The Problematic of the Petrose

The petrose grow out of the rich traditions which we have sketched thus far, to which we will frequently refer in the chapters that follow. Our

purpose is more than simply to recover "medieval" meanings of the poems for which modern readers need annotation. A sense of the intellectual backgrounds of the poems deepens our sense of the fundamental issues that are at stake, issues that Dante increasingly realized were for him inherent in the very activity of writing poetry. To a surprising degree, the petrose show Dante grappling with problems that anticipate those of the Commedia, particularly the need to understand and represent as fully as possible his own nature in its relation to the universe as a whole and—agonizingly—the mutual alienation between the poet and those he most wishes to reach: in the petrose, the lady; in the Commedia, the Florentines.

First, two preliminary questions. The first regards the dramatic situation implied by the poems: how long has the lover been wooing the lady? Already in the first poem, "Io son venuto al punto de la rota," it is clearly implied that the speaker's love is no recent phenomenon, no new emotion born in the winter being described, for, as the central stanza puts it, although all animals' spirits are deadened by the cold, his love is increased ("e il mio [spirito] più d'amor porta"). In other words, his love preexisted the winter and is now increasing. The second poem, "Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d'ombra," intimates the return of spring, for the lady is said to be frozen in both seasons (though it is not completely clear whether the spring in question is the one that preceded the winter of "Io son venuto"—perhaps the time of his falling in love—or the one that follows it). Similarly, the third poem in the series, "Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna," refers to the lady's disdain for love as existing "in all seasons" (line 2).

Now these indications are fairly general: they do not permit the establishment of a chronology of events, for no specific events are related. Their function would seem to be exclusively that of establishing, as the basic situation, the idea that the speaker's love for the lady has existed, and that the lady has been rejecting his advances, for an extended though unspecified period of time, perhaps as much as a year. In fact, the poems do not really imply that they are the product of successive occasions; rather, all spring from the same ideal present: they are successive confrontations of a single problem, and they rest on a coherent analysis of it.^[94]

Second, is the love celebrated in the petrose to be thought of as adulterous? One should consider that none of Dante's works makes the slightest reference to his marriage. For example, the issue of adultery is excluded

from the Vita nuova partly by the religious theme of the book and its insistence (beginning in chapter 2) that sensuality played no part in the love that Beatrice inspired. More fundamentally, Dante's marriage is not part of the fictional situation; within the Vita nuova —in the fiction of the book—it simply does not exist. In fact, it had to be rigorously excluded, unless the issue of adultery was to become explicitly a theme. Those who observe Dante in church (chapter 5) and the ladies who question him about the purpose of his love for Beatrice (chapter 18) are not thinking of him as a married man with family responsibilities (as he in fact was), and if Beatrice had so regarded him she would surely have snubbed him much sooner! In other words, although we do not always reflect on the fact as we read, the Vita nuova must be read as if Dante had not been married. To be sure, there must have been a relation between the realities of Dante's marriage and the fictions of the Vita nuova, almost certainly a deeply significant one; but we cannot know it.

It is important to see that the theme of adultery as an issue is also rigorously excluded from the petrose, although the same is not true of the theme of sexuality. It is not that the petrose assert the superiority of a lover's claim to a husband's, a frequent theme in the Provençal and Old French tradition; rather, the issue is simply excluded. Thus it will not do to assume that the love represented in the petrose is adulterous. There is nothing in the poems to justify the assertion, which could only be made on the basis of some quite unjustifiable appeal to the facts of Dante's biography. Married or not, Dante was perfectly capable of writing poems about nonadulterous love, as the Vita nuova shows. For that matter, if biography is to enter the interpretation of the petrose, it would be quite as legitimate to see them as about some real or imagined phase of Dante's relationship with his wife, who at least had a stunningly appropriate name: Gemma (a word that, both as a name and as a common noun, is absent from the poems). By the same token, it seems to us a serious mistake for modern readers to label the sexuality of the petrose as obviously reprehensible. The complexity of the poems can only emerge if we resist the temptation of a priori judgments.

The problematic that emerges from the poems can be set forth as follows: The goal the lover aims for is given in the last stanza of the last of the poems, "Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro":

          Ancor ne li occhi, ond'escon le faville 
che m'infiammano il cor, ch'io porto anciso, 
guarderei presso e fiso

per vendicar lo fuggir che mi face; 
e poi le renderei con amor pace. 
          (76–80)

In other words, the imagined goal of the lover, represented as a prolonged mutual gaze (itself the culmination of the act of love), is complete reciprocity and a complete communion of intersubjectivity. The actual situation, however, is the opposite of mutual and peaceful intersubjectivity, for the lady utterly refuses the lover's claims on her attention: lover and lady are antagonists, each actively denying the subjectivity of the other. The poems are represented as the lover's effort to express and communicate the nature of his predicament, as well as to work through it. The traditional status of love poems—that they are addressed to, and woo, the lady (this becomes explicit in the last poem)—gives us the basis of the identity of the erotic problem with the poetic one, as we shall see.

Since the lover is blocked in his wooing of the lady, because she refuses and flees his love (and the petrose represent the refusal as much more radical and thorough than is customary in the troubadour and Italian traditions), the lover is in a fundamental sense alone with his desire, and he must find a way to deal with it. The petrose represent him, as it were, alone in the cosmos, confronting with his individual faculties a whole array of negative forces. The difficulty of his situation is represented at one level by the winter that is the scene of the first and third poems; yet the winter is itself the product of cosmic forces, the power of the stars. The forces arrayed against the lover range from the lady's hostility to the influence of the stars (a kind of conspiracy of the entire cosmos against him) to the destructive forces inherent in his own nature (traceable to his nativity and strongly affected by astrological influence). Against these forces the lover strives for a positive victory, and the analysis and representation of the negative forces is essential to the enterprise. The new microcosmic poetics, in short, is represented as a determined—and hopeful—response to the difficulty of the lover's situation.

This poetics, then, represents the struggle between positive and negative aspects of the poet-lover's situation and of his nature. Thus it requires a certain deliberate self-division by which the poet pits the two sides of his nature against each other. He understands these two sides in terms of the Platonic analogy between the two "motions" of the World-Soul—called by Plato the motions of the Same and the Other—and the two basic motions of the human soul, roughly identifiable with rational

and irrational.^[95] Each of the petrose is a phase of the effort to deal with negativity by allowing it scope, within the higher coherence of the poet-lover as ultimately master of himself and confident of the positive value of his love. His love is not merely irrational desire, but it does include that component (the Other, the irrational)—ultimately, he hopes, governed and contained, like the cosmos, by the Same. In fact, each successive petrosa optimistically allows greater scope to the negative, taking greater and greater risks, both psychological and artistic.

In the last poem of the sequence the negative motives—anger, frustration, violence, and self-destructiveness—must be confronted directly. "Così nel mio parlar" has two phases: a katabasis involving successive retreats into inner allegorical stages, in which the violence is increasingly identified as within the lover himself, and an anabasis in which the violence is imagined as redirected outward, turned into "playful" erotic violence, and gradually disarmed, so that the poem culminates in the prolonged gaze of mutual acceptance and reconciliation. As a symbolic or imagined working through of the problem (thus at the imaginative level a kind of victory over it), these are phases of repeated (self-)destructive division overcome, in intention at least, by reintegration.

In terms of the drama between the lover and the lady, the sequence can of course have no solution other than a fantasy of reconciliation. The violence could be fully disarmed only in a reciprocal relation in which the lady would be the match of the lover in every respect. And this leads close to the core of the problem. The adoption of the microcosmic poetics—the very effort to represent in all its complexity the lover's relation to the cosmos as a whole—in itself constitutes simultaneously the choice of a certain solitude and the effort to break out of that solitude. In terms of the tradition of love poetry, this solitude is supposed to be merely provisional, a temporary deferral. But we can already see in the petrose how powerful in Dante is the sense—and to some extent the choice—of isolation within the cosmos created by poetry, how violent the need for living communication with the world. The erotic and the poetic problematics are identical: both include the paradox that the difficulty of eliciting response requires the elaboration of the poetry, but the elaboration of the poetry requires the indefinite deferral of direct interaction and therefore of response. There is also the (unanswerable) question of to what degree both aspects of the lover's situation—his impasse with the lady and his isolation within the poetic cosmos—are expressions of sexual fear.

In modern terms, of course, one must be struck by the absence of any but a mythicized representation of the psychology of the lady. Her refusal of the lover is depicted as so absolute that the possibility that the lover might do well to try to understand the Other better is simply excluded. There is no questioning of the status of the male subject as such: obviously Dante lived in an age when the politics of gender were far from understood. They provide the background against which the potential tragedy of the impasse must be seen. Though his insights were partial, Dante had a strong intuition into what linked his isolation, his monologism, his violent anger, and the traditions of courtly love song. The poem in which he is finally able to speak his anger at the lack of true reciprocity between the sexes, though this anger takes a most disturbing form, is a landmark in the history of love poetry.

Moreover, the petrose show us one of the fundamental structures of the Commedia. To be sure, the scope of the masterpiece is immeasurably greater, including all of history as well as the entire cosmos, setting forth a profoundly original and intensely meditated analysis of the social and spiritual evils that plagued the world, as well as a fully elaborated philosophical position and a religious quest that has often been mistaken for practicing mysticism. An important core of the situation of the Commedia, however, is closely parallel to that of the petrose. First, like the petrose, the Commedia represents—and in fact springs from—a situation in the "real" world in which the speaker is almost totally blocked. In the Commedia this obstruction has two main dimensions. First, whatever the date at which the Commedia was first planned and its composition begun, a very large portion of it was written after 1313,^[96] the year of the death of the emperor Henry VII, to whom Dante had looked as the savior of the political situation in Italy and the rest of Europe. From Dante's point of view, as countless passages in the Commedia and other works make clear, the dominant political tendencies of his day—especially the weakness of the Empire, the rise of the French crown, and the involvement of the papacy in temporal affairs (not to mention its corruption and the corruption of the monastic and religious orders)—were leading Florence, Italy, and the whole of Europe to disaster. Dante had worked extremely hard to further the success of Henry's effort to gain control of Italy. In the Commedia, he is divinely charged to return to the world and write the poem; the poem thus becomes a divine intervention in history, represented in the cantos of the

sun and Mars (Paradiso 10–17) as parallel to the intervention at a similar moment of crisis that inspired the foundation of the Franciscan and Dominican orders. In other words, the writing of the Commedia is, as a political act, in large measure the expression of Dante's despair at the political realities and the normal avenues of political action.

The second way in which the poet is blocked in the outside world—no less important than the first—is the fact that he is exiled from his native city and that his fellow citizens have repeatedly demonstrated a literally murderous hostility toward him. Significantly, in the Commedia the city of Florence is personified as a woman: in one particularly revealing passage, as a bride (Paradiso 15.97–102), in another as like Phaedra (Paradiso 17.46–48). The first pain of exile, as Cacciaguida tells Dante, is that one is barred from what one most loves:

Tu lascerai ogni cosa diletta 
     più caramente; e questo è quello strale 
     che l'arco de l'essilio saetta prima. 
                             ( Paradiso  17.55–57)

Compare the unfailing arrows of "Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro," lines 9–12:

     ed ella ancide, e non val ch'om si chiuda 
né si dilunghi da' colpi mortali 
che, com'avesser ali, 
giungono altrui e spezzan ciascun arme.

An important parallel obtains between the hostility of the city of Florence and that of the donna pietra. Even though Dante's picture of the lady's hostility is no doubt poetic hyperbole, one can understand why earlier in this century Guerri and Filippini, disregarding the reliable grounds we have for dating the poems prior to Dante's exile, interpreted the lady of the petrose as an allegory of Florence (Dante 1946 149).

The point is not that the situation of the Commedia can be reduced to that of the petrose, but that they share a fundamental parallel in the structure of the poet's relation to the world and to his poetry. In both, the relation with the audience he wishes to win is intensely conflicted. In both, the relation between poetry and action in the world is paradoxical. The Commedia gives us Dante the poet-prophet driven to write the poem by his despair of the world of history; confronting a hostile world, he woos the world and his city. And the poem deals with the poet's situation in the world by constructing an elaborate model of the

universe as he hopes it to be, a universe in which the difficulties he faces are not palliated but are inevitably taken toward their resolution, in which the ultimate victory of what the poet stands for is assured. These statements apply almost without revision to the petrose. And if the petrose show the lover moving, through a katabasis into his own self-destructive violence, to a mutual gaze of reconciliation, the Commedia gives us a protagonist who must go through an even more violent katabasis into his own and others' negativity—Hell itself—and who ascends beyond this into ever more perfect intersubjectivity (culminating, not by accident, in a prolonged gaze into the light).

Thus one of the fundamental problems in the Commedia—for Dante as well as for his readers—is the blurring of the line between the representation of "reality" and religious faith on the one hand and what must be called wish fulfillment on the other. The nub of the problem can be represented in the Commedia's claim to speak for God, which Dante realizes is dangerously close to fraud. Modern readers have a further problem in that Dante's effort to make philosophically and scientifically true statements about the universe increases the difference between his model of the universe and the real one as we know it. (How aware Dante may have been of this problem is an intriguing question: to what extent did he understand that his very ability to construct so lucidly his elaborate model was inherently a sign—even a cause—of its imminent rejection?) In any case, no matter how powerfully Dante imagines the resolution of his solitary activity, whether in perfect reconciliation with the lady or in perfect communion with God, the more ambitious his poem is, the more effectively it commits him to his alternate universe, as opposed to the real one. This problem—and Dante's awareness of it—is already sharply present in the petrose. In the petrose, too, the poet's effort to achieve power over the lady is, by the choice of poetry, inevitably shifted away from the practical goal into the alternate universe of art, in spite of the poet's fierce desire. Beginning with the petrose, Dante's poetry exists in the tension of this unresolvable paradox.