The Dances of “Paradiso”
Joan Acocella (the name sings!), the dance critic of The New Yorker, has a stunning book review in the current issue.
She discusses (at welcome length) Robert and Jean Hollander’s new translation of Dante’s Paradiso, bringing to a close their epochal journey through the three cantiche of the Commedia.
Ms Acocella has the highest praise for Jean Hollander’s translation. She is more reserved about Robert’s voluminous notes, useful, she thinks, more for the graduate student than for the average reader.
Of Paradiso itself, however, she seems conflicted in a secular sort of way. There is, clearly, some magnificent poetry, but all that dusty scholasticism. Besides heaven can sound simply boring — nothing but unreserved love.
Of course, she says it more breezily than that (this is The New Yorker after all):
[W]e live in an intermediate, tragic world. Paradise is not like that. Neither, accordingly, is the Paradiso.
This lack of shading is the fundamental problem, poetically, with Heaven’s emotional life. The souls there are uniformly
charitable. “Oh, here is one who will increase our loves!” the spirits
in the sphere of Mercury exclaim when the pilgrim arrives there. The
souls in the spheres of Venus, Mars, and Jupiter are just as glad to
see him, and as their greetings accumulate one starts to feel a little
nostalgic for the screaming and farting that went on in Hell.
Strangely, what is missing from this fascinating review, by the New Yorker’s dance critic, is any sense of dance, of the joyful movement of persons in relation, of the moto spiritale of the individual, now fully freed to join in the highest form of love: true friendship.
It is telling that the word “communion” does not appear in Acocella’s multi-page reflection. Yet, if one were to try, foolishly, to sum up Paradiso in a word, “communion” would, I think, be the closest approximation.
Finally, one of the scholastic questions she enumerates is this: “At the Last Judgment, will souls in Heaven get their bodies back?” And she leaves it at that: dry, distant, unanswerable.
But for the souls this is no scholastic disputatio. It is literally the heart of the matter. For it has to do with their integrity as persons, their familial relations, the significance of their (and all) history.
Without bodies, how can joy be whole? how can the dance be complete?
The Paradiso has always been a difficult read, and Dante recognized it as such in the opening of Canto II: :Oh you, eager to hear more . . . .. turn back if you would see your shores again./ Do not set forth upon the deep,/ for, losing sight of me, you would be lost.” Difficult in small part because the interjections of medieval astronomy, and the scientific and scholastic explanations of Dr. Beatrice can be hard (for me, at any rate) to follow. But difficult in large part because of the need to sustain interest in blessedness for so long. And that Dante does it, and carries it off triumphantly, is a not so small miracle (Acocella leaves out reference to one of the greatest parts of this — the image of Light as a river, in Par. xxx 61-66).
But the blessedness is not quite as absolute as Acocella’s review suggests, and there are plenty of references even in Heaven to the political and particularly the ecclesiastical troubles of earth — Folco of Marseilles’ prediction (unfortunately wrong) that Rome would soon be cleansed of the stain brought upon it by Pope Boniface VIII and his like, for instance (IX. 37).
Still, I enjoyed Acocella’s piece enormously, and was delighted that the New Yorker even printed it; for many of their readers, I expect, that if they have any knowledge of Dante at all, it begins and ends with the Inferno (as it does with some poet translators, e.g., Robert Pinsky). She’s a bit too optimistic in thinking that they have also make it through the Purgatorio. I was glad also that she zeroed in on the Hollanders’ determinedly un-romantic reading (Francesca da Rimini and her lover, Ulysses, etc., placed exactly where they belong in the Inferno, for instance). The Hollanders have taken some flak for this from our contemporary neo-pre-Raphaelites.
And if the New Yorker’s readers are held back in their knowledge of Dante, could it be said that our spiritual shepherds are any better? How many members of the USCCB, one wonders, have read Dante at all? how many have read the poem all the way through? And if they have, do you suppose they have learned anything from it, and from the poet’s fierce denunciations (among other things) of ecclesiastical wrong-doing?
If they have, they aren’t telling.
Finally, Acocella’s dead wrong about the notes being only fit for graduate students; they’re enlightening and essential, and compared to Singleton, rather short. Still, I note that this new Hollander Paradiso runs to 915 pages; Purgatorio came to 742, and Inferno a mere 634.
I found much to like in the review. Someone once said that to read only the Inferno but not the rest of the Divine Comedy is like visiting Paris only to inspect the sewers. Ideally a prominent review like this will gain for the Paradiso a much deserved wider reception.
However, I found problematic the way Acocella contrasts romantics and allegorists among the readers of Dante. She puts Croce (and, very questionably, Auerbach) in the former camp, Singleton and Hollander along with some stuffy theologians in the latter. Croce recommended ignoring the Comedy’s theology and its moral concerns in favor of concentrating on the poetry. That is ultimately her position as well, a kind of estheticized “Dantism” (a “Cafeteria Comedy?”).
She rejects “the very root of the pro-allegory position, which assumes that, seven centuries after the fact, we can say accurately what Dante’s views were. While seeming historicist, this is actually ahistorical, in that it denies the historicity of all knowledge, the fact that what we think is always conditioned by our time. Furthermore, the insistence on our judging from Dante’s point of view, while it aims at putting us closer to the poem, actually distances us from it, by telling us that our hearts and minds are not good enough to read the Divine Comedy.”
It’s difficult to tell if she’s a “strong” or a “weak” historicist but if it’s the former, as I think it is, she is relegating not just the Comedy but all pre-Enlightenment literature to an antiquarian status – these works are interesting for what they tell us about an earlier innocent age but irrelevant to the concerns of our advanced mentality. That may be the sophisticated (or is it just exceptionally naïve?) interpretation of the 21st century, one that, for example, appreciates and exalts damned Promethean sinners, but it is a view that Hollander’s notes make every effort to correct. Acocella acknowledges their utility primarily as arcana for graduate students and not as seriously informative about currently relevant theological or philosophical issues.
I also think it’s a mistake to classify Hollander as a simple “allegorist.” From the beginning of his career he has argued that Dante uses the allegory of theologians, not that of the poets. This allegory is figural, not figurative, and historical not metaphorical. No more determined opponent of the “Virgil is Reason” school can be found anywhere.
One other comment in the review seems strange: “Seldom does he (Hollander) consider that, like most poems, the Divine Comedy has some loose ends.” The notes are filled with examples of loose ends and inconsistencies. Here’s one representative comment (p. 246): “Dante is a precursor of at least one aspect of Renaissance humanism, its pleasure in syncretism, a delight in putting together things that would prefer to be kept separate, making new concepts out of the ideas of the unsuspecting (and defenseless) great figures of the past, about some of which they would, had they a voice, surely bellow in complaint.”
Fr. Imbelli observes that oddly the sensitivity of the dance critic is missing from the review. Acocella partially redeems herself in one comment, however:
“In the Paradiso, Dante tells how the souls in the sphere of the Sun circled him and then stopped, and he asks us to think of ‘ladies, poised to dance, / pausing, silent, as they listen, / until they have made out the new refrain.’ What a pretty sight that is: the ladies, in their party dresses, pausing together on the dance floor and waiting—we can see them cock their heads—to hear the new measure. They make the souls in the sphere of the Sun seem much more appealing.” It’s as though to distract herself from all those theologians she finally notices the dance.
One final observation about the Paradiso: Hollander concludes his notes to Canto XXXIII (p. 933) with the initials AMDG, i.e., Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam (For the Greater Glory of God), surely a rare appearance of that abbreviation in this secular age.
Those interested in a short and accessible introduction to Dante by Hollander can find one in this fine 1999 article in First Things.
http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=3139
Sorry, the AMDG appears after the notes to the final canto on p 844.
Thanks to Nicholas and Patrick for their thoughtful and helpful remarks.
I share with Nicholas delight that the New Yorker gave such extensive coverage to the book. I also thank Patrick for pointing out one place where Acocella’s sensitivity to dance does shine through.
Robert Hollander expanded upon his FT article with a brief book, Dante: A Life in Works (Yale: 2001).
I also recommend highly Peter Hawkins’ Dante: A Brief History (Blackwell: 2006).
I use the “Purgatorio” for a course I teach in the Classics of Spirituality, on the grounds that it is the Cantica which most resembles our present life, with the possibility of spiritual maturation. The blessed in Purgatory, however, can only rise, they can no longer fall back.
Is the syllabus of Fr. Imbelli’s Classics of Spirituality course available on line?
Twain also wondered about what Acocella calls the “lack of shading” in heaven, marveling that so many people wanted to go to what amounts to an eternity of church with a lot of people they couldn’t stand, when they could scarcely work up the gumption to attend once a week for a mere lifetime.
Perhaps dancing is the answer.
Of course, heaven would at least be peaceful and quiet, free of the constant “screaming and farting that went on in hell,” which is one of the most accurate, succinct and funny descriptions of the Inferno (not to mention my neighbor’s yard full of dogs) I’ve ever read.
The review was a delight! Thanks!