The Uncanonical Dante: the Divine Comedy and Islamic Philosophy
Chapter One The case of Dante provides an excellent opportunity to open up the question of the Western canon. In one sense, Dante is the perfect example of acanonical author. His name is one of the few certain to appear on anybody's short list of the truly central authors in the Western literary tradition. But in another sense Dante can be regarded as uncanonical. In his own day he was widely suspected of being heretical in his religious views,1 and a careful reading of his works does indeed raise serious doubts about his being the pillar of orthodoxy he is often taken to be today.2 Out of this interplay between thecanonical and the noncanonical Dante, I hope to show that the issue of the Western canon is more complicated than either its defenders or its attackers generally present it.
In discussing the issue of the canon, it is important to sort out at the**[End Page 138]** beginning what we do and do not mean by the term. Acanonical work may merely be a work that has been accepted into the literary canon, one that has become a touchstone in the reading and teaching of literature. But the termcanonical can suggest something else, that the work is orthodox and somehow represents a central authoritative position in Western culture. The wordcanonical is so loaded with religious connotations that it is difficult to separate the relatively neutral first meaning of the term from the loaded second meaning. Dante is a case in point. When people refer to him as acanonical author, they usually do not simply mean that he is widely read and taught. Most discussions of Dante today treat him as representing an authoritative cultural moment in the Western tradition, as the supreme embodiment of the medieval mind. Viewed that way, Dante becomes an emblem of everything contemporary critics of the Western canon bitterly hate and reject. The reason they feel that they must attack authors like Dante and displace them from the center of literary study is that these authors have come to stand for orthodoxy and thus seem to enforce the hegemony of Western culture.
Critics who wish to champion various forms of non-Western culture have a particular axe to grind withcanonical authors like Dante. The contemporary debate over the Western canon seems to be premised on a sharp opposition between Western and non-Western cultures, as if they were complete and irreconcilable antitheses, and even wholly unrelated. One of the principal charges against the Western canon is that it is Eurocentric, that it remains confined within a narrow orbit of European ideas and beliefs, thus excluding all other views of the world. A corrolary of the idea of Eurocentrism is the concept of Orientalism, developed by Edward Said.3 Said argues that throughout its history, the Occident has defined itself in opposition to the Orient, basing its elevated self-image on a debased vision of the cultural Other. In Said's argument, the Occident views itself as rational as opposed to an irrational Orient, as emotionally disciplined in contrast to an emotionally uncontrolled Orient, and as masculine over against a feminine Orient.
In medieval Europe the Orient was chiefly represented by the Muslim world, and one does not have to look far in medieval literature to find the kinds of orientalist stereotypes about which Said writes. The French Song of
Roland contains excellent examples, but even theDivine Comedy seems to provide grist for Said's mill. Consider the portrait of the prophet Mohammad and his nephew Alì that Dante gives when he places them among the schismatics in the Eighth Circle of Hell:[End Page 139]
No barrel, even though it's lost a hoop
or end-piece, ever gapes as one whom I
saw ripped right from his chin to where we fart:
his bowels hung between his legs, one saw
his vitals and the miserable sack
that makes of what we swallow excrement.
While I was all intent on watching him,
he looked at me, and with his hands he spread
his chest and said: "See how I split myself!
See now how maimed Mohammed is! And he
who walks and weeps before me is Alì,
whose face is opened wide from chin to forlock."
(xxviii, 2236)4
This viciously unsympathetic treatment of these central figures of the Islamic religious tradition is exactly what Said's theory of orientalism would lead us to expect in a bastion of the Western canon such as Dante.
But the portrait of Mohammad in theDivine Comedy is an isolated moment, and wider reading in Dante reveals a surprisingly positive treatment of figures from the Islamic world. I want to discuss Dante's debt to Islamic thought in general and to one Islamic philosopher in particular.5 This may seem like a recondite subject, one that will lead me away from the center of Dante studies. In many ways it will, but I hope that I have already suggested its larger importance. The charge against the Western canon is that it is Eurocentric and works to exclude all non-Western cultures. No figure is more firmly entrenched than Dante at the center of the Western canon. What happens if we can show that Dante displays a secret and even sometimes a not-so-secret sympathy for and affinity with Islamic thought? Non-Western culture in the very bastion of Western culture, Dante's Divine Comedy--that is a remarkable prospect, and one calculated to throw both attackers and defenders of the canon off balance. Attackers would have to grant that the Western canon is not as Eurocentric as they have claimed. And defenders of the canon might have to admit thatcanonical works are not quite as orthodox as they often maintain.