As everyone knows, Dante’s Comedy is permeated by an effect of declinistic sense, which consists in the representation of a very positive past (the courteous and chivalrous civilization), a present in a state of progressive (social and political) decline and a future with apocalyptic features (the prediction on Veltro or Greyhound in Hell, the mystical procession in Purgatory, and so on). It is not my intention here to discuss the biographical and historical bases of Dante’s declinism, whose complex issues Erich Auerbach (among others) has already focused on. In this article, following the semiotic perspective, I would like to narrowly focus on the effect of declinistic sense that emerges in particular in Dante’s purgatory. In this mountain-island, the Dante as a character advances from a spatial point of view and, simultaneously, he moves backwards from a temporal point of view. On the one hand, he lands at the mythological heaven-on-earth; on the other, he reconstructs – through his memory – a social and political past that is in contrast with the present from which he wants to move away. My hypothesis is that in this spatial and temporal game the place of the “island” – detached and muffled – has the semantic function of amplifying the effect of declinistic sense, facilitating the ideological reconstruction of a reality placed in another dimension, beyond an ocean that not even Ulysses – in Dante’s imagination – managed to cross in his last “mad flight”.
L’isola del purgatorio e il declinismo di Dante
S TRAINI
2020-01-01
Abstract
As everyone knows, Dante’s Comedy is permeated by an effect of declinistic sense, which consists in the representation of a very positive past (the courteous and chivalrous civilization), a present in a state of progressive (social and political) decline and a future with apocalyptic features (the prediction on Veltro or Greyhound in Hell, the mystical procession in Purgatory, and so on). It is not my intention here to discuss the biographical and historical bases of Dante’s declinism, whose complex issues Erich Auerbach (among others) has already focused on. In this article, following the semiotic perspective, I would like to narrowly focus on the effect of declinistic sense that emerges in particular in Dante’s purgatory. In this mountain-island, the Dante as a character advances from a spatial point of view and, simultaneously, he moves backwards from a temporal point of view. On the one hand, he lands at the mythological heaven-on-earth; on the other, he reconstructs – through his memory – a social and political past that is in contrast with the present from which he wants to move away. My hypothesis is that in this spatial and temporal game the place of the “island” – detached and muffled – has the semantic function of amplifying the effect of declinistic sense, facilitating the ideological reconstruction of a reality placed in another dimension, beyond an ocean that not even Ulysses – in Dante’s imagination – managed to cross in his last “mad flight”.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
