SOURCE: "Synchronicity: Death and the Vita Nuova," in Writing in Dante's Cult of Truth from Borges to Boccaccio, Duke University Press, 1991, pp. 11-50.

Menocal argues in this excerpt that the Vita Nuova's real subject is Dante's search for a viable poetry and that he ultimately succeeds when he adopts an absolute literalness.

I

The story of the Vita Nuova is deceptively simple. The artist as a very young man falls hopelessly in love with an equally youthful Beatrice, and over a precisely marked period of years—the numbers will all turn out, in retrospect, to have been key markers—he acts out all the conceits of what we have come to call "courtly" love. In this endlessly suffering pursuit, hopeless beyond fulfillment, he sings the anguishes of such love and gives his readers a number of poems that are as lovely hymns to his ancestor troubadours as any...