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Thematic pathway > Selected readers, early and more recent > Charles S. Singleton
 Charles S. Singleton
 North American scholar Charles S. Singleton (1909-1985) turned his attention to Dante in 1949, after a period devoted to renaissance texts and the Decameron. In his extremely important contribution to Dante studies he put forward a number of critical-theoretical questions which were to become essential for subsequent criticism. Among the many compelling features of his critical works is the invitation to rebuild, through an exercise of what he calls our “historical imagination”, the religious and transcendental perspective from which medieval culture interpreted reality, conceived of as a combination of real data, things, and signs from the Creator. In the Commedia, Dante imitated the two books through which God was revealed to humanity: the world, with its system of signs and symbols, and the Bible. Dante’s Commedia, therefore, as mimesis of the world, is the allegorical revelation of the divine signs imprinted upon it; as a text modelled on the Holy Scriptures, it vehicles allegorically a message of salvation, which concerns Dante the pilgrim, but also the whole of humanity. On the basis of Epistle XIII, Singleton has no doubts in claiming that the Commedia is organized according to the model of biblical exegesis, the so-called allegory of the theologians, in which the spiritual meaning does not cancel out the literal one, but leaves its historical truth intact, juxtaposing itself to it. To achieve his edifice, however, Dante had to organize his subject matter in such a way as to inform his readers of the reference to the divine models, and he had to make it credible: “the fiction of the Commedia is that it is not a fiction”[1]. In this perspective, the structure, namely the organization of the poem according to theological criteria, is no longer, as Benedetto Croce believed, an obstacle to the poetry, but a suitable means of expression that shows the complexity and originality of Dante’s thought.
[1] [1] Ch. S. Singleton, “The Irreducible Dove”, in Comparative Literature, 9 (1957), pp. 124-135.
 
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