A Reader on Reading

To say “I” is to place before the reader seemingly irrefutable proof of a speaker whose words can tell the truth or lie, but whose presence, vouched for by his voice, must not be doubted. To say “I” is to draw a circle in which writer and reader share a common existence within the margins of the page, where reality and unreality rub off each other, where words and what the words name contaminate each other. If that is the case, and if the characters we meet on Dante’s long way from the dark forest to the Empyrean have the quality of dreams, then what of those others whom the evidence of our senses tells us are alive: we, the constant readers? “I’ll tell you a story,” says Dante, and in that preliminary utterance both he and his audience are trapped until the last word is reached—and also beyond it. “You, reader, exist,” says the poet, “as the witness and receiver of my book, and therefore I, whom you can vouch for, since you see and hear my words, must exist too. And also, since they occupy the same linguistic space as you and I, you can vouch for the creatures of my story, the characters of my plot. At least within the circle of our relationship, bound by words, we must believe in one another and in one another’s honesty, knowing that the lie that binds us holds the truth. Within that circle, can you, reader, decide in absolute terms that I exist but the Minotaur does not? That Beatrice and Saint Bernard and Virgil and Gianni Schicchi are real because history tells us that they once lived, but that the Angel who guards the Pass of Pardon does not except in faith, and that Charon is nothing but the stuff of ancient stories?” Dante, like every poet, repeats the words of the Unicorn to Alice through the Looking-Glass: “If you’ll believe in me, I’ll believe in you. Is that a bargain?” Seven centuries of readers have willingly entered into this Mephistophelian bargain.

But literary faith is never absolute: it exists between the skepticism that forbids enjoyment of the imagination and the madness that denies the world tangible reality. The historical Dante, the one who perhaps resembled the famous Giotto portrait, the Dante who underwent like every man the common pains and pleasures of the human lot, becomes inextricably entwined with the other, the Dante who said “I” in Paradise and whose singed beard, people said, came from having walked too close to the flames of Hell. For Dante, for the Dante we come to know, the Commedia is not a fiction: it is the enactment in words of a truth, that of salvation from the suffering of the world. If anything, it is the chronicle of a voyage, a piece of travel writing in foreign lands, with its geographical descriptions, dialogues with the inhabitants, notes of local history and politics, personal misadventures, and passion for lists: a guide for readers who may later have to undertake a similar journey.

The reading prescriptions set out by Dante in his famous letter to Can Grande della Scala explaining how his Commedia was to be understood are too constringent. They argue for a divided or graded reading (literal, allegorical, analogical, anagogical), when in fact, as Dante no doubt knew, no reader proceeds in such an orderly fashion. All or none of these levels takes priority in the act of reading. By saying or implying “I,” the first words of a text already draw the reader into a murky place in which nothing is absolute, neither dream nor reality, and in which everything told is at once what it purports to be and something else, and also the mere words that make it up. The Earthly Paradise at the end of Purgatorio is the stage that Dante reaches after all seven initials of sin have been wiped from his forehead, and also the garden in which we lost our innocence, and also the grove from which Proserpine was taken, and also the starting place of our ascent to Heaven, and also the lighted counterpart of the dark wood of the beginning of Dante’s voyage, and also the musical words “humming/a continuo under their rhyming” (Purgatorio, 28.17–18, trans. W. S. Merwin). But the Earthly Paradise is also the solid pine forest of Chiassi near Ravenna where Dante wrote the last cantos of Purgatorio when the sea still came up to its borders, and also the threadbare plantation that now stands far inland, a few steps from the church of San Apollinare.