The Eternal Image of the Father

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the image of the father in Dante's Commedia. In Inferno the theme of the meeting with a father image is characterized by irony, while the meeting with Cacciaguida in Paradiso appears to be the fulfillment of an allegorical referentiality, a partial truth glossed repeatedly and painstakingly until it is finally revealed at the ending of the poem. There is a sense in which the theme of the clash between father and son, when neither will yield, is illustrative of the clash of irony, where no resolution but death is possible between two antithetical yet equally plausible assertions. We might say that the oedipal struggle is the thematization of the atemporal and corrosive quality of ironic impasse. To introduce temporality into this impasse, however, and to order the past to the future with the mediating influenced of a third term in which both participate is to transform irony into allegory, and generational conflict into the unfolding of salvation history.

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