Like Rauschenberg’s Dante drawings, John Kinsella’s Divine Comedy: Journeys through a Regional Geography has firstly had to address the question of its status with regard to ‘the allegorical requirement of a master text.'[ref]John Kinsella, Divine Comedy: Journeys through a Regional Geography (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2008).[/ref] It is a question made increasingly explicit both in the presentation and arrangement of Kinsella’s own text, notably in its various prefaces and, above all, in the titling of its constituent ‘cantos’ and their often direct form of address to passages in Dante (to the extent that many even include as epigraphs quotations from the original Florentine). Reviewers of Kinsella’s Divine Commedy have mostly obliged by picking through their various Dante translations, whether to credit or discredit Kinsella’s re-versioning of it as a (principally allegorical) ‘journey through a regional geography’—it hardly matters which. In the process, the denotative/connotative binary has been allowed to predominate, at the cost of missing what (as in Rauschenberg’s spirit transfers) is fundamentally critical in Kinsella’s work.

Kinsella establishes his own precedents for this—for a critical poetics—in earlier (serial) compositions like the montage-driven Warhol poems and the open-ended Graphology sequence.[ref]See John Kinsella, Poems 1980-1994 (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1997) and Doppler Effect, intro. Marjorie Perloff (Camridge: Salt, 2004).[/ref] The seriality of these works anticipates the formalism of Kinsella’s Divine Comedy, and should alert us to one of the text’s underlying concerns, which is the schematic logic at work in Dante’s Divina Comedia and consequently a logic of schematization in general (exemplified for Kinsella in ‘the obsessive categorizing of modern life’).[ref]John Kinsella, ‘Introduction to Purgatorio,’ Divine Comedy, 5 — subsequent references in-text.[/ref]

At first appearance, Kinsella’s Divine Comedy is a protracted exercise in stanzaic form—the word ‘exercise’ here functioning as it does in Queneau’s Exersises de style, as the application of a programme, in this case permutational or generative, translational and transcriptive. There is something excessive, almost parodic about Kinsella’s formal insistence, which itself echoes the commonplace understanding of the word ‘comedy,’ while also evoking the more archaic sense of recursion and cyclicality (‘experiencing, learning, forgetting and renewal’ [273]), of a repetition compulsion that we find at work throughout Dante, itself echoing the comedic form of cycles and sub-cycles found in the Bible and throughout the canon of ‘Western’ literature since. In turn, Kinsella’s ‘open-form three-line stanzas’ (268) double the canticular, triadic organization of Dante’s text as a whole, of Purgatorio, Paradiso, Inferno. Here, poetic form ‘articulates’ the work’s total structure (to paraphrase film maker Maya Deren), probing the ramifications of trope and schema.

What is ‘open’ about Kinsella’s otherwise rigid stanzaic form is their (the stanzas’) internal organization, which—like Rauschenberg’s drawings—operates on a logic of montage (a three-fold logic by which repetition and juxtaposition open the text to the unpredictable, but also to the unrepeatable, the singular, the unique). Likewise at a schematic level, Kinsella repeats, by re-ordering and displacing, Dante’s threefold organization (the sequence commences with Purgatorio and concludes with Inferno, thus marking a displacement of the usual progression from low to high; fall to redemption, grace, beatitude, and so on). This re-ordering in turn is made to articulate a structural logic: Purgatorio, Pardiso, Inferno ‘feed each other and require each other. They co-exist‘ as ‘states of being’ (267; 272—my italics). Thus Inferno, as Kinsella says, ‘is internal as Purgatorio is externalized internals, and Paradiso: bifurcated transformations and transfigurations that don’t come off’ (267). Kinsella’s topological refiguring of Dante is likened to a Möbius strip ‘where earth, hell and paradise // grow inseparable’ (‘Canto of Starlight,’ 408), whose topos is thus a type of literalised ‘utopia’ or non-place, evocative of Milton’s abyss, and emblematized by ‘the sunless / sunset, the sunless sunrise’ of a habitation displaced into a negative iconographics (‘Second Clockwise Canto of the Möbius Strip, between 30 and 31,’ 380).

Like the damaged landforms of Kinsella’s regional geography, these ‘textual forms’ remain open because they remain metamorphic. Their ‘totalities’ are generative—embodying change—what Krauss calls ‘a matrix of slippage.’ Nothing ever ‘merely repeats.’ Repetition is instead monstrous, just as the Comedia itself is a kind of monstrum (‘everything,’ as Sade says, ‘is paradise in this hell’). Even in Kinsella’s rigid stanzaic form we witness ‘the lost paradise of intactness’ (269), in which the same is already a deviation, a détournement, or (why not?) an enjambment. Every apparent repetition carries within it a whole complex topology or tropology—like a symptom endlessly refiguring itself. Kinsella himself prefers the term ‘distraction’—something which draws away from; bewilders; perplexes. Something in the picture, so to speak, from outside. Something which interferes with what we might call the totality of the field of ‘attention’—and hence, too, of ‘intention.’ We might think of the paradoxical nature of desire—of an aim constantly deviated from its object, whose deviance henceforth becomes its one ‘true’ object.

Just as Rauschenberg’s Dante drawings function together as an ‘image duplicator’ because duplicative of an image-logic that is of itself internally ‘deviated,’ so Kinsella’s Divine Comedy may be thought of as a ‘word duplicator’ in which it is what Jackson Mac Low called ‘the objective hazard’ of language that operates by duplication and contrafaction (see ‘Canto of Imitation [Eighth Circle, Tenth Bolgia, 30]’). Again, we are drawn to the structural inherence of this logic in the apparent ‘master text’—mirrored, so to speak, in the project of correction and redemption at work throughout Dante’s Comedia and in fact constituting its raison d’être. Its obsessive corollary of eternal judgment and inherent culpability (like the threefold Id-Ego-Superego ‘mechanisms of penance’ [4] we find in Freud), points beyond the relentless, willfully insistent vision of transcendence to its Sisyphean reality—underpinned by laws not of redemption but of entropy.[ref]This would be one of the implications of Agamben’s discussion of Dante in ‘The End of the Poem,’ The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) 109—much of which is a meditation on Valéry’s thesis about the co-implication of prosody and semantics, of which Kinella’s text, too, is an ‘illustration.'[/ref]