Commentary Purg IV 98-99

The voice that breaks into what has by now become, for most readers, a rather labored and even fussily academic discussion will turn out to be that of Belacqua.  Named only at verse 123, he was a 'Florentine, contemporary of Dante, said by the old commentators to have been a musical instrument-maker; modern research has suggested his identification with one Duccio di Bonavia' (Belacqua).  According to Debenedetti (Debe.1906.1), Belacqua was dead before March 1302 but still alive in 1299.  In other words, like Casella, he would seem to have been, in Dante's mind, a recent arrival.

      His ironic and witty response to the conversation he has overheard immediately wins the reader's affection.  (But, for a denial that this speech of Belacqua's is in fact ironic, see Petrocchi [Petr.1969.1], pp. 270-71.)  For a moment we feel drawn out of the moralizing concerns and serious tones of the two poets.  Manica (Mani.2000.1), p. 35, calls attention to the great importance of Dante's Belacqua to Samuel Beckett's fiction.  According to him, Belacqua becomes a contemporary myth of irony rather than a depiction of the loss of will; however, he may not sense how much of the Beckettian view of Belacqua is already present in Dante.  Much of Beckett's work is a kind of rewriting of the Dantean universe from the point of view of Belacqua alone, a universe of waiting, boredom, question, and frustration, as in the early short story 'Dante and the Lobster' and certainly including the rock-snuggled hoboes of Waiting for Godot.  For at least a moment in this extraordinary exchange, Dante's Belacqua seems to control the situation.  Of course he will have to be swept aside in the name of progress toward a Christian goal.  But it is astounding (and heartwarming) to see how greatly Dante empathized with this character we like to imagine as being so antipathetic to him.

      Belacqua's first word, 'perhaps,' immediately reveals his character as being indecisive, at least where goals or noble purposes are concerned; what follows shows his wit, deftly puncturing the balloon of Dantean eagerness (for he is a man who longs to do some serious sitting -- see verse [Purg IV 52], where he accomplishes that goal).  As we shall see, Dante will fight back, and we will then have a scene that is reminiscent of the back-and-forth between Farinata and Dante in Inferno X.