Dante elegiaco: Una chiave de lettura per la Vita nova (review)

Stefano Carrai's slim volume on Dante's juvenile, but still enigmatic, Vita nova is unified by periodic reliance on Boethius's Consolatio philosophiae as a model for the prosimetrum as a form: a welcome approach. Carrai notes, for example, the parallel between the speaker's call for death in the first meter of Boethius's book (Cons. 1m.1.10–15) and lines 10–13 of Dante's Vita nova canzone "Quantunque volte, lasso, mi rimembra" (33.6). The first chapter, "La Vita nova come testo elegiaco," is the most ambitious and successful. Its claim is that a medieval conception of elegy, as the genre best adapted to expressing miseria, and of which Boethius's work is a chief exemplar, extensively suits the Vita nova. Understanding Dante's book in this way, Carrai can explain the dolorous manner of many poems and prose works, the frequent reference to scriptural Lamentations, and much else. Citations from texts such as Henry of Settimello's Elegia, as well as the testimony of commentators on Boethius and Dante, buttress the argument. That elegy is in medieval terms more thematic than metrical, a literary therapy in which, according to Guillaume de Conches, Boethius applies "rational" prose for consolation, and metrical delectatio to soothe pain (31), is a useful touchstone; at the same time, this emphasis risks the elimination of important theoretical (indeed, Boethian) distinctions of prose and verse, a problem that reemerges in the third chapter.

The second chapter examines the narrative dispositio of the book, with emphasis on the prose as the bearer of the narrative thread. This chapter is largely constative of known narrative structures and patterns: the numerological organization of the narrative, its nodal points (the first canzone, Beatrice's death), the formulaic beginnings of prose sections, the episode of the "Donna gentile," Beatrice in relation to Mary. Much, therefore, remains to be done. As Carrai reiterates, the formulas beginning chapters are scriptural in inspiration. Surprisingly, however, the most significant instance of these for Dante's book, the Vulgate prose preface to Lamentations, has been overlooked as an explanatory device: "Et factum est, postquam in captivitatem redactus est Israel, et Ierusalem deserta est, sedit Ieremias propheta flens, et planxit lamentatione hac in Ierusalem." Dante's formulas "Poi che," "Poscia che," and "Appresso" beginning the prose sections reevoke the biblical preface, situating the controlling author in the aftermath of desolation, in the elegiac moment.

The third chapter takes up once more the relation of poetry and prose, this time from the viewpoint of the genesis of their combination. The approach is intriguing, but as we do not know in what, if any, stages Dante assembled his anthology of poems and added prose connective passages, this chapter, as Carrai acknowledges, is necessarily speculative. Still, there is little attempt to break new ground. A discussion of the second canzone, "Donna pietosa e di novella etade," long recognized as paralleled in content by its accompanying prose, but distinguished from it by the use of artificial, rather than natural narrative order, adopts belletristic criteria that the first chapter had admirably transcended. More relevant would be Boethius's explicit distinction in the Consolatio (2.1) between prose as rhetorical, and verse as musical, thus wedded to number. For Boethius, and plausibly for Dante as well, prose and verse spring from distinct branches of philosophy, and have correspondingly different effects on the mind.

Regrettably, in his discussions throughout, Carrai excludes Dante's divisions of the poems from serious consideration — indeed, ratifies Boccaccio's myopic and anachronistic mutilation of the work in his copies of it. This despite demonstra-tion of the role of the divisions in drawing out Dante's meaning in the first canzone of the Vita nova, "Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore" (for example, see R. M. Durling and R. L. Martinez, Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante's Rime petrose [1990], 53–70).