Everyman and the Threefold Dante Subject in the Diegetic Structure of the Commedia

Abstract

Everyman and the Threefold Dante Subject in the Diegetic Structure of the Commedia Catherine Adoyo (bio) [M]i volsi al suon del nome mio,che di necessità qui si registra.1 One of the most conspicuous features of the Commedia that shapes how the poem packages and delivers meaning also happens to be among the most significant keys to discerning how the text frames different degrees of epistemic authority in the poem's narrative voices. I refer here to Dante Alighieri's multifaceted subjectivity in the text. Numerous studies have dedicated attention to the first-person-singular speakers who, either intradiegetically or extradiegetically vis-à-vis the journey through the world beyond, answer to the identity "Dante."2 To date, the three figures generally recognized in this respect are Dante the pilgrim, Dante the narrator, and Dante the author. Undeveloped by critical tradition, however, is a clear structural map distinguishing these three figures and articulating the epistemic function that these [End Page 123] distinctions play in the self-exegesis of the poem. As we expound on how the threefold Dante subject is delineated in the text, we will also explore how each subject's testimonial expression contributes to the hermeneutic program of the Commedia and how this plural subjectivity signifies the structural unity of the poem. In a synthesis of critical treatments of the distinct Dante subjects, Giovanni Cecchetti dates their differentiation back to Dante's own time, associating them with auctor and agens, medieval concepts that do not apparently entail the question of Dante's textual subjectivity. Cecchetti also attributes Charles Singleton's more germane and influential 1941 reconfiguration of the Dante subjects in modern terms to Giovanni Venturi's 1924 commentary.3 In his 1941 study "Dante in the Divine Comedy," Singleton deliberates upon and identifies four "voices in the first person:" the voice of the narrator returned from the supernatural journey to recount his experience; the lone voice in the wilderness inveighing against contemporary ills in the apostrophes of the poem; the voice of the artist who continually comments on his poetic craft; and finally, the voice of the core narrative's protagonist whose onomastic identity is declared by Beatrice in Purgatorio (30.55–63) and alluded to by Cacciaguida in Paradiso (15.91–92 and 15.137–138).4 Singleton later narrows his focus on the protagonist of the journey, codifying the critical idea of Dante as the universal stand-in for the allegory of the soul's return to its Maker: [o]f the scene and of the journey in the prologue we might say "our life." Not so beyond the door. The journey beyond is too exceptional an event to bear any but a singular possessive. […] Whereas in the prologue […] in so far as we might see this as "our" journey, it takes place, as to time, in a kind of "ever-present," with Everyman as actor.5 Building on Singleton's concept of Dante as Everyman, Leo Spitzer frames the question as a distinction between the "poetic 'I'" and the "empirical person."6 Spitzer agrees with Singleton that Dante, as the poetic "I," is "representative of humanity" in his universal experience and deems it a necessary conceit in Dante's cultural context: this Odysseus of the Beyond who says "I" purports to have undertaken a voyage for which he offers no authentication by evidence transplanted from other sources: he is the only witness. How could the medieval public [End Page 124] have accepted as genuine the supposedly eye-witness report (in this poem "to which Heaven and Earth collaborated") on the supermundane world, unless the "poetic I" of Dante represented, for this medieval community, the human soul as such with all its capacity to attain to the Beyond and to reach out of space towards its Creator?7 The empirical "I" in Spitzer's configuration, namely, the historical figure Dante Alighieri, is present in the text to "perceive and to fix the matter of experience."8 Here Spitzer appears to conflate history and poetry, all the while ignoring their fictional function in the poem, when he points to the medieval audience's need for "authentication by evidence" of the Commedia as an "eye-witness...