COMEDY’s (in)famous break! Here, 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 can understand the shifting dynamics of the poem by looking at the poem itself and how it carries on from this point.
Read MoreThe fifth circle. The wrathful. Except where are the damned? Not here. This passage is opens with a scene of interpreting, leads out to a rather obscure figure from classical literature, and finishes up by putting the pilgrim firmly in his body. The poet is rarely satisfied. His art is ever-changing. But it’s settling into the thing that will make it last: storytelling.
Read MoreRather than interpreting a passage from Dante’s COMEDY, let’s read through the fifth circle of INFERNO, the encounters with the wrathful all the way up to the gates of the city of Dis. We’ve already had three episodes on this circle . . . with more to come. But first and foremost, storytelling is the point of COMEDY and it’s easy to get lost in the interpretive weeds.
Read MoreOur 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 . . . in a passage packed with interpretive nuggets: Bible verses, personal vendettas, call-outs to previous cantos, and set-ups for subsequent cantos. But most importantly, this passage is about story. The poet is settling into his form.
Read MoreOur pilgrim, Dante and his guide, Virgil, come to the walls of Dis, a geopolitical border of INFERNO. But the poet Dante must also cross an important barrier. Aeneas doesn’t enter Dis in THE AENEID. We have reached the limits of Virgil’s imagination in his masterwork. But not Dante. He will eventually go into Dis where his master (and Aeneas) can’t.
Read MoreThe pilgrim, Dante, is left alone at the walls of Dis. This passage from INFERNO may be the most human since the opening lines of Canto I. So much is changing! Virgil gets a backstory. Virgil is developing interiority (or an inner emotional space). Virgil is becoming more fatherly. All at the same moment when he abandons the pilgrim—and maybe the poet, too.
Read MoreDante and Virgil are outside the walls of Dis, the city of hell. Virgil seems particularly stuck in some sort of doubtful faith. Or maybe faithful doubt. To remedy that, he launches into the story of his first descent to the bottom of hell—thereby complicating Dante’s masterwork COMEDY, causing a rupture in the fabric of its fiction, repositioning Dante’s work against other classical works, and sticking Virgil squarely in the landscape of Lucan’s PHARSALIA.
Read MoreStanding in front of the walls of Dis with our pilgrim, Dante, and his guide, Virgil, we encounter the thickest bits of classical imagery we’ve yet seen in INFERNO. And the poet asks us to interpret it all as an allegory. But of what? And we’re also asked to go back to classical literature and interpret it as allegory, bringing forward that interpretation into this passage.
Read MoreThe pilgrim Dante and Virgil have been standing at the walls of Dis forever! Here comes help . . . in the form of the archangel Michael? Jesus? Mercury? Mercury brought the words of the gods to mortals. Is this the coming of eloquence as we depart the last of Virgil’s world to fully enter Dante’s imagination of hell?
Read MoreDante, our pilgrim, has passed the gate of Dis and come to the sixth circle of hell, the ring of the heretics. With him, we’ve stepped beyond Virgil’s imaginative landscape from THE AENEID. And we’ve stepped beyond the seven deadly sins as a structuring device for COMEDY. We’ve also stepped into a world where politics and poetry show what people do for and to each other.
Read MoreIn the sixth circle of hell, we haven't yet seen any of the damned. Instead, Dante, our pilgrim, and Virgil are picking their way along a secret path between the burning sarcophagi and the walls of Dis. Here, Virgil brings up the Last Judgment. And he picks a fight with our pilgrim. Or maybe Virgil calls out our pilgrim who then responds with a little passive-aggressive anger.
Read MoreWhat happens when you come face to face with history? And not the history of the great heroes. Instead, the history of the pain your own family has suffered. Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as Dante-the-pilgrim comes face to face with Farinata degli Uberti in this complicated and rewarding passage from INFERNO.
Read MoreDante finds himself face to face with the suffering he caused as the shade of his friend’s father rises up beside Farinata. Or more than just a friend. His own poetic rival, Guido Cavalcanti. This is a tough passage, with garbled lines and intentional misunderstandings. And it may tell us that that poet is proving to us that the pilgrim, still sunk in Florentine factionalism, is not ready to be a poet.
Read MoreCavalcante sinks back into the tomb in fatherly grief—and Farinata, our austere Greco-Roman statue of Stoicism, is ready to pick up his jabbing fight with our pilgrim right where he left off. Except something strange happens. Farinata softens. He does something no heroic figure would ever do: He sighs. What’s going on in this strange passage about factionalism? How do you come to see your great enemy as human, too?
Read MoreDante and Farinata arrive at a place we could never have predicted: A machismo match becomes camaraderie. They see each other as fellow-sufferers and perhaps honor each other, even in hell. Farinata explains the metaphysics of sight in hell. He even gets to name the farthest point in the future ever named in COMEDY. Then Dante, our pilgrim, repents something. But what?
Read MoreLet’s step back from the lines of Inferno, Canto X, and look at its as structure. If we think it through, we’ll realize that we may be misplacing our focus. We tend to see this as Farinata’s canto. But the structure will lead us to realize its Cavalcante’s canto. And mostly, a canto the turns on his horrifying question, “Where is my son?”
Read MoreDante has to force himself away from Farinata and back to Virgil—who then makes a promise that is never fulfilled in COMEDY. The passage out of the sixth circle of hell is a strange one: heretic popes, Beatrice’s eyes, the edge of blasphemy, and the stench of the deepest parts of hell, the place where the poet Vergil and his hero Aeneas never dared to step. But we’re headed right there!
Read MoreAs our pilgrim rests under the lid of a pope’s tomb, Virgil lays out the first rationale for the lowest parts of the abyss: injustice and malice, force and fraud, powerful combinations of human evil. Virgil is mapping hell on the cusp of the age of discovery. And he’s giving us the rationale for the regions of the underworld that neither he nor his hero Aeneas could visit in THE AENEID.
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