CHAPTER 5. Dante and the Poetics of Revelation
I. Introductory: The Coordinates of Divine Vision
The Visit to the World of the Dead as the Origin of Apocalyptic Prophecy
We come to Dante’s Inferno as the culmination of a series of visits to the underworld. Dante’s most direct precedent is Aeneas’s journey to meet his father in Hades, as told by Virgil in Book VI of the Aeneid. Aeneas’s voyage is modeled in turn on Odysseus’s encounter with shades of Hades in Book XI of the Odyssey. The epic quest in each of these models pivots on a visit to the domain of the dead, a discensus ad inferas, as a climactic episode at its center. However, Dante makes this episode the general framework of the whole poem: from beginning to end, Dante’s poem narrates a voyage through the world beyond the grave. In this respect, Dante’s Inferno, and indeed the whole Divine Comedy, is conceived primarily as an expansion of the ancient epic motif of the katabasis or “going down” of the protagonist to the underworld for a revelation of his destiny from beyond the threshold of death. Like Virgil, Dante interprets history prophetically, finding in it the essential pattern of things to come. But this projection now reaches to an eschatological future beyond history altogether—to an uncannily dynamic realization of eternity.
The other world that is visited by Dante asserts itself unequivocally as ultimate reality. It is not just some shadowy world of bloodless phantoms like the shades that approach Odysseus, nor is it vacuous and inane, as are Virgil’s “houses void and empty realms of Dis” (“domos Ditis vacuas et inania regna,” Aeneid VI. 269). Dante’s “other” world shows up as even more vivid than the world of ordinary sense-perception by virtue of a strikingly realistic, indeed surrealistic imagery. Dante heightens the mythological topos of the visit to the underworld that he inherited from Virgil and Homer. He uses it to represent the true and eternal life: the vera vita. Dante’s world of the dead, moreover, is not just one in a series of episodes befalling the protagonist: it is rather the final and definitive experience, the apocalypse that reveals the true meaning of all possible experiences and thereby the meaning of the cosmos as a whole. This is perhaps implicit and incipient in Homer, or at least in Virgil, since the journey to the underworld in each case frames a revelation that illuminates the meaning of everything else and orients the protagonist’s entire subsequent journey through life up to death. But Dante’s other world is more than just the place for a miraculous glimpse into the true meaning of life: it transposes the essence of this life on earth into actual existence in a transcendent dimension.
Of course, Virgil had interpreted the whole of Roman history through the optics of prophecy, but his prophetic history was directly disclosed only at privileged moments within his poem. Dante’s poetic narrative transpires wholly in an eschatological register disclosing the final ends of human life. It aspires to reveal, beyond the limits of history, a full-blown vision of eternity—history as projected into the eternal world that it is taken to prefigure. While at the level of content Dante expands the theme of a visit to the underworld into an entire poem of epic proportions, more deeply, at the level of genre and in terms of its mode, Dante’s whole poem is prophetic in character. In it, history and narrative become themselves prophetic rather than only forming a background or a frame for prophecy.
So the descent to the dominion of the dead—a symbol for the revelation of the ultimate meaning of life—is more than just a thematic thread that runs through each of the works we have examined so far. In Dante it becomes the central axis of a poetic text that is per se religious revelation. Moreover, Dante greatly intensifies self-consciousness of the revelatory function of poetry. His work represents an unprecedentedly powerful reflection on poetry as revelation in the modes of prophecy and apocalyptic, in as much as the customary literary means of poetic expression are now revealed in their intrinsically prophetic and apocalyptic potency.
From the Aeneid, Dante could learn that prophecy reveals not so much fated facts as an order of significance that opens within history and activates a dimension of human freedom. We observed an allegorical dimension in the Aeneid, in which the heroic actions of the past were spoken into the present—so as to impinge on the moment of decision for Virgil’s contemporaries in Augustan Rome. The poem indirectly challenges the Romans to realize a future prefigured by their heroic past, particularly in their founding father, Aeneas. This sort of implicit interpellation mutates to an explicit form of address in Dante’s poem, specifically in its addresses to its readers.
The First-person Protagonist and the Address to the Reader
In general, prophetic discourse is never merely descriptive or predictive; it is always also prescriptive, and as such it is addressed to a public. The hearers or readers of prophecy are involved in a future that is revealed, yes, but revealed as to be achieved by their own efforts. Virgil and his contemporaries, Augustus Caesar foremost among them, who see along with Aeneas the prophetic revelation of the glory that is in store for Rome, are at least subliminally called upon to act worthily of their noble ancestors. Moving beyond this, Dante writes the reader right into the text consciously and explicitly through his use of direct addresses. The poem calls the reader to conversion as a consequence of its eschatological revelations. There is even—in marked contrast to his epic models—a hidden form of address to the audience from the very first line: “In the middle of the way of our life” (“Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita”).
The reader accompanies Dante on his journey through the afterlife, and in a certain sense everything that happens to him is to be realized by his readers in its pertinence to their own lives and in the now of their act of reading. It is their acts of interpretation of themselves as they confront interpretive challenges such as those presented by the poem that will be decisive for the readers’ own lives and even for their afterlives. Sin and salvation in Dante’s afterlife stem from how one interprets oneself, and the reading of the poem can be crucial to determining the outcome of this drama: how we read is, at any rate, symptomatic of how we live and act morally. The poem can thus reveal us to ourselves and can even become instrumental to our salvation through the insight it provokes.
Dante’s prophetic discourse is different from Virgil’s and from his other models, which are principally biblical. In crucial ways, he personalizes prophetic address, dramatizing his own role as first-person prophet-poet addressing himself directly to his reader. Dante’s whole personal experience and history are now vehicles of the divine Word. This is not exactly the direct speech of God such as was conveyed by the biblical prophets: they functioned purportedly as simple mouthpieces, intoning “Thus saith the Lord . . . .” Dante offers rather a personally mediated experience to which poetry, language, culture, and reflection all contribute: his historical baggage and even his personal biases become overt mediators of a revelation of the divine.
The first-person protagonist thus becomes the fulcrum for realizing the poem’s truth in the present of each individual reader’s personal experience. The address to the reader, with its injunction to interpret, extends the exercise in self-reflection from the poet-protagonist to the reader: each is engaged in a realization of revealed religious truth by personal appropriation in terms of their own life and experience. This self-reflective, subjective locus of revelation owes as much to Augustine’s unprecedentedly personal story in the Confessions as to the invention of history as revelation in Virgilian epic. Augustine had fore-grounded reading as the means and medium of a divine revelation understood as an inner illumination in the life of the individual. Dante now addresses himself expressly to the individual reader, who is enjoined to become the living center of a dramatic actualization of his poem’s prophetic truth. The poem’s pretensions and projections become reality in and through the interpretive responses of the reader, whose life becomes potentially a locus for the operation of divine grace.
Dante’s Journey and the Augustinian Itinerary through Self to God
Augustine forms a vital link from the ancient epic, as well as from the Bible, to Dante. The Confessions, too, situate themselves symbolically on the trajectory of a descent to the world of the dead. This happens expressly when Saint Augustine writes “ibam iam ad inferos” (“I was going to hell,” V. ix) to describe his moral disease, the death of his soul (“mors . . . animae meae”). The Confessions adumbrate an existential descent into the depths of Augustine’s own sinful self and into the abysmal heart of a fallen humanity as the precondition and the necessary path of his conversion. This existential descent into the self and its personal hell is dramatized on an epic scale by Dante.
Dante combines classical tradition with Christianity, and Augustine is a major precedent, even though Augustine, in his Confessions, rejected pagan literature and specifically the Aeneid. Augustine guides Dante to a fundamentally Scriptural rather than a classical poetics. Nevertheless, Dante places his emphasis on synthesis rather than on disjunction between classical literary tradition and Christian revelation. We know that Augustine saw Virgil’s fictions as temptations. Pagan literature distracted him from the serious challenges of his own life. The classics and the rhetorical institutions within which they were studied are of this world and, at least at first, an impediment to gaining the next. Given this imposing precedent, it is striking that Dante, in a bold symbolic gesture, should make the pagan author Virgil his guide to salvation specifically in a religious sense. More broadly, he brings biblical and pagan traditions together in his unique creation of a poetic-prophetic vision. He thereby reverses the prejudices and moralizing objections expressed by Augustine and other Church fathers that inhibited full appreciation of pagan literature, the auctores, in the course of a Christian education. Building on revivals of classical literature in humanist schools like Chartres from the 12th century on, Dante envisages a full integration of all human learning in a Christian-prophetic perspective. And yet, notwithstanding this radical revaluation of pagan letters, Dante remains profoundly Augustinian.
An Augustinian itinerary is mapped out from the opening of the Inferno in the “prologue scene.” This scene stages Dante’s failed attempt to scale the mountain mantled by the light of the sun, a natural symbol of divinity, as Dante explains elsewhere (Convivio III. xii. 7). This hill is identified, at least symbolically, with the mountain of Purgatory, at the summit of which lies the Earthly Paradise, the original place of human happiness on earth. But Dante’s attempt to directly ascend the slope proves abortive, and he is constrained to take a detour that leads him all the way to the bottom of the Inferno. This recalls Augustine’s descriptions of his experience of intellectual conversion to the certainty of the Truth, spurred by his reading of “certain books” of Platonist philosophy, and consequently his attempt to ascend directly to the Light in Book VII of the Confessions. His will, nevertheless, remained unable to follow suit by conforming itself to the Good until his complete moral conversion as described at the climax of Book VIII.
Augustine’s account is itself modeled on Saint Paul’s drama of the divided will in Romans 7. At the literal level of the narrative, Dante is in fact impeded in his ascent by the three beasts that emerge to deter him from progressing upwards. The leopard, the lion, and the she-wolf can perhaps be decoded as allegories of envy, pride, and greed (see Inferno VI. 74), or of lust, pride, and avarice, the devastating threesome rehearsed again in XV. 68. Such moral corruptions inhering in Dante’s will prevent him from reaching happiness, even after his intellect has been able clearly to see the way to it. These figures, moreover, exemplify some of the more traditional, didactic features of Dante’s poem that are surpassed as it distinguishes itself from the medieval context of symbolic-allegorical literature by the power of its new idiom of realistic representation.
Dante, like Augustine, then, seems to have experienced, first, a conversion of the intellect on a Neo-Platonic model. This would correspond to the period of his philosophical work, the Convivio, abandoned unfinished, perhaps in view of the new Christian-moral perspective inaugurated by the Commedia. Dante’s flirtation with philosophy as a substitute for authentic Christian salvation would be allegorically encoded into his attempt at the beginning of the Inferno to ascend the hill cloaked in the light of the sun, the planet that “leads men straight along every road” (“pianeta / che mena dritto altrui per ogne calle,” I. 17-18). In fact, Virgil, for whom, as a pagan, direct philosophical ascent to enlightenment would be possible and indeed the right way to go, asks Dante why he is returning to so much suffering rather than simply ascending the delightful mountain (“dilettoso monte”) that is the source of all joy (I. 76-78). He proposes an alternative route only after he sees Dante weeping (“poi che lagrimar mi vide,” I. 92) and evidently understands something about his moral condition.
We learn that Dante had been climbing in a spiral because his “left foot was always the lower” (“’l piè fermo sempre era ’l più basso,” I. 30). This line has been ingeniously elucidated as meaning that the protagonist’s will drags along behind his intellect in the process of conversion. John Freccero shows this by drawing on exegetical literature by the church fathers, including Ambrose (from whom Augustine learned to interpret Scripture spiritually), concerning the two feet—or wings—of the soul, of which one, the will, lags behind the other, namely, reason.
The Platonic dialogues are predicated on the principle that virtue is knowledge, but Dante, like Augustine and Paul before him, discovers that knowing the truth, or seeing the light, is not enough. Indeed in the biblical view, virtue and moral reform are not matters purely of the mind. As Paul avowed, “The good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I practice” (Romans 7: 19). Likewise for Augustine, intellectual illumination by Platonic metaphysics may give certainty about God and his sovereignty, but it does not give him the power to realize the good that he now would do. And Dante similarly finds in Inferno I that he is unable to ascend the mountain, even though he sees the light. This is what forces him to take “another way” (“altro viaggio,” I. 91), passing through all the hazards of Hell. It means going through excruciating moral self-examination by facing up to sin always also in himself, as he views his own woefully fallen humanity mirrored in others at each step of his way. Read in this perspective, the prologue scene to Dante’s epoch-making poem is about the necessity, beyond merely intellectual illumination, of a more thorough-going moral and existential conversion such as Augustine undergoes finally in Book VIII of the Confessions.
Didactic Poem and Summa of Truth
Dante lived from 1265 to 1321 and wrote at the height of the Middle Ages, just after the high-water mark of the Scholastic synthesis, in which the metaphysics of Aristotle were wedded to Christian theology in the doctrine of God as Being (esse) by philosopher-theologians like Albert the Great (1206-80) and Thomas Aquinas (1225-74). It was, moreover, a great age of encyclopedias such as the Speculum maius of Vincent de Beauvais (1190-1264) and the Legenda aurea of Jacopo de Voragine (1230-1298). Somewhat in the image of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, Dante’s Commedia represents a grand synthesis of the knowledge available to his age of culture. From early in antiquity, as we have seen, poetry was often considered to be the original and comprehensive form of knowledge in general, and Dante revives this humanistic ideal and the claim it makes for poetry. Virgil and Beatrice, his guides, are also his teachers on a journey that is always fundamentally a gnoseological journey traversing the whole known world—past, present, and future—as it could be conceived in Dante’s times. The encyclopedic aims of the poem become conspicuous early on, in Limbo, with its extensive, immensely learned catalogue of philosophers and poets, among other great and famous personages (Inferno IV. 70-147).
Homer was esteemed to be the summa of Greek culture and the encyclopedia of all significant knowledge of the world. He was imitated by Virgil, in whom these “epic” ambitions became more self-conscious. Saint Augustine, too, turned his Confessions into a kind of encyclopedia, especially from Book X on. At that point in the aftermath of his conversion story, Augustine begins interrogating Memory as the place where all knowledge is stored. He turns from a personal story of individual redemption to the interpretation of universal philosophical truths and to exegesis of the story of Creation. The Bible, of course, for Dante and his Christian medieval culture is the book of books and the book of the universe. It contains preeminently, as divinely revealed, all that can be learned from any other source. Dante’s work, in its encyclopedic scope, is thus an imitation and dissemination of the Bible.
This means also that the Divine Comedy is a didactic poem in the broadest and deepest sense. Its lesson is the most important one humanly conceivable. “Mark well my words,” it insists, like the bard in Blake’s Milton, for “they are of your eternal salvation.” Indeed, the literal subject of the poem is the afterlife, which consists of souls in Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven all revealed in the eschatological light of their eternal destinations. The knowledge in question is not just a knowledge of facts and culture but, much more vitally, a knowledge by revelation of the ultimate ends of life and history. In this regard, the poem fits into and, moreover, brings to its culmination the tradition of poetry as religious revelation that we have been tracing from Homer and the Bible. Of course, this would not forestall further elaborations of prophetic poetry subsequently by the likes of Milton and Blake.
The Figural Method of Representation
The basic interpretive technique used by Dante to perform this revelation of ultimate, saving truth is a species of allegory known as “figuralism.” This is the key to the poem’s working as a prophetic revelation. Dante represents the souls in the form of bodies and as performing actions that epitomize the sort of action they freely chose to engage in on earth. Their earthly lives in this way serve as “figures” for what each soul has become in eternity. The souls represented as already in the state in which they will remain for eternity are the “fulfillment” of the condition that their earthly lives have prefigured. By this device, the eternal state of souls after death is made poetically palpable and graphic through realistic representation of the fateful moment and decisive act of their mortal existence: this moment figuratively represents their eternal destiny.
In its figural dimension, Dante’s poem is modeled on the Exodus. If this were not already evident from the text itself (especially in Purgatory II. 43, which cites Psalm 113: In exitu Isräel de Aegypto), we could nevertheless infer it from Dante’s discussions of theological allegory in his theoretical writings, particularly the Convivio II. i, along with the Letter to Can Grande (Epistle XIII. 7-8). We have already considered (in chapter 1, sec. III) Exodus as a model for the prophetic interpretation of history in the Bible. In Dante’s prophetic poem, the Exodus becomes a general paradigm of escape from the enslavement of sin followed by an arduous journey to the promised land of Christian salvation. From the other side of its cultural heritage (the classical), the journey is also quasi-Odyssean or “Ulyssean,” in Dante’s Latinized rendering.
This itinerary to hard-won freedom starts from a key passage in the prologue scene, in which Dante begins his ascent of the Mountain. He has just figured himself as a survivor narrowly escaped from shipwreck:
poi ch’èi posato un poco il corpo lasso,
ripresi via per la piaggia diserta,
sì che ’l piè fermo sempre era ’l più basso.
(Inferno I. 28-30)
(When I had rested a little my tired body,
I began again the way along the deserted slope
so that my left foot was always the lower one.)
As Charles Singleton pointed out, the immediately preceding verses referred to Dante’s mind (“animo”) as looking back like a shipwreck over the perilous pass that he has managed to survive (I. 22-27), but it is Dante’s body that rises up out of the simile of the shipwreck in order to embark on the journey to the other world. By bringing the body of the protagonist that is going to make the journey out of a poetic simile in this way, Dante’s poem produces, out of its own powers of poetic figuration, an incarnate revelation. In this bodily resurrection of the poem’s protagonist from a symbolic shipwreck, poetic language and metaphor themselves produce a type of embodiment that is destined to become the bearer of the revelation of the poem.
Redemption, like revelation, is emphatically incarnate in the perspective developed by Dante’s poem, and this is one of the deeply distinguishing features of the whole Christian understanding of revelation. That is one reason why poetic representation, alongside pictorial and plastic arts, has such a prominent place in transmitting and achieving revelation throughout the cultural history of Christianity. Poetry, with its figurative, pictorial powers and its sensuous sonorities, is peculiarly apt to give an incarnate rendition of the intellectual contents of language. The language of poetry can even be defined, as it was by Roman Jakobson, as “sense made sensuous.” Poetry in Western tradition following Dante, from Metaphysicals to Romantics to Symbolists, has often exhibited a propensity to interpret itself as, in effect, incarnation of the divine Word in the form of some higher Truth or Meaning. Of course, the very strength of this proclivity inherent in poetic language generates many attempts precisely to interrupt and counter it, especially among modern poets, starting from Baudelaire and Rimbaud, for example, with their anti-idealist and sometimes satanic insistence.
Poetry as Prophetic Vision of History
Poetic prophecy, as a superior sort of vision, as inspired insight of the kind to which poets since Homer have continually laid claim, is deliberately raised by Dante to a new level of seriousness and self-consciousness. Beyond the conventional gesture of the invocation of the Muses, Dante, assuming an authoritative attitude and prophetic tone, directly addresses himself to a reader in the name of Truth. A distinctive new accent in Dante’s recreation of the office of prophecy within the parameters of poetry and specifically of epic narrative is the literal truth claim he makes. We have already seen the extent to which prophecy is interlocked with history, so that in the case of the Bible we were able to define prophecy as the interpretation of history from the point of view of divine revelation. Even Homer purported to relate the true history of the Trojan War and its aftermath, and he claimed to do so assisted by the divine Muses, to whom all history was perpetually present. But Dante claims to have been there historically himself and to have seen with his own eyes all that he relates of the eternal worlds. Moreover, at the outset of his journey, he invokes the Muses together with his own ingenious mind or memory, to the end that all he has experienced may be made manifest:
O muse, o alto ingegno or m’aiutate;
o mente che scrivesti ciò ch’io vidi,
qui si parrà la tua nobilitate.
(II. 4-6)
(O muses, o high genius help me now;
o memory that wrote what I saw,
here your nobility will show itself.)
The basis for prophecy here is direct personal witness—“what I saw” (“ciò ch’io vidi,” II. 8)—which regrounds the conventional appeal to the Muses for help in representing what is beyond normal, mortal vision. This appeal takes an especially telling turn when Dante invokes his own “memory” and invites it to show its nobility by manifesting what it wrote. Writing is thereby recognized not only as an external medium but rather as intrinsic to the experience. To the extent that the experience as recorded in memory is already “written,” the literary medium by which Dante poetically conveys his vision is brought into—and becomes constitutive of—the making of the visionary experience itself.
Such reflective concentration on his poetic art and its capability of modulating into prophecy, in order thereby to reveal a higher reality, characterizes Dante’s work throughout its whole extent. The theoretical reflection on writing, poetry, and prophecy as all co-implicated in his act of literary creation and religious vision marks Dante’s poem with a distinctive character that earns it its preeminent place in the history of prophetic poetry, as well as of literature generally. In Dante, the question of poetry as prophecy becomes a central and conscious preoccupation. Poetry is not simply assumed as the necessary vehicle for a message of purportedly divine import. Nor are prophetic strains and utterances occasionally interjected into what otherwise would remain merely an artful display of human talents in poetic composition. In Dante, poetry becomes programmatically prophetic. It is prophetic as poetry, which becomes, then, not just the rhetorical dress for a religious message. The poetic act itself is discovered in all its intrinsically prophetic potential.
History, Eschatology, Apocalypse
In this respect—as a peculiarly intense and self-conscious instance of the communication of poetic tradition as prophetic or as religious revelation—Dante’s Divine Comedy marks the culmination of the developments that we have been tracing all through Western humanities tradition. Poetry becomes prophecy in Dante’s magnum opus more programmatically and explicitly than ever before. Poetry as prophecy, and finally as apocalyptic, coincides with the injunction to remake one’s history through reinterpreting it in the present: poetic prophecy issues in an urgent call to conversion. This is a call to conversion of religious faith, of course, but first and foremost of interpretive outlook. Interpretation is the decisive locus of revelation of the meaning of life—of individual as well as collective life as deposited in tradition. The origination of tradition and its truth, and so also of history and its meanings, in the act of interpretation is realized by Dante more deliberately and intensely than by any of his predecessors. Although he is for the most part only bringing out the far-reaching implications of their works, he also radically transforms the scope of what prophecy as interpretation in poetic literature—epic, dramatic, and lyrical—ultimately entails.
Dante, moreover, represents the terminus, or at least an apex, of Western tradition in its development toward a unified vision of reality as the total vision of apocalypse, wherein all things are revealed in their final truth. Such unity of vision has presumably become impossible in the modern world. It is often held to have been realized as never before or since by Dante in the Divine Comedy. The modern Italian poet Eugenio Montale remarks that this unity was still possible in Dante’s age, after which the historical conditions for such a synoptic vision of reality never existed again. Dante is an icon of this totalizing, unitary outlook, and the visionary mode of his poem expresses its claim of access to ultimate truth. And yet he also shows how even apocalyptic revelation relies on the dynamics of interpretation—the interested appropriation of meaning by individuals in historically specific circumstances. To this extent, individual interpretation and even creative appropriation are recognized as key to unlocking the secret sense and the final truth of human lives and of life as a whole. This truth, as it is revealed in Holy Scripture and in texts, including Dante’s own, which mediate and renew Scriptural revelation, is always in need of further interpretation in order to remain actual and operative in the minds and hearts of individuals.
Prophecy in the narrower sense of foretelling the future is already largely surpassed by Virgil. The grand vision of the Roman future at the center of his epic is actually an interpretation of the past as itself a prophecy of a future destiny that must be enacted in the present. Dante, grasping the importance of such prophetic historical interpretation to the shaping of destiny by the epic enterprise, and heightening the vocation of poetry to the level of apocalyptic revelation, makes the announcement of immanent redemption for the world the central message of his poem. According to his prophecy, the veltro (“greyhound”) will come not devouring land and wealth (“Questi non ciberà terra né peltro”) but nourished by wisdom, love, and virtue (“sapienza, amore e virtute,” I. 103-104) from a land “between Feltro and Feltro.” The felt suggests, among other overtones, medieval writing implements, specifically a felt blotter, and thereby hints possibly that the poem itself, as a prophetic revelation, may play a messianic role in the event of salvation that it announces. This cryptic code for identifying (or rather failing to unambiguously identify) the Redeemer belongs to the allegorical nature of Dante’s prophecy. It is not explicit but rather disguised in figures whose true meaning calls for interpretation, perhaps unending interpretation. Indeed scholarship on the veltro prophecy has never been able to satisfactorily resolve the question of the identity of the expected savior.
This anticipation of an apparently historical savior modulates into an apocalyptic expectation of the renewal of the world, for which Dante mobilizes the classical myth of the return of the Golden Age. The poem lays claim to being nothing short of an eschatological vision. That this prophetic revelation of a final End should be realized expressly in and through the experience of reading poetry is rather extraordinary. In crucial ways, it inaugurates the sense of self-reflectiveness as an ultimate revelation characteristic of modern consciousness. We have already sounded its premises as they are set down in decisive ways by Augustine. But in Augustine, writerly self-consciousness still understood itself as a reflection of Transcendence, of the infinite consciousness of God. And Dante likewise writes before the modern severing of consciousness from its ground in the Divine Mind. Yet he does so with a vivid, startlingly modern sense of discovery of himself through poetic invention as a unique, concrete human person: he grasps his humanity as participating in divine revelation in the historical sphere. Dante’s awakening to new consciousness as an individual is conspicuously marked by traditional apocalyptic signs: the passage into Hell occurs between his swooning at the end of Inferno III (verses 130-36) in terror at an earthquake, with a flash of vermillion light, and his being re-awakened from “deep sleep” by the sound of thunder at the beginning of Inferno IV (“Ruppemi l’alto sonno ne la testa / un greve truono . . . “).
The work’s prophetic, eschatological meaning is closely bound up also with a political vision that is intelligible only in light of the contemporary political scene. The two great powers of world history, Emperor and Pope, are bitter rivals fighting for hegemony in medieval Europe. Dante’s own city, Florence, is riven asunder by two parties, the Guelfs, allied with the Papacy, and the Ghibbelines, in league with the Emperor. Dante himself is exiled as a result of internecine party politics, leaving the city in 1301, never to return. He writes his poem in exile and in relentless protest against the injustice that reigns in his own city and in the world at large. At the same time, he prophetically envisages an apocalyptic event that will overturn this reign of wickedness and restore justice upon earth.
The political vicissitudes of Dante’s life and times are brought to focus, first, in cantos VI and X of the Inferno in relation to fellow Florentines, Ciacco and Farinata degli Uberti, with their prophecies of Dante’s exile. The events alluded to are, in fact, important background for reading Dante’s poem. In 1260, the Emperor’s party, the Ghibbelines, had gained control of Florence through their victory at Montaperti near Siena. But in 1266, a year after Dante’s birth, the defeat of imperial forces at Benevento, near Naples, by Charles of Anjou, brother of the French King, Louis IX, and favored also by pope Clement IV, ushered in an era of Guelf power in Florence in which Dante himself participated.
Dante was a Guelf, even though his ideology was to develop along imperialist lines. Indeed, with the demise of the Ghibbelines, the Guelf party itself split into white and black Guelfs, reproducing the ideological divide between champions of the empire versus supporters of the papacy. The death of the imperial heir-apparent, Manfredi, at Benevento, together with the demise in 1268 of the grandson of Frederick the Great, Conradino, captured at Tagliacozzo and beheaded at Naples, sealed the fate of this imperial dynasty and therewith of the Holy Roman Empire: it was condemned to be ineffectual in Italy for the remainder of Dante’s days. The defunct status of the Empire was proved again by the unsuccessful, indeed fatal campaign of Henry VII of Luxembourg, who descended into Italy in 1310. This claimant to the imperial throne was enthusiastically hailed by the poet (Epistola VII) with an impassioned call to arms (Epistola V), but in vain: by 1313, Henry was dead.
Considered with hindsight, Dante’s visionary apocalypse projecting a restoration of unified rule to the world under the aegis of the Holy Roman Empire appears thus to have been anachronistic and politically unrealistic. As apocalyptic vision, however, it represents an ideal of world government as the only effective guarantor of peace and justice on earth among inevitably fractious human beings. And as such, Dante’s vision of a unified world order remains compelling as a possible ideal in our own age of globalization, with its distressing sectarianism, its fragmentation into rivalrous and often warring ethnic and religious identities.
II. The Interpretive Journey and the Allegory of Reading (Cantos I-VIII)
Humanities traditions, as we have seen, live by being interpreted, which means being constantly reinterpreted, and the truth they bear and disseminate depends on how they impinge on the present—on the historical and institutional and personal situations into which they are interpreted. Their representations of the past reveal a meaning that can become prophetic, to the extent that it represents a challenge to the present to realize its own highest possibilities as these are disclosed by the past. Energized in this way by relation to the present, the past can become prophetic of the future, which it then actually contributes to shaping. This happens especially in epic poems, which interpret the past in accordance with a claim to divine revelation that is expressed in the appeal to the inspiration of the Muses. Epics typically address this interpretation specifically to an historical people.
In this sense, every text in the humanities tradition—on the model of the epics that, to a considerable degree, found it—is not only about the past that is being recounted but also about the present, in which its meaning is sifted, and the future, which begins to be realized by anticipation as its promises are turned into active projects. Humanities texts live by continually projecting the old stories into new historical contexts in which they take on new meanings and thereby interpret the present, illuminating it, revealing it to itself in ways that would never be possible without the historical perspective that tradition affords. Conversely, the past is revised in the light of the present and its possibilities: new, previously invisible or neglected aspects of it move into the foreground as prophetic of a newly emergent, possible future.
We have observed this reshuffling of tenses—which reverses time and anticipates it—taking place within Greco-Roman tradition in the epic, as well as in the context of Judeo-Christian tradition in the Bible. We dwelt, for example, upon how Adam is us all, as even his name suggests, and on how the Exodus from Egypt is memorialized in order to be repeated and relived in each successive generation. The text itself insists, with reiterated injunctions, that the story be told and retold to “your sons and your sons’ sons.” This demand for re-living by retelling, or by narrative rumination, re-actualizes and can even encroach upon the “original” event. Retelling becomes a retrospective, even a retroactive realization of the original events: these events are revealed and realized in their enduring meaning and truth through the process—not to say the “progress”—of tradition.
This faculty of tradition to expose and challenge the present, to address itself to us as readers, by contemporizing the past and future in the present, becomes especially intense in prophetic poems. By virtue of some extraordinary access or uncanny insight into the meaning and destiny of things, prophetic poets lay claim to delivering nothing short of divine revelation. The claim to prophetic knowledge through inspired interpretation of the past in the present and in the incandescent light of the future becomes more conscious and explicit in Dante than ever before.
For Dante, the prophetic meaning of his narrative is actualized in an event of interpretation expressly enjoined upon his poem’s readers—particularly in the poem’s addresses to its readers. The address to the reader thus becomes the locus for revelation and for the realization of truth in self-consciously interpretive experience. Everything that supposedly happened in the past that is recounted by the poem in a certain sense happens all over again in the present of the poem’s telling as an event of interpretation, and it is here that its vital meaning and truth are revealed. The narrative as such assumes the status of an allegory of reading. The story is, in this respect, about the interpretations enacted by the reader and the conversion of life that these interpretations (can) inspire and embody. Explicitly through these addresses, the reader’s interpretation is integrated into the poem itself, just as the poem becomes part of the reader’s life.
The emphasis on repetition of past events in the present time of poetic interpretation and reading is palpable from the first verses of the poem in the insistence on the prefix “ri” in “ritrovai,” “rinova,” “ridir”: it is so hard for Dante to retell what happened to him that fear is renewed in merely thinking of it (“nel pensier rinova la paura”). Everything is being reenacted, and it is in the literary reenactment that the full charge of emotion can perhaps for the first time register, and so the crucial meaning of events be comprehended. Then their saving significance can, furthermore, be realized and result in conversion. This possibility of “conversion” is precisely what is at stake in the first canto of the poem right from the proem, with its rhetoric of re-enactment and its emphasis upon poetry as the site of an original experience of truth, inasmuch as poetry involves the reactualization of events, their being relived in poetic interpretation:
Ahi quanto a dir qual era è cosa dura,
esta selva selvaggia e aspra e forte,
chè nel pensier rinova la paura!
(I. 4-6)
(O how difficult a thing it is to say how it was,
this wild wood, bitter and oppressive,
that fear renews in thinking about it!”)
Thus literary repetition presents itself from the outset as the origin of the conversion experience that the poem invites its readers to participate in and make their own. Participative reading can validate Dante’s conversion experience, for it is potentially reenacted by the reader every time the text is read. This gesture of bringing the drama and its emotion into the moment of interpretation as a repetition of Dante’s original experience in the underworld is frequently revisited throughout the Inferno. It is the extreme intensity of Dante’s encounters that provokes this emotional osmosis from the original experience to the experience of interpreting it, or from the narrated temporality to the temporality of the narrating, which is itself already an act of interpreting (cf. III. 132, V. 25-27, VI. 1-9, VIII. 56, XVI. 12, XVII. 115-123, XXII. 31, XXIV. 84, XXVI. 19, XXVIII. 113-14, XXXII. 71-72; in different ways also IV. 145-47, X. 1, VII. 19-21 and XIV. 16-18, XIII. 25, “dico,” “I say” in VIII. 1 and XIV. 8).
In this sense, the journey realized by Dante’s poem is an interpretive journey as much as a literal journey through the other world. The latter journey has some traits of fiction; the former is in every sense real. To the extent that Dante’s claims to truth may not be believable at the literal level of a journey through eternity, still there is a literal journey in interpretation that is manifestly realized in and through the poem by its being read. When transferred onto this journey of interpretation, on which Dante takes the reader, the imperious claims to truth are no longer far-fetched: they become plausible and even compelling. The reader need only believe his or her own experience of poetry.
This aspect of the poem—its built-in interpretive dimension and its character as a script for interpretive acts performed by Dante himself and by the reader in his wake—is announced from the opening verses and is called back to mind repeatedly throughout the poem by the shifts into the present tense: the present is the tense of interpreting and, in this sense, reenacting the incidents that are narrated. What the poem as a whole relates is not only the past action of Dante’s visit to the afterlife in 1300 but also his reactions to it as he relives the whole journey in the experience of writing it, which is the act of interpreting it poetically. And at this level, the reader, too, can directly share with Dante in the journey of interpretation that the poem recreates and is.
Part of this fantastic poem’s insistence on its own literal truth—as in the invocation in Inferno 2: “O memory that wrote what I saw” (“O mente che scrivesti ciò ch’ io vidi”)—is to be accounted for by Dante’s new and acute apprehension of the literariness of truth, of the way that truth is produced in and by the event of reading and writing. This was already patently the case, though it remained still largely unacknowledged, in Augustine’s conversion narrative, with its multiple framings by narrations of other exemplary conversions. But Dante exploits all the resources of literature—the subtle suggestions of poetic language, the dramatic effect of graphic description, a savant design of narrative structure—in order to enact a religious revelation that occurs in the present tense of the reading of the poem. He produces thereby a text that actually performs the revelation it conveys rather than only telling about it. Any mere telling about can tend to conceal more than it reveals. But as inducing an interpretive experience—one that can be as much religious as literary in character and that, in any case, converts its reader to a new sense of existence and its possibilities—the poem itself becomes a revelatory event. The human reality of the poem as an interpretive event thus can become the revelation of a putatively transcendent, theological truth. The experience of poetry discloses what claims to be the ultimate meaning of things, and in this sense poetry becomes religious revelation.
The first fully developed dramatic episode of the poem demonstrates this interpretive-revelatory dynamic in exemplary fashion. From its first highly individualized representation of sinners, namely, Paolo and Francesca, the poem is explicitly about reading. Their sin of lust is mediated by reading and is shown to be inextricable from it. Likewise Dante’s reading of their story—together with the way he provokes his own reader’s interpretations of it—is laden with implications about how sin is itself basically an act of false self-interpretation, a misreading of one’s own life and its meaning. In some way or other, all these false readings fail to acknowledge God as the Lord of life. They are self-interpretations of individuals who obstinately opt for a view of themselves that is sequestered from divine revelation. Francesca’s interpretation of herself and Paolo contradicts God’s manifest judgment revealed as the final truth of their lives by their condition in the eternal world.
What we see directly are the punishments, but these are transparent to the sins which they, in effect, interpret and reveal in their deeper meaning. In general, the punishment simply makes explicit and permanent the life-choice that is elected in committing the sin. The first in the series of sensual sins is lust: the sinners are being driven by a tempest that externalizes the inner state of turmoil of “those who subject reason to desire.” The punishment reveals the nature of the sin and fulfills its true intent by fully and manifestly realizing its inescapable consequences. This understanding of sin makes the punishment intrinsic to the sin rather than a condition externally imposed by a punishing God.
In the case of the neutrals in Canto III, who are actually barred from Hell and so not under the same law of retribution, this logic is reversed: the sinners are subjected to the very state that they attempted to avoid, and it is intensified so as to become unbearable. Since their sin is not exactly what they chose but rather their refusing to make any choice whatever, they are being painfully spurred into motion behind a banner, and so are goaded into a perpetual parody of partisanship. Their being forced to run around frenetically makes mockery of their having preferred inaction, showing that it, too, has consequences and is, in itself, an adherence simply to themselves rather than to any greater cause. And this is deemed even more reprehensible than any of the choices they might otherwise have made. The price of passivity is made painfully tangible in their being stung or bitten by wasps and giant flies and noisome worms. Crucial is that what these sinners experience be, in any case, directly the result and, in effect, the true realization of their failure to choose for one party or the other, for good or for evil. The moral: you get what you choose, but if you do not choose at all, this refusal (“rifiuto,” III. 60) will itself become your inescapable fate and will sting and torture you unremittingly.
Deeply considered, each of the punishments externalizes the corresponding sin and thereby makes the sin transparent to the false interpretation of self that it results from and embodies and enacts. Whatever the specific nature of the sin in question, it entails some sort of positioning of oneself vis-à-vis God and others, and it is this self-understanding that issues in concrete acts. Sinful acts are the expression of erroneous, willful interpretations of self as autonomous and separate from God. There are as many sins as there are ways of alienating oneself from God. All are forms of distorted and willfully false misinterpretation, pivoting always on some misinterpretation of oneself. As forms of mistaken self-interpretation, the sins represented are applicable not only to the characters but also potentially to the reader, since reading is an activity of self-interpretation par excellence. In order to interpret each character, readers cannot but interpret themselves and project onto the characters their own possibilities of being. The reader, qua reader, is able thus to participate, at least potentially, in each sin as at bottom a possible mode (however covert or latent) of their own self-(mis)interpretation.
The self-reflexiveness of the poem, the potential application of its implicit moral sense to the reader, applies in some way to each representation of sin in the Inferno. But the first detailed description by Dante of an act of sin, namely, Paolo and Francesca’s sin of adultery, demonstrates this emblematically by focusing explicitly on reading as the locus of self-interpretation and –misinterpretation: it suggests how sin per se is symbolically bound up with “reading” in just this sense of self-interpretation. At the source of Francesca’s sin with Paolo is the reading of a book: the Arthurian romance of Lancelot is presented literally as literature pandering to lust. The name of the book’s author, Gallehaut, is offered anachronistically as already synonymous with pandering: “Gallehaut was the book and the one who wrote it” (“Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse,” V. 137).
It is the reading of this romanticized tale of courtly love, or rather of adulterous passion, that induces Paolo and Francesca to cede to a falsely idealized interpretation of their lust for each other. And Francesca is continuing still to pander this false interpretation by recounting her sin to Dante in the rapturous measures of the love lyric, indeed by echoing just such love lyrics as Dante himself wrote in his youth. Her “Love, which swiftly takes the gentle heart” (“Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende . . .,” 100) rehearses the love poetry of Guido Guinizelli, on whom Dante’s own amorous verse was modeled. This line cites specifically “Foco d’amor in gentil cor s’aprende” (“Fire of love in noble heart is kindled”) from Guinizelli’s sonnet “Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore,” which Dante imitated in chapter XX of his Vita nuova. However, this exalted and refined language notwithstanding, some of the less polite terms, like “bocca” (“mouth”) or again “questi” (“this one here”) for Paolo, betray the cruder, more sensual motives of this discourse by a bourgeois dame out of contemporary chronicle assuming a pretentious air of nobility. Heard in this conjunction, her first address of Dante as gracious “living creature,” literally “O animal,” may have also a brute overtone unintended by Francesca and jarring within the classical rhetoric of her captatio benevolentiae.
Dante construes the sin of the lustful as a “subjecting of reason to desire” (“peccator carnali, / che la ragion somettono al talento,” V. 38-39), and he shows how exactly this is what threatens him and all who listen to Francesca—all those who read his text. The infectiousness of Francesca’s sin of interpreting herself in a way contrary to the truth revealed by the judgment manifest in her is demonstrated by Dante’s own reactions. He literally falls for Francesca and her seductive story, as the last verse of the canto says: “and I fell as a dead body falls” (“e caddi come corpo morto cade”).
Dante (as poet, but not as character) understands this surrender to sensuality as a sort of death, the death inherent in the body per se. In Dante’s Christian medieval and moral understanding, a human body, to the extent that it is infected by sensuality, is already dead and fallen. If we listen soberly, discerningly, and even a little suspiciously, Dante’s own interpretation of himself as “tristo e pio” (“sad and full of pity,” or “sad and compassionate”) in his reaction to Francesca sounds like a moralization and Christianization of what is actually his libidinous interest in her intriguing story. Despite his affecting a religious detachment and compassion, a much more passionate sort of involvement is betrayed by the eager accents with which he solicits the juicy details of “how?” and “when?” she fell into the forbidden embraces: “at what point and in what way did love grant / you to know the dubious desires?” (“a che e come concedette amore / che conosceste i dubbiosi disiri?” 119-20).
From the beginning of his encounter with the lustful, he understands his own reaction in terms of the Christian virtue of “pity” or “compassion” (“pietà,” V. 72). This term is suggested to him by Francesca herself (V. 93). But his initial perception of these souls as “ancient ladies and knights” (“le donne antiche e’ cavalieri,” 71) hints that he may be dupe to a romanticized misinterpretation of this company of sinners. He is like them in having his reason placed into subjection by desire: he is involved emotionally and cannot extricate himself and in the end literally faints and falls, which symbolically is to die.
The reader, in turn, is presented with the question of how to react to Francesca and her story. Should we recognize her high citations as shabby artifices employed to disguise sneaking lust and seduce unwary readers by a romantic rhetoric? Her own idealizing misinterpretation of her carnal sensuality, which rubs off on Dante in his perception of the lustful as noble knights and ladies, tempts the reader as well. Indeed many critics and readers have glorified Francesca into a Dantesque heroine. This was the case particularly in the Romantic Age, and such a strain resonates still, for example, in Puccini’s opera Francesca da Rimini. But precisely this sort of reading is exposed as an interpretive trap, as itself exactly the sin for which Francesca is punished. What she does right here in the encounter with Dante, in proffering the misinterpretation of herself within which she continues to live—or rather to eternally die—is itself the sin for which she is being punished. She performs it ever anew in the eternal present of Hell and in the endless repetitions of this text. It is, we have seen, fundamentally a sin of self-misrepresentation, of interpreting herself in a way that denies God and his judgment on her sin. The divine judgment reveals her as blinded by the lust that she legitimizes in her tale. And this is precisely what she does in the encounter with Dante, specifically in the way she presents herself thus also before the eyes of his readers: they, in turn, are tempted in their own imagination of the scene to cede to sensual lust aroused by her seductive words.
This case shows exemplarily how the true sense of the characters’ histories is presented in and through their modes of interpreting themselves presently in the text. The sinners are punished not just for what they have done in the past but for what they continue to do as we encounter them presently in our reading: their sin is an ongoing reality in the way they constitute themselves by self-interpretation in the text we read. Francesca’s sin consists not only in one past act of passion and adultery or in any other facts and events of her personal history. It is constituted much more essentially by her self-(mis)interpretations performed in the text presently. And this misinterpretation may well implicate also the reader. The chain begins with Dante himself as the first reader of his Francesca, vulnerable as he is to the seductions of her story and its poetic language. The incipit of the following canto confirms that Dante’s emotions of “pity” and compassionate “sadness” fully confused him, so that he lost his mind and judgment—just like the lustful, who “subject reason to desire”:
Al tornar de la mente, che si chiuse
dinanzi a la pietà d’i due cognati,
che di trestizia tutto mi confuse, . . . .
(VI. 1-3)
(At the return of consciousness, which closed
in view of the pity of the two in-laws,
who completely confounded me with sadness . . . .)
Francesca’s power of attraction is unmistakable, as Dante’s sympathetic reaction demonstrates. Yet there is something equivocal about her seductive blandishments and the idyllic description she gives—even from the midst of the maelstrom that now devours her!—of her native land as the place where the river Po descends to the “peace” of the sea (99). For she, in contrast, is forever consumed by the winds of passion to which she willingly abandoned herself, surrendering her power of rational self-control. If we understand her sin and each sin as a form of self-(mis)interpretation, the deeper sense of justice in the Inferno surfaces. It becomes glaringly evident in Francesca how sin is its own punishment and how the punishment is nothing other than a perpetuation of the self-misinterpretation in which the sin consists. The pains of Hell are to be understood as eternalizing the willful desires that constitute the corresponding sins in the first place. In Hell, these willed desires are simply followed out to their natural and necessary consequences.
One’s freely chosen way of being is the decisive act of will that alone can be sinful. It is the only basis for one’s fate in eternity. For God does not vengefully punish: he rather gives each soul only what it has freely chosen. The punishments are not just externally imposed: they are rather manifestations and intensifications of the state chosen by those who sin. This state flows from each soul’s free interpretation of itself and of the sense of its existence. Fundamentally, sinful souls choose to understand themselves as separate from God. They prefer to believe a conceit of their own fabrication rather than to accept the divine Will that created them with a specific purpose for their lives. The damned, furthermore, persist in such a choice beyond the point of no return, the point at which their will is no longer capable of reversing itself. We see Francesca even in eternity still resisting seeing herself in accordance with the divine Judgment.
Through persistent sin, free will is eventually lost, as St. Augustine taught, notably in De libero arbitrio. Free indulgence becomes habit and eventually results in loss of the ability not to sin. What we once chose freely becomes addiction, compulsion, necessity: we become it. Eventually we no longer know how to understand ourselves otherwise than in terms of the sin (or of the self-interpretation it entails). We die morally, and at that point it is too late to change. This is demonstrated in the punishments of the gluttonous (Canto VI), of the avaricious and prodigal (Canto VII), and of the slothful and wrathful (Canto VIII). In each case, the punishment is the sin presented as involving a specific misinterpretation of being human, one that distorts and eventually destroys human nature in its original state as created by God.
III. Deep Hermeneutics of Complicity and Conversion (Cantos IX-XVII)
Self-interpretation, which is so crucial to the fate of the souls in the afterlife, is made manifest as a crucial structuring principle of the poem in the segment that begins with Dante’s entry into the city of Dis. This transition directly involves the reader as interpreter by means of the poem’s explicit addresses to the reader. The first explicit address to the reader occurs in Canto VIII before the Gate of the City of Dis, where the difficulties for Dante in his descent through the Inferno become humanly insurmountable. Demons and furies gather to make him remain (“rimarrai,” 92) there, separating him from Virgil, his guide. The address comes in the form of a direct meta-narratological intervention that interrupts the narrative, which has reached an impasse (VIII. 94-96). Recalling his fear that he might never return, Dante turns to his reader:
Pensa, lettor, se io mi sconfortai
nel suon de le parole maladette,
ché non credetti ritornarci mai.
(VIII. 94-96)
(Think, reader, if I did not panic
at the sound of the accursed words,
since I believed I’d never again return.)
This express involvement of the reader throws into focus a whole new field of reference for the realization of the narrative’s meaning.
The significance of this dimension, in which the reader is brought directly into the poem, begins to become clearer when a similar interruption occurs again, but much more dramatically, in Canto IX. Here the address to the reader follows upon the appearance of three infernal furies that block the Gate and threaten to show the Gorgon’s head that would petrify Dante, forcing him to remain in that place forever. By close proximity and association with the address to the reader, these threats are made to figure the risk also to the reader of remaining fixated upon the literal level of the narrative and consequently failing to penetrate to its deeper doctrinal meaning. Precisely such hermeneutic penetration is expressly enjoined by the address to the reader in Canto IX:
O voi che avete li ’ntelletti sani,
mirate la dottrina che s’asconde
sotto ’l velame de li versi strani.
(IX. 61-63)
(O you who have sound intellects,
look at the doctrine which hides itself
beneath the veil of the strange verses.)
At this point, “the veil of the verses,” that is, the story which serves as vehicle for the allegory or doctrine of the poem, has become particularly riveting and tends to arrest attention upon the visual surface of the narrative, where the furies are described in graphic detail with their blood-flecked female limbs and snaky hair. Only Virgil’s naming of them with traditional mythological names—“Megaera,” “Allecto,” “Tisiphone”—exerts some measure of control over the hallucinatory visual intensity of this scene. Without Virgil’s verbal mediation, Dante’s (and the reader’s) gaze would be liable to remain fixated, petrified forever by the Medusa. However, the figures of the furies and the Medusa are typical of the sort of myths that were routinely interpreted in accordance with allegorical meanings in medieval exegesis. By literally blocking the protagonist’s further progress through Hell, they serve as figures for blockage of the hermeneutic process of interpretation on the part of the reader.
Stumbling blocks at the literal level force the interpreter to dig deeper in order to find the rational, allegorical meaning that is masked beneath the mythic exterior. The interpreter must avoid becoming obsessed merely with the story and its images and rather pass beyond the literal sense. The face of Medusa, whose beholders turn to stone, emblematizes this tendency to remain fascinated and frozen or literally petrified by the aesthetic-erotic surface. Virgil, representing the better part of rationality, rescues Dante also by putting his hands over his protégé’s eyes and turning him around, so that he not remain petrified when the Gorgon’s head (Medusa) appears.
. . . ed elli stessi
mi volse, e non si tenne a le mie mani,
che con le sue ancor non mi chiudessi.
(IX. 58-60)
( . . . and he himself
turned me, and did not rely on my hands,
but with his own also closed my eyes.)
This act directly precedes the injunction to the reader. Virgil does this in a coercive manner that concretely imitates the author’s intrusive intervention into the text by direct address to call the mind of his reader away from the literal narrative and its dangerously engrossing action. The call to allegorical penetration beyond the veil of the verses warns the reader not to be absorbed by what simply appears in its immediacy on the narrative’s surface. Virgil’s action within the narrative in this way figures the interpretive action performed by the author upon the narrative: the abrupt breaking off of the narration (diegesis) with the sudden switch to the discourse of address (appellation) invasively interrupts the reader’s involvement in the story on its literal level. Made in the image of Virgil turning Dante about and covering his eyes, the address to the reader forcibly turns the reader away from the literal surface of the narrative and demands reflection searching rather for its allegorical meaning.
The prompting of the readers to look beyond the letter of the text and to find a hidden, allegorical meaning, inevitably by application of the text to themselves, thus becomes perfectly explicit in cantos VIII-IX, in the transition from upper to lower hell (“basso inferno,” VIII. 75) and into the City of Dis. We noted that this sequence is subtly prefaced by the encounter earlier in Canto VIII with Filippo Argenti, who, like the other damned souls, remains where he is in hell (the word “rimani” in various declensions reverberates in lines 34, 38, 92, 116). Argenti’s condemnation to remain is confirmed by Dante’s curse. He stays in the Styx, whereas Dante himself passes over it and into further depths of the nether world, and Dante tells him so: “If I come, I do not remain” (S’ i’ vegno, non rimango,” VIII. 34). Even more significantly, the poem leads Dante, together with his reader, into further depths of revelation, into a space of interpretation where the true journey beyond the fictive one unfolds. The forward motion through hell thus becomes a figure for passage beyond the poem’s literal sense to its “doctrinal”—its educative and prophetic and ultimately apocalyptic—meaning. Dante’s going deeper into hell within the narrative becomes an image for the interpreter’s looking beneath the letter of the narrative to its deeper figural and salvific meaning, as is enjoined expressly in Canto IX by the address to the reader.
Already at the end of Canto VIII, Virgil recalled the “dead letter” (“la scritta morta,” 127) that Dante saw inscribed over the Gate of Hell. Dante was not able to understand it when he saw it immediately before his eyes. The sense of the words was “hard” for him (“il senso lor m’è duro,” III. 12), since his understanding was, in effect, petrified by being confined to the literal level. Only by entering into hell—and seeing not just the literal landscape but seeing through to its figural meaning—is he able to understand the sense of this inscription presented with literal immediacy to him at the entrance. This inscription appears also to the reader at the head of Canto III as a “dead letter” whose meaning, if it remains merely literal rather than becoming the gateway to deeper “doctrinal” understanding, will spiritually kill him: “For the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Corinthians 3: 6).
Contrary to this dead letter, Christ is the key to all true interpretation, and the sprung bolts on the Gate of Hell mentioned at this juncture allude to him (VIII. 126). The traces of Christ’s descent are inscribed unmistakably in Hell in the form of the Gate left unsealed (“sanza serrame”) by the earthquake that was caused by his descent into Limbo. The evidence of this quake is also seen in ruined bridges and debris of landslides pointed out along the way, most conspicuously at XII. 4-10 (see also V. 34, XI. 2, XXI. 108, XXIII. 136). Passage through the lower Gate to the city of Dis is secured for Dante and Virgil by a figure who descends from heaven in the track through Hell opened previously by Christ. This “one” sent from heaven (“un . . . da ciel messo,” IX. 85) indeed crosses the Styx and “walked as if on land and with dry soles” (IX. 81) like Christ (Matthew 14: 24-33). The celestial “messenger,” the literal Greek meaning of “angel,” is in effect repeating Christ’s descent into and unsealing of Hell. Hell is opened now for Dante as protagonist, as well as for his reader, both of whom enter into “secret things” (“cose segrete,” III. 21), in order to emerge with new and supernaturally enhanced understanding.
Christ is the interpretive key that clears away all impediments to Christian understanding for the reader. He unveils allegorical meaning behind the mere letter of the fatal text (“la scritta morta,” III. 127) that kills. Classical myths of descent into Hell by heroes such as Hercules and Theseus, alluded to in lines 98-99 and 54 respectively of Canto IX, were similarly taken in medieval exegesis to be allegorical prefigurations of Christ’s descent. Illuminated according to their spiritual or allegorical sense, these descents, too, reflect the light of Christ that lightens the way through Hell for the protagonist, as well as for the reader on the path of life. In this manner, the events in the narrative ensuing immediately upon the injunction to the reader in Canto IX read coherently as figuring an event in the interpretive journey of the reader.
The violent descent of the “heaven-sent messenger,” causing the great disruption that is drawn out in detail in verses 64-105 of Canto IX, is homologous to Dante’s abrupt interruption of his own narrative. Dante’s intervention by direct address forces the reader to break away from the literal narration in order to reflect upon and decipher its meaning in allegorical terms. The angelic figure is a sort of Hermes, the god of interpretation, whose name actually lies at the root of the word “hermeneutics” for the theory and practice of interpretation. The messenger’s descent recalls the descent of Hermes in Aeneid IV. 146ff intervening to free Aeneas from an erotic attachment potentially fatal to his world-historical mission. The celestial messenger’s intervention is now necessary to unblock the way for Dante and Virgil to descend deeper into the Inferno and to allow the deeper allegorical sense of the poem for the reader to emerge from beneath its surface. Paralleling the action of the messenger within the narrative, the intervention of Christ from outside upon the reader’s mind is necessary to enable the reader’s understanding to penetrate deeper into the meaning of the poem.
Interpretation, like the Christ event itself, and specifically the descent to Limbo that caused so much visible structural damage in Hell, is often inevitably a violent activity. Interpretation must disturb the surface in order to penetrate the depth of an experience or a text. And in this, too, the text of Inferno IX strikingly mimes the essential elements of the hermeneutic process. Since Dante enters into the circle of the violent (the seventh circle) just beyond this juncture, it is no accident that the violent side of interpretation should be foregrounded with particularly impetuous imagery such as is used to describe the descent of the celestial messenger. He breaks on the scene with a frightful fracas of wind and storm that provoke a scattering of branch and beast and herdsmen (64-72). He is a Christ figure (we have already seen that he walks on water), but in this world of evil he also ambiguously possesses some demonic traits: the terrified souls flee before him like frogs from the “enemy snake” (“la nimica / biscia,” 76-77).
The violence Dante focuses on is never exclusively that of the characters and events represented in his poem, but always also that perpetrated by the interpretive event that the poem itself is, which includes also by anticipation the interpretive act of the reader that is folded into it. This is demonstrated by Dante’s own interpretive violence, which is underscored throughout this circle, for example, against his beloved teacher, “Ser Brunetto.” Dante’s poem in this manner realizes its meanings performatively—in the event of poetry as an interpretive act.
The realization of the journey in an interpretive dimension is then carried to the level of the reader programmatically by Dante’s explicit meta-narratological addresses to the reader. These begin, as we have seen, in Inferno VIII and establish themselves as key to the poem as a whole in Canto IX. But just as strikingly, within the narrative the characters themselves are all involved in acting out dramas of self-interpretation. In fact, their sins are presented by Dante most fundamentally as forms of self-misinterpretation, and we see it enacted by them directly as they appear in Dante’s text. Particularly compelling instances of this can be found in the first and last extended first-person narratives of damned souls in the Inferno: Francesca da Rimini’s in Canto V and Conte Ugolino’s in XXXII-XXXIII.
Another telling example of sinful self-misinterpretation can be found in Canto X. The insinuations concerning Guido Cavalcanti have proved confusing to commentators. Nevertheless, they make a clear statement that he refused the necessary support of grace and guidance from above and beyond himself. His very name, “Guido,” means “I guide,” and Dante pronounces it in answering Guido’s father, telling him that his son held God or Beatrice in disdain (“forse cui Guido vostro ebbe a disdegno,” X. 63). Whoever Guido disdains, it is a mark of lack on his part of openness to guidance from above and therewith to transcendence. Guido flies rather by his own “high genius” (“altezza d’ingegno”), exactly as his father’s words suggest. This constitutes a self-centered rather than a God-centered interpretation of his life’s journey. He has no guide but his own conceit of genius, and that marks his essential difference from Dante and from the type of journey that the latter is on. Like Guido, whose fate is evoked here, so the heretics, with whom his father is punished, are condemned by their misinterpretations of Christian doctrine and therewith of their own existence. Most flagrantly, this is the case of the Epicureans, who “make the soul die with the body” (“l’anima col corpo morta fanno,” X. 15).
Linguistic Self-Interpretation and Sins of Rhetorical Violence (XIII-XVII)
In Pier de la Vigna, Capaneo, and Brunetto Latini, the poem continues to offer perspicuous examples of how self-understanding and self-interpretation determine the eternal state and destiny of each individual Dante meets. The history of each, with respect to their fateful nemesis, is seen realized in nuce in their present encounters with Dante and in the compressed dramas of self-presentation that they act out before him. They all, as we encounter them, actually do whatever it is that they are condemned for, showing this to be in no way incidental or over—and, to that extent, forgivable. Rather, their sin is manifest as the very essence of who they are for all eternity as a result of their own free and fatal choices. Capaneo says as much explicitly: “Such as I was alive, so am I dead” (“Tal fui vivo, tal sono morto,” XIV. 51)—at the beginning of a blasphemous speech defying the gods that reenacts in Dante’s presence the very sin for which this Greek king (one of the Seven Against Thebes) is being punished.
A more complicated and elaborate display of sin as erroneous self-interpretation is folded into the verses presenting Pier de la Vigna. Pier’s tortuous rhetoric exposes one type of interpretive fallacy, that of becoming tangled up in his own neurotic self-consciousness and its excessive verbiage, which is “knotty and convoluted” (“nodosi e ’nvolti,” XIII. 5) like the branches of the shrub into which he has been turned. Indeed such a destiny seems to be written into his very name “de la Vigna,” meaning “of the vine.” This involution is realized tellingly in Pier’s own self-reflexive language and twisted logic, obscuring the natural and normal function of language. This function, according to medieval logic and semantic theory, is primarily to refer, to designate objects in the world. And it cannot do this well if it gets all wound up around itself. The presumably proper function of language is perverted disastrously by the courtier who becomes enmeshed in viscous verbal formulations that become impenetrable like the twisted and knotty wood of the vine.
A vertiginously convoluted pattern of language is patent in Pier’s description of how the “meretrix” or “courtesan,” allegorically Envy, worked against him when he was the loyal privy counselor of the Emperor, Fredrick II. He protests that she “inflamed all minds against me; / and thus the inflamed inflamed Augustus” (“infiammò contra me li animi tutti; / e li ’nfiammati infiammar sì Augusto,” XIII. 67-68). A likewise doubly-folded, opaque verbal style inflects again Pier’s description of his “injustice against his own just self” (“ingiusto fece me contra me giusto,” XIII. 72). The same thick, self-reflexive rhetoric, moreover, is dangerously reflected in Dante’s own language from the outset of this very canto: “I believe that he believed that I believed . . .” (“Cred’io ch’ei credette ch’io credessi . . .,” XIII. 25).
The tendency of highly rhetorical language to become self-involved, thereby interfering with transparency and obscuring reference beyond itself, is signaled from the beginning of Pier’s speech, in his pleading for indulgence for what is about to become a woody or viscous (“inveschi”) discourse:
“. . . e voi non gravi
perch’ io un poco a ragionar m’inveschi.”
(XIII. 56-57)
(“. . . let it not burden you
if I dilate a little in discoursing.”)
This is the first hint of how speech can thicken into a substance and cease thereby to properly serve its purposes with reference to the world, and so become a tangle and a trap. The intrigues of the imperial court, which led to Pier’s demise, are all wound up with language taking on a disproportionate weight in and for itself: it thereby becomes a sticky bird lime (the most literal meaning contained in “m’inveschi”) rather than a transparent medium. All the descriptions of speech in this scene insist on its becoming physicalized, its being turned into a thing and thereby being made into a mechanical production rather than a natural human expression of thought and spirit:
Come d’un stizzo verde ch’arso sia
da l’un de’ capi, che da l’altro geme
e cigola per vento che va via,
sì de la scheggia rotta usciva insieme
parole e sangue . . .
(XIII. 40-44)
(As a green branch that is burned
at one end, that from the other groans
and squeaks from wind that passes through,
so from the broken stump words and blood
came out together . . . .)
The mixing of words and blood is a palpable carrying out to an extreme of the degradation and befouling of speech by an overly conspicuous rhetoric. In Pier’s punishment, words actually become concrete things: his language and its immaterial meaning metamorphose into blood and words mixed together, and his speech is mechanically generated like the hiss of a burning log (XIII. 40-45). This artificial concoction and simulation of human speech is spooky—but it is also uncannily close in its results to the familiar artifices of rhetoric. For this is what rhetoric tends to do: it dwells upon the sensuous, material qualities of language and draws attention to words as things in their own right.
Turned to bloody substance or mechanical sound, the intellectual quality of speech is corrupted; it becomes completely mired in the material world. This sort of hypostatization is tantamount to a denial of the referential function of proper language to point beyond itself. In fact, rhetoric tends to take language as a substantial medium to be molded into shape by purely formal means. Having denied to language transcendence of the world that it should reflect and represent, Pier then denies transcendence to life itself—through his suicide. He acts as if the soul possessed no transcendence of the material world but could die along with the body. Pier’s rhetoric and his suicide constitute a negating of the transcendence of language and of the human soul respectively, and the two are tightly intertwined.
The power of language to negate real things is placed into evidence from the opening of the canto, with the insistently negative grammar used to describe the pathless forest : “No green foliage . . . no smooth branches . . . no fruits were there . . . . No such thickets harsh and dense” (“Non fronde verde . . . non rami schietti . . . non pomi v’eran . . . Non han sì aspri sterpi né sì folti,” XIII. 4-7). This is rather like the description of the island of the Cyclops in the Odyssey, which similarly specified only what was lacking and what things were not. Rhetorical language, by virtue (or vice) of its inner-linguistic density and self-referentiality, is at some level the negation of real beings. Such language readily induces also to the inverse negation or category-mistake of reducing language—which is arguably that by which humanity is made in the image of God and transcends nature—to a thing. From treating language as if it were a thing without intellectual transcendence, it is a short, slippery step to treating one’s own soul and its immortal life as if they were a mere thing that could be snuffed out, broken off, extinguished.
The dupe of his own rhetoric, Pier takes himself, just as he has taken words, to be a thing—and so he actually becomes one, and for all eternity. Befuddled by the instrumentalization of language reified into mere material to be manipulated through rhetoric, he takes also his own life as if it were a material thing that could be destroyed. Misunderstanding the spiritual nature of the soul as much as of the word, he tries to break off his own life as one would break a branch off a tree. Such is the crude misinterpretation of himself with which he is condemned thenceforth to live in an eternal death. This curiously disarticulates all natural relation of the soul to the body, as is grotesquely illustrated by the hanging, after the Last Judgment, of the bodies of the suicides on the trees into which their souls have degenerated and metamorphosed. Nature is thus perverted to a macabre metaphor for instrumentalizing words and bodies, as if they were external, dead material rather than animated spiritually from within.
Pier, as a rhetorician, molds language like a malleable substance, yet precisely its susceptibility to manipulation allows rhetorical language to be used against him by the court flatterers who undermine the Emperor’s trust and confidence in him. Concrete experience such as Virgil affords Dante in bidding him to break the branch of Pier’s shrub rather than relying only on the text of the Aeneid about Polydorus is a sounder basis for true belief. But Pier turns to and believes in rhetoric more than in reality itself. He becomes therefore eternally entangled in rhetoric’s intrinsic negativity and involutedness. Dante, too, is susceptible to falling prey to such deceptions, especially being a poet and finding himself lost in a dense, pathless forest. But to Pier, such belief in mere words becomes fatal: he is mortally wounded and envenomed by words of calumny to the point of physically annihilating himself.
This concentration on the pitfalls of rhetorical language hints at how, in this case again, the sins Dante sees are virtually and potentially his own, for Dante himself inevitably and self-consciously employs rhetoric in the making of his poem. Its seductions and deceptions represent aspects of his own self-interpretation, aspects that he must guard against, lest they become the fatal motions of his soul and determine how his will is fixed for eternity. The reader, moreover, is in nearly the same case as Dante vis-à-vis each of the exempla of sin, since what readers make out of the Commedia’s characters is intimately related to how they understand themselves. It is symptomatic of how they are able to understand human beings generally and therefore of how they interpret themselves also—for good or ill, salvation or damnation.
Canto XIII, seen from this perspective, is about the horror of reification of the human, of the human becoming a thing, and this involves particularly the reification of language. Language, in the humanist tradition to which Dante so decisively contributes, particularly in his De vulgari eloquentia, is the essential vehicle and sign of a transcendence of mere nature. Language is what distinguishes humans from beasts in the classical humanist outlook reflected in De vulgari eloquentia and enshrined in the Aristotelian definition of man as an “animal endowed with speech” (zˆon løgon ‘xon, Nichomachean Ethics I, 13). But language can also be perverted into the negation of this transcendence. This happens through the corruption of language by mendacious, self-serving rhetoric, whenever language is detached from its civic purpose and content and becomes mere form and flattery. Pier has fallen victim to the deceptions of his own style of intricate, rhetorically elaborated speech. This negative potential of language is insisted upon from the opening lines, and Dante’s own rhetoric is in jeopardy of becoming all for naught, as suggested by its homologous mirroring of Pier’s patterns of rhetorical convolution: it, too, could become suicidal for his mission by becoming an end unto itself.
Dante’s critical examination of rhetorical humanism continues in the encounter with Brunetto Latini. This episode, however, inverts the lesson imparted in connection with Pier de la Vigna. This encounter develops an indictment of rhetoric as inducing not to a materialization of speech but to the illusion of a final transcendence of matter and time through man’s own works and words. Brunetto interprets himself as a winner of eternal life betokened by the ever-green banner he runs after in the concluding verses (XV. 121-24) of the canto. He sees himself as immortalized through his own rhetorical achievement in his Li Livres dou Tresor or “Tesoro,” literally his “treasure”:
“Sieti raccomandato il mio Tesoro,
nel qual io vivo ancora, e più non cheggio.”
(XV. 119-20)
(“May my Treasure, in which I still live,
be commended to you, and I ask no more.”)
Since “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Matthew 6: 21), this indeed becomes his self-willed lot and portion for eternity. He substitutes a self-created image, an artifact, an idol, for what should have been rather a living soul blessed eternally in the sight of the living God.
Nonetheless, Dante represents himself as still somewhat under the spell of his great teacher. This sentiment is attested by his expressions of deep affection and attachment, as well as respect signaled by the formal “you” (“voi”). Yet Dante’s reminiscing upon the way Brunetto taught him “how man eternalizes himself” (“come l’uom s’etterna,” XV. 85) shows up as tragically ironic in this scene blazoning Brunetto’s eternal damnation. Brunetto reenacts precisely this sin and its damnation again here and now in this very text by the manner in which he still interprets human being, particularly his own, humanistically. Specifically, the desire for eternity, for personal immortality, is pursued by Brunetto, as by a certain breed of humanists generally, through merely human channels rather than by submitting to God as the ultimate and only Lord of life. The humanist dream of self-immortalization through an artifact of one’s own creation, one’s literary work or oeuvre, is exposed as really an illusory evasion of time and death through an idolatrous sort of false transcendence.
Of course, Brunetto is actually condemned to the seventh circle of Hell for the sin of sodomy, but this too may be understood as falsely interpreting one’s mortal, worldly, and physical life as perennial and even eternal. The specific form of sodomy in question here, namely, pederasty can be analyzed as a self-deluded form of pretending to be ageless and eternal. Through amorous liaison with a youth, the pederast perhaps seeks an illusory escape from his own mortality. The sodomite’s indulgence in sterile sex—especially the pederast’s passion for infertile sexual relations with a young boy—constitutes, in a certain Christian moral perspective, a self-deceptive denial of time, to which all are nevertheless subject. Pederasty is a use of sex that dissociates it from the death of the old and the birth of the new and denies its implication of ceding one’s own place to the next generation. Reproductive sex defines the limits of our personal life: it entails the succession of generations and therewith our own mortality, whereas pederasty perverts sex in its refusal to recognize these limits.
The pederast remains spell-bound by a fascination with apparently ageless, ideal beauty. Just such a passion is explored by Thomas Mann in his story “Death in Venice”: the aging protagonist’s love for the beauty of a youth proves fatal to him. In this way, sodomy and humanism, which were closely linked historically in educational institutions based on the relationship between young boys and masters of the liberal arts, are exposed together as both forms of seeking a false transcendence. Each mirrors and reveals the other.
Brunetto Latini is, furthermore, a deeply individual and personal version of the “old man” of New Testament resonance (Romans 6: 6 and Ephesians 4: 22), of fallen humanity, that Dante also treats on a historical-allegorical level as the “Old Man of Crete” in Canto XIV. “Erect” (XIV. 104), like Capaneus, the “veglio” embodies iconographically the pride through which humanity falls in its very attempt to raise itself in defiance of the divinity it wills to supplant. An allegory of the succession of empires, as in Daniel 2: 31ff, this figure tells the story of humankind as a history of progressive decline—from gold, to silver, to bronze, iron, and clay. Its tears, forming the four rivers of Hell, concretize the flow of history and its tragedy into eternity, with ineffaceable consequences.
All of these examples, moreover, point out how absolutely central language, as interpretive medium, is to the sins and fates of the characters in the Inferno. That sin and indeed human action per se should be fundamentally linguistic in character is in itself an index of the extent to which Dante is conscious of human life as interpretation through and through. Self-interpretation—construing ourselves in one way or another—constitutes the very essence of what we, as free agents, do and are, and it takes place preeminently in the medium of language. Accordingly, Dante analyzes all the ways that language can be employed and perverted by interpretation for sinful purposes. Practically every sin is understood as basically linguistic in nature, or at least from the standpoint of its linguistic manifestation. As Robin Kirkpatrick suggests, “the speeches Dante attributes to the damned represent a pathological display of the many ways in which words can die or become, quite literally, immoral.” Directly dependent on language is not only the essentially human power of rationality, specifically perverted in graver sins, but also freedom, a necessary prerequisite for the possibility of any sin whatsoever. Only an animal endowed with speech is capable of sinning.
This linguistic emphasis of Dante’s outlook takes on particular importance through a kind of recursive twist, inasmuch as language is also the medium of Dante’s poem. The poem, therefore, constantly calls itself into question as a linguistic act and artifact. The poem and Dante’s act in writing it are themselves vulnerable to being marred by all the sorts of sins that are manifest linguistically and inventoried in the course of the journey. As poet, he can directly participate in the sins he represents specifically under the aspect of their linguistic manifestations. Dante’s examination of sin and of how it infects human language constantly reflects on himself and his own dilemmas with language in attempting to write a prophetic poem, a human work of art that will somehow communicate the Word of God, even from the depths of damnation in Hell.
Throughout the Commedia, Dante is in search of a new sort of language, a language with an authority that is not that of philosophy, which is liable to being corrupted by intellectual pride or “presumption,” as Augustine warned, nor just that of poetry and its rhetorical prowess. He ruthlessly impugns all language that depends on his own capabilities or on any merely human resources whatsoever. The Inferno is a relentless undermining of all the conventional sanctions of human and institutional authority that Dante might turn to for legitimation and validation of his language. The solution he finally adopts is that of a sermo humilis, a humbly sublime Christian prophetic word that lets divinity speak by disavowing and discrediting its own human authority and prestige. He goes so far as to humiliate his own human speaking and persona. Dante’s artistically self-conscious production of poetry is merely human, and he prominently highlights and exposes its limitations as such. Dante’s model is, ultimately, the Bible, which speaks from beyond its human authors and their individual voices as the Word of God. But he can approach this model only to the extent that he effaces his own authority and delivers his text up to be used for a higher purpose by another Author.
In Canto XVI, the noble Florentines indirectly confirm Brunetto’s prediction that Dante is destined for greatness by recognizing the privilege of his descent while living into the world of the dead. They entreat this marvelous man traversing hell safely on living feet (“vivi piedi,” 32) to tell them who he is. The extraordinary fact of his presence among the dead is immediate evidence of his enjoying the special favor of God. To this extent, Dante’s authority as poet and prophet in the interpretive journey is directly grounded on the corporeal journey of Dante as protagonist that demonstrates his election by grace for a world-historical mission. That is why all the vicissitudes to which Dante is subjected as a pilgrim cannot but reflect upon his status as poet-prophet. What happens to the character also happens to the author, even if somewhat indirectly, since the character is represented as in the process of becoming the author. Even the indignities to which he is subjected are necessary to strip away the merely human bases of his authority: Dante’s human capacities are compounded of a corrupt admixture needing to be purged away in the course of his descent for the sake of his divine calling. These capabilities are indeed foregrounded, yet not as reliable resources assuring him the mastery necessary to achieve his goal but rather as offered up to a higher Author and Person and Purpose, in order that they may be made genuinely fruitful.
Dante’s first and most indispensable human resource as a poet is, of course, his language. And the scene with the sodomites is one of myriad scenes that point up the essentially linguistic status of the past and of every spiritual condition in the present. Time and language are inextricable. This is suggested by the reply the sodomites give to Dante’s ringing denunciation of the Florentine nouveaux riches:
“Però, se campi d’esti luoghi bui
e torni a riveder le belle stelle,
quando ti gioverà dicere ‘I’ fui,’
fa che di noi a la gente favelle.
Indi rupper la rota, e a fuggirsi
ali sembiar le gambe loro isnelle.
Un amen non saria possuto dirsi
tosto così com’ e’ fuoro spariti . . . .”
(XVI. 79-89)
(“Therefore, if you make it out of these dark places
and return to sight of the stars,
when it will please you to say ‘I was,’
do make mention of us to the people.
Then they ruptured the wheel, and fleeing
their legs seemed wings for speed.
An ‘amen’ could not have been said
as fast as they were gone . . . .”)
Past time is identified as the tense that says “I was,” and a minimal moment of present time is measured by saying “amen.” These hints of the essentially linguistic definition of the past and present highlight the power of language to determine our reality particularly in its temporality. This power will prove fundamental to Dante’s attempt to use language to prophesy the future.
But immediately after this demonstration of appreciation for Dante’s high-minded, prophetically intoned speech delivered “with face upraised” (“Così gridai con la faccia levata,” XVI. 76), which is recognized right away as “the truth” (78), speech is drowned out by the waterfall of the Phlegethon tumbling down to the next lower circle of the Inferno, where indeed vision will take over from discourse, the eye from the ear. The sound of rushing water now deafens Dante and Virgil so that they can hardly hear each other speak:
che ’l suon de l’acqua n’era sì vicino,
che per parlar saremmo a pena uditi.
(XVI. 92-93)
(for the sound of the water was so near us
that we would scarcely have heard ourselves speaking.)
The simile used to describe this falling water compares it to “Acquacheta”—literally “Quiet Water”—in the Apennines by “Monte Viso” (XVI. 95), which can be taken to mean “Mount of Sight” (“viso” is, in fact, used in this sense a few lines later: “al tuo viso si scovra”—“be uncovered to your sight,” XVI. 123). This hushing up or drowning out of speech signals the transition—which is imminent—to a region where disclosure will depend more on the power of the image than on the word. Dante is building towards his thoroughgoing and devastating indictment of speech, in its turn, as chief among the all-too-human means of interpretation.
Precisely at this point, the transfer to the Malebolge takes place, with Dante and Virgil on the back of Geryon. It is a transfer from the circle of violence to that of fraud and, at the same time, an exposure of fraud in Dante’s own poetic interpretations. This parallels the transition from the circles of incontinence to those of heresy and violence (cantos X-XVII), in which Dante’s interpretations themselves tend to become violent. By swearing to the literal truth of his comedía in one of the most obviously preposterous moments of the whole poem, Dante deliberately provokes the question, Can we take all this seriously? Obviously not at face value. Rather than being any sort of natural creature, Geryon, that “filthy image of fraud” (“quella sozza imagine di froda,” XVII. 7) with the face of a just man (“faccia d’uom giusto,” XVII. 11), is a literary pastiche, a production of high artifice like a Turkish tapestry or like Arachne’s virtuoso web. The many colors of his hide suggest “colors” of rhetoric, just as the knots and convolutions painted on his surface (“dipinti avea di nodi e di rotelli,” XVII. 15) make him an emblem for textuality and for some of the more far-fetched literary inventions that have been woven into the text of the Inferno. Both knots (“nodi”) and scrolls (“rotelli”) are terms suggestive of writing and written artifacts. Geryon’s symbolizing, in these respects, Dante’s poem itself suggests that the poem is “a truth having the face of a lie” (“ver c’ha faccia di menzogna,” XVI. 124).
The claim to straightforward literal truth, to actually having seen this very beast come rising up out of the depths of hell, conspicuously invalidates and ironizes itself. It thereby forces us to interpret the poem’s nonetheless serious claim to truth on different grounds. Ingeniously, Dante manages to impose the authority of his text precisely by exposing its extravagant fictiveness. For exactly this sort of self-ironic interpretive twist is what is necessary to reverse the fraud of fiction and turn it into an instrument of prophetic revelation. Dante’s prophetic authority can be asserted only at the expense of the human poet’s authority and voice, for the latter can be but a purveyor of fictions and therefore, in strict medieval rationalist terms, of lies. Still, the episode affirms the truth of fiction in its very preposterousness, since fiction, by exposing its own falsehood, becomes, paradoxically, true. In this sort of interpretive self-consciousness resides fiction’s capacity to tell truths indirectly that otherwise cannot be told at all, so as to grasp what otherwise remains ungraspable about real life.
The actual descent, with the blocking of Dante’s sight and the concomitant concentration of attention on the sense of hearing, enacts the drama of another hermeneutic transition: it figures interpretive penetration to a new depth of sense, thus taking up the relay from Canto IX. Canto XVI concludes with the image of a diver returning to the surface, after having freed an anchor snagged on something beneath the sea. This may hint that Dante, too, has had to make some adjustments in the depths of his own poem, helping it to become unstuck from too rigidly literal an interpretation of the deep truth to which it is indeed anchored. So the “bark” of his poem is freed to sail on.
In this transition from the circle of the violent to that of the fraudulent—and thus from the second to the third major structural division of the Inferno (the first being incontinence) according to the classes of sin outlined in Canto XI—Dante again emphasizes ways in which his own poem is complicit in the type of sin it portrays. Behind the face of a just man, Geryon has the body of a serpent (XVII. 12)—recalling the first prevaricator in the Garden—and a sharp tail that menaces unseen (XVII. 1 and 84). And its descent in one hundred circles (“per cento rote,” XVII. 131) is a figure for the poem’s one hundred cantos. Throughout the eighth circle, Dante will concentrate on how poetry itself is apt to become a sort of hermeneutic fraud. Only by just such a self-aware admission and open exposure can the fraud inherent in poetic fiction be neutralized and even corralled into serving indirectly as a disclosure of divine truth.
In his descent to the eighth circle, Dante registers, through his references to two notoriously over-audacious voyagers in heaven, Phaethon and Icarus, his worry over trespassing upon territory where as a living human being he does not belong. Both are emblems of the risk Dante runs of encroaching upon a realm that is off-limits to him. As a human being and particularly as a poet, he is liable to producing a representation of the other world that cannot but be fraudulent. It is a risk that he is able to contain only by admitting the absurdly arduous, mad undertaking on which he has embarked in his poem. By clinging close to Virgil as father figure, an all-too-fragile delegate of ultimately divine authority, Dante corrects for the transgressiveness of the temerarious sons who ignored their fathers’ warnings. By calling attention himself to his dangerous proximity to such figures, he claims to be in conscious control of the risk and thereby differentiates the program of his poem from their disastrously deluded enterprises. While his poem is inextricably complicit in the very fraud and violence it denounces and which prove to be his characters’ eternal fate, this diagnosis and conscious denunciation opens a possibility of being saved by grace for Dante and for those who follow him on his journey of self-interpretation.
IV. Dante’s Deconstruction and Reconstruction of Prophetic Voice and Vision
in the Malebolge (Cantos XVIII-XXV)
In the Malebolge especially, we see Dante subjecting himself to scathing self-critique and even becoming a comic figure. As the protagonist climbs down deeper into the pit, the poem itself descends a declining scale of genres and stylistic registers all the way to the crude realism and burlesque of cantos XXI and XXII. Here Dante’s epic poem sinks to the level of Latin New Comedy, perhaps alluded to in Dante’s phrase “nuovo ludo” (XXII. 118), replete with lewd displays, comic gags, and sadistic games. It resorts especially to cooking imagery and proverbial wisecracks such as, “In church with saints and in the taverns with drunkards” (XXII. 14-15). Prophecy itself, insofar as it is the invention of a human poet, must be subjected to ridicule and affronts to its dignity. We see, in the Malebolge, a relentless critique of the prophetic voice to the extent that it represents the presumption of a human poet. This is necessary to categorically distinguish prophecy as divine revelation from every merely human counterfeit made of persuasive and perhaps deceiving rhetoric.
The authentic language of prophecy cannot be any proud, self-confident Ciceronian rhetoric but only a sermo humilis, such as is forged in the Bible, eminently by Christ himself, for example, in parables drawn from the common run of experience and quotidian life. Paralleling Augustine’s progression from the language of “presumption,” which is characteristic of philosophy and classical literary models, to acceptance of the humble language of Scripture, Dante dramatizes his own coming into such a language by representing himself as undergoing a series of humiliations that force him to relinquish all his own human resources, including his personal pride and self-reliance. Dante’s existential descent into the self enacts a destitution of his own self-sufficiency and self-centeredness, his being grounded in himself, and issues in an unconditional openness towards a transcendent or divine ground for his existence. Only by such self-ironic exposure of the inevitable deceptions of literary language and self-representation can Dante’s all-too-human poem actually attain to the transcendent heights of authentic prophecy.
Such self-irony may be the deeper sense of “comedía” as the generic description Dante adopts for his poem in Inferno XVI. 128 and again in XXI. 2. Indeed, only as “comedy” can it become “divine.” The best that any human effort can do, finally, is to confess its own insufficiency. A poem can, furthermore, unmask the false pretensions of more purportedly solemn attempts to prophesy that, without comic qualifiers, take themselves absolutely seriously, as if they were Gospel. This is seen by Dante to be the case even with the prophetic claims of the Aeneid. Virgil’s “high tragedy” (XX. 113) lacks the self-ironizing capacity of comedy that alone can allow human literature to become truly divine revelation. Of course, modern readings of the Aeneid go a long way towards discovering already in Virgil’s text an ironic current running counter to its own presumable imperialistic program. The triumphalistic story of Rome’s founding through glorious martial victory yields to a tragic tale of irreparable human loss, of becoming embroiled in a war of conquest and eventually in bloody civil war. Yet precisely such self-undermining serves in Dante’s text not just to render the poem ambivalent but to spark a higher realization of truth. By systematically undermining his own autonomous pretensions to communicate the truth, Dante’s comic irony catalyzes a conversion to a divine Truth that can emerge from beyond the lie of artifice inherent in the literary.
Only as comedy in this sense can literature attain ultimate truth. The Commedia’s comedy, deeply considered, is its irony, its exposure of literature as dissimulation. The insinuation of tragedy in Virgil’s ostensibly optimistic epic—its communicating a tragic truth only by way of its irony—may well be among the essential lessons that Dante learned from the Aeneid. However, as “high tragedy” Virgil’s epic remains essentially a dissimulation of its own ironic truth. Dante, in contrast, discovers in comedy the self-ironic mode necessary to let a truth break through what otherwise would remain human mendaciousness and fraud disguised behind the face of a just man (XVII. 7-12). By ironic exposure of its own inherent fraud as a literary fiction, Dante’s poem overcomes or at least neutralizes this fraud in order to become “the truth that has the face of a lie” (“quel ver c’ha faccia di menzogna,” XVI. 124).
This strategy of self-subversion in the Commedia is carried out particularly through its demolition of language. The development of the poem through the Malebolge, starting from Canto XVIII, demonstrates the devastating breakdown of language, rhetoric, prophetic pronouncement, authorial integrity, etc. Here “ornate speech” (“parole ornate,” XVIII. 91) becomes an instrument of perdition in the mouths of seducers like Jason. This ironizes Virgil’s supposedly saving “parola ornata” (II. 67), called on for Dante’s rescue at the outset of the poem. In fact, here the power of Dante’s speech is in its being not ornate but clear (“la tua chiara favella,” XVIII. 53), and his eyes become more potent than any eloquence. Pimp Venedico Caccianemico finds that he cannot hide from Dante’s gaze (XVIII. 45-46), and Alessio Interminei da Lucca cries out in protest over being eyed more than the other flatterers (XVIII. 118-119).
At this stage, it is the dialectic between seeing and saying that becomes most revealing. Canto XVIII presents the sin of pandering in the act of being performed, as if it were to capture the culprit precisely at the moment of saying “yes”—just as the word operates in the execution of this sin. Dante uses sipa, an affirmative in Bolognese dialect (XVIII. 58-61), for local coloration of this linguistically characterized sin. Similarly, barrators or grafters are identified in the dialect of Lucca as changing “no” to “yes” for money (“del no, per li denar, vi si fa ita,” XXI. 42).
This sort of crystallization of a sin by its linguistic expression can be found almost everywhere in the Inferno. In XXIII. 7, two words for “now” in different dialects, mo and issa (from Latin modus and ipse respectively), are used to point out a difference in the sensible signs used as signifiers, even where the signified meaning remains the same. Such arbitrary interchangeability of linguistic signifiers is intimately bound up with fraud, here specifically in the form of hypocrisy. Sin is inextricable from language right from Eve’s being beguiled by the serpent’s deceptive discourse in the Garden. The sins’ linguisticality also renders them susceptible of bleeding into Dante’s text, of participating in the poem itself as a linguistic act. As a writer, Dante inevitably presents all sins and sinners through linguistic constructions and representation, even when he does not explicitly make language his theme. Sin is realized in the poem linguistically, not only in the linguistic acts of the sinners, but also in the poem itself as a form of self-interpretation in language. The poem’s language cannot escape and will even own up to being sensual, violent, fraudulent, and finally treacherous—following the sequence of categories of sin progressively punished in Hell.
Pitfalls of Prophecy (XIX-XXIII)
In Canto XIX, Dante claims a prophetic authority for himself surpassing the priestly authority of the popes, but at the same time he begins to become a comic figure in his own poem. Standing over the popes, who are rammed upside down into the ground, he is ironically on the high ground vis-à-vis these high priests: he is in the position of the confessor with whom a condemned criminal was allowed to communicate just before the earth was filled in from above, so as to cause death by suffocation. Yet Dante himself may also be seen to be undermined in this exchange: in reprimanding the writhing feet, he cannot but come off as a little ridiculous. The poem oscillates subtly, but persistently, between affirmations of prestige and acceptance of ridicule with respect to its protagonist.
Here it becomes crucial to see how what happens to the pilgrim at least indirectly reflects also on the poet: they are both, after all, “Dante,” this personality that is created essentially by the poem. The savant artistry of the Commedia exploits this ambiguity between Dante as protagonist and as poet to its own immense advantage rather than dissembling it as a secret condition which, if exposed, would invalidate the fiction. Dante writes fiction and makes the reality of this very act of writing into an underlying theme of the poem. The self-reflective act of the imagination as opening another world, a glimpse into eternity, has been implicit in poetic prophecy all through ancient and medieval tradition, but it becomes fully self-conscious and identified with the act of writing only in Dante.
In setting up this scene of his preaching to the popes, Dante as narrator refers to an episode in his own life in which he claims to have broken a baptismal basin in San Giovanni, the baptistery in Florence, in order to save the life of someone who was drowning (XIX. 16-21). This odd allusion may well be concerned with justifying Dante’s apparent usurping of priestly authority in this canto attacking the popes. In fact, Dante’s whole poem constitutes an assertion of his prophetic authority in his role as poet over and against the official, sacramental authority of the clergy, who are criticized scathingly throughout the work. And yet the canto of the popes (XIX) depicts Dante being reduced from the self-confidence manifest in the opening denunciation of Simon Magus (“O Simon mago . . .”) to a state of helpless insecurity. For he himself has no authority to stand on. When Pope Nicholas III mistakes him for Boniface VIII, his successor in office and in sin, Dante’s identity is so shaken that he is incapable of responding until Virgil feeds him a response that he meekly repeats, stuttering: “I am not he, I am not he whom you think” (“Non son colui, non son colui che credi,” XIX. 62)—a response that is purely negative and defensive.
After hearing the pope’s story, however, Dante recovers and again preaches vehemently against the greed of simony that so provokes him. In presuming to denounce the Church’s official heads, Dante is, by his own admission, perhaps again too temerarious, “troppo folle” (XIX. 88). He uses the word folle that elsewhere describes the rash venture of Ulysses (XXVI. 125), as well as his own perhaps too rapid resolve to enter into the underworld (II. 35). But this time he also cleaves to the word of Scripture, with a reference first to 2 Maccabees 4: 7-8, which concerns the buying of priestly offices from the emperor. He then alludes further to the selection by lot rather than for money of Matthias to replace Judas in Acts 1: 26 and to the great whore of Babylon in Revelation 17: 1-5. This reliance on Scripture seems to make the essential difference. In accusing the popes of making gold and silver their gods, Dante is repeating the characteristic denunciation of idolatry leveled by the prophets of the Old Testament against religious authorities. In particular, he is echoing Hosea: “of their silver and their gold have they made them idols” (8: 4).
It is no longer a foolish self-confidence of his own but rather the language of Holy Writ on which Dante relies in reprimanding the popes. This allows the voice of the divine Other to break into his text, and this voice alone is able to make Dante’s poem truly prophetic. For all that is said in his own voice is the work of a man, a rhetorician; it is an instrumentalization of language for interested, egotistical purposes, as is illustrated eminently by the eloquence of Francesca, Pier, Brunetto, and Ulysses, and it is therefore subject to damnation. Against such self-serving rhetoric, Scripture breaks in with its magnificently unrhetorical and yet commanding and irresistible authority in a phrase like “Follow me” (“Viemmi retro”), or again in the inverted echoes of the Magnificat (Luke 1: 52): “calcando i buoni e sollevando i pravi” (“treading under the good and exalting the wicked,” 105). This echoing of God’s Word enables Dante to transcend his own human limits in making his poem the mouthpiece of a moral authority beyond that of his own confessedly sinful self. By this means, the “sound of words truly expressed” (“lo suon de le parole vere espresse,” XIX. 123) reverberates through his text, which thereby becomes genuinely prophetic. For Dante, in effect, admits his own inadequacy and the inadequacy of his own poetic rhetoric to be a vehicle of the divine vision. But he suggests that in exposing its inadequacy, in retracting its own claim to truth, the poem can become instrumental to allowing another more adequate, truer Voice to be heard.
The problematic nature of Dante’s language in the poem is brought to thematic focus with ever increasing intensity in the Malebolge. Starting in XVIII, the eye assumes the ascendancy. The potency of the eye cuts through the entanglements of language and rhetoric to reveal the naked truth of hell. Moreover, as language is increasingly revealed in the depths of its fraudulence, the guidance lent to Dante by Virgil depends more and more on his physical and emotional presence and less on the rhetorical style (“bello stilo,” I. 87) that initially was relied on in forming the relationship between the two poets. Virgil carries Dante on his hip down to the perforated turf in which the popes are plunged (XIX. 43-5, as promised in 34). And at the end of XIX, in order to bring him into the fourth division (or “bolgia”) of the Malebolge, Virgil takes Dante into his arms and lifts him onto his breast (“Però con ambo le braccia mi prese; / e poi che tutto su mi s’ebbe al petto . . .,” 124-25). In XXIII. 37, Virgil will clutch Dante like a mother escaping with her infant in arms from a house afire.
Canto XX is ostensibly an encomium of Virgil, who is presumably Dante’s guide and model as prophetic poet. But actually the canto pursues further the interrogation and indictment of claims to prophecy on the part of human poets specifically in relation to Virgil. Virgil waxes loquacious in his story of the founding of Mantua by Manto, begging indulgence as he sets out on what he perhaps half realizes is a too lengthy disquisition (“onde un poco mi piace che m’ascolte,” XX. 57). Nevertheless, Dante assents unconditionally to his authority when Virgil enjoins him to believe no other account of his home town’s origins, in order that “no lie be allowed to dafraud the truth” (“la verità nulla menzogna frodi,” 99). The irony here is that Virgil, in his story of the founding of Mantua on the bones of Tiresias’s “virgin” daughter, Manto, has contradicted his own account in Aeneid X. 198-201. The Aeneid makes Mantuans descendents from a son of Manto, Ocnus, presumably in accordance with Manto’s divination. Is Virgil’s account as poet of the Aeneid then a fraud? The word “defraud” (“frodi”) renders irrepressible this possibility. Prophetic-poetic authority here demonstrates its susceptibility to contradicting itself. Indeed the ambiguities of this type of authority are the central issue of this canto and of the bolgia that it covers.
All of the sinners punished here, including classical figures like Amphiaraus, Tiresias, Aruns, and Eurypylus, have been self-proclaimed prophets, but false ones, in their various ways. All were “seers.” What distinguishes Virgil, nevertheless, from the soothsayers, augurs, astrologers, haruspices or omen readers, mantics, and divines in this circle is that his prophesying is an interpretation of history. The false kinds of prophesying that are punished here consist in foretelling facts by presumably magical means rather than in rationally interpreting the significance of things as revealed in history. Virgil’s account of the founding of Mantua after Manto’s death is based on the natural ecological and strategic advantages of the site chosen rather than on any supposed divination or omens. Virgil, in effect, interprets natural history, bringing out what would make this place an ideal site for a fortress city. This sort of use of interpretive intelligence, unlike mechanical and superstitious techniques of fortune telling, can form the basis for an authentic exercise of prophetic faculties quite different from those of the sinners punished in this bolgia.
Nonetheless, by dint of its intensive discursivity, Virgil’s own brand of prophecy also risks falling into error. That is what becomes conspicuous in this most intensely visual area of hell: as one index, the word “vedi!” (“see!”) is constantly repeated throughout the canto. Virgil’s idyllic interpretations, loaded with blessings and picturesque charm and names bespeaking benevolence (like “Benaco”), gloss over the harsher realities written into the deceptive landscape, which are also inadvertently exposed—including rivalry between bishops and a garrison set for war that is aestheticized as a “beautiful and strong fortress” (“bello e forte arnese,” 70). Even more subtle is a mutation of the river’s name, as it begins moving into the real world, to “Menacio” (XX. 74), connoting loss (meno, less) and badness (-accio) and threat (minaccia). Upon investigation, Virgil’s serene words turn out to be mined with hints of violence and treachery; they are even liable to becoming fraudulent. Presumably all merely human, rhetorical claims to prophecy are thereby likewise placed under a shadow of suspicion.
The visual immediacy of Dante’s Hell is at a maximum in the Malebolge and particularly in cantos XXI and XXII, which depict the barrators boiled in pitch and the escape of Ciampola, the corrupt official from Navarra. Immediate action completely absorbs all attention, with an at least momentary loss of any further dimension of significance. The opaqueness of the pitch perfectly reflects the lack of penetrability, the occulting of interpretive depth in this part of hell. Even the Discensus Christi is here reduced to a brute fact of dates: “1266 years less five hours ago” (XXI. 112-14). Ironically, we receive this vital information from an unreliable source, Malacoda, who lies concerning the ridge that he says remained intact and would allow Dante and Virgil to cross over to the next bolgia (XXIII. 136). Alas, as is pointed out by the jovial friars, the devil is a proverbial liar and father of lies (XXIII. 139-44). In this way, the poem again flags its own complicity—as a work of fiction—in fraud.
The narrative here is full of implicit questionings of the veracity of Dante’s deed in narrating. This apparently problematizes his claim to prophetic authority, and worry about such a claim is reflected back into the narrative itself: it is felt again in the way Dante’s confidence as protagonist is also destroyed. After having adopted a prophetic tone in denouncing the popes and in his clear speech (“chiara favella”) exposing the procurers, Dante is portrayed here as ludicrous and himself a butt of the farce. He is told by Virgil to crouch down behind a crag out of sight (XXI. 58-60). A little later, he is told that it is all right for him to reappear:
“O tu che siedi
tra li scheggion del ponte quatto quatto,
sicuramente omai a me ti riedi”
(XXI. 88-89)
(“O you who sit squatting
among the jutting rocks of the bridge,
in safety now you can come out.”)
This seems much like the familiar ploys of farce, with its quickly improvised makeshifts. As literature, Dante’s work at this point belongs inextricably together with low comedy of the most raw and unedifying sort. The slapstick slams and blows dealt by the demons also menace an extremely vulnerable Dante: “Let him have it in the rump!” (“in sul groppone,” XXI. 101). In this manner, language can suddenly plummet to the vernacular profanity of street slang and sarcasm. Indeed, “Here is no place for the Sacred Face!” (“Qui non ha loco il Santo Volto!” 48). The allusion is to an ebony icon in “Santa Zita” (literally “Holy Hush,” 38), a church in the city of graft and corruption, Lucca, where mum is the word. Nether “cheeks” blackened and bobbing up to the surface of the pitch here blasphemously evoke this icon of the Holy Visage.
The mixture of styles and even of stylistic registers is seasoned, furthermore, with a generous dose of cooking imagery (“Non altrimenti i cuoci . . .” 55), and this, too, is part of Dante’s strategy to make mockery of the prophetic pretences of his own poem, to ironize its solemn tone and high seriousness. Such sudden sinkings from the sublime to the scarcely decent and grotesque are among the indirect ways in which Dante exposes the vulnerability of his poetic project—its potential for collapsing into mere presumption and even to become demonically deceptive. If its exalted purpose is to be fulfilled, its artifices, even those of the lowest sort, must be exposed and seen through, just as the literal meaning of the narrative must be transcended. But that is exactly what Dante has trouble doing here, as he looks into the boiling pitch: “I saw it, but I did not see into it” (“I’ vedea lei, ma non vedëa in essa,” XXI. 19).
Ultimately the penetration of the meaning of all history is possible only thanks to Christ. Underlining Virgil’s hermeneutic limitations once again, the next canto brings out precisely Virgil’s inability to understand the Christ event and its significance. This absolutely unique event cannot be comprehended by any pagan discourses constructed on however perfect rhetorical principles, for language and rhetoric are inherently general and universal. Every word in language is made to be reiterated in an unlimited variety of situations. Before the sight of “one, crucified” (“un, crucifisso”), Virgil is at a loss for words. Dante sees him perplexed and uncomprehending:
Allor vid’ io maravigliar Virgilio
sovra colui ch’era disteso in croce
tanto vilmente ne l’etterno essilio.
(XXIII. 124-26)
(Then I saw Virgil marveling
over him who was stretched in a cross
so vilely in eternal exile.)
But more than just Virgil’s limitations are in question here. Dante, too, is tested, and his own poetic-prophetic pretensions are in danger of showing up as blatant presumptuousness by the test of Christ’s uniqueness and the incomparable, singular event of the Crucifixion. Specifically at this juncture, there is a hint that perhaps he is implicated in hypocrisy through his fiction posing as prophecy. The possibility that he is an impostor seems to invade his consciousness subliminally and to check him as he begins to excoriate the jovial friars (frati godenti) for their hypocrisy. His speech is called up short by the sight of Caiaphas, the “one, crucified” on the ground in front of him and Virgil:
Io cominciai: ‘O frati, i vostri mali . . .’;
ma più non dissi, ch’a l’occhio mi corse
un, crucifisso in terra con tre pali.
(XXIII. 109-11)
(I began: ‘O brothers, your ills . . .’;
but I said no more, because my eye was struck by
one, crucified in the earth with three stakes.)
Throughout the Malebolge, Dante’s (like Virgil’s) repeated resort to prophetic elocution and its presumed authority is punctured and deflated by the immediacy of sight. Here the uniqueness of the fact of an individual in front of Dante—an individual alluding to the individual and unique event at the center of all history—asserts its absoluteness against the inherent generality of all discourse. This immediate presence gestures towards the revelation of a truth external to the digressive meanderings and weavings of Dante’s text, a truth that no human discourse can possibly comprehend.
All this points up the ingeniously indirect strategy by which Dante’s poem asserts its prophetic authority: it does so through undermining all of its own merely human pretensions to precisely such authority. By exposing itself as fiction, it becomes true. Its self-deconstruction of its own assertion of authority enables it to be informed from beyond itself by an authority not just its own. It thereby opens the way for divine grace to work the revelation of truth within the reader’s heart and intellect trained on the doctrine hiding beneath the veil of the strange verses (IX. 60-63). Its truth may thus be discerned by individual readers aided by divine action of grace working in and through interpretation carried out in the light of Christ—in whose tracks Dante follows on his own descent into Hell. The apex (or nadir) of infernal irony is that Dante’s Inferno becomes prophetic revelation of truth by undermining its own merely human claim to be capable of delivering just such a revelation.
Writing and (Anti-) Revelation (XXIV-XXV)
The general breakdown of all human interpretive means, signally language, in the Inferno is analyzed particularly with regard to writing as a medium in cantos XXIV and XXV. Canto XXIV opens with an image of the frost’s ephemeral writing on the earth and its fading soon away: “but not for long does its pen’s sharpness last” (“ma poco dura a la sua penna tempra,” 6). Tellingly, the canto closes with images of black and white that clearly refer to the vicissitudes of contemporary Black and White Guelf politics. Pistoia will first grow thin of Blacks (“Pistoia in pria d’i Neri si dimagra,” 143), but then Mars will bring turgid clouds and tempest and suddenly burst the mist “so that every White will be wounded” (“sì ch’ogne Bianco ne sarà feruto,” 150). Yet these images also suggest black ink on white paper, and as such they are woven into the metaphorical fabric of allusions to phenomena of writing that runs through these cantos.
Writing is in theory an instrument of stability, but here it becomes an emblem of turmoil and transience. Writing had traditionally been relied on as the means of stabilizing and fixing an indelible memory of oneself: witness, for example, the epigraphs on ancient tombstones. But in these cantos Dante reveals writing to be an eminently erasable trace of a human, mortal reality that is quintessentially vanishing. Particularly poets endeavor to achieve immortal fame by their writings. Dante’s own aspirations for his writing are patent, for instance, where he boasts over outdoing Lucan and Ovid by his virtuoso description of metamorphoses of thieves into snakes and vice versa (XXV. 94-102). Such a claim for writerly rank with or even above the Latin classics, however, is ironically undercut by being placed in the midst of a demonstration of how impermanent all human identity is—particularly insofar as it is entrusted to written tokens or inscriptions.
The central action of Canto XXIV is the instantaneous reduction to ashes, in order to be restored and start over again, like the phoenix, of Vanni Fucci, whose very name rings with vain fugacity (vanitas) and the fact that he was here (ci fu). This predicament of perpetual disintegration of self is perceived through a metaphor of writing construed as an impersonal act described by a reflexive verb (“si scrisse”). The instability and volatility connoted by writing are linked with dissolution of personal identity also in the way io, the word for “I,” breaks down into the sub-semantic particles of its component letters: o and i.
Né o sì tosto mai né i si scrisse,
com’ el s’accese e arse, e cener tutto
convenne che cascando divenisse . . . .
(XXIV. 100-102)
(Neither o nor i ever was so quickly written,
as he ignited and burned, and was turned all
to ashes at the same time as he fell.)
In the same vein in the next canto, the metamorphoses of the thieves into snakes and vice versa, robbing them of personal identity, is consummated metaphorically as the dying of the whiteness of paper turned black by the heat of the flames (XXV. 63-66).
né l’un né l’altro già parea quel ch’era:
come procede innanzi da l’ardore,
per lo papiro suso, un color bruno
che non è nero ancora e ’l bianco more.
(XXV. 60-63)
(already neither appeared as he was before:
as a brown color proceeds
before the heat when paper burns,
it is not yet black, while the heat dies.)
This is a subtle reminder of the impotence of writing in the face of physical dynamism. It comes just as Dante boasts of his unprecedented writerly mastery of metamorphosis, with his defiant challenge to classical poets, whom he claims to have surpassed: “Taccia Lucano . . . Taccia di Cadmo e d’Aretusa Ovidio, . . . io non lo ’invido” (“Be silent Lucan . . . Be silent Ovid concerning Cadmus and Arethusa . . . I have nothing to envy,” XXV. 94-99). The volatility of writing undercuts the interpretive art that is Dante’s own vehicle, sending up in smoke even his own illusion of establishing a permanent identity through such a work as the Inferno.
If the work is to have enduring value, this cannot derive simply from Dante’s own virtuosity, for his writing per se is unmasked as another merely mortal expression of a perishable self. Truly lasting value can only be given rather by a transcendent source. As the property of its author, the Inferno, too, is condemned by the dissolution of all supposedly stable identities, the ineluctable obliteration of all merely human form. Dante’s writing outstrips Ovid’s by entering more deeply into the mystery of metamorphosis that writing cannot describe without fixing (and thereby falsifying) it in static signs. Writing in this way reverses its usual connotation of permanence and becomes emblematic of the instability of unredeemed, mortal, human identity.
Dante, moreover, incorporates into his text the dimension of reading as a factor that inevitably makes the meaning of the written internally unstable and open to shifting interpretations. His own writing is continually opened to new appropriations of meaning through the poem’s solicitations of its reader. This is a crucial way in which Dante relinquishes and even undermines his control as author, in order to let loose a power transcending his own. Ultimately only relation to an absolute Other—a transcendent God—can create stable, substantial, and inviolable identity for the human person. Creation of an enduring identity can be catalyzed, but cannot be contained or controlled, by human acts and means such as writing. Indeed within a few lines of the arrogant boast relegating Lucan and Ovid to silence in face of Dante’s matchless virtuosity (XXV. 97-102), these cantos conclude with Dante’s confession that he is not in command of his own pen and a consequent appeal for pardon:
. . . e qui mi scusi
la novità se fior la penna abborra.
(XXV. 143-44)
( . . . and here may the strange novelty
excuse me, if my pen at times is errant.)
This sudden shift typifies Dante’s oscillation between bursts of self-confident pride, marked by prophetic pronouncements, and moments of humiliation and retrenchment, in which he (as protagonist) is often reduced to silence.
V. Discursive Traps: False Transcendence and Bad Faith (XXVI-XXX)
Writing is one of the means that human beings seize upon in order to attempt to establish their identity and confer eternity upon themselves—in fact, to steal it, Dante suggests in the cantos on the punishment of the thieves—from the one Author who alone can truly give life and even immortality. In his Inferno, this connotation of permanence is reversed, and writing turns into a revelation of the collapse of human identity and its pretended stability. So far from standing for things eternal, writing is made to serve as an emblem of the ephemeral. Dante’s demolition of writing in its pretentions to permanence becomes part of a strategy of indicating the way towards the true transcendence that only God can grant. This reversal belongs to a series of ruthless exposures of false transcendence sought by sinners through human works and particularly by means of words. In crucial ways, this series climaxes in the encounter with Ulysses. The series runs through Francesca, with her deceptive poetic rhetoric (canto V), Pier de la Vigna, who is also duped by his own linguistic dexterity (canto XIII), and Brunetto Latini, whose teaching “how man eternalizes himself” (“come l’uom s’etterna,” XV. 85) through his own work in words—his literary Tesoro—is emblematic of false transcendence that ignores the one true Lord of life in attempting to achieve immortality by one’s own efforts.
Canto XXVI represents the height of Dante’s examination of the dangers of hubris inherent in his own rhetorical project. Ulysses, the great voyager and rhetorician of antiquity, is an alter-ego in whom Dante beholds the image of his own near-damnation. In the presence and proximity of the legendary Greek hero, Dante registers his sense of peril about his own audacious voyage: it is a little too like Ulysses’s “mad flight” (his “folle volo,” 125), which echoes Inferno II. 35, where Dante feared that his own journey might be rash or “folle.” Here Dante says that he has to reign in his genius, as he depicts himself gripping a rock tightly, without which he would be precipitated down to his own destruction (XXVI. 43-45). He is, in his keen empathy and eagerness to converse with Ulysses, bent with desire toward the tongue of flame flickering in damnation (“vedi che del disio ver’ lei mi piego!” 69).
Ulysses is a chief and, in crucial ways, a culminating symbol of the attempt to establish human identity autonomously. He minds none of the markers put in place by others but rather follows only his own unprecedented audacity. He travels out beyond the limits of language and its domestications into the Nameless. Navigating the world prior to its being charted with names, he reaches Gaeta before Aeneas names it for his nurse-maid, and in fact before anyone else living he comes into sight of Mount Purgatory in the southern hemisphere. He ventures past all the limits set for human nature, embarking at an already advanced age, when he is old and slow (106), trespassing beyond the columns of Hercules (108-109) into the unpeopled world (“mondo sanza gente,” 117) behind the sun.
Ulysses’s mad flight turns his ship’s oars into wings (“de’ remi facemmo ali al folle volo,” 125)—a kind of category mistake reminiscent of Geryon’s aviation described as navigation that violates and defrauds the natural order of things (XVII. 7). More precisely, here it is a question of artifacts, specifically oars: they are produced by human art for a rational purpose which, however, is perverted in exceeding their natural use, as they are made metaphorically into wings for a reckless “flight.” Indeed, throughout the Malebolge, it is perversions of reason that are punished. Whereas, from Dante’s theological viewpoint, human identity can be secured only through a relationship with the divine source and Creator of all, Ulysses’s fully autonomous search for himself, relying entirely on artifacts of his own making, leads him, heedless of his mortal limits, into uncharted seas where no human being belongs. Dante’s own unprecedented journey comes perilously close to retracing this wild course, particularly in his ultimate adventure transcending the limits of language into the ineffable sublimities of Paradise in quest of a God who must ultimately remain unknown. It is entirely fitting, therefore, that in Paradiso XXVII. 82-83, as Dante crosses the threshold of the fixed stars, moving beyond the planetary universe, he should again recall “the mad passage” (“varco / folle”) of Ulysses. That Ulysses’s brave new rationality should be exposed as the height of unreason uncannily anticipates the “dialectic of enlightenment” as analyzed by Adorno and Horkheimer.
The voyage of Ulysses is mad and foolish because he attempts, not unlike the humanist Brunetto Latini, a false transcendence based on human faculties, specifically “virtue and knowledge” (“virtute e canoscenza,” 120). In his unguided journey, he is oblivious not only to the divine Other but also to all others, including his wife and son, his father, and even his companion in arms, Diomedes, whom he does not so much as acknowledge, even though they are eternally bound together in the same punishing tongue of fire. He himself tells us that no natural bonds to others were able to conquer his lust for experience of the world and of human values:
“né dolcezza di figlio, né la pietà
del vecchio padre, né ’l debito amore
lo qual dovea Penelope far lieta,
vincer potero dentro a me l’ardore
ch’i’ ebbi a divenir del mondo esperto
e de li vizi umani e del valore.”
(XXVI. 94-99)
(“neither tenderness for a son, nor pity
for an old father, nor the love owed
Penelope, to make her glad,
could conquer in me the ardor
I had to become experienced in the world,
both of human vices and of valor.”)
Experience is for Ulysses the highest value (“esperto . . . del valor,” 98-99), whether it is the immanent, all too finite experience of the senses or rather experience following the cyclical eternity of the sun (“l’esperienza / di retro al sol,” 116-17). In either case, experience is for its own sake and therefore a type of knowledge that remains within an enclosed circuit. Even in overstepping all the boundaries that he encounters along his horizontal trajectory over the ocean, Ulysses falls far short of true vertical transcendence towards the God above. Only in this direction, moreover, could he transcend the pagan time of cyclical repetition—traced in the circlings of his ship as it founders into the deep—towards the radically new time of the absolute Other inaugurated by the Christian Incarnation. In the end, he sees that his destiny is directed by the will of an Other—“com’altrui piacque” (“as pleased another,” 141)—from beyond the horizon of his own experience. This final recognition (agnitio) qualifies him as a tragic hero, but his fate is nevertheless sealed.
The human power of self-reliance that Ulysses chooses over anything or anyone else transcending him is manifest most immediately in his language. Yet it becomes for him a trap of self-enclosure. In his own speech, he consigns himself and his companions eternally to the immanent sphere of human life and his own subjective consciousness—“this so tiny vigil of what remains for our senses” (“questa tanto picciola / vigilia d’i nostri sensi ch’è del rimanente,” XXVI. 114-15). The world of his experience circumscribes his ultimate concern, and he will acknowledge no boundary beyond or above himself.
Ulysses’s language, his rhetorical prowess exercised for purposes of deception, metaphorically “robs” him of himself (“e ogni fiamma un peccator invola,” 42) and wraps him eternally in an ancient flame (“fiamma antica”) that shakes “as if it were the tongue that spoke” (“come fosse la lingua che parlasse,” 85-89). These are not (except in parody) the flaming tongues of the Holy Spirit that descended upon the disciples’ heads at Pentecost (Acts 2), but rather the vain tongues of false counselors that burn eternally in Hell. This threat of damnation for whoever becomes wrapped up in his own rhetoric—to the forgetting and exclusion of the one and only transcendent ground of all eloquence and truth—is a great threat for Dante also, as he is himself engaged upon the all-too-willful act of creating his sublime poem.
Countering this risk, a vertical axis pointing upward towards this transcendent ground can be glimpsed in the allusion to Elijah’s chariot, with its horses rearing up straight to heaven (“quando i cavalli al cielo erti levorsi,” XXVI. 35-36). The allusion is more directly to Elijah’s disciple, Elisha, watching his master’s chariot ascend. This brings onto the scene, from biblical as opposed to classical tradition, a model of transmission of prophetic revelation to a younger generation, and as such it contrasts with Ulysses’s neglect of his son. Dante himself hopes for such sons from among his literary progeny; he describes them as bursting eventually into the “great flame” that he hopes his words will spark (Paradiso I. 34). But Ulysses endeavors to transcend all limits himself, leaving nothing for those who, following after, would transcend him.
The sublime speech Ulysses delivers is larded with topoi of modesty, signally with the recurrent adjective “picciol” (“small”), but this is more strategic than sincere, as his damnation for false counsel suffices to suggest. In keeping with the classical prescription for a tragic hero, Ulysses comes to consciousness of his flaw after he has fallen: this happens at the canto’s end in the peripeteia of joy turning to sorrow (“Noi ci allegrammo, e tosto tornò in pianto,” XXVI. 136). Ulysses’s tragic greatness is unmistakable in his attempt to transgress all limits, emblematically the limits of the humanly navigable world. His mistake is to attempt it on his own power rather than in acknowledgment of the divine Other whose good-pleasure is in reality the master of his human fate. This is what makes all the difference between his fate and Dante’s. The risks of transgression and prideful impurity inherent in Dante’s undertaking are registered all through the Inferno. However, Dante’s journey transcending mortal limits is based on a vocation accepted in response to the summons of a transcendent Lord God rather than on the quasi-Romantic overreaching of a self-absorbed hero who acknowledges no limits and submits himself to no Other or even others.
In the first canto of the Purgatorio, Dante will look back over the sea that Ulysses failed to cross, the sea from which he himself had narrowly escaped as a metaphorical shipwreck in Inferno I. 22-27. He will recall, in a thinly veiled allusion to Ulysses, that no man was experienced or expert (“esperto”) enough to cross it without losing himself:
“Venimmo poi in sul lito diserto,
che mai non vide navicar sue acque
omo, che di tornar sia poscia esperto.
Quivi mi cinse sì com’ altrui piacque . . . .”
(Purgatorio I. 130-33)
(“We came then to the deserted shore,
which never saw its waters navigated
by any man expert enough to return.
There he girded me even as pleased Another . . . .”)
The last line reiterates verbatim the phrase “as pleased another” (“com’altrui piacque”) from the end of Inferno XXVI, where Ulysses finally recognizes, too late, the sovereignty of a divine Will. Dante’s journey, by contrast, is divinely sanctioned, not just self-willed, as canto II. 52-114 explains through the account of a relay of three blessed ladies summoning Virgil to Dante’s rescue. This is signaled again in Purgatorio I, when Dante is girded with the yielding reed of humility at the foot of the purgatorial mountain. He is guided by an Other—with and through the mediation of others like Virgil and Beatrice—rather than being a self-elected explorer with no transcendent purpose or limits to orient and contain him. For all his perilous proximity to Ulysses, this makes the dramatic difference between his salvation and Ulysses’s damnation.
In contrast to Ulysses, who is the archetypal ancient hero, Guido da Montefeltro, “coming a little late” (“perch’ io sia giunto forse alquanto tardo,” XXVII . 22), epitomizes the modern anti-hero. Unlike Ulysses, he does not boldly pursue his destiny to infinity without looking back, heedless of the all else. Guido, in characteristically self-conscious, modern fashion, calculates the consequences. When he is near death, at the time of life when it is more astute to be pious than ruthless, he turns repentant and confesses. In this respect also, he contrasts with Ulysses, who sets off on his mad flight at that time of life when other men are trimming their sails. Guido believes that he can manipulate his fate in the same way that he attempts to manipulate his own conscience—by making himself believe what he wants to believe—and so win heaven too. And he really believes, he says, that this would have worked to save his soul, had it not been for the hypocrisy of the pope, that “prince of the new Pharisees” (85):
“Quando mi vidi giunto in quella parte
di mia etade ove ciascun dovrebbe
calar le vele e raccoglier le sarte,
ciò che pria mi piacea allor m’increbbe,
e pentuto e confesso mi rendei;
ahi miser lasso! e giovato sarebbe.”
(79-84)
(“When I saw myself come to that part
of my life where everyone should
lower the sails and gather in the cords,
that which pleased me before I regretted,
and I made myself penitent and confessed;
Oh miserable wretch! And it would have worked.”)
Turning Franciscan after his exploits as a captain in arms, he believes he can make amends for his sins. His bad faith, however—his awareness that he does not really believe what he tries to make himself believe—is betrayed by the fact that he describes this conversion as a mere change of costume from captain to monk. It is no more than an astute maneuver, a trick devised to win him salvation by hook or by crook:
“Io fui uom d’armi, e poi cordigliero,
credendomi, sì cinto, fare ammenda;
e certo il creder mio venìa intero . . . “
(XXVII. 67-69)
(“I was a man of arms, and then a friar,
believing that, so girded, I made amends;
and certainly my belief would have been fulfilled . . . .”)
Guido avails himself of a similar device at the climax of his story. He tries to make himself believe that the pope can assure him of absolution for a sin even before he has committed it. Counting on his ability to manage his own conscience, he tricks himself into believing that he needs only to formally repent, ignoring the fraudulence of such a sentiment summoned at will and at the most opportune moment for purely strategic purposes. Such perverse mental meddling turns against him and is mocked by the devil, who comes to vie for his soul, arguing irrefutably against Saint Francis that it is logically impossible to will the sin and repent for it at the same time. Like the artisan of evil who perishes in his own death machine—the “Sicilian bull” evoked at the outset of the canto (XXVII. 7-12)—Guido is trapped by his own devious construction of a belief that he does not himself really believe. He finds himself unable to evade the necessary consequences of his beliefs as actions whose implications he cannot simply control at will. In attempting thus to manipulate his own beliefs, in the end he is trapped by them.
This sort of dishonest management of one’s own beliefs has been analyzed as “bad faith” by existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, and it has been represented in poetry by T. S. Eliot, particularly in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” This poem, too, is about the cripplingly over-acute self-consciousness of the modern protagonist, the anti-hero whose capacity for whole-hearted conviction and sincere commitment has been undermined by excessive self-reflectiveness and self-doubt. Such convoluted consciousness expresses itself tellingly in Guido’s opening lines, those chosen by Eliot for the epigraph of his poem :
“S’i’ credesse che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria sanza più scosse;
ma però che già mai di questo fondo,
non tornò vivo alcun, s’i’ odo il vero,
sanza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.”
(XXVII. 61-66)
(“If I believed that my response was
to a person who would ever return to the world,
this flame would remain stock-still;
but since never from this bottom
has any one returned alive, if I hear truth,
without fear of infamy I answer.”)
The irony here is that Guido, the fox, for all his renowned cleverness, does not see, as most all other souls in hell do, that Dante is alive and destined to return to the world. Arguably, he fools himself by design, since what he really wants is to relate his story (“e come e quare, voglio che m’intenda,” 72). In this way, he would be caught actually re-enacting in the text the bad faith intrinsic to the false counsel for which he is damned. Bad faith—making oneself believe what one really does not believe—is diagnosed here as a characteristically modern syndrome already by Dante. With the emergence of a modern, acutely reflexive self-consciousness come specific unprecedented pitfalls that Dante is quick to register and dissect in his examination of the human psyche and its vulnerability to sin. He is all the more anxious about this particular case, since self-reflexiveness is so crucial to his own so highly reflective artistic project—and also so potentially vitiating of it.
Canto XXVIII begins with a meta-narratological reflection declaring the extreme difficulty of telling what has been seen, serving notice that the poem has arrived very near the limits of its discursive powers:
Chi poría pur con parole sciolte
dicer del sangue e de le piaghe a pieno
ch’i’ ora vidi, per narrar piú volte?
Ogne lingua per certo verría meno
per lo nostro sermone e per la mente
c’hanno a tanto comprender poco seno.
(XXVIII. 1-6)
(Who could even in unrhyming words
and with repeated narration tell
the blood and wounds galore that I now saw?
Every tongue would surely fail
because of our discourse and mind
that are not apt to comprehend so much.)
This opening announces the obliteration of speech by vision that is then directly realized by the canto’s intensive focus on limbs cut off, that is, on isolated and static components of formerly organic bodies. The canto moves from Mohammed to Bertran de Born and Ahitophel, sowers of discord, thrusting into view graphic images of mutilated and truncated body parts that interrupt the narrative perhaps more violently than ever before up to this point. The word is arrested by startling visual tableaux such as Mohammed’s being ripped wide open in a laceration from chin to bowels or Bertran de Born’s carrying his head swinging alongside him like a lantern. A similar effect is achieved by Pier da Medicina’s cloven throat, chopped off nose, and single ear (“una orecchia sola”), by Mosca dei Lamberti’s handless stumps (“moncherin”) raised in the air, and by Curio’s slit tongue. The tongue that split Rome and fomented civil war in the body politic, by urging Caesar to cross the Rubicon, has now become literally and visibly the division of a body against itself.
The images of division and mutilation are mirrored in Dante’s own narration, with its augmented complexity, its fracturing and overlapping and fragmentation. The narrative is constantly interrupted and its fabric ripped apart. The poetry itself, moreover, partakes of the human form’s violability and volatility among the thieves. It is torn asunder, just as Bertran’s condition ruptures the unity of the person made in the image of God who is One, producing an unholy “two in one and one in two” (“eran due in uno e uno in due,” XXVIII. 124). Characters and their successive episodes bleed into and contaminate one another, corrupting the integrity of the individual scenes. Images of amalgamation and adulteration abound—signally among the falsifiers and counterfeiters. This messiness is itself a manifestation of infernal unholiness and unwholeness, in which Dante’s own poetry fully participates.
Dante is severely scolded by Virgil at the beginning of Canto XXIX for having become too absorbed in the chaotic visual spectacle offered by the disseminators of discord:
Ma Virgilio mi disse: “Che pur guate?
perché la vista tua pur si soffolge
là giù tra l’ombre triste smozzicate?”
(XXIX. 4-6)
(But Virgil told me: “What are you gawking at?
why is your gaze fixated down there
on the sad mutilated shades?”
The same sort of reproach is leveled at the end of Canto XXX, when Dante is threatened by Virgil for looking too intently, as if mesmerized, upon the scuffle between Simon Greco and Mastro Adamo: “Now go ahead and ogle, / I could almost fight with you myself!” (“Or pur mira, / che per poco che teco non mi risso!” XXX. 131-32). Language, for all its deceptive pitfalls, is nevertheless necessary in order to maintain a certain distance from the fray and mayhem that is displayed before the open gaze of the pilgrim. Thus discourse and sight have at least a negative function of checking one another reciprocally. If sight has been privileged against discourse as revealer of a more immediate truth throughout the Malebolge, at the end of the eighth circle its own risks and inadequacies are brought out, leaving us in a state of epistemological incertitude and without any secure channel for ascertaining truth. The world of the Inferno proves rather the unattainability of truth for fallen human nature and its fallen faculties.
Moreover, at the bottom of the Malebolge, a certain trivialization becomes rampant and makes a travesty of truth, whatever the means by which it may be disclosed, whether visual or discursive. The striking thing about most of the falsifiers of metals and of persons punished in the last of the ten bolge is the frivolousness of their characters. We have come rapidly down from the ancient and modern tragic modes of Ulysses and Guido da Montefeltro respectively to stories of ridiculous frauds from contemporary anecdote. Gianni Schicchi’s disguising himself as Buoso Donati on his death-bed in order to change this deceased man’s last will and testament proved to be perfect material for comic opera (opera buffa) in the hands of Giacomo Puccini. The scuffle between Mastro Adamo, a contemporary counterfeiter, and Simon Greco, mixing up the ancient with the modern, also stoops to new depths of indignity: it transgresses the sense of decorum separating the ancient from the modern that has been invoked as recently as in Virgil’s insisting that he alone should speak with Ulysses and Diomedes (“Lascia parlare a me”), since as Greeks they might well balk at Dante’s unclassical speech (XXVI. 73-75).
On a purely physical and visual plane, Mastro Adamo illustrates a further assault upon the dignity of the human form. Deformed into a shape like that of a lute by his dropsy, he has become a satiric representation of harmony perverted and disturbed. The music of the universe—based on the Pythagorean proportions that hold all things together in unison—is distorted by the counterfeiter’s action. Since by counterfeiting he interferes with the flow of currency in the body politic, the circulation within his own body is now deranged. As an individual, Mastro Adamo is a representation of the base and abject condition to which fallen man falls, in spite of—and belying—his idyllic discourse on the pure waters coursing uncontaminated through the valley of Casentino (XXX. 64ff). As suggested also by his name, he is an archetype of the fallen human condition.
All this cannot help but reflect on Dante’s poetic discourse, which must accept showing up as itself base and trivial, if any higher purpose is to be accomplished through it. Indeed Griffolino d’Arezzo’s story of a flying man is embarrassingly close to Dante’s own unbelievable tale of descending alive into hell, as Virgil summarizes it in XXIX. 94-96. Dante has to debase and discredit and in every way demean his literary means, along with his very humanity, in order that they might be redeemed from above and beyond his own creation and control. Only so can he be reached by a true transcendence that he is as powerless as Ulysses is to reach all by himself.
VI. Freezing of Signification in “Dead Poetry” (XXXI-XXXIV)
In the last major structural division of the Inferno, the well of Cocytus, where traitors are punished, the difficulty of progress increases, approaching a zero-point, not only for the pilgrim but also, and expressly, for the poet. The linking of these two kinds of difficulty has been evident before. For example, Dante’s weariness and Virgil’s exhortations to exert in order to make an enduring mark and achieve fame (XXIV. 46-51) apply not only to the pilgrim struggling with difficulty over the rough ridges of Hell but also indirectly to the writer descending even deeper into the representation of yet more unspeakable sin. Here, at the bottom of the universe (“fondo a tutto l’universo,” XXXII. 8), Hell becomes explicitly a “place about which to speak is hard” (“loco onde parlare è duro,” XXXII. 14). Writing becomes as hard as the rock and ice at the bottom of the pit. The writer can only wish that he had adequately harsh rhymes with which to represent it:
S’io avessi le rime aspre e chiocce
come si converrebbe al tristo buco
sovra ’l qual pontan tutte l’altre rocce . . .
(XXXII. 1-3)
(If I had harsh and grating rhymes
such as would suit this sorrowful hole
upon which weigh all other rocks . . .)
Here, apparently, Dante gives up his aspirations towards higher interpretive significance and attempts simply to describe the literal reality before him (“discriver fondo a tutto l’universo”), which is arduous enough, not a task to be taken lightly or in jest (“ché non è impresa da pigliare a gabbo,” XXXII. 7-8). The Muses are invoked once again to ensure that the saying not diverge from the facts (“sì che dal fatto il dir non sia diverso,” XXXII. 12).
Yet just such plain, literal description of Hell proves impossible, and as Dante descends via the giants of classical fame into the frozen lake of Cocytus, the journey is turned back virtually into myth, which is all that this poetic production of the eternal world can really be, at least in the absence of divine grace. At the same time, myth here is defined in the most factually objective terms, for example, by the comparison of Nimrod’s face to the bronze pine cone that once stood outside St. Peter’s in Rome. Such reduction of the mythic to the factual signals a deflation and a deadening of the symbolic potential of literary signs. Despite scattered signs of moving towards apocalypse (for example, the trumpet blast announcing war in XXXI. 12), the ultimate disclosure in this section—and consequently in the conclusion to the Inferno as a whole—is disclosure only of sound and fury signifying nothing. Satan, like the evil he perfectly personifies, is in fact a perfect nullity (echoing Augustine’s Neoplatonic interpretation of evil as lack and as in itself nothing). So is all human effort, including writing, in the end, nothing—unless something can be made of this nothing by a wholly other power, a power that declares itself thereby as transcendent and divine.
Already at the end of the Malebolge, Dante represented himself as speechless with shame, after he had been reprimanded by Virgil for being transfixed before the scuffle between Mastro Adamo and Simon Greco (XXX. 130-36). He points out that it is ironically his very inability to excuse himself that excuses him:
tal mi fec’io, non possendo parlare,
che disiava scusarmi, e scusava
me tuttavia, e nol mi credea fare.
(XXX. 139-40)
(so became I, unable to speak,
and I desired to excuse myself, and in fact did so
in spite of believing that I did not do it.)
That he does not and cannot say what he would like to say is the exact expression of the bitter embarrassment and chagrin that overpowers him. Such an expression by negation of expression becomes already at some level Dante’s mode, most importantly as a writer, as he bears down on the inexpressible, absolute nullity of Hell. Dante has had to evolve a negative form of expression throughout his journey, and now he must complete and perfect it. The reality he aims to convey, namely, absolute evil, is, strictly considered, nothing. It is therefore without significance and is literally unsignifiable. This makes him impotent as a writer, and paralleling this writerly impotence Dante as a character, too, is denied speech, as he passively submits to the grasp of the giants.
The linguistic impasse Dante reaches at the core of Hell is emblematized in the figure of Nimrod, the main instigator and engineer of the building of the tower of Babel and thereby of the fall of human language into confusion, according to Genesis 11: 1-11. Nimrod presides, with a language that has degenerated into unintelligibility (XXXI. 67), over Dante’s descent to the ninth and last circle of Hell. Reminiscent of Nimrod’s leading role in building the Tower of Babel, the giants appear to Dante in the illusory form of towers: they are seen to “tower” (“torreggiavan,” XXXI. 43) above the well of Cocytus. Again, as Dante is lowered by Antaeus, he perceives the giant as a tower of Bologna, “la Garisenda,” leaning over him (XXXI. 136-38). The “reality” of the literal giants is thereby changed back into the imagination’s figure for them—the tower. In the collapse of language to the level of literal fact, literal sense itself tends to collapse back upon the metaphors—technically “catachreses”—lying at the origin of words.
One of Dante’s constant techniques throughout the Inferno is to literalize the language that he uses to describe features of Hell, taking his cue from the root meaning of metaphors in order to determine the literal reality that is represented. The simonist popes who put money in their purses end up literally “impursing” themselves (“mi misi in borsa,” as Nicolas III says in XIX. 72) in the pouches (“bolge”) of the Malebolge. Such cases suggest how language can become most revealing by dint of a kind of failure to signify in the usual way. They reveal a crassly literal, crudely true meaning beneath language’s overt meaning as used for conscious purposes of representation and also, inevitably, misrepresentation. This meaning remains as a stubborn residue clinging to the words themselves and resists all motivated manipulations of surface sense. Another more basic level of meaning below the conventional level of signification emerges from the concrete sense of words taken according to their etymological senses based typically on the physical content of images. Such displacement and apparent distortion by improper, metaphorical meaning turns out to disclose a deeper, truer reality beneath what is said by the official, conventional significances of words.
As Dante descends to the last circle of Hell via the giants in XXXI, he makes much of the optical illusion that they present to him in their guise as towers: the end of the Malebolge emphasizes how sight can be just as deceptive as discourse. This suggests that there is no reliable standard for judgment in the Inferno at all. And yet precisely this uncertainty is superlatively revealing about the human condition. When language shakes itself loose from conscious, conceptual control and meaning spills over into metaphor, the author or authoritative statement may be undermined, but the truth thereby first finds a way to get out. Language in the poem lets us “see” a truth that cannot as such be consciously and deliberately said.
The canto immediately following Dante’s being lowered by the giant Antaeus harps on the inadequacy of language to the reality the poet has to describe: “If I had harsh and grating rhymes . . .” (“S’io avessi le rime aspre e chiocce . . .” XXXII. 1). The dead-wood literalness of language comes to stand for its lack of transitivity, of referential transparency, and especially of transcendence in a theological sense. While the Inferno tends to concretize the literal meaning of its own language, in the Paradiso language is metaphorical in a sense that points away from the concrete towards infinitely open and ineffable meaning. Here, in Hell, it is not the Infinite and divine that is being contemplated, at least not directly, but fallen, sinful humanity. And language’s falling into the dark opacity of the literal expresses this. Here the truth is a matter of facing brute facts: it is most immediately and intimately a matter of facing oneself without the distorting lenses of language. Dante must take the lead in this process of exposure to himself. His actual viewing of himself in the spectacle of the damned comes to express articulation in the question put to him by Camiscion de’ Pazzi: “Why do you mirror yourself so much in us?” (“Perché cotanto in noi ti specchi?” XXXII. 54).
In the last circle of the Inferno, it finally becomes explicit that Dante is viewing himself in the sinners he encounters—here, those frozen in the lake of Cocytus. However, most importantly as writer, and not only as character, Dante has shown himself to be complicit in the sins examined in each region of Hell. His interpretive acts as poet are equivocally adulterated with falsehood in the registers specifically, as we have seen, of sensuality, violence, and fraud. In the last segment of the Inferno, Dante accordingly concentrates on writing no longer merely as fraudulent but as outright treacherous. His very act of writing and publishing Hell betrays certain individuals to everlasting reprobation in the minds of fellow humans and in history (Canto XXXII furnishes two lists of five names each in lines 55-69 and 116-23), and Dante is perhaps somewhat sadistically conscious of this power as a punishing weapon that he can wield. In this vein, he (now as protagonist) reviles Bocca degli Abati, taunting him with the promise to carry news of his damnation back to the living:
“. . . malvagio traditor; ch’a la tua onta
io porterò di te vere novelle.”
(XXXII. 110-11)
(. . . wicked traitor; to your shame
I will bear back true news of you.)
It is striking and really quite shocking to see how Dante is now meting out, with genuinely hateful animus, the punishments of Hell before which previously he had often recoiled in pity and horror. While crossing the lake with sinners frozen solid in it, he kicks Bocca degli Abati in the face—whether by destiny or by fortune he does not know (“se voler fu o destino o fortuna / non so,” XXXII. 76). Again, the levels of character and poet interact, and the insinuation of culpability creeps from one to the other.
Perhaps the most explicit example of Dante’s actually practicing treachery among and upon the treacherous is his treatment of Frate Alberigo. Dante promises to relieve Alberigo of the heavy visor of ice congealed on his brow in exchange for the sinner’s story, but he expresses this promise equivocally in a conditional: “if I do not defrost you, let me go down to the bottom of the ice” (“s’io non ti disbrigo, / al fondo de la ghiaccia ir mi convegna,” XXXIII. 115-17). Since that is exactly where he is going anyway, he can omit performing the favor requested without technically breaking the word of his promise, even while betraying the soul with whom the pact was made.
Dante is seen torturing Bocca, pulling his hair out while the wretch screams, in order to force him to reveal his identity. It is uncannily accurate that the voice that then cries out Bocca’s name should ask, “What devil is tormenting you?” (“Qual diavol ti tocca?” XXXII. 108). For Dante himself has assumed the role of a punishing devil in this awful bottom of the infernal abyss. Dante as character, here and elsewhere in the Inferno, in this way doubles the writer—the prodigious inventor of so many devilish designs for punishments. They are inflicted, as if for his own revenge, on many whom he had reasons to hate and, in fact, resented and despised in real life.
Dante the writer’s complicity in treachery is scrutinized above all in the justly famous episode presenting Count Ugolino. Here the veritably Satanic potential of narrative is terrifyingly exposed. Dante is concerned to show how the art of narrative can become a treacherous instrument for suppressing and killing meaning. This exposé is the more poignant in that it occurs within Dante’s own revenge narrative—and thus may bear a sharply self-critical edge. While narrative ideally reveals meaning and discloses truth, it also remakes whatever it reveals in the image of the narrator: narrative inevitably shapes what it tells and molds it to the motivations and character of the teller. But then the true meaning of the story can be buried beneath the infernal purposes of an evil narrator. And in this case, narration itself can be turned into a highly destructive engine of sin.
Ugolino’s speech begins with the topos of how the telling of a tale about painful experience renews the pain. He remarks that the experience of pain in a sense can even (re)originate in its verbal imitation in narrative: the thinking about pain, which issues in narrative, renews that very pain. So Ugolino protests:
“Tu vuo’ ch’io rinovelli
disperato dolor che ’l cor mi preme
già pur pensando, pria ch’io ne favelli.”
(XXXIII. 4-6)
(“You ask me to renew
desperate pain, so that my heart is wrenched
just thinking of it, before I start to speak.”)
This echoes the incipit to Francesca’s oration—itself based on the lines of Aeneas to Dido at the beginning of his tale of travels and woe in Book II of the Aeneid, which is, in turn, an echo of Odysseus’s proem to his autobiographical narrative of adventures and gruesome ordeals in the Odyssey IX-XII. Dante began his own Inferno the same way with the phrase: “the fear renews in thought” (“nel pensier rinova la paura,” I. 6). Here in Cocytus, where traitors are punished, this topos of narrative self-consciousness par excellence signals Dante’s attention to the use of narrative for its potential of inflicting pain—and of committing betrayal.
Ugolino’s speech—and even more emphatically what he does not say—constitutes a reflection on rhetoric and its fatal traps, its aptitude for becoming treacherous. Dante indicts the art of rhetoric more mercilessly than ever before in an all-out onslaught upon the presumption built into human rhetorical projects, not excepting the Inferno itself. Ugolino uses the form of his story as a weapon of revenge upon the bishop against whom he burns eternally in hatred. His aim in speaking is none other than that his words might be seeds bearing the fruit of infamy for the enemy whose temples he gnaws (XXXIII. 7-9). Yet in the intensity of his malicious purpose, he is devilishly deaf to the redemptive possibilities that are nevertheless present in the situation he describes, however tragic it may be. Concentrated on the hateful aim of his own rhetoric, he closes off and seals this story with a meaning that feeds and satisfies only his own vengeance. He entirely misses the profounder human meaning and indeed the divine, Eucharistic significance of this agonizing death, which his young sons, in contrast, are able to discern and even movingly to express. The narrative itself and the events it relates are full of signs of this potentially redemptive meaning, but to Ugolino all other possibilities of meaning besides those serving his own revenge are as dead and frozen as the ice of Cocytus. His all-consuming rage is made incarnate in the “bestial sign” (“bestial segno,” XXXII. 133) that he himself has become, gnawing in ghastly, mock-Eucharistic fashion on the flesh of his enemy’s skull.
Ugolino’s account shows exactly what it means to be imprisoned—not only in the tower that for him has the name of “hunger,” but also within narrative. Indeed this “tower” will continue to enclose other persons (“e che convien ch’altrui ancor si chiuda,” 24), and it will continue forever to enclose Ugolino in and by his narrative, which he repeats in perpetuity in the text of the Inferno. There he remains, eternally obsessed by the unconscionable facts of his demise. He is unable to see beyond them to any higher meaning such as is nevertheless poignantly conveyed, particularly by his sons’ Christological gestures. They offer their own flesh (“carni”) in sacrifice to their father (XXXIII. 61-63).
The sons offer themselves with the words “eat of us” (“mangi di noi”) in express recognition of their progenitor’s right over all that they are: “you dressed us with this miserable flesh, so you may strip us of it” (“tu ne vestisti / queste miseri carni, e tu le spogli,” 61-62). They are saying, in effect, “Take, eat, this is my body,” as in the sacrifice of the Son in obedience to the Father enacted in the Mass. The Eucharistic rite of the Mass is understood profoundly to be a ritual rehearsal of the self-offering of Christ on the Cross. The echo of “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me” (Matthew 27: 46) in Gaddo’s words “My father, why do you not help me” (“Padre mio, ché non m’aiuti,” XXXIII. 69) is perhaps somewhat subtle. But if we were unsure as to whether they were really meant to recall Christ’s cry from the Cross, our doubts would be dispelled by Dante’s own voice a few lines later remonstrating with “Pisa” for having “put the sons on such a cross” (“non dovei tu i figliuoi porre a tal croce,” XXXIII. 87).
We cannot help but observe, furthermore, that Dante’s calling upon the islands offshore from Pisa near the mouth of the Arno, where it flows into the Tyrrhenian sea, to dam up the river so as to drown every person (“ogne persona!” 84) in the city implicates the poet himself in a vengeful narration of his own. Evidently following his instincts for what is authentic, Dante admits to the virtually murderous passions that drive his own narrative. The islands’ names “Capraia” and “Gorgona” mean “Goat” and “Gorgon” island respectively, recalling petrifaction, as with the Medusa, and damnation, as in Christ’s separation of sheep from goats in Matthew 25: 33. They thus invoke dangers condemning the denizens of the Inferno and menacing Dante himself in his descent. It is difficult to know exactly what to do with such violent outbursts of bloodlust on Dante’s part, unless they can be seen as part of a strategy of self-subversion and of implicitly admitting that as a human poet he is complicit in the abuse of narrative art for his own vindictive purposes. Having admitted this, Dante’s narrative is open to being used from above and beyond his own human control for other, divine purposes: it can then bring an illumination of grace and truth into its readers’ lives, to the extent they are examined in its light and are exposed as to their own worst risks.
The sacramental overtones of the whole passage in Dante’s text are there to highlight, by conspicuous contrast, all that Ugolino’s own interpretation overlooks and indeed savagely blots out. Ugolino reports only how he “petrified within” (“sì dentro impetrai,” XXXIII. 49). He is unable to respond with any genuine human emotion to his sons’ deeply moving offer of themselves in sacrifice for him. He is, furthermore, unable to envisage any potentially sacramental, redeeming significance in the dire plight of the whole family. As in Canto IX, where the Medusa threatens to forever arrest Dante’s gaze and his reader’s alike, petrifaction serves here as emblem of the death of interpretation and of the inability to see any further sense in events beyond the literal and most immediate one.
Ugolino avails himself of the device of direct address to his hearer—“You are exceedingly cruel, if you do not already grieve” (“Ben sei crudel, se tu non gìa ti duole,” 40)—that Dante himself often employs to such momentous effect, signally in Canto IX. But when Ugolino uses it, the purpose of such address is not to open the text to limitless interpretation by the whole range of readers who may apply it to their own lives. Ugolino’s purpose is rather that of locking the receiver into his own fixed interpretation of the events, a judgment without repeal that is, according to his own words, set in stone in his heart (“impetrai”). How ironic, then, that his account itself proves finally to be ambiguous, particularly with regard to the undecidability of its last line. Ugolino’s own narrative takes its revenge against him by remaining infinitely open to interpretation despite his obsessive determination to fix its meaning unequivocally. Its last line reads: “Then, more powerful than pain was fasting” (“Poscia, più che ’l dolor poté ’l digiuno,” XXXIII. 75). This could mean either that despite his sorrow hunger drove him to consume the corpses of his sons or simply that he starved. Given the former possibility, his own inhumanity as much as that of his enemy turns out to be the overall impression of meaning perpetuated by his tale.
Either way, meaning, as a single, deliberate, intentional act, is sacrificed. It is the very lack of properly intentional and determinate meaning that becomes the line’s linguistic and human significance. Thus it demonstrates how linguistic signification is by its very nature open and interpretable. The final meaning of the scene is horribly displayed rather in the act of cannibalism that we actually see Ugolino performing as he gnaws on Ruggieri’s skull—at the point where the brain is joined to the nape—the way one chews on bread in hunger (“come ’l pan per fame si manduca,” XXXII. 127). In the “bestial sign” (XXXIII. 133) of Ugolino’s grisly revenge, meaning sinks below the threshold of language and humanity. This contrasts violently with the transcendent meaning of the Eucharist, which signifies the divine beyond the order of the material signs by which it is conveyed. The language of narrative is used by Ugolino no longer to illuminate and convey a transcendent meaning or truth but rather to occult it in the darkness of his blind passion sunk in sin and gorily materialized.
When used with treacherous intent, even prophecy, which is in principle a means of revelation, can become part of a narrative mechanism annihilating true meaning and its intrinsic openness by the attempt to manipulate it. Ugolino’s “bad dream” “rips the veil of the future” (“io feci ’l mal sonno / che del futuro mi squarciò ’l velame,” XXXIII. 26-27) and reveals the horror that awaits him. Nonetheless, he proves blind to the full meaning of his own prophetic dream, which depicts him as a wolf that is being chased along with its little cubs (“il lupo / e ’ lupicini,” 29). He interprets these figures simply as “the father and sons” (“lo padre e’ figli,” 35), ignoring the much more somber and sinister connotations of the wolf as a predator fabled for its treachery and ruthlessness. He is insensitive to the meaning of the prophecy that he himself recounts and that indeed is fulfilled in the sequel, in which he (by the implications of his own words) savagely devours human flesh. This exemplifies the gross betrayal of meaning that Ugolino’s general practice of the art of narrative embodies. He is hell-bent on using his narrative to manipulate his hearer’s sympathies, and as a result he is deaf to its deeper human and even divine significance. As it is repeated eternally in this text, his chilling narration enacts a petrifaction of his understanding, which is forever blinded by his rage for revenge.
The scene is all the more provocative in that Dante, too, produces a narrative that apparently would fix significances permanently, significances which are driven by his own sometimes admittedly unholy passions. At this juncture, Dante could hardly fail to be preoccupied with the pitfalls of his own poem as itself prone to turn into a revenge narrative against his personal and political enemies. It is therefore imperative that his narrative include also a self-critique of narrative, an exposure of its own diabolical potentialities. By this means, Dante’s narrative opens to question the specific significances that it also inevitably establishes. It simultaneously suspects itself as narrative, so as to keep the dialectic of meaning open and in motion. It thereby undermines the type of fixity in which Ugolino’s damnation is narratively sealed for all eternity. The horrendous presumption of Dante’s pronouncing eternal condemnations against others in his poem is to this extent mitigated by the poem’s built-in self-reflection on the deceptiveness and treacherousness of narrative, not least its own narrative—by its owning up to the inherent liability of narrative to being instrumentalized for purposes of revenge.
The last stage of the Inferno marks a return to the blockage of an impenetrable narrative, such as we encountered first in Canto IX, just before its address to the reader. Dante now provides an image for this type of impasse in the frozen lake in which the sinners are immobilized. The ice prevents the damned from venting their emotion (“Lo pianto stesso lì pianger non lascia,” XXXIII. 94-99). They can express virtually nothing, and it is only Dante’s representation of this nothing that enables them to take on significance in the poem. Significance is trapped and cannot escape the ice that freezes it at the zero-point of expression.
All this is condensed and concretized in an immobile, mute Satan. He is the absolutely evil being, an absolute cipher or lack, as St. Augustine taught. Considered dramatically, this is an anti-climax—hence the ironic incipit, announcing the king of Hell’s banners unfurling, as if for a great battle and final show-down: “Vexila regis prodeunt inferni” (XXXIV. 1). Such description could hardly be less appropriate for this Satan placed on ice, but theologically it makes perfect sense. Satan is the absolute zero of the universe, an ontological nullity, from which only a cold wind blows, and that is exactly what evil is in a world created good, where everything that is, insofar as it is, is good. Evil is exposed as a tale of sound and fury signifying precisely nothing. It can acquire meaning only by being the parody of the Good—that is, of God: hence this “emperor” is a threefold unholy Trinity of heads and mouths punishing the arch-betrayers of Christ (Judas) and Caesar (Brutus and Cassius).
Dante’s metaphorical representation of Satan, precisely by failing to be dramatically compelling like Milton’s Satan, conveys the nullity of evil that is Hell’s reality at its core. After this encounter, Dante is turned around, literally “converted,” and prepared to ascend to the stars. The abstract nullity of evil has been encountered face to face, and from this point on Dante can begin to climb the mountain of virtue, the “dilettoso monte” sighted in vain at the outset of the poem. In the same movement, he can “let dead poetry arise,” as he raises his sails to embark on “better waters” (“miglior acque,” Purgatorio I. 1).
How poetry dies is the business specifically of the Inferno’s last segment, the ninth and final circle, which occupies Cantos XXXI-XXXIV, but also in many ways of the Inferno as a whole. In fact, everything human is mortal, and the pride of poetry, which Dante shares in common with the great poets eternally suspended in Limbo (Canto IV), is likewise claimed by death. In the invocation of the Purgatorio, where Dante calls for a resurrection of dead poetry (“la morta poesì resurge,” Purgatorio I. 7), he will define the new poetics of Purgatory with reference to the divinely inspired psalms and the angel pilot’s “eternal pens [or feathers] that do not mutate as does human hair” (“etterne penne, / che non si mutan come mortal pelo,” II. 35-36). But before that can happen, he must complete his denunciation of poetry as one of the humanistic means by which man presumptuously attempts, like Brunetto Latini, to “make himself eternal” (XV. 84) and consequently loses himself to eternal death. The Inferno climaxes in some of Dante’s most thoroughgoing and devastating indictments of poetry as it is actually practiced by fallen humans pursuing their sinful purposes.
Only afterwards, upon leaving Hell, will Dante be ready to begin to learn the discipline of a purgative poetry that renounces itself in order to live for God. In the Purgatorio, poetry is seen in the process of being punished and purged of its own inevitably flawed, self-serving motivations: this happens most explicitly in the persons of some of Dante’s poetic predecessors in the vernacular like Forese Donati, Bonaggiunta da Lucca, Guido Guinizelli, and Arnaut Daniel in Cantos XXIV-XXVI. Then poetry is prepared finally to blossom into a figure of theological transcendence, spectacularly in the Celestial Rose—a transfiguration, among other things, of the profane French poetic masterpiece Le roman de la rose. Poetry is transfigured beyond the human and even beyond the articulable altogether in Paradise, since “transhumanizing cannot be signified by words” (“trasumanar significar per verba non si poría,” Paradiso I. 70). Prophecy outdoes and ultimately undoes itself in these final gestures of transcending humanity. Dante conducts poetic prophecy to a culmination in self-erasure at the limits of language, which are the limits of the human.
Source: https://my.vanderbilt.edu/williamfranke/files/2014/03/Ch.5.-Dante.12.doc
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