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55 CHAPTER 4 The Interpretation of Dante Alighieri Closing One’s Eyes in Order to See In Canto IX of the Inferno the character Dante is standing outside the city of Dis. Dante’s descent has reached an impasse at the gates of this city. The devils who guard the city refuse to listen to Virgil’s entreaties. The Furies then appear and threaten the appearance of the Medusa. Virgil has to cover Dante’s eyes with his own hands to make sure that he does not look upon the Gorgon and turn to stone. One look would be enough to ensure that Dante could not continue the journey. The feelings evoked by this scene are those of frustration, fear, and danger because of being threatened with blindness. Looking at the Medusa directly will turn one into stone, but not overcoming the present obstacle will also end the journey. What is the pilgrim to do? Dante as author chooses this moment to address the reader directly.1 O you who have sound intellects, look at the doctrine which hides itself beneath the veil of these strange verses. (IX, 61–63)2 56 Chapter 4 At the very moment in the poem that the character Dante’s vision is being blocked by Virgil’s careful hands, the author commands the reader to look more deeply and to interpret. More specifically, Dante tells us that the versi strani, strange verses, are a veil beneath which hides a dottrina or doctrine. So we have somehow to remove or get beneath the veil of strange verses. This task is, perhaps, analogous to Mark Danner’s call that we get beneath the surface of society and find out what is really going on. For Dante this involves looking away from the spectacle that holds us captive. William Franke tells us that “the reader[’s] . . . immediate vision, or literal reading, encounters a veil that hides a deeper truth. Indeed, the reader, no less than the protagonist, has been scandalized, that is, absorbed in the spectacle of Hell as Dante has vividly depicted it up to this point, but is then called upon to see through to the doctrine veiled beneath the myth.”3 Dante, in other words, is encouraging the reader to close his or her eyes to the surface meaning, while opening them to a veiled meaning. In effect, one has to look away and approach the text indirectly, through certain hermeneutical procedures. What leads a reader to the kind of interpretation that tries to get “beneath the veil” of a text are the obstacles to understanding that it presents. Dante is proposing that one not just look at his poem more closely but rather that one turn away in order to understand it. If one were to look directly at the Medusa, one would turn to stone and be unable to continue the journey. Certain sights petrify the understanding, inducing a kind of intellectual trauma to which the cry of Leontius may well be pointing. Dante scholar John Freccero suggests that this “petrification is an interpretive as well as moral threat and that the act of interpretation depends on a moral condition .”4 Petrification, he suggests, is the “inability to see the light of truth in an interpretive glance.”5 The passage from Dante is meant to help us overcome this danger. Nonetheless, according to Freccero, the words of this direct address have “always represented something of a scandal in the interpretation of Dante’s allegory, primarily because they seem to fail their didactic intent: thedottrina referredtohereremainsasveiledtousasitwastothepoet’scontemporaries.”6 I need to draw attention here to the way in which the very effort by Dante to help the reader overcome her scandal, her obstacle to understanding, has historically generated not deeper understanding but more scandal. My critical point is very near the surface. The attempt to overcome a scandalized The Interpretation of Dante Alighieri 57 consciousness can fail and lead to more scandal. The risks that Dante runs in the construction of The Divine Comedy are not all fictional. Freccero overcomes the scandal of the passage by seeing it as a clue to overcoming scandal in reading, and he does this by specifying to what the words “strange verses” refer. That is, he closes his eyes to the text in front of him and finds another referent outside the first text. Having ascertained that, he is able also to specify the doctrine. Paradoxically he ends up looking more closely at the...

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