Dante’s Characters: Part One, Francesca da Rimini

12/14/2023

A monologue on Dante’s famous love heroine, Francesca da Rimini. This episode is part one of a new mini-series on “Dante’s Characters,” set to air over the coming weeks, in which Professor Robert Harrison discusses some of the most fascinating characters in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Song in this episode: “Helen” by Glass Wave.

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00:00:00.000	[ Music ]
00:00:06.000	In title opinions coming to you from the underworld of KZSU on the Stanford campus.
00:00:12.000	[ Music ]
00:00:14.560	Speaking of underworlds, today's show marks the first installment of a miniseries devoted
00:00:20.300	to the great wafer of the nether regions.
00:00:23.300	I mean our medieval comrade Dante, author of the divine comedy.
00:00:29.840	[ Speaking of world ]
00:00:31.840	[ Speaking of world ]
00:00:35.840	[ Speaking of world ]
00:00:39.840	[ Speaking of world ]
00:00:43.840	[ Music ]
00:00:46.840	At a time when English departments are struggling to get students into courses on Shakespeare,
00:00:51.840	the romantics, and the Victorian novel,
00:00:54.840	Dante continues to max out.
00:00:57.840	He may be the only dead white male in the literary canon who stalk keeps going up in our post-Christian age.
00:01:05.840	Go figure.
00:01:07.840	I've been teaching the divine comedy for decades,
00:01:10.840	and many of the poems characters have become like family members to me by now.
00:01:15.840	So I thought I would offer the brigade a handful of scattered episodes
00:01:20.840	about the most fascinating, original, and complex sinners in Dante's Inferno.
00:01:26.840	One thing you can say about hell is that its denizens are more interesting and seductive,
00:01:32.840	and certainly more perverse than the paragons of moral virtue in Dante's other
00:01:38.840	tentacles.
00:01:39.840	So stay tuned, our first episode on Francesca de D'Imini,
00:01:44.840	who else?
00:01:45.840	Coming right up.
00:01:47.840	[ Music ]
00:02:06.840	What makes the characters in Dante's Inferno so compelling are above all their monologues.
00:02:14.840	Almost all of the major monologues contain bruises of one sort or another,
00:02:20.840	bruises by which the sinners offer misleading, manipulative, or meritricious accounts
00:02:26.840	of the motives and actions that landed them in hell.
00:02:31.840	Since they know that Dante the journeyman will eventually return to the world
00:02:36.840	and report what he has seen and heard in the underworld,
00:02:40.840	and since their worldly reputation still matters a great deal to them,
00:02:45.840	these sinners find themselves in the incongruous position of trying to curate
00:02:51.840	their self-serving narratives from within a framework of damnation.
00:02:56.840	In other words, their confessions are permeated by an infernal irony,
00:03:02.840	by which I mean an insidious discrepancy between what the sinners say
00:03:09.840	and what they mean between what they show and what they tell,
00:03:14.840	between what they hide and what they reveal.
00:03:18.840	This type of infernal irony is what distinguishes the Inferno's monologues
00:03:23.840	from the soliloquies in Shakespeare's major plays.
00:03:28.840	In one case, we have the presence of an interlocutor,
00:03:32.840	namely Dante's waferrer.
00:03:35.840	The presence of an interlocutor gives the sinners an incentive to be duplicitous
00:03:40.840	and even at times deceitful.
00:03:43.840	In the other case, Shakespeare's characters speak aloud their inner thoughts
00:03:48.840	to themselves without an interlocutor,
00:03:52.840	and in so doing they coerce the audience into an uneasy complicity with them,
00:03:58.840	by laying bare the secret intentions, doubts, guilt, or motivations
00:04:03.840	that they conceal from other characters in the play.
00:04:07.840	It's the difference between opaque and transparent self-revolations.
00:04:13.840	However, villainous or treacherous, they may otherwise be,
00:04:18.840	we can trust Shakespeare's characters when they invite us into the inner sanctum of their psyches.
00:04:26.840	For example, as King Claudius does in Hamlet, I quote,
00:04:30.840	"Oh, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven.
00:04:34.840	It hath the primal eldest curse upon it, a brother's murder.
00:04:39.840	Pray, can I not, though inclination be as sharp as will?
00:04:44.840	My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent,
00:04:47.840	and like a man to double business-bound,
00:04:50.840	I stand in pause where I shall first begin and both neglect."
00:04:57.840	It goes on like in that vein, and this is what you could call an honest confession.
00:05:04.840	We find the same kind of honest divergence in King Lear,
00:05:08.840	when Edmond uses aloud about his perfidious machinations,
00:05:13.840	"Wherefore should I stand in the plague of custom and permit the curiosity of nations to deprive me,
00:05:19.840	for that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines, lag of a brother,
00:05:25.840	or when McBeth confesses, I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent,
00:05:31.840	but only vaulting ambition which overemates itself and falls on the other."
00:05:37.840	Or when his wife, Lady McBeth prays,
00:05:41.840	"Make thick my blood, stop up the access and passage to remorse.
00:05:46.840	Feel no guilt that no compunctuous visitations of nature,
00:05:51.840	shake my fell purpose nor keep peace between the effect and it."
00:05:58.840	The opaque nature of the confessions in Dante's Inferno by contrast
00:06:03.840	obliges us to bring a hermeneutics of suspicion
00:06:07.840	that would rest the truth from the web of infernal irony that informs their speech acts.
00:06:14.840	One could say that the reader of Inferno must become like a psychoanalyst dealing with an
00:06:19.840	"anali-zand" whose discourse shows more than it tells, or reveals more than it declares.
00:06:28.840	As the American psychologist Roy Schaffer puts it in an essay of his called "Narration in the
00:06:34.840	Psychoanalytic Dialogue," if we are forever telling stories about ourselves
00:06:39.840	and others and to ourselves and others, it must be added that people do more than tell.
00:06:46.840	Like authors, they also show.
00:06:49.840	And there is no hard and fast line between telling and showing,
00:06:54.840	either in literary narrative or psychoanalysis.
00:06:57.840	The competent psychoanalyst deals with telling as a way of showing and with showing as a way of telling.
00:07:06.840	I'll take this as my cue to show how the show and tell dynamic permeates one of the most famous
00:07:12.840	speeches in Dante's poem.
00:07:14.840	I'm in the speech of Francesca Deremini and Inferno 5.
00:07:19.840	We meet her in the circle of lust, where she and her lover are buffeted by the infernal world-wind of passion
00:07:27.840	that sweeps up the lustful in this region of hell and deprives them of any rest or peace.
00:07:34.840	That world-wind includes the likes of Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Diodo, Tristan,
00:07:42.840	the soul, Paris, and other great heroes and heroines of love in the literary tradition.
00:07:50.840	Dante notices a couple of shades who, as his text says, seem so lightly carried by the wind and desires to speak to them.
00:08:01.840	"O battered souls," Dante calls out, "if one does not forbid, please speak to us."
00:08:08.840	So did they emerge from the flock where Diodo is, coming to us through the cruel air so compelling, was my deep felt cry.
00:08:28.840	And here in Francesca's voice, "O gracious and benign living creature who through the black air go visiting us who stained the world,
00:08:36.840	blood red, if the king of the universe were friendly, we would pray to him for your peace since you have pity on our twisted pain."
00:08:48.840	Of whatever it pleases you to hear and to speak, we will listen and speak to you while the wind is quiet for us now.
00:08:57.840	The city where I was born sits besides the shore where the pole descends to have peace with its followers.
00:09:06.840	Now for centuries readers have been swept up by Francesca's charm and blandishments,
00:09:11.840	much the way that she and her lover palore swept up in the whirlwind that buffets the souls and Dante's circle of lust.
00:09:19.840	Now I say "pallow," but in fact the lover alongside Francesca during their encounter with Dante's wafer remains unnamed and speechless.
00:09:30.840	We know from strong circumstantial evidence that he is "pallow" Malatesta.
00:09:37.840	It's not just a character, he was a real individual.
00:09:40.840	And he was the brother of Francesca's husband, Jean-Chot-Dumalatesta.
00:09:46.840	Francesca and Paolo in life fell in love with one another, and in one of the great areas of the divine comedy, Francesca tells Dante how love sees hold of the two of them back on earth.
00:09:59.840	I'll read those three tersets first in Italian.
00:10:03.840	I'll read the story of Francesca, and I'll read the story of Francesca, and I'll read the story of Francesca.
00:10:15.840	I'll read the story of Francesca and I'll read the story of Francesca, and I'll read the story of Francesca.
00:10:26.840	I'll read the story of Francesca and I'll read the story of Francesca.
00:10:35.840	Love which is swiftly kindled in the noble heart sees this one for the lovely person that was taken from me and the manor still injures me.
00:10:47.840	Love which pardons no one loved from loving and return sees me for his beauty so strongly that as you see it still does not abandon me.
00:10:58.840	Love led us to one death.
00:11:01.840	Kaina awaits him who extinguished our life.
00:11:06.840	Now, given the Annafara and Asinuses on which the poetry takes wings here, it seems petty to point out that Francesca displaces the blame for her
00:11:17.820	affair with Paolo onto a personification, namely the God of Love, whom a gentle heart cannot help but obey.
00:11:27.820	That affair got them both murdered by Francesca's husband who was destined to end up in Kaina, which is at the very bottom of hell, where the murderers of family members are punished.
00:11:39.820	When Dante and one of his many Barbara Walters moments inquires how and when the two lovers first succumb to their dubious desires, Francesca responds as follows.
00:11:53.820	And she to me there is no greater pain than to remember the happy time in wretchedness and this your teacher knows.
00:12:01.820	But if you have so much desire to know the first root of our love, I will do as one who weeps and speaks.
00:12:09.820	We were reading one day for pleasure of Lancelot, how love beset him.
00:12:15.820	We were alone and without any suspicion.
00:12:19.820	Many times that reading drove our eyes together and turned our faces pale, but one point alone was the one that overpowered us.
00:12:29.820	When we read that the year and four smile was kissed by so great a lover, he who will never be separated from me kissed my mouth all trembling.
00:12:42.820	Galleo Tto was the book and he who wrote it that day we read there no further.
00:12:51.820	Then Dante concludes in fair enough five saying while one spirit said this, the other was weeping so that for pity I fainted as if I were dying and I fell as a dead body falls.
00:13:08.820	So let's review Francesca says that she and Paolo were reading one day for pleasure.
00:13:14.820	That phrase, pere de lette, already raises flags in a medieval context.
00:13:20.820	We're reading for moral edification was encouraged, but pleasure reading was viewed with suspicion.
00:13:28.820	She and Paolo were reading the romance of Lancelot. They were alone, she says, and without suspicion.
00:13:36.820	That's to say they didn't suspect what was about to happen.
00:13:41.820	This despite the fact that the story made them blush at many turns.
00:13:47.820	We know that Lancelot's adulterous affair with Queen Guinevere brought about the downfall of King Arthur's court.
00:13:55.820	Yet Francesca and Paolo did not read that far into the book that day, a case of Lectio interu, so what kind of punctuality is Francesca referring to when she declares one point alone is the one that overpowered us.
00:14:15.820	How can a point overpower what is a point in fact?
00:14:22.820	All we can say for sure is that the point in question is coincidental, namely that literature and reality coincided when Paolo kissed Francesca at the moment or point when they read that Lancelot kissed Winnevere.
00:14:39.820	Galleo Toh was the book and he who wrote it that day, we read there no further. Who was Galleo Toh?
00:14:46.820	He was Galahot, the character in the romance of Lancelot, who is the go-between who in fact facilitated the affair between Lancelot and Guinevere.
00:14:57.820	Here it's the romance itself that does the go-betweening.
00:15:04.820	There's a long one could say about the mediating role literature plays when it comes to providing models of emulation for romantic courtship and behavior.
00:15:14.820	In our day, that role has been taken over mostly by movies, television shows, music videos and pornography.
00:15:24.820	Yet I'll leave aside that consideration here and simply point out that Francesca was a great consumer of romantic literature.
00:15:33.820	Not only of the Arthurian romances, but of the love poetry of her own age.
00:15:39.820	She does not tell us this, but she shows it.
00:15:43.820	She shows, for example, that she had read Dante's predecessor, Guido Guineet Cedli, a famous Tuscan poet who made the gentle heart, the cornerstone of his theory of love.
00:15:57.820	Francesca has also read the other poets of the still-noveous school of poetry associated with Guineet Cedli, including Dante himself in the earlier part of his career when he was still a lyric poet.
00:16:11.820	Francesca shows furthermore that she had read Dante's poems about Beatrice and his Vitanova, as well as the poetry of Dante's friend Guido Cavalcante, whose lyrics connect love to death
00:16:26.820	and occasionally pun on the word Amor by conjoining the indefinite article Una with the noun Morte, "um Amorte".
00:16:39.820	Just as Francesca does, when she declares love led us to one death, Amor Cecondu Céadun Amorte.
00:16:51.820	Furthermore, she refers to Dante's teacher, "to a d'otore", showing that she's also read Virgil, most likely book for the Aniad, which tells the story of the love between Diodo and Anias.
00:17:08.820	Indeed, there's every reason to believe that Francesca had read the stories of all the famous love heroines, whom Dante places alongside her in that circle of lust.
00:17:18.820	Diodo, Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Gisolde, among others. None of them had a happy end any more than Guinevere did.
00:17:28.820	Francesca's literacy raises a question. What did she really desire when she plunged into her affair with paul?
00:17:38.820	The question is pertinent because according to Dante's theology, it's a person's desire or inner will that moves them to sin.
00:17:49.820	In Fairnofive, reminds us of this theology when it deploys a simile to describe how paulo and Francesca came toward Dante, "like doves called by their desire, with wings raised and steady come to their sweetness through the air, born by their will."
00:18:07.820	Francesca's speech leads us to believe, let's say it tells us that she wanted what all lovers want when they love, namely unending union with the beloved.
00:18:21.820	I refer here to the authority of Aristophanes in Plato's symposium, where he imagines a festus, querying two lovers who are lying together in a bed.
00:18:33.820	Yes, is this your heart's desire then for the two of you to become as near as can be and never to separate night and day?
00:18:44.820	Because if that's your desire, I'd like to weld you together so that the two of you are made into one.
00:18:51.820	Then the two of you would share one life and you would be one and not two in Hades having died a single death.
00:19:02.820	Aristophanes concludes, I quote, "no one who received such an offer would turn it down."
00:19:09.820	There's every indication that Dante's pair, paulo and Francesca, would not or did not think twice before accepting such an offer.
00:19:20.820	If that much is true, one could say that the author of the divine comedy, Grant's Francesca, her ultimate jouisauce, namely, "oneness in Hades through a single death" and "eternal togetherness with," I quote, "he who will never be separated from me."
00:19:41.820	Yet, Francesca's deepest desire and motivating will were fully realized in her solipsistic union with paulo in the afterlife.
00:19:50.820	She would not be likely to respond to Dante's call to engage with him.
00:19:55.820	A couple's bliss, after all, is complete and non-relational.
00:20:00.820	Why then would Francesca respond so wincely to the solicitation?
00:20:06.820	Oh gracious and benign creature who, through the black air, go visiting us, who stained the world, blood, red, if the king of the universe were friendly, we would pray to him for your peace and so forth.
00:20:21.820	And why would she show herself so eager to tell Dante her story? Clearly, union with paulo is not the beall and end all of her desire.
00:20:31.820	There is something in her will that outruns it.
00:20:37.820	It's important to note here that before she comes forth from the world-wind to speak to him, Francesca knows exactly who Dante is, namely one of the best love poets of the Florentine school.
00:20:52.820	In her full-throated idea, she practically quotes his Vitanova back to him.
00:20:58.820	She knows furthermore that Virgil is leading him through hell.
00:21:02.820	So there's every reason to believe that Francesca understands that this encounter with Dante represents her one opportunity to inscribe herself into literary history and join as an equal, the illustrious heroines of the love stories she was schooled in.
00:21:23.820	The least we can say is that she makes the best of that opportunity.
00:21:29.820	In fact, her flawless performance in Inferno 5, Catapults her to the very front of the line of the great love martyrs named in that contour.
00:21:39.820	I doubt that anyone has ever, before or since, aged an audition more decisively than Francesca does when she meets Dante in Inferno 5.
00:21:52.820	It's for a reason that I speak of Francesca as a person with her own autonomous agency rather than merely a literary character created by Dante.
00:22:01.820	Before they are realized in the work of art, characters are born in the author's mind with independent wills of their own.
00:22:11.820	Pidandello says as much in his preface to six characters in search of an author.
00:22:17.820	We have no idea what went on in Dante's mind at the time.
00:22:22.820	Yet Francesca comes to life in Inferno 5 as a character with an over-weaning will to self-authorship that is to say with a will to establish herself as a modern literary heroine on a par with those of antiquity and the Arthurian romances.
00:22:42.820	This is no easy feat for someone who is neither a queen nor a princess but a minor aristocrat from provincial Riemini.
00:22:53.820	What Francesca has going for her is not her pedigree but her lyrical intensity.
00:22:59.820	The gentle heart, after all, marks the nobility of poetic sensibility, not a nobility of blood.
00:23:07.820	In that respect, she's as noble as they come. Nothing can compete with the condensed poetic e'lawn of her self-noration.
00:23:18.820	We need only compare Daito's long and overdone lements and loves little equation book four of the Ani'id to Francesca's compact, diamantine speech in Inferno 5.
00:23:32.820	It's the difference between Edward Everett's two-hour long or ration at Gettysburg and Abraham Lincoln's two-minute tour de force on the same occasion.
00:23:45.820	The only way to fully appreciate what gets accomplished in Inferno 5 is by taking a step back into Inferno 4.
00:23:55.820	In Inferno 4, we enter Limbo, the first circle of hell where unbaptized infants and virtuous pagans live out their after-lives in desire without hope as Dante puts it.
00:24:11.820	Something highly unusual takes place in that canto.
00:24:15.820	As they approach the noble castle of the illustrious pagans, Virgil points out to Dante a group of poets who welcome Virgil back into their coterie.
00:24:27.820	Those poets are Homer, Avid, Horus, and Lucan.
00:24:33.820	Virgil steps away from Dante to rejoin this beautiful school, Labilà Scola.
00:24:40.820	After exchanging some words with Virgil, the poets turn toward Dante and smile.
00:24:48.820	Then they do him, I quote, "an even greater honor for they made me one of their band so that I was sixth among such wisdom."
00:24:59.820	Now think of this, the image of Dante as the sixth member of such a tribe doesn't strike us as preposterous today, since he went on to make himself worthy of that association.
00:25:13.820	Yet when he composed that early canto, he had not yet authored the divine comedy, he was far from being the great epic poet that he would go on to become.
00:25:25.820	He was just a Florentine rhinester known in select circles for some fine love lyrics, some of which were almost as good as those of his friend Guido Cavalcante.
00:25:39.820	Just as Francesca needs Dante to provide her with a platform to realize her ambitions as a literary character, so too, Dante needs Francesca to make good on his boast in Inferno 4.
00:25:54.820	With all this pressure bearing down on her, she comes through for him brilliantly.
00:26:00.820	In one and the same speech in Inferno 5, Francesca claims her place among the likes of Dido, Cleopatra and Helen of Troy, while Dante, thanks to that speech, justifies his inclusion among the likes of Homer, Virgil and Abbot.
00:26:20.820	I have to assume that the figure of her character Francesca had already been born in Dante's mind before his audacious gambit in Inferno 4.
00:26:31.820	And since we are in the realm of speculation here, I have to believe that it was Francesca's independent will to self-realization, her confidence in her own agency, and her faith in her own self-authorship, that sent Dante on his way to authoring the poem.
00:26:49.820	That would place him among the greats.
00:26:53.820	More in 30 seconds.
00:26:56.820	[Music]
00:27:24.820	I have claimed that the monologues in Inferno call for a hermeneutics of suspicion that takes into account the infernal irony that both frames and pervades their speech acts.
00:27:36.820	What makes Francesca's monologues so fascinating and also so unusual is that despite its infernal irony, it remains fiercely resistant to demystification.
00:27:50.820	Over decades of teaching the divine comedy, I've worn my students against falling under the spell of Francesca's magnetic charm.
00:27:59.820	I've pointed out how she displaces the blame for her actions.
00:28:05.820	I have harped on how her imitation of her literary models belies the spontaneity of her passions for Paolo.
00:28:13.820	I've shown in textual detail how she is Madame Beauvare
00:28:16.420	a v'on la lette. Yet all attempts to deconstruct Francesca's thoroughly mediated persona almost invariably prove feckless.
00:28:28.820	Why?
00:28:30.820	Why is it nearly impossible to break the spell she casts even on 21st century students?
00:28:37.820	I believe it's because those students are responding to an ethos or character trait that they perceive in Francesca.
00:28:46.820	An ethos or character trait they admire and morally approve of, namely her resolute affirmation of the law of self-determination.
00:28:57.820	At first glance it seems altogether paradoxical that this mimetic and mediated character should appear to them as a champion of personal autonomy and authenticity.
00:29:09.820	And yet I've come to the conclusion that the students are in fact right.
00:29:14.820	They are responding to something that can't be taken away from Francesca by the commentaries, namely her existential authenticity.
00:29:23.820	She is who she is. Her romantic mysticism, her seductive charms and herself excalpatience are all part of her unapologetic will to own her sentiments, to will her fate, to embrace her damnation, and to accept without regret or compunction the consequences of her actions.
00:29:49.820	Whatever a hermeneutics of suspicion might reveal about Francesca, it does not change the fact that she chooses herself.
00:29:59.820	We see that choice at work in her free adoption of her literary models.
00:30:05.820	We don't hold it against aspiring writers that they admire and emulate literary predecessors.
00:30:11.820	Whether Francesca's spires to romantic idealism or to literary heroism is not all that important, what is important is how, in her assertion of sovereignty over her own desires and aspirations, she reveals a quintessential modern subjectivity.
00:30:33.820	For a medieval woman to assert her subjectivity against the laws, norms, and institutions of a society that smothered female autonomy amounts to an act of insurrection.
00:30:49.820	Francesca pays the ultimate price for that insurrection, yet like Camus Cissifus at the top of the mountain before the boulder rolls back down.
00:31:00.820	She appears to us in the Inferno Five as the master of her fate.
00:31:07.820	It's this assertion of agency that defines her as a proto-existentialist of sorts.
00:31:13.820	The irony here is that she, in fact, stands up to the rigors of a sartrean ethic of self-responsibility.
00:31:21.820	Jean-Paul Satt wrote, I quote, "The existentialist will never regard a grand passion as a destructive torrent upon which a man is swept into certain actions as by fate, and which therefore is an excuse for them."
00:31:40.820	With all her talk about the book, the irresistible power of the God of love and the point that overpowered us, Francesca would seem to stand under indictment by that statement.
00:31:54.820	And yet, if her true ambition is to make it into the divine comedy, where her story will live as long as humanity endures, then there is no doubt that Francesca aligns herself with Satt.
00:32:09.820	And he asserts that the existentialist, quote, "things that man is responsible for his passion."
00:32:18.820	She assumes that responsibility and through that unconditional commitment realizes her ambition to become the superstar of a poem that had yet to come into existence.
00:32:31.820	An aphorism of Nietzsche's reads, "My formula for happiness, a yes, a no, a straight line, a goal."
00:32:41.820	We find that formula at work in Francesca's speech, and for all her tears, we have to conclude that in the end, she is happy.
00:32:51.820	I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Thanks for listening.
00:32:56.820	[Music]
00:33:20.820	I hear words the face that ended the world of his new dreams of that pretty girl, life was such a bore.
00:33:36.820	So I started war in the last day, when I started again.
00:33:58.820	Now time has come, every power wants it to our will and the sun, and the heart stays.
00:34:16.820	All the broken, alive, rich through.
00:34:26.820	It's a home truth, everything is through.
00:34:38.820	All because of you.
00:34:54.820	I need it something new, but now it's true, but it could be you.
00:35:12.820	What left was stories, millions of stories, I need something new.
00:35:28.820	I thought it was you.
00:35:30.820	I couldn't stand the way the days back into one.
00:35:36.820	I started war in the last day, when I started war in the last day.
00:36:02.820	I love you.
00:36:12.820	[Music]