Our pilgrim, Dante, and his guide, Virgil, are on a boat across the Styx in the fifth circle of hell when a damned soul rises out of the muck and threatens them. This passage is packed with interpretive nuggets: Bible verses, personal vendetta, call-outs to previous cantos, set-ups for subsequent cantos. But most importantly, this passage is about story. The poet is settling into his form. And the results are nothing short of revolutionary.
Read MoreRather than picking apart a single passage from Dante’s COMEDY, this episode presents the entirety of the fifth circle of INFERNO, the wrathful. We’ve already had three episodes on this circle—and we’ll have more to come. But right here, I’d like to stop and read you the entire story. Because storytelling is becoming the point!
Read MoreThe fifth circle. The wrathful. Except where are the damned? Not here. Instead, this passage is full of all sorts of problems: it opens with a scene of interpreting, it leads out to a rather obscure figure from classical literature, and it finishes up by putting the pilgrim firmly in his body. Dante-the-poet is never satisfied. His art is ever-changing. And it’s finally settled into the very thing that will make it last: storytelling.
Read MoreHere’s the problem: there are no manuscripts of COMEDY in Dante’s hand. So what do we have? And can we trust it? Here’s my brief history on the problems of manuscript transmission for Dante’s masterwork. Sure, it’s a bit in the weeds. But weeds can be fascinating!
Read MoreThe famous break! It’s at this point that many see a stop-restart in the poem. True, it does back up, just about the only time the poem does. And true, Boccaccio tried to explain the break with a story. But perhaps we don’t need his story. Perhaps we can understand the shifting dynamics of the poem the poet needs to write by looking at the poem itself and how it carries on from this point.
Read MoreWe descend a full level while still in a canto! After the avaricious (and the prodigal spenders), the pilgrim and his guide scramble down to the next circle of hell: the wrathful. Or really, the wrathful in their two states, a perversion of some pretty standard medieval imagery. But also this section of the canto is stocked with gorgeous, naturalistic imagery. The poem is settling into its stride—despite the fact that it’s breaking the walls of the cantos.
Read MoreAfter we’ve seen the ones who hoard and the ones who spend too much, Virgil steps back and offers a boiler-plate sermon straight out of Boethius’ THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY. But maybe that sermon’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Maybe the poet has left us some hints that there’s more afoot here than may first meet the eye.
Read MoreThe clergy. Avarice. And Aristotle, too. It’s all packed into this dense passage from Canto VII of INFERNO. I’ve got some thoughts on the anti-clerical nature of some passage of COMEDY. And some further thoughts on why Dante-the-pilgrim doesn’t seem to recognize anyone in the fourth circle of hell.
Read MoreThe fourth circle. The great enemy. But more questions than we can imagine. Who is this blocking figure at the entrance to the circle? What’s he saying? Why’s he so easily put down? And why does Virgil have such a grip on Christian theology all of a sudden? So many questions—with no time to answer them as we’re hoisted up to get a bird’s-eye view of an entire circle of hell for the first time in the poem.
Read MoreDante the pilgrim and Virgil walk on among the gluttons discussing the only thing possible: the last judgment and the resurrection of the body.
Read MoreDante the pilgrim and Virgil have made it to the 3rd circle of INFERNO, the gluttons, where they encounter a surprising future-teller in the rancid muck.
Read MoreDante, our pilgrim, comes upon Ciacco, the emblematic glutton, who gives us readers more questions than answers in this passage from The Divine Comedy.
Read MoreThe third circle of hell: the gluttons, a dumbfounded Dante, a snarling Cerberus, and Virgil, who rewrites his own epic, The Aeneid.
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