The Chronotope of the Encounter of Nizāmī’s and Dante’s Walking Heroes: The Strength of Human Reality in the Divine Order

This article intends to examine and compare some examples of representation of the ‘chronotope of the encounter’ (Mikhail Bakhtin) in Nizāmī’s Iskandar Nāma and Dante’s Divina Commedia. In both works, the protagonist is a hero on a journey, a hero who walks and meets many people, whose stories he listens to, and with whom he enters into dialogical relations that vary according to the situation. We will try to see how the realistic description of these encounters relates to the presence of supernatural elements within the narrated story and to the divine and universal perspective on which the design of the two works is based. In both poets, the force of human reality embodied in the depicted settings, events, and characters tends to press against the didactic, allegorical, and theological framework. On the one hand, as Erich Auerbach writes, ‘Dante’s work made man’s Christian-figural being a reality, and destroyed it in the very process of realizing it. The tremendous pattern was broken by the overwhelming power of the imagery it had to contain.’ On the other hand, Nizāmī offers us a perspective delimiting ‘a sphere and an autonomy for human knowledge’, recognizing its ‘intrinsic value’, and affirming a ‘positive humanity rooted in the experience of the world …, tending towards the analysis of the concreteness and the active intervention’ (Carlo Saccone)