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Modern Italy
Journal of Modern Italian Studies
RIVISTA DI STUDI ITALIANI
Anno XVII , n° 1, Giugno 1999 ( Contributi ) pag. 112-129
THE DIVINA COMMEDIA
AND THE RHETORIC OF MEMORY
JEROME MAZZARO
State University of New York at Buffalo,
Buffalo, N. Y.
Readers of the Divina Commedia are accustomed to interpreting its opening tercet autobiographically and figuratively. "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita" is seen as the midpoint in the poet's life - 35 years of age - calculated from the biblical "seventy years" (Psalms 89[90]:10) and affirmed in the Convivio (Conv. IV,
xxiii, 9). It is the "noontime" when Hezekiah's psalm says that he will "go to the gates of Hell" (Isaiah 38:10). The "selva oscura" of line 2 is seen as part of the vision which the poet is about to recount and linked by commentators to the Aeneid, Bernard Silvestris, and Saint Augustine. Both statements occur in an evolving terza rima which will aid memory in its ordering and retention through meter and rhyme and in an evolving structure whose numerical cantos and canticles are intended through sympathetic vibration to convey Christ's earthly life, the Trinity, and Perfection. Memory (la mente) is herself invoked in Canto II of the Inferno almost immediately on the invocation of the Muses (Inf. II, 7-8), and it may not be accidental that in De memoria et reminiscia Aristotle observes that "in general [...] the middle point [...]
is a good mnemonic starting point" (De mem. 452a); or that in De oratore Cicero uses "silva" to convey "a mass of unrelated and disordered material," indicative of an initial directionlessness (De orat.
III, xxvi, 103 and III, xxx, 118) (Dante's smarrita!); or that in Institutio oratoria Quintilian proposes for an acceptable artificial memory structure "a long journey or going through a city" (in itinere longo et urbium ambitu - Inst. or. IX, ii, 21) (Dante's cammin?)
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