IN THE FINAL lines of Paradiso, Dante enjoys the vision of God. As he gazes into the Trinity he sees "nostra effige" (Par. 33.131): he sees our image. Dante's gesture resembles that of Narcissus as he gazes at his image. 1 But if the gestures in each case are alike, their intentions and results define the difference between beatitude and damnation. Dante sees our image, which includes his but which is not his own. And this sight, which at once identifies him with and distinguishes him from Narcissus, is the culmination of his entire pilgrimage. At the end, Dante is Narcissus "transhumanized" (Par. 1.70).

The story of Narcissus was so popular and widely known in the Middle Ages that Dante probably counted on his readers' recognition of the similarity between the two of them in Paradiso 33. 2 Moreover, it is possible that he had to do so since contemplation, or the ascent to mystic vision of God, under one of its names in the Middle Ages, is speculatio; 3 and "speculation" if a way of seeing God is also Narcissus's error. Further, the turning inward, which mystic theologians agree is necessary to the vision of God, is also the movement of consciousness, though belated, characteristic of Narcissus. 4 In their structures, then, mystic vision and narcissism are perilously similar. And Dante, profound theologian as well as poet, acknowledges that this peril is a crucial element in the pilgrimage. The poet remembers the pilgrim's slow and painful emergence from narcissism to a just self-love; and, scribe that he is (Par. 10.27), he transcribes that memory in canto 30 of each canticle and in cantos 3 and 33 of Paradiso. 5

The numerology at work in Paradiso is important to grasping Dante's meaning. The three cantos of that canticle in which Narcissus and narcissism figure most prominently are 3 + 30 = 33 . Obviously the text is releasing Trinitarian energies; and while the Trinity is not the main focus of this book, it is a crucial part of the relevant context. That context, seen most inclusively, is {21/22} Dante's concern with the Image of God in man and the reformation of that image. Speculation and reflection obviously involve images and image making, while Narcissus, of course, errs in regard to an image and the proper construction of an image. Dante can hardly deploy the Narcissus narrative without involving his text in the theology of the Image. That theology is a subject vast in scope, and I cannot pursue its relevance to the Commedia as a whole. 6 Nor is that my aim. On the contrary, I am concerned with the narrower but related issue of Dante's vision, both his sight and what he sees. While the purification of Dante's vision is a necessary part of the reformation of his image to the likeness of God, I think it can and should be studied separately for two reasons.

First, Dante obviously lays more emphasis on vision than on any other sense of the human body. So much is this the case that near the end of his vision (the pilgrimage, of course, is a vision) he figures the whole of his experience in an image of the eyebrow. In the Celestial Rose, Saint Bernard points out to the pilgrim, "`Lucia, che mosse la tua donna, / Quando chinavi, a rovinar, le ciglia'" ("`Lucy, who moved your Lady when you were bending your brows downward to your ruin'"; Par. 32.137-38). The implication is that Dante "ruined"--the same verb is used of the pilgrim's fall at Inferno 1.61--because he lowered or, perhaps better, closed his eyes. In keeping with this implication, the whole of Paradiso is an opening and a clearing of Dante's eyes. 7 To return to God, a man must open his eyes, open them to and into a just self-love.

Open eyes and purified vision chasten the Narcissus in every man since in such a condition he can begin to see the narcissism in all human instrumentality. Hence my second motive for isolating Dante's vision and studying it separately. His poetics of reference originates in the perception that human instrumentality is narcissistic. To articulate that poetics, therefore, we must follow the intermediate step of the purification of Dante's vision. Then we may turn to Chaucer, who derives his own poetics of reference, in part, from Dante's. For the aim of this book is to read Chaucer, with Dante's help.

To begin the study of Dante's vision, we must read the three cantos 30, for they are a systematic meditation on narcissism and, in particular, on narcissism in art. Just as we must read the three cantos 26 vertically to map Dante's exploration of the historicity and temporality of language, so we must read the three cantos 30 vertically to map his strategy for the recovery of speculation and reflection in art and in life.

Common to each canto 30 in all three canticles is the problematics of imagery. Each canto tests the reality of imagery. Thus, in Hell there is no reality {22/23} except imagery ("ombra"). There is matter, materiality, but no substantiality, where "substance" is understood to be the real (Par. 29.15). In Paradise there is no imagery, only light, and the images we see are cast by the poet's eyes. Though transhumanized (Par. 1.70) the poet still sees with bodily eyes (see especially Par. 33.31-37), and we, who are hardly transhumanized, to whom he must communicate his vision, see it and read it through bodily eyes. The poet, then, darkens the light of Paradise with shadows or "ombra" (see Par. 1.22-27). In Purgatory there is reality which is a complex of imagery and light. Most like this world which we inhabit, Purgatory is the space of confusion and subsequent correction where "ingegno" and "arte" (Purg. 27.130) divide and distinguish the fictional and the real (Purg. 26.12).

In Hell--to describe the pattern now metaphysically--images refer without a referent; they "mean" only themselves. It rains, for example, only to assert that it is not raining (Inf. 30.95); or, trees grow only so that they may never ripen (Inf. 13.97-100). In Paradise, on the other hand, is perfect reference; light is always the In-Light-of-Whom or the Universal Mediation through whom creation means. Dante never sees this unmediated Light; rather, at the end, his "mente" is "percossa / da un fulgore in che sua voglia venne" ("smitten by a flash wherein its wish came to it;" Par. 33.140-41); rather than see, Dante is enlightened ("fulgore"). In Purgatory imagery and light mix so that reality is experienced as a confusion of signs and referents. For example, in Purgatorio 10 at first the pilgrim is unable to make out the proud (lines 112-14). Virgil, similarly confused (line 117), subsequently tells Dante to look again, more intently (lines 118-19). Whereupon, having discerned the proud, Dante proceeds to describe them in a crucial simile (Purg. 10.130-35):

Come per sostentar solaio o tetto,
per mensola talvolta una figura
si vede giugner le ginocchia al petto,
la qual fa del non ver vera rancura
nascere 'n chi la vede; così fatti
vid'io color, quando puosi ben cura.

(As for corbel to support a ceiling or a roof, sometimes a figure is seen to join the knees to the breast--which, unreal, begets real distress in one who sees it--so fashioned did I see these when I gave good heed.)

Finally to describe the pattern with regard to the pilgrim poet. In Inferno, canto 30, Dante lapses into a Narcissus and almost realizes or substantiates mere shades or "ombre"; Dante proves himself a son of (Master) Adam. In Paradiso, canto 30, Dante darkens the pure, unmediated Light with the "umbriferi prefazi" (line 78) in his mortal eyes; he still carries Adam with him. In Purgatorio 30, Dante begins to understand the confusion of reality in the light and dark of signs and referents by learning, or beginning to learn, the nature of imagery; Dante begins to know who Adam is when he sees what Adam lost.

The act which grounds Dante's discourse about imagery is falsification. Inferno, canto 30, is the canto of Master Adam, who falsified the florin with "`tre carati di mondiglia'" ("`three carats of alloy or dross'"; line 90); it is also the canto of Myrrha "`falsificando se in altrui forma'" ("`falsifying herself in another's form'"; line 41) so as to be "`al padre fuor del dritto amore amica'" ("`loving of her father beyond rightful love'"; line 39) and of Sinon who spoke "falso" (line 115) regarding the Horse. Purgatorio 30 is the canto in which Beatrice rebukes Dante for following "`imagini di ben . . . false / che nulla promession rendono intera'" ("`false images of good, which pay no promise in full'"; lines 131-32), where the phrase "nulla promession rendono intera" is economic and refers to redeeming or covering the value of a coin (read "image"). Paradiso, canto 30, ends with Beatrice's last words in the poem; these are words in condemnation of"`cieca cupidigia'" ("`blind cupidity'"; line 139) and in particular of simony, or the buying and selling of office--which is a kind of falsification; 8 in this canto Dante's eyes "coin" the light of Paradise into topazes, rivers, sparks, flowers, and so on, before they finally adjust to the brilliance of the Empyrean. Finally, falsification and coinage figure in many other cantos which bear directly or indirectly on the three cantos 30: an obvious case in point is the likening of faith to a coin in Paradiso 24.84.

Next in importance to the act of falsification is the imagery of water. Indeed, words for water abound in all three cantos. The most important "water" is the Mirror of Narcissus. "`Lo specchio di Narcisso'" is actually named at Inferno 30.128, and Dragonetti (1965:121-22) explains the importance of its being named there. If not named, the Mirror of Narcissus also figures in Purgatorio 30, where, following Beatrice's rebuke, Dante looks down and sees himself in the "chiaro fonte" (line 76) on!y to withdraw his eyes instantly and thus interrupt the narcissistic vision. Finally, the Mirror of Narcissus is evoked only to be rejected in Paradiso 30, where Dante's eyes become mirrors (lines 84-85) in which reality, or the light of Paradise, now no longer subject to mirroring, is itself mirrored. Supplementing the Mirror of Narcissus, this image of imagery in Inferno 30, is the water which Master {24/25} Adam imagines, "`li ruscelletti'" ("`the little brooks'"), and which, as image, parches him (lines 64, 68); the water of the rain he imagines himself to have been when he rained down into Hell (line 95); the water which is poisonously dammed up in his dropsical body; and, finally, the water of the shame which washes Dante's face (line 142). In Purgatorio 30 there is the water of the rain of"`grazie divine'" ("`divine graces,'" line 112) which fertilized Dante's soul; the water of the ice which melts from around his heart, issuing in his tears (lines 97-99); the water of the "chiaro fonte"; and the water of the river Lethe. In Paradiso 30 there is the water of the light which Dante sees in the form of a river (lines 61-62) and the water of the same light which Beatrice tells Dante he must drink (lines 73-74). Connected with the imagery of water is the physical sensation of thirst, which is explicit in Inferno 30 and Paradiso 30 and implicit in Purgatorio 30, where, I assume, Dante means us to realize that he thirsts for the water of Lethe. As always in Dante, thirst ("sete") carries with it the connotation of the desire to know, a connotation which he owes to his reading of Aristotle (Conv. 1.1.9-10; Metaphysics 980a22; Boyde 1981:51). Furthermore, accompanying the imagery of rain is the closely related phenomenon of growth--"maturo"/"acerbe" ("ripe"/"unripe")-- which is explicit in Purgatorio 30 and Paradiso 30 at a number of points and implicit in Inferno 30, where all the damned are by definition immature and unripe.

Answering to the imagery of water is the imagery of its natural opposite of fire. This imagery, more so than the water imagery, is indebted to its source in Ovid, where both fire and water are crucial to the peculiar Ovidian pathos (Met. 3.426, 464, 487-88, 490). But Dante is primarily interested in fire as an agent, successful and unsuccessful, of transformation, or "transhumanization" (Par. 1.70). Inferno 30 begins with an allusion to Zeus and Semele (lines 1-3); the latter was burned to death by Zeus in his glory when she foolishly demanded that he reveal himself to her as he appeared to Juno in lovemaking. And since in Ovid the story of Narcissus follows that of Zeus and Semele with that of Teiresias intervening, it is possible to recover a pattern there of revelations destroying by reveiling which Dante may have read, too, since he pursues the problematics of "velo," especially in Paradiso 30. 9 This pattern, however, is probably subsidiary, in both Ovid and Dante, to the theme of madness which they each explore through the image of Narcissus. Equal in importance to the Zeus-Semele allusion as an insistence on fire is the burning of Master Adam's body (Singleton 1970:1, 2, 556-57). If the false coiner is to be understood as a figure of Narcissus, then he is a disfigured figure, since the fire which burned the beautiful boy has been grossly literalized in the actual burning of Master Adam's flesh. 10 Then, too, Master Adam burns with thirst as does Sinon, his opponent in debate, and Dante recurs to their parched suf- {25/26} fering, by dropsy and by fever, respectively, several times (e.g., lines 63, 68, 99, 127-28). In Purgatorio 30, Dante turns "sinisterly" to Virgil to confess, "`conosco i segni de l'antica fiamma'" ("`I know the tokens of the ancient flame'"; line 48), only to learn quickly that, one, these signs, like those of another "fiamma antica," or Ulysses (Inf 26.85), are fraught with ambiguity and error, and, two, that the flame he feels through these signs is perilously similar to that which burns Narcissus and Master Adam. Indeed, insofar as Dante is (a son of) "Adam," they are identical flames--the reason's version of and to a truth which it only projects from within itself (Dragonetti 1965:91-92). Also in Purgatorio 30 the ice melts from around Dante's heart just as if it were snow melting under the sun's heat (lines 85-99). And, finally, when, having rebuked Dante, Beatrice asserts that he must pay some "scotto" of penitence (line 144), the word "scotto" imports into the text not only another economic image but also a connotation of fire since Italian knows a verb "scottare" meaning to burn (Vernon 1907:2, 533). Presumably it is Dante's tears which burn him or are about to burn him, and this burning too may be some punishment of the "Adam" in Dante. Finally, in Paradiso 30, Beatrice tells Dante that every soul who enters the Empyrean is a candle which God prepares so that it may burn with His light (line 54); and indeed Dante is said to be kindled by the light (line 58). Moreover, Beatrice remarks that desire burns Dante (line 70), and eventually she herself is said to be the sun in Dante's eyes (line 75), where the suggestion is that those eyes envision because they contain the cosmos.

The last notion common to each canto in the three canticles is that of reflection, which is expressed in Inferno and Paradiso by the word "specchio" or some form thereof. 11 In Inferno 30, "specchio" is of course the Mirror of Narcissus (line 128). In Purgatorio 30, the word "specchio" is not mentioned, but Dante obviously "reflects" in the "chiaro fonte"; and the absence of the word for mirror is significant. In Paradiso 30, "specchio" occurs twice in a crucial simile describing the "reflection" of the Celestial Rose (lines 109-14), and a related word, "spegli," is used of Dante's eyes when they drink of the light (line 85).

This already long list could be extended by many items which are common to two of the three cantos 30, but these are probably better left until they arise in the context of discussion, since there is no apparent rank to them. On the other hand, preliminaries must be extended by a careful consideration of Ovid's story of Narcissus and of that story as the Middle Ages received and revised it. Included among the stories of Zeus and Semele and of Teiresias and of Bacchus's arrival in Thebes, the story of Narcissus forms part of a very {26/27} dense text of unreason and madness; this Dante acknowledges and emphasizes as Inferno 30 opens; for example, "tanto il dolor le /Hecuba/ fé la mente torta" ("so did grief twist her mind"; line 21). Madness is the dominant note of this canto's exordium because it is the canto of the fraudulent. As Dragonetti has shown (1965:94-106), fraud vitiates the reason, inducing madness, because it is a covert and self-masking perversion of the reason. Furthermore, as such, fraud is a falsification of the Image of God in man, for the reason is just that. Moreover, sin of any sort is always a turning to the self to the exclusion of the Other- -a gesture identical with that of Narcissus. And so, sin, especially fraud, falsification and narcissism provide Dante with a system of discourse about imagery. And since the poet is obviously a worker in images, this system also doubles as Dante's discourse about his own craft and his practice of it.

The connection from unreason or madness to the poet's craft of working in images is formed by vision itself. The sane or healthy, the mature, mind sees the truth, and, seeing the truth, it makes and uses images without falsification. Such a mind Dante wants to become and eventually does become. We can see the process clearly at a crucial moment in its unfolding in Paradiso 21, where we also see Ovid's text return to underwrite Dante's intricate design. In this canto Beatrice explains that Dante cannot, because of his mortality, look on her smile: "`tu ti faresti quale / Fu Semelè, quando di cener fessi'" ("`You would become such as was Semele when she turned to ashes'"; Par. 21.5-6). She then goes on to issue this extraordinary command (Par. 21.16-18):

"Ficca di retro a li occhi tuoi la mente,
E fa di quelli specchi a la figura
Che 'n questo specchio ti sarà parvente."

("Fix your mind after your eyes, and make of them mirrors to the figure which in this mirror shall be shown to you.")

If Dante exacts so much from Metamorphoses 3 in this oblique allusion, that text provokes him even more in his direct confrontation with it in Inferno 30. For example, it inscribes the concept of reflexivity itself: "Dumque petit petitur pariterque accendit et ardet" ("At once he seeks and is sought, himself kindling the flame with which he burns"; line 426, emphasis added; see also line 440; Innes 1955:92). Next in importance to this concept is the question on which the text insists of self-knowledge. Teiresias's prophecy regarding Narcissus, when asked "an esset/Tempora maturae visurus longa senectae" ("Whether this boy would live to a ripe old age"; lines 346-47)--namely, "si se non noverit" ("yes, if he does not come to know himself"; line 348; Innes 1955:90)--locates the pathos of narcissism, or self-knowledge that so far from liberating rather only binds. Incidentally, it is worth noting here, though it anticipates later parts of the argument, that to Ovid's "maturae . . . senectae" answers Dante's concern with maturity and ripeness in the three cantos 30; Master Adam is precisely an unripe Narcissus, immature and imperfectly grown. After reflexivity and self knowledge, the issue of desire probably attracted Dante most to Ovid's text. Narcissus laments "uror amore mei" ("I am on fire with love for my own self"; line 464), and again "Quod cupio mecum est; inopem me copia fecit" ("What I desire, I have. My very plenty makes me poor"; line 466; Innes 1955:93); obviously he laments a desire which can {28/29} never be fulfilled, and such is also, of course, the condition of Master Adam and Sinon. Moreover, and of equal importance, the cry "inopem me copia fecit" answers, with searing irony, to Narcissus's earlier refusal of coition with Echo: "`ante,' ait, `emoriar, quam sit tibi copia nostri'" ("`I shall die,' he says, `before you enjoy the plenty of my beauty'" Met. 3.391; emphasis added)--he who would not part with and share his "copia" now festers in poverty because of that very "copia." Selfishness destroys the self. Desire which refuses the Other is only a simulacrum of itself; it is not itself if it is not Other. Just so, Master Adam is not himself but only an image ("ombra") of himself. Finally, Ovid touches on the problem of imagery. He writes, for example: "Ista repercussae, quam cernis, imaginis umbra est. / Nil habet ista sui; tecum venitque manetque; / Tecum discedet, si tu discedere possis" ("What you see is but the shadow cast by your reflection; in itself it is nothing. It comes with you, and lasts while you are there; it will go when you go, if go you can"; lines 434-36; see, further, lines 416-17; Innes 1955:92). Such lines, we will see, were crucial to Dante's strategy. In addition to these concepts and problems, Ovid's text is also provocative in its emphasis on water, thirst, fire, light, and eyes (see lines 417, 430, 431, 439, 470, 490).

Such a preliminary sketch hardly does justice to Ovid's poetry, but it does serve to suggest the spur Dante might have found there. Also provocative were later, medieval versions of Narcissus's story. The most important of these, for present purposes, is that of the Roman de la Rose. 12 This is the version of the story, in both Guillaume de Lorris's and Jean de Meun's parts, that after Ovid probably spurred Dante on the most. He would have found, in Guillaume, that, because of his perverse love for himself, Narcissus "perdi d'ire tot le sen / et fu morz en poi de termine" ("lost his reason and died in a short time"; lines 1500-1501). 13 In Jean's part, certainly the more provocative part, he would have also read that "quant /Amans/ s'i mira, / maintes foiz puis an soupira, / tant s'i trouva grief et pesant" ("when Amans looked at himself in it /the Fountain of Narcissus/, he found himself so heavy and full of grief that many times thereafter he sighed over it" lines 20387-89; Dahlberg 1971:334; emphasis added). Master Adam of course is precisely "pesant" and thus corporealizes or materializes Amans's narcissistic condition. 14

Dante would also have read in Jean the crucial observation that " 'n'est nule chose qu' ele tiegne / qui tretout d'ailleurs ne li viegne'" ("`there is nothing about it that does not come to it from elsewhere'"; lines 20399-400; Dahlberg 1971:335). Precisely the curse on the mirror of Narcissus is its total incapacity for origination: everything comes to it "tretout d'ailleurs." It is perhaps as extreme a parody of the creative fullness of God, whence comes everything, as the poet could have found. And he found it already in large measure {29/30} worked out in the Roman.

Jean himself opposes the Fountain of Narcissus to the Fountain of Life: "`cele les vis de mort anivre, / mes ceste fet les morz revivre'" ("`the other makes the living drunk with death, while this fountain makes the dead live again'"; lines 20596-97; Dahlberg 1971:337). For him, the Fountain of Life is clearly analogous to the Trinity (see lines 20349-448), and because of the Trinitarian structures of the Commedia, and especially of the Paradiso, Dante, I suspect, was much attracted to this opposition between the two fountains, as much as he was to the opposition between the Rose of the Roman and the Celestial Rose of Paradise, and this especially because Jean establishes the opposition principally in terms of vision. In Guillaume's part, the Fountain of Narcissus is clearly to be assimilated to the Lover's eyes, and like any other pair of human eyes, their field of vision is restricted to 180 degrees: "car torjors, quel que part qu'il soit, / l'une moitie dou vergier voit; / et c'il se torne, maintenant / porra veoir le remenant" ("for always, wherever they are, they see one half of the garden, and if they turn, then they may see the rest"; lines 1561-64; Dahlberg 1971:51). Now to Jean this is partial and all-too-human vision. Indeed, he complains of the "cristauz" which Guillaume praises that "`certes ainz sunt trouble et nueus'" ("`on the contrary, these stones are murky and cloudy'"; line 20418; Dahlberg 1971:335). He then goes on to celebrate the very different kind of vision to be enjoyed in the Fountain of Life. The Trinitarian carbuncle (see line 20500) which is the sun of this fountain is such that when people look into it and see themselves in it (lines 20541-47; Dahlberg 1971:336-37),

tourjorz, de quelque part qu'il soient,
toutes les choses du parc voient
et les connoissent proprement,
et eus meismes ansement;
et puis que la se sunt veu,
ja mes ne seront deceu
de nule chose que puisse estre.

(They always, no matter where they may be, see all things in the park and understand them rightly, themselves as well. After they have seen themselves there, they become such wise masters that they will never be deceived by anything that can exist.)

Although Dante certainly turned to the Ovidian and to the medieval versions of Narcissus's story, in his text all these versions cohere in a new structure. They all serve his fundamental premise that the ultimate falsification of images is sin which falsifies the Image of God in man or the reason. Falsification, as the figuration of money in Dante's text suggests (Inf. 30.90), consists in adding alloy or dross ("mondiglia") to a coin after subtracting from it pure substance, or three carats of gold in this case. Hence, in keeping with the figure, sin should also be an addition after subtraction if it does falsify the Image of God in man. But sin, all evil, is a negativity: in the classic Augustinian formulation it is a corruption of the good. 16 Hence while sin certainly subtracts from the soul it corrupts, what can it be said to add if it is itself nothingness? The question appears more formidable than it is. Sin adds that very nothingness; sin "adds" what it "leaves behind," a residue of corruption. And this Dante expresses in the word "mondiglia." The word is formed off Latin mundus, "clean," and expresses the leavings or the waste or the chaff which remains after cleaning. 17 "Mondiglia" consists of matter, not substance--of a something that is nothing. As matter, existing merely, it is important and it is necessary, but it is not to be confused with substance, living and inspirited.

Sin, however, precisely confuses matter and substance, thus corrupting substance. So much is explicit, we now can see, in the sin of Master Adam: he so confuses matter and substance that matter passes for substance--"mondiglia" for gold. He generates "as": three carats of dross are seen as gold. Thus his sin derives from and in one sense repeats the sin of the original Adam (and thus also original sin, we might pause here to note, is for Dante basically a sin of falsification). Adam our father generated "as" when he committed "il trapassar del segno" ("the transgression of the sign"; my translation; Par. 26.117). When Adam transgressed the sign of the apple, he suddenly knew evil--signs of evil were suddenly everywhere. The whole of creation, however, was good--God had created it so--and hence the only way he could know evil was to know the good as evil; just so, his first experience after the transgression was shame, or knowledge of his good body as evil, as something to be ashamed of. When Adam transgressed the sign, he incurred the punishment of naming one thing by another thing--one leaf after another leaf, to {31/32} adapt Dante's (and Horace's) image (Par. 26.137-38). 18 The sin of Adam issued in the mutability of the sign (as did that of Lucifer--after Lucifer, "serpent" can no longer unambiguously name the creature snake). Gone now the singleness and purity of prelapsarian naming (Gen. 2.19-20); in its place, men, simply by reasoning, name A as B. They never know A; they only know A as . . . something else. And B is always a mutation of A because unlike A as well as like A.

For men, in their fallen state, there are necessarily both, likeness and unlikeness: this is the lot of men--"as" always threatens them with illusion through the confusion of like and unlike which it generates. To prevent such illusion, likeness and unlikeness must cooperate in a diacritical or differential relationship: the sign must be different from the thing it signifies (Weiskel 1976:140-41). Some sons of Adam, however, actually exploit the mutability of the sign, to erase the unlikeness, thus concealing the confusion "as" generates in the illusion "as" generates. They make signs so like the original that it is impossible to tell the difference between sign and original. Thus they corrupt reference itself, for reference respects difference--and there, of course, is the ground of the analogy between language and money. Master Adam is the type of these. A counterfeiter, he further damages the already mutable sign by rendering it "irreferent"; his florin refers to the florin-- it is like it--but it has no reverence for the florin because it erases, by concealing, its unlikeness to the florin. A counterfeit or "irreferent" sign is a false image because it is identical with its exemplar and thus disdainful of "as." But it is not granted the sons of Adam to nullify their Father's sin by evading, however intricately, as; they must take the route through "as" if they would arrive at "is." 19

With the mutability of the sign we enter the arena of the poet's agon. He, the maker of images, always struggles with the indeterminacy of signs. Moreover, as maker of images, he is identical with Master Adam in one respect, namely, that he makes images of images just as the counterfeiter made false images of the image of Florence's credibility. Saint Paul teaches the Middle Ages that "the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made" (Rom. 1.20). The things that are made, the "ea quae facta sunt," are themselves images, and the poet produces images of them. Hence the great risk of falsification that he constantly runs. To avoid this risk, the poet must take great care in his response to the mutability of the sign. He must not be tempted by the illusion of permanent identity between the sign and his meaning. And yet this is a great temptation. Everyone would like, without misunderstanding, to mean what he says, even if hardly anyone ever says what he means. {32/33}

The sign is mutable; its meanings are indeterminate. As a consequence, the sign is inseparable from dissension in human communities. 20 In such dissension men practice fraud on each other: one faction attempts to wrest control of the sign to itself--to determine its indeterminacy (to fix it and "fix" it) in its favor. Analogously, the counts of Fonte Branda hire Master Adam to falsify the florin, so that they may control part of its gold--masking their self determination by the illusion of truth in the false florin. Thus the sin of Master Adam is a further perversion of the issue of Adam's sin: from mutability to the corruption of reference.

Men can take this step, so fraught with perilous consequence, because signs and coins are subject to their will. Aristotle made the point that "it is up to us to change a given coin or make it useless" (Ethics E1133a-b). And his medieval commentators followed suit; for example, Saint Thomas declared that "if the disposition of men who use riches should change, then coins will not buy a thing, nor will they bring anything of necessity to living, if, say, it pleases the king or community that they be of no value." 21 At the same time, medieval language theory, early and late, recognizes that signs are instituted by an arbitrary impositio ad placitum. 22 Indeed, theorists acknowledge that it is in the community's power to change a sign's significance if they so choose. 23 Such power does not constitute ownership of the sign, since the same sign in a different community at the same time might have a different significance. But it does demonstrate that by concord men agree--as one theorist puts it, "mutualiter"--on the "property" a given sign possesses; moreover, it also demonstrates that the community is the steward of this "property." According to Émile Benveniste (1971:277), "Communis signifies literally `one who shares in the munia or munera.'... Charges and privileges are the two faces of the same thing, and this alternation constitutes the community." When we communicate, we are sharing the wealth and the gifts of language; in the word itself, we confront how language is a kind of wealth. But this wealth is more than and other than coin: with coin I possess wealth; with language I share wealth. Signs, in short, are never private property. 24

Except when a malicious will wrests the sign to itself, ap-propr-iating the sign to itself as if it were a coin. Gradually I have been letting the words "proper" and "property" and "appropriate," "appropriating" and "appropriation" rise to the surface of my text. In the notion of the proper lies the crux of this book. In the Middle Ages "proper" denoted what we mean by the word "literal"--the first, the primary sense of a word. 25 This sense is the "property" of the word. Extra-literal or metaphoric senses of a word were indicated, most suggestively, by terms like "usurpata translatio." 26 These senses are "improper": they are not the property of the word; they are brought to the word, {33/34} added to it, imposed upon it. Metaphor, then, is the ex-propr-iation of words in favor of an alien sense ("the meadow laughs"), while, in keeping with this reasoning, the natural opposite of metaphor (which for that very reason closely resembles it), or mendacity, is the ap-propr-iation of words to covert realities. Metaphor and mendacity are both "improper" uses of words; so it is, for example, that poetry, always dense with metaphors, in antiquity and the Middle Ages was called a lie. 27 But metaphor and mendacity are "improper" uses in different ways. A metaphor is improper because it is a usurpation of sense; a lie is improper because it is a divagation of sense and reality. However, although they differ thus, and differ crucially, both are violations of the proper sense of words. And as such, both are demonstrations that words possess property (cf. de Man 1974:39).

Words possess property; coins are property. The distinction is crucial: coins can be owned, words cannot. Even to say that words are "community property," which is close to the truth, is to violate (by metaphor) the property of words. No one, no group either, owns words; owned, words cease to be words, become counters or ciphers of the arrogating will. The just use of words respects the property of words --which is to say, it respects the others who live in the community of the language and thus share the property of words. My coins are mine though issued by the state; my words are ours though issued by me.

The notion of the proper thus leads to the relationship of justice to money and language. This subject is crucial to the present argument, since justice is always inevitably the first victim of fraud, which is as much as to say that community or social relations are also fraud's first victim; for justice in the Middle Ages was preeminently the social virtue, and especially so in the later, Aristotelian Middle Ages. And Dante so passionately loathes fraud, damns it so deeply and so precisely, because it undermines justice--for him the supreme virtue--hence also society. Saint Thomas makes the connections abundantly clear: "It is proper to justice, as compared with the other virtues, to direct man in his relations with others: because it denotes a kind of equality, as its very name implies; indeed, we are wont to say that things are adjusted when they are made equal, for equality refers to some other. On the other hand the other virtues perfect man in those matters only which befit him in relation to himself" (ST 2a. 2ae. 57, 1 reply; emphasis added). Justice always looks outward, to the other. Thomas goes on to define justice as "a habit whereby a man renders to each one his due by a constant and perpetual will" (ST 2a. 2ae. 58, 1 reply). Moreover, he insists-- and this is important to the present argument--that (ST 2a. 2ae. 58, 11, 3)

justice is first of all and more commonly exercised in voluntary interchanges of things, such as buying and selling, where the ex-{34/35} pressions 'loss' and 'gain' are properly employed; and yet they are transferred to all other matters of justice. The same applies to the rendering to each one of what is his own.

When the just work of language is interrupted and words are perverted into coins, thus to resemble justice without a soul, they become counterfeit. Wrested to the appropriating self, they are no longer just or true but, soulless, like counterfeit coins, are "irreferent." The counterfeiter, the falsifier, it is who exploits the arbitrariness of the mutable sign to privatize it and thus corrupt its reference. And the poet is constantly in danger of becoming a falsifier because he has a meaning which he desires to communicate. Mutable and arbitrary signs the poet is under compulsion to make refer. 30 He is tempted to fix and "fix" the sign in his meaning--to appropriate it to himself, thus becoming a liar, demanding that it reflect his meaning and only his meaning. But that meaning, to be a meaning, must become Other and the meaning of others'. 31 Failing that, it is no meaning but an echo, and Narcissus is gazing at himself in the mirror of language. If the poet would shun the identity of Narcissus, he must first accept the mutability and arbitrariness of signs in the hope of their eventual reference to and reverence for reality. Such hope must {35/36} have faith as its substance--faith which, for good reason, Dante calls "moneta" (Par. 24.84).

Accepting the mutability and arbitrariness of signs, the poet realizes that if he were to fix and "fix" the sign in his meaning, he would nullify the seminality of history, the ongoing interpretative labor which inscribes human beings in time and the world--which marks them as human. Rather than succumb to this temptation and thus demean the sign, the poet must contribute his meaning to the sign. Nothing could be further from falsification. Since a sign is formed as a coin is formed, it can be deformed as a coin is deformed. A coin is deformed or falsified by the subtraction of gold and the subsequent addition of dross; a sign is deformed by the subtraction of reference and the subsequent addition of personal desire. Reference is the "gold" of signs, the property because of which they are "valuable," though it is a property immaterial and intangible. If the poet wrests the property to himself--makes it his coin--if he materializes it as his own, if it becomes synonymous with his reality, then the sign becomes false, fixed in and by a private will. If, for example, my pun "irreference" fails to communicate a valid insight, exhibiting instead only my wit, then it is a counterfeit coinage. If, on the other hand, the poet contributes his meaning to the temporal and communal inheritance of the sign, he adds without subtracting even as he inserts the sign into the seminality of history. As long as he owns up to his meaning, without presuming to own the meaning, of the sign, the poet does not falsify or "fix" the sign; rather, he historicizes and personalizes the sign (cf. the narrators of Troilus and Criseyde, Chap. 9 below, and of The Canterbury Tales, Chap. 10 below). He publishes his personal meaning. Put another way, as long as the reference of the sign is intact, the poet may figure it as he will. As long as the Celestial Rose refers to a rose --and to the Roman de la Rose and to every other rose in medieval literature--Dante may make of it the awesome and intimidating figure he does. And so much, in fact, is the case: Dante's Rose is part of the common fund, the common store or treasury, of literary tradition.

Dante the poet, we can begin to summarize, confronts the question of imagery in the canto of the falsifiers, and in the vertically related cantos, because he must differentiate his coinage as poet from the false coinage of Master Adam. We his readers must be able to spend his coin--read his language--for the vision which he experienced. So it is that, from his position of the allegory of the theologians (Hollander 1969:15-24), he must convince us that his coin or language is not fraudulent, not false, but a true and a valuable representation of what he saw when grace dispensed with the ordinary limits on human sight. He has no alternative but to use images or coins; they are all that a son of Adam has with which to communicate. He {36/37} must therefore accept the mutability and the arbitrariness of the sign without impatiently fixing it in a meaning. Rather than fix and "fix" the sign in a meaning, he must liberate in the sign its energies of meaning and meaningful energies. Hence, even as he strikes the image ("batter li fiorini"), he must strike it from reality--lest it falsify reality in the illusory fixity of identity. Rather than in the spurious security of self-aggrandizing meanings, the poet must reside in the tension of reference. Such is the residence of the viator who has no true home here. And its name is faith. The lot of Adam and his sons and daughters is this, that if they would pass from mutability and arbitrariness to reverence, they need the sub-stance of faith (Heb. 11.1); and faith Dante names "moneta" (Par. 24.84) to insist that the sub-stance is only one more if the most fundamental means. It is not an end, not a fixity. It is an "as"--not yet an "is."

Here emerges a serious question for Dante's text, and, indeed, for all of medieval literature. The coin is valuable. It has so much gold. The flower too is valuable. It has beauty. Why then strike the medium from reality? Why discard the sign? The question, of course, is venerable. Its more familiar medieval form is, what has Ingeld to do with Christ? What has literature and all its mediations-- images and figures and "beautiful lies"--to do with divinity and the purity of Christ's truth? We recognize the trenchant problem for the whole of the Middle Ages of the justification for poetry. 32 Necessary to any answer to this question is a distinction between the flower (or gold) and the "leavings" ("mondiglia"). The "fiore" is good in the measure to which it is current and exchangeable for the good. Saint Paul's phrase "ea quae facta sunt" (Rom. 1.20) is helpful here. The "ea quae facta sunt" are good for the "invisibilia Dei." But the "ea quae facta sunt" are flowers-- evanescent, temporary, mutable, historical (and if gold seems permanent, that is precisely the curse on gold because of which it so often leads to idolatry). All media because they are historical disappear and are consumed in mediation (even the coin is abraded). 33 This is the most immediate consequence of the seminality of history. And in their historicity, all media must be struck from reality because they are less real than reality--not unreal, less real.

From this vantage point--namely, his Platonistic trust and distrust simultaneously of figures and figurativity--Dante's strategy in the three cantos 30 is completely visible. It originates in coinage because in the word "fiore" is the very value (coin) but also evanescence (flower) of all media of exchange. Thus when Dante's eyes in Paradise "coin" the spirits in the Empyrean into "fiori" (Par. 30.65, 95), we are suddenly aware that all "fiori"--coins, images, flowers, even (historical) persons--must be struck from reality or the light of {37/38} Paradise because all "fiori" are finally, however beautiful, also evanescent. Whatever coin the poet contributes, it is still coin--a promise and not the reality .

Furthermore, some "fiori" are like the Narcissus narcissistic: to them have been added the leavings of the self's desire for itself. To adapt John of Salisbury's reading of Narcissus's story, such flowers are "sine fructu" ("without fruit") because they mediate no reality--rather interrupt it to replace it with themselves. 34 The florin with three parts dross does not mediate, does not represent, the credit or creditability of Florence because in such a flower the fruit of Florence is blasted: such a flower cannot yield the fruit of Florence. Rather, it contains dead, useless matter which shadows and blights the fruit of Florence: such a flower is false, a false image, which "pays no promise in full" (Purg. 30.132). All flowers ("fiori") then are false in the sense that they fade and pass away--their "as" is only an afterglow of the being Adam man's father lost--but even so (and here is the Aristotelianism of Dante's Platonism) they can be trusted--one can have faith in their coinage--to mediate while they last the "invisibilia Dei." 35 The Celestial Rose is a "fiore" even as it also is not a "fiore." The faith which accepts, endures, and rejoices in this paradox is the faith of the via affirmativa. 36 And it is the faith which substantiates Dante's naming faith "moneta"-- supreme tautology since money is itself based on faith (credit). Faith is "moneta" because faith and the creation are simultaneous and reciprocal: the goodness and the value of the creation depend on faith, while faith depends on the goodness and the value of the creation. And so it is that, for the poet of the via affirmativa, if all flowers or images are false, only those flowers or images must be repudiated which have been intentionally falsified by the addition of narcissistic "mondiglia." All images must be struck from reality, yes, but only some images belong in Hell.