DANTE IN PURGATORY
DISPUTATIO Editorial Board Dallas G. Denery II Bowdoin College Georgiana Donavin Westminster College Cary J. Nederman Texas A&M University Founding Editor Richard Utz Western Michigan University Previously published volumes in this series are listed at the back of this book. VOLUME 18
DANTE IN PURGATORY States of Affect by Jeremy Tambling H F
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Tambling, Jeremy. Dante in Purgatory : states of affect. -- (Disputatio ; v. 18) 1. Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321. Purgatorio. 2. Emotions in literature. 3. Deadly sins in literature. I. Title II. Series 851.1-dc22 ISBN-13: 9782503531298 2010, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2010/0095/113 ISBN: 978-2-503-53129-8
CONTENTS Preface vii Chapter 1: On Affect 1 Chapter 2: Seven Capital Vices 13 Chapter 3: Virtues and Vices: Convivio to Purgatorio 37 Chapter 4: Purgatorio I and II 61 Chapter 5: The Art of Pride 81 Chapter 6: Envy 103 Chapter 7: Overcoming Anger 127 Chapter 8: Sloth 145 Chapter 9: On Avarice 175 Chapter 10: Greed and Gluttony 197 Chapter 11: Nostro peccato fu ermafrodito 219 Chapter 12: Matelda: Love, Narcissism, Fragmentation 241 Bibliography 265 Index of Dante s Works 285 Index of the Bible and Apocrypha 287 General Index 289
PREFACE Dante in Purgatory: States of Affect offers a reading of Dante s Purgatorio, perhaps the most beautiful, most haunting, and most affective part of the Commedia. It is not a complete reading; it concentrates only on those passages whose focus is on affective states. Analysis of what is meant by affect, drawing on psychoanalysis, appears in Chapter 1, which says little specifically about Dante. Emotional states are called states of affect, because the word emotion presumes that the feeling is the product of an individual subject who knows what he or she feels and moves out to the external world with recognizable feelings. Affect implies that states in which the subject feels something derive from both inside and outside, including conditions, including those of language and of discursive formations, which create the subject as feeling in certain ways. Such constructions meet and contrast with, if they do not contradict, impulses coming from the self connecting with, desiring, what is outside. The book argues that what we think of as emotions are not ahistorical products of our sensibilities, but are created historically and discursively; there is a history of how at different moments, affective states have been created. A history of such concepts as the passions, the will, and the desire for apatheia, as these developed from the classical to the early Christian period, is in Chapter 2. Here, it is shown how emotions were described, and attacked, and downgraded, and specifically objectified as capital vices, in Evagrius of Pontus, in his disciple Cassian, and, later, in Gregory the Great. Chapter 3, on the soul, shows how Dante understood the relationship between the appetites, which had been seen as states of desire emanating from inside, the reason, and the will. This leads into the question, what does it mean to think of someone as marked by vice, or by virtue? Dante deliberated on this in Convivio, c. 1304, left incomplete: it was where he intended to expound virtues, and how they arose from the love of
viii Preface philosophy. At some stage, for reasons often explored, but still not wholly understood, he moved from this to the Commedia, and to the distinctions between vices and sins of Inferno, and then to the seven capital vices. How Purgatorio is put together comes in the final section, which reads Canto XVII. 82 139, giving Virgil s rationale for and order of the vices to be purged, and examines the discussion of love and free will (Canto XVIII. 10 75). The sequential reading of Purgatorio starts with Chapter 4, on Cantos I and II; I have little to say here on Cantos III to IX, which deal with ante-purgatory, but from Chapters 5 to 11, concentrate on the purgation of the capital vices, pride, envy, anger, sloth, avarice and greed, overeating (overconsuming), and sexual desire, which I see as affective states, and as linked. The last chapter concludes Purgatorio, including Matelda, and the Earthly Paradise. I started thinking about this project after reading Jacques Le Goff s The Birth of Purgatory at the end of the 1980s, and considering how it connects Purgatory as a new state with new forms of narrative, ways of thinking about time, and liminal forms of identity in process, outside the binary division of saved or damned. Drafts of some chapters that follow began appearing in the 1990s and I thank the journals editors for permission to reprint: Exemplaria, for Nostro peccato fu ermafrodito : Dante and the Moderns, 6 (1994), 405 27; Modern Language Review for Getting Above the Thunder: Dante in the Sphere of Saturn, 90 (1995), 632 45; New Literary History for Dante and the Modern Subject: Overcoming Anger in the Purgatorio, 28 (1997), 401 20; and Forum for Modern Language Studies for Dreaming the Siren: Dante and Melancholy, 40 (2004), 56 69. Other material written on Dante from the 1990s onwards, more loosely relevant to this argument, appears in the Bibliography. Quotations from the Commedia are taken from the three-volume edition of Anna Maria Chiavacci Leonardi (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1999 2001), and for the Italian minor works, from the Opere minori in two volumes edited by Domenico de Robertis, Gianfranco Contini, and Cesare Vasoli (Milan: Ricciardi, 1979). For the Commedia I have drawn freely on the translation and commentaries of Charles Singleton and on those by Sapegno, by Bosco and Reggio, and by Durling and Martinez, and on editions of the Vita nuova by Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vasta, and of the Convivio by Michael Ryan and Richard Lansing, and the two volumes of Dante s lyric poetry in the edition by Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde. Details of all these appear in the Bibliography, and I would like to acknowledge how all these editions have been formative for insights on virtually every page of this book.
Preface ix I began the writing after 2003, with the aid of a grant from the Hong Kong University Grants Council, which enabled me to pursue this research. Three research assistants have worked at various times on it: Bob Tsang, Pablo Tsoi, and Ian Fong, and to each of them I am grateful. Paul Fung, Sam Jenkins, and Alfie Bown have helped materially with the preparation of the manuscript. Colleagues in Manchester have helped: Spencer Pearce, with good conversations about Dante, and with reading the manuscript, Kate Cooper with Augustine, and Jeremy Gregory with other aspects of church history. I thank the anonymous reader of the book for Brepols. Permission for the reproduction of the cover photographs has been graciously granted by the Uffizi museum in Florence, under the auspices of the Ministry for Culture and Environment. To three libraries among others I am particularly grateful: the University of Hong Kong Library, whose staff and facilities have always been magnificent, the Warburg Institute in London, and Manchester University. I thank members of my immediate family for their forbearance during periods of writing. I dedicate this book to three early teachers of mine whose impact was immeasurable and unforgettable: David Handforth, the late Michael Fitch, and Brian Worthington.