Last Things
Page 32
From “narrazion buia” to “parole nude”
After Dante has witnessed the apocalyptically charged pageant and the resurrection of his “Word” (Beatrice, whose Christological significance is elaborated in the Vita Nuova), the central element in the procession, the chariot that bore her to him, now becomes the focus of attention as it undergoes a series of allegorically allusive metamorphoses.16 The carro is invaded by a fox, assaulted by an eagle, and then becomes the seven-headed dragon of Apocalypse, ridden by the equally familiar meretrix, who is, however, accompanied, kissed, and beaten by a novel giant who then drags the dragon and its rider into another selva. When this apocalyptic pastiche has finally come to an end, Beatrice suggests that in witnessing it Dante has reached a new moral and poetic level at which he can cast off fear and shame “sì che non parli più com’ om che sogna” (Purg. 33: 33: “so that you may no more speak like one who is dreaming”). An epistemological hierarchy is implied by Beatrice’s words, telling him he can transcend even the visionary mode of John, another dreamer of some of Dante’s images, who was seen “dormendo, con la faccia arguta” (29:144: “asleep, with keen visage”) at the end of the parade of biblical books in the first, more allegorically obvious, part of the Earthly Paradise procession. Beatrice seems to acknowledge that the meaning of the latter part of the spectacle is somewhat less self-evident, for she provides an explanation, in language, of the images. But this exegesis, rather than enlightening, actually culminates with the infamous “enigma forte” (33:50) of the Commedia’s second major prophecy:
. . . io veggio certamente, e però il narro
. . . un cinquecento dieci e cinque,
messo di Dio . . . (Purg. 33: 40, 43–44)
. . . for I see surely, and therefore I tell of it. . . a Five Hundred, Ten, and Five, sent by God. . .
One can imagine the blank look with which these words leave Dante, for Beatrice must assure him that events will soon make clear the meaning of her “narrazion buia,” whose darkness is perhaps also a function of its being, precisely, the narration of what she sees—it is an image, translated into words; a number that is somehow an object, a thing, and does not quite make sense linguistically. She nevertheless tells Dante that he must report what she has said: “Tu nota; e sì come da me son porte / così queste parole segna a’ vivi” (33: 52–53: “[Note this], and even as these words are uttered by me, so teach them [mark them] to those who live”). And when you write them, she adds, don’t hide what you saw happen to the plant. What he sees and what Beatrice says, the visual and the verbal signs to which Dante is being exposed and which he must somehow translate for earthly consumption, are thus confused or conflated, their epistemological relationship unclear. Indeed, as Beatrice goes on about that plant—recalling both its Edenic and its Christological significance—she sees that Dante is still quite dumbfounded, and with some annoyance she says:
Ma perch’io veggio te ne lo ’ntelletto
fatto di pietra e, impetrato, tinto,
sì che t’abbaglia il lume del mio detto,
voglio anco, e se non scritto, almen dipinto,
che ‘1 te ne porti dentro a te per quello
che si reca il bordon di palma cinto. (Purg. 33: 73–78)
But since I see you turned to stone in your mind, and stonelike, such in hue that the light of my word dazes you, I would also have you bear it away with you—and if not written, at least depicted [painted]—for the reason that the pilgrim’s staff is brought back wreathed with palm.
Dante’s incomprehension is described by Beatrice in another paradoxical conflation of visual and verbal modes of understanding—her words blind him and turn his mind stony and opaque—but her solution to his bafflement in the face of her “dark narration” is the instruction that he store her words in images “painted” in his memory as the sign of his pilgrimage. The prophetic mode of representation Dante adopts in this eschatologically charged section of his poem engages the hermeneutic of “the revelation that conceals” and demonstrates that, despite having regained Eden, he has not fully transcended the limits of his genre, in which images must stand as shorthand for the proliferating polysemy of apocalypse that appears to the human mind as a “narrazion buia.” But then, in the final moments before Dante will experience the vision of heaven, the description of which occupies the thirty-three cantos of the Paradiso, but which itself lasts only an instant, Beatrice makes him a promise:
Veramente oramai saranno nude
le mie parole, quanto converrassi
quelle scovrire a la tua vista rude. (Purg. 33: 100–102)
But [truly,] henceforth my words shall be as simple [naked] as may be needful to make them plain [reveal them] to your rude sight.
The promise of “naked words” represents the epistemological plenitude of unmediated understanding that eschatological apocalypse promises to fulfill, and in which Dante will participate by partaking of the beatific vision. The Edenic interlude, replete with the prophetic imagery of Ezekiel, John, and more contemporary apocalypticists, is thus for Dante but a step along the way to the revelation that constitutes the Paradiso. Before that revelation he must yet pass through the river Eunoe, Dante’s invented counterpart to the classical Lethe (which also flows through his Terrestrial Paradise), the waters of which, Beatrice says, will revive his stunned faculties (“la tramortita sua virtù ravviva”: Purg. 33: 129) and prepare him for the “trasumanar” (Par. 1: 70) that makes his raptus to the empyrean possible. But in an address to the reader in the final lines of the Purgatorio, Dante suggests that despite the eschatological and epistemological revelation he is about to experience, and despite Beatrice’s promise of “parole nude,” his own words continue to be bound by textual limits he describes in their most literal, physical sense:
S’io avessi, lettor, più lungo spazio
da scrivere, i’ pur cantere’ in parte
lo dolce ber che mai non m’avria sazio;
ma perché piene son tutte le carte
ordite a questa cantica seconda,
non mi lascia più ir lo fren de l’arte. (Purg. 33: 136–41)
If, reader, I had greater space for writing, I would yet partly sing the sweet draught which never would have sated me; but since all the pages ordained for this second canticle are filled, the [brake] of art lets me go no further.
Beatrice promises “parole nude” and in many ways delivers them in the Paradiso, explaining the heavenly hierarchies and the physics of immortality as unallegorically as possible; but the paradox of apocalyptic textuality is by no means resolved in the Commedia’s final cantica. It is, however, ultimately “deified” when Dante, in his concluding vision of the Trinity, sees the image of a book, the single volume in which all the universe is bound. This is the book of divine order, the book that guarantees meaning in all “ciò che per l’universo si squaderna” (Par. 33: 87: “that which is dispersed in leaves [unbound] throughout the universe”), a book whose eschatological and epistemological equivalent the Commedia itself attempts to be.17 The book is both the object and the site of beatific plenitude, but it is also, as an image of the physical book from which Dante’s lettor reads, a reminder of the distance between our words and God’s words of creation, incarnation, and judgment.
When the personification Book appears in Langland’s vision, between Christ’s death and his triumph over it, he is described as “a bolde man of speche . . . wihte two brode yes” (C.20: 240, 239: “a man with two broad, open eyes . . . who was very outspoken”).18 Like the two wheels of the chariot in Dante’s Earthly Paradise vision, these two eyes denote the Old and New Testaments—two ways of seeing what is from the Christian perspective one truth, that of the Old Law fulfilled in the New—as well as suggesting the eschatological fulfillment to which they ultimately “look.” This temporal and typological ambiguity (or polysemy) is present as Book authoritatively asserts both the promise and the threat of Christ’s resurrection, in the speech that serves as the prelude to Will’s witnessing the
Harrowing of Hell.
And yut y, Boek, wol be brente bote he aryse to lyue
And comforte alle his kyn and out of care brynge
And alle the Iewene ioye vnioynen and vnlouken,
And bote they reuerense this resurexioun and the rode honoure
And bileue on a newe lawe, be ylost lyf and soule. (C.20: 264–68)
And yet I, Book, will be burnt but he rise to live and comfort all his kin and bring them out of their cares and unjoin and unlock all the joy of the Jews; And all but those who adore this resurrection and honor the cross, and believe in a new law, will lose life and soul.19
The ambiguity of Book’s words permit several readings. The conventional one has Book staking himself on the assertion that Christ will live again, and is generally linked to an anti-Semitic interpretation of the effects of Christ’s rising on the “Iewene ioye.” However, the grammatical parallelism of Book’s promises—linking the verbs arise, comfort, bring, unjoin, and unlock—may in fact undergird a reading in which the “unlocking” of the millennial promise of the Hebrew Scriptures (“the Iewene ioye”) is predicated upon “this” resurrection—a reading which could be described as “two-eyed” in its conflation of the literal with the typological. This double vision is appropriate in the context Book is introducing, for the Harrowing of Hell will show that the death of the Jewish patriarchs is not final, despite the Old Law, because of its fulfillment by the New. But as Langland transcribes the Harrowing from the gospel book into his own, these ambiguities reach a level of both epistemological and eschatological transgression, as the words of the Incarnate Word are inscribed by the poet into his text and in his own vernacular, and his book becomes a Book of apocalyptic pretensions.20
An angel threatens “Princepes of this place, prest vndo this gates” (C.20: 272) for the king of glory is on his way, while Lucifer, Satan, and Hell itself debate the eschatological question of the Devil’s right to sinners after the Fall. Christ will deny this right in his upcoming speech with an argument previewed by Satan himself in his accusation that Lucifer lied to Eve when he promised her the knowledge of good and evil:
And byhihtest here and hym aftur to knowe
As two godes, with god, bothe goed and ille.
Thus with treson and tricherie thow troyledest hem bothe
And dust hem breke here buxumnesse thorw fals bihestes . . . (C.20: 317–20)
And you promised that after they would know, as two gods, with God, both good and ill. Thus with treason and treachery you deceived them both and made them break their obedience through false promises.21
Gobelyne concurs, “We haen no trewe title to hem” (20: 324), and as the light he recognizes as God appears, Satan concludes that they have now “ylost oure lordschipe a londe and in helle” (20: 349) because of that lie. It is a lie that proves the limits of human epistemological possibility, which Christ “quytes” by stretching the previous limits of human eschatological possibility, so that, as Christ says, punning and suggesting the way his own mercy cheats death, “gyle be bigyled thorw grace at the laste” (20: 392).
Christ announces his presence in hell, body and soul, to retrieve the prophets and patriarchs who proclaimed the law he himself fulfills, an action whose justice he asserts through a series of juxtapositions that turn on the notion of Old Testament retribution—“Dentem pro dente, et oculum pro oculo” (Ex. 21: 24, C.20: 385a)—and prove that “Non veni solvere legem, sed adimplere” (Matt. 5: 17, C.20: 395a). Christ makes clear that this harrowing is the type of the resurrection of the dead, for “thenne shal y come as kynge, with croune and with angeles, / And haue out of helle alle mennes soules” (412–13), and he suggests that then, too, he will be stretching the limits of justice with his grace. Langland’s Christ thus reveals his triple typological identity, as the fulfillment of the Old Law in the New, and as promise of a final law, when he will reign on earth.22 At the same time, the legalistic maneuvers of Christ’s speech, its slippery punnings and pairings, are at once paralleled and opposed to the lies of Satan to Eve, so that Christ’s language undoes the semiotic rupture of the Fall just as Christ’s mercy undoes Satan’s treachery: “Y may do mercy of my rihtwysnesse and alle myn wordes trewe” (431).
Christ tells Satan he has no right to the just souls of the prophets and patriarchs because he got Adam and Eve not by right but by guile, the antidote to which (its complement) is the grace by which his death redeems the Fall. But Langland’s Christ goes on to suggest that his compassion for humanity, because of his own human nature, may go even further than this already generous deal:
Ac to be merciable to man thenne my kynde asketh,
For we beth brethrene of o bloed, ac nat in baptisme alle. . . .
For bloed may se bloed bothe afurst and acale
Ac bloed may nat se bloed blede, bote hym rewe.
Audivi archana verba, que non licet homini loqui.
Ac my rihtwysnesse and rihte shal regnen in helle,
And mercy al mankynde bifore me in heuene. (C.20: 417–18, 437–440)
And how can I, with my human nature, refuse men mercy on that day? For we are brothers of one blood, though we are not all of one baptism. . . . For a man may suffer his kind to go cold and hungry, but he cannot see them bleed without pitying them. And I heard secret words which it is not granted to man to utter. My righteousness and my justice shall rule over hell, and my mercy over all mankind before me in heaven.
The day of wrath might in the end be a day of mercy, Christ suggests, for all those who share the “blood” of human nature, which Christ, himself a creature of blood whose blood has been shed, cannot bear to see bleed. At this point, at the height of Langland’s revelation of the apocalyptically speaking Christ, at the point where a heterodox universalism is almost being espoused, Langland inserts the Pauline paradigm of visionary restraint and epistemological aporia. The appropriation of Paul’s words constitutes a kind of apocalyptic ellipsis, despite the fact that in some sense the transgressive words (the promise of universal salvation) have already been uttered.
This moment represents the epistemological apotheosis of the poem, when Christ speaks the “parole nude” that mark the limits of Langland’s apocalypse, which appropriately ends with the chaining of Satan—the action, in John’s Apocalypse, that signals the start of the millennium. In Langland’s text, however, it initiates the descent back into allegory after revelation, a return to the personifications framing the dramatic reenactment of the life of Christ that at first continues the sense of triumphant resolution found in the finale of the Harrowing episode, imparting a sense of closure and culmination alien to the rest of Langland’s poem. Peace and Righteousness are finally reconciled, and Truth and Love sing and play music until “the day dawned . . . That men rang to the resurreccioun” (C.20: 470–71). The eschatological context is quickly recast in its temporal form—it is the celebration of Christ’s resurrection, Easter, not the Last Judgment—“a return to time which confirms in reality the truth of his vision.”23 At the end of this passus, all the levels of Langland’s allegory are marvelously in synch, and the opening of the following passus adds a final element to the apocalyptic concordia as Langland inscribes for the first time the moment at which he not only “waked” but also “wrot what y hadde ydremed” (C.21:1).
From Comedy to Tragedy
Almost immediately, however, confusion returns, first epistemologically, with Will’s inability to understand what he sees at the opening of his next dream, then eschatologically—after the allegorical narrative of the founding of Holy Church (to which Augustinian interpretation equated the millennial binding of Satan)—in the appearance of Antichrist and the descent into chaos with which Piers Plowman concludes.24 While in Passus 20 Truth can emphatically exclaim, “Trewes . . . thow tellest vs soeth, by Iesus!” (462), in Passus 21 truth has once again become fragmented and elusive, and Will’s vision is clouded and confused as he sees the figure of Piers-as-Christ:
And thenne calde y Conscience to kenn
e me the sothe:
“Is this Iesus the ioustare . . .
Or hit is Peres the plouhman? who paynted hym so rede?” (C.21: 9–11)
So I called to Conscience to tell me the truth about it—“Is this Jesus, the knight. . . or is it Piers the Ploughman? And who stained him so red?”
Conscience replies that they are Piers’s arms, but that it is Christ who bears them. And Will, ever the quibbler, asks why Conscience uses the name Christ when the Jews called the son of God Jesus. The discussion is markedly anticlimactic after the previous passus’s rendering of the Passion and Harrowing of Hell, in which Christ is unambiguously Christ, the text is unimpeachably true, and paradox and polysemy enable understanding rather than impede it.
The defeat of truth culminates with the arrival on the scene of Antichrist, instantly undoing the work of Piers Plowman, who had gone off, in Passus 21, to till truth throughout the world:
Auntecrist cam thenne, and al the crop of treuthe
Turned hit vp-so-down and ouertulde the rote,
And made fals sprynge and sprede and spede menne nedes;
In uch a contrey ther he cam, kutte awey treuthe
And garte gyle growe there as he a god were. (C.22: 53–57)
Antichrist. . . came . . . and overturned all the crop of Truth, tearing it up by the roots, and causing Falsehood to spring up and spread and supply all men’s needs. In every district where he came he cut down Truth, and grew Guile instead, disguised as goodness.
In the face of this epistemological debacle, Conscience calls on Kynde (Nature) for help and calls on all the people to take refuge in Unity/Holy Church, attempting, it seems, to regain the harmony signaled by Christ’s “kynde”—his assuming of human nature—and realized socially in the ecclesiastical allegory that dominates Passus 21, in which Piers heads the building of the fortress Holy Church, whose Unity must stand against the assaults of Antichrist. The people seem largely to ignore Conscience, but Kynde hears his plea. Rather than the deification of human nature exemplified and promised by Christ, however, Kynde now sends the agents of its destruction: