[Menocal argues in this excerpt that the Vita Nuova's real subject is Dante's search for a viable poetry and that he ultimately succeeds when he adopts an absolute literalness.]

I

The story of the Vita Nuova is deceptively simple. The artist as a very young man falls hopelessly in love with an equally youthful Beatrice, and over a precisely marked period of years—the numbers will all turn out, in retrospect, to have been key markers—he acts out all the conceits of what we have come to call "courtly" love. In this endlessly suffering pursuit, hopeless beyond fulfillment, he sings the anguishes of such love and gives his readers a number of poems that are as lovely hymns to his ancestor troubadours as any those father figures ever wrote themselves. The living Beatrice in the first half of the book is thus the provocation of and the evocation in much marvelously self-serving and self-loving poetry, poetry that, in the strong vernacular tradition that fathered it, is primarily fascinated with itself and with the love object always just beyond its reach. The poetry itself is spun from that desire fueled and sustained by perpetual failure and endless seeking. The young poet playing the lover, then, indulges himself endlessly, has sleepless nights (some with remarkable dream visions), is physically ill, pines away … and sure enough, love poetry comes forth from the ordeal, as it is supposed to. All is well. Until, in a kabbalistically inscribed twist of events, Beatrice dies, and with her, for that young poet, so does inspiration. Without the absent object of desire, the young man is left without song—but he will not give in to such a fate. And it is Beatrice's death that provokes the realization that there is more to both life and poetry than that, than desire never fulfilled, than poetry that is its own center.

It is the dead Beatrice who is not only the focus of Dante's new life as a poet, but also, perhaps, a keen metaphor for his own first life and death as a poet. The new poet emerges from the crucible of her death a far abler reader of the text than the young troubadour who fell in love with Beatrice: he has turned to the truths that lie in the poetry itself, truths that were there before but that he could not read because he could not decipher the language they were written in. The centrality and necessity of death for this sort of revelation—a revelation rooted in both synchronistic and kabbalistic truths that taunt the modern reader—was keenly understood (and mocked, not so gently, perhaps) by Borges: his incarnation of Beatrice is a Beatriz who is not only dead but seems never to have been alive, but whose portraits reign over the house that shelters the Aleph, in the dark pit of the basement, that Aleph, that magic looking-glass that enables one to see, and thus write, the literature of the cosmos.

II

It has been, at least in part, the tremendously authoritative power of Charles Singleton's reading of the Vita Nuova as an authentic and all-powerful religious conversion that has kept us in the intervening years from seeing the full extent to which Dante's so-called prologue to the Commedia is first and foremost his manifesto of literary conversion. By this I mean—and this will be the point of this chapter—that the Vita Nuova is first and last about writing, that other conversions and other "themes" are ancillary to this principal, literal story, that of the artist as a young man. I will argue, in fact, that to convince the reader of the literal truth of that story—a literal truth we have taken, by and large, as a metaphor—is the very point of Dante's narration of this remarkably failed love story. It is quite remarkable that one of the dominant clusters of themes of Dante criticism vis-á-vis the Commedia in recent years, that of tracing out the almost unending instances of self-reflection, literary conversions, literary invention reinscribed in the text, in sum, Dante's preoccupation with his work and his craft and his text, has been far less visible in readings of this text. This is true despite the fact that almost everyone views the Vita Nuova as the important—if at times arcane and impenetrable—prolegomenon to the masterpiece. While a number of key critics have certainly understood and explored the metaliterary dimensions of the Vita Nuova, I want to suggest that what we call metaliterary is, in the case of this text, the plainly literary as well, the story at the surface as well as just below it, and that the combination, which is a species of kabbalistic writing, has by and large evaded our modern critical readings.

Clearly, on many points and at many key junctures, my reading of this text will intersect and parallel previous readings, especially Singleton's powerful and canonical model. But the difference, I think, is fundamental, rather than merely one of emphasis or tone: to say that the story is about literature at the surface and that the conversion story is about a crucial change in an ideology of writing is apparently to situate the Vita Nuova within a category of texts somewhat outside the bounds of conventional criticism. Indeed, this shift renders it highly accessible to the modern reader—precisely the opposite of what Singleton's reading does. The Christian conversion story, on the other hand, one in which an ideology of writing and literature is ancillary to the specific detail of Christian belief, is, as Singleton himself was the first to point out, profoundly distanced from us, from all readers since the Council of Trent, in fact, and remarkably difficult if not impossible to recapture. However, Dante's story about arriving at strong—indeed, categorical—opinions about what is "right" and "wrong" in literature possesses a clearly transcendental importance and is readable within various historical constructs, including our own.

In fact, Dante in the Vita Nuova is unabashedly, shockingly concerned with texts and writing, with how one reads the text of life and then makes it literature. The work begins with the invocation of the Libro della memoria ("book of memory") and the narrator's thus establishing himself as an author, a writer. This explicit self-characterization, abundantly ratified throughout the work, is sealed at the end of the work, when the author-narrator reveals his future plans and tells us what he will write in the future—a future which is post-conversionary, of course, because he learned how to read a certain language. One of the major effects of the prose-poetry format of the Vita Nuova is the continual affirmation, with each poem "transcribed" from the old text to the new, that the protagonist is, of course, a Poet. The story of the Poet rises most consistently to the surface, presented without allegorical or symbolic intermediary. As Ezra Pound says, emerging from the critical/philological constraints of 1910 (not far different from our own in many ways), "Saving the grace of a greatly honored scholar, to speak of the Vita Nuova as 'embroidered with conceits' is errant nonsense. The Vita Nuova is strangely unadorned. … It is without strange, strained similes. … The 'Lord of the terrible aspect' is no abstraction, no figure of speech. There are those who can not or will not understand these things."

Indeed, to believe in the literal truth of the literary story of the Vita Nuova is, first of all, to begin to account for the otherwise unaccountably strange power of the story; it is rendered readable, what some might call "relevant" (if the latter had not become, in recent years, a term of opprobrium among so many), not just to the modern critic and reader but, crucially, to other writers, writers who, after Dante, struggled with his very deeply seated and in many ways very rigid views on the proper nature and function of poetry' and literature. While the import of the specifics of an individual's faith may indeed, as Singleton recognized, dissolve into history, a strong poet's vision of poetry is never impenetrable or insignificant, even in its detail. In this text, then, as much as at the heart of the Commedia, Dante is a literary historian and theoretician; but here, in this more primitive story of his conversion, we have a starkly kabbalistic story as well, one in which the poet stands far less adorned, naked, vulnerable. The young artist has bared his soul and told us of his massive disappointments—his failures, really—and how he turns things around. As has been recently pointed out, Dantology has been a slave to Dante himself, a Dante who has convinced us, through the most remarkable rhetoric, of what his texts are about—and in this case, the authorially guided emphasis on the positive future has indeed obscured how much death and a dead past are the obsessions of a text thus deceptively entitled. In this, as in much else, Dante is a kabbalist, reading and interpreting "with excessive audacity and extravagance." What is at stake everywhere in the Vita Nuova is the Book, its reading and its rewriting, and, of course, it is Beatrice's death that constitutes the indispensable heart of the conversion (and this is equally true whether we read it as principally poetic, theological or amorous). Above all, the Vita Nuova, the story so charmingly called the "New Life," is in fact the story of the death—the purposeful and necessary death—for Dante of the old ways of reading and writing, the old kind of Literature, that had proved so disappointing.

III

The momentous break that marks the beginning of lyric poetry in the European vernaculars has been an obsessive fascination for critics since Dante himself first made it a legitimate object of study in his De Vulgari Eloquentia. It is one of a number of literary-historical subjects about which the braggart claim can be made that more has been written about it than about any other. Of the many entangled issues in this domain, I wish to single out the two major metaliterary ones that seem to me to have been of greatest concern to Dante the author of the Vita Nuova: the issue of the "new life" or new beginning for poetry that is so starkly raised by the conspicuous establishment of the vernaculars of eleventh- and twelfth-century Europe as a new beginning in literary cycles, and the deeply solipsistic nature of that newly minted poetry itself.

One can, paradoxically, dispense with any extended review of the "origins" debate(s), for when and where the story of lyric poetry in the European vernaculars "actually" begins (a matter, of course, of some considerable dispute) is not nearly so important in this discussion as the fact that it does have a discernable beginning, that it is and was perceived as a major rupture vis-á-vis its "classical" antecedents. Indeed, whatever the provocations and contingencies at its beginning, the denouement of the story invariably includes the remarkable invention that did indeed take place as part of the cluster of innovations conveniently tagged as "twelfth century": the vernaculars were born and prospered as literary languages, as the prime matter of a literature perceived (then, as well as now) as "new." It is difficult to overestimate the importance, difficulty, and implications of such an event, and it is supremely important to remember that, unlike the biological analogy that gives rise to the "birth" metaphor, a death is the implacable contingency of such creation: the displacement and substitution of a new language almost invariably constitutes, despite the wishes of many, the death of the one being replaced. Even more dramatically and with greater pain, of course, a number of paternal figures are supplanted by others. Dante, of course, was not only fully aware of these issues but both disturbed and fascinated by them: even his discussion of Latin as never having been a natural language at all but rather a koine, an artificial construct, smacks of self-justification, the defense against some unheard but deeply sensed reproach. His discussion of the inevitable evolution of natural and living languages, as opposed to those that are dead in their immutability—and the embarrassing but lurking hint that the same may hold for the poetry of such languages—leaves in no doubt his sensitivity to the issues of transitions and replacements that are both birth and death.

Thus, the specific historical conditions of the rupture are by and large irrelevant here. Almost any of the models that have been proposed for such origins share the characteristics that are critical for the perspective necessary for this reading of the Vita Nuova: a linguistic rupture that involves the canonization of a language previously spoken but not canonized, and the concomitant invention of poetic norms for a complex written poetry springing, in different measures and ways, from both an oral tradition (the spoken and probable sung vernacular languages and songs) and a written tradition or traditions. Dante's descriptive metaphors of heritage are unambiguous: the mother's language (her lullabies and love songs alike, those models of sung and unwritten literature) is being elevated to the status of what is otherwise the father's, and the father's, the classical, is then, of course, replaced as the model by the child's, by this "new" language of poetry. Of course, there is an important paradox in all of this: the establishment of this new form, when it is sufficiently entrenched to be considered canonical (as was certainly the case soon enough with both Provençal and Mozarabic lyrics, for example), itself becomes a new norm, a new canon, a new father figure to be either followed or replaced. Thus, a Dante acutely aware of the literary history of which he is a product (and out of which, in many ways, he is trying to write himself) has not one but two major ancestral historical forms that have given him birth as a poet: firstly, the classical, since he is still, of course, a reader of that tradition; and secondly, and no less critically, those first several centuries of the vernacular or troubadour writings which, by the turn of the fourteenth century, are themselves quite legitimately a tradition. Historical foreshortening should not obscure the fact that the latter was in its own right no less oppressively canonical for a writer like Dante. Dante, then, stands at what may be a unique kind of crossroads in terms of poetic ancestry: because he is still remarkably close to the Latin tradition, certainly enough so that it is a fundamental part of his linguistic and poetic upbringing, it has paternal authority and will constitute, when he writes in Italian, a model he is rejecting. But—and this is the peculiarity and perhaps the paradox—he has imbibed a considerable and powerful vernacular tradition as well (certainly the De Vulgari is an homage, among other things, to that part of his ancestry), one which was itself eminently canonical and well established, in many crucial ways decaying and at an end, dead in the death of static and artificiality, by the time Dante began his writing career. Thus, although the extant vernacular tradition also defined itself, in great measure, as breaking from that same classical patronage, it too was a past for Dante; it too has been indispensable in his creation, and it too, inevitably, must be left behind.

If Dante embraces the first of the two salient characteristics of the troubadours, the substitution and recreation of a new poetic language deriving from the maternal tongue, ultimately he is deeply troubled by its second distinguishing feature, by what we insist on calling "courtly love" but is far more advantageously described as poetic solipsism. Dispensing, once again, with the seemingly interminable discussions of many often irrelevant ancillary aspects of the "courtly love" debate, and focusing on those readings that coincide with Dante's own interpretations of his antecedents, one can indulge in the simple assertion that the greatest obsession of troubadour poetry is itself. The poetry appears, on the first level, to be about an inaccessible love object; but when one apprehends, as most poets have, that the love is inaccessible because only then can the poetry be generated, then the true, the consummated objects of love are revealed: language itself and the music and poetry that are its receptacles. Given the historical nature of the dramatic linguistic break that is being executed and the new language that is being forged and molded as one goes along, it is scarcely surprising—perhaps even inevitable that the creator will be more intrigued by his own creation than even normally. The circular and solipsistic (and some would eventually say sterile and pristine) nature of the poetic ideology is striking: since the generation and writing of the poem itself depends on lack of fulfillment, only an unfulfilled love can exist within the borders of this poetry—since poetry itself is the real desired object. The circle is a tightly closed one (as Zumthor has so well pointed out), the poetry often starkly hermetic, the love perforce a dead end, "sans issu" ("without issue, or offspring"), as the Tristan poet will tell us, and the ultimate adoration is of the lyrical form per se, of this poetic language quite literally in the making. While these features are abundantly clear from the earliest Provençal examples (one need only remember Guillaume's "Farai un vers de dreyt rien" [I will make a poem from absolutely nothing]), the phenomenon reaches its peak and glory in what is called, appropriately and in full recognition of the tight hermetic circle, the trobar clus, perhaps best rendered as "self-enclosed poetry." The master craftsman here is, of course, Arnaut Daniel, who, among other things, appears to have invented what is certainly one of the most difficult of lyrical forms, the sestina. The essence of Arnaut's accomplishment is best conveyed by the high priest of his cult in the modem period, Ezra Pound, who first learned about him in his truncated studies in Romance philology at the University of Pennsylvania, but who, shortly after abandoning that formal academic training, expended considerable independent effort on the translation of most of Arnaut's eighteen known extant songs, writing in 1918, "I have completely rewritten, or nearly finished completely rewriting all Arnaut Daniel." Two years later Pound published his essay of admiration on "il miglior fabbro" ("the better maker, craftsman"), delighting there in Arnaut's two salient characteristics: the stunning musicality of his verses and their hermeticism. Pound's translations, which are not, in fact, as complete as he had claimed, in turn also feast on these qualities of Arnaut's poetry (the very qualities which make him so perfect an exemplar, because of the high pitch of focus and the distillation—some might say exaggeration—of obsession with self and lyricism), and Pound's renditions are sparkling mosaics of almost meaningless beautiful sounds. As one critic of those translations has put it: "One winds up with the opposite of a literal trot: a free rendering that corresponds more with the original in terms of sound than in sense of imagery."

That, then, distilled through the later, far more iconoclastic philologist-become-poet, is the ancestor whom Dante too would hold up, in the considerably different, retrospective light of the Purgatorio, as exemplary of the tradition that had preceded him and molded him, although, crucially, the tone of Dante's apparent praise has not been much listened to … But no matter, for the time being: Dante's high estimation of Arnaut's craftsmanship and of the essential apprenticeship provided by the full range of the vernacular traditions is everywhere apparent. The De Vulgari, certainly, makes it abundantly clear that the Proven, al corpus, and the Sicilian one closely linked to it, constitute explicit role models, and from the opening pages of the Vita Nuova there is no doubt that a crucial part of the story told is that the young Dante Alighieri has apprenticed himself to the rich (and by then venerable, over two centuries old) traditions of the highly self-reflective love lyrics of the Romance vernaculars. His own earliest efforts are so unmistakably (and self-consciously) a part of that tradition that they include, among other things, sestine to equal Arnaut's own best examples of the trobar clus. But the young artist ends up being far from satisfied with the poetics of predecessors who were once attractive, in part, because they stood as revolutionaries with respect to their ancestors (who were Dante's own, at the same time), predecessors who taught him, quite literally, how to write in the parlar materno, the mother tongue. His conversion from their poetics to his own thus becomes the meticulously chronicled story of the Vita Nuova; this follows the archetypical structures of autobiographies in beginning at the end of the story, a story which is that of how the author came to be able to understand what he had already written and then go on to write his new kind of literature—that literature of the New Life.

The confusion here, in part, is that of the occasional doubling between historical author and the author who is the poet of the story of the Vita Nuova. The role played out by the protagonist is that of authorship itself, and this conflation, a making explicit of what is always implicit, is part of Dante's kabbalistic enterprise: what is written is literally true and precedes any other reality. Among other things, that mysterious book from which the author Dante is taking his text is very much the kabbalistic text of reality. As in the Commedia, there is a tension between author and protagonist, the younger author, which is parallel to the tension between poet and pilgrim in the later text. After all, one is bent on usurping the other, quite literally taking his place, and the reader too suffers at least some of the anxieties and fears that naturally attend to such mergers of personalities within the self as we follow the not always gradual merger—at times a death struggle—between the two. At the end, after an apparently full assimilation of the implications of the conversion, we have the new author as he sits down to—in this case—rewrite, copy, recount, the story of how the old life came to be the New Life—all, of course, inevitably, from the light of the New Life which has recast the meanings and intentions of what was read and written in the old. All, of course, rooted in the death of the old. Freccero, in words about the Commedia which are no less applicable to the Vita Nuova, notes that "the paradoxical logic of all such narratives is that the beginning and end must logically coincide in order for the author and his persona to be the same." In the case of the Vita Nuova it is critical to note that the coincidence or convergence that unifies the beginning and end of the text is, furthermore, a congruence of emphasis on the process of writing: the first chapter gives us the author sitting down with a "book of memory" at hand and about to give the reader what we may best call a version of that text, and the last chapter ends with an invocation of a text to come, the text that is the logical and necessary result of the conversion just recounted—as it turns out, the Commedia. And in the Vita Nuova, it is worth repeating, the persona of the author, most markedly at the points of resolution and convergence, is the Poet. The conversion which is the fulcrum of change involves the movement, at least in theory a radical one, from poetry that serves itself primarily and a solipsistic love in the process, poetry as music and verbal hermeticism, in other words, to a poetry whose meaning and unequivocal truth exists a priori outside itself and its own frame of reference, a poetry pre-inscribed in the cosmos. The poet in this new universe is not the creator but the agent of revelation, at times even unknowingly so: the meaning of magic and sequences and visions may not be known until a startling revelation makes it transparent. This, of course, is exactly what is indicated in the recounting of the Vita Nuova's seemingly impenetrable first dream and in the author's annoying denial of an explanation for his puzzled readers, saying: "Lo verace giudicio del detto sogno non fue veduto allora per alcuno, ma ore e manifestissimo a li più semplici" (The true meaning of the dream I described was not perceived by anyone then, but now it is completely clear even to the least sophisticated [chapter 3]). This is, from certain necessary perspectives, the story of a Platonic conversion: the harnessing of the primitive power of music—Poetry—to serve the needs of a kind of reason—Truth. But this is thus a species of reason that would be easily dismissed by almost any Platonist, for it is a reason which reflects not only transcendental Truths—which may or may not be true in an Aristotelian paradigm—but which is grounded in a shocking belief in the necessary truth of textuality itself and in the synchronicity that more traditional rationalists squirm away from uneasily.

IV

The major dramatic turn of events, what can be fairly described as the literary conversion, in the Vita Nuova is drawn out over nine chapters, from 19 to 28, thus beginning just before the midpoint of this text of forty-two chapters. The first two of these contain two of the poems generally described as "stilnovistic," "Donne che avete intelletto d'amore" and "Amor e 'l cor gentil son una cosa," and even if we had no other indicators, we might well suspect we are on the threshold here of an important shift or event, because these are the poems in which Dante's immediate poet-ancestors most starkly reverberate. If the poems, as well as the actions narrated, of the first eighteen chapters are reflexes of the earlier "courtly" traditions of Provence and Sicily, these two poems, following both chronology and taste, approach Dante himself: they are kissing cousins to and resonances of the poet's contemporaries and near-contemporaries, Guinizelli and especially the powerful and enigmatic Cavalcanti, to whom the Vita Nuova is dedicated and who is called here the "primo amico." In the chronology of a poetic autobiography, then, the alert reader would anticipate a threshold: narrator and protagonist must soon merge, since the last of the poetic antecedents, those still lurking about in the authorial present, are rapidly falling behind.

But from a narrative, structural point of view the text is still at this point adhering to the initially established (preconversion) format. One must pause here to consider carefully the peculiar structure of this text: "Everyone knows" that the Vita Nuova is a prose-poetry text—and it is then described as either a hybrid or a sui generis. But far fewer seem to have noticed that what is of utmost importance is the variable nature of the prose-poetry relationship, the shifting relationship of three different voices vis-à-vis each other that is of interest, since in fact a major formal conversion will occur in this central cluster of chapters as well. The first part of the text is composed so that those chapters that contain poems (not all of them do, of course) include two very different prose voices which frame the lyric voice between them. There is the initial narrator, who has been telling us the story all along and is the generally unchallenged voice in the structurally simpler chapters that contain no poetry. This is the voice which is the autobiographical "I," necessarily already knowing the outcome but attempting to narrate the events "innocently" as he goes along, with a sense of fidelity to his preinscribed text. (This narrator appears also to have an often acute sense of the reader's expectations of suspense and dramatic outcome from something that has been marked off in the preexisting text and announced as the point at which a new life began.) This Dante narrates the events which, in these chapters at least, occasion or inspire a poem, introduced at the end of that chapter's events and following immediately thereafter. And these poems are—and here lies, finally, some considerable strangeness—in turn followed by a brief and usually completely straightforward and formal description of the poem itself, that poem that has just been presented. This second prose section of the chapter is normally called a divisione.

Thus, in the first movement of the text, roughly its first half, in each chapter that presents a poem (or more than one poem, as is the case in some chapters), there are three formally distinct presentations of what might be crudely described as the "same material": a prose narration of "what happened"; the poem(s) that formed the lyrical reaction to the event(s); and finally, and most mysteriously for almost all critics, a pseudoscientific and remarkably banal explication of the poem's structure and "divisions" (i.e., its formal fundamental formal characteristics—that is why these blurbs are called divisioni, of course). In the invariable order of these three components, this last is a miniature and accurate, but essentially quite primitive, explication de texte. The first problem in knowing just what to make of these little expositions of the poems that precede them is their transparent limitations: they rarely go beyond telling the reader what he can see for himself (even "li più semplici," as Dante would have it). Traditional criticism has scarcely gone beyond pointing out the conspicuous similarity these divisioni bear to mechanical scholastic procedure—and Boccaccio, as editor of the Vita Nuova, acts out this reading by shifting these highly formal and starkly positivistic glosses to the margins. But there is a no less puzzling feature, one that seems largely to have gone by the wayside in most readings: these unadorned little expositions, beginning about halfway through the text, are either eliminated altogether or are fully integrated into the quite different voice of narration that precedes the poem. The text's second movement is thus substantially altered, structurally and tonally, from its first: after chapter 27, in which the canzone stands starkly alone, without any divisione, each chapter that houses a poem finishes with that poem—and the voice of mock Scholasticism, that droning voice of the self-evident gloss, the simple student at his rote best, is either gone altogether or transformed, absorbed into the "crowd of Dantes" of the storyteller. But I am getting ahead of the story here.

In chapters 19 and 20 we are still playing by the old rules: Dante has given us his remarkable "philosophical" or stilnovista poems and the reader is still given a divisione after each. The subsequent chapter, 21, exists almost exclusively to give us yet a third sonnet in what would be called the "sweet new style" in the retrospective clarity of the Purgatorio, and it too is followed by an exposition of its outward form. But the action of the story starts to pick up again in chapter 22 when Beatrice's father dies, a prefiguration of the more significant death that is to follow. If, however, Beatrice alive is in part an emblem of the old poetry, then her father's death is much more than mere foreshadowing of her own, since the death of the old poetry's father is a literalization of transparent significance. In chapter 23, Dante dreams that Beatrice herself has died, and once again there are at least two sayers of textual truth that mark events: the "annunciation" of what is "really" to happen and the literalization of the dream itself, the synchronicity playing itself out. And, in a relentless accumulation of images destroying the past, Dante's multiple literary pasts, there is yet another death—or, more appropriately, a disappearance—in chapter 24, in which we see for the last time the figure of Love.

Love had played a significant role in the first half of the book, the literally personified metaphor for Love as a separate entity and persona. His fourth and last appearance here is both spectral and explicitly intended to clarify that he is disappearing because there is no longer any need for him, no longer any call, in the development of the artist's poetic ideology, for this kind of poetic prop. The narrator tells us that Love himself clarifies his own insufficiency, and quotes him as saying: "E chi volesse sottilmente considerare, quella Beatrice chiamerebbe Amore per molta simiglianza che ha meco" (Anyone of subtle discernment would call Beatrice Love, because she so greatly resembles me [chapter 24]). It is of considerable significance that this revelation comes on the heels of Beatrice's first death, so to speak, for that is what one must make of Dante's first knowledge of her death in a dream. Beatrice herself is no longer that dying kind of love poetry any more, the kind that needed agents like Love, elaborate and mediated poetic imagery, to be meaningful. It is crucial to remember here that the older, the first, the now-vanishing Beatrice had such needs, and in that purposefully cryptic first dream, with that engaging but teasingly difficult sequence of the burning and then eaten heart, she had exhibited some awareness of the nature of her limitations, at least in life. It is perhaps at this point, and not at the end of chapter 3, when Dante taunts us with the "obviousness" of the meaning of that numerically critical dream, that we can speak with some modicum of assurance about what it might in fact have so "obviously" signified. But again I get ahead of the story, for the meaning of the dream is explicitly dependent on the revelations of the conversion.

Returning, then, to the dismissal of Love from the story, the reader is left to conclude that mediation and metaphor in poetry have flown out the window—and in case it was not clear from Love's dramatic last annunciation and bowing out of the scene, Dante devotes the following chapter, the liminal twenty-fifth, to a clear prose discussion of the nature and purposes of poetry. It is a passage which includes a round dismissal of his vernacular antecedents, saying, "E la cagione per che alquanti ebbero fame di sapere dire, e che quasi fuoro li primi che dissero in lingua di si" (The reason why a few ungifted poets acquired the fame of knowing how to compose is that they were the first who wrote poetry in the Italian language [chapter 25]). Even more to the point, the chapter ends with the following succinct statement on what real poetry ought to be: "PerÒ che grande vergogna sarebbe a colui che rimasse cose sotto vesta di figura o di colore rettorico, e poscia, domandato, non sapesse denudare le sue parole da cotale vesta, in guisa che avessero verace intendimento" (For, if anyone should dress his poem in images and rhetorical coloring and then, being asked to strip his poem of such dress in order to reveal its true meaning, would not be able to do so—this would be a veritable cause for shame [chapter 25]). Once again, one is compelled to remark on the extent to which the Dante of the Vita Nuova is cultivating varieties of transparency; here, certainly, masking is not only dropped, it is denounced. (There is thus some irony in noting that so much criticism of the work has remained attached to the language of metaphor that is being banished from the "new life": in fact, the details of the "love story," paradoxically, start to fade and are increasingly subservient to the reflections on the nature of writing and literature that are at the core of this story of the "new life.") At this critical turning point we glimpse a Dante who has figured out the simplest solution to an impossibly complicated problem: how to limit and control the insufficiency and treachery of poetic language. The "solution" is, however, not an invention but a revelation, the kabbalistic insight that Truth is already there to be read and then rewritten—and it is only then that poetry can have any kind of exactitude of meaning, that it can say the Truth.

This revelation goes a very long way to explaining the meaning of the mysterious divisioni themselves, which, like the figure of Love, are no longer necessary in the new life. The last of the old-life divisioni, in fact, will appear in the next chapter, 26. (This, of course, is the number that will resonate strongly in the cantos of the Purgatorio devoted, once again explicitly, to poetic theory. It seems to me an exemplary case of the kind of synchronicity, as opposed to numerology, that Dante is involved with, for chapter 26 is important in the texts because of their internal harmony and correspondence, rather than because of any extemally determined other "meaning.") The narrator tells us, from his perspective of knowing how it all came out and how it all fit together, things he could barely discern while he was living through them: Beatrice actually dies while Dante is writing the canzone that will stand alone in chapter 27—and we remember that in its transparency this becomes the first poem in the book not to have to be followed by a simple gloss, a poem that seems itself to reject the empty formal conceits of Scholasticism. Chapter 28, when Dante finds out about Beatrice's death m the original sequence of events, follows, and this is, ie last of the nine in this liminal and conversionary sequence. It is followed, appropriately, by the famous chapter that sets out the meaning of the number nine and concludes with the observation, rather precious for the modern reader, that Beatrice is a nine:

Ma più sottilmente pensando, e secondo la infallibile veritade, questo numero fue ella medesima … questa donna fue accompagnata da questo numero del nove a dare ad intendere ch'ella era uno nove, cioè uno miracolo.… Forse ancora per piiu sottile persona si vederebbe in ciò più sottile ragione; ma questa e quella ch'io ne veggio, e che piii mi piace.

If anyone thinks more subtly and according to infallible truth, it will be clear that this number was she herself… then this lady was accompanied by the number nine so that it might be understood that she was a nine, or a miracle. Perhaps someone more subtle than I could find a still more subtle explanation, but this is the one which I see and which pleases me the most. (chapter 29)

It is thus that in this seemingly bizarre chapter we find what is perhaps the most direct, the most unabashed and naked presentation not only of "what Beatrice means to me" (to paraphrase Eliot's famous essay on Dante) but, far more importantly, of what Dante has become; he has become a simple reader of the simplest truths inscribed, preinscribed, in a universe that can make sense only when we can become such readers. Then, at that point of breakthrough, the sense is complete, almost too simple, for the good reader—he who is not subtle, who has discarded the mediations and the conceits of all those other poetics. Initially, in fact, Beatrice's death leaves the Dante trained in the classical traditions, that earlier poet, stunned and poetryless. As Mazzotta has noted, "Now that she is physically dead, the metaphors for her seem to be another empty fiction. If the question while Beatrice was alive was whether she is and how she is unique, now that she is dead the question is finding the sense of metaphors that recall her." Once again, the problem can be reduced, at least initially, to one of the nature of expression chosen and the rejection of an expressive mode, a poetics, that was insufficient to deal with fundamental truths that are inscribed in texts we must first learn how to even read. What Mazzotta is calling rhetoric here I have called poetics, but the fact that they might indeed be taken for the same thing is exactly what Dante has in mind: the elimination of both or either as a category of expression separate or separable from other categories of truth and knowledge. There is a certain pathos, I think, in realizing that it is exactly when the poet's soul is most naked, when he reveals the most outrageous of truths, that his readers, at least in this century, have thrown the most elaborate of veils on his simple revelations. She was a nine, she was a miracle—no likes about it.

The differences, then, between the old life and the new life include the fact that poems in the new life, after the living Beatrice's death, need no divisioni or pseudoscientific explication, as did those in the old, now discarded days and poems once reigned over by an inaccessible love object, the living Beatrice, and a mediating Love figure. In those old days the author was just like all the other poets, in other words, all those in the tradition from which he came, a tradition within which, according to the Vita Nuova (and as a follow-up of sorts to the De vulgari), poems need the prop of commentary in order to have any really unassailable "truth value"—those things that are measurable and provable such as the number of stanzas and the kind of rhyme and where the first part ends and the next begins. The old poetry adored the empty glossing of form, but in the aftermath of death and its revelations, in the aftermath of the conversion—and in some great measure that is the conversion—it is clear that for him who can read and then rewrite the universe the poems themselves have absolute truth value, they are stripped of the trappings that begged for that kind of commenary and made it necessary, and they are so simply and so clearly about transcendental other truths that they can and must stand by themselves. Beatrice is love. Poetry is truth. The old Beatrice is dead, and the new writer, forged by the pain of the failure of the first Beatrice, will now revel in the vision of Beatrice who will need no Love as a figure to mediate between her and the absolute value of love itself. And just as she is a nine, as the newly converted Dante loses no time in telling us, so poetry, real and worthwhile poetry, is as rationally true as what others call scientific language. Here, clearly, is the merger between the disparate components characterized in the preconversion part of the text by the three different and incomplete voices: the narrative, the lyric, and the commenting. These observations, of course, have been made by a number of critics vis-á-vis the Commedia and its development of the motion of the inseparability of theology and poetry, but the Vita Nuova's explicit turning to the primary truth of (certain kinds of) texts has been far less recognized, although, oddly enough, it is expressed with an embarrassing directness that has faded in the Commedia itself. Freccero's observation that, contrary to what Auerbach maintained, "the theological principles that seem to underlie Dante's formal pattern are themselves in turn derived from literary principles" is, if anything, even more applicable to the Vita Nuova, where on the most literal level—which is the level now invested with absolute truth value—the writer and his literary texts are invariably primary. This, then, is a new life indeed, and in the last half of the book, in the chapters remaining after the banishment of the past, we see an author preparing for the full significance, only partially divined (for that is the very nature of such belief in the kabbala of writing), of his newfound faith and practice. This is succinctly put in the famous last paragraph, of course, as "io spero dicer di lei quello che mai non fue detto d'alcuna" (I hope to write of her that which has never been written of any other woman [chapter 42]). Here all the components come together in the terseness and incantatory repetition of a synchronistic text: the hope that the reveleatons will continue and that the writing, the saying of truths of the universe that is the poetry, will flow from that.

V

Poi che fuoro passati tanti die, che appunto erano compiuti li nove anni appresso l'apparimento soprascritto di questa gentilissima ne l'ultimo di quest) die avvenne che questa mirabile donna apparve a me vestita di colore bianchissimo, in mezzo a due gentili donne, le quali erano di più lunge etade; e passando per una via, volse li occhi verve quella parse ov'io era molto pauroso, e per la sue ineffabile cortesia, la quale è oggi meritata nel grande secolo, mi salutoe molto virtuosamente, tanto che me parve allora vedere tutti li termini de la beatitudine. L'ora che lo suo dolcissimo salutare mi giunse, era fermamente none di quello giorno; e pero che quella fu la prima volta che le sue parole si mossero per venire a li miei orecchi, presi tanta dolcezza che come inebriato mi partio da le gent), e ricorsi a lo solingo luogo d'una mia camera, e puosimi a pensare di questa cortessima E pensando di led, mi sopragiunse uno soave sonno, ne lo quale m'apparve una maravigliosa visione: che me parea vedere ne la mia camera una nebula di colore di fuoco, dentro a la quale io discernea una figura d'uno segnore di pauroso aspetto a chi la guardasse; e pareami con tanta letizia, quanto a se, che mirabile cosa era; e ne le sue parole dicea molte cose, le quali io non intendea se non poche; tra le quali intendea queste: Ego dominus tuus. Ne le sue braccia mi parea vedere una persona dormire nude, salvo che involta mi parea in uno drappo sanguigno leggeramente; la quale io riguardando molto intentivamente, conobbi ch'era la donna de la salute, la quale m'avea lo giorno dinanzi degnato di salutare. E ne l'una de le mani mi parea che quest) tenesse una cosa la quale ardesse tutta, e pareami e he mi dicesse queste parole: Vide cor tuum. E quando elk era stato alquanto, pareami che disvegliasse questa che dormia; e tanto si sforzava per suo ingegno, che le facea mangiare questa cosa e he in mano li ardea, la quale ella mangiava dubitosamente. Appresso cio poco dimorava che la sue letizia si convertia in amarissimo pianto; e cosi piangendo, si ricogliea questa donna ne le sue braccia, e con essa mi parea che si ne gisse verve lo cielo; once io sostenea si grande angoscia, che lo mio deboletto sonno non poteo sostenere, anzi si ruppe e fui disvegliato. E mantenente cominciai a pensare, e trovai che l'ora ne la quale m'era questa visione apparita, era la quarta de la notte state; si che appare manifestamente e ch'ella fue la prima ore de le nove ultime ore de la notte. Pensando io a cio che m'era apparuto, propuosi di farlo sentire a molti li quali erano famosi trovatori in quello tempo: e con cio fosse cosa che io avesse già veduto per me medesimo l'arte del dire parole per rima, propuosi di fare uno sonetto, ne lo quale io salutasse tutti li fedeli d'Amore; e pregandoli che giudicassero la mia visione, scrissi a loro cio che io avea nel mio sonno veduto. E cominciai allora questo sonetto, lo quale comincia: A ciuscan 'alma presa.

  A ciascun'alma presa e gentil core
nel cui cospetto ven lo dir presente,
in cio che mi rescrivan suo parvente,
salute in lor segnor, cioè Amore.
  Già eran quasi che atterzate l'ore
del tempo che onne stella n'è lucente,
quando m'apparve Amor subitamente,
cui essenza membrar mi dà orrore.
  Allegro mi sembrava Amor tenendo

meo core in mano, e ne le braccia avea
madonna involta in un drappo dormendo.
  Poi la sveglieva, e d'esto core ardendo
lei paventosa umilmente pascea:
appresso air lo ne vedea piangendo.

Questo sonneto si divide in due part); che ne la prima parse saluto e domando risponsione, ne la seconda significo a che si dee rispondere. La seconda parse comincia quivi: Gia eran.

A questo sonetto fue risposto da molti e di diverse sentenzie; tra li quali fue risponditore quell) cui io chiamo primo de Ii miei amici, e disse allora uno sonetto, lo quale comincia: Vedeste, al mio parere, onne valore. E questo fue quasi lo principio de l'amista tra lui e me, quando elk seppe che io era quelli che li avea cio mandato. Lo verace giudicio del detto sogno non fue veduto allora per alcuno, ma ore e manifestissimo a li più semplici.

After so many days had passed that precisely nine years were ending since the appearance, just described, of this most gracious lady, it happened that on the last one of those days the miraculous lady appeared, dressed in purest white, between two ladies of noble bearing both older than she was; and passing along a certain street, she turned her eyes to where I was standing faint-hearted and, with that indescribable graciousness for which today she is rewarded in the eternal life, she greeted me so miraculously that I seemed at that moment to behold the entire range of possible bliss. It was precisely the ninth hour of that day, three o'clock in the afternoon, when her sweet greeting came to me. Since this was the first time her words had ever been directed to me, I became so ecstatic that, like a drunken man, I turned away from everyone and I sought the loneliness of my room, where I began thinking of this most gracious lady and, thinking of her, I fell into a sweet sleep, and a marvelous vision appeared to me. I seemed to see a cloud the color of fire and, in that cloud, a lordly man, frightening to behold, yet he seemed also to be wondrously filled with joy. He spoke and said many things of which I understood only a few; one was Ego dominus tuus. I seemed to see in his arms a sleeping figure, naked but lightly wrapped in a crimson cloth; looking intently at this figure, I recognized the lady of the greeting, the lady who earlier in the day had deigned to greet me. In one hand he seemed to be holding something that was all in flames, and it seemed to me that he said these words: Vide cor tuum. And after some time had passed, he seemed to awaken the one who slept, and he forced her cunningly to eat of that burning object in his hand; she ate of it timidly. A short time after this, his happiness gave way to bitterest weeping, and weeping he folded his arms around this lady, and together they seemed to ascend toward the heavens. At that point my drowsy sleep could not bear the anguish that I felt; it was broken and I awoke.

At once I began to reflect, and I discovered that the hour at which that vision had appeared to me was the fourth hour of the night; that is, it was exactly the first of the last nine hours of the night. Thinking about what I had seen, I decided to make it known to many of the famous poets of that time. Since just recently I had taught myself the art of writing poetry, I decided to compose a sonnet addressed to all of Love's faithful subjects; and, requesting them to interpret my vision, I would write them what I had seen in my sleep. And then I began to write this sonnet, which begins: To every captive soul.

To every captive soul and loving heart
 to whom these words I have composed are
 sent
for your elucidation in reply,
greetings I bring for your sweet lord's sake,
  Love.
The first three hours, the hours of the time
of shining stars, were coming to an end,
when suddenly Love appeared before me
(to remember how he really was appalls me).

Joyous, Love seemed to me, holding my heart
  within his hand, and in his arms he had
  my lady, loosely wrapped in folds, asleep.
He woke her then, and gently fed to her
the burning heart; she ate it, terrified.
And then I saw him disappear in tears.

This sonnet is divided into two parts. In the first part I extend greetings and ask for a response, while in the second I describe what it is that requires the response. The second part begins: The first three hours.

This sonnet was answered by many, who offered a variety of interpretations; among those who answered was the one I call my best friend, who responded with a sonnet beginning: I think that you beheld all worth. This exchange of sonnets marked the beginning of our friendship. The true meaning of the dream I described was not perceived by anyone then, but now it is completely clear even to the least sophisticated. (chapter 3)

If we follow Dante, and we have reached a certain level of clarity and vision, then, as he suggests tantalizingly, here and there throughout the work, certain things are now perfectly clear. First and foremost among the mysteries that ought to be clear now is that of the first dream, that garbled and vaguely terrifying vision that produced the first of the text's poems. Dante's almost taunting line about even the "simplest" of readers "now" (in the light of revelation) grasping it clearly still resonates—and a leery reader, a would-be interpreter remembers that none of the other poets appealed to at the time, not even the great Cavalcanti, got it right. In fact, it is fair to say that it is a problem more often avoided than not, despite its excruciating interpretative problem of the discrepancy between the enduring opacity of the dream and the assertion that, in a visionary light, it would become transparent. Certainly none of the interpretations offered to date gives one that "bingo" smart of recognition that a dream's "transparent" decipherment should certainly provoke, although the most recent meditation on it by Harrison is other-wise satisfying in its richness and density, thus mimicking appreciatively the text's and the dream's singular qualities. But Dante's dismissive little line invites us to call his bluff.

We must view the dream retrospectively, of course, realizing first and foremost that the Love who is the mysterious protagonist in that first dream has been utterly abandoned. That Love who once was verging on omnipotence for the struggling young poet, that tradition, as Singleton so aptly named it, has been banished from the scene, quite effectively killed off. In his second appearance, Love was the spokesman, a mediator, in fact, among several explicitly false "loves," the donne schermo, thus making his association with the older poetry as explicit as possible. It was Love who wept once again in his third appearance, one in which he was explicitly aware of his imminent banishment: he weeps, as does any lover who knows he is about to be abandoned, but he is also gracious enough, in Dante's depiction, to urge a new sincerity in Dante's poetry—thus, of course, sealing his own doom and final departure in chapter 24, as we have already seen. But this Love, this conceit of a spiritually solipsistic tradition and often intensely hermetic poetry, is still at the peak of his powers in the third chapter, in the dream and its retelling, a sequence of events provoked by the drunken ecstasy of Beatrice's greeting. In fact, since in the story that is the moment at which the young artist, overcome by classic first love, will write his first poem, Love's power could be no stronger—he is the poetry revered and emulated by the virtually mad young man about to write his first poem. Madness was her greeting and its revision in his provocatively difficult dream.

The first "obvious" interpretation, then, is that the author's statement, made in the light of the most severe kind of disdain, is subtly ironic: what is obvious to him when he has buried the poetics of Love is precisely that the dream has no meaning—certainly no "clear" meaning. One can, of course, point to all sorts of the bits and pieces of the dream that are true and that are interpretable: the color symbolism, the mysterious Latin, the burning heart, and so forth. One can talk about the young, misguided poet's heart being burned by Love and eaten by his Lady—i.e., step by step the original artist is destroyed by the trappings of his ancestors' poetry. One can, in fact, construct a number of more or less elaborate and more or less sophisticated interpretations of the dream—but none that is or would have been transparent and obvious, let alone to the most simple. The only thing that is transparent and obvious, especially to the simple, is that the vision qua vision—or qua prophetic dream—is a garbled one. Inevitably, the poem written to reflect the incoherent vision is able to be formally lovely without shedding any light, any meaning, on the puzzle of the dream vision. And in much of this there is little question that it derives from that fine troubadour tradition of self-referentiality and obsession with the poetry itself, beginning with the evocation of an audience that is (what else?) exclusively other poets. That the "message" of the poem, beyond the evident interest in poetry and its encoding and decoding, should be hermetic is the best possible "proof," I believe, of Singleton's claim that this Love is a troubadour, and that the lyrics of the preconversion Vita Nuova are meant to be seen as examples and specimens of that parent with whom he had such a love-hate relationship. Finally, it is imperative to note that this is an incoherence that Dante as author is ascribing to a poetic history which he has clearly renounced for himself. What is it that we can always see so clearly at the end of the road? Our mistakes, of course, and the shallowness of so many a first love.

There can be little question, in the cruel light of that early morning, that dawn from which Dante is recounting his past, that his first love was, indeed, a failure. And since his persona, his character, was explicitly that of the artist as a young man, the Poet in the making, rather than independently or primarily a lover, then, crucially, it is not that the change in love drags with it a change in poetry, but rather that a change in attitude about what poetry is will necessarily entail writing about a different kind of love. The love written about and dictated by troubadour poetry is what the young Poet is in the Vita Nuova: self-serving, self-involved, self-pitying, unproductive of anything other than a love poetry, which may be marvelous in its forms—the cherished object of the structural gloss—but which is not a part of a larger universe of meaning. But for Dante such poetry and such a lover were simply no longer sufficient—in fact, were never sufficient or rewarding in the first place. One of the dark undercurrents of the Vita Nuova—detected by Borges in the resonances of the Commedia—is the great chasm of Beatrice's insufficiencies. In a particularly moving passage of his Essay, Singleton says that Dante is rejecting a love which knows no rest or satisfaction, necessarily a hopeless love, a love without possibility of peace. "Troubadour love was really always that—a love without peace" (99).

This is precisely the ease, of course, except that it is critical to note that this is because it is an explicitly and hermetically literary concept of love. It may, because of the charms of the writing of it, the seduction of its expression in lyrics, go on to influence people, of course—but the poets themselves do not hold it up as anything more than poetic, certainly not as a sociological or a theological theory of love developed outside the context of the need for poetic inspiration and production. It is a theory of love which transparently serves artistic needs primarily and social ones secondarily, if at all, and a broad range of readers would argue it is highly negative and destructive when it is applied as a social principle. And that too is the story of the Vita Nuova, the failure, the heartbreak, even the tragedy of transferring what can only be lyrical to all other parts of life, including the narrative: garbled dreams, dead young women. And the point, finally, is that Dante rejects it as a literary principle as well because his young love of Beatrice was so catastrophically painful; but instead of retreating to a novelistic stance, he moves forward to the kabbalistic vision within which realities and lyricism cannot be separated from each other and literature functions in a moral universe that is no different from the moral universe of individuals. Literature, writing, is real. Beatrice is a nine. The Book of Memory exists. The ideology rejected is a poetics that does not recognize this, that cannot read or accept these truths about texts and their relationship to life—an ideology that is founded on a notion of fiction as something that has its own rules and that is epistemologically different from reality. Dante, a kabbalist in this sense as well, rejects such a notion and kills off Love and the rather foolish and weepy young man who believed in him, a false god indeed. And Beatrice, finally, most painfully, had to go as well; she will he written about again when a Dante fully liberated from the old traps and trappings can both fully decipher and then say what she can mean in the newly revealed universe. The newly minted Dante has many hints which he has dutifully passed on to us, but he has a great deal more contemplation to go until all the harmonies and all the congruences, all those nines, are clear enough to he reinscribed. He licks his wounds and bides his time.

Alas, the modern reader, with few exceptions, cannot accept the radical notion that Beatrice is a nine as anything other than a literary statement, understanding literature as a construct that is starkly different epistemologically from the construct we privilege as "reality." This is so despite the fact that the statement is delivered in the Vita Nuova precisely as an example of how poetry is not fiction hut rather the ultimate, the very expression of Truth—mystical, kabbalistic, perhaps, but Truth nevertheless. If we were not, for better or worse, so deeply entrenched in a universe of reason and positivism anti their derivatives, we would be less inclined, perhaps, to talk about the fiction of not being a fiction, to remember that most famous of lines about the Commedia, hut rather about the destruction of fiction and the elevation of Truth as the principles of Poetry. That too is what the Vita Nuova is about. The severe difficulty lies in determining whether we must deal with all of this as a fiction, whether, to put it differently, we reject the most fundamental premise of Dante's text by interpreting it as a fiction. But Dante himself is trying to reconcile something which we, as heirs of a remarkably powerful positivism and rationalism, are greatly tempted to call mysticism, with a belief in the possibility not only of writing the Truth but having such written truth be revelatory and even conversionary for others. Thus, the "miracles" he describes in the Vita Nuova are miracles for him, true for him and part of what he is trying to tell us: that there is (or can be, if we can learn how to read it) great transcendent Truth in what the unbeliever and the blind might take to be pedestrian "reality" or reduce to the banal parameters of the "factual" or "nonfactual." Moreover, in the writing of the events and the experiences, the "facts" are turned back into the Truth (a Truth we are unable to account for outside of literature) they once were in the first Book. There are thus three separate "versions" of the events, of any event: those that are written kabbalistically, those that take place, which may seem to be pedestrian and unexceptional, and the third reinscribing in a literary text. The latter must be the right kind of literary text: that which is written by someone who is first and foremost a strong and able reader, able to properly interpret the events of the life that is lived "factually" as manifestations of events that in fact are already inscribed in the first Book, and then is able to write a text that lets us see the truth of one through the other. This is an experiencing and subsequent writing of a reality and Truth that cannot be understood, let alone described and rewritten, in positivist terms, in the terms that require an "understanding" that is limited by either rationalist discourse or precepts.

Dante, in other words, is a full step ahead of the many philosophers—all post medieval, of course—who have said that when the truth is understood it can no longer be said. Dante, prewriting Vico, believed that when the truth was understood it could be said—it must be said—and in a poetry that is more truthful than any facts can be. I believe his answer to the belief in the unsayability of truth would be that that is true only in a system that has classified the mystical and the "real" inappropriately, divided them from each other inappropriately. What is True, in a text such as the Vita Nuova (and since the story of it is held up to be exemplary, by sheer dint of being True, in all texts), is that which lies between the pedestrian and ultimately meaningless "facts" of any possible encounters with a Bice Portinari—or any other woman, for that matter—and what renders such facts true and meaningful: how they reveal to us and act out what was and is always written in the greater text. The literary text, then, is the expression of the interpretation of one through the other. That is the lesson about writing and Truth—which ought, in fact to be inseparable—that Dante learns in the trials and tribulations recounted in the Vita Nuova.

Synchronicity is everywhere strewn along those paths, and that, first and foremost, is the meaning of such things as numbers and their obvious, if at times problematic conjunction with each other and with other meanings. Although the "meanings" of numbers according to external systems of symbolism are undeniably there and potent, though sometimes difficult to pin down and decipher in any absolute or neat system, the meanings of such coincidences of numbers is, more importantly, internal-markers along Dante's path that critical events or revelations are at hand, deeply personal, ultimately, and perhaps not fully interpretable according to formalized, external systems of numerology. They are, however, unmistakably and intensely meaningful personally, and they are inscribed in the text and in the universe of Truth precisely because there is an intersection between the details of a personal life and its potential banalities and cosmic Truth, on the one hand, and sense and order on the other. But neither the inattentive nor the unbeliever will be able to read such Truths. And the elaborate constellation of numbers which in part seem to make "sense" and in part do not is part of that greater text manifesting itself, leaving its markers in real life, although they can only serve as such markers if and when someone can read them. It is clear, for example, that even the "obvious" correspondence of the number nine with Beatrice's appearances and her very person are not perceived or understood by Dante until after the revelation is at hand; it is then, retrospectively, that he is able to understand that she was marked in certain specific ways as significant, unusual, a recurring indicator of the way his writing must turn. The additional fact that there are unavoidable links thus established between Beatrice and Christ caused modern critics some consternation, until Singleton was able to explain the ways in which, in an earlier mode of Christianity, such a tie between personal and universal salvation was in no way blasphemous. But one is also tempted to add, of course, that in many, if not most non-Western religions (and, not surprisingly, in the more universalistic, mystical branches of the Western ones, including the Christianity of the Gospels), the discovery of God within the individual is not only not blasphemous but altogether expected, the revelation that is actively sought in a lifetime. But because Dante is difficult to classify as a mystic, according to the ways in which we have come to label mysticism—i.e., principally by an assumption of a lack of linear coherence—we have discarded this as an additional interpretation of the facts set out in the Vita Nuova—that Beatrice is, for him, the Christ, and that Christ, rather than Beatrice, is the metaphor. And yet, Dante dearly is setting out for us in this text a mode of first reading and then writing the Truth that lies at the far end of the traditional and caricatured view we have of the mystical experience as unsayable, but is, if anything, even further removed from that positivist dichotomy of fact versus fiction with which we perforce operate in our times and in our culture. In the new life, when the old gods and the first loves are dead, Truth is strange, and it is everywhere to be read, and poetry is its handmaiden.