William C. Maisch
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Narrative Agents of the Vita
nuova and Their Awareness of the Issues of
"Reading"
In reading Dante's Commedia, critics have paid much
attention to the functions of voice and narrative agents ญญ
primarily, the poet and the pilgrim. Somewhat surprisingly,
however, similar approaches have not been applied to analogous
issues in the Vita nuova. The libello, in fact,
offers extremely fertile ground for such critical readings since
the text's complexity is doubled by the presence of two distinct
narrative levels: prose and poetry.1 Corresponding to
these two narrative levels, two voices or narrators, address the
reader: the poet and the prose writer. The two narrators also
serve as the Vita nuova's predominant focalizers. The
text, in fact, presents a world seen primarily through the eyes
of its two narrators although secondary characters occasionally
offer readers opportunities to shift their perspective on the
same world through their direct discourse. Furthermore, an
analysis of the narrating and focalizing in the Vita nuova
will alert us to the text's treatment of the problems involved in
the process of reading in general: namely, interpreting,
hypothesizing, constructing meaning, what Wolfgang Iser has
called the act of consistency-building.2
The issue of reading not only informs how the prose and
poet narrators function in relation to each other but also sheds
light on three traditionally enigmatic and seemingly unrelated
issues: 1) the young poet's motivation to write; 2) the prose
narrator's addresses to the reader on the issue of reading,
including the divisioni; and, 3) the notable vagueness of
descriptive details throughout the text. I feel that these three
problematic aspects of the Vita nuova are central to the
text's presentation of the reading process.
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See the entire article: "The Narrative Agents of the Vita
Nuova and Their Awareness of the Issues of "Reading."
in Romance Language Annual 3 (1994): 234-38.