I teach the Inferno
in my Epics class, after we have read Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid. It
works beautifully, since we first encounter the Greek version of the aftermath
of the Trojan War, then the Trojan/Roman; then we get to Dante, and he puts
lots of those characters in his afterlife. Odysseus goes to Hades. So does
Aeneas. It’s kind of a thing.
But nothing prepares them, really, for Dante.
The Type Scene of the Underworld Journey (Greek katabasis) is present in most epics,
really. The hero crosses over—literally dies—and
brings back otherworldly knowledge to help his people. Gilgamesh, Hercules,
Odin, Vainamoinen, Gandalf—so many heroes go and come back, and it’s a dramatic
event in their storied lives.
But for Dante it’s the whole work.
For one canto at the beginning, poor Dante is lost, halfway
through his life, wandering and trying to get somewhere, but he can’t do it
alone. We can all relate to this. And it’s how he hooks us. Then his favorite
poet appears, a literary and spiritual guide—Virgil, the Roman author of The Aeneid—and he offers to lead Dante along
his edifying journey for as long as he can.
Dante the poet has a poet laureate lead him. Who would be
our guide, we wonder? Someone whom we revere; someone who led us by example
before they passed on. But before we can get too bogged down in thought, the journey
begins.
Dante journeys to Limbo where he sees the spirits of Homer
and other classical authors. This is where Virgil has been called from and
where he will return when Dante’s tour is over. And we are introduced to Dante’s
method and his mania at one stroke. He can put anyone who ever lived—real or
literary—in the place he sees fit. It is a hugely ambitious task and a minor
miracle that he completed it. So I guess it wasn’t mania—just drive.
The first sinners Dante encounters are the Lustful, and it’s
one of my favorite passages in the whole Commedia.
I spend a good deal of time on Canto V of the Inferno, unpacking it and reading it carefully with
my students. One of Dante’s techniques is to have a soul tell her story (in
this case, Francesca da Rimini, who had an affair with her brother-in-law), so
he can understand the sin or virtue through a firsthand witness.
Francesca tells of how ill she was treated—trapped in a
loveless marriage, she found what she thought was love just a little left of
legal. And she first committed adultery at the instigation of a book. She calls
the romance of Lancelot and Guinevere a “Galeotto” or go-between. It is after
they read together the salacious details of the royal affair that brings down Camelot that Paolo first kisses
Francesca.
Dante faints at this moment, and some read it as guilt. He, too, has loved
where he should not have.
But I think it’s something else entirely. In an age
where books are copied by hand, they can get miscopied very easily. And in the case of Francesca and Paolo, they
didn’t read thoroughly—they stopped before the lovers’ consequences were
realized, so were tempted in to the same sin.
As Dante begins to tell of countless sinners and sins, he
feels the weight of his responsibility and collapses under it. What if his text inadvertently--through sloppy copying or sloppy reading--leads others to Hell?
And so my students and I start another ambitious task—that of
reading judiciously—with the hopes of making it to Paradise.
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