine ) of poets and prophets, language-users and visionaries, wordsmiths and truthtellers. Literary self-consciousness is a trademark of visionary authors, from the author of the Apocalypse, who refers repeatedly to himself as a writer and to us as his readers, to the author of Tundale’s Vision (Irish, 1149), who sets himself certain narrative regulations : he believes in selectivity (‘‘we ought to try to be brief, since not all that we hear is worth writing down,’’ he says, anticipating Dante’s ‘‘altro parlando / che la mia comedı̀a cantar non cura’’ [speaking of other things, that my comedy does not care to sing] [Inf. 21.1– 2]); does not want to be repetitive (‘‘Since we described this before, we should not repeat it again’’); is aware of his limitations (‘‘Neither could your humble writer understand it nor his...

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