The project of a vertical reading of Dante suggests a ‘speculative’ – or all at once – grasp of the themes of the Commedia, as opposed to an horizontal running-through its various successive narratives, rhetorical appeals and snatches of dialectic. But if one were seeking a complete reading, one would need to combine a straight read-through with an horizontal succession of the parallel vertical readings.

In order to try to arrive at this combination in microcosm, I will read the three 31s in chronological succession, but I will try to note the ways in which the vertical reading speculatively undercuts this. I will argue that this undercutting seems to require a problematization of the apparent tale of a journey from darkness to light. The reader seems to travel from below to above, but in another and specifically Christological sense, below turns out to be above, and above below. Therefore, the reader is implicitly invited not just to see herself as part of the receptive rose (Par. xxxi. 1, 10, 16-8), but also of the company of seraphic bees who plunge downwards into the rose’s heart (Par., xxxi. 7). For to travel towards the divine viewpoint turns out to have been to share in it secretly from the outset. And since this is the viewpoint of a creative God, His gaze paradoxically looks downward and outward from Himself, by force of his nature as love.

This substantive truth of the poem is echoed in formal and literary terms. The poem seems more to be anaphorically resumed than forgotten, as it advances towards its conclusion, like the ‘positive remembrance’ involved in drinking the waters of Eunoe (Purg., xxxi. 92). Unlike a mere fiction, composed of surrogate signs, it does not dissolve upon completion, because it is ‘about itself’, in a stronger than the usual postmodern sense of fiction understood formalistically. It is about itself because it invokes by imaginative means what Dante held to be truths, rather as Plato refers to the city of the Laws as the ‘true tragedy’, because it does not represent the high realities, but lives them out, providing a context for their unfolding. In this way, the Commedia is closer to liturgy than it is to literature, as it inhabits what it is about. Indeed, Giorgio Agamben, in his short book Ninfe, places Dante just before the invention of ‘literature’, and Boccaccio just after. This, he argues, is because the imagination, for Dante, was not yet understood as primarily a portal between the real and the fantastic, but rather, between the corporeal and the intellectual, within a world-view that saw the intellectual as raising things into a higher reality, and as bringing us closer to the realm of really existing intellectual beings, the angels and God. Similarly, at a lower level, the imagination starts the work of making things more real, and offers access to a realm of strange beings – gods, monsters, nymphs – in some degree or other real. If, indeed, the imagination misleads us, then this is somewhat in the sense of conveying us into a reallymonstrous sphere, a true tragedy, as opposed to one of benign, pastoral enchantment.