Huizinga reminds us of Froissart the chronicler’s enthusiasm for ships with flags and ensigns fluttering in the wind, and gaily colored escutcheons flashing in the sun, the play of the suns rays on helmets, breastplates, lance tips, the pennants and banners of knights marching; and in coats of arms, the combinations of pale yellow and blue, orange and white, orange and pink, pink and white, black and white; and a young damsel in purple silk on a white horse with a saddlecloth of blue silk, led by three men clothed in vermilion and capes of green silk.
At the root of this passion for light there were theological influences of distant Platonic and Neoplatonic origin (the Supreme Good as the sun of ideas, the simple beauty of a color given by a shape that dominates the darkness of matter, the vision of God as Light, Fire, or Luminous Fountain). Theologians make light a metaphysical principle, and in these centuries the study of optics develops, under Arab influence, which leads in turn to ideas about the marvels of the rainbow and the miracles of mirrors (in Dante’s third cantica the mirrors often appear to be liquid and mysterious).
Dante did not, therefore, invent his poetics of light by playing on a subject matter that was recalcitrant to poetry. He found it all around him, and he reformulated it, as only he could, for a reading public who felt light and color as passions. In rereading one of the best essays I know on Dante’s Paradiso, Giovanni Getto’s “Aspetti della poesia di Dante” (Aspects of Dante’s Poetry, 1947), one can see that there is not a single image of Paradise that does not stem from a tradition that was part of the medieval reader’s heritage, I won’t say of ideas, but of daily fantasies and feelings. It is from the biblical tradition and the church fathers that these radiances come, these vortices of flames, these lamps, these suns, these brilliances and brightnesses emerging “like a horizon clearing” (Par. 14.69), these candid roses and ruby flowers. As Getto says, “Dante found before him a terminology, or, rather, a whole language already established to express the reality of the life of the spirit, the mysterious experience of the soul in its catharsis, the life of grace as stupendous joy, a prelude to a joyous, sacred eternity.” For medieval man, reading about this light and luminosity was equivalent to when we dream about the sinuous gracefulness of a movie star, the elegant lines of a car, the love of lost lovers, brief encounters, or the magic of old films and love songs, and they read it all with a deeply passionate intensity that is unknown to us. This is anything but doctrinal poetry and debates between teacher and pupil!
We now come to the second misunderstanding: that there cannot be poetry of pure intellect, capable of thrilling us not just at the kiss of Paolo and Francesca but at the architecture of the heavens, at the nature of the Trinity, at the definition of faith as the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things unseen. It is this appeal to a poetry of understanding that can make the Paradiso fascinating even for the modern reader who has lost the reference points familiar to his medieval counterpart. Because in the meantime this reader has known the poetry of John Donne, T. S. Eliot, Valéry, or Borges, and knows that poetry can also be a metaphysical passion.
Speaking of Borges, from whom did he get the idea of the Aleph, that fateful single point which showed the populous sea, dawn and dusk, the multitudes of the Americas, a silver cobweb in the center of a black pyramid, a broken labyrinth that was London, an inner courtyard in Calle Soler with the same tiles he had seen thirty years previously in the entryway of a house in Calle Frey Bentos, bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, steam coming off waters, convex equatorial deserts, an unforgettable woman in Inverness, an exemplar of the first translation of Pliny in a house in Adrogué, and simultaneously every letter on every page, a sunset at Querétaro that seemed to reflect the color of a rose in Bengal, a terraqueous globe placed between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly in a study in Alkmaar, a beach on the Caspian Sea at dawn, a pack of tarot cards in a shopwindow at Mirzapur, pistons, herds of bison, tides, all the ants that live on the earth, a Persian astrolabe, and the shocking remains of what had once been the delicious Beatriz Viterbo? The first Aleph appears in the final canto of the Paradiso, where Dante sees (and, as far as he can, makes us see) “bound with love in a single volume whatever is spread throughout the universe, substances and accidents and their behavior, almost fused together…” (Par. 33.88–89). In describing “the universal form of this bond,” with “mind suspended and inadequate language,” in “that clear subsistence,” Dante sees three circles of three colors, and not, like Borges, the shocking remains of Beatriz Viterbo, because his Beatrice, who had turned into shocking remains some time previously, has come back again as light—and so Dante’s Aleph is more passionately rich in hope than the one in Borges’s hallucination, which is clearly informed by the understanding that he would not be allowed to see the Empyrean, and that all he had left was Buenos Aires.
It is in the light of this centuries-old tradition of metaphysical poetry that the Paradiso can best be read and appreciated today. But I would like to add one further point, to strike the imagination of young readers, or of those who are not particularly interested in God or intelligence. Dante’s Paradiso is the apotheosis of the virtual world, of nonmaterial things, of pure software, without the weight of earthly or infernal hardware, whose traces remain in the Purgatorio. The Paradiso is more than modern; it can become, for the reader who has forgotten history, a tremendously real element of the future. It represents the triumph of pure energy, which the labyrinth of the Web promises but will never be able to give us; it is an exaltation of floods and bodies without organs, an epic made of novas and white dwarf stars, an endless big bang, a story whose plot covers the distance of light-years, and, if you really want familiar examples, a triumphant space odyssey, with a very happy ending. You can read the Paradiso in this way too; it can never do you any harm, and it will be better than a disco with strobe lights or ecstasy. After all, with regard to ecstasy, Dante’s third cantica keeps its promises and actually delivers it.
Written as an article for la Repubblica on 6 September 2000, in a series of pieces to celebrate the seventh centenary of The Divine Comedy.
ON THE STYLE OF THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO
It is difficult to imagine that a few fine pages can single-handedly change the world. After all, Dante’s entire oeuvre was not enough to restore a Holy Roman Empire to the Italian city-states. But, in commemorating The Communist Manifesto of 1848, a text that certainly has exercised a major influence on the history of two centuries, I believe one must reread it from the point of view of its literary quality, or at least—even if one does not read it in the original German—of its extraordinary rhetorical skill and the structure of its arguments.
In 1971 a short book by a Venezuelan author was published: Ludovico Silva’s Marx’s Literary Style. (An Italian translation was published in 1973.) I think it is no longer available, but it would be worthwhile reprinting it. In this book Silva retraces the development of Marx’s literary education (few know that he had also written poetry, albeit awful poetry, according to those who have read it), and goes on to analyze in detail Marx’s entire oeuvre. Curiously, he devotes only a few lines to the Manifesto, perhaps because it was not a strictly personal work. This is a pity, for it is an astonishing text that skillfully alternates apocalyptic and ironic tones, powerful slogans and clear explanations, and (if capitalist society really does want to seek revenge for the upheavals these few pages have caused it) even today it should be read like a sacred text in advertising agencies.
It starts with a powerful drumroll, like Beethoven’s Fifth: “A specter is haunting Europe” (and let us not forget that we are still close to the pre-Romantic and Romantic flowering of the gothic novel, and specters are to be taken seriously). This is followed immediately by a bird’seye history of class struggle from ancient Rome to the birth and development of the bourgeoisie,
