memories as long as possible, in all its transparency and its mystery.
*
Zibaldone di pensieri, 2
vols., ed. Francesco Flora (Milan: Mondadori, 1937), 1.1145, 1150, 1123-25.
*Invisible Cities, translated by William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), pp. 131-132.
4
VISIBILITY
There is a line in Dante
(Purgatorio
XVII.25) that reads: “Poi piovve dentro a Palta fantasia” (Then rained down into the high fantasy …). I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
Let us look at the context in which we find this line of the
Purgatorio.
We are in the circle of the Wrathful, and Dante is meditating on images that form directly in his mind, depicting classical and biblical examples of wrath chastised. He realizes that these images rain down from the heavens—that is, God sends them to him.
In the various circles of Purgatory, besides the details of the landscape and the vault of the heavens, and in addition to his encounters with the souls of repentant sinners and with supernatural beings, Dante is presented with scenes that act as quotations or representations of examples of sins and virtues, at first as bas-reliefs that appear to move and to speak, then as visions projected before his eyes, then as voices reaching his ear, and finally as purely mental images. In a word, these visions turn progressively more inward, as if Dante realized that it is useless at every circle to invent a new form of metarepresentation, and that it is better to place the visions directly in the mind without making them pass through the senses.
But before this it is necessary to define what the imagination is, and this Dante does in two terzinas (XVII. 13-18):
O imaginativa che ne rube
talvolta si di fuor, ch'om non s'accorge
perche dintorno suonin mille tube,
chi move te, se ? senso non ti porge?
Moveti lume che nel ciel s'informa
per se o per voler che giu lo scorge.
It goes without saying that we are here concerned with “high fantasy”: that is, with the loftier part of the imagination as distinct from the corporeal imagination, such as is revealed in the chaos of dreams. With this point in mind, let us try to follow Dante's reasoning, which faithfully reproduces that of the philosophy of his time. I will paraphrase: O imagination, you who have the power to impose yourself on our faculties and our wills, stealing us away from the outer world and carrying us off into an inner one, so that even if a thousand trumpets were to sound we would not hear them, what is the source of the visual messages that you receive, if they are not formed from sensations deposited in the memory? “Moveti lume che nel ciel s'informa” (You are moved by a light that is formed in heaven): according to Dante— and also Thomas Aquinas—there is a kind of luminous source in the skies that transmits ideal images, which are formed either according to the intrinsic logic of the imaginary world (“per se”) or according to the will of God: “o per voler che giu lo scorge” (or by a will that guides it downward).
Dante speaks of the visions presented to him (that is, to Dante the actor in the poem) almost as if they were film projections or television images seen on a screen that is quite separate from the objective reality of his journey beyond the earth. But for Dante the poet as well, the entire journey of Dante the actor is of the same nature as these visions. The poet has to imagine visually both what his actor sees and what he thinks he sees, what hedreams, what he remembers, what he sees represented, or what is told to him, just as he has to imagine the visual content of the metaphors he uses to facilitate this process of visual evocation. What Dante is attempting to define, therefore, is the role of the imagination in the
Commedia
, in particular the visual part of his fantasy, which precedes or is simultaneous with verbal imagination.
We may distinguish between two types of imaginative process: the
*
Zibaldone di pensieri, 2
vols., ed. Francesco Flora (Milan: Mondadori, 1937), 1.1145, 1150, 1123-25.
*Invisible Cities, translated by William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974), pp. 131-132.
4
VISIBILITY
There is a line in Dante
(Purgatorio
XVII.25) that reads: “Poi piovve dentro a Palta fantasia” (Then rained down into the high fantasy …). I will start out this evening with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.
Let us look at the context in which we find this line of the
Purgatorio.
We are in the circle of the Wrathful, and Dante is meditating on images that form directly in his mind, depicting classical and biblical examples of wrath chastised. He realizes that these images rain down from the heavens—that is, God sends them to him.
In the various circles of Purgatory, besides the details of the landscape and the vault of the heavens, and in addition to his encounters with the souls of repentant sinners and with supernatural beings, Dante is presented with scenes that act as quotations or representations of examples of sins and virtues, at first as bas-reliefs that appear to move and to speak, then as visions projected before his eyes, then as voices reaching his ear, and finally as purely mental images. In a word, these visions turn progressively more inward, as if Dante realized that it is useless at every circle to invent a new form of metarepresentation, and that it is better to place the visions directly in the mind without making them pass through the senses.
But before this it is necessary to define what the imagination is, and this Dante does in two terzinas (XVII. 13-18):
O imaginativa che ne rube
talvolta si di fuor, ch'om non s'accorge
perche dintorno suonin mille tube,
chi move te, se ? senso non ti porge?
Moveti lume che nel ciel s'informa
per se o per voler che giu lo scorge.
It goes without saying that we are here concerned with “high fantasy”: that is, with the loftier part of the imagination as distinct from the corporeal imagination, such as is revealed in the chaos of dreams. With this point in mind, let us try to follow Dante's reasoning, which faithfully reproduces that of the philosophy of his time. I will paraphrase: O imagination, you who have the power to impose yourself on our faculties and our wills, stealing us away from the outer world and carrying us off into an inner one, so that even if a thousand trumpets were to sound we would not hear them, what is the source of the visual messages that you receive, if they are not formed from sensations deposited in the memory? “Moveti lume che nel ciel s'informa” (You are moved by a light that is formed in heaven): according to Dante— and also Thomas Aquinas—there is a kind of luminous source in the skies that transmits ideal images, which are formed either according to the intrinsic logic of the imaginary world (“per se”) or according to the will of God: “o per voler che giu lo scorge” (or by a will that guides it downward).
Dante speaks of the visions presented to him (that is, to Dante the actor in the poem) almost as if they were film projections or television images seen on a screen that is quite separate from the objective reality of his journey beyond the earth. But for Dante the poet as well, the entire journey of Dante the actor is of the same nature as these visions. The poet has to imagine visually both what his actor sees and what he thinks he sees, what hedreams, what he remembers, what he sees represented, or what is told to him, just as he has to imagine the visual content of the metaphors he uses to facilitate this process of visual evocation. What Dante is attempting to define, therefore, is the role of the imagination in the
Commedia
, in particular the visual part of his fantasy, which precedes or is simultaneous with verbal imagination.
We may distinguish between two types of imaginative process: the
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