Celestial Discords: The Music of Dante's Paradise

Abstract

The music that I am concerned with in the present paper is not that of angelic choirs and lyre-strumming seraphim (though of course there is that too in Paradiso). Rather, it is the music of Dante's poetry, and more precisely, the relative lack of a particular kind of word-music that one might expect to feature in an account of Paradise: the music of ecstasy, or jouissance. Because if one of the poem's aims is to communicate the experience of someone who claims actually to have been there, then it might be suggested, to adapt an elegant phrase of Roland Barthes, that Dante's is a somewhat sparing ecstasy, a jouissance parsimonieuse. Setting aside the fraught issue – the subject of animated debate to this day – of whether Dante had actually experienced a vision of some kind, and therefore believed his account of the Hereafter to be in some sense ‘factual’, there is no doubt that in writing the Paradisohe intended somehow to representthe state of bliss, an intent to which he refers with the polysemic verb figurare, meaning at one and the same time depict, imagine and, in accordance with contemporary allegory and typology, identify in the things pertaining to this world intimations of the transcendent truths of the next. If therefore Dante is sparing in his celestial jouissancethis is in part because the demands of earthly representation are such that the state of blessedness, and even Heaven's more transient effects on the ‘still flesh-and-blood’ Dante-character, can only be adumbrated, rapidly suggested and just as rapidly left off. At the root of Dante's achievement, as Auerbach taught us to recognize, is his extraordinary skill as a story-teller, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Paradiso, where, beyond time, there is in a sense no celestial story to tell. Dante fills that void with a variety of earthly stories instead: exemplary human lives and the history of mankind generally as a journey whose end-purpose is the celestial city; scientific, philosophical and theological narratives explaining how everything in creation exists and operates to fulfil that end-purpose; the story of Dante's own progress through the heavens.

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