
The Personal is the Political
Sally Minogue reflects on the connection between the two in George Orwell’s 'Nineteen
...
Feb
05
Feb
12
After the
initial shock at the new restrictions, the panic-buying and the logistical
challenges of working from home, there was a point during the first lockdown in
March 2020 when the creeping realization that we would be in this for the long
haul sparked a resurgence in interest in books about real and fictional
epidemics. Sales of Albert Camus’s 1947 novel The Plague boomed, and
Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron expanded its reach beyond the Italian
school-system, and world-literature syllabi. It’s not often that a
late-medieval masterpiece starts trending as a go-to topical read, but
Boccaccio’s collection of a hundred tales told by ten young people who are
self-isolating at the outskirts of Florence in 1348, while the Black Death is
ravaging the city, seems ready-made, structurally and thematically, for virtual
literary get-togethers. It is also exactly the kind of big, bold reading
‘project’ for the endless, groundhog days of these pandemic times.[1]
(My own big reads of 2020 have been Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and
Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, and they’ve both bountifully spilled
over into 2021.)
If 2020
has been good to Boccaccio, 2021 promises to thrust into the limelight his
precursor and unsurpassed master of Italian literature: Dante Alighieri.[2] On
the 700th anniversary of his death, Dante (the surname is surplus to
requirement) remains a towering figure in the western canon, comparable to
Shakespeare in the way he has left his mark on his native language, and in the
cross-cultural influence of his powerful imagination. The epic vision of Hell,
Purgatory and Paradise in the The Divine Comedy is at the root of a
conception of the three realms of the afterlife as physical spaces, mapped out
according to rational and just principles; we resort to this idea in the common
expression – usually uttered from a sense of having been sinned against – that
“there is a special place in Hell” reserved for every particular kind of
sinner.
The
rhetorical power of this turn of phrase has a bipartisan appeal, as evidenced
in the invocations of a special place in Hell for “women who don’t help each
other”, for “any foreign leader that engages in bad-faith diplomacy with
President Donald J. Trump”, and for
“those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan for how to carry it
[out] safely”. We owe these additions to Dante’s infernal topography to former
U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (speaking of Hillary Clinton’s 2016
presidential candidacy), Republican economist Peter Navarro and former European
council president Donald Tusk, respectively. Their soundbites are a catchy
opener for BBC Europe editor Katya Adler’s ‘Dante 2021’, a three-part
exploration of how The Divine Comedy speaks to our present moment
from across the centuries.
The first
weekly episode was broadcast on Radio 4 on 11 January, and the whole programme
is now available on BBC Sounds. A self-confessed Italophile (extra brownie
points), Adler goes to town in arguing for Dante’s relevance. His anguished
journey into the depths of Hell, followed by the difficult yet hopeful ascent
through Purgatory into Paradise chimes with the experience of loss and the
apocalyptic mood of the past year, which has forced us into a collective
reconsideration of our values and priorities, as well as private soul-searching
for reservoirs of resilience and faith in the future.
The
broader parallels between then and now are not always on target, though. Adler
is good at emphasizing Dante’s keen sense of social justice, his unrestrained
contempt for the fat cats of his time, and his suspicion at the morality of a
banking system that makes money out of money. The analogies wear thin when we
are invited to think of the snaking of Minos’s tail as a demonic algorithm,
programmed to match every damned soul to the appropriate circle of Hell.[3] “I
know this is silly”, Adler admits. With that remark she almost gets me on side,
even as I don’t quite follow where she goes next, with the idea of The Divine
Comedy as an early example of virtual reality. Isn’t that true of any act
of imagination? Isn’t the very act of opening the pages of a work of fiction a
stepping into a virtual reality? Perhaps I’m being harsh.
The thing
is, by the time the first episode concludes with Dante and the world of gaming,
I’m already lost in a dark wood of outrage. For me, Adler oversteps the mark –
the irony! – in her reading of Ulysses as a populist demagogue. In one of the
most famous passages of Inferno, as I have written in greater detail here,
Ulysses reminisces about the “folle volo” (“mad flight”) he took with his
comrades, when he convinced them to sail with him past the pillars of Hercules,
the limits of the known world and, as it turns out, literally the end of the
earth. To reduce Ulysses’s impassioned, rousing appeal to one of the noblest
human instincts – our thirst for knowledge and discovery – into the
manipulative, self-interested rhetoric of petty politicians really is a sin
deserving of its special place in Hell.
And yet,
there is much to like about ‘Dante 2021’, especially when it stops trying so
bloody hard. A few final points on this score: the tripartite division is a
no-brainer, as is Adler’s canny choice of guides for each realm of the
underworld, in an echo of the Comedy where Dante has Virgil and Beatrice
to rely on during his journey. (And, anyway, who am I to pass judgement on lame
nods to the poem when I’ve put two in the previous paragraph?) But the
numerological framework – the programme aims to offer twenty-one reasons to
read Dante in the twenty-first year of the twenty-first century – lands a bit
flat.
I’m sure
Dante would have appreciated the homage. His poem plays on the pregnant
significance of numbers, beginning from its very structure. Each of the three
canticles contains thirty-three cantos (an additional one in Inferno serves
as an introduction to the whole work and brings up the total to a round
one-hundred) written in terza rima (the rhyme scheme is aba, bcb, cdc,
etc.), for three is a symbol of perfection and of the Christian divinity.
Adler’s enthusiastic reprisal of numerology gets top marks for effort, but is
too flimsy even to be rescued by her knowingness. It diminishes the enterprise,
boiling it down to a list rather than adding an extra dimension to it, because
it’s too close to the lazy journalism of “Top ten…” articles that have become
ubiquitous fodder against the demands of
24/7 content production.
Leaving
the framework aside, things pick up in the discussions about Purgatorio and
Paradiso, which I found more insightful, and a reason for persevering
with this series. The second episode made me see Purgatorio in a new
light, as the most interesting of the canticles, rather than the
neither-fish-nor-fowl intermediary realm, a place we must slog through on the
way to our heavenly destination. Adler’s guide here, Professor Matthew Treherne
from the Centre for Dante Studies at the University of Leeds, talks about the
connection between dubious financial practices in the present day and in
Dante’s time, when the banking industry was in its infancy. But what got me
thinking was another comment of his, said half in jest, about the truism that Inferno
has the most compelling characters. As Treherne points out, you wouldn’t want
to be stuck with them for eternity: after ten minutes in their company, you’d
find that they are bores, self-obsessed, mono-maniacal.
I see what
he’s getting at. Dante’s damned are memorable because the enormity of their
sins is the large canvas they are painted on – the colors bold and vivid, but
from a limited palette. They are not interested in interacting with one
another, unless the connection is part of their punishment, as in the case of
Count Ugolino della Gherardesca. Guilty of treason, he is locked up to his neck
in ice – a symbol of the hard-heartedness inherent in this crime – and gnaws
for eternity on the skull of archbishop Ruggiero, the man who betrayed him in
turn. Ugolino’s perpetual act of revenge on his enemy is contrappasso
(retribution) for the terrible fate to which he was condemned by Ruggiero:
imprisoned in the torre Muda, Ugolino starved to death, having witnessed his
children perish one by one to the same fate.
The story
of Ugolino and his young sons folds horror upon horror; when, in despair at the
slow inevitability of their demise, the count bites on his hands, his children
mistake the gesture as a sign of hunger and offer themselves to him: “…Father,
we should grieve / Far less, if thou wouldst eat of us: thou gav’st / These
weeds of miserable flesh we wear, / And do thou strip them off from us again.”
(Inf. XXXIII, 58-61). Days later, Ugolino – rendered blind by
starvation – gropes for his dead children: “Then fasting / Got the mastery of
grief” (73-4), he tells Dante, concluding his account. These parting words
contain a chilling ambiguity. Ostensibly they refer to the manner of his death,
but they also hint at an unspeakable act of cannibalism which might have
preceded it. And, just like this, Ugolino returns to his “fiero pasto” (“fell
repast”).
Treherne
is right: Hell is rife with solipsism. The spotlight on the damned is for our
benefit, not theirs. In this sense, their exchanges with Dante are never
genuine, because they lack the foundation for reciprocity. With the exception
of Dante himself, nobody’s getting anywhere. And yet. And yet, the poet is
repeatedly moved to pity in his encounters with the damned. If they have lost
the capacity to connect, Dante – and, by extension, us readers – haven’t. In
fact, this is the greatest triumph of Inferno: that it invites us to see
the spark of humanity in the monstrous. But I’ll have to save fuller treatment
of this point for another time.
Professor
Treherne’s observation that Purgatorio is about change stands. There is
no movement, no character development, in the other two realms. And, having
left behind the ineffability of sin in the likes of Ugolino, once we get to Paradiso
we must face the ineffability of grace. This poses something of a narrative
problem, arguably more acute in the last canticle than in the first. Adler
tackles it head on when she greets her third guide, Dr Vittorio Montemaggi, with the provocation that Paradiso
is a hard sell, because the devil has the best tunes. Montemaggi’s interpretative key to Paradiso is an
invitation to latch on to its definition of love as the first principle, the
energy “that moves the sun in heav’n and all the stars”, in the poem’s famous
closing line.
The focus
on love as connection, as our essential need for connection – so evident at this time when we cannot
physically be with one another – makes Paradiso accessible, even without
an in-depth understanding of medieval theology and of Dante’s religious beliefs
(and prejudices, which are rightly taken to task in the third episode of the
programme). The corollary to the compelling power of “l’amor che move il sole e
l’altre stelle” is that if Inferno shows us the humanity in the
monstrous, Paradiso unveils the divinity in the human. This is why it’s
worth embarking on this journey. But there’s worth and there’s worthy. Dante’s
idea that in seeing God, we become God is ribbed as a “such a wonderful thing,
so simple to understand, so simple!” in an exuberant, affectionate exegesis by
Roberto Benigni, the Oscar-winning Italian actor and director of Life is Beautiful. It is a hard
sell.
Or is it?
As I was pondering this, I thought of a similar call, a call we’ve heard much
more recently, from a young poet, on one of those very few public occasions
when we still turn to poets to tell us where we are, remind us how we got here,
and show us the way forward. In revisiting Dante, in the twenty-first year of
the twenty-first century, my mind goes to Amanda Gorman’s impeccable rendition
of ‘The Hill
We Climb’, her powerful poem for the inauguration of
President Biden, a work that manages to be life-affirming without embroidering
reality.
Gorman too
charts a difficult ascent, the continuation of an arduous journey during which
we’ve already stumbled and fallen, and are bound to do so again. We’re in a
different context from Dante, of course. The hill we climb with Gorman is less
a vision of Purgatory (though it is that too), and more obviously a reference
to John Winthrop’s ideal of America as the “City upon a Hill”, a beacon of hope
and a moral example for the rest of the world. The shared metaphor of the
ascent is inevitable, built into our way of conceptualizing what is good,
whether we hail from a Christian background or not.
But Gorman’s call to action so that “Love becomes our legacy” takes me back to Dante with greater firmness, as does her insistence on our agency.[4] Both writers return to these concepts at the end of their poems. As he basks in the light of God, and in a blissful sense of unity and harmony, Dante experiences a revelation that leaves him speechless: “Here vigour fail’d the tow’ring fantasy: / But yet the will roll’d onward, like a wheel / In even motion, by the Love impell’d, / That moves the sun in heav’n and all the stars” (Par. XXXIII, 132-35). Gorman too concludes on a luminous vision where we become that which inspires out of the dark: “The new dawn blooms as we free it. / For there is always light, / if only we’re brave enough to see it. / If only we’re brave enough to be it.”
Dr Stefania Ciocia is a Reader in Modern and Contemporary
Literature at Canterbury Christ Church University. You can find her on Twitter
as Gained
in Translation @StefaniaCiocia.
Image: Eugene Delacroix The Barque of Dante (Dante and Virgil in the Underworld) Credit: Artepics / Alamy Stock Photo
[1] Also inspired by
Boccaccio is the Decameron Project: 29 Stories from the Pandemic, commissioned by The New York Times Magazine.
This all-fiction issue – featuring, amongst others, Margaret Atwood, Edwidge
Danticat, Téa Obreht, Kamila Shamsie, and Colm Tóibín – was published on 10
November 2020, with the strap-line “When reality is surreal, only fiction can
make sense of it”. For pandemic-free
book recommendations, see Sally Minogue’s blog on lockdown reads.
[2] Boccaccio (1313 –
1375) admired Dante (1265 – 1321) hugely, and wrote the first commentary to the
Comedy. In fact, he is credited with giving it the qualifier Divine.
For a taster of what the Italian literary critic Francesco De Sanctis called
Boccaccio’s “hearthly comedy”, see my own piece on the Decameron.
[3] The eternal punishment of each sinner is determined by the number
of times king Minos coils his tail around his body.
[4] Dante celebrates it openly in Paradiso: “Supreme of
gifts, which God creating gave / Of his free bounty, sign most evident / Of
goodness, and in his account most priz’d, / Was liberty of will, the boon
wherewith / All intellectual creatures, and them sole / He hath endowed” (Par.
V, 18 -23).