The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 02
On the descriptio loci of Inf. 18 and its Vergilian antecedents, see Edoardo Sanguineti, chapter 1 of Interpretazione di Malebolge (Florence: Olschki, 1961), and Marino Barchiesi's lectura of canto 18, "Arte del prologo e arte della transizione," Studi danteschi 44 (1967): 115-207. Sanguineti's book is notable for its ideological motivation as well as its practical criticism; the author intends his "lettura narrativa dei canti di Malebolge" (xx) as a methodological challenge to Crocean emphasis on the Commedia's "Iyrics." Although Sanguineti's thirteen chapters on each of Malebolge's thirteen cantos more often provide detailed individual canto readings than one overarching lettura narrativa, his attempt generates insights into the poem's narrative dimension.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 03
Jurij M. Lotman notes that for Dante the worst of sins is "un uso falso dei segni" ("11 viaggio di Ulisse nella Divina Commedia di Dante," Testo e contesto [Bari: Laterza, 1980], 92). On the Inferno as a whole, see also Fredi Chiappelli, "11 colore della menzogna nell'lnferno dantesco," Letture classensi 18 (1989): 115-28.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 04
"In quanto alla forma, la parola fa si che il nostro verso proemiale proponga, con esemplare sinteticita , quello che costituira l'aspetto piu singolare dell 'intero canto, vale a dire l'accostamento di linguaggio elevato e linguaggio violentemente realistico" ("Arte del prologo," 126).
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 055
Dante's Malebolgian poetics seem to savor Augustine's recommendations in De doctrina Christiana 4.22.51: "But no one should think that it is contrary to theory to mix these three manners; rather, speech should be varied with all types of style in so far as this may be done appropriately. For when one style is maintained too long, it loses the listener. When transitions are made from one to another, even though the speech is long, it proceeds more effectively" (trans. D. W. Robertson, Jr. [Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958], 158). The fourth book of De doctrina Christiana is particularly concerned with the role of rhetoric in true discourse.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 06
See Interpretazione di Malebolge, 14, and "Arte del prologo," 190-92. The coupling of classical with contemporary figures is a feature of exemplary literature; see Carlo Delcorno, "Dante e l"Exemplum' medievale," Lettere italiane 35 (1983): 3-28.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 07
On the linguistic shift between cantos 26 and 27, see Teodolinda Barolini, Dante's Poets: Textuality and Truth in the "Comedy" (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 228-33; for the significance of classical/contemporary couples, which may also be read as fictional/real, see the reading of Sinon and Master Adam, 233-38.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 08
I would like to remind the reader that I am not referring to what is funny, not even in the sophisticated dress of "play." In my opinion, Dante's use of the terms comedia and tragedia must be understood in the context of truth and falsehood.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 09
For the connection between Vergil and Jason, see Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979), 158.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 10
Vergil's "parola ornata" finds expression most often in his use of the captatio benevolentiae; Cato responds to Vergil's captatio with the rebuke "non c'e mestier lusinghe" (Purg. 1.92). The four occurrences of lusinga/ lusingar seem to outline a gradual calling into question of ornate speech. Lusinga first appears in relation to fraud, in Inf. 11's resume of Malebolge ("ipocresia, lusinghe e chi affattura" [58]); it recurs in the pouch of the flatterers, juxtaposed to Jason's parole ornate, in Alessio's self-indictment ("Qua giu m'hanno sommerso le lusinghe" [18.125]). The final two uses both point to the limits of captatio benevolentiae: the infernal perspective is expressed by Bocca's "mal sai lusingar per questa lama!" (32.96), and the purgatorial by Cato's "non c'e mestier lusinghe."
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 11
The use of rime aspre belongs mainly to the bolgia of the flatterers; starting from line 101, we find rhyme words like "s'incrocicchia," "nicchia," "scuffa," "picchia," "muffa," "zuffa," and "zucca." These are noted by Barchiesi, "Arte del prologo," 198. H. Wayne Storey points to the harsh rhymes at the beginning of canto 18, including-oscio, "used only once by Dante" (31); see "Mapping Out the New Poetic Terrain: Malebolge and Inferno XVIII," Lectura Dantis: A Forum for Dante Research and Interpretation 4 (1989): 30-41.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 12
Although Dante works to undercut the consistently high style associated with classical epic, his point is not that high style is always wrong, but that a mixed style alone can capture all reality. The high style of canto 19 is, in any case, biblically rather than classically inspired; its rhetorical hallmarks will reappear in later political invectives, such as that of Purg. 6. Regarding "the violent oscillations in style marking, for example, Inferno 19,20, and 21, which imitate the Bible, the classics, and the comico realistici," Zygmunt G. Baranski comments: "The Comedy embodies a truly middle style: a midpoint at which every kind of expression and literary genre, and every subject can come together within a single structure" ("'Significar perverba': Notes on Dante and Plurilingualism," The Italianist 6 [1986]: 5-18; quotation, 12).
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 13
Kirkpatrick characterizes the shift differently "It is one of the most surprising features of the transition from Canto 18 to Canto 19 that Dante should [have] exchanged the ugly triviality of the one for the scriptural simplicity of the other: 'low' language now becomes sermo humilis" (Dante's "Inferno", 255). The language of canto 19 seems to me less biblical sermo humilis than biblical grandiloquence.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 14
"Hanc veritatem etiam Gentiles ante tubam evangelicam cognoscebant" (Mon. 2.9.7).
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 15
Sanguineti's crusade against romantic psychologizing readings of the Commedia leads him to ridicule D'Ovidio's suggestion that the autobiographical insert is connected to the sacreligious aspect of canto 19 as a whole. Despite D'Ovidio's heated phrasing, far too involved by today's cool critical standards, he hits on the key
point when he writes that this is a canto where the poet takes on "un peccato essenzialmente sacrilego, e non ci sarebbe mancato altro che egli medesimo non fosse del tutto libero dalla taccia di un sacrilegio!" (see Interpretazione di Malebolge, 41n).1t is worth remembering that Sanguineti is unusual among Italian Dantists of the early 1960s, since he not only sustains an anti-Croce polemic but also routinely critiques earlier Italians like D'Ovidio in favor of such as Spitzer and Singleton.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 16
The only other words in the Commedia specifically labeled true are Beatrice's see Dante's Poets, 280n, for an elaboration of this point.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 17
See Dante's Poets, 215-22, and my lectura, "True and False See-ers in Inferno XX," Lectura Dantis: A Forum for Dante Research and Interpretation 4 (1989): 42-54, where Dante's revision of the Aeneid is seen as investing not only the epic's content but its style, which is parodied in the excursus on Mantova.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 18
Ciampolo, as he is called by commentators, seems to be reacting to Dante's and Vergil's accents; the speech habits of guide and pilgrim constitute another semiotic theme that will be developed in Malebolge.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 19
Malacoda's lie in canto 21 is balanced by a further semiotic abuse in canto 22, where Ciampolo promises to summon his comrades by whistling, the sign that indicates the coast is clear (103-5). These abuses of sign systems by humans and devils are offset, ironically, by the behavior of animals: dolphins help sailors by signaling impending storms ("fanno segno / a' marinar" [Inf 22.19-20]).
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 20
Sanguineti refers to the "amplificazione catalogica dei segnali" in the exordium of canto 22 (Interpretazione di Malebolge, 121). Augustine refers to the trumpet in his discussion of signs in the opening chapters of book 2 of De doctrina Christiana.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 21
The response from one tower to another is described with the phrase "render cenno" (Inf. 8.5).
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 22
The same association is pointedly achieved at the beginning of Inferno 14, where we are faced with divine art‹"di giustizia orribil arte"‹and with the human whose job it is to narrate it: "A ben manifestar le cose nove, / dico che" (6-8). The independent reality conferred by the first verses of canto 21 will further manifest itself; as Sanguineti points out, this episode is exceptional for the "libero giuoco vitale, quell'autonomia drammatica" (Interpretazione di Malebolge, 141) that will allow Dante and Vergil to be forgotten while Ciampolo and the devils take center stage.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 23
He comments apropos the opening of canto 22 that the author "vult se excusare de turpi recitatione quam fecit supra in Capitolo precedenti in fine, per id quod scribit Socrates, dicens: 'Que facere turpe est. ea nec dicere honestum puto"' (Guido Biagi, ed., "La Divina Commedia" nella figurazione artistica e nel secolare commento, 3 vols. [Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1924-1929], 1:531) . More perceptively, Jacopo della Lana writes of the end of canto 21: "Circa la quale locuzione si po excusare l'Autore a chi l'acusasse de parladura porca e villana si in questo logo commo eziamdeo in lo XVIII° Capitolo de Tayde, che la materia del logo lo constrenge, zoe l'lnf., in lo quale e omme dexordinazione" (Biagi, La Divina Commedia 1:529).
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 24
For Domenico De Robertis, the exordium is marked by "epicita" ("In viaggio coi demoni," Studi danteschi 53 [1981]: 1-29). On the episode's stylistic registers, see Leo Spitzer, "The Farcical Elements in Inferno, Cantos XXI-XXIII," MLN 59 (1944): 83-88; Vittorio Russo, "If XXII o del 'grottesco sublime,"' Il romanzo teologico (Naples: Liguori, 1984), 95-123; and, most recently, Michelangelo Picone, who reads cantos 21-22 against the backdrop of "comic" Romance cultural modalities, as embodied by the jongleurs and by texts such as the Roman de la Rose and the Fiore ("Giulleria e poesia nella Commedia: una lettura intertestuale di Infemo XXI-XXII," Letture classensi 1 8 [ 1989]: 1 130) . For the "camevalizzazione del canto 2 1 ," see Piero Camporesi, "11 carnevale all' inferno," in II paese della fame ( Bologna : 11 Mulino, 1978), 23-51; I disagree, however, with Camporesi's suggestion that the ludic mode enters the Infemo against Dante's will. Rather, it enters as part of the narrative variety hymned by Tommaseo: "Sembra quasi che, dopo sfoggiata nel XX° Canto erudizione profana, e nel XIX° dottrina sacra e poetico sdegno, in questi due voglia riposare la propria mente e de' lettori con imagini che ben staddicono al titolo del Poema. All'aridita del 11° Canto abbiamo cosi veduta succedere la bellezza del 111°; e alle enumerazioni del IV° la grande poesia del seguente; e alla disputa sulla Fortuna il furor dell'Argenti, e a questo la venuta dell'Angelo e le scene del Farinata e del Cavalcanti; e dopo la scolastica precisione del Canto Xl° e le enumerazioni del X11°, il Canto dei suicidi; e dopo la descrizione de' fiumi d'lnf., la scena con Brunetto e coi tre Fiorentini; e innanzi alla tromba che suona pe' simoniaci, la faceta rappresentazione di Venedico, d'Alessio, di Taide. Varieta mirabile se pensata; se inavvertita, piu mirabile ancora" (Biagi, La Divina Commedia 1: 529).
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 25
Boccaccio may have had this episode in mind when he composed Decameron 4.2, the story of frate Alberto and madonna Lisetta: the friar's leap to safety into the Grand Canal and away from Lisetta's irate brothers seems modeled on Ciampolo's leap into the pitch. To support this reading, l would point out that 4.2 is Boccaccio's Venetian story, and that the bolgia of the barraters begins with the simile of the Venetian arsenal; most importantly, 4.2 is an anomolous story for the Decameron, in that friar Alberto's wit does not ultimately serve to save him. Like Ciampolo, Alberto is playing in a no-win game, a nuovo ludo. Note that, with respect to a sinner, nuovo has assumed an inverted hellish significance; it refers to the incapacity to move forward, to ever be "new." Similar usages are the "color novo" and "novelle spalle" attained by the thieves during their dead-ended metamorphoses (Inf. 25.119, 139). By contrast, when referring to the pilgrim, the adjective conserves its positive valence, implying his capacity for rebirth and forward movement; see Inf. 23.71-72.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 26
Kirkpatrick refers to "the 'humble' speech of the fable" (Dante's "Inferno," 279). A further intertextual complication is the echo of Cavalcanti's "e vanno soli, senza compagnia, / e son pien' di paura" ("lo non pensava che lo cor giammai," 51-52) .
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 27
"Far from being wrong, the pilgrim's wish to listen is right, for his is the comedic desire to confront evil and to bear witness to all of reality, including Hell" (Dante's Poets, 238).
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 28
Guido uses istra, a variant of issa: "O tu a cu' io drizzo / la voce e che parlavi mo lombardo, / dicendo 'Istra ten va, piu non t'adizzo"' (Inf. 27.1921). Bonagiunta uses issa to signal his conversion to understanding: "'O frate, issa vegg'io,' diss'elli, 'il nodo / che 'I Notaro e Guittone e me ritenne / di qua dal dolce stil novo ch'i' odo!"' (Purg. 24.55-57).
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 29
See Robert Hollander, "Virgil and Dante as Mind-Readers (Inferno XXI and XXIII)," Medioevo romanzo 9 (1984): 85-100.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 30
Dante's understanding of mo and issa could be described in the terms Zygmunt G. Baranski uses for the "In of Par. 26, i.e., as "an avant la lettre instance of neo-Saussurean 'arbitrariness of the signifier'" ("Dante's Biblical Linguistics," Lectura Dantis: A Forum for Dante Research and Interpretation 5 [1989]: 105-43; quotation, 126).
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 31
See Mark Musa's notes to this canto, Dante's "Infemo" (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 202.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 32
Joan Ferrante notes that "normally, we think of art imitating nature (cf. Inf. 11.97-105), but here nature seems to imitate art, using its tools just long enough to deceive its audience" ("Good Thieves and Bad Thieves: A Reading of Infemo XXIV," Dante Studies 104 [1986]: 83-98; quotation, 87). The semiotic meditation of lower hell will offer another example of nature as an imperfect artist in Inf. 31, where she is congratulated for having left off the art of making giants: "Natura certo, quando lascio l'arte / di si fatti animali, assai fe bene / per torre tali essecutori a Marte" (49-51) . All these passages depend on the mimetic hierarchy articulated in Inf. 11.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 33
Guido Almansi glosses this episode's "stupenda turpitudine," noting, with respect to the following passage, that "l'adesione, ovviamente, non e geometrica o matematica , bensi squisitamentesessuale " ( "I serpenti in infernali , " in L'estetica dell'osceno [Turin: Einaudi, 1974], 37-88; quotations, 41, 66).
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 34
In "Dante's Anti-Virgilian Villanello (Inf. XXIV, 1-21)," Dante Studies 102 (1984): 81-109, Margherita Frankel reads the simile as written in "two distinct styles, one highly literary and rhetorically ornate, the other humble like an Evangelical parable" (92). From this perspective, one could see the simile as initiating the hybrid style of cantos 24-25.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 35
She writes of the "imprevedibile alleanza tra registri stilistici tradizionalmente antitetici" and of a "discorso letterario di provenienza ora petrosa ora stilnovistica, ora giocoso-realistica ora biblica, ora virgiliana ora dottrinaria" (Dante e la tradizione letteraria medievale [Pisa: Giardini, 1983], 28-29). Sanguineti too discusses Malebolge's last two cantos in these terms, noting canto 29's "modulazioni di narrato al tutto imprevedibili" (Interpretazione di Malebolge, 322) and characterizing canto 30 as a supreme example of Dantesque "politonalita" (337).
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 36
Hugh Shankland points out that Dante's "dei remi facemmo ali" is "actually a reversal of the Virgilian tag remigium alarum, that is 'delle ali remi,' originally applied to the sure flights of Mercury and Daedalus in Aeneid 1.301 and 6.10" ("Dante Aliger and Ulysses," Italian Studies 32 [1977]: 21-40; quotation, 30). The image recurs in Ovid's account of Icarus's fall: the boy's wings melt, and he beats his naked arms to no avail, "remigioque carens" ("lacking oarage" [Metam. 8.228]). Thus, the image that Dante adopts as his chief emblem for Ulysses is associated in Vergil and Ovid with both Icarus and Daedalus, setting up the Commedia's twofold analogy: as a frightened flyer, the pilgrim is compared to Icarus; as an artist who completes his flight, Dante is analogous to Daedalus, who arrived at Cumae.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 37
The above verses are, in order of citation, Metamorphoses 8.188-89, 195, 215, 220, 234. The text is from the Loeb edition by F J. Miller, 2 vols. (1916; rpt., Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann, 1971 [vol. 1] and 1968 [vol. 2]).
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 38
See E. R. Curtius, "The Ape as Metaphor," European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1948; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 538-40, and,
for a reading similar to mine, see Steven Botterill, "Inferno XXlX Capocchio and the Limits of Realism," Italiana 1988: Selected Papers from the Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Conference of the American Association of Teachers of Italian, ed. Albert N. Mancini et al. (River Forest, 111.: Rosary College, 1990), 23-33. Curtius's account does not include the passage in the Convivio in which Dante denies that parrots speak as men or that apes act as men; their representation is not real, because not guided by reason: "Onde e da sapere che solamente l'uomo intra li animali parla, e ha reggimenti e atti che si dicono razionali, pero che solo elli ha in se ragione. E se alcuno volesse dire contra, dicendo che alcuno uccello parli, si come pare di certi, massimamente de la gazza e del pappagallo, e che alcuna bestia fa atti o vero reggimenti, si come pare de la scimia e d'alcuno altro, rispondo che non e vero che parlino ne che abbiano reggimenti, pero che non hanno ragione, da la quale queste cose convegnono procedere; ne e in loro lo principio di queste operazioni, ne conoscono che sia cio, ne intendono per quello alcuna cosa significare, ma solo quello che veggiono e odono ripresentare" (3.7.8-9). Unlike apes, the falsifiers possess reason and are therefore responsible for their imitations. In the context of poetic imitation, we recall the anonymous sonnet "In verita questo libel di Dante / e una bella simia de' poeti," connected by Guglielmo Gorni to Inf. 29 in "Cino 'vil ladro': parola data e parola rubata," 11 nodo della lingua e il verbo d'amore (Florence: Olschki, 1981), 138.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 39
I follow Robert Hollander's suggestion that the adverb qui in "punisce i falsador che qui registra" refers to the text of the Commedia, see "Dante's 'Book of the Dead': A Note on Infemo XXIX 57," Studi danteschi 54 (1982): 31-51, where Hollander also notes that the alchemists are "perversely reminiscent of the poet's role of fabricator" (34).
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 40
Ephialtes' desire to be "esperto" recalls Ulysses' ardor to become "del mondo esperto" and his subsequent call for "I'esperienza, / di retro al sol, del mondo sanza gente" (Inf. 26.98,116-17). The Ulyssean stamp imprinted on the sin of pride in Inf. 31 will be confirmed in Purg. 12, where the examples of pride rehearse the same transgressive configuration: Lucifer, the giants, including Nimrod, and‹as stand-in for Ulysses‹Arachne.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 41
The canto's first three words can thus be taken, out of context, to announce its theme.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 42
The idea of traversing is present in the De vulgari eloquentia, where Dante discusses the dual nature of language in terms of mankind's need to traverse the distance between the rational and the sensual, using the verb pertransire: "Quare, si tantum rationale esset, pertransire non posset; si tantum sensuale, nec a ratione accipere nec in rationem deponere potuisset" (1.3.2). One could look at the Commedia as a project that on the one hand seeks to eliminate the need for passage between the sensual sound (signifier) and its rational meaning (signified), by making them indivisible, and on the other is aware of the impossibility of a task whose consummation would make us like angels. In this sense, the Commedia is, like the tower of Babel, an "ovra inconsummabile" (Par. 26.125).
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 43
The use of convenire in 32.2 echoes the infernal decorum of the previous canto, which dictated that Nimrod speak gibberish since he is one "cui non si convenia piu dolci salmi" (31.69); the poet, too, is one for whom "sweeter psalms" are not currently appropriate. By the same token, the poet's "rime aspre e chiocce" echo
Plutus's "voce chioccia" (Inf. 7.2; these are the only instances of chioccia in the poem).
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 44
Dante had long striven for what Gianfranco Contini calls "la conversione del contenuto nella forma": in the verses "Cosi nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro / com'e ne li atti questa bella petra," we see an earlier version of Inf 32's dir and fatto. (For Contini's comment, see his edition of Dante's Rime [1946; rpt., Turin: Einaudi, 1970], 165.) In the same canzone the poet tells us that the weight that submerges him "e tal che non potrebbe adequar rima" (21). Dante most likely had his earlier experiment with hard speech in mind as he composed Inf. 32: the canzone's last stanza begins, "S'io avessi le belle trecce prese," a verse that will be echoed in "S'io avessi le rime aspre e chiocce." Moreover, in canto 32 the optative hair pulling of the canzone becomes "reality" when the pilgrim pulls the hair of Bocca degli Abati. For other echoes of the petrose in Cocytus, see Robert M. Durling and Ronald L. Martinez, Time and the Crystal: Studies in Dante's Rime Petrose (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 217-23.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 45
See Giovanni Papanti, ed., Dante, secondo la tradizione e i novellatori (Leghom: Vigo, 1873), 151-53.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 46
See Giorgio Barberi Squarotti, "L'orazione del conte Ugolino," Lettere italiane 23 (1971): 3-28; Piero Boitani, "Ugolino e la narrativa," Studi danteschi 53 (1981): 31-52.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 47
In "Ugolino e la narrativa," Boitani categorizes both Dante's exordium of canto 32 and Ugolino's dream as narrative authenticating devices, referring explicitly to Bloomfield's "Authenticating Realism and the Realism of Chaucer"; see chapter 1 for discussion of Bloomfield's essay.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 48
Dante is here reminding us of the treatise in which he classifies the various languages spoken in the bel paese, and where he first refers to Italian as the lingua di si. For further connections between the De vulgari eloquentia and this portion of the poem, in which we are made to witness man's "betrayal of his very essence as speaker, according to the definition in the treatise" (137), see Donna L. Yowell, "Ugolino's 'bestial segno': The De Vulgari Eloquentia in Inferno XXXII-XXXIII," Dante Studies 104 (1986): 121~~~43.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 49
The writerly context that has absorbed the originally oral "canto" is denoted by the adverb "suso"; the poet refers to the children whose names are registered "above," in the written text. l do not agree with Jeremy Tambling, for whom Ugolino "is going beyond representation, going into the stark withdrawal about which there is nothing to say," and who sees in the episode the signs of an "Ugolino impasse" whereby "a writer who continued in the Inferno mode would soon have to cease writing altogether" (Dante and Difference: Writing in the "Commedia" [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1988],81-82). This interpretation depends on suspending awareness of the composing poet, who demonstrates no difficulty in moving beyond Ugolino, who suffers no impasse, no drying up of his tongue as he responds to Ugolino's narrative with the scathing indictment of Pisa. It is not enough to say, "The address to Pisa is a separate thing" (82). Why conclude that a text that is about absence of signification itself participates in the absence of signification it represents?
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 50
See Simonetta Saffiotti Bernardi's entry, "Ugolino," in the ED; apropos Ugolino's vicarship, she comments that "probabilmente il conte usava questo titolo di vicario, oramai privo di contenuto, per legittimare le sue pretese sarde" (5:795).
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 51
Canto 33 also encompasses stylistic extremes, since as Piero Boitani points out, Alberigo's tone is as "low" as Ugolino's is "high" (see 'lnferno XXXIII," Cambridge Readings in Dante's "Comedy," ed. Kenelm Foster and Patrick Boyde [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981], 7>89, esp. 86).
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 52
The condition of the neutrals, of whom Dante writes at the outset of the journey‹as now he is at the end‹that "mai non fur vivi" (Inf. 3.64), is perhaps akin to this one, making them souls who never transited transition.
The Undivine Comedy, ch. 04: 53
With the words "per cotali scale . . . conviensi dipartir da tanto male" (Inf. 34.82, 84), Vergil echoes "Omai si scende per s} fatte scale," canto 17's first formulation of participatory transition. Kathleen Verduin reads the episode as the pilgrim's participation in the "essentially deathful condition of the devil" ("Dante and the Sin of Satan: Augustinian Patterns in Infemo XXXIV 22-27," Quaderni d'italianistica 4 [1983]: 208-17; quotation, 211).