Think of Victor Hugo’s description of the battle of Waterloo in Les Misérables. Unlike Stendhal’s description of the battle through the eyes of Fabrizio del Dongo, who is in the midst of it and does not know what is going on, Hugo describes it through the eyes of God, seeing it from above. He is aware that if Napoleon had known that there was a steep descent beyond the crest of the Mont-Saint-Jean plateau (but his guide had not told him so), General Milhaud’s cuirassiers would not have perished at the feet of the English army; and that if the little shepherd guiding Bülow had suggested a different route, the Prussian army would not have arrived in time to decide the outcome of the battle.
With a hypertextual structure we could rewrite the battle of Waterloo, making Grouchy’s French arrive instead of Blücher’s Germans. There are war games that allow you to do such things, and I’m sure they are great fun. But the tragic grandeur of those pages by Hugo resides in the notion that things go the way they do, and often in spite of what we want. The beauty of War and Peace lies in the fact that Prince Andrej’s agony ends with his death, however sorry it makes us. The painful wonder that every reading of the great tragedies evokes in us comes from the fact that their heroes, who could have escaped an atrocious fate, through weakness or blindness fail to realize where they are heading, and plunge into an abyss they have often dug with their own hands. In any case, that is the sense conveyed by Hugo when, after showing us other opportunities Napoleon could have seized at Waterloo, he writes, «Was it possible for Napoleon to win that battle? We reply no. Why? Because of Wellington? Because of Blücher? No. Because of God.»
This is what all the great narratives tell us, even if they replace God with notions of fate or the inexorable laws of life. The function of «unchangeable» stories is precisely this: against all our desires to change destiny, they make tangible the impossibility of changing it. And in so doing, no matter what story they are telling, they are also telling our own story, and that is why we read them and love them. We need their severe, «repressive» lesson. Hypertextual narrative has much to teach us about freedom and creativity. That is all well and good, but it is not everything. Stories that are «already made» also teach us how to die.
I believe that one of the principal functions of literature lies in these lessons about fate and death. Perhaps there are others, but for the moment none spring to mind.
Lecture given at the Literature Festival, Mantua, September 2000.
A READING OF THE PARADISO
«As a result, the Paradiso is not read or appreciated very much. Its monotony is particularly tedious: it reads like a series of questions and answers between teacher and pupil.» Thus Francesco De Sanctis in his History of Italian Literature (1871). He articulates a reservation many of us had in school, unless we had an outstanding teacher. Whatever the case, if we look through some more recent histories of Italian literature, we find that Romantic criticism downgraded the Paradiso—a disapproval that also carried weight into the next century.
Since I want to maintain that the Paradiso is the finest of the three canticas of The Divine Comedy, let us go back to De Sanctis, a man of his time certainly, but also a reader of exceptional sensibilities, to see how his reading of the Paradiso is a masterpiece of inner torment (on the one hand I say one thing, on the other another), a revealing mixture of enthusiasm and misgivings.
De Sanctis, a very acute reader, immediately realizes that in the Paradiso Dante speaks of ineffable things, of a spiritual realm, and wonders how the realm of the spirit «can be represented.» Consequently, he says, in order to make the Paradiso artistic Dante has imagined a human paradise, one that is accessible to the senses and the imagination. That is why he tries to find in light the link with our human potential for comprehension. And here De Sanctis becomes an enthusiastic reader of this poetry where there are no qualitative differences, only changes in luminous intensity, and he cites «the throngs of splendours» (Par. 23.82), the clouds «like diamonds whereon the sun did strike» (Par. 2.33), the blessed appearing «like a swarm of bees delving into flowers» (Par. 31.7), «rivers from which living flames leap out, lights in the shape of a river that glows tawny with brightness» (Par. 30.61–64), the blessed disappearing «like something heavy into deep water» (Par. 3.123). And he observes that when Saint Peter denounces Pope Boniface VIII, recalling Rome in terms that smack more of the Inferno: «he [Boniface] has made a sewer of my burial-place, a sewer of blood and stench» (Par. 27.25–26), all the heavenly host expresses its contempt by simply turning red in color.
But is a change in color an adequate expression of human passions? Here De Sanctis finds himself a prisoner of his own poetics: «In that whirlwind of movement, the individual disappears. […] There is no change in features, just one face, as it were. […] This disappearance of forms and of individuality itself would reduce the Paradiso to just one note, if the earth did not come into it, and with the earth other forms and other passions. […] The songs of the souls are devoid of content, mere voices not words, music not poetry. […] It is all just one wave of light. […] Individuality disappears in the sea of being.» If poetry is the expression of human passions, and if human passion can only be carnal, this is an unacceptable flaw. How can this compare with Paolo and Francesca kissing each other «on the mouth, all trembling»? Or with the horror of Ugolino’s «bestial meal,» or the sinner who makes the foul gesture toward God?
The contradiction in which De Sanctis is caught rests on two misunderstandings: first, that this attempt to represent the divine merely through intensity of light and color is Dante’s original but almost impossible attempt to humanize what human beings cannot conceive; and second, that poetry exists only in representations of the carnal passions and those of the heart, and that poetry of pure understanding cannot exist, because in that case it would be music. (And at this point, we might well pause to mock not good old De Sanctis but the «Desanctism» of those fools who assert that Bach’s music is not real poetry, but that Chopin’s comes a bit closer, lucky for him, and that the Well-Tempered Clavier and the Goldberg Variations don’t speak to us of earthly love, but the Raindrop Prelude makes us think of George Sand and the shadow of consumption hanging over her, and this, for God’s sake, is true poetry because it makes us cry.)
Let us begin with the first point. Cinema and role-playing games encourage us to think of the Middle Ages as a series of «dark» centuries; I don’t mean this in an ideological sense (which is not important in the cinema anyhow) but rather in terms of nocturnal colors and brooding shadows. Nothing could be more false. For while the people of the Middle Ages certainly did live in dark forests, castle halls, and narrow rooms barely lit by the fire in the hearth, apart from the fact that they were people who went to bed early, and were more used to the day than to the night (so beloved by the Romantics), the medieval period represents itself in ringing tones.
The Middle Ages identified beauty with light and color (as well as with proportion), and this color was always a simple harmony of reds, blues, gold, silver, white, and green, without shading or chiaroscuro, where splendor is generated by the harmony of the whole rather than being determined by light enveloping things from the outside, or making color drip beyond the confines of the figures. In medieval miniatures light seems to radiate outward from the objects.
For Isidore of Seville, marble is beautiful because of its whiteness, metals for the light they reflect, and the air itself is beautiful and bears its name because aer-aeris derives from the splendor of aurum, i.e., gold (and that is why when air is struck by light, it seems to shine like gold). Precious gems are beautiful because of their color, since color is nothing other than sunlight imprisoned and purified matter. Eyes are beautiful if luminous, and the most beautiful eyes are sea green eyes. One of the prime qualities of a beautiful body is rose-colored skin. In poets this sense of flashing color is ever present: the grass is green, blood is red, milk is white. For Guido Guinizelli a beautiful woman has
