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)