Peter Cowlam
Photo: MAMJODH
Borges – always a free thinker – at no time espoused Christian theology, but did regard one of Christianity’s foremost theological poets as having authored ‘the apex’ of all literature – namely Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), whose Commedia continues to be studied, and is regularly translated, by other writers. Dante composed his Commedia in three parts – Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso – in a verse form called terza rima (groups of three eleven-syllable lines whose rhyme scheme is aba bcb cdc etc.). The Inferno is a description of Hell, into whose successive circles various categories of sinners are consigned, and remain eternally. The Purgatorio deals with Christian Purgatory, which Dante conceives as a mountain of circular ledges, reserved for repentant sinners. Topping this mountain is the Earthly Paradise – the Paradiso – Dante’s vision of an aesthetically perfect world.
Dante casts himself as one of the characters of the Commedia, and selects as his guide through Hell and Purgatory Virgil, Roman poet of antiquity, and, significantly, pagan by a matter of only two or three generations (Virgil, 70–19 BC). Virgil’s Aeneid is the legendary account of the Trojan prince Aeneas, who after the fall of Troy laid the foundations of Roman power, whereas his Fourth Eclogue, in its celebration of the birth of a child to a Roman official, was believed in the Middle Ages to have been Messianic, a prediction of the coming of Christ.
Borges, in his essay on the Commedia, describes himself as a ‘hedonistic reader’, who never reads a book merely because it is ancient, but because of the aesthetic emotions it offers. ‘Aesthetics’ and ‘emotions’ for Borges belong to a very particular area of literary specialisms, and are not simply matters of imagery and musicality, of joy/sorrow, pain/pleasure, etc. Nowhere in Borges’s œuvre is it evident that the literary aesthetic is reductive to its corporal state, the body as the site of the senses and therefore prime in everything that is sensorily received or given. Similarly his sensibility, or his literary emotion, does not have much commerce in the quotidian exchanges of everyday human life.
What he responds to, and may even be slightly bewildered by, is an intellectualised emotion, which frames the notion of beginning (or I should say capital B Beginning) as an infinite regress, and Completion as a geometrical progression, to whose nth term can always be added 1, plus an ellipsis. In this sense he can be a lover of Dante, but unlike Dante can’t be a committed Christian, in whose Beginning is God, creator of heaven and earth (Genesis, 1:1), and whose End is the Resurrection (‘…Jesus shewed himself to his disciples, after that he was risen from the dead’ – John, 21:14) – or at least whose temporal end is the Resurrection, without which mortal redemption is not possible (and neither is heaven’s populace).
Borges pinpoints the Commedia’s aesthetic emotion in the relationship between Dante and Virgil, which he describes as ‘filial’ (Dante the son of Virgil). Virgil, because he’s a pagan, cannot accompany his charge beyond Purgatory, in fact is a sad figure forever condemned to that nobile castello, which is ‘filled with the absence of God’. Dante by contrast will see God. Dante will know, and understand the universe. Further than this, Borges isolates Canto XXVI of the Inferno as the Commedia’s high point, perhaps precisely because, for several reasons, it is representative of metaphysical being devoid of Christian hope. This is the episode of Ulysses, in a re-rendering of Homer’s Odysseus, who has been, in the pagan world, a traditional emblem of the soul’s journey, without a guide (without God as guide), to its celestial destination. The Greek word nostos describes that journey as circular, starting from and returning home, and between those two points encountering all of life’s adventures.
According to Homer, Odysseus completes his journey, returning not only to the bosom of his family but to the throne of his kingdom. According to Dante, Ulysses is punished for daring to seek out the mountain of Purgatory, at whose summit is the forbidden knowledge of the universe, a complete and ultimate meaning that it is not granted to mere mortals to know. This leads Borges to speculate that Dante in some way sees himself as Ulysses, a poet who has dared through his work to impinge on the mysterious laws of God. It is tempting to suggest that Borges is also Dante’s Ulysses, a triform who lives on that shifting dune whose origin is indeterminate and whose end is one of perpetual transmogrification. This is a condition that is sometimes called infernal.
2 comments so far ↓
Roger Conner Jr // Feb 9, 2010 //
On Dante, on the Inferno, is there any mortal with a working mind and soul who could not think, reflect, comment and write for days (years?)
Thank you Peter Cowlam for your brief and very literate reflection of the effect of Dante on Borges, and by extension, obviously on yourself (and I am simply going to have to find some of your work, after tracking backward through the authors tab here, I find the themes you deal with to be fascination to me at this time, and I am sure to many other as well…)
To some of your points, I may as well add some of my own semi-literate thoughts in this area, because although they do not pay by the word for commentary here, neither do they charge for the words!
I want to concentrate first on your sentence, “Borges pinpoints the Commedia’s aesthetic emotion in the relationship between Dante and Virgil”. True, and it is true of many commentators on “The Commedia”, but it troubles me.
In my first reading of “The Inferno” many years ago, I immediately took the very unpopular view that Virgil’s presentation was essentially only an act by Dante of “paying homage” to the pagan influences on his work (great as they were and undeniable to Dante himself) and (prepare yourself for a sacrilege) Virgil as errand boy.
Virgil was sent by someone, was he not? The central character of the Commedia, who would not be sullied by a descent into hell (unthinkable to Dante to even stain the hem of her gown!) had sent Virgil to act as a guide to Dante.
This central figure is of course Beatrice, the absolute “light” of the universe to Dante, short only of God and the savior. But can we accept that Beatrice, whom Dante once “saluted”, a woman he had no intimate contact with, could be such a guiding light to this man?
The short answer is yes. There were deeper emotional and psychological issues at work, issues Dante was trying to deal with, even if he seems to have been often unaware of the source of his need to resolve, given the age in which he lived.
Interestingly, Borges seems to confront some of the same unresolved issues, if one is at least familiar with his career in passing, and it can be argued that these issues remain to be resolved in the individual lives of all men in all ages: I am referring to the issue of the feminine, the attempt to resolve the problem of women.
It has been pointed out by commentators on Borges that he seldom created female characters in his own fiction and in fact often transmuted characters to the male to avoid it. In his own life, he engaged in a pair of marriages over his lifetime, both seemingly arranged for business conveniences to deal with his need for a caretaker given his blindness, his final marriage being questioned on legal grounds after his death. In short, his relationship with the female element of his life was difficult.
The same can be said of Dante, who upon being cast into exile left his legal wife behind, never to see her again. Psychologically, Dante’s mind held the romanticized, even deified view of the female that had been imbued into his sensibility by both the poetry of courtly love (so much a part of his literary formation) and the deification of the Virgin in his Catholic upbringing.
So the guide and the central relationship in “The Inferno” would have been, in the eyes of Borges, male to male, mentor to protégé, Virgil to Dante, just as it had been in Borges own early work, “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote”, Cerventes to, let us admit it, every male writer since Cerventes! (can any male writer lay pen to paper or finger to word processor without the ghost of Cerventes hanging over him? I have not been able to manage it…)
Dante has been criticized for his “Deification” of the female…surely there has never been as deified a female, short of the Virgin Mary herself, in all of literature as Dante’s Beatrice, the adoration for whom, to use his own words, “the song has never been severed”, and by extension the deification of the female image, but has any male writer since Dante found a better way to deal with the female? Since Dante, most males have shown a mix of confusion and misogyny when writing about women, or simply, like Borges, tried to avoid the whole problem by omission. Perhaps Dante had it right…deification is the only path forward.
At the time of writing the Commedia, Dante was in crisis: Middle aged, in exile, relying on the charity of friends, without mate in any acceptable sense for his time, vanquished by men he regarded of lower stature, both morally and intellectually. The Commedia is a poem written in search of consolation, of resolution of deep philosophical and existential issues. Borges must surely have felt the appeal of this search for resolution as blindness and age descended upon him, but Borges would not have had the consolations Dante made available to himself, the Christian faith with its sense of certainty in redemption, and the deified female image perfecting the aesthetic of all existence for the male who could avail himself psychologically of such an image. Cut off from these two great consolations, man is much lonelier in the modern age.
Thank you again Mr. Cowlam, for pushing me along in our study of the “filial” relationship we feel as literary heirs to Virgil, Dante, Cerventes, Borges…and now if I may speak so boldly, to Peter Cowlam.
Roger Conner Jr.
Peter Cowlam // Feb 9, 2010 //
Thanks for those kind words, Roger, and for some very illuminating comments, which will prompt my return, like you after some time, to a renewed reading of Dante.
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