Virginia Woolf’s admiration for Dante is testified by the several references to his work which occur not only in her non fiction texts, where she lists Dante among the authors capable of creating for the reader that “common ground” (“The Leaning Tower”) which allows their texts to be perceived as immortal and universal, but also in her works of fiction. In Mrs Dalloway, Septimus Smith’s altered perception implies not only his hallucinatory relation with the ‘objective’ world, but also, simultaneously, a more sensitive apprehension of words: “he could read, Dante for example, quite easily […] his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then – that he could not feel”. Dante’s presence in this key passage of the 1925 novel appears as a precise reference, which hints to Woolf’s own experience as both a reader and a writer, and which proves the intertwined nature of these two activities in her. Woolf’s remarks on her own reading of Dante (“Some days I can’t read Dante at all […] other days I find it very sublime & helpful. Raises one out of the chatter of words”, The Diary) coincide with her fictional association of the Italian author with a particularly intense state of mind and with that non-linear perception which allows words to be apprehended in their multiple meanings and supra-semantic potentialities. Moreover, as often in Woolf, her reading activity merges with her own writing, through a process of confrontation which proves simultaneously discouraging (“I am reading Dante, & I say, yes, this makes all writing unnecessary” The Diary) and deeply inspiring. In particular, Woolf’s reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy while completing The Waves (1931) proves highly influential in her quest for structuring this work as an “abstract, mystical, eyeless” text, in accord to the ‘impersonality’, and to the inter-relation between intellectual and sensorial experience which her close friend T. S. Eliot envisaged in Dante. Nonetheless, Woolf also appears to re-question such a definition of Dante’s style, by making appear, through the lens of her own work, the active tension between the categories of personality/impersonality and materiality/immateriality in both perception and writing. In Woolf’s diary, her remarks on how The Waves should end by the dominance of the themes of “effort”, “personality” and “defiance” are introduced by a few lines (94-102) taken by the Canto 26 of the Inferno. In this sense, the re-emergence of the subject in the text shows how Woolf’s interpretation of Dante’s style and organization of the literary discourse implies a set of issues which re-define the concept of allegorical language, by underlining how this, similarly to what Auerbach will remark in relation to Dante, hints less to bodiless abstraction, but rather gives raise to a “dual vision” (through a process of “split reference”, in Paul Ricoeur’s definition of metaphor) capable of unifying the “thinker and the poet” as well as of rendering the portrayed world “like a globe, of which one side is always hidden” (“Phases of Fiction”).
Misi me per l'alto mare aperto: personality and impersonality in Virginia Woolf's reading of Dante's allegorical language
PRUDENTE, Teresa
2011-01-01
Abstract
Virginia Woolf’s admiration for Dante is testified by the several references to his work which occur not only in her non fiction texts, where she lists Dante among the authors capable of creating for the reader that “common ground” (“The Leaning Tower”) which allows their texts to be perceived as immortal and universal, but also in her works of fiction. In Mrs Dalloway, Septimus Smith’s altered perception implies not only his hallucinatory relation with the ‘objective’ world, but also, simultaneously, a more sensitive apprehension of words: “he could read, Dante for example, quite easily […] his brain was perfect; it must be the fault of the world then – that he could not feel”. Dante’s presence in this key passage of the 1925 novel appears as a precise reference, which hints to Woolf’s own experience as both a reader and a writer, and which proves the intertwined nature of these two activities in her. Woolf’s remarks on her own reading of Dante (“Some days I can’t read Dante at all […] other days I find it very sublime & helpful. Raises one out of the chatter of words”, The Diary) coincide with her fictional association of the Italian author with a particularly intense state of mind and with that non-linear perception which allows words to be apprehended in their multiple meanings and supra-semantic potentialities. Moreover, as often in Woolf, her reading activity merges with her own writing, through a process of confrontation which proves simultaneously discouraging (“I am reading Dante, & I say, yes, this makes all writing unnecessary” The Diary) and deeply inspiring. In particular, Woolf’s reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy while completing The Waves (1931) proves highly influential in her quest for structuring this work as an “abstract, mystical, eyeless” text, in accord to the ‘impersonality’, and to the inter-relation between intellectual and sensorial experience which her close friend T. S. Eliot envisaged in Dante. Nonetheless, Woolf also appears to re-question such a definition of Dante’s style, by making appear, through the lens of her own work, the active tension between the categories of personality/impersonality and materiality/immateriality in both perception and writing. In Woolf’s diary, her remarks on how The Waves should end by the dominance of the themes of “effort”, “personality” and “defiance” are introduced by a few lines (94-102) taken by the Canto 26 of the Inferno. In this sense, the re-emergence of the subject in the text shows how Woolf’s interpretation of Dante’s style and organization of the literary discourse implies a set of issues which re-define the concept of allegorical language, by underlining how this, similarly to what Auerbach will remark in relation to Dante, hints less to bodiless abstraction, but rather gives raise to a “dual vision” (through a process of “split reference”, in Paul Ricoeur’s definition of metaphor) capable of unifying the “thinker and the poet” as well as of rendering the portrayed world “like a globe, of which one side is always hidden” (“Phases of Fiction”).
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