John Freccero - David Quint, Yale University

This reflection was originally presented as a talk during an online tribute to Robert Hollander (1933-2021) and John Freccero (1931-2021) presented by the Dante Society of America following its 140th annual meeting on May 7, 2022. For more information about the tribute, including a videorecording and links to the remarks given by other presenters, please see "Quel Savio Gentil: Remembering our Teachers," posted under the "Pedagogy" section of Dante Notes.

I have been asked to talk about the teaching of John Freccero, but I also want to say something about Robert Hollander, who was my colleague at Princeton for fifteen years. I didn’t take part in his celebrated Dante course, but we taught together in a year-long Great Books course that Bob designed – and superbly designed at that. Bob loved to talk about literature. He treated me as an equal when I was still a raw junior professor and he and I discussed back and forth the books on that syllabus. My own books on Montaigne and Cervantes owe a large debt to that course and to those conversations. I add that Bob batted behind me on our softball team, and was almost always good for a sharp single or double to right field.

It is hard to talk about the teaching of a professor as charismatic as John Freccero. As was the case with many of my fellow students, his course on the Divine Comedy was life-changing for me. It made me want to become a teacher and student of literature. John made it both intellectually vital and sexy to read Dante.

John came to Yale in the fall of 1969.  The university was in a golden age, the English Department in particular: I’ll just mention William Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks, Maynard Mack, Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, Thomas Greene. Perhaps slightly defensively, John was not going to be impressed. He had, after all, come from the Johns Hopkins of Leo Spitzer, Don Cameron Allen, Earl Wasserman, Charles Singleton. That was a home of deep scholarship in romance philology and the history of ideas. He let me know that the New Criticism which Yale was teaching me was unhistorical and held a whiff of right-wing conservatism. I duly reported this bombshell about the New Critics to my terrific English professor Michael O’Loughlin, who slightly raised his eyebrow. This was the late 1960s, and in the spring Yale would be on strike over the Bobby Seale trial. John organized a small group of Yale students to distribute in New Haven’s Italo-American neighborhoods a leaflet that compared Bobby Seale to Sacco and Vanzetti; that bit of community organizing did not get very far, but we didn’t get beaten up.

John was indebted himself to the pervasive New Criticism and its insistence on close reading and the relationship of poetic form to meaning, and to its delight in ambiguity. It helped to make his reading of the Commedia less doctrinaire. Nor did he offer a lot of political readings of the poem, I think, partly because Dante’s local politics can be unappetizing. But his own insistence on the long-term] intellectual history that underlies the imagery and the very metaphors of the Commedia came as a breath of fresh air into Yale’s critical environment.  He also, quite consciously, brought a grand tradition of Catholic scholarship and thought into Yale’s WASP intellectual world. (More of this below.) John practiced a highly sophisticated form of Quellenforschung, unpacking not just a model or source for a Dantean passage or allusion, but the long history of thought that the model brought with it. And he would – and I think this was his greatest gift as an interpreter and teacher – spell out the human logic, the meaning for us as readers in the present – of those sometimes arcane intellectual and theological traditions. To take a celebrated, not so arcane instance. John pointed out how the moment of Virgil’s disappearance from the Commedia in Purgatorio 30 is accompanied by citations of Virgil’s poetry in ever more distanced forms, first direct Latin quotation, “Manibus o date lilia plenis,” the lament for Marcellus, then Italian translation, “conosco i segni dell’antica fiamma” of Dido’s awakening love for Aeneas, then the still fainter recollection of Orpheus’s threefold repetition of Eurydice’s name in Virgil’s Fourth Georgic in the naming of “Virgilio” in three successive verses of a terzina. Virgil fades away. The bravura critical detection of Dante’s bravura effect, already leaving us electrified, did not stop there, as John went on to explain how the three passages also stood for the negativity of Virgil’s poetry that the Commedia pretends to overcome, the failure in the face of death in the case of Marcellus, the failure of love in the story of Dido, the failure of poetry itself in Orpheus’s fate. John’s readings of the Commedia were less interested, I think, in spelling out the poem’s Christian answers than to showing us the human problems and quandaries to which they are addressed. These resonant readings were further enriched by his demonstrations of analogies in other literary and filmic works: his invocation of how African-American spirituals reworked the same Biblical tropes on which Dante depends – who’s that coming dressed in white, must be the children of the Israelites, who’s that coming dressed in red, must be the people whom Moses led, who’s that coming dressed in black, must be the hypocrites turning back. (John almost certainly got this from the Peter, Paul, and Mary version of “Go tell it on the mountain.”) Thus the three colors of Satan’s heads show the process of his fall from grace. He invoked the Jordan imagery behind both the angelic boat of Purgatorio 2 and Little Eliza crossing the ice floes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the different Jordan imagery that turns the end of La Dolce Vita, where Marcello cannot hear or reach the adolescent Paola, into a version of Dante’s inability to reach across Lethe to Matelda in Purgatorio 28.

In the fall of 1971, Paul de Man came to Yale.  John joined the discussion around deconstruction, although his texts of choice were St. Augustine’s De Trinitate and the sign theory of Charles Sanders Peirce. He wanted to know what deconstruction could offer to the reading of Dante. Nonetheless it was through John’s teaching that most of the Yale graduate students around me were able to understand what Derrida and de Man were up to. He above all, I want also to mention Robert Durling and Eugenio Donato, brought not only Dante, but also Italian studies into dialogue with literary theory – out of Italian’s provincial corner – and into a larger conversation across literature and philosophy. John was already equipped to do so because of his engagement with a philosophically informed Catholic tradition, largely French, concerned with the Bible and the church fathers –I am thinking of Pierre Courcelle, Jean Daniélou, and Henri de Lubac, all three of whom turned theology into a kind of poetry– and also with Georges Poulet, Kenneth Burke, and very importantly for John because of their close friendship, René Girard. These were not names to be conjured with at Yale until John made them our essential reading.

So, what was the classroom experience like, and what kind of Dante did we receive? We watched a brilliant, deeply learned critical mind, witty, articulate and, above all, crystal clear, take on one of the greatest works of world literature. He would exhaustively read an individual canto of the Commedia and connect it both to real-life issues, to problems of literary form, to vast intellectual traditions and contexts. These were performances, carefully crafted, jokes strewn in place, carried out from memory, polished and repeated from year to year, that seemed to be spontaneous: we were watching a mind at work. We were invited into John’s thinking as he worked out what would be classic articles on the Medusa episode of Inferno 9 – and it was incidentally there that we got the point of de Man’s rhetoric of temporality essay – and on the tragedy of Ugolino. So we felt we were inside Vulcan’s forge. John insisted on the autobiographical model for the Commedia of Augustine’s Confessions. Perhaps in reaction to his own early education and its insistence on Thomism, John recovered and emphasized the medieval Platonic tradition, particularly Calcidius’s translation of the Timaeus. Millicent Marcus recalls to me John’s profession of astonishment that none of us knew who the Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite was, and sent us off to read him. (I seem to have tried something like this to my own graduate students, who later made fun of me about the Pseudo-Dionysius.) He drew invaluable diagrams on the blackboard: on the shape of Aristotelian soul, on the fourfold levels of Biblical allegory. He charted and explained ancient and medieval geometry and astronomy. He was especially proud of his essay on “Dante’s Pilgrim in a Gyre,” because it was voted their favorite literary essay by students at MIT.

The playful sense of humor and quickness of wit were wonderful, too. One graduate student, struggling with the Sayers translation of Dante’s neologism, “incielare” (Par. 3.97), exclaimed, “Oh en-sky, en-sky. I couldn’t figure it out.  I kept reading enskee.” John, without missing a beat: “Ah yes: the Blessed Insky, ninth-century Polish saint.” Maybe you had to be there, but these moments have a way of sticking to one, at least to me.

I am going to conclude what is already a long reminiscence by reading to you my class notes from 1969 to his first class on the Commedia.  I have to say I was a good note taker.

Commedia: divine is 16th century
Begins with conversion, glance at sun – if this were Neoplatonism the poem would end – conversion does not succeed.
Nostra vita  mi ritrovai  maximal difference bween common humanity and I alone
The two trajectories will come together
The all-knowing authorial voice and straight-man personage must also come together
How the character becomes the author.
To read one must have read   The ending gives meaning – like a sentence
11th book of Confessions push metaphor to autobiography in retrospect 
end is moment of death
EVERY AUTOBIOGRAPHY MUST BE COMPLETE, MUST BE EPITAPH -- central paradox
Drowning man life flashes before the eyes, but we know this because some drowning men survive, look at image of swimmer
Ritrovare to retrieve from drowning
Christian autobiograpy is the record of a conversion – thus radical discontinuity

Why write it? To tell of the good, apologetic, to bear witness
[7th book of Confessions deals with Augustine’s attempts at Plotinian ecstasy, an intellectual truth ¬ ends in failure
Augustine distinguishes between seeing light (guardai in alto) and reaching it (Moses on Mt. Tabor)]
This is a Pauline doctrine – man as fallen being. The good that I would I do not do
Persona body
Insistence on presence of the body
Cosi l’animo mio – mind spirit in secular intellectual sense
Posato’l corpo lasso
Drag of body, problem of incarnation   differs from the common medieval vision poem, flight of disembodied mind, problem of the so-called “allegorical structure” of cantos 1 and 2. This is no tired swimmer, this is a shipwreck
Pelago passo (Exodus) how can a pelago be a passo?
But if no man ever left alive, he has survived something no one else has ever done, insistence on uniqueness, the exception
Pie’ fermo, again Augustine VII see Freccero’s article
Ed ecco – ed ecce – now projection into external world of internal states of contemplation
Hope gets him by leopard and lion Easter, Creation, Annunciation, March 25th first day of Florentine calendar.
But he can’t get by the wolf, you can get by without being a murderer or traitor, or being gratuitously violent, but the common sins to all stop him
Pilgrim is at position of minus one: 
Plato’s cave can only to be found after hell has been traversed, to strip away illusions of idea of negative transcendence, (that is, that you can cancel out instead of overcoming by some addition, by bringing something more)
Piaggia water imagery continues
Sole tace
Lungo silenzio...  pareva fioco
Superbo Ilion umile Italia (also a quotation from Virgil umilis Italia low lying)
Virgil writing truth without knowing it. Dante’s re-reading, Ilion as a happy fall, felix culpa, allowing a restoration, redemptive act in History
The greyhound dark prophecy of Inferno grows clearer until Cacciaguida
Virgil sua citta quello imperador, Rome, the political interpretatio 
Freccero: not political in modern terms, but can this deny the political thrust, for isn’t sin the root of Florentine troubles?

Thank you and thank you, John.