Is Dante's Four-Level Method of Interpreting Literary Texts Still Relevant Today?
Is Dante's Four-Level Method of Interpreting Literary Texts Still Relevant Today?
Is Dante's Four-Level Method of Interpreting Literary Texts Still Relevant Today?
reticence
before seeing some of their works published. Goethe waited forty years
before allowing his poem Wandrers Sturmlied to appear in published
form. Robert Browning destroyed almost all records of his Juvenilia
verses. According to Barbara Melchiori 2even the main body of his works
was subject to a form of self-imposed censorship and as a consequence
the reader of his poetry should pay special regard to verbal clues that
point to the poets hidden, his deepest concerns, and of these he was not
himself fully cognizant.
We face here the entire question of the levels of meaning at which a poem
is to be interpreted. Can a regard for the four-level approach to textual
and originally scriptural exegesis formulated in the Middle Ages and
refined by Dante help us here? He differentiated between the four levels
of interpretation, to which he assigned the terms literal, allegorical, moral
and anagogical. 3It is interesting to note that Northrop Frye still found
the term anagogical relevant to his anatomy of literary criticism though
he found little place for the allegorical and moral levels.
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1 View:
Can Grande della Scala the biblical verse (Psalm 114, 1-2) referring to the
exodus from Egypt bears interpretation at four levels, the literal, allegorical,
moral and anagogical. These refer respectively to the literal accuracy purported
facts, the religious truth assigned to their unstated significance, the conversion
of the believer and the parting of the body and soul at death.Dantes mode of
interpretation finds precedents in those of Aquina and in rabbinic tradions.
4 Milton Millhauser, "Poet and Burgher: A Comic Variation on a Serious Theme," Victorian
cavern, the Promised Land, water symbolism and the plagues of Egypt.
With all this in mind, can we dismiss the implied association of the
words cross and passion and the Mayors Sadducean
of
common usage. Thus the line He never can cross that mighty top in
The Pied Piper of Hamelin seems an odd way of stating that the piper
will never be able to surmount the peak of a high mountain. In
Brownings poem By the Fire-Side we come across a truly glaring
departure from good style according to the criteria governing prose in
the line
view of the occurrence of the words crossed and the Cross in the
immediately preceding lines. We note here a conflation of the word cross
object serving only the innate laws of aesthetics and the exigencies of its
functional integrity, has nothing to say about externals in areas such as
biography, history politics or religion, truth in short.
One should not imagine that the domain of literary criticism poses a
unified and monolithic body of opinion, for, to the contrary, this area is
not altogether dissimilar to Speakers Corner in Londons Hyde Park,
where the most divergent points of view are defended fervently, volubly
and often raucously by their respective proponents. While
Roland
Barthes denies that authors exist as anything more than scriptors and
Calvin Brown argued that what ordinary folk take to be Walt Whitmans
passionate eulogy of Abraham Lincoln in When Lilacs Last in the
Dooryard Bloomd is not about Lincoln at all, 7 other no less erudite
scholars produce what seems to be convincing evidence that an authors
choice and arrangement of words reflect that
authors lifelong
in Goethes life and letters by studying the contextual placing of the word
Wanderer throughout the course of Goethes life from the time that he,
as a young man, declared that Shakespeare was the greatest of all
wanderers until the penning of his final work, which closes with Fausts
7 Calvin S. Brown, "The Musical Development of Symbols: Whitman," Music
artist during his life and his concern with the transition from time to
eternity, all of which illumines the four-fold unity which inheres in
Dantes model for interpreting literary works. Why should we dwell only
on what we glean at the literal level of Brownings The Pied Piper of
Hamelin and of a simple and enchanting poem such as Wordsworths I
wandered lonely as a cloud? Alternatively, why should we shy away from
poems that evince no plain narrative such as Dylan Thomass Altarwise
by Owl-Light at the other end of the scale. Let nothing prevent us from
examining poems that could beguile with their simplicity or deter us by
their daunting obscurity, for all of these will yield their secrets if
approached with a well-founded understanding of poetic language, which
is universal.