The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante.

Teodolinda Barolini. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. xi + 356 pp. $18.95.

By privileging polemics over clarity of thought, Barolini - in the lamentable choice of an irksome title and disingenuous subtitle - has needlessly disguised perhaps the decade's most brilliant book on Dante and has unnecessarily subjected herself to merciless derision. Harold Bloom's pontification - "detheologizing Dante would be as irrelevant as theologizing him" (The Western Canon, 83) - typifies the response of all too many literary arbiters to a text studded with revelatory glosses.

Tibor Wlassics has ridiculed the "de-" word by drawing parallels to delicing, lambasting "detheologizing" (an attention-grabbing neologism) as a "trendy twang" and "corny tag" calculated to win the author "her Guggenheim" (Lectura Dantis 11:111). Another critic has stooped so low as to snipe at Barolini's book even for its "spectacularly ugly cover" (Steven Botterill, Italica 71.3: 405), which reproduces part of an unattributed Gustave Dore illustration of Inferno 18 in which Dante and Virgil gaze inexplicably downwards (upon, as it turns out in the original wood-block engraving, Thais and flatterers besmirched in excrement).

For the record, therefore, I affirm that this is one book that definitely should be judged neither by its title nor by its cover. For one thing, in Barolini's recondite parlance "detheologizing" does not mean "de-theologizing" (where "de-" carries the universally understood sense of "excising" or "removing" theology as a focus); rather it means "re-theologizing" (where "re-" points, at least in this case, to a re-evaluation of Dante's theologizing in light of his narrative strategies for re-presenting truth). This becomes apparent when we read that detheologizing, as employed uniquely and idiosyncratically by Barolini, "is not antitheological; it is not a call to abandon theology . . . from Dante criticism. Rather, [it] is a way of reading that attempts to break out of the hermeneutic guidelines that Dante has structured into his poem, hermeneutic guidelines that result in theologized readings whose outcomes have been overdetermined by the author" (17).

Barolini's intent in her highly formalistic and sensibly philological approach is to "privilege form over [but never at the expense of] content" (17). To her enormous credit, in the nine chapters (three per canticle) that follow the overly pedantic introductory chapter, she accomplishes this feat consistently and magnificently. Close readings and extraordinarily perceptive comments pepper every chapter, whether Barolini is discoursing on the poetics of the new (in chapter Two), Dante the poet as a figure of Ulysses (chapter three), the use of rime equivoche in the extended villanello simile (chapter four), Beatrice's use of the verb volgere to indict Dante (chapter five), the significance of names and naming (chapter six), the meaning of sleep and dreams (chapter seven), the ontological bases of difference in Paradise (chapter eight), the use of the phrases "l'un" and "l'altro" in the heaven of the sun (chapter nine), or the poetics of enjambment (chapter ten). Even the appendix, which treats canto beginnings and endings, and especially the numerous notes (267-348), reflect a remarkable degree of sophisticated thinking, nuanced arguments, and painstaking research.

Of course Dante never referred to his opus magnum, at least within the context of the Christian epic itself, as "divine," leaving that task to an Italian editor who added the epithet in 1555. Instead, the Florentine poet early on called his work simply la mia comedia ("my comedy," Inferno 21.2) and later on christened it "the sacred poem" - lo sacrato poema (Paradiso 23.62) and l poema sacro (Paradiso 25.1). What Barolini achieves in The Undivine Comedy is not to remove the "divinity" or "sacredness" of the poem - what her misleading title presages - but to explicate in minute and mesmerizing detail how Dante manages, rhetorically and textually, to package his Christian ideology as visionary truth.

The best argument I have read for interpreting Dante as a bona fide poetatheologus is not by Charles Singleton or his minions; ironically, it is by Teo Barolini.

MADISON U. SOWELL Brigham Young University