ABSTRACT
Lyric reflexivity is everywhere indissociable from Dante’s presentation of the Empyrean, since Paradise proper is beyond representation. John of Salisbury and others, relaying Patristic admonishments, had spelled out moral strictures concerning the narcissism inherent in ornately rhetorical and particularly in lyrical language. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde are a beautiful and profound dramatization of the characteristic narcissistic dilemmas of lyric speech in a medieval perspective. All of Paradise is manifest in the verses as a narcissistic self-reflection of divinity in the blessed souls. Dante presents, as one supreme and original instance of lyric, the angelic annunciation of the Incarnation. From God all the way down through the creation, self-reflexivity is highlighted and affirmed as the original mode of being of both Creator and creation. Even more decisively than at the thematic level, self-reflection determines the Paradiso in its linguistic and poetic form.
