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c h a p t e r 7 q: Does Dante Hope for Vergil’s Salvation? a: Why Do We Care? For the Very Reason We Should Not Ask the Question T he Commedia makes narrative believers of us all. By this I mean that we accept the possible world (as logicians call it) that Dante has invented; we do not question its premises or assumptions except on its own terms. We read the Commedia as fundamentalists read the Bible, as though it were true, and the fact that we do this is not connected to our religious beliefs; for, on a narrative level, we believe the Commedia without knowing that we do so. Whatever else Dante may have had in mind, this fact constitutes his essential ‘‘allegory of theologians ’’; indeed, it is possible that rather than continuing to attempt to ascertain Dante’s mode of signifying in the abstract, we should begin with what the poem actually does, and how it accomplishes what it does, and extrapolate backward to its theoretical mode of signifying. The history of the Commedia’s reception offers a sustained demonstration of our narrative credulity, our readerly incapacity to suspend our suspension of disbelief in front of the poet-creator’s masterful deployment of what are essentially techniques of verisimilitude, or (as Morton Bloomfield puts it) authenticating devices.1 Thus, the poet manages our scandalized reaction to encountering his beloved teacher among the sodomites by staging his own—‘‘Siete voi qui, ser Brunetto ?’’—so creating a complicity between reader and pilgrim that masks the artifice always present in what is, after all, a text. Spontaneous lived experience replaces the artifice of representation. By the same token, we have rarely stopped to consider that the writer of the words on hell’s gate is Dante, that the maker of the ‘‘divine art’’ on the terrace of pride is also Dante, that Beatrice is employed by this same Dante to tell the pilgrim that the souls only appear in the various heavens for his sake because he (the poet) both requires the heavens as narrative differentiators and wishes to pretend that they are not Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture 152 there—that heaven is undifferentiated unity. All of this and much more: for these examples are culled from a text whose fundamental strategy is that it has no strategy, that everything is described as it was ‘‘seen’’ (here Dante’s analogy between himself and biblical visionaries like the author of the Apocalypse enters, with the whole question of the Commedia’s allegory), a text that propels critics to pose their questions and situate their debates within the very presuppositions of the fiction they are seeking to understand. Thus we find the common defensive move we could call the ‘‘collocation fallacy,’’ whereby a critic argues that reading x is not tenable with regard to soul x because, if it were operative, soul x would be located elsewhere (for example, Ulysses cannot be guilty of fraudulent discourse, because then he would be with Sinon among the falsifiers of words).2 But why should collocation be elevated to a heuristic device? Only because we approach the poem through the lens of its own fiction treated as dogma. * * * How is all this connected to Vergil? One of Dante’s key strategies for achieving our narrative assent involves his handling of other poets: he consistently formulates the difference between his poetry and that of his predecessors as the difference between truth and (with various shadings) falsehood.3 In other words, the entire question of the Commedia ’s intertextuality can be placed under the rubric of its truth claims: one of the ways that Dante secures the credibility of his text is by constructing situations designed to reveal the incredibility of his precursors’ texts. I use the terms ‘‘credibility’’ and ‘‘incredibility’’ advisedly ; I am echoing Dante’s own ‘‘cosa incredibile’’ from the Pier della Vigna episode, where the ‘‘incredible thing’’ is Piero himself, a tree-man, the fact that a man has become a tree. In this episode Vergil is put into the position of apologizing to Piero for having induced the pilgrim to pluck his branch; he would not have had to make this cruel suggestion had the pilgrim been able to believe, on the basis of his reading of the Aeneid, in the possibility of a tree-man: ‘‘‘S’elli avesse potuto creder prima,’ / rispuose ’l savio mio, ‘anima lesa, / ciò c’ha veduto...

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