Vivos De Marmore Vultus

It will seem scandalous to many readers that Dante's poem of violent sexual fantasy concludes with the terms—they are quite unmistakable—of the beatific vision. But to declare the scene parody would be an oversimplification.^[111] We must read again the last two stanzas, in detail, if we are to appreciate their very subtle shifts of meaning.

The fantasy of the lady's reciprocation begins with her being plunged into the hot pit of sexual desire and frustration, exacerbated to the point that its expression is bestial, latra; this state is attributed to the lover ("com'io per lei"), and in spite of its evident hyperbole (for his speech, however violent, is still superbly articulated), the term latra carries a real shock value (particularly as it is the culminating term in the series of B/b rhymes, perhaps the most intrinsically harsh rhymes in the entire poem: squatra, atra, latra, latra, the equivocal rhyme of the last two contributing considerable emphasis to the effect).^[112] So also the caldo borro, which continues the themes of sinking, drowning, and enclosure (cf. especially "il peso che m'affonda," line 20). The fantasy of both protagonists being reduced to bestiality naturally includes the most difficult question raised by the poem: can such exasperated lust ever be humanized, ever be reconciled with the principle of love? This question is more profound and difficult than the question of what a lover should do when confronted with an unwilling lady (obviously he should leave her and find another), and it is what justifies Dronke's insistence that the central theme of the poem is the struggle for the lady's acknowledgment that her hostility is in fact the mask of an intensity of desire that matches the lover's.

Dante's claim within the poem would seem to be that lust can be redeemed for love only by granting it its scope, always within a largeness of spirit that gradually disarms its inevitable aggressive component. This view is part and parcel of the refusal we have traced in the other petrose to renounce either of the two principles (flesh and spirit, body

and soul) represented by the Twins of Gemini. The caldo borro, of course, is one of several indirect references to the sexual organs, in this case clearly to the female organ, and there is a strong suggestion that the next lines (especially the mention of the lady's hair) involve a certain exchange of upper for lower.^[113]

Thus the lover's imagined response, "Io vi soccorro," is really quite ambiguous.^[114] In the first place, one of the overt meanings derives from the notion that the lady is sinking or drowning in a pit from which the lover can withdraw her. But there is an element of irony, too, for the help he offers involves her subjection to her lust as well as to his desire. Later, at the level imagined as reached in the last line of the last stanza, his help has led to peace, has rescued her from the inhuman state of the borro. One of the most striking things about the passage, however, is that once the lover takes action, the borro itself disappears from the poem. We are free to imagine that the lover joins the lady there, but the suggestion is really much stronger that the locus of the encounter is the literal bed. This change is an important step in the demystifying movement of the last two stanzas, which we associate with the poem's overall de-metaphorizing activity.

The last stanza of the poem, then, is an indirect representation of sexual intercourse. "Con esse passerei vespero e squille": the braids are to be undone slowly and gradually; this stands for the removal of all ornatus, including clothing. "Non sarei pietoso né cortese": there is to be no holding back or sparing of the lady out of false delicacy or the sentimental passivity of the traditional courtly lover (who, like Lancelot, is often imagined as paralyzed when offered the object of his desire). "Anzi farei com'orso quando scherza": obviously this means that the lover will be rough and potentially dangerous, but it probably implies as well an extreme delicacy and precision of movement. The image of the bear also includes the greater physical size and weight of the lover compared to the lady (and, as we have already noted, the lover's being supine under the blows of Love's sword clearly implies, when the fantasy is reversed, the lady's being supine). Thus, the puzzling line "io mi vendicherei di più di mille," still explicitly referring to the lady's trecce, invites (especially since the trecce have been called whips) the completion mile colpi, "a thousand blows." In the context of the earlier stanzas, the implied blows are strongly suggested to be blows of what is represented in the poem by Aeneas's sword: the penis.

It is easy to lose sight here of the insistence on slowness earlier in the

stanza. In the sirma, the gradual disarming of hostility and violence is completed, and full communication and reconciliation are represented as achieved in the long unflinching gaze of the couple into each other's eyes: "Ancor ne li occhi . . . / guarderei presso e fiso / per vendicar lo fuggir che mi face." The "vengeance" here is no infliction of pain: the lady must endure the lover's gaze, and he hers. In the context of all the petrose, the sustained gaze of the lover here represents the refusal of aversion from the lady's glance, breaking the power of the lady's gaze in "Così" as in the other poems. The prolonged mutual gaze of the two lovers is a pointed demystification of the idea that the lady could be a Medusa.^[115] The now merely human couple has been divested of all mythology. And of course the time scheme of the pedes governs the sirma. That is, the gazing takes place at the same time as the earlier gesture of seizing the hair. "Nei biondi capelli . . . metterei mano" establishes contact with the lady's head, and the mutual gaze of the last lines brings the two heads close together. The reference to the traditional kiss on the lips that marks the ritual reconciliation of former enemies means that in the course of the stanza the term vendicare has undergone important changes. The injury said to be avenged changes: in the previous stanza the lady's golden hair is described as consuming the lover, in the last stanza the trecce are whips; but in the sirma the injury to be avenged is the lady's very absence, her avoidance of the lover. So, too, the mode of the so-called vengeance diminishes from the thousand blows of the pedes to the fixed gaze of the sirma. One of the ambiguities of the stanza lies precisely in this shift. At one level the violence is all playful, sharply bracketed, and identified as lovers' play, since the entire scene presupposes the lady's willing participation; at another the couple's mutual hostility and resistance are represented as very real, but these reactions, by being given scope and worked through, are shown to be disarmable.

The speaker's fantasy is not technically one of rape. His wish is that the lady call for him ("perché non latra / per me, com'io per lei," 59–60), that she feel the goad of love that he feels and reach out to him for its appeasement. The fantasy is thus that the lady will desire him. Dronke argues that the petra is herself moved by Amor, that her hostility to the lover is the sign of an unacknowledged investment. The poem purports to be as much a mirror held up to show the petra her violence as it is an admission, and catharsis, of the speaker's own violence. The imagined lovemaking in the last two stanzas would then be no more than what the lady herself wants; indeed, it is the lady's pleasure that is imagined

("piacere'le"). In this respect the poem must be distinguished from poems like Guinizelli's "Chi vedesse a Lucia un var capuzzo," where the fantasy is precisely the pleasure of taking a woman by force.^[116] Unlike Guinizelli's fantasy, moreover, "Così" does not (in feudal terms) ameliorate the violence it depicts by lowering the social class of the woman: Dante characterizes the petra not as a femina but as a donna, a lady of power and station deserving of the honorific voi ("Io vi soccorro," 63)—a connotation that the irony does not eliminate.

It will have struck readers that the peace achieved in the body of the poem appears to vanish in the congedo, where, returning to the diegetic present, the speaker commands the poem to attack the lady. The congedo expresses the reversal of roles active in the poem as well as the poem's antiphrastic quality by inverting generic expectations; rather than a petition placed humbly at the feet of the domina, a suppliant envoi, it is an imperious assailant. But the congedo is also ironic (though in a sense different from line 63), for it proposes to make the lady fall in love. The poem would be the arrow of love that the lady has hitherto evaded; love comes most suddenly and violently to those who pretend immunity from it, like Virgil's Dido or Chaucer's Troilus. The feudal ethos of the final verse—"che bell'onor s'acquista in far vendetta"—is thus curiously ameliorated by its sentenza, which is that the petra, unnaturally rigid and averse to love, be mollified.^[117]

In this sense the poem is a call or lure (richiamo ) attempting to win the lady over to Love.^[118] Her answering call, were it to come, would fall into the pattern of calls and requests in the poem: it would reverse the lady's request for greater and greater cruelty ("impetra più natura cruda," 4) and compensate Love's (but also in a sense the lady's) refusal of the speaker ("merzé chiamando ," 38). The speaker would answer the lady, running to help her ("'10 vi soccorro ,"' 61) as the speaker's own blood answers the heart's call ("corre verso lo cor, ch'el chiama," 47) and saves him from running to his death ("ov'io per sua bellezza corro ," 56). Thus, whatever else might be said, it is clear that mutual recognition and reciprocity is the ideal posited by the poem, and that Dante strcngly insists on the aggressive component of desire. In this respect the poem is a demystification of the idolatry of the lady in the courtly tradition, which places her on a pedestal supposedly far above all strenuous sexual encounter and makes the lover her submissive servant in spite of the avowedly sexual nature of his intentions. Indeed, one of the most interesting suggestions of the poem is that the traditional courtly elevation of the lady is itself partly an expression of a fear of women and resultant

anger toward them. That the violence in "Così" is as much within the lover as in the lady is acknowledged; the disarming of the violence within the lover, it is suggested, could take place only within a relationship in which that violence was indeed matched within the lady.^[119]

Sed contra. All this said, the poem's sexual politics remain disconcerting. The fact that the lady's desire for violent lovemaking is presupposed at the beginning of stanza 5 really does not palliate the fact that, whatever peace is imagined as achieved at the end, the fantasy is avowedly violent. In the prolonged gaze of the sirma of stanza 6, too, one may see merely the infliction on the subjected and humiliated woman of the victorious superiority of the male. Moreover, the premise, advanced by Dronke, that the lady's hostility is a repressed eroticism, and its corollary, that the lady will be stirred to acknowledge her own desire by reading the poem, are also suspect: the gambit that no is really yes, pervasive enough to have enjoyed a "scientific" revival in the psychoanalytic theory of denegation, has received of late its sufficient critique. At the same time, one is not free to simplify the issue. The denial of the possibility of the kind of violence the poem ascribes to the lady would be as naive as the denial of the expression of male violence in the poem.

But the problem may lie still deeper. The poet's wish is for a word, a logos, that can move the will of the petra. Thus, the fantasy of making the lady fall in love might also seem the wish to forcibly alter her will: the metaphorics of the poem, in this view, would sublimate literal force, the force of the hand, for the force of the pen, of language—an effect that may be seen as increased, not diminished, by the elaborate periphrasis and allusion. Indeed, we saw that this exchange of pen for sword is latent in the background of the canzone, in the language of Ovid's letter from Dido to Aeneas. Not only the tropes that present the lover's suffering and subsequent revenge—shields, swords, arrows, the file, whips—remain phallic and warlike; the poem's elaborate investment in and enlistment of the intellectual constructs of the scholastic age—the implication that the lady's refusal is unnatural, a retrograde motion blocking the natural telos of desire, the always intractable Other that must be bent back within the harmonious order of the Same—are subtle and powerful ways in which concerted ideological force is applied to the petra as recipient of the poem's message. In this sense, the suggestion of the petrose that the petra in fact does not yield presents itself as rather a vindicating datum: her difficulty is not expunged, her difference not reduced.

For it remains that the poem's elevation of its language to act, to ex-

ercise power, remains hypothetical, a possibility never realized. The poem, though it rears up to fire its words at the lady, never does so in fact; it can only be a metaphor, the rhetorical image of an archer. It is finally but a parlar aspro, and its satisfaction of vengeance and pleasure are expressed in contrary-to-fact conditional terms. The bravado of the congedo, the passage from petition to imperative (dàlle ), the apotropaic and exorcistic quality of the poem's language are linguistic gambits that cannot guarantee the lady's return of love. The lover cannot know, within the poem, if the poem will work and change her. The relation of poetry to the "real world" remains deeply problematic: all that he has secured is the survival of his own voice.

Both because of its violent content and because the result of the enunciation must remain suspended, the final effect of the poem is profoundly ambiguous. A measure of its ambiguities, and of the poet's own uneasy relation to the admixture of love and violence, may be taken by considering the reigning myths, inexplicit but deeply ingrained, of the petrose—Medusa, Narcissus, and Pygmalion.^[120] As we saw, by grasping the lady's hair and gazing into her eyes, the speaker in one sense transcends the threat, one that haunts the four poems, of petrifaction by the lady's harsh and unyielding beauty.^[121] The mutual gaze of the lovers suggests the speaker's escape from his frustrated obsession and the lady's emergence from her inhuman rigidity. But the scene of the speaker's violence also raises the specter of the Gorgon's origin: because her violation by Neptune occurred in Minerva's temple, Minerva turned Medusa's loveliest feature—her hair—into snakes.^[122] Thus the Gorgon is a type of the punished victim, virtually an icon of the raped female. The uncanny, overdetermined return to the lady's hair—evoking the special attribute of Medusa—in the narrative and technique of "Così" raises again the question of the content and origin of the speaker's fantasy: is the poem a revised memory or fantasy of a rape?^[123]

If the myth of Medusa raises the question of the lady as threatening the lover with petrifaction, the myth of Pygmalion, in which the lady begins as a rigid statue fashioned by the artist, is its antithesis and complement, raising the question of the poet himself as producer and idolater of reified images.^[124] Pygmalion, the sculptor who falls in love with an image of his own making that, at his request, is brought to life by Venus, resembles the poet-speaker of the petrose, who attempts, in dazzling exercises of art, to find the verbal formula that will persuade his petra, the lady of his desire, to feel love, to act, as he says, "come suol far

bella donna."^[125] In one sense, then, all the petrose are attempting to bring the petra to life, to reverse the petrifying power of the Medusa.^[126] This demiurgic function of the poet reflects medieval interpretations of Pygmalion, who was sometimes compared to Prometheus, animator of the first humans, and thus allegorically to the creator God himself, who made man after his own image.^[127] But Pygmalion was also seen as a type of the idolater, the fool who fashions and adores an image of his own creation.^[128] The myths of Medusa and Pygmalion thus encapsulate the dilemmas that the petrose repeatedly raise: a hard-won but substantial reconciliation, or indulgence in fantasies of rape? Persuasion, or reification?^[129]

The specter of the lover's paralysis presented by the Medusa myth is in fact the specular complement of the lady as a statue brought to life by art and desire in the Pygmalion myth. This speculation, the mind of the obsessed lover mirrored in the frozen image of the petra, is an originary Narcissism that threatens to envelop both terms, both the subject and the object of contemplation. The final danger in the petrose, as we have anticipated, is not so much the death of the lover or the persisting inflexibility of the lady, but the self-enclosure of the poet in his own vision, his own private universe—his own monologism. The statue is dead because it cannot speak: Pygmalion's ivory girl is froide, sourde et mue; the petra must be forced, in the speaker's fantasy, to cry out for him ("perché non latra per me . . .").^[130] But the poet of the petrose is barred from the facile fantasy of the Roman de la rose, where the animated image speaks and offers the sculptor his heart's desire. For the petra really to speak would have breached the confines of lyric art as Dante practiced it. When the poet's lady does speak, in the person of Beatrice in the Commedia, it is from the transcendent status of a soul in glory: one of the dead.

Dante required the Commedia—and a different interpretation of the agency of the lady in the economy of love and salvation—to solve the dilemma posed by the sexuality of the idolized donna. Or perhaps merely to displace it. When she returns in Purgatorio 30–33, Beatrice appears in many of the guises of the petra: she comes sotto verde manto (30.32; the petra is sotto un bel verde in "Al poco giorno," 38).^[131] She attacks the pilgrim ("nell'atto . . . proterva," 30.70) with sword-sharp words ("volgendo suo parlare a me per punta") and bitter (acro ) terms and attitudes that recall the petra of "Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro," whose atti are harsh (aspro ) and blows telling. In passages that,

like "Così," are dense with military terminology, the pilgrim's responses are those of a broken crossbow ("la voce allentò," 31.21) like the distempered lover of"Così" ("n'allenta l'opra," 34).^[132] The virtues have brought the pilgrim before Beatrice's eyes, which are precious stones:

"posto t'avem  dinanzi a li smeraldi 
ond'Amor già ti trasse le sue armi." 
          (Purgatorio  31.116–117)

Her several reckonings, which earlier left him momentarily frozen ("sì come neve . . . ," 30.85) and later leave him petrified ("impietrato, tinto," 33.74), repeat the lover's terror before the Gorgon-like petra ("dinanzi dal sembiante freddo," "Amor, tu vedi ben," 31).^[133] The first petrosa also recurs in Purgatorio 30–33 in relation to weather and winds: 32.53, for instance, an allusion to Aries ("la vertù d'Ariete," "Io son venuto," 41), and 31.72, "quello [vento] che spira dalla terra di larba" ("lo vento peregrin che l'Italia turba," "Io son venuto," 15; noted in Dante 1946 153). The recurrence of impetra, nuda, and atra, three rime aspre characteristic of "Così," in the text of Purgatorio 30–33 is strong corroboration for this return of language and scenes from the rime petrose along with the return of Beatrice.^[134] Beatrice as a dangerous, even petrifying, power is not new: we saw it in "Donne ch'avete," where she ennobles the good but destroys the ignoble. In Purgatorio, however, her return, more powerful than her old self ("vincer parìemi più sé stessa antica," 31.83), seems also to mark her assimilation of the dangerous beauty and aggressiveness of the petra along with the attributes of the biblical Wisdom and of Boethius's Lady Philosophy. Indeed, Dante seems to have literally incorporated the petra—as harshness, as phonic material—in his conception of Beatrice's name, inclusive at its center of the -atr cluster of atra.^{[ 135]} Like Dante's revision of his response to the Sapienza of the Convivio—first fera e disdegnosa owing to the defect of the observer, and later, when properly understood, seen as benign, even umile—the passage of the attributes ofpetra to Beatrice redefines them as the just indignation of a slighted benefactor, the rigorous solicitude of a parent and moral teacher.^[136] It is striking that Beatrice never seems more like a real woman than when she returns at the summit of the Purgatorio—when she fiercely attacks Dante, when she is most like the petra.