Joyce and Dante: The Shaping Imagination

by Mary Trackett Reynolds

Overview

Mary Reynolds studies the rhetorical and linguistic maneuvers by which Joyce related his work to Dante's and shows how Joyce created in his own fiction a Dantean allegory of art. Dr. Reynolds argues that Joyce read Dante as a poet rather than as a Catholic; that Joyce was interested in Dante's criticism of society and, above all, in his great powers of innovation.

Originally published in 1981.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691602165
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #565
Pages:	398
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.90(d)

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Joyce and Dante

The Shaping Imagination

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By Mary T. Reynolds

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1981 Mary T. Reynolds
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06446-8

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CHAPTER 1

The Presence of Dante in Joyce's Fiction

The patterns of Joyce's interest in Dante form a larger design, which developed over a long span of years. A dominant element from the beginning was his desire, shared with other writers in the English language, to absorb the great poem into a later age, a different language, an alien culture. Joyce might have translated Dante (as Chaucer translated Petrarch, and as Byron translated Dante's Francesca episode). But he chose instead to assimilate Dante's poetic effects in his own fictions.

As we read his books we see the questions Joyce asked of Dante's text. These range from minute questions of word choice and placement to the manner of Dante's creation of the structures and sequences by which he shaped imaginatively a particular experience of life in a particular time and space. Joyce scrutinized closely Dante's combination of poetic structures in a sublime whole. Dante's rhetorical management of complexity was Joyce's most pervading interest. His approach is epitomized in Pound's remark: "The best critic is the next fellow to do the job."

As a reading of the Divine Comedy, such a preoccupation with the literary rather than the theological aspects of the poem, such an interest in craftsmanship rather than in doctrine, followed a critical tradition of long standing. The tradition began with the Commentary of Benvenuto da Imola, only some fifty years after Dante's death, and it has furnished matter for argument and controversy down to the present day. Whatever, we may think of its merits or defects, this critical stance, which argues that the Comedy can be understood through a primarily literary interpretation, is an inclusive critical position that has been validated by time, and it is the approach that governed Joyce's perception of Dante.

An account of Joyce's study of the Divine Comedy, so far as we can reconstruct it, will help in understanding the Dantean allusions in his work. As a preliminary, it is useful to examine a small sample of those allusions. As Joyce's art developed and matured, his imitations of Dante submerged into the fabric of his fiction. This process was less a matter of deliberate concealment (although this factor is not absent) than of Joyce's making more and more fully his own the artistic devices and maneuvers he found in Dante's poetry. It was a matter of indifference to him whether the borrowings were detected and traced to their originals. On the other hand he did not conceal the presence of Dante in his work; to the contrary, his overt allusions to Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Ibsen and others are a proud acknowledgment of kinship. In this they resemble Dante's acknowledgment of his debt to Virgil.

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Joyce's imitation of Dante is, of course, too protean to be pinned down in neat categories. It is possible, however, to identify five kinds of imitation, which he often used together: first, the echo of Dante's cadences, a more or less faithful translation from Italian into English; second, the reproduction of Dante's visual imagery; third, the appropriation of Dante's characters; fourth, an adaptation of Dante's analogies in such a way that distinctive components of simile or metaphor reappear in a new setting; and fifth, the creation of a narrative pattern modeled on one of Dante's situations or narrative sequences.

Even a small sample of Joyce's allusions to Dante suggests the presence of an important design: Joyce's recognition of literary allegory in the Divine Comedy and his mimetic attachment of Dante's literary allegory to his own fiction. The elements of literary allegory are most prominent in A Portrait of the Artist and in Ulysses, but the design is an important feature, and a Dantean element, throughout Joyce's work.

An important element of Joyce's originality in his critical observation of Dante was the recognition of broadly metaphorical patterns in the Divine Comedy. Metaphor has become a focus of interest in Dante criticism only in recent years. The older view implicit in T. S. Eliot's comment that "Dante makes us see what he sees" has been recognized to be unduly restrictive, so that a larger critical interest now probes the Comedy for images in which the visual element is relatively weak and the design seems rather to be focused on "making us feel what Dante feels." It was in this larger figural mode that Joyce found his strategic instrument for creation of a complex poetic unity.

Let us observe first the simple form of allusion that is recognizable because the cadences of the original are present. Joyce puts this statement in the Ithaca episode of Ulysses:

He thought that he thought that he was a jew whereas he knew that he knew that he knew that he was not ...

The sentence is an unmistakable echo of the lines given by Dante to Pier della Vigne in Inferno 13:25, "Cred'io che' ei credette ch'io credesse ..." ("I believe that he believed that I believed ...") Allusions of this kind, for which Karl Vossler coined the happy term "quotations in solution," are a feature particularly of Finnegans Wake. In that book they are by no means confined to Dante, but range widely over all kinds of written material, perhaps most notably Irish poetry and song.

Joyce, when he echoes Dante, shows an awareness of Dante's context. The allusive construction is delicately and subtly connected with Dante's text in some way that at the very least indicates Joyce's recognition of why Dante wrote the line as he did. In Inferno 13 the "conceit" of this line represents the artificial, flowery style of the speaker, Pier, a contemporary poet of the Sicilian school at the court of Frederick II. Joyce's reconstruction indicates awareness of Dante's taste for parody and imitation. Joyce's line thus becomes a parody of a parody, and also, like Dante's, a comment on fashions in literary style. Since a poet and his poetry are involved at both levels, Joyce's allusion also becomes an oblique comment on the literary act.

A second sample pattern finds Joyce reproducing one of Dante's visual images. In the closing paragraph of the Cyclops episode of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom takes form suddenly as Elijah, ascending to Heaven in a chariot of fire drawn by horses of fire:

When, lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld the chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld Him in the chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment as of the sun, fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they durst not look upon him. And there came a voice out of heaven, calling: Elijah! Elijah! And he answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai! And they beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to the glory of the brightness at an angle of forty-five degrees over Donohoes in Litde Green Street like a shot off a shovel. (U 339:14-23)

Here Joyce has in mind the famous simile in Inferno 26, the canto of Ulysses. There Dante is reminded of Elijah's fiery ascent because he is watching the flames, each one holding an evil counsellor.

And as he who was avenged by the bears saw Elijah's chariot at its departure, when the horses rose erect to heaven — for he could not so follow it with his eyes as to see aught save the flame alone, like a little cloud ascending: so each flame moves along the gullet of the ditch ... (Inf. 26:34-40, trans. Singleton)

While Dante is building on the Old Testament, II Kings 2:11, he puts much emphasis upon the fiery nature of the ascent, and his flames reappear (with due modification) in Joyce's "glory of the brightness," and "raiment as of the sun." Dante's "little cloud" also reverberates slightly in Joyce's "clouds of angels," which is notably not in the Biblical reference. (Joyce named one of his short stories "A Little Cloud," and gave the name of Nuvoletta, the Italian word in Dante's passage, to one of the characters in Finnegans Wake.)

Richard Lansing has demonstrated that elements of the simile at this point in the Divine Comedy mimic the epic action of the poem as a whole. Dante emphasizes the spectator who watched the ascent of the chariot, and this reflects Dante's own situation as a pilgrim-spectator in Inferno 26. His role as watcher, seeking to learn the meaning of the scene — the valley filled with flames — suggests by extension the role of the pilgrim in the Commedia. But that spectator, the Dante who watches, is the poet and author of the Comedy. The reader who receives this small bit of knowledge observes that Dante is externalizing an aspect of the imagination that created the text we are reading.

Bloom's comic ascent identifies him passingly with the sternest of the Hebrew prophets, champion of freedom and purity of life, who not only ascended to heaven in a fiery chariot but was able to call down from heaven consuming fires to destroy his detractors. Dante's simile is given in the voice of the traveler as watcher. The spectators of Bloom's apotheosis are the Dublin bystanders, and the voice is that of an anonymous narrator. As a comic miracle this unforgettable little vignette sets Bloom/Elijah in a relation to the hostile crowd he has escaped. The reader smiles but is reminded, however jocosely, that Elijah triumphed over his enemies. Unquestionably this element of triumph was important to Dante in selecting the simile, for Dante — as we learn much later in the poem — has a stern political message through which he will win an ultimate victory over the enemies who exiled him, though not until his journey has given him a full Christian perspective. Now, in the comparison of the two metaphorical constructions, and especially in Joyce's placement of Dante's simile at the close of the chapter, the reader becomes aware that the mind of the author is reflected indirectly, as Dante's is more directly reflected, in this double vision. It is the mind of a writer who wished, he said, to stir the conscience of Ireland by becoming the poet of his race.

In the chapters that follow we will move from the single line parody, and the brief, single-paragraph simile dominated by a visual image, to Joyce's larger mimetic constructions. Joyce did occasionally pick out from the Divine Comedy a single telling piece of detail that could be used for a fleeting identification of one of Dante's characters. More commonly, however, he reconstructs the portrait by a broad selection of compositional features that distinctively identify Dante's personage. The form and placement of the Elijah simile in Joyce's Cyclops chapter momentarily reinforces the Ulyssean identity of Leopold Bloom at the same time that he is comically seen as a Biblical prophet, because the reader is reminded of the hero of Inferno 26, Ulysses in Dante's rather than Homer's version. It was to introduce him that Dante created the Elijah simile, with its companion simile of fireflies watched — the spectator again — by the peasant above Fiesole. Such complications and ambiguities are purposeful. Joyce told Beckett, in discussing the use of Dante, "The danger lies in the neatness of identifications."

* * *

Joyce's interest in Dante has been undervalued, if it has not been unnoticed. Many areas coincide. Both Joyce and Dante deal with man in the most fundamental terms and over the largest range of behavior. Both intend to set forth the universal in the particular. Both show a marked pride in their epistemology. Both writers make use of the artist in the work as one of the characters, and describe the artist with autobiographical detail. Moreover, both are concerned with man as creative artist ("There's a touch of the artist about old Bloom"). This is a mode of writing, and an aspect of the work, that Thomas Bergin in writing about Dante has described as literary allegory, that is, an allegory about the literary act.

The unity of Dante's poem demands the reader's involvement, at least temporarily, with scholastic theology. This was not a problem for Joyce, who had a thoroughly Catholic as well as a poetic knowledge of Dante. The poetry of the Paradiso may indeed be more accessible to a mind that has very early been conditioned to the intricate patterns of Catholic apologetics and doctrine. Joyce would not have regarded the theological aspects of the Commedia as an impediment, as T. S. Eliot (despite his express recognition of the sublimity of the Paradiso) apparently did, nor would he have wanted to separate Dante's lyric passages from his theology, as Croce insisted. Rather, Joyce saw the intellectual structure of scholasticism as one of the monuments of civilization, a noble product of the human mind — beautiful not merely in its intricacy and subtlety but also as an embodiment of an elevated moral and ethical conception of life.

Moreover, the poetic imagination in Joyce's view would be shaped by the same imperative that produces those higher qualities of the mind that have led to all the great visions and visionary systems. Joyce, like Renan, would have distinguished between the supernatural, which is meaningless or of no account in human affairs, and the ideal, which, whether in poetry or philosophical speculation or mysticism, has always implied a noble effort of the mind to pass beyond the limits of its knowledge.

Joyce was aware that in Britain Dante was highly esteemed but seldom carefully read. In the Wandering Rocks section of Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus is the subject of discussion between his enemy, Buck Mulligan, and the English visitor, Haines. In Mulligan's disparaging remarks a contrast appears between his view of Dante and Stephen's.

They drove his wits astray, he said, with visions of hell. He will never capture the Attic note. The note of Swinburne, of all poets, the white death and the ruddy birth. That is his tragedy. He can never be a poet. The joy of creation. (U 245:25)

Buck Mulligan, self-proclaimed Hellenist, really knows nothing about Dante; Swinburne is his model for the poets of Ireland. "Visions of hell" are not considered by him to be the stuff of poetry; the sense of the passage is that Stephen, because of his ingrained Catholicism, is incapable of following the lead of Yeats, Russell, and the group of Dublin intellectuals who wish to Celticize Homer — to graft onto native Irish themes the "Attic note" of classical Greece. Neopaganism and paganism both exclude the kind of introspective and spiritual quest that Dante provides.

Eternal punishment, Haines said, nodding curtly. I see. I tackled him this morning on belief. There was something on his mind, I saw. ... He can find no trace of hell in ancient Irish myth. The moral idea seems lacking, the sense of destiny, of retribution. (U 245)

But Stephen, unsuspected by the Dublin cult, is following Dante's lead — the example of the poet who, with skills comparable only to Shakespeare's, made use in an original fashion of classical themes and models. Mulligan's scornful answer is equivocally met by Haines:

— Ten years, he [Mulligan] said, chewing and laughing. He's going to write something in ten years.

— Seems a long way off, Haines said, thoughtfully. Still, I shouldn't wonder if he did after all. (U 245-246)

So Joyce announced the inception of Ulysses, a Dublin Commedia. Dante could hardly have handled the event more precisely or violently.

Joyce, who was by training as thoroughly Catholic as Dante, rejected the authority of the Church in the form in which he found it in his day. Dante, bitterly critical and hostile to a corrupt Papacy, still accepted and exalted the Church as an institution divinely created and inspired. Joyce had lost his faith and was unable to accept the Church's claim to supernatural inspiration: his predicament here resembled that of Renan. In respect to his loss of faith it is impossible to find Joyce in the same position spiritually as Dante.

No more complex question can be asked, in estimating Joyce's view of Dante's poem, than what effect the tensions that arose from Joyce's loss of faith had on his imagination and his art. If Joyce needed to mark out his distance from Dante, he also needed and accepted the sense of identity that came with their shared inheritance. Joyce was an unbeliever who saw his Church with "the spirit of an acute, sympathetic alien" (SH 73). He said, moreover, "To get the right perspective on me, you really should allude to me as a Jesuit." Judging the Irish Church by its own standards and in its own terms, his indictment of worldliness and simony takes a position that much resembles Dante's. He never formally apostatized, and when asked whether he had left the Church he replied, "That's for the Church to say."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Joyce and Dante by Mary T. Reynolds. Copyright © 1981 Mary T. Reynolds. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Illustrations, pg. ix
• Preface, pg. xi
• Acknowledgments, pg. xiii
• Editions and Abbreviations, pg. xvii
• Introduction, pg. 1
• CHAPTER ONE. The Presence of Dante in Joyce's Fiction, pg. 12
• CHAPTER TWO. Paternal Figures and Paternity Themes, pg. 33
• CHAPTER THREE. The Theme of Love: Dante's Francesca and Joyce's "Sirens", pg. 79
• CHAPTER FOUR. Poetic Imagination and Lustration Patterns, pg. 119
• CHAPTER FIVE. Toward an Allegory of Art, pg. 149
• CHAPTER SIX: Between Time and Eternity, pg. 179
• APPENDIX: JOYCE'S ALLUSIONS TO DANTE, pg. 229
• Notes, pg. 331
• Index, pg. 361