The Commedia: allegory

In Epistle XIII, having identified the meanings of the Commedia according to a twofold literal and allegorical meaning, Dante sets out the poem’s basic allegory, explaining that the Commedia’s literal subject is the condition of souls after death, while its allegorical subject is the free will of human beings who by sinning or acting virtuously are punished or rewarded by God. Beyond this fundamental element and a few episodes whose allegorical aspects Dante encourages the reader to note, the aesthetic, moral and intellectual values of the poem are internal to its literal meaning, making it seem beside the point to search obsessively for additional meanings in every detail. As regards its allegorical status, whether to choose the poets’ allegory (where the literal meaning is a “happy lie” under which the truth lies hidden) or that of the theologians (where the letter itself is real and historical) is an unresolved matter, deliberately left ambiguous, with conflicting signals that sometimes suggest interpreting the poem as a poetic fictio, albeit representative of an authentic truth, and at other times suggest a mystical visio. It is no coincidence that ever since the early commentators, Dante critics have been divided as regards the poem’s ambiguity, usually seen as literary or rather prophetically inspired.

No-one doubts the use of conventions and codes specific to poetic writing. Nonetheless, it is equally obvious that the realistic depiction of characters (with a figural value of the kind discussed by Auerbach) and powerful tone of actual experience, present throughout the journey through the afterlife from the very start, create the conditions in which the Commedia’s strong divergence from the abstract personifications of medieval didactic-allegorical literature takes place. The reader is somehow forced to note that, as Singleton puts it, “the fiction of the Divine Comedy is that it is not a fiction”[1].

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[1] Ch. S. Singleton, La sostanza delle cose vedute, in Id., La poesia della ‘Divina Commedia’, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1978, p. 88.