A scar is connective tissue. Odysseus’s scar is the connection between two stories, widely separated in time: a battered traveller’s return, and a boy on a boar hunt. Two apparently distant series are stitched together by a common element. Euryclea draws breath in surprise, and Odysseus’s foot drops into the bowl.
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A cut separates. Dante and Virgil are interrupted by the voice of Farinata; Farinata is interrupted by Cavalcante. There are two narrative patterns in the Divine Comedy: the grand progression of the soul and, peppered throughout that, the interruptions which cut in, clamouring to be heard. |
"O Tosco ... piacciati di restare in questo loco": stop, Tuscan, stay a while, listen to my story. |
This is not paratactic, says Auerbach. It is not a lateral juxtaposition, a wandering away and back, but something which rises from the depths and overwhelms (178). What ties it all together--and all the more so for the dramatic severity of these cuts, these "undisguised incursions into the realm of a real life neither selected nor preordained by aesthetic criteria" (190) --is the figural: the stories all these interruptions tell are ultimately the same one, once seen from this impossible position beyond and after all stories. Now (which is to say beyond all nows), as Dante is wandering with Virgil, all stories have received their final retrospective meaning, the one meaning they will have had all along, and for most of them without knowing.
If the scar is contingent--an accident, unrepeatable--then what stitches everything together in Dante, and totally fills the universe, is that not yet, at the impossible moment of its final arrival and completion. We are wandering by these tombs of heretics and atheists, out of which flames and voices emerge, but we are already, at this moment, climbing up the flanks of Satan, talking with the toilers up Mount Purgatory, emerging into the Garden, and speaking with Beatrice in Paradise.
