Just Finished a Book: Dante's Inferno

This one was a long time coming. I got The Inferno from a good friend of mine for Christmas, and it was particularly hard to get into, though it's been one of the most enriching reads I've had.

My version was the Barnes and Noble Classics edition that employs the teriffic Henry Wadsworth Longfellow translation and, more importantly, a detailed Endnotes section that runs about a hundred pages. If you've ever read or tried to read The Divine Comedy, you know what a boon that is ("Who the hell is Cardinal Guido Cavalcanti de Arezzo degli Rosso Rigatoni?).

I will say that Dante Alighieri's Inferno, and perhaps The Divine Comedy as a whole, should be one of mankind's greatest epic poems, but it does have the most preposterous premise I've ever encountered. I'll make up a contemporary comparison that should give you an idea.

Okay, let's say former NYC Mayor Rudolph Giuliani wrote an entire collection of love poetry -- not of his wife but of an ideal woman/mistress we'll call "Beatrice" (just stay with me). His love poetry wasn't recognized as spectacular, but it was still pretty good. Now let's say after that, Rudy Giuliani wrote himself into an epic poem, which starts him out walking through a dark forest until he encounters the ghost of Abraham Lincoln. Giuliani is then praised by Lincoln as the greatest politician of modern times, and that he will be conducted on a private journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Beatrice, Lincoln tells him, sits in heaven among Biblical women such as Rachel, and she personally sent Lincoln to take him on the trip.

It gets better. Once he reaches the First Circle of Hell (Limbo), Giuliani is greeted by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Teddy Roosevelt, who all embrace him as their peer. And Giuliani's poem about his fictitious adventure across the divine realms carries from there.

The Inferno is much like this, only instead of a politician (though he was that, too), Dante lauded himself as a great poet. Also, Virgil (who wrote The Aeneid) leads him through Hell instead of Abraham Lincoln. So Dante is very, as he might say, egocentrico.

As one would expect, The Inferno holds a lot of thinking material for theology that still very much applies to the present. One of the most thought-provoking concepts that it explored was how one should appropriately respond to the souls of the damned. Early on Dante encounters Francesca de Rimini in the Circle of Lust, where souls are punished by being whirled around in a tempest for all eternity. She tells Dante her story of how she'd carried on a love affair, for which she was murdered by her husband once the cuckold found out. In relating her tale she successfully evokes pity in the Pilgrim, and Virgil reproaches him for shedding tears for her. Virgil essentially tells Dante that to have any sympathy for the damned is to show a weakness of character. One must have the faith that Hell's punishments are perfectly deserved, and to think otherwise is to lack confidence in God's idea of justice. The notion of treating the damned (especially former friends and comrades) with nothing but righteous indignation is understandably difficult for Dante to get his head around, and though he does stumble a few more times in the journey, he is eventually able to close himself off from the pathetic appeals of all of Hell's inhabitants.

And I had trouble with this idea, too, but it all really is a matter of having the confidence in God's plans - and that Hell's punishments are doled out in the proper order of intensity (here's a map of The Inferno that states the order while resembling a kid's menu from Shoney's). I can't imagine somebody looking at the hierarchy of sinners and saying, "Yep, that's about right." Should counterfeitors ("falsifiers" on the map) really be kept deeper in Hell than murderers? An economist could argue so. Is it truly worse to betray your host than it is to betray your own kin? In medieval Italy, it was. Everyone has a different idea of which sins are worse than others -- at least different from Dante's -- and that's why we wonder if the sinners in the poem really are deserving of their fates, and thus unworthy of any sympathy.
You simply have to accept that Dante's idea of just desserts is also God's. But the concept is really something.

Another thing that makes the The Inferno stand out among all epic poems, let alone works of its time, is Dante's ambitiousness in both the monumental subjects he's tackling and the level at which he succeeds in tackling them.

When a medieval poet was to describe a sight or sensation that was overwhelming, it was customary for him to tell you that the thing was simply beyond description ("classical inexpressibility topos"). Chaucer, for example, did this frequently in some of The Canterbury Tales and more so in Troilus and Cressida, where he had the job of convincingly illustrating what it is to be in love. While he attempted and nailed some marvelous conveyances of infatuation and grief, Chaucer repeatedly admitted that his words simply failed him, so to preserve the incomprehensible perfection of the subject and his own reputation. This goes along with the tradition that poets of the time be humble in their craft, admitting their limits while asking for plenty of support from Calliope, the muse of epic poetry.

But you know what Dante thinks? Dante thinks they're all pussies.

When it comes to the indescribable, he goes for it. In doing this, he draws grandiose similes from Roman mythology and the Bible to relate the feeling of Hell at a frightening (and fitting) level of dreadfulness:

(Paraphrases, of course)

-"Remember how Queen Hecuba of Troy watched the Greeks slaughter her children as her great city crumbled, driving her so insane that she began barking like a dog? Well, these spirits I saw were more insane than that." (Canto XXX)

-"Want to know what the Ninth Bolgia looked like? Picture the all the bodies of the massacred Romans in the Second Punic War and those of the Trojans when Aeneas invaded Italy -- together -- and you're still not even close." (Canto XXVIII)

You'd expect Dante would cop out of conveying what it would be like to finally confront the almighty Lucifer (O Reader, you wouldn't want to know!), and you'd be wrong. Yes, he does offer the traditional "beyond words" preamble, but Dante tends to follow these with descriptions that actually do the thing justice. Here's how he treats Dante the Pilgrim's first sight of the Devil:

"Ask it not, Reader, for I write it not,
Because all language would be insufficient.
I did not die, and I alive remained not;
Think for thyself now, hast thou aught of wit,
What I became, being of both deprived." - Canto XXIV

To look upon Lucifer immediately struck him half dead. That's almost good enough for me, but Dante goes from there to portray Lucifer's wings, face(s), and collossal size to name some nasty attributes.

Previous to him, the classical poets like Ovid were known for describing humans morphing into beasts, and vice versa, but Dante one-ups them by setting to paper the novelty of a snake and a man transmuting (they come together and the snake becomes a man, the man becomes a snake). He actually begins the passage by saying something to the effect of "check this shit out, Great Poets! You've never done this before!" (Canto XXV)

The man had the audacity to take on what were considered the limits of human comprehension, and he often did so successfully in this book, alone. So yes, Dante is a cocky bastard, but he backs it up, making The Inferno such a rewarding read once you give it a chance.