Through Human Love to God: Essays on Dante and Petrarch by Pamela Williams

Abstract

MLR, 104.1, 2009 207 Stalinist ghetto. Referring topsychiatric theory, Kimyongur shows howcertaintrau matic experiences ofactioninbothworldwars recurin Aragon'swork:memories ofmud, damp, mutilation, and decomposition and,more specifically, accountsof the bloodyandchaoticflight from Dunkirk.Inhismorepolitically confident phase Aragon seemsable to inscribe traumatic memoriesina coherent, future-oriented narrative. However, when theeventsof 1956 shakethe worldCommunist move ment,Aragon'snarrative orderfragments alongwithhis ideological one: insuch bewildering works as La Mise a'mort and Blanche ou l'oubli,memory and identityare influx. Kimyongiir alsohas interesting pointsaboutgapsanddeviationsin Aragon's treatment ofwar: hisnon-adherence, in1940-41, tothePCF's neutral positionon warwithNazi Germany, whichcouldbe explained byhispresenceinthezone libre and therefore hisdistancefrom the underground leadership; andhis relative silence on thecolonial wars inIndo-China, then Algeria,addressed onlyobliquelyinLeFou d'Elsa.However, Kimyongiir doesnotexplain why Aragonpersists withsuppressing thecompromises ofthe Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact inhismonumental, andaborted, post-war novelLesCommunistes. Unfortunately, thereisno use ofnewlyopened archives, notablythoseof the CommunistParty, togivea deeperappreciation of Aragon'spoliticaland culturalroleat theheightof theColdWar. Nor does the author explainin moredetailhow1956affects andevendisplaces Aragon's memory of war, or how Aragon's work stands in relation to the 'Vichy syndrome' and the challenging ofmythsof theFrench Resistance. Finally, there remains an intriguing gap that is shared bymuch literature on thememory of war: the almost exclusive emphasis on soldiers' passive sufferingand loss, and the quasi-absence of the act of killing so necessary for the futureglory of any nation armee. UNIVERSITY OF STANDREWS GAVIN BOWD 7hroughHuman Love toGod: Essays onDante and Petrarch. By PAMELAWILLIAMS. Leicester: Troubadour. 2007. X+137 PP. ?12.99. ISBN 978-1-905886-40-1. Pamela Williams'smeditationon therelationship inDante andPetrarch between man's love for man (or, to be more precise, man's love forwoman) and man's love forGod is, in truth,but a fresh chapter in theworking out of an old theme, namely how it mightbe possibletoreconcile withinthesingle-minded perspective ofAu gustinian spirituality loveofGod and loveofone'sneighbour. Inthe Gospelsand in Paul thequestionisnothinglikeas acute,thesoteriological issue beingunfoldedin terms precisely ofthe presence ofonehumanbeingtoanother withinthecontext of a commonprofession andofa gathered community. But in Augustine, constrained by the finalities of an at once Christian and Graeco-Roman conscience, itwas severe-as severe, infact, ashis famous distinction between usageand fruition as a way of solving it isproblematic. By the timewe reachDante and Petrarch, an already thorny issue is rendered stillmore painful by the rise of a certain kind of social and literary programme ('courtly love'aswe now call it) movingmore or lessprecari ously between the erotic and the esoteric, and, as we learn from Inferno v, apt even 208 Reviews inthe most refined ofspirits toprecipitate moral andontological catastrophe. This, then, iswhere Pamela Williams comes in.Confronted inDante and Petrarch by two waysofseeing andunderstanding therelationship inhumanexperience betweenthe variouskindsof love-impulse properto man inhispsychosomatic complexity, she straightaway setsaboutexploring their similarity anddissimilarity-Dante's sense of their potential, and indeedactual,continuity, and Petrarch's senseof thepain andultimately oftheimpossibility of itall.First,then, after a preliminary statement of the issue inChapter 1, comes an essay designed to foreground, not pride or lust as theobjectofDante's confessioninthefinal phaseof thePurgatorio, butacedia or a falling shortinrespect of the kindofspirituality engendered byBeatrice'sfirst appearancetohimas anepiphanous presenceinthe world (Chapter 2).Next-and this, I think, is the best part of the book-comes an account of the rootedness for Dante ofsexualandofreligious yearning inone and thesamepassionateanthropo logy (the key texthere being theCunizza episode of Paradiso ix). At a certain level ofbeingand consciousness, inother words,thereisno separating out these orders ofexperience, theone, withinthepattern ofhumandesiring as awhole,coalescing with,anddulyenergizing, the other(Chapter 3). Similarly well judged, especiallyin relation toPetrarch's appealto Augustinian patterns ofthought inexploring an issue which, inPetrarch himself, isnot in fact in any sustained sense Augustinian at all, are Chapters 4 and 5, at every point attuned to the complexity ofLaura's presence tohim as a principle bothofdoingandofundoing, ofself-finding andofself-losing. Here and there, certainly, there isroomfor discussion. How 'rabidly anti-clerical', for ex ample, isDante, at least in any strict sense of the term, in and beyond theCommedia (p. i)? Is it true to say in relation to theVita nuova thatBeatrice is the 'intermediary who elicits love inDante for the sake of directing it towards God' (p. 9), a notion apt tomake of the libello awork of specifically Christian piety?And is itexact...