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For the record: Rewriting Virgil in the Commedia
Studies in the Literary Imagination, Spring 2003 by Hawkins, Peter S
Yet even as we are invited to recall (and admire) the tale that Virgil told in Aeneid 3, we are inevitably led to contrast it with what Dante is doing in Inferno 13-and to measure the distance Dante has traveled in his account. The broken bough, in other words, is an invitation to assess the Commedia's revision of Virgil's rima. To begin with, Dante has intensified the whole element of wonder that dominates in both: the branches that bleed are not trees growing out of a blood-soaked gravesite but the actual extensions of a soul-his arms and legs, so to speak. Nor does the outraged voice rise out of a tomb at some remove from Dante's touch: "Why do you break me...? Why do you tear me?" articulates the pained outrage of one who is being literally dismembered, twig by twig.
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Furthermore, the scope of Dante's retelling is so much larger than the elegant, elegiac encounter Virgil describes. The function of Polydorus in Aeneid 3 is to extend our sympathy for innocent Trojans, to provide another instance when Aeneas unknowingly causes suffering to another person, to offer a general reflection on human greed and the horror of sacrilege, and to play the expedient function of getting Aeneas and his people away from an inhospitable landscape not meant to be their homeland. The meeting with Pier delle Vigne, by contrast, is not only a good deal longer but also far more complex. It gives us not a conversation between two heroes but an encounter of the living with one of the damned, whose convoluted language could not be more different from the straightforward, poignant exchange of Aeneid 3.16 Contrast, for instance, Polydorus's straightforward account of his death with the labyrinthine ways (and tortured syntax) of Pier's recollections of his end:
My mind, in scornful temper, thinking by dying to escape from scorn, made me unjust against my just self.
Pier's speech reflects the maze of his psyche and the machinations of his politics, his careful locking and unlocking of his emperor's heart (serrando e disserrando; v. 60). Whereas the fantastical element of Polydorus's burial and "outgrowth" seems to serve no purpose other than to create an atmosphere of mystery and magic, Pier's incarceration within a tree is an expression of his contrapasso, the process by which the punishment of the damned (in this case, a suicide's severing of body from soul) at once reflects and punishes his sin. Thus, when at Virgil's behest Dante tears twig from stalk, he does more than initiate a conversation with the dead: he mimes the rupture of self from self that represents the sinner's transgression. In addition to the elaborated moral "ramification" of Dante's treeman, there is also a strong theological dimension to the episode that sets the encounter with Pier apart from anything we find in Virgil. Instead of the transmigration of souls revealed by Anchises in Aeneid 6, we get Dante's Christian emphasis on a definitive mortal life as the gateway to eternity, to a divine judgment that forever confirms a soul's dying choice. Pier alludes to the Final judgment when the general resurrection of the dead leads to a reunion of body and soul for everyone except the suicides:
