Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Giorgio Agamben teaches philosophy at the University of Verona. Among his books is Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, 1998).

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Aus dem Klappentext

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

THE END OF THE POEM

Stanford University Press

Contents

Preface........................................................xi 1 Comedy.....................................................1 2 Corn: From Anatomy to Poetics..............................23 3 The Dream of Language......................................43 4 Pascoli and the Thought of the Voice.......................62 5 The Dictation of Poetry....................................76 6 Expropriated Manner........................................87 7 The Celebration of the Hidden Treasure.....................102 8 The End of the Poem........................................109AppendixA An Enigma Concerning the Basque Woman........................119B The Hunt for Language........................................124C The Just Do Not Feed on Light................................126D Taking Leave of Tragedy......................................130Notes..........................................................135

Chapter One

1. THE PROBLEM

1. The aim of this essay is the critical assessment of an event that can be chronologically dated at the beginning of the fourteenth century but that, by virtue of its still exerting a profound influence on Italian culture, can be said to have never ceased to take place. This event is the decision of a poet to abandon his own "tragic" poetic project for a "comic" poem. This decision translates into an extremely famous incipit, which one of the author's letters states as follows: "Here begins the Comedy of Dante Alighieri, a Florentine by birth, not by disposition" (Incipit comoedia Dantis Alagherii florentini natione non moribus). The turn registered by these words is so little a question internal to Dante scholarship that it can even be said that here, for the first time, we find one of the traits that most tenaciously characterizes Italian culture: its essential pertinence to the comic sphere and consequent refutation of tragedy.

The fact that even a few years after the author's death the reasons for the comic title appeared problematic and incoherent to the oldest commentators bears witness to the extent to which this turn hides a historical knot whose repression cannot easily be brought to consciousness. All the more surprising is the poverty of modern critical literature on the subject. That a scholar such as Pio Rajna (who so influenced later studies) could reach such obviously insufficient conclusions as those with which his study of the poem's title ends is something that cannot be explained even by Italian culture's lack of contact with its own origins. Even Erich Auerbach, the author of such penetrating works on Dante's style, does not succeed in explaining the poem's incipit in satisfying terms. "Dante," he writes, referring to the ancient theory of the separation of styles, "never freed himself completely from these views; otherwise he would not have called his great work a comedy in clearest opposition to the term alta tragedia which he applied to Virgil's Aeneid." And, concerning Dante's letter to Cangrande, Auerbach writes:

It is not easy to see how Dante, after having found this formula and after having completed the Comedy, could still have expressed himself upon its character with the pedantry exhibited in the passage from the letter to Cangrande just referred to. However, so great was the prestige of the classical tradition, obscured as it still was by pedantic schematization, so strong was the predilection for fixed theoretical classifications of a kind which we can but consider absurd, that such a possibility cannot be gainsaid after all.

As far as explanations for Dante's choice of title are concerned, in a certain sense modern criticism has not progressed beyond Benvenuto da Imola's observations or the suggestions with which Boccaccio ends his commentary on the title of the poem. "What," Boccaccio asks,

will we then say of the objections that have been made against it? On the grounds that the author was a most prudent man, I believe that he would have had in mind not the parts contained in comedy but its entirety, and that he named his book on the basis of this entirety, so to speak. And from what one can infer from Plautus and Terence, who were comic poets, the entirety of comedy is this: comedy has a turbulent principle, is full of noise and discord, and ends finally in peace and tranquillity. The present book altogether conforms to this model. Thus the author begins with woes and infernal troubles and ends it in the peace and glory enjoyed by the blessed in their eternal life. And this certainly suffices to explain how the said title suits this book.

The methodological principle that we follow in this study is that our ignorance of an author's motivations in no way authorizes the presumption that they are incoherent or faulty. We hold that until proven otherwise, Dante, as "a most prudent man" (oculatissimo uomo), could not have chosen his incipit lightly or superficially. On the contrary, precisely the fact that the comic title appears discordant with respect to what we know of the ideas of the poet and his age brings us to claim that it was carefully considered.

2. A precise study of the passages in which Dante speaks of comedy and tragedy demonstrates that this claim is textually founded.

We thus know that to Dante's eyes, the poetic project that gave birth to the great songs of the Rime seemed eminently tragic. In De vulgari eloquentia, he explicitly states that the tragic style is the highest of all styles and the only one appropriate to the ultimate objects of poetry: "well-being, love and virtue" (salus, amor et virtus). A little later he defines the song [canzone], the supreme poetic genre, as

a connected series of equal stanzas in the tragic style, without a refrain, and focused on a single theme, as I have shown when I wrote "Donne che avete intelletto d'amore." If I say "a connected series in the tragic style," it is because, were the style of the stanza comic, we would use the diminutive and call it a canzonetta.

(iaequalium stantiarum sine responsorio tragica coniugatio, ut nos ostendimus cum dicimus "Donne che avete intelletto d'amore." Quod autem dicimus tragica coniugatio, est quia cum comice fiat hec coniugatio, cantilenam vocamus per diminutionem.)

The poem's comic title therefore above all implies a rupture and a turn with respect to Dante's own past and poetic itinerary, a genuine "categorical revolution" that as such cannot have been decided upon without conscious and vital motivation. In a passage of the letter to Cangrande, Dante seems implicitly to affirm such an awareness of reasons for his choice. With a definition that formally repeats commonplaces of medieval lexicography, Dante here introduces a discussion that cannot be found in any of his known sources. "Now comedy is a certain kind of poetical narration," he writes, "which differs from all others" (Et est comoedia genus quoddam potice narrationis ab omnibus aliis differens). This privileged situation of the comic genre, which has no counterpart in either medieval or late ancient sources, presupposes an intention on the poet's part to alter semantically the term "comedy" in a sense that certainly goes beyond what modern criticism believes itself to have ascertained.

From this perspective, the fact that in the Inferno Dante explicitly defines the Aeneid as "high tragedy" is every bit as significant as the fact that he titles his own "sacred poem" a comedy. This is so not only because he thus comes to oppose the Comedy to the work of the poet from whom he considers himself to draw "the beautiful style that has done me honor" (lo bel stile che mi ha fatto onore), but also because the definition of the Aeneid as a tragedy cannot be coherently reconciled with the criteria of the "peaceful beginning" and "foul end" indicated in the letter to Cangrande.

In an attempt to use one half of the problem as an explanation for the other half, it has been said that to Dante's eyes, the Aeneid, as a poetic narration in the high style, could only be a tragedy. In fact, according to a tradition that has its origin in Diomedes and that is still alive in Isidore of Seville, the Aeneid figures in medieval treatises as an example not of tragedy as much as of that genre of poetic narration that was defined as genus commune on account of presenting the speech of both characters and the author. It is curious that, as has been occasionally noted, in medieval treatises the classification of the three styles-whose prototype is to be found in the Rhetorica ad Herennium-does not necessarily coincide with that of the genres of poetic narration. Comedy and tragedy, which never entirely lost their dramatic connotation, were commonly listed alongside satire and mime in the genus activam or dramaticon (in which only characters speak, without the intervention of the author). The enumeration of styles, moreover, always involved a reference at least to the elegy, and could never be exhausted in the comedy/tragedy opposition. The radicality with which the letter to Cangrande transforms this double classification into a tragedy/comedy antinomy-an antinomy that is at once stylistic and substantial, and with respect to which other poetic genres are quickly set aside-is in itself a sufficient sign of a strong, conscious sense of these two terms.

From this perspective, the eclogue to Giovanni di Virgilio constitutes another piece of evidence. Here Dante alludes to his own poem with the expression comica verba. The interpretation of this passage has been led astray by one of Boccaccio's glosses, which explains that "comica, id est vulgaria." The influence of this gloss has been so tenacious that even in the recent Enciclopedia dantesca one reads that, in the first eclogue, Dante resolutely identified "the comic in the vernacular." A text that could have shed light on Dante's choice of title thus became irrelevant, since the identification between comic style and the Italian language is clearly untenable. An attentive reading of Giovanni's verse epistle demonstrates that the reproaches made to Dante by the Bolognese humanist have as their object not simply the use of the vernacular as opposed to Latin but rather the choice of comedy as opposed to tragedy. The expression with which Giovanni characterizes Dante's writing, sermone forensi, does not allude to the vernacular but rather corresponds to the sermone pedestri of the passage in Horace cited by Dante in his letter to Cangrande, as well as to the cotidiano sermone of medieval poetics. Sermone forensi, in other words, refers to a choice of style and not language. This interpretation is confirmed by a further passage in the letter in which Giovanni, specifying his objections, encourages Dante to sing in "prophetic verse" the great facts of the history of his age, that is, the heroic and "public" material of tragedy instead of the "private" matters of comedy.

At the center of the debate with Giovanni di Virgilio, which belongs to the cultural circle from which the first modern tragedy, Mussato's tragoedia Ecerinis, was to be born, is not as much the Latin/vernacular opposition as the tragedy/comedy one. This testifies once again to the fact that for Dante, the comic title of his poem is neither contingent nor fragmentary, but rather constitutes the affirmation of a principle.

3. If this is true, then it is all the more dispiriting that the title of the Comedy is not compatible with the set of definitions given by Dante for the tragic/comic opposition, and that these definitions cannot, moreover, be reduced to a unitary system.

As has been noted, these definitions are articulated on two planes: a stylistic-formal one (the modus loquendi), and a materialsubstantial one (the materia or sententia). In De vulgari eloquentia (in which the stylistic aspect is prevalent and whose incompleteness is such that this work gives us no genuine thematic treatment of comedy), the tragic style is defined, according to the principles of the classical tripartition of styles, as the most elevated style (superiorem stilum), in harmony with the height of the material reserved for it (the three great magnalia: salus, amore, and virtus). In the letter to Cangrande, in which the material articulation is prevalent, the tragic/comic opposition is instead characterized on the plane of content and as an opposition of beginning and end: tragedy is marked by an "admirable" and "peaceful" beginning and a "foul" and "horrible" end; comedy by a "horrible" and "foul" beginning and a "prosperous" and "pleasant" end. On the stylistic plane, the tragic/comic opposition is presented as an opposition between what is, in one case, an elevated and sublime modus loquendi and, in the other, a "lowly" and "humble" modus loquendi (tempered, however, by a reference to Horace, who licentiat liquando comicos ut tragicos loqui).

Even a superficial examination of these categories demonstrates that according to the criteria of De vulgari eloquentia, the Comedy cannot justify its title without contradiction, though the Aeneid probably can be coherently defined as a tragedy. According to the criteria of the letter to Cangrande, by contrast, while the tragic justification of the Aeneid appears unfounded, the Comedy sufficiently justifies its title. The only thing that can in fact be affirmed with certainty is that in De vulgari eloquentia, Dante has in mind a tragic poetic project that is principally articulated on the stylistic plane, whereas the letter to Cangrande seeks to justify a comic choice defined in mainly material terms. No reasons for this change can, however, be identified. The only new element that appears in the letter to Cangrande is the peaceful beginning / harsh beginning, foul end / prosperous end opposition-that is, precisely the element that appears to our eyes as a mannered repetition of extremely superficial lexicographic stereotypes. This is so much the case that one of the oldest commentators and almost all modern scholars prefer to dwell on the stylistic-formal reasons, however deficient they may be, rather than accept the idea that Dante could have chosen the title of his own poem on the basis of such inconsequential considerations as the "foul" beginning of the Inferno (a principio horribilis et fetida est, quia Infernus) and the "pleasant" end of the Paradiso (in fine prospera, desiderabilis et grata, quia Paradisus).

Yet when it appears that none of these reasons completely does away with contradiction, one may then ask whether the "material" arguments furnished by Dante in the letter to Cangrande are not in fact to be taken seriously, and whether their seeming superficiality even conceals an intention that criticism ought to make explicit. Perhaps the view that the Middle Ages had no experience of the comic and the tragic beyond a purely stylistic opposition, or beyond the crudely descriptive difference between a peaceful and a sad ending, derives from our reluctance to admit that the categories of the comic and the tragic-categories in which modernity, from Hegel to Benjamin, from Goethe to Kierkegaard, has projected its most profound ethical conflicts-may have their remote origin in medieval culture.

II. TRAGIC GUILT AND COMIC GUILT

1. The definition of the tragic/comic opposition given in the letter to Cangrande has until now been considered in isolation, without being placed in relation to its context. While this definition, or at least the part that interests us, concerns the work's "material" (Nam si ad materiam respiciamus . . . ), the immediate context to which it must be brought back is the work's subiectum. A little later, Dante defines this "subject" in the following terms:

The subject, then, of the whole work, taken in the literal sense only, is the state of souls after death, pure and simple. For on and about that the argument of the whole work turns. If, however, the work be regarded from the allegorical point of view, the subject is man according as by his merits or demerits in the exercise of his free will he is deserving of reward or punishment by justice.

(Est ergo subiectum totius operis, litteraliter tantum accepti, status animarum post mortem simpliciter sumptus. Nam de illo et circa illum totius operis versatur processus. Si vero accipiatur opus allegorice, subiectum est homo prout merendo et demerendo per arbitrii libertatem iustitie premiandi et puniendi obnoxius est.)

The "prosperous" or "foul" ending, whether comic or tragic, therefore acquires its true meaning only when referred to its "subject": it thus concerns man's salvation or damnation or, in the allegorical sense, the subjection of man, in his own free will, to divine justice (homo prout merendo et demerendo per arbitrii libertatem iustitie premiandi et puniendi obnoxius est). Far from representing an insignificant and arbitrary choice on the basis of vacuous lexicographic stereotypes, the comic title instead implies the poet's position with respect to an essential question: the guilt or innocence of man before divine justice. That Dante's poem is a comedy and not a tragedy, that its beginning is "harsh" and "horrible" and its end "prosperous, desirable and pleasant" thus means the following: man, who is the work's subiectum in his subjection to divine justice, appears at the beginning as guilty (obnoxius iustitie puniendi) but at the end as innocent (obnoxius iustitie premiandi). Insofar as it is a "comedy," the poem is, in other words, an itinerary from guilt to innocence and not from innocence to guilt. And this is not only because in the book the description of the Inferno materially precedes that of the Paradiso, but also because the destiny of the individual named Dante, as well as the homo viator he represents, is comic and not tragic. In the letter to Cangrande, Dante thus joined the categories of the tragic and the comic to the theme of the innocence and guilt of the human creature, such that tragedy appears as the guilt of the just and comedy as the justification of the guilty.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE END OF THE POEMby Giorgio Agamben Copyright © 1999 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.