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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 85-94 History as Rewriting in Dante and Vico Both Dante's Commedia and Vico's Scienza Nuova have often been read as monumental treatises that curiously blend scientific intention and fictional method. This, and their hermeneutic impenetrability, had no little impact on their fame and authority. Dante's well known letter to Can Grande and Vico's visual allegory that introduces the mythopoetics of La Scienza are meant to extract an esoteric representation of the subject-matter viewed as historic unfolding. Dante explains at the end of his epistle to Can Grande how God is the origin of everything, thus supporting the reading of his own Paradiso with Boethius's words "To behold thee is the end." Here as elsewhere, Dante conceives of human creation as a relentless rewriting directed toward that unique source and causa prima of any history which speaks of the divine creation. For him there is little doubt that the Poet is regarded as a maker of History, whose purpose is solely to recognize and imitate the original Alpha and Omega. Yet, the analogy between poet and prophet is more than a conventional registration of Dante under the banner of the medieval canonic tradition; in foreseeing the future, the poet generates new modalities of shaping history. Guido da Pisa, a contemporary of Dante, was clear in his intention to underline not the similarity but the synonymy between poet and prophet: "unde poeta idem est quod propheta" (Guido da Pisa, 33). On such Platonic recognition lies the idea of History as a rewriting of origins, an idea exemplified by the major works of Dante and Vico. It has already been noted by Giuseppe Mazzotta (Dante, 67-9) how closely rhetoric and history are related in Dante —and, we would add here, in Vico. To write, and therefore to rewrite, ought to be viewed as an instrument reminding the audience that any type of creation holds a structure, a composition, and a semantic and allegoric level. Dante seems to always be aware of his literary authority stemming from his molding of both personal and universal history by means of rhetoric. Rhetoric has thus the quality to reproduce and remind one not only of the Beginning — the incipit is in fact a literal regeneration in Vita Nova — but also the End, that is, the necessity of rewriting under the teleological paradigm. In a truly Aristotelian fashion, the Poet is the speaker of Truth and has, as Dante insists, "the authority of the Philosopher" (Epistola VIII). [end page 85] The mythopoetic aspect of Vico's Scienza has been — four centuries after Dante — grafted onto the same ancient tradition of authority based on speech acts. History becomes a poetic science whose aim is to emanate a universal truth out of the rhetorical distribution of the material collected. Labeled by some critics as a "poetic theology," the Scienza was written with the undeniable intention of demonstrating that history follows the principle of the analogy of the divine creation. The seemingly random way Vico handles rhetoric in the Scienza has fueled his critics severe objections and accusations of a "badly ordered and overburdened mind" (Berlin, 67). But, as others have noted (especially Goetsch, Barfield and Verene), such harsh criticism might well be the fruit of our own hermeneutic fallacies. Our point here, though, is to show that Vico's method, as much as Dante's, derives from the belief in a rhetorical structure resembling a puzzle. Dante's four levels indispensable for a comprehensive reading of the Commedia are scattered throughout Vico's Scienza, a proof of the handing down of the dialogic spirit within the realm of creation; considering the medieval and Renaissance tradition, Vico never fails to incorporate the idea of a complex rewriting of the history of human life relying on the factual model of the cosmic creation and on the intuitive understanding of its creator. As Nietzsche puts it in one of his less known but startling essays on history, the task of bringing "the past to the bar of judgment, interrogating it remorselessly" (Nietzsche, 21) has to define the historian of any time and method, a creed that appeals to Dante and to Vico's common intention of reaching a fundamental teleological truth. Cato gives Virgil and Dante a cold welcome once they land on the island where the mountain of the Purgatory is facing them. Ironically, the great defender of the Roman republican laws accuses the two of having escaped the tyrannical regime of the Inferno. A politician famous for his thirst for freedom has now turned into a despotic supporter of the status quo. Cato's main worry is that, unknown to him, travelers might have escaped the perennial laws of Inferno; Dante's allegorical intention itself might have similarly escaped many commentators: it is the history of theology, or History understood as soteriological institution represented by the Catholic Church, that Dante is hinting at here. Purgatory is the place where things happen so fast that reflection is frequently delayed. Starting simultaneously as prophets and travelers, Virgil leaves Dante when he realizes that is impossible for him to understand the events once across the boundary of Earthly Paradise. The act of symbolic coronation discussed by Teresa Hankey (224) is indeed relevant, and not only for the symbolism of trust and consecration of authority that Virgil passes on to [end page 86] Dante. As a poet and predecessor of Dante, Virgil's "per ch'io te sovra te corono e mitrio" emphatically underlines the need for change. Dante is the one — not Virgil — chosen to interpret and rewrite History; in his three-fold succession of past, present, and future (paralleled by the triple enumeration of sovra, corono, mitrio), Virgil announces that his ability to grasp the reality has been surpassed by Dante's, who is now rightly entitled to offer the theo-philosophical synthesis of the succession of time. Divided in three parts, it corresponds not only to the three discernible segments that define human experience, but extends it on a symbolical and less worldly level: past, present, and future represent Dante's attempt to draw a history of the human spirit that would fulfill the allegorical promises of the Commedia. While it is normal for Virgil to acknowledge his guiding limitations, Dante, the pilgrim chosen for spiritual enlightenment, still appears in many situations without reaction to the unpredictability of events in Purgatory. As it has been noted, there is a certain resemblance between the pace of change in Purgatory and that of our world (Schnapp, 194-5). They are both transitory, and there is no certainty or strong conviction that history has reached a definite becoming, or, at any rate, the result of its "evolution" has been postponed. In fact, there are not many stories to tell in Purgatory, unlike Hell and Paradise. Purgatory is a place where, like the physical world inhabited by humans, things become and are affected. One would say that Purgatory is the place where spirituality has something of a physical energy. In Hell and Paradise history is suspended for different reasons. In Inferno we witness a lack of physical and spiritual becoming; only those who have the chance, like Dante, to complete the whole journey, will be gratified with the sight of God, the origin of History where becoming is overcome. Inferno and Paradiso stand for two distinct mechanisms of representation: representation as diegesis and apophasis, those spaces that allow simultaneous story-telling and speechless reflection. Hell depicts a history of human profanation as far as the Church is concerned; Dante, the poet, may be sympathetic and touched by the multifariousness of sins swarming around him, whereas the Church had given its immutable verdict. It is not so much God who punishes the sinners in Hell but History in the guise of the Catholic Church. In Paradise, the role of history is played by History and consequently the internal mechanism switches from heavy, painful accounting of deeds that deprive men from freedom, to unchained access to ascension where the Creator of History dwells. With his extraordinary poetic acuity Dante sums up in a few words the passage from Hell to Paradise via Purgatory ("... che dall'infima lacuna dell'universo infin qui... piu' alto verso l'ultima salute" [Paradiso, 22-7]) as a journey from the narrative history to its synthesis represented by philo-[end page 87]sophy and ethics. "Written" by God and rewritten by Dante, the Comedy appears as a treatise whose purpose is to record "historically" the foundations of the true scienza. The necessity of historical re-formation is explicitly announced by Dante in a response to Casella's declaration of undying philia for the Poet in the Purgatory: Casella mio, per tornare altra volta Behind his almost didactic reply, and the coyly startled remark about Casella's tardiness in joining the Paradise, there is much at stake here. There is a sense in which the Purgatory resembles a modern day colony, on which history is rehearsed ab originem (De Certeau, 22); however, what matters here is the possibility of reiteration which has been offered only to Dante, chosen firstly because he identifies the idea of a new life with that of rewriting. Moreover the entire Commedia is played out as a dialectical process of katabasis and anabasis, in which the descent is more than a familiar representation of the age old descensus ad inferos. The voyage through the Inferno and upwards is meant to illustrate how history does circulate on its way to the final stasis in Paradise where mundane history is recognized as a whole, incorporated or translated into the language of the infinite. Even God conceives of his world in linguistic terms. More Platonic in its substance than Aristotelian, and intuitively Vichian, Dante's itinerarium is from the outset the attempt to escape a wrong understanding of history. To avoid "la via smarrita" Dante needs the realization that history never ends as long as it is rewritten. God, the great Historian, would be the first to embrace the idea; to convey more poetically the medieval topos of authority, Dante's epistemological vision of God relies heavily on apophatics. There is no better way to speak about God than by replacing the void of transcendence with the fullness of historic immanence. Instead of words, there is silence or a corporeal fall that is meant to reshuffle the errors of intellectual perception. We remember how in the Inferno Dante faints the moment when we expect his response to the tragic ending of Paolo and Francesca's love. Dante's body falling heavily on the ground stands for an eschatological mark; the journey will be resumed afterwards beyond the collapsed body of the poet, a landmark of the cyclical unfolding of history. On the causality between the human representation of the historic events and their spiritual hermeneutics lies the foundation of the mystical discourse. In Purgatory [end page 88] XV, the figure of the fallen body appears again as an echo of what had happened to the two lovers in the Inferno. Yet, there is a difference, and a fundamental one: while in Hell Dante illustrates levels of existential sub-ordination to history, Purgatory already maps out a general plane that concerns the philosophy of history. Approaching the level of the third circle, Dante envisions, not unlike the beginning of his "cammino" through the dark forest, "i miei non falsi errori." It is the startling figure of negative tautology — one of his favorite rhetorical weapons dash to mark off Dante's renewed confession as an extraordinary revelation. Virgil, who had noticed his companion's hesitant motion, points out the necessity to cross over the bridge separating the subjective from the objective history. Rhetorically, the process imitates the logic of causality as a sequential analogy between speech acts (interrogation) and historic acts (physical reaction): Non domandai, 'Che hai,' per quel che face Notwithstanding Virgil's question Dante's response is silence, as if the latter had no better answer but the speechless accord that by itself shows the gradual passage from the politics of rational causality to the poetics of spiritual becoming. Thus, the physicality of the phenomenal chronology will be incorporated within the annihilating universality of the silent voice (de Certeau, 66-7). The reason for using what we call negative tautology is to prepare the way for negative theology. Both of them are similar, as they hint not at a rhetorical or doctrinal dimension. They insist on the disintegration of history into the only form of universal language: silence. The silence should be universal since, in general, Dante dreams of universalities as fragments of social and individual life to be restored in the name of a lost con-sensus universalis. The poet is not unrealistic: for the time being we have to do with the history as it is, with all the semantic Babel preventing us from hearing the celestial music of the angels. But language is destructive and fragmented, as we have seen, and silence occurs several times during Dante's journey as a natural impulse to mend history. The chief reason for a strong and universal empire is to "regenerate the human family of this crazy age" (Epistola VII, 111). As a rule, Dante tends to blur out, as much as possible, the difference between the natural and divine, and thus to orient humanity towards the path of an almost physical spirituality. Narrative and theology in the Commedia go hand in hand as they both help one another to re-write their mistakes [end page 89] (Ryan, 145). Bataille's definition of sanctity as a continual project applies perfectly to the structure of Dante's vision; his poem has to be read as a grandiose project of renunciation and sacrifice of history for the sake of History. The speech-meditation of Cacciaguida in Paradiso XVI is centered on the opposition between human history and celestial history viewed by a mortal who gained access to the other perspective. While individual life is almost meaningless due to its brevity, what really matters and gives away a glimpse of the true, endless History is the concept, or that extension of the human life we may choose to call ideal: Le vostre cose tutte hanno lor morte, In Dante — like in Vico — we may see such moments as a succession of corsi e ricorsi indicating the metaphysical sense of human history. The mythopoetic value of history is the main critical metaphor of Vico's Scienza Nuova. Like Kant, Vico relies for much of his argument on the thesis that the "rhapsodic beginnings of thinking" (Certeau, 88) can be traced inside the more sophisticated forms of civilization. From the primitive man guided by intuition, to the critical man who bases his observations on judgment, and not on the sensuale natura of the former, Vico maps out the principles of historic becoming. History then, for Vico, began when the human species become aware of the phenomenon of alterity. Like the molecular division, men change their identity by inventing difference within sameness. As usual, in order to explain this process, Vico relies heavily on his favorite method, etymological hermeneutics; the equation between the history of humanity and that of language is well known and around it evolves the project of the Scienza Nuova. The passage from the primitive state of bestiality to the "new" one of "umanità"' is poetically described in the Scienza Nuova through the phonetico-semantic difference between educere and educare. The first thing to be transformed was the soul (educere) that "ne' vasti corpi de' giganti era affatto seppellita dalla materia" (Vico, 239); as a result, the body began to imitate the soul and take shapely forms that stimulated a correspondence — involving both the signifier and the signified — and harmony that prepared the road towards the ecstatic kalokagathon of the Socratic heritage. After a long detour, a familiar rhetorical figure of Vico's, the author, connects the pieces of the intricate puzzle: the role of philosophy is to mend history, in other words, to correct the vices and moral flaws of humans, preventing their bodies and souls from turning into "smisurati [end page 90] corpi giganteschi." However, Vico does not mean by philosophy the discipline of abstract reason; on the contrary, the philosophical enterprise owes its foundation to the main tool it ought to use, that of philology. In the wake of Livy, Vico holds that a true historian should not discard the virtual practical relevance of myths for the understanding of the origins and evolution of a nation. Philology is therefore needed to explain and uncover, like archeological field research, the point of intersection between social ideology (politics) and mythopoesis following the genesis of a people (Mali, 254). Meditating on the "corso che fanno Ie nazioni," Vico frequently uses the word mescolamento (mixture, intertwining); this is the point of intersection we insist as being worthy of mentioning, where what we call today "reason of state" is derived from the "poetic" substance that accompanies the primitive instance of any foundational moment. Although Vichian rhetoric is generally considered difficult due to its baroque structure, the Scienza Nuova underscores the design of a method (scienza) that would bring together "istoria e filosofia dell'umanita`"(NS, 770). Vico sees the relation between the two disciplines as hierarchical, undoubtedly a Platonic reminiscence. History ought to lead the way as an exhaustive synthesis, since the philosophers and philologists of the past obscured, rather than clarified, the origins of human nature. In Vico's words, while the philosophers "han meditato sulla natura umana incivilita gia` dalle religioni e dalle leggi ... e non meditarono sulla natura umana, dalla quale eran provenute Ie religioni e Ie leggi," the philologists have committed their own "professional" mistake by postponing the study of "Ie tradizioni volgari cosi svisate, lacere e sparte che, se non si restituisce loro il proprio aspetto, non se ne ricompongono i brani e non si allogano a'luoghi loro" (NS, 770). This conclusion takes, according to Vico, the shape of a paradox: the origins of nations ought to be sought in the causa prima sold by the poeti teologi to their people, pure and thus ignorant of logical causality at the dawn of history. The task to dig out the truth mixed (mescolamento) with religious phantasies (the poets theologians were men who fantasticarono deitadi) therefore lies on the shoulders of the historian. The historian appears thus to be the master of this aporia that encapsulates both truth and falsity, the natural condition of the human beginning as incominciamenti favolosi. To understand history in its institutional becoming, as regulated by clear laws, is the opposite of discerning between truth and imagination: history is the foundational discipline of the mystico-mythical imagination when it stands for the only available form of truth. In other words, the Scienza Nuova is the rediscovered sapienza of the first poet-theologians. [end page 91] It is almost common knowledge, or, to paraphrase the Vichian terminology, sensus communis that the text of the Scienza Nuova abounds in obscure passages. History is derived from philology rather than philosophy in Vico's encyclopedic unfolding of human institutions. Vico's distinction between the two is, for once, less ambiguous: "La filosofia contempla la ragione, onde viene la scienza del vero; la filologia osserva l'autorita' dell'umano arbitrio, onde viene la coscienza del certo" (NS, 83). The difference is sustained by the predicative mode; philosophy contemplates while philology observes, and the outcome amounts to the epistemological separation between scienza and coscienza. Truth (vero) and certainty (certo) define separate territories. On the one hand, there is the objective and thus transcendent realm of truth, and therefore, to study philosophy means to enter the reign of non-becoming. To borrow a Deleuzian term, philosophy belongs to the regime of the diagrammatic, insofar that it is unable to make the difference between natural and artificial (Deleuze, 141). Whereas philology indicates the transformation of reality into semiotic systems; it may be said that, according to Vico, the subjective factor is what constitutes the foundation of history as a synthesis of the linguistic effort. The opposition already outlined in the Poetics between the scientific and the phenomenological type of discourse is reiterated by Vico in his treatise. In order to further approximate the Vichian understanding of history, additional discussion of the notion of truth is needed. In the Scienza Nuova and other writings such as De Antiquissima Italorum Sapientia and Il Diritto Universale, Vico underlines the idea of truth as exacte verum. This is the term he uses for the reality of truth as indivisible entity comprising both causa prima and essentia. The question of the nature of God is described in concepts that remind one of the basic strategies of negative theology (Milbank, 80). The implications of the Vichian "apophatics" are numerous, and they to our present discussion of his conception of history. If only God can make himself known as cause and essence, and such a possibility occurs through revelation, then history might be defined as the discipline of successive revelations ordered chronologically. The psycholinguistic approach described in the Scienza Nuova speaks in an indirect way of God: he is inaccessible to human knowledge yet silently prompting his presence as immanent fragment. We are to decide (as autorità) what is significant from our unmediated (historic) experience. The question of participation (participatio) in the creation (factum) is exposed in Spinozian terms by Vico; we are extensions of God witnessing each other's manifestations. Not having access to the integrity of God's universal design, we re-compose fragments of the "revelations" we have chosen (I'umano arbitrio) to name so. That is why history can and ought to be rewritten periodically. [end page 92] Why is history the object of constant revision for Vico? Mainly because of its subjective origin, one that is based on conscientia which, from time to time, accepts the bits of ingenuity that dwell within the human mind. Vico clearly states that our ingenuity is "infirm" but nevertheless "historic" because of the steady continuity that generates degrees of communality between people, regardless of their temporal simultaneity. According to Vico there are two histories: the "storia ideal eterna," which is always interpreted as the fundament or basis for the second one, the contingent, unfolding "Ie storie di tutte Ie nazioni" (SN, 164). This might justify as well "Vico's intent to write a true history" (Mazzotta, 79), that is two histories: one as a philosophy of history and the other one a Foucauldian rewriting of the documentary records available to him, analyzed through the lenses of the historic coscienza. References Berlin, Isaiah, Vico and Herder. London: Hogarth P, 1976 Dante, Alighieri, Epistolae. Tr. Paget Toynbee. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1966 ___, La Divina Commedia. Firenze: Sansoni, 1985 de Certeau, Michel, II parlare angelico: Figure per una poetica della lingua. Tr. Carlo Ossola. Firenze: Olschki, 1989 Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and schizofrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987 Hankey, Teresa, "The Clear and The Obscure: Dante, Virgil and the role of the prophet." In John C. Barnes & Cormac Cuilleanain, eds., Dante and the Middle Ages. Dublin: Irish Academic P, 1995: 74-86 Mali, Joseph, The Rehabilitation of Myth: Vico's New Science. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992 Mazzotta, Giuseppe, Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and allegory in the Divine Comedy. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979 ___, The New Map of the World: The poetic philosophy of Giambattista Vico. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1998 Milbank, John, The Religious Dimension in the Thought of Giambattista Vico: 1668-1744. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991/2. Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Use and Abuse of History. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational, 1957 Pisa, Guido da, Expositiones et Glose super Comediam Dantis. Ed. V. Cioffari. New York: SUNY Press, 1974 [end page 93] Ryan, Christopher, "The Theology of Dante." In Rachel Jacoff, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Dante. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993: 150-70 Schnapp, Jeffrey T., The Transfiguration of History at the Center of Dante's Paradise. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1996 Giambattista Vico, Tutte Ie opere di Giambattista Vico. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1957
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