Please:

Dear Readers,
I know many of you are friends and many of you are strangers. Some of you visit my blog because of me, but many because it is useful and possibly helps you think more about some of the works and authors. Before you read about the past, please take a minute for the future of Pakistan's flood victims.

The link below lists a number of possible organizations you can send your money to. These ones are not corrupt or fake or anything else, but have been doing real work in Pakistan for years now--

http://www.chowrangi.com/donation-links-and-relief-resources-for-pakistan-flood-victims.html

Thank you.

Original Son.

DEDICATION

"... The souls for whom I sang my early songs
will never hear the songs that follow;
those many friends are all dispersed,
their first response, alas! is long since muted.
My tragic song will now be heard by strangers
whose very praise must cause my heart misgivings,
and those to whom my song gave pleasure,
if they still live, roam scattered everywhere.
I feel the spell of long-forgotten yearning
for that serene and solemn spirit realm,
and like an aeolian harp my murmuring song
lets its uncertain tones float through the air.
I feel a sense of dread, tear after tear is falling, 
my rigid heart is tenderly unmanned--
what I possess seems something far away
and what had disappeared proves real."

This is the second half of the dedicatory poem that opens Goethe's Faust. I find it particularly beautiful because I understand the yearnings of a solitary figure to be one of the more powerful precursors to an art form. But this is a broad generalization, so perhaps I should come down to my more specific, and slightly strange reading of these lines. My reading is concerned with the first-person figure in this poem. Possibly still in the shadow of my previous post, or in the the light of Goethe's stage, I am convinced that this is a poem that embodies both the divine and satanic figures of the play. In other words, what I want to argue is that the "I" of this poem is a struggle between God and Mephistopheles. They are the solitary figure, they are the abandoned lovers, they are the singers whose songs now go unheard: God alone in Heaven, and M. constantly seeking to reunite on earth. If they weep, it is not for figures like Faust and Job, but for the figure who has led them to battle-- Adam. If he went uncared for in Paradise Lost, in Faust, he is the reason why God and Mephistopheles flirt with the figure of Faust. He and others like him are the rebound. The lost son is their first, irreplaceable love.

The reason why I think this reading is a plausible one is because God, Satan, and the Fall have for too long been the subject in modern literature: Marlowe, Milton and now Goethe. By the time Goethe does Faust, they have become too human. So human that before the narrative of Faust, the casualty, starts, God desires the "serene" and rejects the "very praise" of the new.  What I'm arguing here, then, is that by the time we get to Faust in this sequence of plays, God is one of us. We have written him again and again, and he has played among us too many times. Adam, his "first" son, and Eve, his first daughter, have long since left the world he had created for them. What is in the play that Goethe writes is the play of a convenient union between God and man, a tired marriage with occasional tests for excitement. God, the passionate lover, is the figure of the dedication-- the figure who dreads, the figure whose existence now is unreal, the figure who is left with everything but what he wants.

If this is God, then it is the same for M. He too weeps, he too has lost his original prize in this new world where he wanders hungrily, praying for repetition but finding no satisfaction. The response to his song is now "muted," so far from the perpetual excitement of the Fall. It is now mundane no matter which it is-- always the same, not a chase, just a chore. 

These two very dialectical figures, I would say, then, are becoming one. The original son, the symbol of their difference is lost, and in this tragic ordinariness, God and Satan speak the same lines.

(Image: Le Damnation de Faust, Metropolitan Opera 2008-09/ Text: Faust I and II, translated by Stuart Atkins, Princeton University Press.)

Paradise, ever?

"Much pleasure we have lost, while we abstained
From this delightful fruit, nor known till now
True relish, tasting; if such pleasure be
In things to us forbidden, it might be wished,
For this one tree had been forbidden ten.
But come, so well refreshed, now let us play,
As meet is, after such delicious fare;
For never did thy beauty since the day
I saw thee first and wedded thee, adorned
With all perfections, so inflame my sense
With ardour to enjoy thee, fairer now
Than ever, bounty of this virtuous tree."
John Milton, Paradise Lost (Book IX). 

For the next few posts, I want to try and focus a little bit on texts that straddle the Renaissance/Enlightenment boundary and try to trace the coming of a new consciousness and and retelling of older narratives in its light. This passage is from Book IX of Paradise Lost: Adam, in Eve's wake, has finished eating his share of the forbidden fruit and now for the first time is experiencing something for which he has no name. This is where Milton tells his version of a question that has remained unanswered for so many lifetimes: what did Adam feel for Eve before he felt lust? In this case, what is he feeling at this exact moment when Eve's beauty inflames his senses and disarms his experience? Though the Doré image accompanying the text is from a few moments later, I am deeply interested in this too short moment that is the bountiful pleasure of sin. In these seconds, these moments before knowledge is forced upon Adam and Eve, what we see is innocence intact and the body altered. If Adam and Eve never know what it is they are experiencing then is lust, lust? Is Eve the Original Sinner or does a cohabitation of the figures of God and Satan give birth to Original Sin?

I want to answer these questions through the idea of a subject's unwavering gaze shifting from his maker to another. In other words, when Adam obeys Eve and takes the fruit, and then more literally undergoes a change in the way he sees her, he has essentially shifted his loyalties from both God and Satan, and transferred them to the figure of Eve. It's ironic that Eve gets the title of "daughter of God," but Adam is not the Son. It is Christ who will be crowned Son, and who will pronounce the Almighty's judgment. The crucial players of Heaven, the son and the daughter, stand at opposite ends.

But I digress. To come back to the questions at hand-- I think the answer may have several layers: Adam and Eve are not the same. Adam gazes upon God, while Eve's gaze is free, to go to Adam, God, the serpent, the fruit. Adam's changed focus also implies a change in God's position at the top of the foodchain, even if in a temporary way. It is in the seconds where loyalty shifts, where capital becomes competitive, where the subject is enticed by a kinder master, that the divine must generate what the goddess cannot. Sin. The temporarily disturbed supremacy is intact again, and the daughter, the goddess of a second, is sent off to her husband's home. Milton's Trinity, then, is barely harmonious-- Father, Daughter and the Unholy Gaze.

Thucydian Reflection.

"Nevertheless anyone accepting the broad facts of my account on the arguments I have adduced will not go wrong. He will put less faith in the glorified tales of the poets and the compilations of the prose chroniclers, whose stories are written more to please the ear than to serve the truth, are incapable of proof, and for the most part, given the lapse of time, have passed into the unreliable realms of romance. He will conclude that my research, using the clearest evidence available, provides a sufficiently accurate account considering the antiquity of the events... 
Of the various speeches made either when war was imminent or in the course of the war itself, it has been hard to reproduce the exact words used either when I heard them myself or when they were reported to me by other sources. My method in this book has been to make each speaker say broadly what I supposed would have been needed on any given occasion, while keeping closely as I could to the overall intent of what was actually said..."
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War. Book I. Translated by Martin Hammond.

My blog turns sixth months old today and it's the end of a decade, so something commemorative seemed appropriate. When I think about a historian like Thucydides, I can't help but think about Professor Ted Rabb in the fall of '04 telling a fresh class of HUM Sequence students how to read what they were about to read. "What does the text tell us about the people it talks about?" That's what it comes down to even now, I think: finding the people that drove the text into becoming. Thucydides, of course, is one of history's earliest historians; he documents the 5th century BC War between Athens and Sparta, and his "History" constitutes arguably one of the last great sighs of Ancient Greece.

In a way Thucydides' march against poets and ear-pleasers would be a march against the figures who populate this blog, against characters that run ungoverned into windmills and underworlds, against words that force voice, and against the most human of histories. The reason I've chosen to write about him in my last post of the year is because I see his voice as bringing perspective to a series of posts that are deeply concerned with interpretation and the meaning of one individual's voice for another. What I want to do here is to question whether Thucydides' way of representing the human, by occupying his circumstances, is different from the way I try to understand a representation, by occupying the common imagination of a writer and his character. In a sense, Thucydides and I and the struggling reader of any literary text are not dissimilar-- each one of us is somehow trying to belong in a conversation of which we were not part. These conversations, be they between Athens and Sparta, or Cervantes and DQ, were not exclusive because they wished it, but exclusive because their language became available only after it was written. In other words, just as Thucydides as a historian gives voice to war-generals by becoming them, as readers we give voice by reading a character as speaking, and his creator as trying to speak. Don Quixote is not without a Cervantian struggle, and Thucydides the Historian is not without Thucydides the General. For Thucydides to write a history was for his first half to see himself in history and not in his own lifetime.
I  also want to think briefly about whether there's an explicit contrast between circumstance and imagination i.e. whether to understand a situation through its circumstances is significantly different from understanding a situation by throwing oneself into the minds of the persons who play it. Here's how I see it: in the first case, what is understood is understood through the creation of a language that then recreates circumstance. In the second, understanding takes place through the consistent learning of not one, but a number of languages. It is by learning that poet's language that the poem becomes an unlie, the romance becomes real, and the earpleaser becomes a disturbance.

This is one of those tricky concepts that I'm never going to be sure about having grasped myself or talked about coherently, but it's always worth a shot. Next post in 2010-- and some movement  towards modernity! Thanks to everyone who gets on my blog and keeps me writing: Merry C. and a Happy New Year.

Temptation, encore.

As some of you may know, last weekend I went to Paris with my mother for a brief but wonderfully refreshing trip. I knew before I even left that this post would be about one of the many paintings I would see at the Louvre. Technically, this version of St. Anthony isn't owned by the museum-- it's on loan for the unbelievably rich exhibition, Titian, Tintoret, Veronese: Rivals in Renaissance Venice, from the Caen Museum of Beaux-Arts.

Apart from the fact that I couldn't stop looking at this painting when I saw it, I wanted to write about it in contrast to a post I did about Michaelangelo's Torment of St. Anthony some three months ago. To contextualize a little, this one is Paolo Caliari Veronese's Temptation of St. Anthony (1553), and St. Anthony, of course, is the central figure with his two demons above him in human form.  In this post I don't want to talk about torment, or Michaelangelo (though he has definitely influenced the male body in this image), as much as I want to talk about how St. Anthony himself is a temptation for the artist in this image. What does it mean to immortalize the human moment in the figure of someone who has, in a sense, transcended himself? Is this truly a temptation or is this a figure so reduced in this moment that he prays not to his god, but pleads to his tempters? And lastly, is there a symmetry of some kind between the three figures, i.e. is it temptation and man that make a whole?

Not to digress, but a while back I read Borges' Conjectural Poem and in a conversation about it I came up with the notion that Heaven is, in a sense, a place where the good, vanquished from the battle on earth, go after they are defeated by earthly demons. And though I had forgotten about this reading of Heaven, I think this image of St. Anthony is brings it back. His body is right now that battlefield where the two demons are wrestling with their invisible enemies, faith and conscience. In each moment, with every blow it receives from the male demon, it also (if allowed) takes pleasure in the breast that hangs above it. The body of St. Anthony, then, receives each blow and is the conquered territory-- in a way it's all we have of the human saint, a body-battlefield, a body-torn, a body-in-agony.

Where is St. Anthony himself?

I want to answer this question in conjunction with one of my initial questions: is there a symmetry in the figures? Yes, there is a symmetry, a very curious one at that-- if we look carefully at the image, we'll see that there is a fourth human form in the painting, one that is made whole by parts of the three bodies of both the demons and St. Anthony. The female demon's breast, follows the exposed crotch of the male demon, which is then followed by St. Anthony's extended leg. There we have it, the human form from top to bottom. And in this whole human form we have St. Anthony, torn between gender, torn between body and soul, bible and breast. He is two-headed in order that he be tempted, while his third head exposes the agony of the body-battlefield.

This is Veronese's temptation: to represent the man who has transcended himself.  But how does one represent St. Anthony's particular brand of transcendence? There is sainthood, but this is a sainthood that splits itself amongst demons, and other earthly things. This is a sainthood that is saintly because while it pleads for resistance, it wants to know what it is that it resists, it touches the breast, it takes the blow, and in the same instant, it clutches the book.

For YL: Lecture notes, partie deux

Here is the second installment of lecture notes for the two lectures I gave for EK's Dante in English class. Delivering these lectures was one of the hardest but most rewarding things I have done in graduate school yet. I think I'm finally done with D, though I still have a draft with the last few lines of Paradiso-- and they're telling me that I know they're among the most beautiful lines of poetry ever written.

VITA NUOVA, PART II

•    Start with where we ended last time, and the figure of the old.
•    Love= misery, nosos, Cavalcantian view, there was no allegory in love.
•    Love in this way was non-transcendant. Today, we’re going to look at how it becomes T.
•    What didn’t get across last time: Love, no matter which one, still has a premise in physical beauty. Idea that dates back to Plato. How this physical beauty is processed is then dependent on the kind of love. If Beatrice= Medusa, this love, not happening. What enters for Dante is the essence of beauty, through Beatrice, and what enters for C. is love itself.
•    Purgatory XXX, pg. 368 and Beatrice’s reprimand. Fits in perfectly with this idea of Dante mistaking B in VN—Dante had a chance to benefit from her physical beauty and turn it into a spiritual love, but instead the D of the VN doesn’t understand and falls under the spell of Love and not B.
•    Purpose of lecture today: Arrival. We embarked from the old. By the end of the lecture we should be able to look back at the old from the view of the new. Dante arrives at the figure of Beatrice and love. To say the same thing in terms of the self: we’re journeying back to the pre-Lapsarian moment, after recognizing how we exist in the post-Lapsarian. To do this:
•    Vita Nuova, death of Beatrice, entrance of another feminine figure, look briefly at the Convivio, and then form an idea of Beatrice.
•    We’re going to do this in the following way:
1.    The presence of dreams and visions as suggestive of Prof. C’s idea that D had always been aware of the nature of B, and the love she represents—he just needed to understand it.
2.    Dante’s Boethian moment—and think of this as the moment of movement from his despair to salvation. Love can become transcendant. This is briefly visted in VN, so we’re going to talk a little bit about Convivio—interim work, not about B.
3.    And then arrive at the figure of B, and try to make a decisive statement. B as a secular figure. If there is time, we’ll take a quick look at how D was received by his peer, GC.
•    DREAMS: Beatrice’s death and the final VISIONS: (SHOW IMAGE). Try to form a hypothesis about how they relate to D’s greater idea of love.
•    Three dreams, conveniently to fit in with 3s that encompass B.  B and Love, eating the heart; the dream in which love instructs him to clear up his priorities and decide who it is he really loves; and the dream of Beatrice’s death.
•    Dream takes precedence over actual narration of he event. Prophetic nature of the dream. Often seen as religiously significant. Dream is prophetic, but its form becomes a means to express the literal, the non-allegorical love. This Love has a figure in the dream—D and L can communicate—interesting to think about how this old figure of Love has a space only in an unreal space—but what’s more interesting—how the nature of the dream changes in Purgatory, becomes prophetic, but also instructive. 
•    The dream of Beatrice’s death stands in utter contrast of the Purgatory dreams. Whereas they address the nature of the self, this one has a sense of the self obliterated, D is ruled by love, and on Pg. 623, wants to join B in death, in the bodily death, not realizing what he can do with the legacy she leaves him.
•    If the dream isn’t transformative, than what is? The vision. D borrows this from Boethius who in C of P has a vision of being visited by Lady Philosophy, and St. Augustine who in Confessions is moved to read the Bible when a mysterious voice speaks to him.
•    Two visions. The first, pg 645, in which D is reminded of HER, as opposed to of LOVE. Element of this vision, SHAME, the first stage in a conversion. First step towards being saved. Also first inkling that D is writing love poetry to a dead woman, something that Cav is not going to like. This is the vision in which D understands the utter disconnect he has, but because he feels shame, he can transform.
•    Second vision, pg 649, where we don’t know what he sees. But it goes along nicely with this idea of not knowing how to write either. In other words, only when he can see inside himself, will he be able to write about B.
•    Difference between a dream and a vision in VN: dream is prophetic, tool of the artist, means of representation. Vision completely rocks the text, and the world. It makes people take U-turns. Augustine. D on the road of love, feeding his body, makes a U-turn and heads back to the pre-lapsarian.
•    ON THE WAY to the pre-Lapsarian, there has to be something that will make love transcendent. Something that will make him understand the true nature of love. Comes in Section 35, pg. 640, The “gracious lady” or the “donna gentile,” who “has seen into the nature of my darkened life.” Crucial line. She had seen, and she makes him see. She makes three appearances and D doesn’t get it. Who is this woman?
•    Her story older than D’s and she is a reconfiguarion of Lady P. We’ve already seen Boethius in the Sphere of the Sun, along with St. Thomas Aquinas. B, 5th century Roman, charged with treason, finally executed, but during imprisonment wrote a work called Consolation of Philosophy. Last influence on Christian ethics. Lady P visits him moaning and groaning in prison. Over a series of sonnets and lectures, Lady P leads B back to himself and to God.
•    How Boethius mapped out existence? Four levels of existence, sensation, imagination, reason and divine. Humans on the level of reason.  One that what is in this world is material good. Often this material good isn’t controlled or reflective of our actions. But FREE WILL can help reach for a divine good, and go from the human level of reason to the divine. It is through the here and now that we can eventually be divine.
•    D’s Lady P—appears in moment of distress. Though her role is undeveloped in VN, D will devote an entire work to her—Convivio. Beatrice mentioned only once in C, because he still hasn’t found the words. Focuses on the “donna gentile” philosophy instead.
•    What is the gist of it? For one, it apologizes for the VN, calling it “fervid and passionate” and tells us that Convivio will be “tempered and mature.”
•    He also declares that it is inspired by Boethius because it is a desire to defend himself, he was in exile. And by Augustine, because he desires to spread virtue.
•    In the C, D tells us to love Philosophy, which in itself is a love of wisdom. When a human being loves wisdom, he is being the best earthly being he can be. And because this love of wisdom is an infinite process, once you have become the best earthly being, you transcend into harmony with the divine. Partially derives this idea from St. Thomas
•    Now this idea of being in dialogue with a divine creator isn’t purely Christian, it’s actually pretty flexible. St. Thomas—reconciled pagan philosophy with Christian ethics. Aristotle with the Christian world. Suggested that the two look for the same end, and can complement each other. Philosophy and theology are basically different starting points of getting to the same end, he argued, God. The nature of a human being, or the idea of goodness, can be explained both through religion, and through logic.
•    Other important St. Thomas idea, that allows us to read the Comedy as a book about the here and now, human soul is separate from the human body. Not to say that two have nothing to do with each other, but the soul is what makes the body a human body. When the body dies, the soul goes on living possibly. That’s how figures like Cunizza can make it to Paradise—because despite enjoying their sensuality, they don’t lose grip of their soul. She never loses her soul to Love, the independent figure. She is able to forgive herself, ie she knows she’s sinned and is willing to pay for it.
•    And now, finally, after these travels, we can arrive. WHO IS BEATRICE? 

(Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "Blessed Damozel")

•    Here’s the argument we’re going to make: She is constructed as a figure of Catholic salvation, but in truth, she’s deeply secular.
•    From the VN on, we’ve seen her surrounded by 9s and 3s. Explained in terms of the trinity. 9, prime number. There is the image of a pilgrim pg. 649.
•    Pg. 625, he has compared her to Christ. READ this Joan derives from John the Baptist, he who comes first, and she is Christ. This, to footnote, is still before he actually realized her meaning.
•    She is what we call a figure Christi or a Christ Figure. She dies for his salvation. She is not a saint, but she has come into her role of beatifier. 
•    What makes her secular with all this theology? She is Dante’s personal savior. Her numbers occur in relation to Dante—for example, she meets him at nine and then after nine years. She changes as he changes. Her narrative does not exist without his,
•    Later on, she chooses to take him through the three stages of the Comedy. Why Dante? Because in a way, she would not be Beatrice the beatifier without him, for she can only save the figure who loves her, not just anyone.
•    In other words, there is a Beatrice for everyone, if they are willing to find her. It isn’t necessary that she be the exact same as Dante is, just as Paradise is not the exact same as Dante imagines it to be. Beatrice’s nature as imagined, I think, more and more highlights the idea of Paradise as characterized by how each person in it sees it. In this life, the here and now, our actions must signify the desire to move up this path, to be looking for a connection with the divine, whether we do it by embracing our sensuality or whether we do it by defending the principles we stand for.
•    At this point of arrival, we have more symmetry, VN, Convivio, Comedy together also form a kind of trinity—the individual’s journey to his end goal.
•    LASTLY: If we float down to earth. Yes, in the VN, we have the new Dante writing in the old, the new converted Augustine calling the old Augustine a sinner, we have a confession which leaves the old D behind, but what does the Old think of the New?

•    Cavalcanti’s response: Sonnet XXIII
To Dante rebuking him for his way of life after the death of Beatrice
I DAILY come to thee uncounting times
And find thee ever thinking over vilely
Much doth it grieve me that thy noble mind
And virtue's plenitude are stripped from thee
Thou wast so careless in thy fine offending
Who from the rabble always held apart
And spoke of me so straightly from the heart
That I gave welcome to thine every rime
And now I care not sith thy life is baseness
To give the sign that thy speech pleaseth me
Nor come I to thee in guise visible
Yet if thou It read this sonnet many a time
That malign spirit which so hunteth thee
Will sound forloyn  and spare thy affrighted soul

For YL: Lecture notes, partie une.

One of my close friends, and earliest and most devoted readers of my blog told me that if I wasn't writings posts these last couple of weeks, I could at least put up the lecture notes for the lectures I was delivering on Dante's Vita Nuova.  I didn't take him seriously at first, but here you are Yukes, I think it's kind of a neat idea. They may not make much sense, but they're a wonderful memory.

VITA NUOVA

•    Moving back in Dante’s oeuvre, Vita Nuova is one of his early works, produced around 1293-94. This is twenty years before the Inferno, which 1314, and three years after the death of Beatrice Portinari.
•    Generally speaking, the Vita Nuova is a series of poems from Dante’s youth that he started writing for Beatrice nine years after he met her, and that are presented with prose explanation to us in the Vita Nuova. The poems, however, were written much earlier than the prose that accompanies them. When we read Vita Nuova then, this is something that needs to be kept in mind.
•    The Vita Nuova is also the only apparently biographical material we have on Dante’s life.
•    Over the next two lectures our goal is going to be to try and understand who exactly Beatrice is. Is she Beatrice Portinari, the actual woman who in Dante’s lifetime was married to someone else? Is she the muse of reason and philosophy inspired from earlier works such as Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy? Or is she a figure created specifically in the tradition of medieval love poetry, who eventually becomes a central figure of Dante’s masterpiece, the Comedy?
•    The answer to these questions, I’m going to suggest in this lecture and next, lies in forming a conception of Love—and love as it is seen by Dante the poet. In other words, what we’re going to try and do is trace the process by which Beatrice becomes synonymous with love. It’s a process by which Beatrice transforms from Beatrice Portinari to the essence of what it means to be Beatrice, or one who can bless, and love transforms from the Lapsarian moment, professor C identified in his lecture to the pre-Lapsarian conception of love that Dante finally, finally achieves in Paradise.
•    In today’s lecture, we’re going to begin the journey towards the realization of Beatrice’s nature in the first three stages:
First is to have an understanding of what it means to have a Vita Nuova in the first place? How is the Vita Nuova, a new life? And in how many different ways can it be read as a new life? Of course, in order to have a complete understanding of the new, we have to be able to recognize what is it that has become old, what have we left behind, what are we rejecting?  And thirdly, what is it that has happened that has caused for this rejection to take place? What is the seminal moment that causes the rejection of the old?

Some basic ideas to keep in mind:
•    VITA NUOVA: poems from early in D’s career. Cavalcanti’s influence. Tradition of medieval love—secrecy, married lady, a lover who could also be married, Lancelot. Prose after B’s death. VN is pre-1290 and post-1290 text.
•    Phrase, Vita Nuova, never occurs in the text. Vita =Life. Nuova derives from the Latin novus, which can mean new, youthful, young, marvelous etc. D tells us he finds it in his “Book of Memory” which he intends to rewrite in the text we have today. Think about this?
•    But is this the New Life or the New New Life? 1. Beatrice 2. Understanding who Beatrice is. Love to Love as Salvation New life= Being a poet. New New Life= being a poet who reinvents poetry.
•    We will always be able to see VN as both New Life and New New Life, depending on the angle. If we take Dante the narrator’s than it’s just the New Life. If we take, Dante the man’s, from what we know historically, than it is the New New Life.
•    Also think of it as the “young life” for this is how the phrase appears in Purgatory XXX, line 116 (pg 368), Beatrice reprimanding Dante about wasting his Vita N. His “youthful life” or his “new life--” which seems to be a direct reference to the moment at which he sees her in the mortal world. And now it can mean yet another new life, where B because she has realized her role as a “Beatrice” or a blesser, can try to save him through her love.
•    One other way to think about—if we think in terms of the lecture on Tuesday—it is a book of return. In which case wouldn’t the title be an inversion? This last question we’re going to readdress in detail next Tuesday by thinking about it in terms of similar genres and works such as Boethius’ Consolation of Phil and Augustine’s Confessions.
•    We’ll get to these and Beatrice’s role of blesser in the next lecture. In this lecture what I suggest we do is establish a way to get to the new. What does it mean to have something new? What do we need to possess in order to have a new?
•    PAUSE
•    Need an old. An obsolete. That can no longer suffice. Old view of love, and old figure of Beatrice. What is the old view? Guido Cavalcanti. (SHOW IMAGE)

(Dante Gabriel Rossetti," Giotto Paints Dante's Portrait")
•    GC: Love= misery, loss of self, disaster, tears, an occupation of the rational part of the soul. The “beloved” mostly unimportant, just the medium that inspires love.

•    Donna me prega, ,
I
“Because a lady bids me I would speak/
Of an insubstantial thing that is so fierce
And  powerful it bears the name Love...
II
...Love is given shape by a darkness born of Mars
---it takes a sensate name/
It enters when an object caught by sight/
Takes up in the potential intellect.

•    What is this poem saying? He has been inspired by a woman. Love and sight, physical desire, the senses. This is literally what he means. No allegory in his poems.
•    Who have we already met as Cavalcantian lovers? F and P. Love enters through their eyes. And it takes over their minds.
•    But what F and P do in Canto V, D also does to a degree in his poetry.
•    Character called love= first poem, 592. (LOVE IMAGE)
•    597, imitating love
•    598, love begins to fuse with him
•    Here is perhaps the reason Dante faints when he meets them. His love too is physical.
WITH THIS IN MIND, we can ask the question, WHO IS BEATRICE THAN?
•    There are a number of ideas on this. Erich Auerbach has suggested she probably didn’t exist. She could have been the typical Florentine lady. Or she could have been what D made her out to be. But given historical circumstances like different marriages, his exile, her early death etc. probably more made up than anything else.
•    Let’s see what he tells us in the biographical information: they meet when they are nine, he falls in love with her, (GARDEN IMAGE) nine years later, she acknowledges him one day, he sees this as a reason to go on, but then, given that he tries to protect her virtue by going after other women, she is offended and refuses to acknowledge him. And then she dies. 

(Henry Holiday, "Dante and Beatrice" 1883)
•    And what does he tell us in his poems?
•    Well actually very little. Most of his pre-B death poetry is about love, not her so much.
•    Pg 606, B as the typical coquettish mistress (her rejection, show WEDDING IMAGE)
•    Pg 615, physical being that she is
•    Pg 616, back to the gaze, the eyes, the love transformation of Cavalcanti
•    And that’s all really.
•    We’re back at the question, WHO IS BEATRICE?
•    Here’s my answer: The earthly Beatrice is no one significant, in fact, I want to argue that she is a symbol left in by Dante to serve as a comparison to the true Beatrice. She is just the representative of Cavalcante and Guinizelli and Dante’s predecessor poets and their tradition.
•    When we read Beatrice like that, the VN is very much both a text of inversion, and of reinvention. It is the text in which D starts the trend for a return to the pre-Lapsarian moment, the old moment, one won’t be completed till the end of Paradise. But it is also very very new, because in this we have the Dante of old, arriving at the juncture of the New Dante—Boethius, and St. Augustine. 

(All page numbers correspond to Mark Musa's A Portable Dante, Penguin, 2003)