The Disorientation of Figures: The Palio Simile and a Theory of Tropes

Abstract

That Dante loved his mentor Brunetto Latini and damned him to eternal hell is a puzzle that has vexed readers and made the fifteenth canto of the Inferno an often-revisited interpretive crux. The famous ambiguity of the palio simile that ends the canto seems to take up within itself and crystalize both Dante’s own personal ambivalence and the controversy the canto has inspired. This essay analyzes the simile as a preeminent example of what Paul Ricoeur called predicative impertinence, the resistance of a poetic figure to resolution, and takes the palio’s peculiarly strong resistance as an insubordination that unsettles the didactic ends of the Divine Comedy. Like Dante, Ricoeur sought in poetic language a means of illuminating the terrible enigmas of faith. His theory pushes the work of figuration closer to resolution than the palio simile itself may warrant, so Derrida and Merleau-Ponty are enlisted in turn to supplement and correct Ricoeur’s tropology. In their close proximity, these three figural theories help illuminate the radical irresolution of the palio as a stubborn enactment of intransigent enigma.