Performing Salvation in Dante’s Commedia

The second canto of Purgatorio has, over the years, received considerable scholarly attention in the ongoing quest to define Dante’s conception and practice of poetic authorship and signification. In a dominant strand of North American criticism the canto has, from this perspective, been treated as perhaps the most important in the entire poem. This privilege is all the clearer when canto 2 is paired, as the poem urges, with Dante’s response in canto 24 to Bonagiunta da Lucca’s inquiries about whether he is the author of a “dolce stil nuovo.” After revisiting the reasons for according the canto such importance, and reaffirming its status in general terms, this essay will suggest that a key aspect of the canto’s intra- and inter-textual dynamic has been significantly undervalued.¹ I refer to the question of “performance,” broadly understood as the point of intersection between authorship and readership, as between Dante-poet and his narrative projection as Dante-personaggio and pilgrim.² I will argue that when considered from this angle, canto 2, together with 24, effects a radical, deliberate recantation of the definition of poetic authorship in De Vulgari Eloquentia, book 2, chapter 8, a text whose pivotal place in Dante’s self-construction as poet has rarely been given its due, and whose importance for this canto has been entirely ignored. In conclusion, I will argue that for the Dante of the Commedia the dramatization of the performance of poetic song ultimately reveals a process of “performative” becoming in which poet-“singer” enacts and embodies the substance of his composition. In the process, I expect to shed some new light on the perennially problematic relationship between theology and poetry, truth and fiction, in the Commedia.³

I begin with a brief, selective description of the canto and its immediately preceding context. In the first canto, as we know, Dante-pilgrim undergoes a figurative rebirth under the severe gaze of Cato Uticensis,⁴ immediately following the exordial declaration of Dante-poet that he is ready to enter into a new poetic mode (“ma qui la morta poesì resurga / o sante Muse” [Purgatorio 2.7–8]).⁵ Canto 2 concludes the interactions with Cato, and sees the pilgrim begin the first part of this second stage of his journey, through the so-called ante-Purgatorio, where four forms of “negligenza” [negligence, from nec-eleggere: “not to choose”], must be expiated before purgation proper begins. As we will see, canto 2 also ostentatiously offers some possibilities for understanding what more precisely is meant by the image of poetry reborn under the auspices of “Holy Muses.”

The second canto is articulated around the arrival of a boatload of redeemed souls who have come to the “otherworld” by the normal route (as against Dante’s passage through the center of the earth)—a sea-voyage from the mouth of the Tiber river conducted by an angelic “galeotto,” that is, sailor or helmsman.⁶ The exceptionalness of Dante’s own journey is thus put in relief, especially in the inauguration of a recurrent contrast between his living, embodied presence and the shadowy existence of the dead souls.⁷ At the same time, his ongoing dialogue with this new category of soul begins on a highly personal note as he discovers that one of the newly arrived is an old and dear friend, the minstrel Casella. What really makes the canto at once so extraordinary and yet so central to scholarly understandings of the Commedia’s poetics, however, is the performance of two very different songs, both of which have a separate existence external to and independent of the world of the poem, and each of which is evoked by quoting its incipit or first line.

The first, cited at line 46, is the singing of the psalm “In exitu Israel de Aegypto” (Vulgate 113; 114–115 in modern Bibles) by the newly arriving souls:

  ‘In exitu Israel de Aegypto’cantavan tutti insieme ad una vocecon quanto di quel salmo è poscia scripto.

(2.46–48)

The singing of a psalm is very much in keeping with the...