R d n n D nt nd Pr tJ l t r n H rtl

LN, V l 0, N b r , D b r 20 ( p r t v L t r t r ,pp. 0 4 ( rt l

P bl h d b J hn H p n n v r t PrD : 0. ln.20 .00

F r dd t n l nf r t n b t th rt l

Access provided by Oxford University Library Services (6 May 2016 08:52 GMT)

http : .jh . d rt l 6 80

MLN 130 (2015): 1130–1149 © 2016 by Johns Hopkins University Press

Reading in Dante and Proust❦

Julia Caterina Hartley

Dante’s early 14th-century epic poem the Commedia (Divine Comedy) and Marcel Proust’s early 20th-century novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time or Remembrance of Things Past) are both first-person narratives of literary vocation.1 The parallel was first drawn in the 1950s by the philologist Gianfranco Contini, according to whom Proust’s novel was built upon a question which was extremely pertinent to Dante studies: what is the relationship between the author and the protagonist?2 The Commedia tells the story of the otherworldly journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven of the poet Dante Alighieri, who is identified as the author of the poem. Through extradiegetic interventions, the Commedia also tells the story of its own writing. The highly individualized nature of the poem, with a protagonist who is its author and characters who are unique historicized individuals, led Erich Auerbach to describe Dante as “the first to configure [...] man [...] not as an abstract or anecdotal representative of an ethical type, but man as we know him in his living historical reality, the concrete individual in his unity and wholeness” (Dante: Poet of the secular world 174–75).3 More recently, Dante’s literary self-awareness has led Albert

1All references to the Commedia correspond to La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, edited by Giorgio Petrocchi and are presented by abbreviated canticle, followed by canto number, followed by verse number. All references to the Recherche correspond to the edition by Jean-Yves Tadié, and are presented by volume number followed by page number.

2Gianfranco Contini, “Dante come personaggio-poeta.” On parallels between Dante and Proust see also Borton, Bales, Watt, and Rushworth.

3See also his Mimesis, 174–202. The Auerbachian line of interpretation, which I follow, goes against strictly allegorical readings such as for instance Leo Spitzer’s in “A Note on the Poetic and the Empirical ‘I.’”

1131M L N

Russell Ascoli to make a case for Dante as a “modern author.” It is the precocious “modernity” of the Commedia, both in terms of its realism and of its self-reflexivity, which makes it a relevant subject of comparison to Proust’s novel despite their distant historical contexts.

À la recherche du temps perdu tells the story of an anonymous Parisian contemporary to Proust who, from childhood, yearns to be a writer, but proves himself unsuccessful until, in the closing pages of the novel, he discovers his lived experience can provide material for the construction of a work of literature. Therefore while the narrator-protagonist of the Commedia is already a poet at the beginning of the poem, and over the course of the narrative evolves in terms of authority, the narrator-protagonist of the Recherche is not a writer,4 but only projects himself in this role in a concluding ecstatic vision.5 The Recherche also makes abundant use of extradiegetic comments, but these operate in a very different way from Dante’s. While the Commedia strives to remind us that its protagonist and its author are the same person, references to “l’auteur de ce livre” (“the author of this book”, III, 583) in the Recherche playfully trip up the reader’s expectations, so that one is never quite sure who this “je” is, nor what his exact relationship with the author might be.6 Dante’s use of the first-person and exploration of his creative identity rely on what we might call a poetics of assertiveness, whereas Proust’s use of the first-person and his exploration of his narrator-protagonist’s creative identity rely on a poetics of ambiguity.

My aim here is not to argue for a Dantean or Medieval influence on Proust, though this has been shown to be a relevant area of study,7 but rather to read these two works together so that they may prove mutually illuminating. Indeed, I share Contini’s intuition that both novels hold at their heart the same questions, and that these ques-tions are mainly to do with the role of literature and its relationship to identity. Their worldviews may ultimately be irreconcilable, the Commedia being deeply Christian and the Recherche celebrating art as the only necessary form of spiritual experience,8 but both works are

4In the protagonist’s own words: “Je ne suis pas romancier” (III, 881) (“I am not a novelist”). Unless otherwise indicated, translations of Proust are my own.

5Certain scholars will argue for a circular reading of the Recherche, according to which the novel to be written is the one we have just read, whereas others will stress that the novel presents us with no evidence for this. For a review see Pennanech. It may perhaps be most productive to view the novel’s ambiguity on this matter as a “compromise,” as has been recently argued by Jennifer Rushworth in “Proust, Derrida, and the Promise of Writing.”

6On this see Lejeune 29, and Gray 39–42.7Most notably in Richard Bales’s Proust and the Middle-Ages.8On this subject see Bucknall, The Religion of Art in Proust.

1132 Julia Caterina Hartley

equally meta-literary. On a diegetic level, they both center around protagonists who are highly concerned with literary creation, which is invested with redemptive powers.9 They also feature many literary encounters: the protagonists of both narratives talk about literature with other characters, listen to other characters talk about literature, meet writers they have read, and interact with readers of their own. On an extradiegetic level, both works are self-referential and make a complex and varied use of metaleptic breaks and addresses to the reader.10 On top of their explicit references to readers and writers, the Commedia and the Recherche are also constantly in dialogue with other works of literature through an intricate web of intertextual allusions. Writing in Dante and Proust is inseparable from reading. This will become all the more clear as we consider the importance of the image of the book in the opening and in the conclusion of both works.11

In both the Recherche and the Commedia, the first reference made to reading books coincides with the first step towards establishing the protagonist’s subjectivity. In the Recherche the first reference to read-ing is made in the third sentence of the work’s famous opening lines:

For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, my candle scarcely out, my eyes would close so quickly that I did not have the time to say to myself: “I’m falling asleep.” And, half an hour later, the thought that it was time to try to sleep would wake me; I wanted to put down the [volume] I thought I still had in my hands and blow out my light; I had not ceased while sleep-ing to form reflections on what I had just read, but these reflections had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was what the [work] was talking about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. (I, 3)12

“Volume,” “what I had just been reading” (“ce que je venais de lire”) and “work” (“ouvrage”). These repeated references to the book being read signpost the evolution of the reader’s relationship with this book: from reading, to thinking about the book, to almost becoming the book. Proust, by having us first meet his narrator-protagonist in a state between sleep and consciousness, where he is more aware of

9See Chapter 4 of Literary Vocation in Dante and Proust, my University of Oxford D.Phil. thesis for an exploration of the differences in Dante and Proust’s conceptions of redemption.

10By the adjective “metaleptic” I refer to Gérard Genette’s concept of “métalepse narrative.” See Figures III 243–251.

11On the symbol of the book in Medieval culture see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages 302–47 and, on Dante, especially 326–32.

12Translated from I, 3 by Lydia Davis, The Way by Swann’s 7. As Davis translates both “volume” and “ouvrage” as “book” (which in French would be “livre”), I have edited the translation with “volume” and “work” which are closer to the original.

1133M L N

his reading material than of himself, is introducing us to his main traits: self-effacement and porousness to perception. These traits, as the narrative unravels, are what will allow the narrator to frequently be a fly on the wall, a pair of eyes through which we see the world surrounding him, and generally an observer rather than an actor.13

Inferno I, the opening canto of the Commedia, is known for presenting us with what seems to be a sudden shift in genre. Verses 1 to 63 are allegorical, with a man who seems to stand for human-kind confronted with beasts who seem to stand for Christian vices, while the following dialogue presents us with two specified historical individuals: the poets Virgil and Dante (Baranski, 79–97). The shift into the historicized and individualized mode that will characterize the rest of the poem is operated first through Virgil’s self-introduction and then through Dante’s exposition of his relationship to Virgil by way of references to reading and writing:

‘O glory and light of all other poetslet my long study and great love avail

that made me delve so deep into your volume.

‘You are my teacher and my author.You are the one from whom alone I took

the noble style that has brought me honor.

(Inf. I, 82–87)14

Our first introduction to the narrator-protagonist as an individual informs us that he is both a reader and a writer. Moreover, his activity as a writer is presented in terms of a genealogy only made possible by reading: it is reading Virgil that made Dante the poet that he is. Therefore, when Virgil is referred to as “my author” (“mio autor”), the words have a double meaning: Virgil is both Dante’s author in the sense that he is his favorite author and also in the sense that he is, in literary terms, Dante’s maker.

The parallel between authoring literature and authoring the world is most explicit in the concluding canto of the Commedia, Paradiso XXXIII, when God is described as a book lovingly binding together the scattered pages that form the universe (Par. XXXIII, 85–87). This description of God as the greatest author and the greatest book rel-egates Dante to the role of scribe: Dante copies what he can remember

13The most authoritative account of the peculiar nature of Proust’s narrator-protagonist remains Jean-Yves Tadié’s. See Proust et le roman 19–32.

14All Commedia translations are by Robert and Jean Hollander, as viewed on the Princeton Dante Project http://etcweb.princeton.edu/dante/pdp. Accessed 2/16/2015.

1134 Julia Caterina Hartley

of the divine book into his own book. The conclusion of the Recherche too presents the deciphering of a metaphorical book as the first step towards writing. In Proust’s secular world this metaphorical book is the book of one’s individuality, which no one else can read but ourselves. The only way to exteriorize it, and thus make it available to others, is an act of translation which turns the internal book into a work of art—in the case of a writer, into a literal book (IV, 458 and 469).15 The narrator-protagonist hopes, moreover, that his future work will allow readers to look at themselves in a new light, and thus not only read the book itself, but themselves too (IV, 610). In the Recherche therefore all individuals are, metaphorically speaking, books to be read.

In previous research I have entered the question of literary creation in Dante and Proust by centering on the figure of the writer.16 What emerges from the above passages, however, is that the figure of the reader is an equally valid point of entry. When dealing with literary creation or, to put it more simply, the writing of books, we are deal-ing with a triangular structure formed by writer, book and reader. Reading in Proust and Dante is inseparable from writing. It is the first step towards writing: Dante suggests this through a stress on literary genealogies and Proust through the metaphor of the internal book to be translated. Reading is also the desired consequence of writing, for these writer-characters have readers in mind. Moreover, while our present focus is on the reading of books in a strictly literal sense, we must bear in mind that scenes of reading in Dante and Proust are made all the more resonant by the metaphorical power of the image of the book.

While references to reading can be found at many points in the Recherche and the Commedia, each work has an episode which stands out as a focal point: the bedtime reading which concludes the “drame du coucher” episode of “Combray” (I, 27–43)17 and the encounter with Francesca which forms the second half of Inferno V (verses 73–142). Both episodes occupy prominent places in their respective works. The “drame du coucher” is the first memory to be recounted in the Recherche (beginning I, 9). Francesca is the first sinner with whom Dante speaks in the Commedia. Both Proust’s narrator-protagonist’s recounting of his mother reading to him François le Champi and Francesca’s recounting

15Proust’s “livre intérieur” is closer to the “libro de la memoria” of Dante’s Vita nuova, as has been noted by Jennifer Rushworth in Discourses of Mourning 341.

16See my “Fame and Glory in Dante,” “Leggere Dante attraverso Proust,” Literary Vocation in Dante and Proust.

17For English translation see The Way by Swann’s 30–46.

1135M L N

of Paolo and herself reading the Lancelot are therefore situated at a narrative threshold. Their importance is furthermore accentuated in both cases by their being followed by a break. The François le Champi episode ends with a gap in the layout of the page, and when the nar-ration resumes, its focalization has shifted from childhood to adult-hood (I, 43). Francesca’s monologue ends with the double break of Dante fainting and the canto ending. The following canto then opens with a narratorial turning of the page (Inf. VI, 1–6). The conspicu-ous positioning of both scenes further confirms the thematic and structural importance of reading in both works. It suggests moreover that these scenes of reading were intended to have a bearing on how Dante and Proust’s readers read, or rather, “read reading” in the rest of the work. Before beginning our analysis, let us remind ourselves of what takes place in these passages.

À la recherche du temps perdu opens by evoking the different bedrooms in which the narrator-protagonist has stayed over the course of his life. The narrative then focuses on his earliest memories: the childhood summers spent in the family’s countryside home, and arrests itself on a particular episode. This is the night when his father sent him to bed early without letting him receive the customary goodnight kiss from his mother. The child-protagonist is so determined to obtain this kiss that he stays up and, in spite of his fear of parental punishment, breaks all rules by getting out of bed at night to bar his mother’s way as she heads to bed herself. The pair are caught by the father who, to their great surprise, instead of expressing anger, tells his protesting wife that she should spend the night in their son’s bedroom. Once mother and son are alone, the child breaks into sobs and feels guilty to have made his mother act against her will. Feeling herself become emotional too at the sight of her son crying so desperately, the mother suggests: “Voyons, puisque tu n’as pas sommeil ni ta maman non plus, ne restons pas à nous énerver, faisons quelque chose, prenons un de tes livres” (“Come, seeing as neither yourself nor your Maman are sleepy, let’s not stay up getting upset, let’s do something, let’s take a look at one of your books.” I, 38). The chosen book is George Sand’s novel François le Champi. The episode ends with the sensual descrip-tion of the mother reading to her son. The child barely follows the text, due partly to his inattention and partly to his mother’s elisions, but he enjoys the intimacy of the activity, knowing that his desire to keep his mother to himself will never be so perfectly satisfied again.

Inferno V is the canto of the Commedia which describes the first circle of Hell: that of the lustful, whose sin was to submit reason to desire.

1136 Julia Caterina Hartley

Their punishment is to be eternally buffeted around by a storm. Dante’s curiosity is aroused by two particular sinners flying together and, having obtained Virgil’s permission, he initiates a dialogue with them. Francesca de Rimini tells Dante, using a highly poetic language rich in rhetorical flourishes and intertextual echoes, that she fell in love with her companion and that their love led to their death at the hands of a relative (this relative, unnamed, is Gianciotto, Francesca’s husband and Paolo’s brother). Dante cannot help but empathize with the tragic couple and asks Francesca what triggered the lovers’ mutual desire for each other. Francesca replies that the root of their love lay in their reading of the Lancelot. One day as they sat alone reading, they became increasingly flustered as they read of the knight’s love for his queen and were finally overcome by the description of the knight and the queen’s kiss:

Quando leggemmo il disïato risoesser basciato da cotanto amante,

questi, che mai da me non fia diviso,

la bocca mi basciò tutto tremante.Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse:

quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.

(133–138)

(‘When we read how the longed-for smile | was kissed by so renowned a lover, this man, | who never shall be parted from me, | all trembling, kissed me on my mouth. | A Galeotto was the book and he that wrote it. | That day we read in it no further.’)

Galeotto is the name of the knight who acted as a go-between for Guinevere and Lancelot. By invoking him, Francesca accuses the author of the Lancelot and his book to be the authors of her and Paolo’s downfall.

From this cursory overview alone, we can already see that the “drame du coucher” and Francesca’s story have several things in common. In both episodes reading is alluringly associated to sexuality and illicit love as this activity allows the incestuous couples to be alone together, away from the female reader’s lawful husband. The highly visual descrip-tion of the threatening approaching father in Proust (I, 35) is in itself reminiscent of nineteenth-century visual representations of Paolo and Francesca, where Gianciotto often appears in the background as a figure about to walk in on the lovers.18 In both cases the books

18In French art see for example Ingres’s “Paolo et Francesca” (1819) and Alexandre Cabanel’s “Mort de Francesca da Rimini et de Paolo Malatesta” (1870). The scene was also popular in the United Kingdom among the pre-Raphaelites.

1137M L N

mirror the readers’ situation: the Lancelot is a tale of adulterous love and François le Champi one of Oedipal love. As well as mirrors of the action, the books can also be viewed as catalysts for action. Paolo and Francesca’s lust for each other is presented as having been stimulated by Guinevere and Lancelot’s tale. In the Recherche, on the other hand, the mother seeks to avoid stimulating her son’s imagination by offer-ing him a bowdlerized reading that skips the novel’s love scenes. Both episodes, finally, are ominous. Paolo and Francesca’s reading leads to their premature deaths. In Proust, the mother’s night with her son marks the slow death of her ideals for him and of his will power.

Despite their dark undertones, these inaugural scenes of reading are not prescriptive: they do not tell us how to read or not to read, but rather they stimulate further reading. On a superficial level, one might say that this is because the juxtaposition of reading with sexual desire charges the act of reading with wider ramifications through metonymy. But if we consider them more attentively, we see that both episodes problematize the act of reading, which in of itself is to do with desire.19 Both episodes encourage us to interpret, to read between the lines, to fill in the gaps and, even, to read further afield—for instance, the Lancelot or François le Champi. Both episodes, moreover, lead us to ponder on the influence books may have on their readers, and vice-versa. For these episodes are not only about reading, but also about misreading, editing, and bowdlerizing. They can even be interpreted, as we shall finally see, as not being about reading at all. For the narrator-protagonists, these scenes will continue to resonate across the narrative as the first moment in which the characters were confronted with the nature of their desire for literature. They are the beginning of their literary and epistemological journey as readers and (future) writers. In this sense, these episodes can be viewed as “Primal Scenes of reading”.

I borrow the expression “Primal Scene of reading” from Adam Watt, who in turn borrows the expression “Primal Scene” from Freud. Watt persuasively transposes Freud’s model of the Primal Scene (“Urszene”),20 which refers to a child’s witnessing (either real or imaginary) of its parents having sexual intercourse, into the context of reading to approach the François le Champi episode, which is the “inaugural act of reading” of the Recherche. Freud’s Primal Scene is

19On reading and desire see Roland Barthes, Le plaisir du texte and Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot.

20The earliest published use of the term is to be found in the chapter of Freud’s An Infantile Neurosis entitled, “The Dream and the Primal Scene.” See Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII 29–47.

1138 Julia Caterina Hartley

not only a sexual initiation, but also a trigger for intellectual inquiry: “[t]he formative, traumatic scene bears the trace of an inchoate epistemology, the beginnings of an understanding of something greater than the actual event itself” (Watt, Reading in Proust’s A la recherche 12). In this sense, Watt finds it a fruitful frame from which to approach the bedtime reading of “Combray”, for just as the Freud-ian Primal scene “provides an incomplete and problematic introduc-tion” to sexuality (12), so does the mother’s reading of the child’s first grown-up book (“je n’avais jamais lu encore de vrais romans” [“I had not yet read any real novels,” I, 41]) provide an incomplete and problematic introduction to literature. The mother’s reading, moreover, is described in highly erotic terms. The book’s cover and “titre incomprehensible” (“incomprehensible title”) give it “un attrait mystérieux” (“a mysterious appeal”), leading the protagonist to imag-ine in François le Champi, before his mother has even begun to read, “quelque chose d’indéfinissable et de délicieux” (“something unde-finable and delicious,” I, 41). Once the reading has begun, François le Champi is described as having “une émanation troublante” and a “couleur vive, empourprée et charmante” (“a troubling emanation” and a “bright, purple, and charming colour,” I, 41). It is important to note that all of these adjectives are in the feminine form, and that “empourpré” when applied to a person means “flushed.” The child has transposed his desire for his mother onto the book in her hands. Through metonymy, the bedtime reading has replaced the bedtime kiss as the ultimate act of intimacy:

My feelings of remorse had subsided, I was letting myself enjoy the sweet-ness of this night where I had my mother close to me. I knew such a night could not renew itself; that the greatest desire that I had in the world, to keep my mother in my bedroom during those sad nocturnal hours, was too much in opposition with life’s necessities and everyone’s wishes [...]. (I, 42)

As has been argued by both Adam Watt and Margaret Gray, the narrator-protagonist’s identification of his first “vrai roman” with his desire for his mother sows the seeds for his adult fascination with literature as something alluring, forbidden and, perhaps, unattain-able. Indeed, Gray goes so far as to argue that the François le Champi episode imposes a “repression of literature,” that is, a deferral of writ-ing, for to write would be to satisfy an incestuous desire (“Skipping love scenes” 143–44). The narrator himself does actually claim the “drame du coucher” as the cause of the protagonist’s failure to write. This is done “après coup” in Le Temps retrouvé, when the narrator-protagonist identifies that night as the beginning of his weakness

1139M L N

and perpetual procrastination: “that François le Champi, contemplated for the first time in my little bedroom of Combray, during what was perhaps the sweetest and the saddest night of my life, when I had, alas! [...] obtained from my parents a first abdication”; “It was from that evening, when my mother had abdicated, that dated, with the slow death of my grandmother, the decline of my will, of my health” (Translated from IV, 465, 621).

Rather than blaming the book itself, as Francesca does, he sees his mother’s submission of her reason to his desire as the cause of his downfall. Le Temps retrouvé thus answers the prophecy of the “drame du coucher”: “I had managed, as illness, sadness or age might have done, to loosen her will, to bend her reason, and [...] this evening opened an era, would remain as a sad date” (Translated from I, 38). In this context it is therefore not his desire to write that is guilty, as in Gray’s reading of writing as an act of incestuous possession, but rather it is his failure to write that is the source of his guilt. In Le Temps retrouvé, writing offers the narrator-protagonist the path to redemp-tion through an act of will, self-discipline and generosity.21 Whether we choose to interpret the narrator-protagonist’s desire to write as illicit or as laudable, his relationship with literature remains filtered by his relationship with his mother and his grandmother, just as it was already when he was a child. His first novel is offered him through a double mediation: his grandmother, who bought the book, and his mother, who reads his grandmother’s gift. The François le Champi episode thus establishes the central role that both women will play in his problematic relationship with writing.

The encounter with Francesca in the Commedia too can be seen as a “Primal Scene” or “inaugural act” of reading, for it also marks “the beginnings of an understanding of something greater than the actual event itself.” Although this scene of reading stars other characters, it is as much Dante’s story as it is Francesca’s. Indeed, since Contini’s suggestion that Francesca’s rhetoric is none other than Dante’s own rhetoric, and that in analyzing the lovers, we are really analyzing Dante through “interposte persone” (Contini 42–8), it has been widely accepted that Francesca stands for Dante’s past as a writer and reader of erotic literature.22 Francesca’s literary allusions range from

21As observed by Anna Magdalena Elsner, only writing can end the guilt for his grandmother’s death. See “Tracing the Presence” 285.

22Elena Lombardi’s work, devoted entirely to interpretations of Inferno V, offers both a re-appraisal of the critical tradition and new insights into what is one of Dante’s most studied cantos. Interpreting the canto as polyvalent and ambiguous in its treatment of the relationship between lust, literature, reading and authorship, she

1140 Julia Caterina Hartley

courtly literature (the Lancelot) to the classics (she refers to Boethius as Dante’s “dottore” in verse 123). They also include a reference to the poetry of the stilnovists (verse 100), a school of lyric poets with whom Dante was associated, and through her linking of love and death Francesca also alludes to the poetry of Guido Cavalcanti, a poet whom Dante highly admired and sought to emulate at the beginning of his career.23 Francesca presents Dante with his own literary background, so that when he looks at her he sees himself—an unlikely candidate for divinely sanctioned writing. It is no surprise that he faints. Dante’s journey through the afterworld is explicitly a journey towards redemp-tion. But this Christian redemption is of a particular kind: it is literary, as becomes clear at the end of Purgatory when Beatrice confronts Dante with his sins through a string of references to his earlier liter-ary output.24 Indeed, while in Proust the narrator-protagonist’s early memories are represented through the fictional childhood described in “Combray,” Dante, by virtue of having cast himself as the narrator and protagonist of the poem, already has a past. This past is formed by his poetic output prior to the Commedia. Within the economy of the Commedia, the presence of Dante’s literary beginnings as embodied by Francesca therefore functions as an inaugural scene. It shows the origins of Dante’s relationship to literature and the difficulties he will have to overcome in order to become the poet who writes of an “Amor” that leads not to lust/cupiditas or death, but is the source of all forms of love/caritas and life: “l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” (Par. XXXIII, 145).25 The François le Champi episode and the encounter with Francesca are thus “Primal Scenes” for three reasons: their structural position at the beginning of both works, their traumatic effect on both protagonists (their disturbing nature immediately made manifest by fainting in Dante and hysterical sobbing in Proust), and the fact that the protagonists’ relationship with literature forms the basis of their identity. Because so much hinges on what kind of writers, and therefore what kind of men, the protagonists will turn out to be, the “Primal Scenes of Reading” play a crucial structuring function: they are the “before” against which we will be able to contrast the “after” of the works’ resolutions.

concludes: “‘Francesca c’est moi’: Dante could easily repeat the famous claim of iden-tity between the author and the creature of Madame Bovary [...], not so much on the grounds that Francesca is the summary of all of Dante’s mistakes from his poetic and affective youth, but because this enigmatic feminine figure is love poetry itself” (247).

23On Dante and Cavalcanti see Barolini, Baranski, “Per similitudine” 29–36, and Harrison.

24Baranski “The ‘New Life’ of ‘Comedy.’”25“The Love that moves the sun and all the other stars.”

1141M L N

A question both episodes lead readers to ask themselves is: does what we read make us who we are? One school of Dante criticism indeed views Francesca as a prototype for Flaubert’s Mme Bovary, a weak-minded woman whose judgment was clouded by the reading of seductive tales of love and lust.26 But then, being formed by what one has read is not necessarily a sign of weakness in the Commedia. As we saw above, Dante acknowledges reading the Aeneid as having had a tremendous influence on his own writing. This is only the first of several scenes of literary genealogies in the Commedia: Statius will call Virgil’s Aeneid his “mamma” (Purg. XXI, 97), and say that it not only made him a poet, but also led him to convert to Christianity (Purg. XXII, 73). Dante will also call the poet Guinizzelli a poetic father (Purg. XXVI, 97).27 Influence gives rise not to anxiety,28 but on the contrary to celebration. Two types of influence are at hand here: one that affects one’s use of language (both written, as is Dante’s, and spoken, as is Francesca’s), and one that affects one’s actions, either for better, as with Statius’s conversion to Christianity, or for worse, as with Francesca’s succumbing to lust. As has been observed by Elena Lombardi, a concern with such performative qualities of reading can be traced back to Augustine’s Confessions, where reading is seen both as leading to perdition (in the case of pagan literature) and to salva-tion (in the case of the Bible) (The Wings of the Doves 223–233). Both the example of Francesca and the example of Statius are however problematic for, as we shall see further on, they are more to do with misreading than with reading.

In the episode of François le Champi we also find a concern with the influence of reading material on readers. This is done here with a touch of humor, for the view is explored through the perspective of the dogmatically idealistic grandmother. When the mother reaches for the child’s books, the narration is interrupted by a digression that exposes how these works were chosen:

They were La Mare au Diable, François le Champi, La Petite Fadette and Les Maîtres sonneurs. My grandmother, as I learned afterwards, had first chosen the poems of Musset, a volume of Rousseau, and Indiana; for though she judged frivolous reading to be as unhealthy as sweets and pastries, it did not occur to her that a great breath of genius might have a more dan-gerous and less invigorating influence on the mind even of a child than

26Contini and Sanguineti are cited by Lombardi as two prime examples of this critical tradition, see The Wings of the Doves 9.

27On these encounters see Teodolinda Barolini, Dante’s Poets.28See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence.

1142 Julia Caterina Hartley

would the open air and the sea [winds] on his body. But as my father had nearly called her mad when he learned which books she wanted to give me, [...] she had resorted to the four pastoral novels of George Sand. “My dear daughter, she said to Mama, I could not bring myself to give the boy something badly written.” ( Translated by Davis from I, 39–41; The Way by Swann’s 42)

The grandmother’s choice is based on form: her priority is to give the child something well written and, more specifically, which makes use of old-fashioned expressions. She has little concern as to whether the content of the work is age-appropriate, and in this respect the narrator seems to suggest that she is wrong, for he compares her belief in the harmless influence of adult literature on a child’s mind to a belief in the harmless influence of “le vent du large” on a child’s body. We saw that in Dante reading material can influence readers’ language through its form and influence readers’ actions through its subject matter. The description of Sand’s appeal to the grandmother short-circuits distinctions between form and content: if something is well written, its influence can only be positive. Such a view is diametrically opposed to that suggested by Dante. Dante, across his writings, returns to the issue of the relationship between content and form, captured in the Commedia by the noun-adjective pairing “parola ornata” (‘ornate words’).29 In the Inferno, by presenting us with magnetically eloquent wrongdoers such as Francesca, Dante illustrates the ways in which words may be used to mask nefarious ends. The poet, as a wordsmith, must therefore guard himself against the risk of committing the sin of fraud.30

The grandmother’s decision to include a tale of Oedipal love in her choice of four books, however well written they are, is suspicious. But what is even more suspicious is the fact that the mother chooses out of these four books the one concerned with Oedipal love (I, 41). One might be tempted to call her “Galeotto,” reading to her son a tale likely to stimulate his desire to possess her, were it not for one detail: “when it was Maman who read to me, [...] she skipped all the love scenes” (Translated from I, 41). We come to realize that the inclusion of François le Champi in Proust’s novel cannot be justified through plot coherence.

29In the De vulgari eloquentia (II, i, 10), Dante argues that form should match content, since the highest form can be impoverished by lowly content. In the Convivio (I, x, 12–13), poetic form is described as an adornment which can get in the way of viewing the content. The expression “ornate words” is used both in relation to the poet Virgil and to the seducer Jason (Inf. II, 67 and Inf. XVIII, 91).

30On Dante’s negotiation of the relationship between poetry and fraud see Barolini, The Undivine Comedy 48–73, and Lombardi, The Wings of the Doves 238–245.

1143M L N

The inclusion of specified existing works of literature within the frame of a wider work functions as an “enchâssement” or “mise en abyme.” The particularity of this “mise en abyme” is that it concerns itself not with a story within the story, but with a story outside the story. The Lancelot and François le Champi are windows open only to the well-read reader. Indeed, Proust’s narrator never states that the “scènes d’amour” (“love scenes”) in François le Champi are between a son and his adoptive mother. To the non-informed reader, the mother is simply reading a love story to her son. Knowing the subject mat-ter of François le Champi therefore makes us read the ending of the “drame du coucher” differently, by enriching it with added erotic con-notations.31 The book, rather than influencing the fictional readers in the novel, is thus actually influencing Proust’s readers. In the case of the Commedia, prior knowledge of the subject matter of the book within the book alters our reading even more significantly. Indeed, while both the mother and the narrator of the Recherche “skip the love scenes” (Gray, “Skipping love scenes” 147), Francesca does something even more radical: she writes her own love scene.

No scholar has as of yet been able to trace a version of the Lance-lot that matches Francesca’s account of it.32 As we recall, Francesca describes the point that led Paolo to kiss her to be: “When we read how the longed-for smile | was kissed by so renowned a lover. ” The kiss between Guinevere and Lancelot in the Lancelot is performed as a contract, in a convoluted plot-line involving several other charac-ters. Lancelot, moreover, is shy and reticent and therefore far from being a renowned lover. Most importantly, as well as eliding certain details, Francesca rewrites the plot of the Lancelot when she claims that Lancelot kisses Guinevere. In the Lancelot it is in fact the queen who kisses the knight. The French prose Lancelot, which critics have identified as the version referred to by Dante, for instance describes the kiss as follows: “Et la roine voit que li chevaliers n’en ose plus faire, si le prent par le menton et le baise devant Galaholt assés longuement si que la dame de Malohaut seit qu’ele le baise” (“Seeing that the knight dared no more, the queen took him by the chin and gave him a prolonged kiss in front of Galehault, so that the lady of Malehault knew that she was kissing him”) (Lancelot, vol 8, LIIa, 115; Tr. in Lacy. Qtd. by Lombardi, The Wings of the Doves 219). Once we know that it

31See Julia Kristeva, Le Temps sensible 18–21.32See Anna Hatcher and Mark Musa, “The Kiss”; Susan Noakes, “The Double Mis-

reading” 221–23; Lorenzo Renzi, Le conseguenze di un bacio 31–51; and Lombardi, The Wings of the Doves 184–87 and 218–221.

1144 Julia Caterina Hartley

is Guinevere who kisses Lancelot, interpretations according to which Francesca is faithfully imitating her reading material no longer hold.33 Familiarity with the Lancelot therefore leads the reader to realize that Francesca is not a hapless victim of the text’s powerful influence. Elena Lombardi in her chapter on reading in Inferno V has analyzed Francesca’s alteration of the Lancelot both within the context of other acts of reading (or misreading) in the Commedia, such as Statius’s Christian interpretation of Virgil, and also within the wider context of medieval readerly and interpretative practices. This allows for a more dynamic understanding of Paolo and Francesca’s “misreading,” which” does not make them bad or weak readers.” Rather, the lovers are “cunning interpreters,” who “take from the sentence what they need for their “argument” and context, and discard what they don’t need” (The Wings of the Doves 219).34 Francesca’s editing, misquot-ing and adapting of the Lancelot is symptomatic of the Middle Ages’ dynamic and interpretative approach to texts, which were in themselves inconstant by nature, transmitted either through human memory or through manuscripts offering altering versions. The mother’s mode of reading in Proust itself can be seen as Medieval: by skipping the love scenes of François le Champi she is creating a moralized version of Sand’s tale through a process of selection and elision.35

We must consider, finally, an entirely different line of interpretation. That is, that these scenes as well as being about the act of reading, in all its modes and ramifications, can also be interpreted as not being about reading at all. Francesca and Paolo’s kiss, as we have seen, is not the result of an imitation of the text they were reading. If the Lancelot is not a catalyst for desire, we come to understand the book as being a pretext rather than a text. At the time of action, it allows the lovers to be alone together. At the time of narration, it offers Francesca evidence to claim that she had no agency. The true object of desire is not the book, but the kiss. As observed by Martin Eisner, the fourteenth-century depiction of the scene (Trivulziano 1076) which has Paolo offer the book to Francesca “as a kind of temptation that recalls representations of Adam and Eve” misunderstands the canto. Eisner praises instead artists such as Ingres, who by representing the

33See for instance René Girard, “De la ‘Divine Comédie’ à la sociologie du roman” 180.34On the insufficiency of the term “misreading” see Watt, Reading in Proust 102–103.

Watt proposes instead the term “délire” which highlights the instability of acts of read-ing without charging them with negative connotations.

35A medieval analogy is also drawn by the narrator in Le Temps retrouvé, when he states that he will only remain interested in François le Champi for the images of his childhood surrounding the text like “illuminations” (IV, 466).

1145M L N

book “in mid-drop,” capture Dante’s emphasis on the point (“punto”) in which Paolo and Francesca made their choice and stopped read-ing (Eisner 62). Indeed this point is the climax of the canto, which had been leading up to the account of the precise moment at which Paolo and Francesca were irrevocably damned, summarized by the elliptical: “quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante” (“That day we read in it no further”).

In the Recherche too, the true object of desire is not a book but a kiss. The child seeks out his mother in the night to obtain the bedtime kiss that had been denied to him. He obtains more than he could have hoped for in the sense that his mother will spend the night in his bedroom. But on the other hand, he never obtains his goodnight kiss. The mother suggests reading as an activity to calm him and send him to sleep. But in the absence of the longed-for kiss, her reading becomes subjected to his yearnings for a more physical interaction. The child’s reaction to the book, as we saw above, is described in erotic terms, but he is hardly listening to Sand’s novel. For not only does his mother skip the love scenes: his mind also wanders off for entire pages (I, 41). Moreover, when at the end of the novel the aged narrator-protagonist comes across a copy of François le Champi, he states that his only interest in the book stems from the childhood memories he associates to it, so that it can be affirmed, as has been argued by Margaret Gray, that the protagonist of the Recherche in fact never reads François le Champi (“Skipping Love Scenes” 146). Look-ing at the scenes from this angle, we come to see the Lancelot and François le Champi not so much as examples of literature, and more as instruments for ulterior motives. Rather than “initiations” to litera-ture, these episodes therefore might be best described as “obstacles” to an appreciation of literature. If both Francesca and Proust’s child protagonist are attracted to books as a means to achieve intimacy, this false first impression must be overcome in order for literature to gain a redemptive quality.

As we have seen, both these episodes are “Primal Scenes of reading” in so far as they stage the narrator-protagonist’s first confrontation with the nature of his desire for literature. In Dante, this is the tempta-tion of a poetry concerned with earthly love, embodied by Francesca, and in Proust, this is a literature mediated by the desire for absolute parental love. Proust’s child-protagonist confuses the book and the kiss as the objects of his desire. The novel will then spend over three thousand pages meandering in and out of the issue of his desire to write literature, which is inseparable from his fear of disappointing his

1146 Julia Caterina Hartley

mother and grandmother. Writing will only become a possibility well after their deaths, when unadulterated by other desires, the projected work of literature becomes the narrator-protagonist’s sole reason to remain alive. But just as the mother skipped the love scenes and the narrator omitted to inform his readers of François le Champi’s Oedipal plot, so does the novel commit one final elision: it does not show us the moment in which the narrator-protagonist begins to write. This gap is left to be filled by the desiring reader’s imagination. Proust’s inaugural scene is thus doubly prophetic. It announces the protagonist’s future trammeling of writing with parental love, and it also stresses that desire, in order to subsist, cannot be fulfilled. Proust’s gap is comparable to Francesca’s omission of what happens after Paolo kisses her, in so far as it forces the reader to read between the lines. Lombardi has indeed argued that the sudden interruption of Francesca’s narration can be read not only as an allusion to sexual intercourse, but also as a moment in which the poem forces the reader into self-reflexivity. In her words: “The lovers close their book; I, the narrator, faint: what are you, reader, going to do?” (The Wings of the Doves 222).

While the Recherche will reiterate the confusion and open-endedness of its inaugural scene of reading, the Commedia offers a bold resolution to the temptation of the lyric, which had been embodied by Franc-esca: it embraces it. Dante scholarship has drawn increasing attention to the poetically experimental nature of Dante’s third canticle, the Paradiso. Teodolinda Barolini for instance has examined the ways in which as the poem draws to its close, it moves (or rather “jumps”) beyond straightforward narrativity and employs instead a “lyrical” or “anti-narrative” mode, which is “resistant to subdivision and hence to logical exposition, and is characterized by apostrophes, exclama-tions, heavily metaphoric language, and intensely affective similes” (The Undivine Comedy 221).36 More recently, Regina Psaki has argued against orthodox readings of the Paradiso by showing that its language is decidedly erotic (115–30). Such a mode of expression, both “dechro-nologized” and erotic, is particularly apposite to a canticle predomi-nantly concerned with desire.37 In the Paradiso Dante’s lyric past goes from being a sin to being the source of his prowess in describing the beatitude of the blessed, and mortal man’s burning desire to see God, “the first lover” (Par. IV, 118). As observed by Lombardi, the parallel between the infernal lovers’ desire and Dante’s desire is emphasized by the repetition of the phrase “point that overcame us/me,” which

36See also Manuele Gragnolati, Amor che move 157–58.37See Lino Pertile, La punta del disio.

1147M L N

is used both in Inferno V, 132, and in Paradiso XXX, 15 (“punto che mi vinse”). Both in Inferno and in Paradiso we have “two lovers and a text (Paolo-Francesca-Lancelot; Dante-Beatrice-God),” but while Paolo and Francesca “dissolve into each other through the kiss, the lover of Paradiso 30 sees his beloved dissolving into God” (The Wings of the Doves 190-91). While the closing of the book in Inferno V signals the satisfaction of Paolo and Francesca’s desire, in Paradiso the pilgrim can only find satisfaction by gazing into God’s book.

Thus it is that both works end: with their narrator-protagonists contemplating a book that is invisible to their readers. For while the Lancelot and François le Champi were windows open to all those who could get hold of those texts, Proust’s protagonist’s future book and God’s book are not to be read on this earth. We are left holding an incomplete book, which points to a gap that we will have to fill for ourselves through new acts of reading and interpretation.

Christ Church, University of Oxford

WORKS CITED

Alighieri, Dante. La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgate. Ed. Giorgio Petrocchi. Milan: Mondadori, 1966–67.

———. Convivio. Ed. Franca Brambilla Ageno. Florence: Casa Editrice Le Lettere, 1995.

———. De vulgari eloquentia. Ed. and trans. Vittorio Coletti. Milan: Garzanti, 1991.

Ascoli, Albert Russell. Dante and the Making of a Modern Author. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008.

Auerbach, Erich. Dante: Poet of the secular world. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001.

———. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1953.

Bales, Richard. Proust and the Middle Ages. Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1975.

Baranski, Zygmunt. “La lezione esegetica di Inferno I: Allegoria, Storia e Letteratura nella Commedia.” Dante e le forme dell’allegoresi. Ed. Michelangelo Picone. Ravenna: Longo, 1987.

———. “‘Per similitudine di abito scientifico’: Dante, Cavalcanti and the Sources of Medieval ‘Philosophical’ Poetry,” in Science and Literature in Italian Culture: from Dante to Calvino: a frestschrift for Patrick Boyde. Ed. Pierpaolo Antonello and Simon A. Gilson. Oxford: Legenda, 2004.

———. “The ‘New Life’ of ‘Comedy’: The ‘Commedia’ and the ‘Vita Nuova.’” Dante Studies 113 (1995): 1–29.

Barthes, Roland. Le plaisir du texte. Paris: Seuil, 1973.

Barolini, Teodolinda. “Dante and Cavalcanti (On Making Distinctions in Matters of Love): Inferno 5 in Its Lyric and Autobiographical Context.” Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture. New York: Fordham UP, 2006.

———. Dante’s Poets: Textuality and Truth in the ‘Comedy’. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984.

1148 Julia Caterina Hartley

———. The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1975.

Borton, Samuel. “A Tentative Essay on Dante and Proust.” Delaware Notes XXXI (1958): 33–42.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.

Bucknall, Barbara J. The Religion of Art in Proust. Urbana, Chicago and London: Uni-versity of Illinois Press, 1969.

Contini, Gianfranco. “Dante come personaggio-poeta della Commedia.” Un’idea di Dante: Saggi danteschi, 33–42. Torino: Einaudi, 1970.

Curtius, Ernst Robert. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Trans. Willard R. Trask London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979.

Eisner, Martin. “The Word Made Flesh in Inferno 5: Francesca Reading and the Figure of the Annunciation.” Dante Studies CXXXI (2013): 51–72.

Elsner, Anna Magdalena. “Tracing the Presence of an Absence: Mourning and Creation from ‘Les Intermittences du coeur’ to Le Temps retrouvé.’” Le temps retrouvé: eighty years after: critical essays. Ed. Adam Watt. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009. 279–292.

Genette, Gérard. Figures III. Paris: Seuil, 1972.

Gray, Margaret. Postmodern Proust. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992.

———. “Skipping Love Scenes: Marcel’s Repression of Literature.” Postmodern Proust. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1992.

Hatcher, Anna and Mark Musa. “The Kiss: Inferno V and the Old French Prose Lance-lot,” Comparative Literature 20.2 (1968): 97–109

Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works. Ed. James Strachey. Vol. XVII. London: Hogarth Press, 1917–19.

Girard, René. “De la “Divine Comédie” à la sociologie du roman.” Critiques dans un souterrain. Paris: Grasset, 1983. 177–185.

Gragnolati, Manuele. Amor che move: Linguaggio del corpo e forma del desiderio in Dante, Pasolini e Morante. Milano: Il Saggiatore, 2013.

Harrison, Robert Pogue. “Approaching the Vita nuova.” The Cambridge Companion to Dante. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge UP, 2007.

Hartley, Julia Caterina. Literary Vocation in Dante and Proust. University of Oxford D.Phil. thesis.

———. “Fame and Glory in Dante: Problematizing Purgatorio XI.” MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities 8 (2013): 19–29

———. “Leggere Dante attraverso Proust.” AlmaDante Seminario Dantesco 2014. Bologna: Aspasia, Forthcoming..

Kristeva, Julia. Le Temps sensible: Proust et l’expérience littéraire. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.

Lacy, N.J., ed. The Lancelot Grail Reader. Trans. S. Rosenberg. New York: Garland, 2000.

Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975.

Lombardi, Elena. The Wings of the Doves: Love and Desire in Dante and Medieval Culture. Montreal; London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012.

Micha, A., ed. Lancelot. Geneva: Droz, 1982.

Noakes, Susan. “The Double Misreading of Paolo and Francesca.” Philological Quarterly 62.2 (1983): 221–23.

1149M L N

Pennanech, Florian. “18. Le Temps retrouvé et la Nouvelle Critique: le problème de l’achèvement.” ‘Le Temps retrouvé’ Eighty Years After/80 ans après: critical essays. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2009. 239–53.

Pertile, Lino. La punta del disio: semantica del desiderio nella Commedia. Fiesole: Cadmo, 2005.

Proust, Marcel. À la recherche du temps perdu. Ed. Jean-Yves Tadié. Paris: Gallimard, 1987–89.

———. The Way by Swann’s. Trans. Lydia Davis. London: Penguin, 2003.

Psaki, Regina. “Love for Beatrice: Transcending Contradiction in the Paradiso.” Dante for the New Millenium. Ed. Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey. New York: Fordham UP, 2003. 115–30.

Renzi, Lorenzo. Le conseguenze di un bacio. Bologna: Mulino, 2007.

Rushworth, Jennifer. Discourses of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch, and Proust. University of Oxford D.Phil. thesis, submitted 2013.

———. “Proust, Derrida, and the Promise of Writing,” French Studies, 69: 2 (April 2015): 205–219.

Spitzer, Leo. “A Note on the Poetic and the Empirical “I” in Medieval Authors.” Traditio 4 (1946): 414–22.

Tadié, Jean-Yves. Proust et le roman: essai sur les formes et techniques du roman dans A la recherche du temps perdu. Paris: Gallimard, 2003.

Watt, Adam. Reading in Proust’s A la recherche: ‘le délire de la lecture.’ Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.

———. “L’air de la chanson: Dante and Proust.” Dante in France. Ed. Russell Goulbourne, Claire E. Honess and Matthew Treherne. La parola del testo (Società dantesca italiana), MMXIII (2013). 101–110.