Abstract
Reviewed by: Aniello Di Iorio, University of Wisconsin–Madison, USA
The idea of weeping has played an important role in the development of Dante’s theological implications through the Christian doctrine. Because the idea has been neglected for a number of centuries, it is not surprising that a scholarly volume such as Dante’s Tears: The Poetics of Weeping from “Vita Nuova” to the “Commedia” has come under scrutiny. Rossana Fenu Barbera models her well-constructed argument around the complex notion of tears and their importance for understanding the scholarly elaboration around the sphere of Dante’s works. It is the first critical work from which Barbera demonstrates the centrality of tears in the development of Dante’s lifelong search for a new poetics. While she hopes to reveal the correlation between Vita Nuova, Inferno, and Purgatorio, the scholar constructs a new model for the poetics of tears, which turns out to be hermeneutically evocative in Dante’s text.
Barbera divides her scholarly work into five chapters, along with an introduction and a conclusion, and carefully provides a succinct outline for each chapter. She organizes her volume into two sections: one section features the significance of tears from the Vita Nuova and Inferno, while the second features weeping in Inferno and Purgatorio. In the first section, she analyzes Dante’s tears from Vita Nuova by taking into account the figure of Beatrice in the face of Dante’s “desires and fears in his dreams” (p. XII). She also demonstrates how Dante moves from developing a poetics of tears through his inner struggles to defining the “performances of tears” (p. XIII), which convey special meanings through the description of characters like Paolo Malatesta and Count Ugolino. The second section unfolds with the scholar’s re-interpretation of tears through a dual line of argument. The empirical evidence from antiquity to Dante’s time serves Barbera’s need to trace direct and indirect sources, a transition from a direct weeping to an indirect form of tears, which leads us to understand how tears become useful for the Florentine poet as a poetic mediation. This mediation serves as a witness to Dante’s defiance against communal life through a socio-political flouting of the order of civic life and the city of Florence through the last tears for Dante in Purgatorio (p. XV). The scholar’s final focus on Purgatorio XXX establishes a contrast between the static tears in Inferno and the dynamic tears in Purgatorio, from which Dante’s weeping becomes an instrument of change in his writing since Vita Nuova.
A significant aspect of Barbera’s analysis is the notion of tears as a constructive and regenerative mechanism. She identifies this as “intellectual development” (p. 39) whose course begins in the Vita Nuova. Because weeping goes beyond Dante the pilgrim’s verbal qualities, this development underscores the tears’ function through a systematic process of contemplating weeping as a language of their own. According to Barbera, this system operates on a tripartite level in the Inferno, which indicates a moral discourse, a rhetorical role, and a structural function. Such a task can also encompass a bodily procedure when the scholar argues that the figure of Lucifer should be juxtaposed to that of the Old Man of Crete. When she claims that the “same watery substance that the Veglio of Crete cannot shed from his eyes passes directly to Lucifer multiplied by three, and is poured, as a stone fountain, from his six eyes” (p. 105), this shows that the mechanism of tears also endorses a regenerative motion. It is a recurring development that is examined to a greater extent in Chapter four, where we witness a transformation from liquid tears into Ugolino’s frozen tears in Inferno XXXIII. This oscillation from active to passive tears accentuates not only the dual nature of such a mechanism, but also Barbera’s effort to identify the poetics of weeping through multiple layers of interpretation.
To empower the study of this mechanism of tears, Barbera traces a line of thought with a clear logic of argumentation. She makes use of argumentative questions throughout the entire volume, which proves to be efficient and simultaneously compelling. It is a literary strategy that occurs particularly when she contextualizes several characters from the Commedia. For instance, Dante’s weeping in the face of Filippo Argenti and Frate Alberigo in Inferno VIII & XXXIII (p. 124) might have remained unexamined without Barbera’s juxtaposition of these characters’ literary natures and their own pasts. On the one hand, this operation highlights a way in which the scholar channels the significance of tears in overcoming the boundaries that previous critics have elaborated in the past; on the other hand, it endorses the reader’s understanding of Dante’s sagacity through the notion of tears.
In addition to that, the rationality of the scholar’s reasoning occurs also if one takes into account the structure of the book. It almost goes without saying that Chapter one entails an elucidating analysis of tears in Vita Nuova, while the last chapter unfolds Dante’s final tears in Purgatorio. Furthermore, we witness a progressive strategy which allows us to embrace more clearly the hermeneutic steps that Barbera takes in order to diversify her reasoning about the mechanism of Dante’s tears. She claims that if Dante’s poetics of weeping occurs by stressing “confession, repentance, and purification,” these are to be considered moments that unveil “structural and strategical ways” that allow Dante to shift from his “celebration of a youthful, unfulfilling and sinful love to the contemplation of a more mature and sacred love for God” (p. 193).
Barbera’s volume is a milestone that bridges the notion of tears across the realms of Christianity, psychology, physiology, and philosophy. While she leads the reader through this series of disciplines that characterizes a hermeneutical progression, the reader also feels engaged with this intensifying course, which leads him/her towards a collective understanding of tears. Furthermore, to Barbera tears can be seeds that unfold from the literature of Dante, and that assist him in distinguishing his knowledge of religious beliefs as well as non-religious beliefs on medicine, anthropological development, and physiological matter from Galen to Avicenna. The scholar intentionally selects those examples from Vita Nuova and the Commedia to first strengthen the medieval poet’s artistic and literary perspective, and then considers the poetics of Dante’s weeping as a methodological mechanism. It is an indispensable and original work that can be aesthetically pleasing to a modern reader, historically bound to a medieval audience, and universally inspiring to a comprehensive reader, who wishes to digest Dante’s poetics of tears in the Commedia, while seeded in Vita Nuova.