A Reader on Reading

“I was” is how they sum up Dante’s journey, his time spent in the other world: the act of being in the first person singular that asserts Dante’s existence both as witness and as protagonist. Not “I was there,” as Richard Howard’s translation has it, in the sense of having trodden the unthinkable and everlasting place, but “I existed,” in order to assert the action that Hamlet would later have in mind for his famous question. The voice, Dante’s voice, that might grant them posthumous memory must have not only the experience of place but also that of time, and enjoy existence in the deepest, most essential sense, as a living body and an immortal soul. The poet who is to tell future generations the truth cannot be merely emblematic, cannot depend only on the reader’s will to believe in him; he must be able to say “I was” and must acknowledge a factual biography, a specific mind, a physical body. Anonymous literature makes us uncomfortable: even the muddle of different books we call the Bible must have, we say, an Author whose floating beard lends him literary venerability. To avoid the discomfort of anonymity, early readers invented for the Iliad and the Odyssey a blind poet called Homer who knew about seafare and warfare, and who recited his verses on the island of Chios. Dante, more prudently, does not rely on posterity and has his own creations attribute these traits to himself. Everywhere on his otherworldly journey, Dante tells his readers how he meets people he knows well (a catalogue of social notables that caused Lamartine to brand the Commedia “a Florentine Who’s Who”); the corollary to this is that they, in turn, must know Dante, and either greet him with rapture or curse him. Here then, admits the reader, are trustworthy witnesses, since they can recognize Dante in his own story; ergo, Dante must be real. Gradually, in the reader’s eye, Dante (not the author of the poem but its protagonist, Dante the poet) begins to exist. But for what purpose?

Somewhere in the vast Summa Theologica, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Dante’s teacher, invented a literary conceit called quem auctor intendit, “what the author intended,” which has since become a strand in every literary tapestry, as much a part of any book as the plot or the protagonist. To the reader’s implicit question, “Why are you telling me this?” Dante provides implicit answers: “Because I want you to know how I was lost and how love saved me; because I want you to learn from my visionary experience; because I want to defend my belief in a society in which State and Church fulfill their separate obligations.” Dante’s threefold intention can be read (as far as we can read anything) as political, moral, and personal: first, to oppose the legendary Donation of Constantine that granted the Church temporal power, and to follow Christ’s precept in Matthew 22:21, rendering “unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s;” second, to “teach by the example,” according to scholastic methods, by means of his poetic model of the world; third, to fulfill the promise of his encounters with Beatrice and make them meaningful. Above all (but perhaps this is what we, as readers, want Dante’s intention to be), the third purpose, the reasons of love. Falling in love is unreasonable and ineffable: Dante attempts to lend it logic and translate it into words. To follow Dante on this triple path and not abandon the story midway, we need to believe in the existence of the man whose words echo in our ear, as if he were ourselves. To be able to enter a fiction and take part in its reality, “I,” in our mind, has to become “You.”

The dialogue a writer establishes with the reader is one of artifice and deceit. To tell the truth, the writer must lie in a number of clever and convincing ways; the instrument for doing this is language—unreliable, manipulated and manipulative, officially sacrosanct in that it purports to say what the dictionary says it says, but in practice subjective and circumstantial. The narrative voice is always a fiction behind which the reader assumes (or is asked to assume) a truth. The author, the leading character, appears to the reader out of nowhere, almost but not quite a creature of flesh and blood, made present by his own words, like the Beckettian voice that spoke to Moses from the burning bush, saying, “I am what I am.” This is the absolute, godlike, self-defining, circular identity that every writer grants himself in the first person singular. An identity to which the readers are asked to respond: “If we, often across miles and centuries, can hear the voice saying ‘I’ on the page, then ‘I’ must exist and ‘We’ must be forced to believe in it.”