Synchronicity: Death and the Vita nuova

No snowflake falls in an inappropriate place.

—Zen expression

That mankind has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called "visions," the whole so-called "spirit world," death, all those things so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.

—Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

A sleep trance, a dream dance, A shared romance, Synchronicity ...

—Sting

I

The story of the Vita nuova is deceptively simple. The artist as a very young man falls hopelessly in love with an equally youthful Beatrice, and over a precisely marked period of years—the numbers will all turn out, in retrospect, to have been key markers—he acts out all the conceits of what we have come to call "courtly" love. In this endlessly suffering pursuit, hopeless beyond fulfillment, he sings the anguishes of such love and gives his readers a number of poems that are as lovely hymns to his ancestor troubadours as any those father figures ever wrote themselves. The living Beatrice in the first half of the book is thus the provocation of and the evocation in much marvelously self-serving and self-loving poetry, poetry that, in the strong vernacular tradition that fathered it, is primarily fascinated with itself and with the love object always just beyond its reach. The poetry itself is spun from that desire fueled and sustained by perpetual failure and endless seeking. The young poet playing the lover, then, indulges himself endlessly, has sleepless nights (some with remarkable dream visions), is physically ill, pines away ... and sure enough, love poetry comes forth from the ordeal, as it is supposed to. All is well. Until, in a kabbalistically inscribed twist of events, Beatrice dies, and with her, for that young poet, so does inspiration. Without the absent object of desire, the young man is left without song—but he will not give in to such a fate. And it is Beatrice's death that provokes the realization that there is more to both life and poetry than that, than desire never fulfilled, than poetry that is its own center.

It is the dead Beatrice who is not only the focus of Dante's new life as a poet, but also, perhaps, a keen metaphor for his own first life and death as a poet. The new poet emerges from the crucible of her death a far abler reader of the text than the young troubadour who fell in love with Beatrice: he has turned to the truths that lie in the poetry itself, truths that were there before but that he could not read because he could not decipher the language they were written in. The centrality and necessity of death for this sort of revelation—a revelation rooted in both synchronistic and kabbalistic truths that taunt the modern reader—was keenly understood (and mocked, not so gently, perhaps) by Borges: his incarnation of Beatrice is a Beatriz who is not only dead but seems never to have been alive, but whose portraits reign over the house that shelters the Aleph, in the dark pit of the basement, that Aleph, that magic looking-glass that enables one to see, and thus write, the literature of the cosmos.

II

It has been, at least in part, the tremendously authoritative power of Charles Singleton's reading of theVita nuova as an authentic and all-powerful religious conversion that has kept us in the intervening years from seeing the full extent to which Dante's so-called prologue to the Commedia is first and foremost his manifesto of literary conversion. By this I mean—and this will be the point of this chapter—that the Vita nuova is first and last about writing, that other conversions and other "themes" are ancillary to this principal, literal story, that of the artist as a young man. I will argue, in fact, that to convince the reader of the literal truth of that story—a literal truth we have taken, by and large, as a metaphor—is the very point of Dante's narration of this remarkably failed love story. It is quite remarkable that one of the dominant clusters of themes of Dante criticism vis-a-vis the Commedia in recent years, that of tracing out the almost unending instances of self-reflection, literary conversions, literary invention reinscribed in the text, in sum, Dante's preoccupation with his work and his craft and his text, has been far less visible in readings of this text. This is true despite the fact that almost everyone views the Vita nuova as the important—if at times arcane and impenetrable—prolegomenon to the masterpiece. While a number of key critics have certainly understood and explored the metaliterary dimensions of the Vita nuova, I want to suggest that what we call metaliterary is, in the case of this text, the plainly literary as well, the story at the surface as well as just below it, and that the combination, which is a species of kabbalistic writing, has by and large evaded our modern critical readings.

Clearly, on many points and at many key junctures, my reading of this text will intersect and parallel previous readings, especially Singleton's powerful and canonical model. But the difference, I think, is fundamental, rather than merely one of emphasis or tone: to say that the story is about literature at the surface and that the conversion story is about a crucial change in an ideology of writing is apparently to situate the Vita nuova within a category of texts somewhat outside the bounds of conventional criticism. Indeed, this shift renders it highly accessible to the modern reader—precisely the opposite of what Singleton's reading does. The Christian conversion story, on the other hand, one in which an ideology of writing and literature is ancillary to the specific detail of Christian belief, is, as Singleton himself was the first to point out, profoundly distanced from us, from all readers since the Council of Trent, in fact, and remarkably difficult if not impossible to recapture (Singleton 1949, 3—5). However, Dante's story about arriving at strong—indeed, categorical—opinions about what is "right" and "wrong" in literature possesses a clearly transcendental importance and is readable within various historical constructs, including our own.

In fact, Dante in the Vita nuova is unabashedly, shockingly concerned with texts and writing, with how one reads the text of life and then makes it literature. The work begins with the invocation of the Libro della memoria and the narrator's thus establishing himself as an author, a writer. This explicit self-characterization, abundantly ratified throughout the work, is sealed at the end of the work, when the author-narrator reveals his future plans and tells us what he will write in the future—a future which is postconversionary, of course,...