In the Dantean scheme, Virgil represents human wisdom, the quality that can guide the individual in the good life and make him worthy of redemption; and Beatrice is Divine Wisdom, which alone can disclose the truths of salvation and the life eternal. But here we must pause to consider the whole matter of interpretation.
The Divine Comedy, as it came to be called in English, has properly been subjected to endlessly varied modes and levels of analysis and commentary. Dante himself began the process in a letter to Can Grande, written in 1319, in which he declared his intention to dedicate the Paradiso, on which he was then working, to his former host and patron, in return for his kindness. The letter, so to speak, raises didacticism to high poetry. In lecturing fashion, Dante lays it down that the work in progress is twofold in nature, the treatise and the treatment; that the treatise is threefold (canticles, cantos, and verses); that the treatment is multi-fold (poetic, fictive, descriptive, and so on)—and more of the same. Here we may rehearse Dante’s lucid insistence that the work is not a tragedy, a mode that begins in tranquillity and ends in horror, but rather a comedy, a mode that may begin with adversity but ends in happiness. The present poem takes its start in Hell but finishes in Paradise.
The Comedy, he says, is not limited to a single meaning but “might rather be called polysemous, that is, having several meanings.” These latter divide first into two main kinds, the literal and the allegorical: the actual account of what happens to human souls after death, and what that account can mean in moral and theological terms. American literary criticism half a century ago, often citing the letter to Can Grande, was much given to discourse about the “four levels of meaning”: literal, moral, allegorical, anagogical. It tended to interpret “allegorical” as indicating the general drift of human history, as Faulkner’s novels might reflect the history of the South, and “anagogical,” the fourth of Dante’s categories, as the imagery of some ultimate metaphysical fact.
No literary work ever written yields more to this manner of analysis than does the Divine Comedy, with its hypnotic episodes and encounters and characters; its elaborate and always coherent moral scheme; its expansive views of what was happening to Florence, Italy, and Europe; and its Thomistically derived portrait of divinity. At the same time, Dante is the supreme example in literary history of the writer who, at every important turn, is seeking himself (humanly, morally, psychologically, imaginatively), finding himself, defining himself—in effect, telling his life story. In the present biographical context, these are the aspects of the Comedy that I will be emphasizing: most simply, the poetry of Dante’s autobiography. We should keep in mind that the poem resonates on broadening levels of significance, and that the colossal achievement is composed of those resonances.
Although the drama of self-discovery is more evident and continuous in the Purgatorio, it is at work urgently enough in the Inferno. We may begin with the story of Paolo and Francesca in Canto v. Dante, led by Virgil, has by this time passed through the Gate of Hell, with its inscription:“Per me si va nella città dolente ...
Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’ entrate.”
[Through me is the way into the doleful city ...
abandon all hope, you that enter.]
He has observed the trimmers, those who never came to real life, for good or evil, Pope Celestine V among them. They are a huge throng, and Dante is astonished: “I never believed that death had undone so many” (a line that comes into modern poetry via T. S. Eliot to Hart Crane). He has come into the first circle of Hell—Limbo is its other name, an antechamber of Hell—and seen there the good pagans, those who were never baptized (he will ask about them, and the justice of their placement, in Paradise). He has noticed especially the great ancient poets, “the lords of highest song”: Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan. Virgil makes the fifth of these lords, and Dante is happy to record that they greeted him and made much of him, designating him as the sixth among them. The poet has seen heroes and heroines of antiquity—Electra, Aeneas, Caesar, Camilla; and the great philosophers—Socrates and Plato, and “the master of them that know,” Aristotle.
With Virgil, Dante has passed into the second circle, where the infernal torment begins, and where carnal sinners are blown about by an unresting wind. Before it sits Minos, the horrific judge, who decides where each sinner, after confessing, shall be sent for eternal punishment. In a dark, storm-swept place within the circle, two spirits approach, and Dante hears their story. The one who speaks is Francesca da Polenta, of Ravenna. She was married to the lord of Rimini but fell in love with his younger brother, Paolo; the husband caught them in the act of lovemaking, and stabbed them both to death.
Telling of this, Francesca, as it were, rehearses the Vita Nuova, with its climactic poetry of love and death. She sings of love (amor), which is so swiftly caught in the cor gentil (gentle heart) and which needs no excuse. Love, she says, led the two of them to one death: “Amor condusse noi ad una morte.” In Dante’s Tuscan, the tonal repetition of amor in the phrase una morte is itself a version of the love-death theme and of the fateful human conjunction.
Dante is passionate to know how it all happened. And Francesca:Nessun maggior dolore
che ricordarsi del tempo felice
nella miseria; ...
[There is no greater pain
than to recall a happy time
in misery.]
(Dante, somewhere in Tuscany, is talking to himself here.) One day, Francesca relates, they read about Lancelot and his love for Guinivere.
When we read how the fond smile was kissed
by such a lover, he who shall never
be parted from me, kissed my mouth
all trembling.
The book acted upon them like a Pandar—in the Italian word, a Galeotto:Galeotto fu ’l libro e chi lo scrisse:
quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.
[A Galeotto was that book, and he who wrote it.
That day we read no further.]
Overcome by compassion for the two sinners, and by the warm remembrances of his own experience of love and death, Dante falls into a dead faint; and the gleamingly lovely sequence comes to an end.
Paolo and Francesca are in Hell forever; but theirs is the least venal of all the sins that bring departed souls into the Inferno—Dante stresses this more than once. Further down, in the sixth circle, for example, where the heretics are entombed (Canto xi), Virgil lectures Dante on the comparative gravity of human sinfulness. He cites a passage in the Ethics where Aristotle, in a discussion of incontinence, malice, and bestiality, argues (in Virgil’s paraphrase) that “incontinence less offends God and receives less blame.” Virgil advises Dante to think back to those in the second circle, above, who are being punished for carnality; and Dante will see how they are clearly separated from the wicked spirits far below them and “why, with less anger, divine justice strikes them.” It is sound classico-Christian doctrine, in the ongoing humanistic vein, Dante’s way of rendering a relatively mild judgment on his own behavior.
While still unconscious, Dante is carried down into the third circle, where he awakes to discover the souls of the gluttonous, lying prostrate in the mud, buffeted by foul water and snow. One of them sits up and calls to Dante; he is a Florentine citizen known only by his nickname, Ciacco (hog). Dante takes the occasion to ask for news of their city, whereupon Ciacco predicts the coming strife and the brutal victory of the Black Guelphs. Their 1300 colloquy in Hell is darkly stained by the poet’s perspective of a decade later.
Descending into the fourth circle, Dante is confronted by the avaricious, countless numbers of them, all rolling dead weights and hitting each other. The time, apparently, is past midnight.
In the sixth circle, where the heretics are stretched out in fiery tombs, Dante hears a voice saying “O Tuscan ... Your speech clearly shows you a native of that noble country” (Canto x). It is the Ghibelline leader Farinata degli Uberti, who raises himself until part of his body is visible. He and Dante hold the exchang
e quoted earlier, with Farinata recounting how he alone had saved Florence from total destruction. Another spirit cries out from the fires: Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, who asks piteously about his son Guido.
From this scene, Dante is led down a precipitous path through loose-lying stones to a river of blood that flows about the entire seventh circle. Here the violent are severally punished, beginning with the violent against their neighbors such as tyrants and murderers. Next, the violent against themselves, the suicides, with that self-negating act adroitly introduced by three tercets beginning with the word Non: “Not green was the foliage,” and so on. The most memorable of these sinners is Pier della Vigna, once the honored chancellor to Frederick II, as well as a competent writer of Latin prose and Italian poetry. He fell into disgrace, was blinded and imprisoned, and killed himself in 1249. The spirit ends his sad tale with a plea and a flash of poetry:“E se di voi alcun nel mondo riede,
conforti la memoria mia, che giace
ancor del colpo che ‘nvidia le diede.”
[And if any of you return to the world,
give comfort to my memory,
which still lies prostrate from the blow of envy.]
Deeper into the seventh circle, on its third level, Dante finds those guilty of “violence against nature.” They are running across burning sand, and one of them, coming close, seizes Dante by the hem of his shirt and exclaims “Qual maraviglia!” It is Brunetto Latini, with whom Dante partakes of the dialogue previously explored, which continues until Brunetto takes his leave, running hard, and seeming to Dante like one in the annual race for the green cloth at Verona “who wins rather than one who loses.”
In the same corner of the seventh circle, Dante has pointed out to him the grandson of “the good Guadralda,” his remote kin Guido Guerra, who “in his lifetime did much with counsel and sword.” In particular, this Guido counseled against the Florentine attack upon the Sienese that led to the Guelph disaster at Montaperti in 1260. There seems no explanation for why Dante has Guido Guerra being hurried along among the sodomites. But all thoughts of him are driven from Dante’s head when he sees swimming upward through the air toward them “a figure marvelous to every steadfast heart.” This is Geryon (the name is pronounced with a soft g), “the savage beast with the pointed tail,” so Virgil tells Dante, “who passes through mountains and breaks through walls.”
He is the very incarnation, “the uncleanly image,” of Fraud (the sin next to be envisaged), with “the face of a just man” but a reptile’s body, bearing two hairy paws. He is to be the travelers’ transport down to the eighth circle. Before mounting him, Dante is urged by Virgil to look at the last batch of sinners in the present circle: they are the usurers, and Dante is careful to say, after looking into their faces, that he does not recognize any one of them.
The two climb onto the beast’s back, Dante in front, Virgil behind him, clasping Dante in his arms; and the descent begins. Virgil gives strict military orders: “Now, Geryon, move yourself. Make your circles large and your descent gradual.” Geryon swims downward slowly, circling and dropping, with Dante holding on tightly, too stricken with terror to be more than dimly aware of the dark evils flying about them.
At the bottom, Geryon set us; close to the foot
of the ragged rock; relieved of our weight,
he bounded off like an arrow from a string.
That long spiraling journey downward through the fetid air, amid hovering unseen terrors, perfectly dramatizes a decisive turning point in the Inferno: from the serious but lighter sins of incontinence and violence all the fearful distance downward to fraud and deceitfulness—seducers, simonists, evil counselors, forgers—with the traitors to friends and country within the ninth, and lowest, circle. Dante’s hierarchy of human misbehavior is altogether firm and coherent; to the modern mind, it is for the most part sane and sensible. What startles the imagination, moment after moment, is Dante’s twisty inventiveness in the dramatic imagery invoked for the successive circles and settings, characters and misdeeds, particularities of torment. The author of the Vita Nuova and the Convivio had, through a miracle of self-development and through constant immersion in Virgil’s Aeneid, become the grand master of dramatic narrative.
The eighth circle is named Malebolge: Evil Chasms or, perhaps, Pouches. It is a circle of dark-colored stone divided into ten individual pockets of punishment, and occupying Cantos xviii through xxx, more than a third of the entire Inferno. Here Dante sees “new miseries” and “new tormentors,” beginning with the souls of seducers and panders who are being scourged without letup by horned demons. One of them declares himself to be a Bolognese, and Dante’s disaffection with that city’s recent political history is conveyed in the observation that the whole place is packed with Bolognese. Dante’s opinion of fawning courtiers, for him an especially distasteful form of fraud, is shown in the figure of Alessio Interminei da Lucca, whose head is smeared with excrement.
In another chasm, Dante notes with distinct approval those guilty of purchasing spiritual office, the simonists, implanted upside down in narrow round holes, while the soles of their feet are roasted. Here, Dante fancies, Boniface VIII will soon be placed, although the pope would not die until 1303.
The two poets pause at the edge of the fifth chasm and stare down into the darkness to make out souls covered with filthy pitch and being torn at by demons each time they show any part of themselves. These are the barrators, to use the old term, those who have misused public funds for private gain, an unhappily familiar sin in our day. It was the crime for which Dante was falsely accused and condemned by the Black Guelph leaders, and he regards the scene of retribution with so much fascination that he almost falls into the pitch. “Take care!” cries Virgil, as he pulls Dante back.
Virgil, as the adventure moves ahead, becomes a more recognizably human character at each stage. Dante salutes him as “my lord” and addresses Virgil as his good master and his guide. Virgil is all these things, even as, on a higher level, he is the embodiment of human sagacity and the voice of Aristotle. But he is also kindly and wise, with something of the good schoolteacher’s attentiveness as well as his disciplinary rigor. No character in the Comedy is allowed to be purely allegorical.
When Dante inveighs against the simoniac popes (xix)—“your avarice grieves the world ... you have made yourselves a god of gold and silver”—Virgil listens with a markedly satisfied look, then takes Dante in his arms and carries him up to the surface of the chasm. Not long after, Dante sees a cluster of demons coming toward them. His hair rises in fear, and he cries out to Virgil that he should hide them both. Virgil speaks soothingly to him, then takes Dante “as a mother ... takes her child,” sliding down the chasm wall with Dante sheltered in his arms. Dante is sufficiently restored by the Roman poet’s parental care that he can respond at once when a group of spirits in slow procession, wearing heavy cloaks of gilded lead—they are the hypocrites—approach, hearing his Tuscan speech, to ask who he is.
And I to them: “On Arno’s beautiful river In that great city I was born and grew.”
Dante’s dramatic power reaches a peak in the episode centering on Ulysses (xxvi). The old Greek warrior and strategist is the most handsomely endowed character in the Inferno, and the one whose story is as riveting as his ultimate fate is puzzling. This encounter begins with a deceptively pleasing image drawn from the poet’s memory of his family’s country home at Pagnolle:As many fireflies as the peasant, resting
upon the hill ... sees down in the valley,
where perhaps he gathers grapes and he tills ...
The analogy is to the horrid spectacle of countless flames seen down below; they are wrapped around the bodies of sinners guilty of evil counseling, as they run along the rim of the chasm. Here as elsewhere Dante underscores the horrors of Hell by borrowing a charming image of the earthly world above.
Among these damned souls is Ulysses, condemned, as Virgil says, for his part in getting the Trojan Horse inside the w
alls of Troy. Since Ulysses is Greek, he cannot understand Dante’s Tuscan vernacular, and Virgil addresses him in properly lofty tones. The enveloping flame shakes from side to side, and a voice from within then launches into a speech unmatched in the Comedy for its shapeliness of form and its dramatic idiom.
“When I departed from Circe, who beyond a year
detained me there near Gaeta ...
neither fondness for my son, nor reverence
for my aged father, nor the love
that could have cheered Penelope
could conquer in me the ardor I felt
to gain experience of the world, and of human
vice and worth.”
So he put forth once again, on a single ship with a small company of men. They saw Spain and Morocco and the Pillars of Hercules. That would seem the utmost limit of human voyaging; but Ulysses exhorts his men to yet greater effort:“‘Oh brothers,’ I said, ‘who through a hundred
thousand dangers have reached the western rim,
deny not to your brief life
experience of the unpeopled world beyond the sun.
Consider your origins: you were not formed
to live like brutes, but to follow
virtue and knowledge.’ ”
The crew is aroused to the point of exultation. They “turn the poop towards morning,” and voyage on until they see, dim in the distance, the Mount of Purgatory. But here a terrible tempest arises. The winds seize the forepart of the ship:“Three times it made her whirl round, with all the waters.
Dante: A Life (PENGUIN LIVES) Page 9