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)

Pagans and Monsters and Epics! Oh my!

"So Grendel waged his lonely war,

inflicting constant cruelties on the people,

atrocious hurt. He took over Heorot,

haunted the glittering hall after dark,

but the throne itself, the treasure-seat,

he was kept from approaching; he was the Lord.

These were hard times, heart-breaking

for the prince of the Shieldings; powerful counsellors, 

the highest in the land, would lend advice,

plotting how best the bold defenders

might resist and beat off sudden attacks.

Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed

offering to idols, swore oaths

that the killer of souls might come to their aid

and save the people. That was their way,

their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts

they remembered hell. The Almighty Judge

... was unknown to them."

I've changed gears from Homer to another great "epic" poet, the anonymous composer of Beowulf. I was debating trying my hands at Boethius earlier tonight, but somehow the reason and passion just weren't cutting it for me. So here's a piece that is without both-- it exemplifies what it means to be without rationality, and, in a sense, without passion as well. I want to say a couple of things to contextualize the passage and then come back to some of the ideas I may have about it: the poet, it seems, belongs and identifies with a Christian world, but places his narrative in a pre-Christian land. At the same time, because his meter is not without ideas of salvation and divine justice, I see it as essentially layered with both the pagan and Christian tradition.

To come back to the passage at hand though-- we're still early in the poem, Grendel the monster who will eventually be destroyed by Beowulf is at large, and the Danes, a pagan people, are existing in a kind of a reflex, begging for salvation in the face of destruction. There seem to be a number of things going on here, but I want to focus on this idea of a "lonely war." Indeed, what does it mean for Grendel to be alone? But what does it mean for the "Shieldings" or the people of the epic to be alone? If Grendel ravages alone because of his ancestor Cain, who are the Danes at this particular moment, a people who are deeply alone because of their singular disconnect with the narrator? It's a slightly complex thought, but this is how I see this passage as exemplifying the Danes as a more lonely people than a monster like Grendel: Grendel has an ancestry that connects him to Cain, the biblical figure who murdered his brother and became the father, at least according to our poet, of giants, elves, and other evil phantoms. The Danes, on the other hand, are not given this genealogy. Without doubt, they are under the watchful eye of the poet's god who watches over them and keeps Grendel from the throne, but they have other gods, idols to whom they pray and sacrifice, but not the god of Grendel and the poet. In other words, the question this passage raises is what does it mean to be saved by a god who is not your own? What does it mean for a people to be a narrated by a poet who dismisses "their way, their heathenish hope."

If the Danes are a people who do not know their creator, does Grendel know his? Is Grendel, through a clear ancestry, somehow closer to the narrator's God than the Danes, the people who will be saved, are? Of course, the whole poem can be read as a Christian allegory, but what's at stake here is at the level of narrative. Grendel's loneliness surely lies in his evil, but the lonely battle fought by the Danes is explained by the disconnect of their being from the narrative itself. I don't usually like to bring the theoretical into this blog, but I want to quickly mention Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian theorist, who sees the epic as separate from the novel in the way that it has only one view of the world. The poet and his people are one, as Homer was one with the warriors and the travellers, and as Virgil was one with Aeneas and his people. In this passage, there are two voices, maybe three. There is the voice of Grendel, branched off from God's creation through Cain, there is the voice of the narrator, convinced of the presence of the Christian god, and there is finally, the voice of the Danes, broken but still speaking of what it knows to be familiar, what it thinks can save these beleaguered people.

I want to end with coming back to the first stanza. Grendel is being kept from the throne by "the Lord." The battle, and I don't want to do a Christian reading here, is being fought between a creator and a descendant of the figure who threatened creation. What is keeping Grendel from the throne is indeed an invisible force, but this force, I think, occupies the level of the narrative as well. It's possible because the narrator is, in a way, closer to Grendel than he is to the Danes. Grendel is not a pagan outside of Christian discourse all together, in fact he is very much a part of it. Perhaps, then, I should take back my argument about three world views and shear it down to just two. Grendel and the narrator vs. the Danes.

(Beowulf, translated from the Old English by Seamus Heaney. Image: the first page of the original Beowulf manuscript, courtesy The British Library)

Penelope: twisting and turning.

"...Her very words,
And despite our passion and pride, we believed her.
So by day she'd weave at her great and growing web--
by night, by the light of the torches set beside her,
she would unravel all she'd done. Three whole years,
she deceived us blind, seduced us with this scheme...
Then when the wheeling seasons brought the fourth year on
and the months waned and the long days came round once more,
one of the women in on the queen's secret told the truth
and we caught her in the act-- unweaving her gorgeous web."

(Homer: The Odyssey, Book 2, translated by Robert Fagles.)

This is that one point in the Odyssey where I often wonder whether it's an epic about the travels of the man of "twists and turns" or whether it rests on the moment when Penelope becomes a force that drives the narrative. Not Neptune, not the wily Odysseus, but Penelope. In other words, can we read the Odyssey as the story of a going, not a coming? Is it the story of Odysseus coming home or is it story of Penelope whose last stronghold has collapsed and who must, therefore, venture forth in order to save herself?
Here Penelope does not speak, but is spoken about-- by the suitors who have collected in the palace and who wait impatiently for her to finish weaving Laertes' burial shroud. They have been kept at bay, circling, waiting, until this tapestry that will never end is ended, and the husband she waits for is no longer awaited, and until her faith is unfaithful. This is the information that will launch Telemachus's ship and lead, in a way, to Odysseus's successful return to Ithaca. Penelope, then, inspires both speech and action in the Odyssey--something that is almost directly opposite of Chryses in the Iliad, whose presence brings silence and destruction and of Dido in the Aeneid, whose realm is a point of departure, not of arrival.
Yet, for the suitors, Penelope is none of these things-- in fact, she's almost a kind of Circe, who also weaves for the sake of deception. She doesn't turn the suitors into pigs, but in a way, the tapestry is more human for her than these unwelcome visitors are. So what  do we make of her, this woman who weaves desperately to prolong her state of being and belonging? She is very much the wife of Odysseus, twisting and turning even as the "gorgeous web" takes form. But she is also the figure of self-preservation in the epic whose lie is for herself, her son, and her husband. Does she lie really, or does she just never bring herself to a point of speech? Or does she do something more complex than anyone else in the narrative by using an art form to speak for her? I think what Penelope does then should be read as a form of preserving being not only in the sense of her bond with Odysseus and Telemachus, but also as a form of preserving her bond with herself-- she transfers her narrative to the art form, something that can never be interpreted definitively.
The image up there is Joseph Wright of Derby's "Penelope Unravelling her Web," (1784). I've chosen it because of how perfectly it makes the case-- Odysseus in the background, Telemachus in the front-- her past and her future, and her ball of wool in her hand as a kind of weapon of preservation, as something that can both encapsulate what has happened, and prolong what is to be until it can be the way it should be. Until then, she will weave her own version of time.