Carlo Ginzburg

Dante’s Blind Spot

(Inferno XVI-XVII)

1. On October 15, 1897 Freud, who was in the very middle of his excruciating self-analysisis, wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess:

“A single idea of general value dawned on me. I have found, in my own case too, [the phenomenon of] being in love with my mother and jealous of my father” [this was a reference to a previous letter to Fliess, written on October 3rd the same year] “and I now consider it a universal event in early childood, even if not so early as in children who have been made hysterical (…) If this is so, we can understand

the gripping power of Oedipus Rex, in spite of all the objections that reason raises against the presupposition of fate (…) the Greek legend seizes upon a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he senses its existence within himself”.1

In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud developed those remarks into a full-fledged presentation of the Oedipus complex, from which I will quote a passage:

“If Oedipus Rex is able to move modern man no less deeply than the Greeks who were Sophocles’ contemporaries, the solution can only be that the effect of Greek tragedy does not depend on the contrast between fate and human will, but it is to be sought in the distinctive nature of the subject matter exemplifying this contrast”.2

1This is a revised and enlarged version of the paper presented at the Dante Conference in Belrin. An intermediate version was delivered in Vienna, on May 6, 2009, as Freud Vorlesung.

The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess (1887-1904), ed. and transl. by J. Moussaieff Masson, Cambridge, Mass. 1985, p. 272; see also ibid., p. 268 (October 3, 1897). 2 S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, transl. by J. Crick, Oxford 1999, p. 202 (with

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Freud’s passion for ancient Greece extended not only to texts but to objects as well – as the collection he assembled compellingly shows. But Freud’s familiarity with Greek myths is part of a more general approach. Here and elsewhere Freud assumed a) that human nature exists; b) that human psyche always worked in the same way; c) that within any literary document one can trace a distinction between an unchanging psychological core and a more or less ephemeral historical wrapping – which in this case would correspond to the so called “Oedipus complex” on the one hand, and the contrast between fate and human will on the other.

Many historians would reject those three assumptions; others (a smaller crowd, I guess) would accept all of them. I would place myself somewhat in the middle, with some qualifications. I came to believe that human nature exists, although I maintain that the human psyche works in different ways under different cultural constraints. I am emphatically committed to the idea that a referential core, either factual or imaginary, can be found in any document, either literary or non-literary – but only if the document itself has been first

submitted to a close scrutiny as a document. You have heard perhaps of the Chinese proverb (either genuine or alleged, I don’t know) which says: “When a finger points to the moon, the imbecile looks at the finger”. I am one of those imbeciles. Any document points to a referential dimension of some kind, real or imaginary; but if we do not look at the document (at the finger) first, as a document, that referential dimension will be missed for ever. For this distinction, as I will explain later, I am also indebted to Freud, among others.

2. An essay by Jean-Pierre Vernant, the famous historian of Greek religion and culture, will clarify my point. The essay is entitled “Oedipus without complex”.3 Vernant referred to the passage I just

a minimal change). 3 J.-P. Vernant, “Oedipe sans complexe” (1967), in J.-P. Vernant-P. Vidal-Naquet,

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mentioned from The Interpretation of Dreams, and polemically commented:

“This demonstration has all the apparent rigor of an argument based on a vicious circle. How does it proceed? A theory worked out from clinical cases and contemporary dreams is “confirmed” by a dramatic text from another era. But that text can provide such confirmation only to the extent that it is interpreted in accordance with the oneiric universe of today’s spectators, at least as far as the theory in question is concerned. To avoid the vicious circle, the Freudian hypothesis would have been obliged, rather than setting itself up from the outset as a self-evident interpretation, to appear, after a thorough analysis, as a necessity imposed by the work itself, a requirement for making sense of the dramatic order, the key to an entire textual

decoding”.4 I find myself in complete agreement with the polemical side of

Vernant’s argument: Freud’s approach to evidence from the past is flawed, since it is based on a vicious circle. But I am not convinced by the alternative approach which Vernant suggests. He looked at Freud’s assumptions as possible answers to his historical inquiry – only to discover they did not work. I will take Freud’s assumptions not as answers but as questions. The implications of this research strategy will emerge later.

3. My case study will focus on Geryon, the monstrous figure which fills up the sixteenth and seventeenth cantos of Dante’s

Inferno. Geryon takes on its ugly shoulders (“spallacce”) the two poets, Dante and Vergil, and brings them down, after a dangerous flight, to Malebolge, the lower part of Hell. But this narrative function does not justify the solemn tone of the lines announcing Geryon’s showing up:

Oedipe et ses mythes, Paris 1988, pp. 1-22. 4 J.-P. Vernant, “Oedipe sans complexe”, p. 2.

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Sempre a quel ver c’ha faccia di menzogna

de’ l’uom chiuder le labbra fin ch’el puote,

però che sanza colpa fa vergogna;

ma qui tacer nol posso; e per le note

di questa comedìa, lettor, ti giuro,

s’elle non sien di lunga grazia vòte,

ch’i’ vidi per quell’aere grosso e scuro

venir notando una figura in suso,

maravigliosa ad ogne cor sicuro,

“To that truth which has the face of a lie a man should always close his lips so far as he can, for through no fault of his it brings reproach; but here I cannot be silent; and, reader, I swear to you by the notes of this Comedy – so may they not fail of lasting favor – that I saw, through that thick and murky air, come swimming upwards a figure amazing at every steadfast heart…” (tr. Singleton).

Also noteworthy is the detailed description of Geryon’s physical appearance at the beginning of Canto XVII:

E quella sozza imagine di froda

sen venne, e arrivò la testa e ’l busto,

ma ’n su la riva non trasse la coda.

La faccia sua era faccia d’uom giusto,

tanto benigna avea di fuor la pelle,

e d’un serpente tutto l’altro fusto;

due branche avea pilose insin l’ascelle;

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lo dosso e ’l petto e ambedue le coste

dipinti avea di nodi e di rotelle.

Con più color, sommesse e sovraposte

non fer mai drappi Tartari né Turchi,

né fuor tai tele per Aragne imposte.

“And that foul image of fraud came onward, and landed his head and his bust, but he did not draw his tail onto the bank. His face was the face of a just man, so benign was its outward aspect, and all his trunk was that of a serpent; he had two paws, hairy to the armpits; his back and breast and both his sides were painted with knots and circlets. Tartars or Turks never made cloth with more colors of groundwork and pattern, nor were such webs laid on the loom of Arachne.” (tr. Singleton).

For a long time commentators identified Geryon as an allegory of Fraud. But Benedetto Croce, who regarded allegory as an unpoetic, structural element of Dante’s poem, surrendered to the poetical energy emanating from Geryon’s monstrous figure:

“no poetical reader would ever think of imposing the image of fraud on Geryon, or would weaken him by making such an imposition, so truly does the representation of the grandiose and repugnant monster dominate the conception and stand by itself, so closely, almost lovingly, is it studied in every part and motion”.

“Almost lovingly”: the allegorical concept is overcome by a subterranean, loving complicity between the poet and his monster, detected by Croce’s subtle ear. Geryon is, and is not, an allegorical figure:

“Geryon is Geryon” Croce went on. “He who does not feel poetry here is in danger of never feeling any poetry at all” does not

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feel poetry here is in danger of never feeling any poetry at all”.5

In the early Seventies the debate on Geryon took a new direction with Franco Ferrucci’s essay “Comedìa”.6 Ferrucci noted that Dante, the character, emphasizes the truthfulness of Geryon’s monstruous apparition by swearing by the poem itself, whose title is mentioned with great emphasis for the first time:

“e per le note / di questa comedìa, lettor, ti giuro…” (“and, reader, I swear to you by the notes of this Comedy…”) (Inf., XVI, 127-28).

In a leap of critical imagination Ferrucci suggested that Geryon, the monster, is an allegory of that literary monstruosity, the

Comedìa. No scholar had advanced this argument before: but this priority having been acknowledged, one should also note that Ferrucci was unwittingly entering a path which had been opened up a longtime before by Osip Mandelstam, the great Russian poet. In his

Conversation on Dante, written in 1933 and published posthumously in 1967, Mandelstam had forcefully hinted at the self-reflective

dimension of Inferno XVII, Geryon’s canto: “Dante’s thinking in images, as is the case in all genuine poetry, exists with the aid of a peculiarity of poetic material which I propose to call its convertibility or transmutability”. The extraordinary metaphorical richness of Geryon’s canto, Mandelstam went on, is a “truly miraculous demonstration of the trasmutability of poetic material, which leaves all the associative gambits of modern European poetry far behind”.

Poets as different as Pound and Montale, Eliot and Borges shared Mandelstam’s perception of Dante as a contemporary voice7.

5 B. Croce, La poesia di Dante, Bari 1921, pp. 88–89 (The Poetry of Dante, trans. D. Ainslie, New York 1922, 1971).6 F. Ferrucci, “Comedía” in Yearbook of Italian Studies, I (1971); a revised version in The

Poetics of Disguise. The Autobiography of the Work in Homer, Dante and Shakespeare,

Ithaca and London 1980 (=Il giardino simbolico. Modelli letterari e autobiografici

nell’opera, Roma 1980, pp. 9-37). 7 O. Mandelstam, “Conversation on Dante”, in The Poet’s Dante, ed. P. S. Hawkins and R.

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The same fascination resonates in Mandelstam’s emphasis on the self-reflexive dimension of Geryon’s canto. Ferrucci’s discovery, or rediscovery, of this dimension took place in an intellectual atmosphere which is still our own, saturated with a theme which runs across contemporary art and scholarship – the work reflecting about itself. A question inevitably arises: are we confronted with a situation in which the interpreter’s voice either silences or ignores the actor’s voice?

In this case at least the answer must be negative. Scholars working from different perspectives have provided a series of converging elements, which reinforce the connection between the

first mention of the poem’s title – Comedìa – and the first appearance of Geryon. Claudia Villa (who did not mention Geryon) suggested that Dante might have felt legitimized in his experiments in stylistic

hybridity by the passage of Horace’s Ars poetica describing monstruous, heterogeneous creatures as examples of the liberty allowed to poets and painters.8 Teodolinda Barolini, who initially had expressed doubts about Ferrucci’s interpretation, later silently accepted it by focusing on the textile references in the description of Geryon’s skin:

“lo dosso e ‘l petto e ambedue le coste / dipinti avea di nodi e di rotelle. / Con più color, sommesse e sovraposte / Non fer mai drappi Tartari né Turchi, / né fuor tai tele per Aragne imposte” (his back and breast and both his sides were painted with knots and circlets. Tartars or Turks never made cloth with more colors of

Jacoff, New York 2001, pp. 58-61. Some helpful remarks in C. Tenuta, “Dante in Crimea. Osip Mandel’stam e la ‘Divina Commedia’: poesia ed esilio in una lettura novecentesca”,

Intersezioni, XXIX (2009), pp. 179-195. 8 C. Villa, “Per un tipologia del commento mediolatino: l’ ‘Ars poetica’ di Orazio, in Il

commento ai testi. Atti del seminario di Ascona 2-9 ottobre 1989, ed. O. Besomi and C. Caruso, Basel 1992, pp. 19-42, especially pp. 38-39. On Horace’s passage see A. Chastel,

“Le dictum Horatii Quidlibet audendi potestas et les artistes (XIIe-XVIe siècle)”, in Id.,

Fables, formes, figures, I, Paris 1978, pp. 363-376.

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groundwork and pattern, nor were such webs laid on loom by Arachne) (Inf., XVII, 14-18).

Barolini convincingly interpreted this passage as evidence of the textual self-awareness permeating Geryon’s entire episode.9

The etymological relationship between textus and textus, textile and text, gives further support to the hypothesis of a symbolic equivalence between Geryon, the weird, multi–colored, ambiguous monster, and

the Comedy, with its unprecedented mixture of styles. Guglielmo Gorni, who had ignored the passage on Geryon in an essay devoted

to textile/textual metaphors in the Comedy, later convincingly argued that Geryon’s “le cento rote” are an allusion to the poem’s one hundred cantos.10

This impressive amount of research confirms that Geryon

must be regarded as a metaphor of the Comedìa. But why did Dante call Geryon “sozza imagine di froda”, foul image of fraud?

Teodolinda Barolini has an answer: “Even a comedìa, in order to come to existence as text, must to some extent accommodate that human, and thus ultimately fraudolent construct, language”11. These

9 See T. Barolini, Dante’s Poets. Textuality and Truth in the “Comedy”, Princeton 1984, p. 00

(=Il miglior fabbro. Dante e i poeti della Commedia, Torino 1993, p. 172 note 33, suscribing the unconvincing criticism of Ferrucci’s argument put forward by R. Hollander, “Dante

Theologus-Poeta”, in Id., Studies in Dante, Ravenna 1980, pp. 39-89, especially p. 75 (and n.

79). T. Barolini, The Undivine Comedy. Detheologizing Dante, Princeton 1992, p. 58 ff.,

especially pp. 63-64. More recent bibliography in Z. Baranski, “Sole nuovo, luce nuova”.

Saggi sul rinnovamento culturale in Dante, Torino 1996, pp. 153-182. See also R. Mercuri,

Semantica di Gerione, Roma 1984. 10 See G. Gorni “La metafora di testo”, in Id., Metrica e analisi letteraria, Bologna

1993, pp. 137-152; but the statement on p. 152 (“Così, nella Commedia, l’immagine della

‘testura’ è un acquisto tardo”) must be corrected in the light of Inf. XVI, 16-18; G. Gorni,

“Canto XVII”, in Lectura Dantis Turicensis, ed. G, Güntert and M. Picone, Firenze 2000,

233-241, especially pp. 238-39. Gorni inadvertently refers to C. Villa, “Ut poesis pictura:

appunti iconografici sui codici dell’’Ars poetica’” Aevum, LXII (1988), pp. 186-97; see instead the essay by the same author mentioned in footnote n. 6. 11 T. Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, p. 61 see also p. 287 n. 42 on her partial disagreement with F. Ferrucci, “Comedìa”, on this issue.

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words obviously resonate with a contemporary reader: but do they correspond to Dante’s attitude? Likewise, Dante’s words “sempre a quel ver ch’ha faccia di menzogna” (that truth which has the face of a lie) which anticipate the reader’s incredulity in front of Geryon’s wondrous arrival, elicited from Barolini the following comment: “By explicitly confronting the inauthenticity inherent in all narrative, Dante attempts to neutralize it with respect to his own narrative truth claims.”12

To assume that Dante regarded all narratives, including his own sacred poem (“poema sacro”), as intrinsically fraudulent and inauthentic, seems a blatant anachronism. To ask Dante questions put in our own language is not only legitimate, but to a certain extent inevitable. But Dante’s answers will be obviously articulated in a different language – his own, which I will try to retrieve.

4. My attempt will begin with Geryon’s name. A giant provided

with three bodies, Geryon appears twice in Virgil’s Aeneid. In book VI, 289 his presence in the underworld is indirectly evoked with other monstruous creatures, Gorgons and Harpies: “Gorgones Harpyiaeque et forma tricorporis umbrae”. His name is pronounced much later, in book VIII, 202, where Hercules is described as “Maximus ultor / tergemini nece Geryonae spoliisque superbus” (glorying in the slaughter and spoils of triple Geryon). This huge narrative gap might have been deliberately replicated by Dante in his poem: 113 lines separate Virgil’s indirect evocation of the unnamed entity (“Tosto verrà di sovra / ciò che io attendo”, “Soon will come up what I look

for”, Inf. XVI, 121-22) and his straightforward summoning of

Geryon (“Gerion, muoviti omai”, “Geryon, move on now”, Inf. XVII, 97).

Dante was presumably familiar with medieval commentaries of Virgil. More specifically, Ernst Robert Curtius suggested, Dante must

12 T. Barolini, The Undivine Comedy, p. 59.

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have read the commentary on the fist six books of the Aeneid ascribed to Bernardus Silvestris.13 In this commentary the allusion to “forma tricorporis umbrae”, duly referred to Geryon, follows a lengthy passage on the Harpies, the ugly birds-like creatures mentioned in the same line of Virgil’s poem. The commentator’s conclusion reads as follows:

“They [the Harpies] are virgins, because they are sterile and do not bear any offspring. They are birds because they are ready to steal

things. Their nails are usury and loan interest (usura et fenus) which are instruments of theft”.14

I will argue that Dante, who echoed Virgil’s description of the

Harpies (Aeneid, III, 29 ff.) in Inferno XIII (10-15), reworked the

commentator’s allusion to usury in Inferno XVII, the canto devoted to Geryon. Its section describing Dante’s encounter with the usurers has been regarded as “a digression, dense but marginal”.15 This remark misses the relationship between Geryon and the usurers. Before bringing Virgil and Dante to the lower part of Hell, Geryon,

13 E. R. Curtius, Letteratura europea e Medioevo latino, ed. R. Antonelli, Firenze 2002, p. 394 nota 12. Dante’s direct knowledge of Bernardus Silvestris’s commentary is considered

“très incertaine” by P. Dronke, “Integumenta Virgilii”, in Lectures médiévales de Virgile,

Actes du Colloque organisé par l’Ecole française de Rome (Rome, 25-28 octobre 1982),

Rome 1985), pp. 313-329, especially p. 328. See also Th. Silverstein, “Dante and Vergil the

Mystic”, Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology, XIV (1932), pp. 51-82.14 The Commentary on the First Six Books of the Aeneid of Vergil Commonly Attributed

to Bernardus Silvestris, a new critical edition by J. Ward Jones and E. F. Jones, Lincoln and London 1977, p. 74: “Virgines dicuntur quia steriles sunt et nullum fructum pariunt. Volucres sunt quia ad rapienda aliena festine sunt. Ungues sunt usura et fenus que sunt rapiendi instrumenta. Plume vero occultandi instrumenta ut crumena et loculi; venter ingluviosus vorax capacitas pecunie”. The editor, J. Ward Jones, Jr., subsequently rejected his former attribution of the commentary to Bernard of Chartres: see “The So-Called

Silvestris Commentary on the Aeneid and Two Other Interpretations”, Speculum, 64 (1989), pp. 835- 48. The traditional attribution is confirmed by P. Dronke: see his edition of B.

Silvestris, Cosmographia, Leiden 1978, introduction, p. 3, and especially Id., “Integumenta Virgilii”. 15 G. Gorni, “Canto XVII”, p. 29 : “Nell’economia del canto, l’incontro con gli usurai non è più che una digressione, sostanziosa ma marginale”.

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“sozza imagine di froda” (foul image of fraud), is described as squatting in the seventh cercle where usurers are punished: “quella / bestia malvagia che colà si corca”, that evil beast which is couching

yonder (Inferno XVII, 29-30). It is appropriate to recall that Thomas

Aquinas dealt with fraud and usury in two contiguous quaestiones of

his Summa Theologiae, placed under a common rubric: “de peccatis quae sunt circa voluntarias commutationes” (about sins related to voluntary exchanges).16

Let us explore the possibility that Geryon’s association with usury might have been inspired by the connection between Harpies and usury put forward by Bernardus Silvestris in commenting the same line of Virgil’s poem. But the passage on the Harpies, written around 1150, would have acquired 150 years later a different meaning. The Harpies were traditionally described as virgins (for

instance by Virgil, “virginei volucrum vultus”, Aeneid III 216)17. Any reader familiar, either directly or indirectly, with the translation of

Aristotle’s Politics made by William of Moerbeke’s around 1250, would have seen the Harpies’s sterility as a feature pointing at their connection with usury. Here is Aristotle’s passage:

“Usury is most reasonably hated, because its gain comes from money itself and not from that for the sake of which money was invented. For money was brought into existence for the purpose of

exchange, but interest (tokos) increases the amount of money itself (and this is the actual origin of the Greek word: offspring resembling parent, as interest is born of money); consequently this form of the business of getting wealth is of all forms the most contrary to nature.”18

16 S. Tommaso d’Aquino, La Somma Teologica, vol. XVII, La Giustizia, Firenze 1966, trad., ed. T. S. Centi, II-II, pp. 342 ff.: q. 77: “De fraudolentia quae committitur in emptionibus et venditionibus”; q. 78: “De peccato usurae”. 17 The Commentary on the First Six Books, p. 21: (on III, 216): ”De harpiis autem quas ibi invenit dicimus in sexto”. 18 Aristotle, Politics, 1258 a-b (Loeb series, trans. Rackam). Aristoteles latinus,

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5. Aristotle’s argument against usury as an activity contrary to nature, based on the sterility of money, had, as Oddo Langholm cogently demonstrated, a long-term impact on medieval

Scholasticism.19 Perhaps Dante never read Aristotle’s Politics

(although he mentioned it once in Convivio, IV, 4, 5). But he could have access to Aristotle’s argument through Aquinas, who referred

to it both in his Summa Theologiae and in his commentary on

Aristotle’s Politics.20 Moreover, in the time spent “nelle scuole delli religiosi e alle disputazioni delli filosofanti” (in the schools of friars and attending the disputes of those who love philosophy), Dante might have attended the lectures delivered at Santa Maria Novella by the

Dominican friar Remigio de’ Girolami. In his treatise De peccato

usure (On the sin of usury), written during Dante’s exile but based on lectures given for many years in the past, fra Remigio extended Aristotle’s approach to usury arguing that all sins are, like sodomy, against nature; but he rejected Aristotle’s argument on the sterility of money as valueless, since it was based on a metaphor.21

Politica (Libri I-II), translatio prior imperfecta interprete Guillelmo de Moerbeka (?), Bruges-Paris 1961, 1258a40-1258b8: “… rationabilissime odio habetur obolostatica, eo quod ab ipsa numismatis sit possessio, et non ad quod quidam acquisitum est. Translationis enim gratia factum est, tokos autem seipsum facit amplius, unde et nomen istud accepit. Similia enim parta generantibus ipsa sunt, tokos autem fit numisma numismatis; itaque et maxime preter naturam ista pecuniarum acquisitio est.”.19 O. Langholm, The Aristotelian Analysis of Usury, Bergen 1984. 20 See A. H. Gilbert, “Did Dante read the Politics of Aristotle?”, Publications of

Modern Language Association of America, XLIII, 1928, pp. pp. 602-617. Thomas Aquinas,

Summa Theologiae, latin text with English translation, vol. 38, ed. by M. Lefèbure, London and New York 1975: Quaestio 78: “Et Philosophus naturali ratione ductus dicit in 1 Polit., quod usuraria acquisitio pecuniarum est maxime praeter naturam”.21 O. Capitani, “Il de peccato usure di Remigio de’ Girolami”, Studi medievali, s. III, 6 (1965), p. II, pp. 537-662 (the treatise’s text on pp. 611-662). See also L. Minio-Paluello,

“Dante’s Reading of Aristotle”, in The World of Dante. Essays on Dante and his Times, ed. by C. Grayson, Oxford 1980, pp. 61-80, especially pp. 71-72, Remigio’s imprtance for Dante

had been already pointed at by G. Contini, in his introductory note to Poeti del duecento, I, Milano-Napoli 1960, p. XVI.

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It is impossible to say whether this latter, rather contradictory, disclaim was the result of an afterthought. In any case, Remigio’s parallel between sodomy and usury was echoed in Virgil’s speech in

Inferno, canto XI, explaining to Dante why both sodomites and usurers are punished as sinners against nature.22 Virgil’s argument is based on the motto “art imitates nature” taken from Aristotle’s

Physics, II, 2 (“la tua Physica”). For lack of time I will not unfold its implications, which are the topic of my current research project. I will simply recall Dante’s well known, changing attitude towards the relationship between artificial and natural language, between latin

and the volgare. I will also recall that in Inferno XXIX Capocchio, who had counterfeited money by alchemy, engages a dialogue with Dante claiming to be “di natura buona scimia”, a good ape of nature. In commenting upon these words Benvenuto da Imola suggested an analogy between Capocchio and Dante, the counterfeiter and the poet.

The Latin verb contrafacere meant “to falsify” (particularly money) but also “to provide an exact representation”, or “to make a parody”. Reproductions of money can be either genuine or false – a clearcut distinction, in principle (not in reality, since in the Middle Ages inferior currency was often put into circulation by the royal mints themselves). But if money could in principle be reproduced, it could not – according to Aristotle, and his scholastic interpreters – reproduce itself.

The ambiguity between mechanical reproduction and biological reproduction is at the core of my current research project on Dante. I can now come back to Vergil’s analogy between usurers and sodomites as sinners against nature. Both usury and sodomy are a bad imitation of nature, since they both share an intrinsic sterility: an argument which provides a context for Geryon’s metaphorical

22 O. Langholm, Economics in the Medieval Schools: Wealth, Exchange, Value, Money

and Usury According to the Paris Theological Tradition, 1200-1350, Leiden 1992, p. 470, has a prudent remark: “Whether or not Remigio did in fact inspire Dante…”

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relationship with the Comedìa.

6. In order to unfold the full meaning of this relationship we have to focus first on the association between Geryon and usury. This has been usually missed; but not by everybody. Ezra Pound, a passionate reader of Dante’s poetry, referred to Geryon in his Cantos XLVI, XLIX and LI, all of them written in in the Thirties: “Hic Geryon est. Hic hyperusura”; “This is infamy; this is Geryon”. “I am Geryon, twin with usura”.23 Prejudice is always a blinding force; it can also, occasionally, unveil something hidden, simply because it is under everybody’s eyes. Driven by his antisemitism and his obsession with usury, Pound was able to see that Geryon was “twin with usura”. Has this remark any relevance for the recent scholarship on Dante? Before answering this question, I will try to replace Pound’s remarks on Geryon within the larger context of his poetry.

Among Pound’s cantos devoted to usury one is especially relevant here: canto XLV. I will quote its beginning and a few more passages from it:

“With Usura

With usura hath no man a house of good stoneeach block cut smooth and well fittingthat design might cover their face,with usurahath no man a painted paradise on his church wall(…)no picture is made to endure not to live withbut it is made to sell and sell quicklywith usura, sin against nature,is thy bread ever more of stale rags

23 E. Pound, The Cantos, New York 1972, pp. 235, 245, 251. See G. Barfoot, “The

Theme of Usury in Dante and Pound”, Rivista di letterature moderne e comparate, 30 (1977), pp. 254-83.

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is thy bread dry as paper,with no mountain wheat, no strong flour(…) Pietro Lombardocame not by usuraDuccio came not by usuranor Pier della Francesca; Zuan Bellin’ not by usuranor was ‘La Calunnia’ painted. Came not by usura Angelico; came not Ambrogio Predis…”24

Obviously, this celebrated poem (which I find emphatic and dull) should not be read as a factual statement. It would be too easy to object that Piero della Francesca’s patrons, the Bacci, were merchants

from Arezzo; that Botticelli, who painted La calunnia, worked for the Medici family, one of the most powerful bankers in Europe. But the ideology which inspired Pound’s poem can be analyzed as a piece of independent evidence. I shall not comment on Pound’s antisemitism and his support of Italian fascism, reinforced by the latter’s infamous racial laws. I will simply note that Pound placed his hatred of usury, seen as a synonym of Jewish international finance, under the sign of Aristotle, mediated by Dante: usury is “a sin against nature”, CONTRA NATURAM (in capital letters). Pound’s list of artists, whose works were not produced “by usura”, includes mostly painters and sculptors. Perhaps Pound would have never added to his canto

XLV a line saying “Dante’s Comedy, not by usura”. But how would he have reacted to contemporary scholars arguing that Geryon is a

metaphor for the comedìa?

7. These questions, which Pound cannot answer, are not

gratuitous, since we can immediately turn them into questions to

us. If we assume (as I do) that Pound’s line “Geryon, twin with usura” implies a valuable critical insight, how does that line fit in the

24 E. Pound, The Cantos , pp. 229-230.

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current interpretations of Geryon’s canto, and especially in the

identification of Geryon as a metaphor of the Comedìa? This question confronts us with the etic/emic distinction,

familiar to anthropologists and linguists. From an etic point of view, from the point of view of the observer, we must try to face the problems emerging from the double connection between Geryon and

usury and Geryon and the poem. From an emic point of view, we must try to see whether this double connection was part of Dante’s perception. By addressing both issues, and their possible interaction, some unexpected implications will hopefully emerge.

From the observer’s point of view, Geryon’s double connection could be interpreted as follows: Dante’s poem emerged in the framework of a society deeply affected by the diffusion of monetary economy, of which loan interest (often condemned as usury) was an important feature. This statement is, of course, a truism with no explanatory value. I will immediately add that to rephrase it according to the old, now unfashionable, metaphor opposing base and superstructure, would not advance our knowledge. But something potentially promising might emerge, I guess, if we would turn the initial statement into a question, and we would ask: “to what extent the growing role played by commerce and finance affected Dante’s poem?”

An answer to this question must include the actors’s perception, in the broadest sense of the word. We must shift to Dante’s idiom – to his writings. His hatred for “il maladetto fiore”, Florence golden coin, is well known, as well as his scornful remark on “lo puzzo / del villan d’Aguglion, di quel da Signa / che già per barattare ha l’occhio aguzzo” (the stench /of the lout from Agiglion and of him from

Signa / who already has so sharp an eye for graft!)” (Par. XVI, 55-57). To say that Dante was, in his social and political stand, a reactionary, and in his bold poetical experiments, a revolutionary, is also a commonplace. Dante’s attitude seems incompatible with the

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double connection that emerged, between Geryon and usury, Geryon

and the comedìa. Incompatible – at least on a conscious level.

8. This restriction opens up a field of inquiry which is problematic, for general and specific reasons as well. On a general level, the possibility of having access to dead individuals’s unconscious motivations is open to doubt. The contextual awareness which Freud displayed in interpreting his own or his patients’s dreams, is very different from his cavalier reading of the available evidence on which his essay “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood” is based.25 On the specific level, it seems that Dante’s control over his poem was so extreme, that each detail had a definite, carefully planned place in the overall structure; even the most extreme emotions were conveyed under a strict formal surveillance. But this conclusion would be simplistic. In a famous essay Gianfranco Contini commented upon Dante’s memory, selecting some cases of “involuntary memory” in which the signifier prevailed over the signified.26 This “involuntary memory” (as Contini labelled it, with an obvious homage to Marcel Proust) was based on recurrent rythmic patterns. Therefore, it cannot give us any access to Dante’s alleged unconscious motivations, which must be related to the signified.

The idea, suscribed by Dante, that usury was against nature

(contra naturam), was based on Aristotle. In the passage of his

Politics I mentioned before, Aristotle argued for the sterility of money rejecting as valueless a metaphor which labelled interest as

tokos, or offspring (from tiktemi, to generate). A perceptive reader of

Aristotle’s Politics could have read behind this rejection a counter-

25 See M. Schapiro, “Leonardo and Freud: an Art-historical Study”, Journal of the History of

Ideas, XVII (1956), pp. 147-78. 26 G. Contini, “Un’interpretazione di Dante” (1965), in Un’idea di Dante, pp. 87-88. On

this passage see also F. Orlando, Per una teoria freudiana della letteratura, Torino 1973, p. 31.

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argument, embedded in the Greek language, according to which usury, that is money generating money, should be considered as an art imitating nature. I have never come across any medieval example

of this reading of Aristotle’s Politics. But in his Convivio Dante explained why in one of his poems he had referred to another poem as “her sister”:

“I use the word ‘sister’ as a metaphor (similitudine): for just as we call sister a woman who is born of the same parent, so may one call sister a work that is made by the same maker, for our work is, in

a certain sense, begotten (ché la nostra operazione in alcuno modo è

generazione)”.27 Dante explicitly compared the sphere of poetical production to

the sphere of human reproduction. He could have found many examples of this in the works of Alain de Lille. But if the poet generates poems, why should not be allowed, by using the the same biological metaphor, that by usury money can generate money? This argument was used by the Franciscan friar Pietro di Giovanni Olivi, who taught a few years at the Florentine convent of Santa Croce, before Dante’s exile. Olivi tried to set up a theoretical argument which circumvented the prohibition of usury. He relied

upon the word capitale, capital, which he defined as money having

“a seminal reason of gain” (quandam seminalem rationem lucrosi). In Olivi’s perspective the expression “ratio seminalis”, the Scholastic

equivalent of the Stoic logos spermatikos, referred also, in a more literal sense, to biological reproduction. Olivi, who was born near Béziers, in Southern France, was obviously aware of the French

counterpart of the word capitale: cheptel, that is, livestock.28 A

27 “Per similitudine dico [about another canzone] ‘sorella’; chè sì come ‘sorella’ è detta quella femmina che da uno medesimo generante è generata, così puote l’uomo dire ‘sorella’ de l’opera che da uno medesimo operante è operata; ché la nostra operazione in alcuno modo è generazione” (III, ix, 4).28 G. Montalbano, “Moneta e capitalis in Pietro di Giovanni Olivi” (paper presented at

the seminar I conducted at the Scuola Normale, Pisa, in 2007-‘08); G. Todeschini, Un

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metaphor paved the way to a concept.29

9. The possibility that at some level (either conscious or unconscious) Dante perceived the implications of Geryon’s double

connection, to the Comedìa and to usury, led me to focus on metaphors. This is not surprising, since that double connection is based on a metaphor – generation as a metaphor – and Geryon himself is a metaphor.

Metaphors, and rhetorical tropes in general, play a crucial role in

Francesco Orlando’s Toward a Freudian Theory of literature,

translated into English with its empirical companion, a Freudian

analysis of Racine’s Phèdre.30 I am unable to provide an adequate presentation of these dense, highly original books. I will simply recall that Orlando’s approach does not focus, as Freud did with Leonardo da Vinci, and most psychoanalytically oriented critics do, on the problematic relationship between an author’s biography and his or her literary work. Orlando focuses instead on the work itself and its linguistic texture. On this level Freud’s approach to dreams as texts is both extremely helpful and circumscribed.31 Dreams are not the outcome of a deliberate act of communication; literary works are.

Therefore, Orlando suggests, Freud’s book on Witz is more helpful

for literary theory than Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Lacan and Benveniste stressed that the unconscious is structured according to rhetorical tropes. Orlando developed their remarks arguing that literature is a space in which the repressed unconscious re-emerges

trattato di economia politica francescana: il «De emptionibus et venditionibus, de usuris, de

restitutionibus» di Pietro di Giovanni Olivi, Roma 1980, p. 85. 29 G. Lakoff- M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago 1980 . 30 F. Orlando, Lettura freudiana della “Phèdre”, Torino 1971; Id., Per una teoria

freudiana della letteratura, Torino 1973 (both translated as: Toward a Freudian Theory of

Literature, with an Analysis of Racine’s “Phèdre”, Baltimore 1984). 31 See R. Robertson, “Freud’s Work Before The Interpretation”, introduction to S.

Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, pp. xviii-xx (with bibliographical references).

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through a series of compromise formations, conveyed by figural tropes.32

In his empirical research, dealing with seventeenth and eighteenth century French literary texts, Orlando showed the interpretive power of his unconventional approach to Freud.33 Those brilliant analyses came to my mind as soon as I began to explore the possibility that Dante perceived the implications of Geryon’s double connection at an unconscious level. But I immediately realized that my attitude towards the way in which Orlando reshaped Freud’s theoretical model was ambivalent. On the one hand, I was fascinated by its results; on the other, I was somewhat perplexed by its underlying assumption that our interpretive categories can travel into a distant past – an assumption which recalls Freud’s vicious circle, effectively criticized by Jean-PierreVernant, in dealing with evidence from the past.

But distinctions should be made. Rhetoric, which has been transmitted in western Europe, from the antiquity to the present, in theory and in practice, is a case of striking continuity. I will give just one example. In his book Orlando repeatedly insisted on the role

played in Racine’s Phèdre by the word monstre, referred sometimes to physical, mythical monsters, sometimes to unspeakable, monstruous passions. Racine’s tragedy, Orlando noted, is built on the connection between the two meanings, the literal and the metaphorical, and their underlying unity.34 But readers conversant with medieval literature will hear a familiar ring. A work most probably read by Dante,

Alain de Lille’s De planctu naturae, has a long poem on the contradictory nature of Cupid, the symbol of erotic love: a passion

32 F. Orlando, Per una teoria…, p. 56 ff. 33 F. Orlando, Lettura freudiana del “Mysanthrope”, Torino 1982; Id., Illuminismo e

retorica freudiana, Torino 1982 (new, enlarged edition: Illuminismo, barocco e retorica

freudiana, Torino 1997).34 F,. Orlando, Lettura freudiana della “Phèdre”, pp. 38-39, 93-94; Per una teoria

freudiana, pp. 31-32.

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which ignores all boundaries, including incest. Cupid turns old men into young and wise men into mad; and “the man who was able to vanquish the sophistries of ancient authors, and to vanquish all

kind of monsters, is vanquished by this monster [Cupid] (vincitur hoc

monstro, caetera monstra domans)”.35 The two examples, Alain de Lille’s and Racine’s, are in a sense comparable. Can we also assume that in both cases Freud’s unconscious was at work? (I must point out that I do not have doubts of this kind concerning Newton’s laws of motion). But my residual perplexities disappeared when I discovered that Lacan’s and Benveniste’s arguments on the rhetorical structure of the unconscious have a medieval counterpart, in a text that Dante most probably read.

Boncompagno da Signa, born around 1165-1175, taught rhetoric in Bologna for many years; he died in 1240. Both his university teaching and his unconventional personality had a lasting impact. Dante, who spent some time in Bologna, possibly as a student,

must had access to Boncompagno’s famous treatise Rhetorica nova. As it has been pointed a long time ago, Dante must have been

especially impressed by the section of Rhetorica nova dealing with

metaphors: De transumptionibus.36 But the importance of this extraordinary text for Dante has not been properly assessed yet.

Under the label transumptio, or metaphor, which he called “the mother of all tropes”, Boncompagno dealt with the entire reality, from the sublime to the obscene. After having commented on the role

35 Cfr. Alain de Lille, De planctu naturae, PL 210, 455 “Qui prius auctorum solvendo sophismata vincit, / Vincitur hoc monstro, caetera monstra domans”. 36 Boncompagno da Signa, Rethorica nova ed. A. Gaudenzi, in Bibliotheca juridica

medii aevi, Bononiae 1892, II, pp. 249-97; section De transumptionibus, pp. 280-285. See F.

Forti, “La transumptio nei dettatori bolognesi e in Dante”, in Dante e Bologna nei tempi di

Dante, Bologna 1967, pp. 127-49; entry “Boncompagno da Signa” in Dizionario biografico

degli italiani. See also P. Rajna, “Per il ‘cursus’ medievale e per Dante”, Studi di filologia

italiana, III (1932), pp. 44-48, 75, 77-84; H. Wieruszowski, “Ars dictaminis in the time of

Dante”, Medievalia et Humanistica, I (1943), pp. 97 s.; C. Segre, Lingua, stato e società, Milano 1963, p. 177 s.

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of transumptio in visions, like John’s Revelation, Boncompagno spoke of dreams:

“Soul often uses metaphors (transumit), since it shows to those who sleep dangers or benefits through diverse and contrary imaginations. Therefore, many individuals are terrified while they sleep, and others are quite happy; and humans try to provide arbitrary interpretations of those dreams… ”.37

10. Let us go back to Dante’s Comedy, canto XVI. Geryon’s wondrous, enormous body has not appeared yet. Virgil turns to Dante:

“tosto verrà di sovra / ciò ch’io attendo e che ‘l tuo pensier sogna” (Soon what I expect / and your mind dreams of) (vv. 121-22).

Geryon is a dream, dreamt by Dante, the character, and staged by Dante, the poet.38 He is a metaphor, and metaphors are (as Boncompagno da Signa argued) the stuff of dreams. In the protected space of a dream Geryon, Dante’s monstrous creature, expressed under the veil of a biological metaphor a monstrous, unspeakable truth: that the offspring of poetry is comparable to the offspring of money – usury.

But this conclusion might have been Dante’s blind spot. As Freud said, “The ego is not master in its own house”. Not even Dante’s ego.

37 Boncompagno da Signa, Rhetorica nova, p. 280: “Anima enim sepe transumit, quia dormientibus pericula vel commoda futura per diversas et contrarias imaginationes ostendit. Unde plurimi dormiendo terrentur, et aliqui non modicum gloriantur; huiusmodi namque

somnia mortales arbitrabiliter interpretari laborant…”. Boncompagno da Signa, Rota Veneris, ed. P. Garbini, Roma 1996, pp. 17-18, sees in this passage an anticipation of Lacan.38 On the oniric/visionary dimension of Dante’s Comedy see M. Tavoni, “La visione

di Dio nell’ultimo canto del Paradiso”, in Dire l’indicibile. Esperienza religiosa e poesia

dalla Bibbia al Novecento, ed. C. Letta, Pisa 2009, pp. 65-112: a highly impressive essay (which I read after having written these pages) also indebted to Francesco Orlando’s approach to literature and psychoanalysis.

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