The Undivine Comedy

by Teodolinda Barolini

Accepting Dante's prophetic truth claims on their own terms, Teodolinda Barolini proposes a "detheologized" reading as a global new approach to the Divine Comedy . Not aimed at excising theological concerns from Dante, this approach instead attempts to break out of the hermeneutic guidelines that Dante structured into his poem and that have resulted in theologized readings whose outcomes have been overdetermined by the poet. By detheologizing, the reader can emerge from this poet's hall of mirrors and discover the narrative techniques that enabled Dante to forge a true fiction. Foregrounding the formal exigencies that Dante masked as ideology, Barolini moves from the problems of beginning to those of closure, focusing always on the narrative journey. Her investigation--which treats such topics as the visionary and the poet, the One and the many, narrative and time--reveals some of the transgressive paths trodden by a master of mimesis, some of the ways in which Dante's poetic adventuring is indeed, according to his own lights, Ulyssean.

Genres: Criticism, Poetry, Italian Literature, History, Italy

368 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is well worth one’s attention for understanding why The Comedy is so valuable for today. I would even recommend reading this before tackling the Poem on your own.

The Paradiso is a world without narrative with no discourse while only appreciating the simultaneity of the now and will connect the many to the one such that everything is nowhere while not being anywhere leading to the paradox of existence such that irony is jealous of authenticity. That is somewhat of an abbreviation of how the author describes what Dante is getting at and it would also be a perfect description for my other two favorite fictional books, Gravity’s Rainbow and Finnegans Wake.

At times I would get confused between what I was reading in this book and the other book I am currently reading Being and Time. The discursive nature of Thomas Aquinas as explained in this book would overlap with what Heidegger was getting at in B&T and the methodology discussed would overlap in my mind such that I would forget which book had told me which. A book I recently read Becoming Heidegger mentioned Heidegger’s debt he owed to Dante and Aquinas and it shows as I was reading parts of this book and B&T.

Ulysses is Dante. This book will make that point, at least in the literary sense in the meta-poetic way. (If you’re not familiar, Ulysses is in the lowest levels of Hell for breaking barriers and for deceiving while attempting to get knowledge beyond what is due humans and for going beyond the Pillars of Hercules).

Desire is a motif in Purgatory and the way this author breaks it down made me recall Schopenhauer and his Will and Representation. It’s as if Dante was channeling Schopenhauer before Schopenhauer wrote his book. The one philosophy book that I would recommend to start philosophy with would be Schopenhauer’s book not because he is the best philosopher but because he connects all of philosophy to a whole in easy to digest parts and Dante was there 500 years before Schopenhauer.

The religious person, Sister Mary Clemente Davlin in her course Dante’s Divine Comedy, saw Dante from a theological perspective. That’s great. That adds value for understanding, but a theological interpretation can mislead. For example, she gave the scene for why Dante has faith in the Church as if it was apodictic certainty and left it at that (‘why do you believe, because the bible says I should, and the bible is true because I have faith, and the church exist today through its miracles, and that proves the bible is true’, circular logic). But this author will take it one step further and show that Dante knows that the circle must be observed from the outside and that all irony is jealous of authenticity and Dante is getting at that through a meta-poetic statement.

Humanism starts with Dante. It’s not obvious, but almost all of philosophy that comes after Dante is within The Comedy. Dante has a post-modernist bent because he knows that the truth is out there but we will never really know it even if God reveals it to others and that the narrative about the narrative of our own existence is not attainable and justice is only divine when it is infinite and all determinations are a negation of the infinite. This book tells those kinds of things from a literary exposition perspective and the reader will get to understand The Comedy from a different perspective then they might be used to. Yes, Dante is very religious but a reader does well to understand The Comedy non-theologically.

[Davvybrookbook · Rating 3 out of 5]

So glad to have finished this. Perhaps I really want to give it 2 stars, but alas I cannot deny how helpful this source was to digest Dante. Moreover the focus on the Italian tercets with her own translations helped bridge a glaring issue of reading Dante in anything but the original vulgar Latin (Italian). After 256 pages of mixed Italian and English translations cutting up the analysis I feel like someone talking to a bilingual speaker who intermixes two languages freely and a bit too cavalierly. The style can be choppy, jumbled, and even unsetting. Frequently I just skipped over the Italian, and other times I read it. I would prefer something more linguistically digested and differentiated.

[Mieczyslaw Kasprzyk · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was going to spend some time writing a review for this book but I've decided to leave it to these few impressions/responses that hit me as I was reading. This has to be the very worst book I've read on the Divine Comedy. It is laced with pretentious academic language and mumbo-jumbo reinforced by an arrogance that looks down on the ordinary reader of Dante. Teodolinda Barolini is supposed to be at the top of Dante Studies - well whoever thinks that needs to get their heads examined. She comes to this, I can only think of it as a, dissertation with set ideas that totally ignore the fact that Dante was a child of his times; Medieval Catholic Italian. She can tell you how many times a specific word is used in the text and seemingly ignore the work as a whole; it's like analysing a piece of beautiful architecture by looking at individual bricks, or studying the grains of sand on a beach and ignoring the beauty of the place, the surge of the tides, the wind in the air. There is such a thing as being anally retentive when it comes to academia, and it doesn't really contribute to one's understanding of great works.
To give her some credit, she does throw in some jewels of knowledge and some perceptions that really do make you want to dive back into the text, but this is only more frustrating because it shows us what she COULD have done!
If you want to read a really well-written study of Dante and the Comedy read Prue Shaw's excellent "Reading Dante". Now THERE'S a real diamond!

[Serge · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this meticulous guide to the Divine Comedy. In-depth analysis of the Ulysses motif through Inferno and Purgatory. Great stitching of literary criticism (especially Auerbach and Fish. Convincing line of reasoning about Purgatory as Paradigm ("Purgatorio is the canticle in which the restless heart of the Christian pilgrim is most literally dramatized , embodied not only by Dante but by all te souls he meets"). Loved the discussion about Dante stepping out of bounds ideologically (and theologically) in Purgatorio 6 and the work on divine mimesis in Purgatorio 10 through 12 on the first terrace (pride). Had never really thought of Dante as celebrating himself as te poetic correlative of Giotto, but it now makes sense. Absolutely blown away by the level of analysis and argumentation in Chapter 9 ("The Heaven of the Sun as a Meditation on Narrative"). Very grateful to be able to incorporate this scholarship for my sophomore class.

[M · Rating 5 out of 5]

thank you page 303 note 36 for coining beatrix loquax