“Al mio ardor fuor seme le faville, / che mi scaldar, de la divina fiamma / onde sono allumati piu’ di mille” (Statius, to Dante and Virgil, Purgatorio 21. 94-96).
A generative Commedia?
Statius and Virgil conversing, Commedia, Genoa (?), 14th century (c) Bodleian Library, Oxford
I first started thinking about the idea of generativity in the Commedia in relation to the first-century poet Statius, author of the Thebaïd, and his account of his relationship with Virgil’s texts, in Purgatorio 21 and 22.
Virgil asks Statius how, given that he demonstrated no evidence of Christian faith in the Thebaïd, he is on his way to being accepted into Paradise; “qual sole o quai candele” (Purg. 22. 61), Virgil wants to know, finally illuminated his journey.
Statius answers: “Per te poeta fui, per te cristiano” (22. 73): it was through reading Virgil that he became, first, a poet, then a Christian. Statius misread in Virgil’s Aeneid (specifically, where Aeneas condemns the avarice that led Polymnestra to murder Polydorus) the necessity for his own renunciation of the Christian sin of prodigality.
This misreading, or, perhaps we could say, creative reception of Virgil’s text, led to Statius’ salvation. As Dante and Virgil meet him on the fifth terrace of Mount Purgatory, amongst the avaricious, he has just been released from his lengthy process of purgation and will journey with Dante into the Earthly Paradise, and possibly beyond.
This reminded me of an interview with musician and producer Brian Eno that I had seen, online, a few weeks earlier, in which he had outlined not only the functioning of, but also some of the philosophical ideas behind, his generative music apps Air, Bloom, Trope and Scape (http://www.generativemusic.com/). The initial connection in my mind was to do with shifting the site of creativity further down the production chain, towards the receiver. I look at this in more detail in the section on theory and generative music here.
Dante following Statius and Virgil (c) Sandow Birk/Chronicle Books
My current hypothesis is that Statius’s engagement with the Aeneid constitutes a generative reading of a generative text: an active, creative, deeply-engaged interaction with a text that operates not as a sterile enunciation with a single, closed meaning, but rather as a kind of system, an open work that invites and repays such a generative engagement with the possibility for multiple meanings.
The point of such a mode of engagement, I propose, is to facilitate multiple meanings or polysemy, such that the text functions outside time, and across individual perceptions. Virgil, living before Christ, could not have prophesied the Christian system of sin and redemption experienced by Statius, but his text was sufficiently ‘open’ to allow Statius, at the very beginning of the Christian era, to find such a meaning in it for himself.
If, I hypothesise, we could engage with the Commedia in such a way, we may find illumination in the text relating to our own personal, moral or spiritual questions, unpredictable to Dante and his culture, but rendering the Commedia infinitely relevant.
“The notion of a definitive Commedia, even when applied to the poem Dante finished shortly before his death in 1321, limits uncomfortably what to any sensible reader must appear an infinite poem. And yet its collected translations outstrip that monstrous notion and propose instead a series of neverending metamorphoses that […] never pretend to supplant or ignore the original. The many translations of any single text grant it something like the miracle of Pentecost, allowing readers to hear the original words spoken in their own tongue […]. Every translation is very much the same text, but the text questioned, re-examined, doubted, amplified, revised, moved into a different context, commented upon, brought up to date, and changed as the tongues of flame changed the speech and thought of each of the twelve apostles. In this endless cumulative process, an infinity of translators might approach something like the perfect, definitive, archetypal text, fulfilling in its congress all its aesthetic possibilities and making explicit all its possibilities of emotion and meaning […]. All art is approximation, and that which we construct out of words even more so. But perhaps if the wordsmith’s craft is attempted through multiple voices, through original drafts and the successive translations, something of what the poet has imagined can begin to take shape.” Alberto Manguel, ‘The Ongoing Commedia’, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, 32 (2011), 41–52.
generating dante 