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Notes
I wish to thank Prof. Moshe Zuckermann, Prof. Ruth HaCohen and Dr. Michael Lewis for their comments and for reading earlier versions of this paper. I also wish to thank Prof. Zachary Sng for his useful comments on a later version of this paper. A special thank you goes to Prof. Sigrid Weigel from the Zentrum für Literatur und Kulturforschung (ZfL), Berlin.
1 ‘To the short day and the great circle of shadow’, Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, II, X, p.74.
2 A term coined by the French Psychoanalyst André Green. This term describes a transference complex that may arise during analysis which reveals a singular depression. This depression may not be the primary reason for analysis and its symptoms are usually manifested only during the analysis and not outside the analytical space. Green characterized this situation as transference depression. It bears the characteristics of an infantile depression which does not concern a loss of a real object (the mother is not really dead), but rather ‘the essential characteristic of this depression is that it takes place in the presence of the object, which is itself absorbed in bereavement’ (p.177). For the child, the mother's depression changes her maternal imago, which makes the child feel abandoned and in a state of disastrous ‘cold care’. The child feels that nothing is left of his relationship with his mother but ruins. This alters his language representation (because of the influence of the maternal signifier), and although he will most likely recover this feeling it will leave an indelible affect on the subject's future erotic cathexes (p.178). His future cathexes will be determined by two contrasting affects: alienation from the dead mother on the one hand, and a strong identification with her on the other hand (p.179). This early loss of the mother is characterized by an early loss of meaning which leads to several fronts of psychoanalytical defence mechanisms. The most important for us would be the releasing of secondary hatred which brings into play a regressive wish of incorporation, an auto-erotic excitation and most importantly, an early development of the phantasmatic and the intellectual capacities of the ego: a compulsion to think, and a compulsion to imagine (p.180). I wish to interpret these two affects in the case of poetry, and especially in the case of Dante, as deriving from his exile which brought about similar characteristics of Green's ‘dead mother complex’, which underlie Dante's narcissistic crisis and his own state of bereavement because of his loss – a loss that has been done in the presence of the object. I will refer to this in detail later in this paper. André Green, ‘The Dead Mother’[1980] in Life Narcissism Death Narcissism, trans. A. Weller, (London: Free Association Books, 2001), pp.176–183.
3 laeta fere laetus cecini, cano tristia tristis [Gay was oft my song when I was gay, sad it now when I am sad]. Ovid, Ex Ponto, III, ix. 35, trans. A. L. Wheeler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996). Ovid's two books of exile were written in Latin during his exile from Rome and describe in an elegiac tone the pangs of his foreignness. Like Dante, Ovid never returned to Rome. Tristia [sadness] greatly influenced Dante when he was composing his own book of poetic exile, Inferno, the first canticle of the Commedia.
4 The distinction between introjection and incorporation is central in contemporary psychoanalytic discourse about mourning and melancholy. According to psychoanalysts Maria Torok and Nicholas Abraham ‘Incorporation denotes a fantasy, introjection a process’ (p.125). This fantasy is essentially narcissistic, even when it is related to mourning, and it aims at maintaining a status quo of ego preservation. Incorporation is therefore a refusal to integrate or introject loss, whereas introjection denotes ‘casting aside’ and is developed out of a feeling of lack, of emptiness and is connected to the oral phase (p.127). Psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi defined introjection as ‘the process of broadening the ego’ (p.127). According to Torok, introjection is central to the development of language as this basic feeling of emptiness (loss of the breast) stimulates the production of substitutions in the form of language. We may identify this process with the depressive position that was conceptualized by Melanie Klein. Incorporation, on the other hand, denies the loss of the object and the metaphoric power of the introjection, fails to recognize this basic depressive affect due to a narcissistic crisis and brings about the formation of a phantasmatic crypt that contains the lost object and the origin of the trauma, that is eaten by the subject (thus situating this act at the oral stage, corroborating with Freud's notion of melancholia as related to the oral stage). This denial of mourning fails to produce language as it also fails to enact a normative mourning, which we may identify as an asymbolia. I wish to emphasize that in our case it is important to see that the basic affect of emptiness is significant and therefore implies a borderline between full introjection and incorporation. See also, Maria Torok, Nicholas Abraham, ‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation’, The Shell and the Kernel, trans. N. T. Rand, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp.125–138.
5 See also a similar approach in Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality in the Field of Vision (London: Verso, 2005), pp.144–145.
6 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, ed. and trans. S. Botterill, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.xiii–xiv.
7 This goes beyond the scope of this paper, but I am rather hesitant to declare Dante's elation in Paradiso a successful one as I believe that in the third canticle of the Commedia one witnesses the disappearance of achievements attained by the poetic transgression in favour of an orthodox notion of salvation.
8 G. P. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003), p.55.
9 See also a similar assertion in Cestaro, p.52. Moreover, eminent philologist Leo Spitzer was one of the first to recognize the lactating mother and the mother tongue as a medieval idiom. This lactating imagery was well known to Dante when he tried to distinguish between the maternal language and the Latin. In that respect we may also see his entry at the Convivio which implies the transition from the maternal to the paternal (la tetta de la madre […] la correzione del padre), Convivio 2.24 as a variation on the very same idiom. Cestaro notes that this is a free paraphrase of Paul's Letter to the Colossians and Proverbs which insisted that adolescent reason must follow the law of the father away from the mother. See Cestaro, p.73, and Leo Spitzer, ‘Muttersprache und Muttererziehung’, Essays in Historical Semantics (New York: Russell & Russell, 1948), pp.15–65.
10 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, I,I, p.3.
11 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, I,I, p.3.
12 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, I, IX, p.23, and also Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, p.53.
13 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, I,I, p.5.
14 See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. L. S. Roudiez, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p.59; Jacques Lacan,‘The Instance of the letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud’ in Écrits, trans. B. Fink, (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002), pp.412–439, 493–528.
15 Sigmund Freud, ‘Repression’ [1915], in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), vol.14, p.155. [translation modified].
16 Sigmund Freud, ‘The Unconscious’ [1915], in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), vol.14, p.186.
17 Sigmund Freud, ‘Repression’, p.187.
18 Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, pp.25–27.
19 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ [1920] in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), vol. 18, pp.34–35.
20 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p.62.
21 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p.63.
22 Sigmund Freud, ‘Repression’, p.188.
23 I refer mostly to Zygmunt Barański and Gary P. Cestaro. See G. P. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, pp.12–13.
24 G. P. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, p.18.
25 For a thorough outline of Augustine and Quintilian see G. P. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, pp.17–19.
26 G. P. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, p.19.
27 As I will show throughout this paper, these parental signifiers were accentuated in Dante's treatise because of his exilic position that led him to reduce the figure of mother to the realm of the maternal and ideal vernacular tongue and the father to his lost patria. However, this distinction – mother tongue, fatherland – would be hard to maintain even for Dante. One may see the figural and pre-mature winning of the breast (and maybe every winning is pre-mature) most vividly in Dante's recurring metaphor of the lactating Arno River, and his lost Florence. A lost patria that he ceaselessly attempts to reestablish in the imaginary poetical act of idiolect fore-closure, manifested in symbolical means – the very same act that led him to declare: ‘to me, however, the whole world is a homeland’. See Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, I, VI,p.13
28 Maria Torok and Nicholas Abraham, ‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation’, pp.127–128.
29 Maria Torok and Nicholas Abraham, ‘Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation’, p. 128.
30 I am relying on a similar distinction made by Julia Kristeva in Tales of Love, trans. L. S. Roudiez, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), p.11.
31 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, I, II, p.7.
32 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, I, III, p.7 [my emphasis].
33 Dante retains a dialectic attitude towards gramatica throughout his oeuvre. For instance, in the Convivio he describes grammar as the gesture which enveloped the human linguistic experience in its entirety. As such, it is no longer a monolithic structure aiming at stabilizing the vernacular ‘affective’- maternal language, but is rather found at the heart of lingual mutability. It is no longer exclusive but inclusive and hence beyond reason, since it unifies language and experience while securing unlimited access to the symbolic realm. See Convivio 2.13 as well as Cestaro's excellent analysis at G. P. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, pp.56–58. In a later exegesis of de Vulgari Dante attributed to the vernacular the same instability he attributed to gramatica in the Convivio, stating that although its change is moderate, it is dependent on time and space and can therefore ‘in no way remain stable’ [‘Si ergo per eandem gentem sermo variatur, ut dictum est, successive per tempora, nec stare ullo modo potest […]’], Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, I, IX, p.20.
34 G. P. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, p.60. In the Commedia one might see the melting of these three cataclysms into the fall from grace, as it is the motif of the fall which perpetuates movement in the Inferno.
35 G. P. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, p.59. And also: J. Traband, ‘Overcoming the Horror of Variation’ in Dante's Plurilingualism ed. S. Fortuna, M. Gragnolati and J. Traband (Oxford: Legenda, 2010), pp.24–33 (especially pp. 30–31).
36 G. P. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, pp.59–60. And also, Leo Spitzer ‘The “Ideal Typology” in Dante's De Vulgari Eloquentia’, Italica, 32.2 (1955), pp.79–80.
37 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, I, V, p.11.
38 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, I, IV, pp.8–9.
39 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, I, V, p.12. Dante conveys here a strong Augustinian tendency. For Augustine, every terrestrial ‘thing’ (as well as language) is already a substitute, a kind of a displaced object in relation to divinity. See G. P. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, p.18.
40 I refer to the recondite exegesis from Genesis 2.15. Dante refers to this passage in De Vulgari Eloquentia, I, V, p.11. See also Z. Barański, ‘Dante's Bibilical Linguistics’ in Lectura Dantis 5 (1989), pp.105–143.
41 André Green, ‘The Dead Mother’, p.171.
42 Sigmund Freud, ‘Negation’ [1925], in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols, ed. James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001), vol. 19, p.237.
43 A different version is given in Paradiso XXVI, in which Dante undermines the importance of Babel. The protagonist meets Adam, ‘the first soul’ [l'anima prima], who negates the tower of Babel and the figure of Nimrod as the cataclysm which brought about the dissemination of languages. According to the version in Paradiso, Adam's language has been long extinct before Babel: ‘La lingua ch'io parlai fu tutta spenta innanzi che a l'ovra inconsummabile fosse la gente di Nembròt attenta’ (Paradiso, XXVI, pp.124–126). However, this version neither diminishes the importance of the exile as a transgressive moment, nor the (structural) importance of the ‘dead mother’. The moment of exile is also present in the version of the Paradiso and is related to Adam (lines 114–115). See also G. P. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, pp.57–58.
44 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, I, VI, pp.12–13.
45 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other or The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), p.14. Derrida's discussion in this essay overtly revolves around the concept of hospitality [ipseity] and the language of the masters. It therefore eventually lends its metaphors to a political discourse which renounces the idiolect insofar as it re-appropriates it. This depends on the cultural (in the broadest sense) conditions in which such an idiolect is developed. Derrida's notions of amnesia and the forgetting of language (p.60) are thus crucial; his exterior reference here is thus prose and philosophy (deconstruction) rather than ‘just’ poetry. Literature for Derrida is already a place of discontinuity (p.45), and the price of being involved in the literary praxes is therefore the loss of everything that, according to Derrida, evades symbolization and primarily necessitates the waving of the voice of literature (pp.45–48). This might better explain the anxiety deployed throughout the text which leads him to denounce accents, idioms, intonations and other ‘maternal’ aspects of language (under the guise of a search for ‘inpure purity’). However, Dante's lyrical aspects as well as his poetical inclinations avers the opposite pole of things and exemplify an attempt to symbolize in language whatever structures that seem to evade the language of the name of the father – exactly the musical-maternal-primary illustrious vernacular. This goes beyond the scope of this text, but Julia Kristeva distinguishes between these two categories (following Derrida) when she speaks of genotext and phenotext. See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, pp.86–87.
46 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, p.14.
47 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, p.22.
48 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, p.24.
49 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, p.25.
50 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, p.29. Derrida's variation on the poetic solution offered by Dante is of course ‘deconstruction’.
51 This is perhaps the compulsion to imagine and the compulsion to think which Green demarcates in ‘the dead mother complex’, as two characteristics of a pre-mature development of the ego which developed as a response to the releasing of secondary hatred to the mother who is there but is no longer accessible. See André Green ‘The Dead Mother’, p.180 and cf. 1.
52 ‘Whose scent is left everywhere but which is nowhere to be seen’, Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, I, XVI, pp.38.
53 G. P. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, pp.54–55.
54 Leo Spitzer, ‘The “Ideal Typology” in Dante's De Vulgari Eloquentia’, Italica, 32.2 (1955), p.75.
55 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, I, VIII, p.17.
56 This confusion (or even conflation) between the parental entities is echoed rather overtly in the Convivio: ‘This vernacular of mine was what brought my parents together’ (Convivio 1.13.4) and later in the same text: ‘Moreover, this vernacular of mine was what led me into the path of knowledge which is our ultimate perfection, since through its agency Latin was taught to me’ (Convivio 1.13.5). Dante, Il Convivio: The Banquet, trans. R. H. Lansning, Garland Library of Medieval Literature vol. 65 (New-York: Garland, 1990) and also Cestaro, pp.64–65.
57 André Green, ‘The Dead Mother’, p.178.
58 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, I. XVI, p.39 [my emphasis].
59 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, I, XVI, pp.39–41. And G. P. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, pp.67–68.
60 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, I, XVIII, p.43.
61 One of the most breathtaking descriptions of such an attempt is given by Michel de Certeau in Heterologies, trans. B. Massumi (Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 1986), p.94.
62 This reality is poetically manifested and aims at superseding his exilic state.
63 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p.15.
64 André Green, ‘The Dead Mother’, p.198.
65 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, pp.15–16.
66 Melanie Klein, ‘The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego’ [1930] in Love, Guilt and Reparation, (London: Vintage, 1998), pp.223–227.
67 In this context it is rather enraging to note Freud's blunt remark upon the child's exhibiting no signs of grief when his mother was really gone. Freud's analysis fails to be corroborated by modern psychoanalytical theories about processing grief and an adoption of the depressive position which develops after the child learns to control his primary destructive and sadistic impulses which were first exhibited towards the mother. This stage, known in Kleinian theory as the paranoid-schizoid position, precedes the depressive position, and may also corroborate the theory of the transformation of the split-self into the unified ego, under the reinforcement of an early super-ego in Lacanian theory (the mirror-stage).This transformation presents the development of the primary affect of guilt and a sense of taking care of the mother, which would later bring about the development of the Oedipus complex (as a structural model, more than as an evolutionary model). We now know that the occasion of the actual death of the grandson's mother was of intense – though minimized – mourning. See André Green, ‘The Dead Mother’, pp.192–193 and p.198. And Melanie Klein, ‘The Importance of Symbol Formation’, p.227.
68 In that respect, I wish to differentiate myself from Cestaro and Freud's definitions of the primal scene (Urszene). Whereas Freud searched for proofs of the existence of a primal scene in reality that has actually been witnessed by the subject (most notably in the ‘Wolf Man’), I wish to employ Green's definition of the primal scene, where its occurrence in the absence of the subject is stressed. The phantasy of the primal scene is of importance in the case of poetry, which attempts to bring together two objects (mother and father) at the price of expulsion of the subject (Dante, the poet). The phantasmatic traces of the primal scene have been repressed by the poet's psyche, whereas his new narcissistic trauma (his exile) released their original de-cathexis. André Green, ‘The Dead Mother’, pp.186–187. Cestaro's definition of the primal scene in closer to mine as he believes it signifies ‘an ontologically undecideable inter-textual event that is situated in the differential space between historical memory and imaginative reconstruction, between archival verification and interpretive free play’. Whereas Cestaro connects this to the primal scene of suckling, he still retains a relationship towards reality that remains in the order of the real (and thus within the Freudian framework). I wish to stress the imaginary aspect – as well as the immanent lack – of the primal scene as what propagates poetry. See G. P. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, p.52.
69 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p.15.
70 André Green, ‘The Dead Mother’, pp.188–189 [citation modified, parenthesis mine].
71 See for instance DVE, II, I, p.46, as well as n.99, p.96.
72 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p.8 [my emphasis].
73 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p.8.
74 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, pp.10–11.
75 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, II, VI, p.63.
76 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, II, II, p.53.
77 ‘A canzone, according to the true meaning of the word cantio, is an act of singing, in an active or passive sense’, Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, II, II, p.71 [my emphasis]. And on the stanza: ‘And about this you must know that this word was coined solely for the purpose of discussing poetic technique, so that the object in which the whole art of the canzone was enshrined should be called a stanza, that is a capacious storehouse or receptacle for the art in its entirety.’ Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, II, IX, p.73. This definition bears a strong resemblance to the semiotic receptacle (the semiotic chora) which contains the primary psychic drives before they become distinguished by symbolic utterances. See Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, pp.25–27.
78 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, II, X, p.75.
79 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, II, X, p.75.
80 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, II, VII, p.69.
81 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, II, VII, p.69.
82 André Green, ‘The Dead Mother’, p.172.
83 André Green, ‘The Dead Mother’, p.172.
84 In Green's words ‘the metonymical object has become a metaphor for the object’. See André Green, ‘The Dead Mother’, p.176.
85 André Green, ‘The Dead Mother’, pp.173–175.
86 André Green, ‘The Dead Mother’, pp.173–175.
87 André Green, ‘The Dead Mother’, pp.173–175.
88 André Green, ‘The Dead Mother’, pp.173–175.
89 André Green, ‘The Dead Mother’, p.175.
90 This is a sort of separation anxiety. In the case of ‘the dead mother complex’ the presence of the father as a third party is crucial. In many such cases the child relates his narcissistic traumatization, that became apparent because of the loss of the mother (loss of love), to the father's presence. This is the child's attempt to reconstruct meaning (which may also bring about the development of an inverted Oedipus complex). In Dante's de Vulgari we see these identifications vividly accentuated in the figures of the mother tongue and the patria. André Green, ‘The Dead Mother’, p.177.
91 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun, trans. L. S. Roudiez, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), p.42.
92 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun, p.43.
93 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun, p.45.
94 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p.19.
95 Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, p.19.
96 The notion of the peregrinating spirit (‘pilgrim spirit’) is explored throughout Dante's oeuvre, most notably, and unsurprisingly in relation to the patria, femininity and an attempt to sublimate the two under the affect of love directed towards divination in La Vita Nouva, XLI: ‘Ne la terza dico quello che vide, cioè una donna onorata là suso; e chiamolo allora “spirito peregrino”, acciò che spiritualmente va là suso, e sì come peregrino lo quale è fuori de la sua patria, vi stae’.
97 ‘Rhythms, alliterations, condensations shape the transmission of message and data. That being the case, would poetry and more generally, the style that bears its secret imprint bear witness to a (for the time being) conquered depression?’Julia Kristeva, Black Sun, p.63.