Manuele Gragnolati (Oxford)
Mediating the Apocalypse: History and Writing in Dante’s 'Divine Comedy' and Giorgio Pressburger’s 'Nel regno oscuro'
This paper reflects upon the strategies with which Dante’s Divine Comedy and Giorgio Pressburger’s 2008 novel Nel regno oscuro (which is explicitly modelled upon Dante’s Inferno) place personal and collective suffering at the centre of their own narratives and stage writing as an ethical and salvific instrument which can deal with it.
I will begin by focusing on how both the Divine Comedy and Nel regno oscuro subtly mediate between a personal and a universal level. Both works start out with an existential, personal crisis of the character/narrator/author (being lost in the dark wood in the case of Dante’s poem and being trapped in melancholia due to the death of his father and twin brother in the case of Pressburger’s novel) and continue by presenting a journey through the realm of the dead: a visio in somnis in Dante’s poem; a series of psycho-analytical sessions in Pressburger’s novel. Yet in both cases this journey is endowed with a universal significance. In particular, both works depict contemporary history in clearly apocalyptic tones: Italy’s civil wars, the corruption of the Christian Church, and the weakness of the Empire in Dante’s poem, and twentieth-century tragedies, in particular the Shoah, in Pressburger’s novel.
The subsequent part of my paper will analyze the different ways in which both works present the act of writing as allowing for this mediation between the personal and the universal level and thereby providing an element of resistance. By stressing the apocalyptic character of its own times and presenting Dante’s exile as the ultimate emblem of this degeneration, the Divine Comedy incorporates a prophetic tone in the mode of some Biblical texts from the Old Testament to Revelations in order both to denounce contemporary corruption and to utter a Messianic promise of salvation. Moreover, it also succeeds in presenting the writing of the poem itself as the compensation for the exile and sufferings of its character/narrator/author. Unlike Dante’s Divine Comedy, Pressburger’s Nel regno oscuro is written after the apocalypse has already taken place and no renewal has followed. I will argue that Nel regno oscuro, which is a journey guided by Freud through the character/narrator/author’s unconscious, suggests that together with psycho-analysis (or maybe even in its place) writing represents the author’s possibility not only of coming to terms with a personal loss, but also of remembering the tragedies of history. The significance of writing thus consists in giving testimony to the injustice suffered in the twentieth century and (thereby) working against apocalyptic annihilation.
I will begin by focusing on how both the Divine Comedy and Nel regno oscuro subtly mediate between a personal and a universal level. Both works start out with an existential, personal crisis of the character/narrator/author (being lost in the dark wood in the case of Dante’s poem and being trapped in melancholia due to the death of his father and twin brother in the case of Pressburger’s novel) and continue by presenting a journey through the realm of the dead: a visio in somnis in Dante’s poem; a series of psycho-analytical sessions in Pressburger’s novel. Yet in both cases this journey is endowed with a universal significance. In particular, both works depict contemporary history in clearly apocalyptic tones: Italy’s civil wars, the corruption of the Christian Church, and the weakness of the Empire in Dante’s poem, and twentieth-century tragedies, in particular the Shoah, in Pressburger’s novel.
The subsequent part of my paper will analyze the different ways in which both works present the act of writing as allowing for this mediation between the personal and the universal level and thereby providing an element of resistance. By stressing the apocalyptic character of its own times and presenting Dante’s exile as the ultimate emblem of this degeneration, the Divine Comedy incorporates a prophetic tone in the mode of some Biblical texts from the Old Testament to Revelations in order both to denounce contemporary corruption and to utter a Messianic promise of salvation. Moreover, it also succeeds in presenting the writing of the poem itself as the compensation for the exile and sufferings of its character/narrator/author. Unlike Dante’s Divine Comedy, Pressburger’s Nel regno oscuro is written after the apocalypse has already taken place and no renewal has followed. I will argue that Nel regno oscuro, which is a journey guided by Freud through the character/narrator/author’s unconscious, suggests that together with psycho-analysis (or maybe even in its place) writing represents the author’s possibility not only of coming to terms with a personal loss, but also of remembering the tragedies of history. The significance of writing thus consists in giving testimony to the injustice suffered in the twentieth century and (thereby) working against apocalyptic annihilation.
