Dante’s Masterplot and the Alternative Narrative Models in the Commedia

Abstract

In his relationship to his readership, Dante can easily be regarded as the most autocratic of writers. Throughout his oeuvre, whether in the use of self-exegesis in the Vita nova and Convivio or in the highly determined linear narrative of the Commedia, punctuated by direct injunctions to its reader, he demonstrates an intense preoccupation with controlling how his work is to be read and interpreted. Scholars have, nevertheless, begun to identify a different Dante, one whose work shows signs of vulnerability and is open to a wider range of interpretative possibilities. A key example of this critical tendency came in the recent Oxford Handbook of Dante, edited by Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden. As the editors of the volume write in their introduction: ‘the Handbook is interested in letting another figure emerge alongside that more solid and consistent (one might say overly consistent) Dante: a Dante who is (made) open to interpretation, unbound from the shackles of completion and wholeness haunting [his work]. As such, the Handbook does not want to systematize Dante, nor repeat the gesture of the Vita nova of imposing a unitary narrative and fixing the porosity of the rime. Instead, the Handbook invites openness and the plurality of interpretation, similar to the process of recovering the dialogic character of the rime outside of the prose frame’ (p. xxxii). Nicolò Crisafi’s first monograph, based on his doctoral project, emerges from the intellectual environment at the University of Oxford that fostered the Handbook and it shares that collection’s interest in proposing a more open and plural Dante. Its focus is on the ineluctable ‘masterplot’ of the Commedia: ‘the trajectory of progress through which the poet, at various stages of his path, understands in retrospect the most significant events of his autobiography, his writing career, and his protagonist’s progress in the Commedia’ (p. 1). The masterplot represents poem’s dominant, ‘teleological’ narrative mode, whereby ‘the poet is able to subjugate earlier works or earlier parts of the poem to the revisionist gaze of an endpoint’ (p. 1). Rather than taking this masterplot at face value, however, Crisafi attempts to deconstruct its workings, draw attention to some of the critical and hermeneutical problems associated with its dominance, and shed light upon some of the alternative, ‘non-linear’ forms of narrative that are also at work within the poem. The substantial introductory chapter first shows how Dante’s masterplot has impacted upon and shaped the language of modern critical literature. Crisafi examines a selection of keywords in the critical discourse surrounding the Commedia (examples include ‘conversion’, ‘palinode’, ‘synthesis’,