The tribute to Dante continues. This post is a summary of four articles. The first was published at http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/dante-turns-seven-hundred-and-fifty. The second was published at http://dantealighieridpba.weebly.com/the-legacy.html. The third was published at http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-divinecomedy/#gsc.tab=0. The fourth is a very small piece of the chapter I from the book, "Theory of the Novel". Written by Gyorgy Lukacs and was published at https://analepsis.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/georg-lukacs-the-theory-of-the-novel.pdf
On April, Samantha Cristoforetti, Italy,s first female astronaut, took time off from her regular duties in the International Space Station to read from the Divine Comedy. She picked the opening of the Paradiso. As Cristoforetti spun around the globe at the rate of seventeen thousand miles an hour, her reading was beamed back to earth and shown in a movie theater in Florence. Ten days later, The actor Roberto Benigni recited the last canto of Paradiso in the Italian Senate. That same day, Pope Francis made some brief remarks about the poet, officially joining what he called the "chorus of those who believe Dante Alighieri is an artist of the highest universal value. He can, help us get through the many dark woods we come across in our world." The Holy Father said. Italians kids first encounter Dante at school, when they are in the equivalent of seventh grade. They return to him after to study more depth. In secondary school they stay with him. I recently asked the high-school-aged son of an Italian friend of mine about the experience. "It is boring, and it never ends, but then you get to like it." He told me. There are, of course, many possible explanations for Dante's hold on Italy, including, after seven hundred and fifty years, sheer momentum. Language, too, clearly plays a part. When Dante began work on the Divine Comedy, None of the different dialects spoken in Italy's many city-states had any claim preeminence. Such was the force and influence of the Divine Comedy that the Tuscan dialect became Italy's literary language.
Today, Dante's influence still lives and is apparent in many different works. He is considered as having one of the greatest minds in literature of all-time. He has been compared to the most famous poet ever, Shakespeare, and has often been said to be the only writer to be in the same class as him. Dante's Divine Comedy is still one of the most glorified works of literature after 650 years. The work of art is a major part of 'The western Canion', a collection of the greatest books in history. Dante once said, "The secret of getting things done is to act".
Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) wrote his epic poem, while in exile from his native Florence. There are three parts to this massive work: Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. In each section Dante recount the travels of the pilgrim, his alter ego, through hell, purgatory and heaven. The greatness of the Divine Comedy lies in its construction as a summation of knowledge and experience. Dante was able to weave together pagan myth, literature, philosophy, theology, physics, astrology, mathematics, literary theory, history and politics into a complex poem that a wide audience, not only the highly educated, could read. As one of the greatest works, not just of the Middle Ages, but of world literature in its entirely, the influence of the Divine Comedy has been incalculable. The poem was immediately successful, Dante's own sons, Pietro and Jacopo, wrote the first commentaries on it, and it continues to be read and taught today. Many of western literature's major figure were indebted to Dante's masterwork. A selective list includes: Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton, William Blake, Victor Hugo, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges. If this impressive list were not testament enough, one has only to consider the four to five manuscripts of the Divine Comedy in existence, the four-hundred-some Italian printed editions and the hundreds of English translations to get some idea of this work's impact on culture.
This is the paradox of the subjectivity of the great epic, creative subjectivity becomes lyrical, but, exceptionally, the subjectivity which simply accepts, which humbly transforms itself into a purely receptive organ of the world, can partake of the grace of having the whole revealed to it. This is the leap that Dante made between the Vita Nuova and the Divina Commedia that Goethe made between Werther and Wilhelm Meister, the leap Cervantes made when, becoming silent himself, he let the cosmic humour of Dom Quixote become heard, by contrast, Sterne's and Jean Paul's glorious ringing voices offer no more than reflexions of a world-fragment which is merely subjective and therefore limited, narrow and arbitrary. This is not a value judgement but a definition of genre: the totality of life resists any attempt to find a transcendental centre within it, and refuses any of its constituent cell the right to dominate it. Only when a subject, removed from all life and from the empirical which is necessary posited together with life, becomes enthroned in the pure heights of essence, when it has becomes the carrier of the trancendental synthesis, can it contain all the conditions for totality within its own structure and transform its own limitations into the frontiers of the world. The epic is life, immanence, the empirical. Dante's Paradise is closer to the essence of life than Shakespeare's exuberant richness. The totality of the transcendent world-strucuture is the pre-determined sense-giving, all-embracing a priori of each individual destiny, so the increasing comprehension of this structure and its beauty, the great experience of Dante the traveller, envelops everything in the unity of its meaning. Dante's insight transforms the individual into a component of the whole, and so the ballads become epic songs. The epic hero is, strictly speaking, never an individual. It is traditionally thought that one of the essential characteristcs of the epic is the fact that its theme is not a personal destiny but the destiny of a community, of a society. And rightly so, for the completeness of the value system which determines the epic cosmos creates a whole. The omnipotence of ethics, which posits every soul as autonomous is still unknown in such world. When life finds an immanent meaning in itself. An individual structure is simply the product of a balance between the part and the whole, mutually determine one another, it is never the product of polemical self-contemplation by the lonely. Dante represent a historical-philosophical transition from the pure epic to the novel. In Dante there is still the perfect immanent distancelesness and completeness of the true epic, but his figures are already individuals, consciously and energitically placing themselves in opposition to a reality that is becoming near to them, individuals who, through this opposition becomes real. The combination of the presuppositions of the epic and the novel and their synthesis to an epic is based on the dual structure of Dante's world: the break between life and meaning is surpassed and cancelled by the coincidence of life and meaning in a present, actually experienced transcendence.
