Narrative Strategies for Participation in Dante's <i>Divine Comedy</i>

At the 2023 International Seminar on Critical Approaches to Dante, a team of University of Toronto researchers unveiled a virtual-reality rendering of the first two cantos of Dante's Commedia. Part of an exhibition on Dante and emotions, the VR experiment aimed to immerse users in the affective experiences of Inferno 1–2. Navigating the disorienting selva oscura and the liberating appearance of Virgil, participants were invited to feel for themselves the distress, fear, hope, and joy of the poem's prologue.An innovative new study suggests that such embodied emotional responses are already embedded in the poem's narrative. In Narrative Strategies for Participation in Dante's Divine Comedy, Katherine Powlesland resolves to uncover how Dante's Commedia systematically invites readers into interactive engagement with its fictional worlds. She identifies narrative techniques that engender “first-person participation,” in which readers are encouraged to read their own “io” into the text. In a participatory mode, the readers draw out their own “enactive, or neurally embodied, imaginative elaboration” of meaning (153). Compellingly, Powlesland turns to two fields that foreground embodiment to illuminate such narrative strategies: cognitive science and video game theory. Powlesland's analysis adopts the frame of “presence,” which she differentiates from immersive experiences of reading. “Immersion,” she explains, “is a subjective feeling of deep absorption that need not involve the sensorimotor system, but instead can be triggered by a desire to know an outcome” (16; emphasis in original). Presence, by contrast, is grounded in the body, replicating experiential phenomena in virtual spaces.Following a preliminary chapter on embodiment in medieval narratives and pre-Cartesian theories of mind, Powlesland distinguishes three modes of presence that Dante's Commedia invites: spatial presence, social presence, and self-presence. Chapter 2, “Spatial Presence,” discusses the ways the text produces a heightened sense of “being there.” By contrast with literary setting, which provides visual and orientational data that enable readers to locate themselves on a fictional map, spatial presence relies on experiential data to simulate embodied presence in fictional worlds. As evidence, Powlesland turns to the flight on Geryon's back: the scene is, no doubt, immersive as it produces suspense and mystery. But Powlesland argues that the passage also produces presence, by its wealth of cues related to motion, vection, proprioception, and visceral response, relative to its sparse visual data. She compares this somatosensory response to the “transfer of bodily sensations from avatar to player” triggered in immersive gaming.Powlesland develops this argument in chapter 3, “Social Presence.” Here, she details strategies that give readers the illusion of participating in realistic social interaction with the characters of Dante's fictional worlds. Borrowing Bolens's theory of kinesthetic empathy and building on Webb's work on gesture, Powlesland suggests that the Commedia includes textual cues that allow the reader to reproduce the pilgrim's experiences for herself, imaginatively recreating (and thus experiencing) the pilgrim's affective states. The Commedia—unlike the Aeneid, she argues—invites the reader to model both inner and outer states, drawing on personal association, memory, and empathy to reenact the experiences of pilgrim, penitents, and blessed.The longest chapter, “Self-Presence,” argues that the poem “actively seeks to make the mental model of the narrated journey particularly personal to the individual reader” through narrative devices that invite an illusion of self-presence (103). She differentiates self-presence from a feeling of identification with a protagonist; here, multiple voices forestall simple identification and instead consistently invite the readers to perceive themselves as looking, hearing, feeling, remembering, and thinking on their own. Powlesland enumerates several of these narrative devices: shifts in focal view (pilgrim, poet, omniscient narrator, etc.); narration through mobile camera view (i.e., the reader's perceived ability to turn and look around a space); direct addresses; and narrative gaps, particularly similes and ellipses. Following recent work in cognitive literary studies, she argues that such devices collectively constitute a training mechanism that purposefully disrupts immersion to encourage mental modelling. Powlesland—somewhat arbitrarily, I find—limits the number of narrative training exercises to nine, progressing from visualization to enactive imagination. The rigid number overcomplicates the argument, when one could well see other narrative instances (e.g., numerous similes; recognition scenes; allegorical cruxes; the visibile parlare) as part of a continuum of training exercises throughout the poem, a claim Powlesland asserts convincingly elsewhere in the book.By way of conclusion, the final chapter turns to what Powlesland terms “First-Person Participation.” The readers interested in understanding the core of her argument would do well to spend time with these eight concise and well-crafted pages. In them, she highlights the role of the readers’ “io” in their progression through the narrative, often joined with the pilgrim's, but occasionally—jarringly—divorced from it. Throughout the book, Powlesland concedes that not all readers will experience the poem's participatory power. The text “offers” and “invites,” and even the most “responsive” or “sensitive” readers must hone their ability to elaborate the data (68). The author is also careful to point out that readers will not always bring their full attention to the poem's presence effects. This is not a necessary mode of reading, but a “complementary” one (153). The payoff of such an attentive participatory reading is great, “yielding a powerful affective residue and a retrospective sense of some degree of personal transformation” (153). Generally, such a “personal transformation” remains unqualified, with only an oblique reference to a “desire for the divine” (156). Powlesland's reader is left to wonder whether first-person participation might lead to unanticipated outcomes. Can readers be considered free, genuine participants in meaning-making if the poem drives toward one single, unified truth, which is God? Regardless of the answer, the conclusion gestures at a suggestive accounting for the Commedia's perennial newness.Powlesland's study offers an original approach to some of the most well-worn threads of investigation in Dante criticism. Revisiting the last century of Anglophone criticism's most essential narratological puzzles, Powlesland presents a fresh perspective, one that reinvests the body with its critical role in reading, and that draws on current research in cognitive science and video game theory to complement rigorous analysis of the poem's narrative structure.

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