I suppose this should not have taken me quite so aback as it did, because the student who presented me with this revelation was in my World Literature I survey. We read selections from the Hebrew Bible, written by writers claimed to have been divinely inspired; we also read selections from the Qur’an, according to the book itself dictated by Allah to Mohammed. So perhaps my student felt it necessary to make a distinction between those texts written by (or dictated or revealed to) entities who did not actually have a “lifetime,” and those written by flesh-and-blood creatures while they still walked the earth.
Dante’s masterpiece describes an extensive journey the narrator/poet makes through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise in the company of the Roman poet Virgil. Where did he get the ideas he portrays by way of this allegorical trek? He doesn’t say: unlike Coleridge explaining “Kublai Khan,” he makes no claims of an interrupted opium dream; unlike Julian of Norwich, he doesn’t attribute his interpretation of God’s will to visits from Jesus during an illness; unlike John Bunyan, he doesn’t even say the story came to him in a regular dream. Simply, the narrator finds himself midway on the road of life, lost in a gloomy wood; Virgil comes along, and they go on their adventure. Out-of-body experience?
Wherever he got his ideas, we can be pretty sure Dante wrote them down while still alive.
I probably asked for this. When they write commentaries on passages from assigned readings in their Journals, my students are required to note title, author, culture, and when written. This student doesn’t seem to have spent any time with the textbook’s introductory materials at all. Culture from which this text comes? He says Roman. Okay, now, Virgil was in fact Roman. And Dante lived in Italy. But Dante was a Florentine, not a Roman; and he certainly did not live during the Roman Empire, which is what we generally mean when we refer to the Roman culture. Given this sketchy notion of “where,” why should I have been surprised by a sketchy notion of “when”? Why look up the date? In fact The Comedy was written during his political exile from Florence; by 1317 “Inferno” had been published. When the other pieces of the poem were written is uncertain, but “Paradiso” was probably published after his death in 1321 at age 56.
Perhaps my student actually did take a look at the introduction and got the notion that Dante did some of his writing after death too. But if so, he confidently asserts that The Divine Comedy was not among those writings.
And I have to say I’m glad. The idea of literature coming to us from beyond the grave is unsettling, to say the least.
But since we’re fairly certain that every writer who wrote did so while alive (even those who were writing from spiritual direction), we generally don’t take the time to note the fact. My student’s taking the trouble to do so suggests that he felt it worthy of remark. That’s almost as unsettling as ghostly composition—composing while decomposing, as it were…
June 2nd, 2013 at 7:20 pm
Well, not to set off a raging controversy or anything, but there is the
alleged composition of several extremely good plays by the Earl of Oxford that through textual evidence can be shown to have been written after his
death. But perhaps only aristocrats can pull off that maneuver.
June 2nd, 2013 at 7:42 pm
Ah, yes, the multigifted Earl. But Wow, I guess that DOES explain how he could have written the plays!
June 2nd, 2013 at 7:22 pm
On a more work-a-day front, when we lived in a doorman building in
New York City, with a doorman of remarkable childlike simplicity, he told me, very proudly, of the time he had seen Gary Cooper on the street. “That’s when he was still alive.”
June 2nd, 2013 at 7:43 pm
I wonder if he’s related to my student! Or maybe he just wanted to reassure you that he didn’t permit any ectoplasm to stroll past your building….
June 2nd, 2013 at 7:24 pm
And, finally, thank you for reminding me. I am writing as fast as I can.
“And at my back I always hear/Time’s winged chariot drawing near.”
June 2nd, 2013 at 7:43 pm
That’s why these errors are so distracting. They open the floodgates of association….
June 2nd, 2013 at 7:55 pm
Maybe he used an imprecise preposition. He might have meant “throughout.” That would have been somewhat less obnoxious.
June 2nd, 2013 at 8:08 pm
Exactly how old is the use of the Ouija board? (Talk about time consuming – it must have taken forever to get it letter by letter?)
June 2nd, 2013 at 10:46 pm
Now, that’s a great question. Wikipedia says the Ouija Board was patented in 1890, too late for Dante…BUT also says planchette writing as a way of contacting the dead was practiced in China as early as 1100 (they seem to start everything!). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouija
June 2nd, 2013 at 10:49 pm
Get this! (also from Wikipedia, oh how irritated I get with myself for going there first…) “Emily Grant Hutchings claimed that her 1917 novel Jap Herron: A Novel Written from the Ouija Board was dictated by Mark Twain’s spirit through the use of a Ouija board after his death.” So I guess Twain could write things after his lifetime.
June 3rd, 2013 at 6:39 pm
Ah, just one more. Dear Oscar Levant once said, “Calvin Coolidge? I was
still alive when he was President.”
June 4th, 2013 at 3:07 pm
It’s not about an author, but wasn’t there a woman who claimed Mozart’s ghost was dictating music to her? As far as I remember she even wrote the sheet music in Mozart’s handwriting.
June 4th, 2013 at 3:27 pm
That sounds familiar. And of course whom was Yeats’ wife listening to in the other world, when those phases-of-the-moon ideas came to her via automatic writing?
June 5th, 2013 at 5:09 pm
Today, when at least two companies sell after-death management of accounts in social networks, one may wonder if a smart student couldn’t do the same for a famous poet six hundred years ago )
June 5th, 2013 at 6:13 pm
It would stand copyright law on its ear!
June 5th, 2013 at 6:18 pm
Well, thank you for a new idiom — but I believe copyright law today is half-deaf anyway, so one ear out won’t do much harm.
July 9th, 2013 at 1:20 am
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August 31st, 2013 at 8:07 pm
[…] while they are alive. Or perhaps I should say Whitman was not the only poet who wrote while alive: Dante did too, for […]
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