Abstract
This paper reads Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis and the ‘Aeolus’ episode of James Joyce’s Ulysses together via their usage of Dante, asking what productively emerges from considering this medievalism side by side. The resonance of Dante, in particular his Commedia, is shown to align with a shared concern with difficulty and ambiguity: both texts depict the act of re-reading Dante. Struggling with exile of various kinds, and facing the problem of representing these states, both texts attempt to generate new aesthetic modes through Dante’s example. The paper contends that both texts therefore make use of a Dantean poetics here called the purgatorial mode; Purgatorio appears as a forerunner of these works. Wilde’s De Profundis embeds the reader within layers of reminiscence to create the experience of a difficult middle, proclaiming a queer aesthetics of imperfection that aims towards a liberated future. Joyce’s ‘Aeolus’, meanwhile, dramatizes the movement of Purgatorio, the ascent to perfection through exile as allegorised by Dante via the biblical exodus of the Israelites. What this aesthetics of exile achieves is not so much a clear answer to the problems of representation that Wilde and Joyce faced, as a difficult middle.
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