Reclusland

Dante’s claim for the Paradiso, the last cantica of his poem, is as daring as it is clear: “My course is set for an uncharted sea.” History has in fact granted him the unique place that he claimed with that navigational metaphor, both as pilgrim and as poet. Just as, within the fiction of the poem, the pilgrim’s course is privileged beyond the aspiration of ordinary men, so in its final course the poem accomplished what no other poet had ever dared.  Throughout the Divine Comedy, the metaphor of the ship serves to describe both the pilgrim’s journey and the progress of the poem: on both counts, Dante can refer to himself as a new Jason, who returns with the Golden Fleece that is at once the vision of God and the poem that we read.

For the 20th century reader, the fiction of the story requires a great effort of the imagination – few of us still believe in a paradise in any form, much less in the possibility of reaching it in this life. The claim of the pilgrim to have reached the absolute seems to us even more fantastic than the fiction of the Inferno, where at least the characters, if not he landscape, are quite familiar.  For this reason, the Paradiso is often thought of as the most “medieval” part of the poem.  This reputation should not, however, obscure for us the sense in which, as poetry, it remains daring and even contemporary.  By attempting to represent poetically that which is by definition beyond representation, this cantica achieves what had scarcely seemed possible before (even for the poet of the Inferno and the Purgatorio) and has remained the ultimate aspiration of poets ever since.  The quest of Romantic poets and their successors for “pure poetry” has for its prototype the Paradiso.

The poetry of the Paradiso represents a radical departure from that of the Purgatorio, as the latter represented a departure from the poetry of the Inferno.  The changes may be thought of as a gradual attenuation of the bond between poetry and representation, from the immediacy of the Inferno to the dreamlike meditation of the Purgatorio to the attempt to create a non-representational poetic world of the last cantica.  This refinement of poetic representation perfectly matches the evolution of the pilgrim’s understanding within the story: he first learns of all from his senses, from the sights and sounds of a hell that seems actually to exist, now and forever, thanks to the mimetic power of Dante’s verses in the Inferno. As the pilgrim depends upon his senses in his travels, so the reader seems to be with him in a world which exists autonomously, almost as if it had not been created by an act of the imagination.

In the Purgatorio, on the other hand, the major revelations come to the pilgrim subjectively, as interior events in what Francis Ferguson has called a “drama of the mind.” The dream-vision is the primary vehicle this for this illumination; Dante refers to the power which receives it as the imaginative (Purgatorio XV).  According to medieval physchology, this is the same power which enables poets to create from the fragments of sense experience and memory, so that in Dante’s view, the poetic power that created the poem is the same power that is illuminated with the pilgrim during his ascent of the mountain. The poet’s imagination, hidden by it’s own concreteness in the first part of his poem, becomes the focus of his attention and of ours in the Purgatorio. Thus, the landscape is suffused with mist, the tone is nostalgic, and the reader is called upon to respond with his imagination to both the sensory and the emotional suggestiveness, to imagine “visible speech” in the bas-reliefs, to hear the music of familiar hymns, to recall the lessons from the Sermon of the Mount.  The substantiality of this part of the poem resides in the subjectivity of the pilgrim and in our reaction to it more than in an explicit architectonic creation of the poet.

In the last part of the poem, the pilgrim’s vision is transformed until it no longer has any need of any representational media whatever in its communication with the absolute. The technical problem involved in finding a stylistic correspondence to this transformation reaches insoluble proportions by the poem’s ending, for it demands straining the representational value of poetry to the ultimate, approaching silence as its limit. Insofar as the Paradiso exists at all, therefore, it is an accommodation, a compromise short of silence, as Dantes suggests in his first canto:
How speak trans-human change to human sense?
let the example speak until God’s grace
grants the pure spirit the experience.

This sense of compromise, of poetic inadequacy for the ultimate experience, is what accounts for the poignancy of much of the cantica, but particularly of the last cantos, where both memory and fantasia fail the poet, who can describe only the sweetness distilled within his heart.

The prodigious achievement of the poet is that he manages, with the limits of this compromise, to represent nonrepresentation without falling either into unintelligibility or into silence. Within the story, this accommodation takes the form of a “command performance” of all the souls of the blessed for the exclusive benefit of the pilgrim.  In the fourth canto, Beatrice tells him that all of what he sees in the heavenly spheres of the Moon, the Sun, and the planets is there only temporarily, until he is able to behold all of Paradise without any such “condescension”:

So must one speak to mortal imperfection,
which only from the sensible apprehends
whatever it then makes fit got intellection.

- Taken from John Freccero’s introduction to John Ciardi’s translation of the Paradiso.

(see also: The Gun (a story))