A Reader on Reading

To help the reader agree to believe and play the game of exchanged pretences, the writer offers his excusatio propia infirmitatis, the confession of his own weakness, a rhetorical device common in the literature of the Middle Ages. Over and over, Dante tells us that words do not suffice, that memory cannot translate experience into speech, that even memory cannot at times hold the unspoken act, and that the knowledge of certain experiences can only be granted by grace, “for these whom grace hath better proof in store.”

Words may not tell of that transhuman change;

And therefore let the example serve, though weak,

For these whom grace hath better proof in store.

[Paradiso 1.70–72, trans. H. F. Cary]

Not only what is “transhuman” and lies beyond the human realm: all attempt at communication, all literature born from the dialogue between writer and reader, every artifact made of words suffers from this essential poverty. And by declaring language’s inability to convey experience, the poet forces the reader, who shares language’s shortcomings, to acknowledge not only the honesty of the writer’s declaration but also, implicitly, the truth of what the writer confesses cannot be said. All means are valid to try and sharpen the imprecision of words.

“Take note of my words just as I say them,

and teach them to those who are living,”

[Purgatorio, 33.52–53, trans. W. S. Merwin]

says Beatrice to Dante, and later, seeing that Dante’s mind is tough as stone, she concedes:

“I would also have you carry it away

within you, painted even if not written.”

[Purgatorio, 33.76–77, trans. W. S. Merwin]

Images, though lesser tools than words, sometimes must serve where words fail, and even the divine Beatrice must, on occasion, fall back on images. One example should suffice. At the beginning of Paradiso, in order to explain to Dante why God’s brilliance is equally distributed in the heavenly bodies, Beatrice asks him to imagine an experiment involving three mirrors and a common source of light. Two of the mirrors are set at an equal distance from the viewer and the third farther away: even though the light appears smaller in this third mirror, the brilliance of all three reflections is the same. In this way, concrete experience becomes a metaphor for the otherwise ineffable: if what is seen or felt cannot at times be put into words, the impossible words can at times be put into action, for the reader to see and feel what cannot be told.

As Dante repeatedly tells us, truth (the experience of truth) recedes from human expression and understanding, plunges beyond language, beyond remembrance into an essential depth where things are known unto themselves, in their pure untranslatable essence, as that which is carried untouched from language to language in the act of translation.

Dante wants us to admit that it is he, the story’s “I,” who has journeyed through the three terrible realms, but the reader knows that Dante’s experience is not entirely that of the “I” on the page nor that of the “I” who put him there: that it belongs to yet another “I” whom the reader must rescue from the page, pronouncing the word and yet understanding that it is speaking for somebody else. The reader knows that the voice that says “I” names itself and at the same time several others, since the writer creates by mirroring his creations. Into this game of mirrors, the reader must step in, in order to get to know the reality of words and to pronounce this “I” that he is not. Through the reader’s goodwill, Dante can visit Hell and Purgatory and Heaven so that the reader can say at last, “I too was there.”

The shock I received on first discovering that literature invents and that the world peopled by words is not that which the bureaucratic world of fact proclaimed has not entirely passed, more than half a century later. I’m still bewildered by the realization that if the writer who invented an adventurous narrator for the enjoyment of his stepson was not (or only partially) that narrator, and if the poet who conjured up the traveler in the realms to come was not (or not entirely) that traveler, then I, their diligent reader, was not the boy, am not the man on the other side of the page. At least not entirely, at least only partially. I don’t know whether to rejoice or despair at this conclusion.

More than five centuries after Dante, on 15 May 1871, another traveler in Hell drafted the following report:

“If the old fools hadn’t uncovered only the false meaning of ‘I’ we’d not have to sweep away those millions of skeletons that, since time everlasting, have accumulated the fruits of their one-eyed intellect, claiming to be its authors!”