Dante’s Address to the Reader in Face of Derrida’s Critique of Ontology

Abstract

The explicit addresses to the reader in the Divine Comedy comprise an exiguous number of verses in relation to the poem’s total mass and occur only sporadically within its unfolding program. Nevertheless, it is possible to read the whole poem as leveraged from them, as in its entirety a discourse of address, and to hear an implicit address to readers right from the reference to “our life” in the very first line of the work (“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita”). In this sense, as a covert enframement for the poem, the addresses constitute a margin from which the meaning of the whole is called into question: they expressly make it a question for the reader by calling for reinterpretation at a deeper, allegorical level and even opening interpretation in the direction of the reader’s own perspectives and existence. The addresses interrupt the continuity of the narrative and rupture its rhetoric of fiction by staging an encounter with an other, the reader, who is invoked from within the text, even though as standing “really” outside it. And yet, the reader as addressed by the text is not at all but only will have been through the response made possible by the address itself.

Aguzza qui, lettor, ben li occhi al vero, ché’I velo è ora ben tanto sottie, certo che’I trapassar dentro è leggero.

(Purgatorio vii. 19–21)

(Sharpen well, reader, here your eyes to the true, for the veil is now so thin that certainly passing through and within is easy.)