[In the following essay, Tambling examines Guinizelli's confession in Purgatorio 26 as well as Dante's response to it.]

Bâtisseur infatigable, le jeté est en somme un égaré. Un voyageur dans une nuit à bout fuyant. Il a le sens du danger, de la perte que représente le pseudo-objet qui l'attire, mais ne peut s'empêcher de s'y risquer au moment même où il s'en démarque. Et plus il s'égare, plus il se sauve.

———Car c'est de son égarement en terrain exclu qu'il tire sa jouissance. Cet abject dont il ne cesse pas de se séparer est en somme, pour lui, une terre d'oubli constamment remémorée.

———A tireless builder, the deject is in short a stray. He is on a journey, during the night, the end of which keeps receding. He has a sense of the danger, of the loss that the pseudo-object attracting him represents for him, but he cannot help taking the risk at the very moment he sets himself apart. And the more he strays, the more he is saved.

———For it is out of such straying on excluded grounds that he draws his jouissance. The abject from which he does not cease separating is for him, in short, a land of oblivion that is constantly remembered.

Julia Kristeva¹

Could Kristeva's meditation on abjection serve to comment in any valid way upon Dante? Criticism of the Commedia has tended to be unwilling to read Dante against the grain of his own narrative drive, remaining content to work within the terms of reference the text suggests for itself and to explicate these in the light of earlier texts. One concomitant of accepting the terms in which the narrative proceeds is that the poem remains centered, premised on the subjectivity of Dante who moves through it autobiographically, in a journey of the mind towards God. Todorov's and Benveniste's distinction between the subject of the enunciation and the enunciating subject, for instance, which opens up a gap and a textual unconscious, has not been taken up in any major way in questioning the differences betweeen the Dante who speaks and the Dante of whom the narration speaks.² Nor am I concerned here with that particular gap, though it threatens the stability of the subject the narrative of the Commedia privileges, who otherwise remains the distinctive figure of his own discourse, confirmed in his being unless criticism read the text against the grain, or deconstructively. The subject is separated from the figures he speaks to, who, in contrast, are framed and made to speak in confessional terms throughout Inferno and to a lesser extent Purgatorio, and even in the early sections of Paradiso.

In Julia Kristeva's writing on abjection, much of which is concerned with just how much, in order to consider itself a unified subject, the self must lay aside and discard as something worthless to be thrown away, we see an instant difference from this formal progression of Dante, where emergence from the “selva oscura” is the necessary ending to any “straying,” any mad wandering implied by égarer. No voyage au bout de la nuit in Dante: confrontation with various sinners keeps at bay the heterogeneous, the other, that which may well be the self's own abject. Encouragement to take the text as the record of a self not radically self-divided comes from the beginning, where the “stray” that Dante is says “mi ritrovai” (Inferno 1.2), as though to suggest that having found himself he is now a unified subject, though “wounded in the power of his will” (Singleton's gloss of the allegory of Inferno, canto 1, line 30).³ In abjection there is the violent negation of otherness in what is sloughed off, but it is also true that what is abject is also the source of desire, of constant recall, even of joy, jouissance. In the Commedia, though there are distinctions to be marked between the presentation of sinners depending on the cantica, at each stage it seems that Dante's rightness of attitude is established, and the heterogeneous other kept separate, not seen as a sloughed-off part of the self. Even the souls make that kind of difference. In Purgatorio 26, Arnaut Daniel is made to look on his past as a lover as “la passada folor” (144). Much of the Commedia requires the ventriloquism whereby historical souls have their identities spoken for: but that Dante's Arnaut can be dismissive about Arnaut Daniel's past suggests the dominance of the single-subject position which, as it speaks from the center of discourse is marked by the attributes of patriarchy (to follow through the terms of Kristeva). Arnaut's hiding himself and weeping as he sings suggests abjection; it may also imply a gender position, that which in its marginality is dispersed, weak, because femininized. It seems, then, necessary to read the canto to reverse these hierarchies, allowing for a flow between that self and what is constituted other to it. Encouragement to do this comes from the doubleness of the text. For Arnaut in Purgatorio sloughs off his past in the same way as he does in his love poetry: the state of desire that poetry and this poetry records remains the same; the actual madness which is looked back on is not necessarily left behind at all; Arnaut is always in that condition of desire between a love which is “folle” and that which is “fin”—the latter being implied in the “foco che gli affina.”

Even in terms of a formal reading of the text, following its narrative discourse, the divisions may be crossable, though they were set up between Dante and the souls who are interpellated into speaking an account of themselves. There are moments when a chiasmic reversal seems near—in the interviews with Francesca, with Farinata and Brunetto Latini, Dante's very existence depends upon their distinctive qualities being declared transgressive and punishable.⁴ Such reversals suggest that the basis of the huge courtesies and dignities of the protagonist, that centered subject, is the sense that only thus can people and things be declared “other” and kept thus through the formal scheme of punishments and penances at work in the narrative. Thus in this paper, by taking Purgatorio 26 with its poetic self-reflexivity, I want to locate transgressiveness, a discovery of the “other.” To describe this involves questions of gender, important for a canto centering on questions of sexuality; but the awareness of gender-issues immediately confronts any attempt to change the other into the “same,” into a system which supports entirely the values of the dominant subject. Attention to this “otherness” involves recognition of the text's unconscious: that is, it entails asking about textual repression in Dante, my argument being—though in the absence of a history of repression I can only state it here—that the medieval subject must be also a repressed one, like the modern subject of whom Kristeva speaks.

The encounter with the souls purging themselves, the lussuriosi, seems to be crossed by something else. I will concentrate on three chiasmic moments in the canto that interrogate the sufficiency of the textual utterance by asking what subtends it. The first is Guinizzelli (his name at the time of speaking withheld from us) defining the nature of his sin, in contrast to that of the other group moving in the opposite direction: “Nostro peccato fu ermafrodito” (26.82). The second is his comment on Dante's protestation of service:

Ed elli a me: “Tu lasci tal vestigio,
          per quel ch'i'odo, in me, e tanto chiaro,
          che Letè nol può tòrre né far bigio.”

Purg. 26.106-8

And he to me, “You leave, by that which I hear, traces so deep and clear in me that Lethe cannot take them away or make them dim.”

and the third is Dante's comment on Guinizzelli's “dolci detti” which while “l'uso moderno” lasts, will make precious their very ink.

These second and third moments have to do with the poetry of Guinizzelli and Dante; the first, with the sin that the cornice purges by fire. As only poets appear in the cornice of lust, a familiar link between poetry and the erotic becomes apparent. The second and third moments are linked by imagery. What does Guinizzelli mean when he speaks of a speech leaving traces? “Vestigio” (Latin vestigium, “footprints”) appears in Paradiso, canto 31 (81), in an address to Beatrice (“in inferno lasciar le tue vestige”—“to leave in Hell your footprints”) and in Purgatorio, canto 33 (108), when a guide stops if “trova novitate o sue vestigge” (“he comes on some strange thing or traces thereof”). Earlier it appears in the Inferno, canto 24 (50), as a synonym for fame, and here it evokes the impact that words about someone leave—as also in Purgatorio, canto 26. Fame is essential—fame

“sanza la qual chi sua vita consuma,
                    cotal vestigio in terra di sé lascia,
                    qual fummo in aere e in acqua la schiuma.”

Inf. 24.49-51

“without which whoso consumes his life leaves such vestige of himself on earth as smoke in air or foam on water.”

One more reference to vestige is found in Paradiso, canto 5 (11), where Beatrice says that if anything else seduces Dante's love, “non è se non di quella alcun vestigio, / mal conosciuto, che quivi traluce” (“it is naught save some vestige of that light, ill-recognized, which therein shines through”). Singleton compares with this De monarchia 1.8.2—“cum totum universum nichil aliud sit quam vestigium quoddam divinae bonitatis” (“since the whole universe is nothing else than a certain vestige of the divine excellence”). The context in De monarchia is a commentary on Genesis 1.26—“Let us make man after our image and likeness,” and it seems to imply a previous printing or stamping of works through the idea of the “vestigio,” so that the reflection of eternal light on the object which Beatrice speaks of is registered as an imprinting, a leaving of a permanent mark. If matter seems in Dante to be dull and resistant, in comparison to the spiritual, here it receives an impression which is not for nothing. The word vestigio implies a haunting, a shadowy presence persisting after the main body, the substance, has gone. Guinizzelli is himself a vestigio, then, and exists in a continuity with words in air, and with textuality itself.

For the imprint Dante's words leave will not fade or grow pale: Dante's response to Guinizzelli's comments is to say that as long as modern use persists, his rhymes will continue to make their very ink precious. Ink could be a metonymy for the paper; but it links back to the trace. Vestigio suggests writing—or perhaps illumination with Oderisi (Purg. 11.79-99) in mind (that context may also involve Guinizzelli). Oderisi, thinking of the book where writing and image go together, as though in a common identity, declares how the pages of his rival smile (“più ridon le carte”—11.82). In canto 26, Dante follows the revelation of himself to the spirits with the words “ditemi, acciò ch'ancor carte ne verghi / chi siete voi” (26.64-65) which Singleton, presumably following Wicksteed, translates as “tell me, so that I may yet trace it on paper, who you are,” which is suggestive for the “vestigio” as the trace; but his note to the line is “literally, that I may yet rule pages for it.” The poet is committed to further writing, with a stress on the labor of preparation of paper, like the labor involved in illumination. But covering the paper with lines, or with writing—as in Petrarch's address to the “alma genta cui tante carte vergo”⁵ is also an act of desire, or of love, here addressed to male spirits, and even ink is suggestive of passion in a canto describing burning: “incostri” (26.114) relates to the Latin incaustum, the iron-gall ink “oxidized, or burned into the parchment.”⁶ If the ink remains precious it does so because it is the record of a purification: to write is tendentially an act entailing the refining fire, and the ink is precious because it is the trace of passion, desire and suffering.

The trace in the context of preparing pages suggests the significance of writing within the terzina, of writing upon the mind or upon the prior writing that makes up Guinizzelli's texts; it also seems to evoke Derrida's sense of the trace, used to suggest how the forgetting of writing marks Western philosophy. The recall of the materiality of ink here means there is no forgetting, either of suffering, or—in a canto which shows how emotions are produced textually, through poets—of the conditions of writing. “Sovenha vos” (“be heedful”—Purg. 26.147) is a message inscribed within ink.

The trace is not only the disappearance of origin … it means that the origin did not even disappear, that it was never constituted except reciprocally by a nonorigin, the trace, which thus becomes the origin of the origin.⁷

The trace refuses the myth of origins, of any opening initiatory experience originating from a founding subject, so that experience is marked with previous writing. The trace is something dual, for it is not unambiguously there, recording as it does absence, non-presence at the origin. Such an ambiguity, a play of presence and absence, marks out this canto from the moment the shades speak of Dante—“colui non par corpo fittizio” (26.12), as not a shadowy fictitious body, which is what they are as traces—though within the text he is indeed “fittizio.” Dante's speech acts both as a trace within Guinizzelli who is prior to him (he died in 1276), and secondly as a form of writing within the discourse Guinizzelli calls the “parlar materno.” Any idea of linear progression in time is baffled: the “parlar materno” preceded Dante, especially if we can make any link between Guinizzelli as the “madre” and this language; but then, the trace is already within that mother-speech, the “parlar materno,” which as a concept or non-concept is created through Dante's poetry. That mother-speech cannot be an original whole language, therefore, though certain aspects of it I will read in Heideggerian terms, since Heidegger is so much the philosopher of language beyond individual utterance.

Thus, to follow this through, Guinizzelli speaks of that which he hears (“ch'i' odo”) and the phrase recalls Bonagiunta, on the previous cornice, who historically took issue with Guinizzelli.⁸ Bonagiunta speaks to Dante of the “dolce stil novo ch'i' odo” (24.57). He has already quoted the incipit of the canzone “Donne ch'avete intelletto d'amore” (24.51); what may both he and Guinizzelli be said to hear? The words continue to sound for Bonagiunta: with Guinizzelli, it is not clear what the words that leave such traces are: perhaps the words of grace that Dante has previously spoken, (26.53-60) saying that he is “going upwards to be blind no longer,” or the words uttered after his long silence, when he had walked looking at Guinizzelli, words not recorded but summarized in indirect speech, offering his service. But if the words conveying the trace include these last, not recording them may imply the sense that they also involve silence. Bonagiunta hears nothing: the absence that renders Dante's words fits the timbre of “sanza udire e dir pensoso andai” (26.100) where the absence of literal hearing does not necessarily shut the poet off into a single-subject state where he hears nothing, but suggests the effect of the trace in him, registered in silence. To invoke Heidegger is relevant here. His later philosophy has much to do with the subject's ability and need to let go (the process of “Gelassenheit”), and take language as that which the subject must experience as beyond the self, and more important than it. Subjectivity is always only in process, we are only “on the way to language,” not knowing what it is.

It is just as much a property of language to sound and ring and vibrate, to hover and to tremble, as it is for the spoken words of language to carry a meaning.

Heidegger gives priority to listening over questioning, since he defines language by seeing it not as a concept but as an event, speaking actively and thus forming the subject; furthermore this is an event which gives—es gibt.⁹ “Amor mi spira” indeed: Dante speaks in Purgatorio, canto 24 (53) as one who receives language from something beyond himself. The trace in canto 24, as in canto 26, suggests the occurrence of a chiasmus, as both poets, Bonagiunta and Guinizelli, receive something from Dante, reversing an historical narrative order. The same point could be extended to Virgil, whose work is now to be read with the Dantean trace within it: Virgil's poetry is under constant test and implicit criticism within the Commedia.

This return-effect, where a later poetry is seen to make an earlier discourse possible or richer, certainly fits with Heidegger, who takes the origin of the work of art to be beyond the personal subjectivity of the artist-just as, in Purgatorio, canto 26, the “parlar materno” allows for the poetic discourse of these modern poets. Heidegger I mention with diffidence, but not because his presence is unusual in Medieval Studies. Attention to the otherness of language in this area seems long overdue, and requires consideration in ways not confined to medieval rhetoric and to then contemporary understandings of such alterity: the terms of reference can very suggestively be those of Heidegger or Kristeva, since these attend to the possibility of repression existent unconsciously in that rhetoric, in those who were constituted subjects in the fourteenth century. Or were such subjects simply oppressed, not repressed? My diffidence comes from what is known of Heidegger's politics, which seem so much not accidentally tied in to his philosophy. The refusal of a tendential linkage between Fascism and a philosophy which disallows the individual cogito its clarity and insight in favor of arguing about the destining of Being seems too easy. And, another demurral, any attempt to trace the “feminine in language” in Heidegger must run up against the absence in his work of the erotic.¹⁰ In Heidegger, there is no surrender of the self in erotic relationship as there certainly is in Dante: in Purgatorio, canto 26, there are so many expressions of desire, such as the souls nuzzling each other, the half-bawdiness of the cries the spirits utter against themselves, the sons longing for their mother, the expression of love towards the father, the use of “frate” and the giving place of one self to another (26.133). These movements of desire are subsumed within the purging of the lustful who still desire in the flame (26.18, 52), as their erotic poetry was marked by desire and by burning. Their desire is a straying “en terrain exclu” yet it provides a jouissance, both in the ecstatic response of Dante and in the poignancy of Guinizzelli's reply.

If what was said of the trace suggests that previous texts are to be read differently as a result of the work of Dante, thus avoiding an “anxiety of influence,” this might confirm the sense of Dante as the dominant centered subject. But it could also be read as an aspect of “l'uso moderno”—modernity enabling a rereading of earlier forms of poetry. The phrase is normally considered to connect to the newness of writing in the vernacular, with reference to Vita nuova 25.4—“non è molto numero d'anni passato che appariro prima poete volgari” (“it was not a great many years ago that poets first appeared who wrote in the vernacular”).¹¹ If this is what “modern use” means, it includes Guinizzelli and Arnaut Daniel, with the “parlar materno” (26.117) a shadowy trace behind the writings of both, whether in Provençal or Italian.

Nonetheless the idea of the modern is not dependent on the definition of writing in the vernacular. Curtius discusses the word modernus as belonging to the sixth century, characterizing those who are of “now”; elsewhere he speaks of the distinction emergent around 1170 between “the humanistically minded disciples of antique poetry”—which would include Dante in the Eclogues—and the moderni.

The latter also write in Latin—there is never any mention of vernacular literature in these debates—but they represent a “new” poetics.¹²

“Modern use,” then, may well take up the associations of modernity challenging the literature of antiquity, both classical and Christian. Alan of Lille (1128?-1202) writes as a modern in the Anticlaudianus—his prose prologue arguing “Let this work not be disparaged as base nor suffer the sting of reproach because it reeks of the roughness of the moderns, who both exhibit the bloom of inborn genius and proclaim the merits of diligent care—for the lowliness of the dwarf, placed upon a giant's enormousness, surpasses the giant in height, and a brook gushing from a spring is increased and swells into a torrent.”¹³ The familiar twelfth-century image of the dwarf on the giant's shoulders who thus can see further than the giant, reappears in Alan of Lille as a mock-modesty; as in Dante, “modern use” implies the transcending of what has gone before.

Transcending, and being modern too, even as twentieth-century modernism introduced a radical questioning into earlier, dominant—realist—modes.¹⁴ The concept of the modern works through the twelfth-century in debates over what should be taught in the schools and universities, accruing suggestions that moderns are subtle, speculative—as in philosophy the moderni are associated with skepticism as regards epistemology and with a lack of a sense of determinism, of the necessity of things to have to be as they are in theological matters (Duns Scotus's voluntarism, his sense of God's potentia absoluta which theology could not touch, since it could only take account of the lesser potentia ordinata whereby God limited himself in order to enter into convenant with men). Perhaps the interest in empiricism of a modernus such as William of Ockham (only a little later than Dante, born in 1300) fits the text's reference to “esperienza” (Purg. 26.75) as that which Dante is collecting in passing through this region. Experience, which is sensory, as sexual love is, challenges the primacy of reason and theology, and the synthesizing of wisdom within a complete summa. Thus the conception of the “modern” may well touch radical ground, challenging not only settled opinion, but also the premises, rational and theological, that such opinion assumed in order to move to its conclusions. To associate Dante with the largely anti-Thomist moderni is not to attribute to him any definite set of beliefs that they had, but to suggest that the phrase “uso moderno” may carry with it radical, transgressive tendencies.¹⁵

The declaration that Dante's poetic, and perhaps that of Guinizzelli and Arnaut Daniel, belongs to the modern touches the heart of the canto and the question of Dante as the centered subject of his own text. It implies an historical awareness—perhaps an awareness of historical relativity, recalling the dialogue with Oderisi on the temporality of fame—but also introduces a narrative of movement forward, where modern use cannot perish: something new has come in with those poets who work with the “parlar materno” which cannot be gone back on. Another demarcation is suggested by the phrase from the poetry of Virgil and Statius, who are also there in the canto, Virgil speaking words of warning to Dante (26.3). And the separation from those older spirits and from their use for language connects to the erotic, suggesting that “l'uso moderno” is inherently transgressive through its linking of poetry to sexual love. Statius is not a poet of the erotic, though his subject is “furor,” and something of that non-eroticism may well be a subtext within canto 25, his masculinist account of conception and birth and the body and of the “fittizio” body (fictitious in not being flesh and blood; fictitious too in belonging to the fiction the poem is and the fiction Statius's narrative is). Such a statement about the erotic could not be made about Virgil, however, especially as in Purgatorio, canto 22 (57), he speaks as the “cantor de' buccolici carmi” (“singer of the bucolic songs”) and Eclogue 6.45-60 may well be cited in Purgatorio, canto 26 (41-42). The second Eclogue deals with homoerotic love, the sixth, eighth and tenth with heterosexual.¹⁶

But that ambiguity within Virgil's discourse is suggestive for the first statement I singled out for attention in the canto—Guinizzelli's confession of fault. “Nostro peccato fu ermafrodito” is said to distinguish one group of sinners from the other. But what marks out the others? Those who run past the original number, according to Guinizzelli,

“offese di ciò per che già Cesar, trïunfando,
‘Regina’ contra sé chiamar s'intese.”

Purg. 26.76-78

“offended in that for which Caesar in his triumph once heard ‘Queen’ cried out against him.”

They record a carnivalesque overturning of royalist and imperial pretensions: the spirits meeting, interrupting and shouting seem to enact a Bakhtinian carnival and saturnalia, including, almost, its own jouissance, recalling Kristeva—with this difference, that the spirits shout against themselves, accuse themselves, in that form of confession Bakhtin also finds to be part of the carnivalesque, a moment of affirming community.¹⁷ The reference to “Soddoma” (26.40) of course suggests homosexuality, recalling its use in Inferno, canto 11 (50), with the fulfilment of that reference in Inferno, cantos 15 and 16, but it seems also relevant to note the underlying subversiveness of this: the representative of Empire, on whose account Brutus and Cassius suffer in Inferno, belongs to the political will to tyranny which is undone by the anarchic spirit that comically subverts the title of King. Sexuality is seen as disruptive, carnivalesque, just as the cries of the people in the crowd go against the hierarchical order of Caesar's procession. This should be compared with Walter Benjamin's comment that “empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers,” which entails then being complicit in “stepping over those who lie prostrate.” In the context of refusing history as progress, a narrative of a catena of events which can be read teleologically, Benjamin urges the task to “brush history against the grain,” to read against that triumphal, purposive and fluent narrative.¹⁸ While Dante's sympathies rest with Caesar and his triumph, so far as he stands as the poet of empire, he also allows brushes against the grain. The triumph is not allowed to work on its own terms of reference. It is questioned by the activity of sodomy, which also represents in ideological terms a turning away from nature. Reversing nature and reversing an historical triumphal narrative involve the same thing; the questioning of ideological representations. To put these ideas together suggests that the lines have the power to undo the transgressive nature of sodomy, or, to make the transgressive the necessary.

A definition of sodomy in the medieval period would include acts of homosexuality, but not be limited to that; it would include acts of intercourse where the semen was lost—another connecting point back to Purgatorio, canto 25, and to Statius's solemn account of the itinerary of semen there. Wyclif, for instance, reads simony as spiritual sodomy, because through it the effects of the seed of the Word of God are frustrated.

For just as in carnal sodomy contrary to nature the seed is lost by which an individual human being would be formed, so in this sodomy [i.e., simony] the seed of God's word is lost with which a spiritual generation in Christ Jesus would be created. And as sodomy in the time of the law of nature was one of the most serious sins against nature, so simony in the time of the law of grace is one of the most serious sins against grace.¹⁹

Sodomy, then, names a kind of sexuality—or activity—that frustrates teleology, goal-directedness; its unnaturalness is linked to its questioning of the existence of a straight path or progression via transgression. It is, of course, relevant in this connection to recall Derrida's deconstruction of the “natural” by reference to the “dangerous supplement,” that is, Jean-Jacques Rousseau's acts of autoeroticism which fill out the space left by heterosexual love, and which also, in the process of “supplementarity,” define that love as existing, not on the basis of being “natural” but on the basis of personal fantasy.²⁰

Thus medieval sodomy, though it is named as that from a position of power, may also act in return to threaten the ideology of Nature, an ideology defended by Virgil who is made to say—quite out of the spirit of his second Eclogue—that the sodomites “spregiando natura, e sua bontade” (“[are] despising Nature and her goodness”—Inf. 11.48). It is the characteristic of Paradiso that there is no turning there, no deviation, no transgression—“appetito non si torce” (“appetite is not warped”—Para. 16.5). Dante criticism should not underwrite this set of valuations, becoming Freud's “secondary revision,” and failing to see the text as itself characterized by elements of difference that make single, monological judgements deeply difficult to maintain. I take Dante's “uso moderno” to involve the possibility of a carnivalesque evoking of transgression and, since the poetics glanced at in Purgatorio, canto 26, are placed alongside an evocation of the sexual, to see poetry as, like the sexual, running against nature and the ideology associated with it. Such a point might be intimated through the sodomites. But for the other, more prominent, more centered group:

“Nostro peccato fu ermafrodito;
          ma perché non servammo umana legge,
          seguendo come bestie l'appetito,
in obbrobrio di noi, per noi si legge,
          quando partinci, il nome di colei
          che s'imbestiò ne le ‘mbestiate schegge.”

Purg. 26.82-87

“Our sin was hermaphrodite: but because we observed not human law, following appetite like beasts, when we part from them, the name of her who bestialized herself in the beast-shaped planks is uttered by us, in opprobrium of ourselves.”

They shout “Nela vacca entra Pasife, / perché 'l torello a sua lussuria corra” (“Pasiphae enters into the cow, / that the bull may hasten to her lust”—26.41-42). The haste of the bull (“corra”) and the haste of the penitents (“trascorra,” 26.38) operate together: the speed is part of the disruption, in a canto otherwise notable for its meditative pace.

But both the abusive cry and the explanation of it, as well as the account of the sin as “ermafrodito,” read curiously. Besides the Virgilian source, Pasiphae derives from Ovid (Ars amatoria 1.289-386, Metamorphoses 8.13ff.). The context in the Ars amatoria is the willingness of women to be wooed and won and their readiness to transgress, Pasiphae with her white bull being a teasing instance of this. “Well known is that I sing of: Crete, that holds a hundred cities, cannot deny this, liar though she be.”²¹ The affirmation of truth in the context of Crete's reputation for lying (compare “the Cretans are always liars”—Titus 1.12) only puts the narrative into a context of fiction—which no doubt it is anyway. Further, the account of Pasiphae's love for the bull, ending in her experience in a cow of maple-wood, is playful, indulgent. It belongs to the transgressiveness of fiction. A strong contrast to that playfulness runs through Purgatorio, canto 26. The people speaking here are all men, the sodomites emphasizing the maleness of the erotic that is being purged—while, on the cornice, seven women in all are referred to—Mary, Diana, Elice, Venus, Pasiphae, Beatrice (if she is referred to in canto 26.59), Isifile, all invested with strongly symbolic existences. While Ovid teases by stressing the weakness of women, this canto avoids that fictionalizing and playful note by its investment in women as sexually corrupt. Pasiphae is marked out by a false, non-natural metamorphosis, becoming identified with the “falsa vacca” (“false cow”) of Inferno, canto 12 (13); and her unnaturalness plays against Guinizzelli's reference to human laws (these lovers have not gone to Pasiphae's lengths, we assume), and those human laws are contrasted by the text to the natural laws the sodomites break. In fact Pasiphae's breaking of laws aligns her more to the sodomites.

The antifeminism of the comparison, excluding any sense of male lust, the reaccentuation of Ovid's playfulness, and the forced comparison of ordinary beasts (26.84) to Pasiphae's extravagant behavior in relationship to the bull (26.87—an expression of a male fantasy)—these elements are curious. They may suggest an anxiety about the sexual which succeeds in displacing it. But more odd is the line describing the sin as “ermafrodito.” It might have been expected that the two groups would have encompassed both homosexuality and heterosexuality. Sapegno, Bosco and Reggio, and Singleton read “ermafrodito” as meaning heterosexual, Vallone and Scorrano as “bisessuale.” Thomas R. Nevin is interesting on the line, when he refers to early commentators taking it to imply bisexuality, and others to imply that these lovers were “ne l'atto venero ora agenti et ora pazienti.” He also has a footnote where he refers to Benvenuto da Imola's (to me baffling) reference to the “sin of hermaphroditism,” while he also cites Statius's characterization of copulation, “l'un disposto a patire, e l'altro a fare” (“one designed to be passive, the other to be active”—Purgatorio 25.47). The semen provides the active force, the menstrual blood, on which it falls, the passive. Nevin also, in view of this, reads Dante as a “triumphantly unreconstructed ‘chauvinist’” since for him “masculine meant … active.”²²

These readings are strongly divergent. “Ermafrodito” seems to mean anything from heterosexual to homosexual. Alan of Lille associates the hermaphrodite with the sodomite—

The active sex shudders in disgrace as it sees itself degenerate into the passive sex. A man turned woman blackens the fair name of his sex. The witchcraft of Venus turns him into an hermaphrodite. He is subject and predicate.²³

For Curtius, in the medieval period “only a fluid boundary separates [hermaphroditism] from male homosexuality.”²⁴ But a fluid boundary is exactly what Ovid's narrative is concerned with, as it deals (Metamorphoses 4.285-388) with Hermaphroditus, son of Mercury and Venus, being seduced by the nymph Salmacis. As with Pasiphae, the woman takes the initiative. Ovid gives the history of the boy's movement from mountains to streams (drawn towards something, he cannot intuit what), and depicts the nymph Salmacis as both the woman and the watery medium that dissolves identities and that eventually links the two figures together into one sex. The attraction, unknown by the boy is, in fact, for dissolution, for the loss of sexual difference, for the loss of the distinction between the self and the other. Such an aspiration belongs with the myth of origins that the Symposium plays with when Aristophanes gives his account of the original androgynes; and Freud's use of such a myth in Beyond the Pleasure Principle is suggestive again for the discussion of the setting up of desire from the search for the other (necessitated by the splitting imposed on these androgynes by the gods)—a search which will break down the painful initiation into singleness and individuality.²⁵ While Dante could not have known Plato directly, he could have been aware of the idea of Adam as originally androgynous, as Origen and Augustine (De trinitate 12.7) taught, which suggests that individuality belongs to the Fall.²⁶

If Guinizzelli had wanted to convey by his term “ermafrodito” that he and the others in the group were simply heterosexual, he could scarcely have chosen a more unfortunate way to express it. But Singleton's note on the word “ma” in the following line also deserves weighing:

The conjunction clearly implies that “ermafrodito” might also be used of a love that is not sinful.

Agreement with that means that the very transgressiveness of the “sin” characterized by hermaphroditism is itself necessary, and cannot be discarded. Both groups of sinners question the concept of transgression. While there are elements here strongly condemnatory of the sexual, and anti-feminist in their mode of procedure, there are also countervailing suggestions which deconstruct such a position by suggesting that the very nature of desire cuts across any ideological stability, and thus give the priority to that which is disruptive of order.

These moments of the canto may be thought together—the description of transgressiveness, which may belong to “uso moderno”; the trace existent in speech. Guinizzelli's description of his sin both reveals and conceals—it teases by its refusal to offer a complete explanation. But inherently the word “ermafrodito” takes femininity out of any marginal transgressive position, and makes it a condition of sexuality and of poetry, and of rule, too, if the reference to Caesar as “Queen” is remembered. Perhaps Statius's sense of the male as active and the female as passive is relativized by this canto, and Statius, as not a modern, declares his non-modernity in this (though his prior reference to the Aeneid in feminine terms in Purgatorio, canto 21 [97, 98] sets all this in almost dialectical terms: the feminine, the exclusion of the feminine, the declaration of the importance of the hermaphrodite). And the significance of the hermaphrodite, I take it (in light of Ovid), is the loss of single identity, the discovery of something beyond the single-subject position.

The canto becomes thus venturesome in Dante's response to Guinizzelli's self-revelation, which does not make Dante's desire of him less (Purg. 26.91) but involves silence, the breaking of a narrative which has so far been completely fluent (compare 26.25-27, 49-52 for that sense of continuity). The break is only filled by the statement that Dante was thinking; but the thought is concealed. A recognition of a gap in speech, doubly significant in a canto full of poets, where love and desire are produced by a performative language, is again suggestive in the light of Heidegger, for whom the boundary between silence and speech is not fixed.²⁷

Quali ne la tristizia di Ligurgo
          si fer due figli a riveder la madre,
          tal mi fec'io, ma non a tanto insurgo,
quand'io odo nomar sé stesso il padre
          mio e de li altri miei miglior che mai
          rime d'amor usar dolci e leggiadre;
e sanza udire e dir pensoso andai
          lunga fiata rimirando lui,
          né, per lo foco, in là più m'appressai.
Poi che di riguardar pasciuto fui,
          tutto m'offersi pronto al suo servigio
          con l'affermar che fa credere altrui.
Ed elli a me: “Tu lasci tal vestigio …”

Purg. 26.94-106

As in the sorrow of Lycurgus two sons became on beholding their mother again, so I became, but I do not rise to such heights, when I hear name himself the father of me and of others my betters who ever used sweet and gracious rhymes of love; and without hearing or speaking, I went pondering, gazing a long time at him; nor did I draw nearer to him, because of the fire. When I had fed my sight on him, I offered myself wholly ready for his service, with the oath that compels another's belief. And he to me, “You leave, by that which I hear, traces. …”

Later, Guinizzelli refers to the talk of fools (“lascia dir li stolti,” 26.119). Silence moves away from talk in the context of those who praise an art ostensibly dedicated to love but lacking, failing poetically. Heidegger's reference to idle talk—Gerede—is relevant; so is Barthes's sense, derived from Heidegger, that

the primary substance of literature is not the unnamable, but on the contrary the named. … The writer does not “wrest” speech from silence, as we are told in pious literary hagiographies, but inversely, and how much more arduously, more cruelly and less gloriously, detaches a secondary language from the slime of primary languages afforded him by the world, history, his existence, in short by an intelligibility which preexists him … the whole task of art is to unexpress the expressible.²⁸

Idle talk follows the art that fails; silence follows the art of Guinizzelli; whereof Dante can speak, thereof he is silent. Perhaps that silence embodies his refusal of the dominant subject-position. For in the quotation, not only the reference to the “vestigio” breaks up that single-subject position by its inclusion of the other. Gazing at Guinizzelli involves more than mere literal looking. It entails going beyond the male figure who would interpose himself—Lycurgus—in order to reach the mother who is also the father, in another moment of androgyny. Guinizzelli himself points beyond his work to the “parlar materno,” and thus replaces himself by the feminine. But then silence—whether Wittgenstein's philosophy knew this or not—is not simply literal either; it involves the unconscious, that which goes beyond utterance—certainly that of “gli stolti”—and which is here called the “vestigio.” Silence is not the absence of desire, then: there seems to be the implication that poetry—writing—is inseparable from the aporia, from gaps insistent within the construction of the erotic.

The trace, according to Guinizzelli, cannot be taken away by Lethe, which suggests forgetfulness, as of course it appears in Purgatorio, canto 31 (91-103). Lethe acts on the memory, obliterating it, but the memory of Guinizzelli, or the whole scene of writing altogether, has been so inscribed that such erasure is impossible. The past is Kristeva's terre d'oubli, constantly remembered. Heidegger's antagonism to clarificatory, Cartesian objective “truth” makes him return to the Greek word aletheia, which with its privative prefix a- and its stem which suggests escaping notice, being hidden, and its connection with the word “Lethe,” means “that which is uncovered, unconcealed, surpassing that which can be taken away by Lethe.” Forgetfulness: concealment—both concepts appear in this canto. Heidegger defines truth, contending that it is always something that must be

wrested from entities. Entities get snatched out of their hiddenness. The factical uncoveredness of anything is always, as it were, a kind of robbery.²⁹

There can only be glimpses at any moment of what is, and those glimpses play within a pattern of presence and absence, revelation and concealment.

The moment of the divine vision in Paradiso, canto 33, is also described in terms of Lethe and of the trace, rather than in those of direct perception:

Un punto solo m'è maggior letargo
          che venticinque secoli a la 'mpresa
          che fé Nettuno ammirar l'ombra d'Argo.

Para. 33.94-96

A single moment makes for me greater oblivion than five and twenty centuries have wrought upon the enterprise that made Neptune wonder at the shadow of the Argo.

The enterprise (“impresa”) of Jason, the first mariner, is only seen as the shadow of the ship, (or perhaps, less literally, the “ombra” would be the ship's wake, also a kind of shadow); it is revealed not in its full reality, only as a trace. Neptune looks up from a sea that has been darkened by the ship moving overhead, as Guinizzelli and his troop look out from darkened flames. (Perhaps Purgatorio, canto 2.42—the angelic ferry—may gloss, by comparison, the relationship of the ship to the water.) “Impresa” also bears the sense of “an impression,” and on the basis of my argument about the trace could contain within it the vestigio of a later meaning, i.e., writing (as a Renaissance impresa). The trace includes the wake of the ship as a vestigio, so what survives after Lethe takes away the full presence of the vision, is what Guinizzelli speaks of in Purgatorio, canto 26 (106-8). If Heidegger's stress on philosophy's having forgotten the question of being may be used here, it may be suggested that the self is at this point made aware that the basis of its insight and power remains opaque, unknown. The poem hides as much as it reveals; it does not, cannot bring a whole truth to light and clarity. Hence the hiddenness involved in aletheia.

But to rest with a sense of the text resisting a full reading is less interesting than to note how the self is given over, in any case, to a loss of itself through desire of the other. The erotic suggestiveness of the poets alluded to in Purgatorio, canto 26, necessitates going beyond a joylessness in Heidegger; his sense of the play of absence and presence needs supplementing by the sense that such a play is constitutive of desire and the erotic. Thus Arnaut Daniel, though he says that he cannot nor will he conceal himself from Dante, hides himself in the refining fire (26.148), as Guinizzelli has already disappeared like a fish going to the bottom (26.134-35): the fire, like the mother, sustains him as a necessary form of life. In Arnaut Daniel's trobar clus such as “Lo ferm voler”—the erotic sestina whose form Dante follows in the rime petrose—there seems also to be the desire to write or speak in such a manner that the utterance remains partially hidden. Concealment suggests that the object of desire is not outside language which itself sets up desire: jouissance is drawn from that play of language which is not articulated in such a way to set up a single subject or object of desire. For the canto to close with a literary form only partially readable, Dante's version of Arnaut Daniel's Provençal, suggests that the hermeneutic drive within the text towards clarification is attended by an opposite movement. Nevin suggests that “ermafrodito” may contain Dante's word-play and be rendered as “love-messenger, on the basis of Hermes' and Aphrodite's mythic functions.”³⁰ I would add my own sense that the link this canto makes between sexuality and language may be that Hermes operates in the ambiguous character of the hermaphrodite—revealing and stealing, agent of insight and eloquence—but he is also to be equated with the Egyptian Thoth, the inventor of writing, that inherently double and destabilizing form, which belongs with the undecidability of Plato's pharmakon.³¹

Arnaut Daniel is declared to be “a better workman of the mother tongue”: refining it like a blacksmith working something in the fire. Now the fire refines him. Especially in the light of Alan of Lille's sense of sexual inversion, and the imagery of “Venus' hammers being converted to the function of anvils,”³² there is at least the possibility in this line of a kind of incest—as there is with Arnaut's “chantar d'ongl' e d'oncle”—the song of finger-nail and uncle, suggestive of an incestuous crossing over—a chiasmus in that it suggests a switch of subject-positions—into the bedroom/woman's body which I assume is possessed by the uncle. If poetry as a form of transgression exists here in that line commemorating Arnaut as the “fabbro,” there is also a crossing over as the fire and the “parlar materno” seem suggestive of each other and double each other.³³

Doubling, which obviously breaks the single-subject position, provides a trope for the canto: in the two sons who see their mother, in the mother who is also the father, in the two groups running past each other on the cornice who both are and are not different from each other; and in the figure of the hermaphrodite who on this reading becomes the privileged figure to confuse the sense of a single gendered center of discourse. This may be where the real purchase of “uso moderno” exists. Modernity is contrasted with its opposite:

Così fer molti antichi di Guittone,
          di grido in grido pur lui dando pregio
          fin che l'ha vinto il ver con più persone.

Purg. 26.124-26

Thus did many of our fathers with Guittone, from cry to cry giving the prize to him alone, until with most the truth prevailed.

The “antichi” are not necessarily earlier in time than the moderns: indeed, in this context they can hardly be, since Guittone d'Arezzo seems to have been born around the same time as Guinizzelli (1230) and not to have died till 1293. The actions of the “antichi” stand in a near relation to the central event of this canto. Their “grido” is self-confirming, monologistic, contrasting with the “sopragridar” (26.39) of the double set of spirits, each of whose cry crosses the other's, as though to place sodomy and hermaphroditism in a relationship of non-determinacy with each other, neither given a hierarchical status in relation to the other. The “gridar che più lor si convene” (26.48) is impersonal, not taken up with the individual subject, whereas the cry of the “antichi” intends to confirm the greatness of a particular subject. In contrast, both Dante and Guinizzelli speak of others who are described as “miglior” (26.98 and 117) and thus evoke a poetry of plurality.

The comedy inherent in the self-accusing cries of these spirits, vying with each other to establish either sodomy or the sin of the “ermafrodito” as primary, comes close to affirming the essential nature of the erotic within speech, and asks for a writing which is beyond consideration of a dominant gender position. To suggest that the loss of hard distinction between subject and subject, which is glanced at in this canto where eroticism and poetry both mean the end of the sufficient discrete self, means an aspiration towards an écriture feminine is not to imply that problems of dominant masculinity may be swept away by reference to a notional feminine in writing that is nowhere else represented, or even to a privileging of the woman regarded in essentialist terms.³⁴ But it might imply that the writing and design of the Commedia, which are so usually strongly gendered as masculine, are brought, as here, to a recognition of the inadequacy of that masculinity to sustain them—that in late twentieth-century terms we might say that the excluded part (Kristeva's “terrain exclu”) is that which is dubbed as feminine, and that here in the canto of love which joins and separates the sexually different, there is the sense that it is only by the transgression of that ordered design that there is any writing at all.

Notes

1. Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l'horreur: Essai sur l'abjection (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 15; Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 8.

2. See Tzvetan Todorov, “Language and Literature,” in The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 132; Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), 225.

3. The Divine Comedy, 3 vols. in 6, translated with a commentary by Charles S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970-75). Quotations and translations of Dante are from this edition. I have also referred to the Commedia as edited by Natalino Sapegno, 2nd ed. (Florence: “La Nuova Italia” Editrice, 1968), to the edition of Umberto Bosco and Giovanni Reggio (Florence: Le Monnier, 1979) and to that of Aldo Vallone and Luigi Scorrano (Napoli: Editrice Ferraro, 1986).

   This essay continues arguments from my Dante and Difference: Writing in the Commedia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chap. 5, which contains my earlier reading of Purgatorio, canto 26; see 191 n. 25 for bibliographical suggestions: to these earlier readings, I add Thomas R. Nevin, “Regenerate Nature in Purgatorio 26” Stanford Italian Review 3 (1984): 65-81.

4. For the chiasmus, see Rodolphe Gasché, “Reading Chiasms: An introduction,” in Andrzej Warminski, Readings in Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).

5. Rime sparse 146.2, “noble spirit for whom I line so many pages,” trans. Robert M. Durling, Petrarch's Lyric Poems: The “Rime Sparse” and Other Lyrics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 292-93.

6. Leila Avrin, Scribes, Script and Books: The Book Arts from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Chicago: American Library Association, 1991), 214. R. A. Shoaf, who is working on the imagery of fire and writing in this canto, too, calls to my attention the following relevant study: Les encres noires au moyen âge, Monique Zerdouin Bat-Yehouda (Paris: Éditions du Centre National de la Recherche Sciéntifique, 1983).

7. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 61. The sense of the “vestigio” is illuminated by Augustine (Confessions 11.18). See Karla Taylor's translation (in Chaucer Reads the Divine Comedy [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989], 27):

   when past events are truly narrated, out of the memory are drawn forth, not the things that occurred in the past themselves, but words conceived from the images of those events-images that the events, in passing through the senses, have impressed in the mind like footprints.

   See also her commentary:

   All memory is verbal, and the inner words of memory (verba concepta) are themselves based on mental images, the traces left in the mind by sensory impressions and captured, in this passage, by the strongly visual comparison to footprints

   (vestigia).

   Words and pictorial images seem to exchange for each other here as both are dependent on a prior representation: the impression in the mind that is itself glossed imagistically as the “vestigio.”

8. On Dante's relation to other poets within the Commedia, see Teolinda Barolini, Dante's Poets: Textuality and Truth in the Comedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984).

9. Martin Heidegger, “The Nature of Language,” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (1959; reprint New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 98. For language as “giving,” see Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 214.

10. See Jean Graybeal, Language and “the Feminine” in Nietzsche and Heidegger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 157. For the absence of the erotic in Heidegger, see Edith Wyschogrod, Spirit in Ashes: Hegel, Heidegger and Man-Made Mass Death (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) where Heidegger is compared to Rilke. Any reading of Heidegger's philosophy must confront the political aspect of his work as discussed by Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism ed. Joseph Margolis and Tom Rockmore (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989) and Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).

11. Trans. Robert S. Haller, Literary Criticism of Dante Alighieri (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973), 116.

12. E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), 254, 119.

13. Trans. Kent Kraft, “Modernism in the Twelfth Century,” Comparative Literature Studies 18 (1981): 288. On modernism in this century, see M. T. Clanchy, “Moderni in Education and Government in England,” Speculum 50 (1975): 671-88.

14. Association of Dante with modernism is hardly new: in Eliot, Pound, Auden, Beckett, for example, see Stuart Y. McDougal, Dante Amongst the Moderns (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); and, for Joyce, see Mary T. Reynolds, Joyce and Dante: The Shaping Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); and more generally, Robert Pogue Harrison, “Comedy and Modernity: Dante's Hell,” MLN 102 (1987): 1043-61.

15. An excellent introduction to the moderni is found in Janet Coleman, Piers Plowman and the Moderni (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1981), chap. 1. On medieval scepticism, seen as in part a result of the failure of the Crusades, see John M. Bowers, The Crisis of Will in Piers Plowman (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 3-16, 43-60. For an overview of the period, see Heiko A. Oberman, “Fourteenth-Century Religious Thought: A Premature Profile,” Speculum 53 (1978): 80-93.

16. The dominant image of Eclogue 2—the lover burning—is relevant for Purgatorio, canto 26; so too the sense of love as madness—“me tamen urit amor; quis enim modus adsit amor?” (“love still burns me up; for what bound is set to love?”): cf. Arnaut Daniel on “la passada folor” (Purg. 26.143). Cf. Eclogue 6.47 on Pasiphae, “ah virgo infelix, quae te dementia cepit” (“unhappy virgin, what madness seized you”) with Eclogue 2.69—“ah, Corydon, Corydon, quae te dementia cepit.” Echoes of Pasiphae exist also in Eclogue 8. On the details of the love poetry, in Eclogues 2, 6, 8, and 10, see Michael C. J. Putnam, Virgil's Pastoral Art: Studies in the Eclogues (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).

17. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 227-66. I have discussed this aspect of Bakhtin in more detail in my Confession: Sexuality, Sin, The Subject (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), chap. 7. I have no specific Bakhtinian reference for the carnivalesque turning over of order that I evoke in this paragraph, but cf. Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 244-52, for example, for a discussion of Roman carnival.

18. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1970), 258.

19. Wyclif, “On Sodomy,” trans. Terrence A. McVeigh, quoted in Eugene Vance, Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 24. On homosexuality in the Middle Ages, see John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980): there is also much of relevance here to the hermaphrodite considered as the homosexual. Dissident readings of Inferno, canto 15, which construct Brunetto Latini's sin as not that of homosexuality, are important: see, for example, Peter Armour, “Dante's Brunetto: The Paternal Paterine,” Italian Studies 38 (1983): 1-38, for a recent statement of points for and against. It is another example of what Foucault calls “sodomy—that utterly confused category” (History of Sexuality 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981], 101). Joseph Pequigney, “Sodomy in Dante's Inferno and Purgatorio,” Representations 36 (1991): 22-42, sees sodomy in Purgatorio, canto 26, as “erotic excess” (39).

20. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 149-57.

21. Ars amatoria 1.297-98, trans. J. H. Mozley, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929), 33.

22. Nevin, “Regenerate Nature” (note 3 above), 77-78.

23. Alan of Lille, The Complaint of Nature, trans. James J. Sheridan (Toronto: PIMS, 1980), 67-68. The association of a correct sexuality with its carefully apportioned roles to correct grammar or syllogizing (see my Dante and Difference, 89-90) lends itself to deconstruction, as with Nietzsche's “I fear we are not getting rid of God because we still believe in grammar”—see Twilight of the Idols, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 38.

24. Curtius, European Literature, 113.

25. For an important deconstructive reading of Freud's account of Plato, which resists the idea that there is any sense of a founding myth in the idea of an original androgyny, and replaces this with a sense of the androgynous subject as already constituted by desire, see Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 148-62.

26. For Jewish, patristic and Gnostic understandings of the androgyne, see Wayne A. Meeks, “The Image of the Androgyne: Some uses of a symbol in earliest Christianity,” History of Religion 13 (1974): 165-208. In neo-Platonism, the hermaphrodite could also be taken as the image of perfect marriage: see A. R. Cirillo, “The Fair Hermaphrodite: Love-Union in the Poetry of Donne and Spenser,” SEL 9 (1969): 81-95; Donald Cheney, “Spenser's Hermaphrodite and the 1590 Faerie Queene,” PMLA 87 (1972): 192-200, and C. S. Lewis, Spenser's Images of Life, ed. Alistair Fowler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 36-44; Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 211ff., also discussing the hermaphrodite as a figure in alchemy, representing a synthesis of elements. Wind (75 n. 1) also associates the Hermaphrodite myth with that of Narcissus. Alastair Fowler, Spenser and the Numbers of Time (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964), 167, refers to the Gemini as depicted as androgynous. The Gemini are relevant to Dante (Para. 22.112-20) and may be glanced at in this canto as the two sons beholding their mother, which would obviously suggest Dante as also, in desire, “ermafrodito.”

27. Alan Megill, Prophets of Extremity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 169-70, compares Wittgenstein and Heidegger on the relation between poetry and silence, arguing that whereas Wittgenstein chooses silence (“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen,” “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”) with regard to mystical thought, Heidegger chooses poetry, but “it can be convincingly argued that Heidegger's poetry is a form of silence, and Wittgenstein's silence a form of poetry.”

28. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, sect. 35, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), 211; “Gerede” is the “already spoken.” Roland Barthes, Critical Essays, trans. Richard Howard (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), xvii.

29. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, section 44 (265).

30. Nevin, “Regenerate Nature,” 78.

31. “As a messenger, Thoth is consequently also an interpreter, hermēneus. This is one, among numerous others, of the festures of his resemblance with Hermes”—Jacques Derrida, “Plato's Pharmakon,” in Disseminations, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 88.

32. Alan of Lille, The Complaint of Nature, Prose 4, 135-37. Pasiphae is referred to here, as is Myrrha (cf. Inferno 30.37-41), not as in Ovid changed to a tree but into a pig as though to show the character of incestuous lust, and Tiresias (cf. Inferno 20.40-45, where Virgil speaks with amused contempt of his sex-change and return to his “maschili penne”—after he has found the use of his rod—his “verga” again. Such sexual word play may owe something to Arnault Daniel's “vergua,” his rod, in “Lo ferm voler”; see next note). This makes “ne verghi” (64) suggestive (vergare includes “to flog” [with a rod], “to rule,” “to write,” and “to pen”), perhaps making the act of writing sexual.

33. Laura Kendrick, The Game of Love: Troubadour Wordplay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 100 and 106, draws attention to manuscripts of Arnaut Daniel's “Lo ferm voler” showing the poet pointing at his text, as though giving place to the “scene of writing”; for this, cf. Richard Abrams, “Illicit Pleasures: Dante among the Sensualists (Purgatorio XXVI),” MLN 100 (1985): 1-41, esp. 25-29. For a reading of “Lo ferm voler,” see Charles Jernigan, “The Song of Nail and Uncle: Arnaut Daniel's Sestina ‘Lo ferm voler q'el cor m'intra,’” SP 71 (1974): 127-51.

34. For a skeptical but useful reading of the idea of écriture feminine, see Ann Rosalind Jones, “Writing the Body: Towards an Understanding of l'écriture feminine,” in The New Feminist Criticism, ed. Elaine Showalter (London: Virago, 1986), 361-77. The founding text of écriture feminine is Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa”: see New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle Courtivron (Brighton: Harvester, 1981), 245-64.