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Tuesday, March 12, 2013

PAOLO E FRANCESCA -- LANCILOTTO, GINEBRA, E GALEOTTO

Speranza

Dante

GALEOTTO, GUILT AND THE READER

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Paolo and Francesca, 1849-1862.

Canto V -- or the circle of "the lustful", has been commented on,
rewritten in literature and illustrated by artists more than any other canto in
the Commedia (Menocal, Writing in Dante’s Cult of Truth 183).

In particular, artists are most interested in Dante’s encounter with Francesca,
condemned to the “bufera infernale” with her lover Paolo
MALATESTA for eternity.

Let's analyze a writer or artist’s rendition of Francesca’s fate.

We can look at 18 th and 19 th-century visual artists’ renditions of Paolo and Francesca here:

 
And here are three twentieth—and twenty-first-century images of Paolo and Francesca.
 
Salvador Dali's watercolor 'Francesca' (1951-2)
 
 and
Jennifer Strange's drawing 'Francesca and Paolo' (1994?).
 
 
Click the link "Dante's Inferno illustrations powerpoint" in the middle of the page.
Sandow Birk’s lithograph “Canto V: Paolo and Francesca” (2002).
 
 
As Menocal points out (and as you can
confirm in this small gallery of art above) reinterpretations of
Canto V frequently focus on the book Paolo and Francesca
have read together.
 
Remember that Francesca calls her book a “Galeotto” (line 137),
referring at one level to the “go-between” GALEOTTO
who gets Lancelot and GINEBRA together in the romance
the lovers have read.
 
In Dante’s interpretation, the “Galeotto” is a go-between
because the book has inserted itself between literature and
life (Menocal 187).
 
This is assuredly a moral judgment on Dante’s part,
his concern that the book of love is a pander to adultery.
 
Because Francesca’s lines in the canto echo stilnovistic verse
 – the kind of secular poetry that Dante wrote as a young poet –-
we can also assume that Dante is condemning his older writing here
(Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante: Poet of the Desert 169; Menocal 187).
 
When Dante faints in “pietade” (pity) at the end of canto V
upon hearing Francesca’s words, we sense
his own guilty conscience for having written a love poetry
that, like the adultery it might lead to, is only about itself.
 
No, Dante urges both readers and writers,
we must look beyond the seductions of
lust and art (much like he urges us to look
beyond petty partisan politics) to something
larger than ourselves.
 
Menocal points out that the Francesca story ends
abruptly, truncated by Francesca’s own lines
“quel giorno piùnon vi leggemmo avante”
(138) and by Dante’s swoon as if “in death.”
 
Canto V, which warns of the awful destiny of
narcissistic love, comes dangerously to
being the end of the story.
 
On the one hand, of course, we know that
Francesca’s fate is only a detour in a much larger
narrative whose scope concerns God, or the opposite of self-love.
 
Dante is challenging us as readers of the Commedia to
avoid Francesca’s pitfalls of reading too
literally, of making literature life.
 
If we stay the course, he suggests, we will
see the larger meaning, the wider book, that will have
outlasted any wordly seductions.
 
In the end, it is Dante’s creation of Beatrice – the object of a love greater
than oneself -- that is to outlast his creation of Francesca, the icon of self-love.
 
Dante, who was ever-conscious of the power of rhetoric,
placed greater responsibility for a reader’s fate on
the book and its author.
 
Yet as Menocal writes, Dante’s judgment of the
book of love as a pander is only available
at the end of the Commedia (191).
 
In Canto V itself, Dante shows uncertainty
 about whether it is the book or the reader
that is to blame for the sin.
 
The endless renewal of the Paolo and Francesca story,
from Boccaccio’s subtitling of his Decameron as a “Galeotto”
to the huge number of illustrations in the history of art on
Canto V, shows us that the story has had remarkable valence
as “an unrivaled portrait of the intricacy of a reader’s relationship to a text”
(Menocal 182).
 
Let's interpretat the dilemma of Francesca and her book.
 
Find a “Galeotto,” a blurring of literature and life, for our time, and consider
 briefly different angles on the event.
 
You may want to look at the very recent case of the Danish cartoons, the Salman
Rushdie case almost 20 years ago, or the censorship of books in schools.
 
Here are two websites with different views on censorship:
 

 



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