These are my comments from the Good reads discussion on Inferno. All quotes come from the Hollander and Hollander translation, unless otherwise noted.
I’m not sure where to start with comments. I
could write an essay on something in all those Cantos. My first thought is to try to minimize, if
not dispel the notion that much in the Comedia
works as allegory. Allegory is a device
where a character or event stands for an abstract notion. Dante can be said to stand for “everyman,”
Virgil for wisdom, and say Beatrice for virtue.
This was common practice in many medieval works and even going into the
Renaissance. Edmund Spencer’s The Fairy Queen is a late example where
an epic work actually carried this one for one allegory. But other than at the beginning of The Divine Comedy, this sort of simple
allegory falls apart in Dante’s work.
The characters are three dimensional.
Dante isn’t an “everyman” but a specific man, a poet, a Florentine who
has been exiled, someone in love with a specific woman. Same thing with Virgil. He may be wise but he’s not an abstract
“wisdom.” He’s the ancient Roman poet
from the city of Mantua who died before Christ and so was a pagan. Despite the fantastical premise of passing
through the world of the hereafter, Dante’s work is a highly crafted realism,
way ahead of its time.
Take
the three beasts in the first Canto, the leopard, the lion, and the
she-wolf. Unless your notes went into a
lot of detail, it probably listed a simple allegory of the leopard standing for
lust, the lion for pride, and the she-wolf for greed. Hollander goes through the history of varying
opinions. At times the leopard was
believed to stand for envy instead of lust; other times, incontinence. The lion has been thought as standing for
violence or even malice. The she-wolf
for mad brutishness or fraud. Then there
are those that have read the three beasts as representing Dante’s human enemies:
the leopard for the Florentines who exiled him, the lion for the royal house of
France, and the she-wolf for the papacy.
All possible.
So
what do they stand for? In my opinion
those beasts stand for all those things, envy, lust, avarice, brutishness. Why would a leopard be less brutish than a
she-wolf, or a she-wolf less violent than a lion? Notice in Canto II there are three ladies
that come to Dante’s aid: the Blessed Mother, St. Lucy, and Beatrice. The three ladies directly correspond to the
three beasts, and yet we don’t look for some sort of abstract meaning behind
those three ladies. It’s the three
ladies whose virtue is there to counteract the appetite of the three beasts.
Hollander
in his introduction has an interesting section of allegory, and without quoting
him I think supports what I say above.
He goes on, however, to distinguish that simple allegory I described
above with what he calls theological allegory.
I had never heard the term before, but apparently it traces back to
Thomas Aquinas. Theological allegory is
where a figure in one part of the bible runs parallel to another. Christ for instance can be thought of as the
new Adam, or the new Moses; Mary as the new Eve, and so on. I always called that typology, and I guess it
does have a certain allegorical connection.
Hollander doesn’t explain in the introduction how Dante uses theological
allegory; perhaps that will come later.
Now let me speculate on the first two cantos: could the three blessed
ladies be typologies for the three beasts in the first canto? That might be so.
But
what I do what to emphasize again how The Divine Comedy is a work of great
realism, way ahead of its time.
Hollander also points out the skilled use of point of view. Notice how complex it is. We have the point of view of Dante the
writer, who stands back knowing all that has transpired; we have the point of
view of Dante the character who is undergoing the journey for the first time
and is almost completely ignorant; we have the point of view of the person who
comments on the situations – the guides – in this case Virgil who understands
partially but is not in on everything, and we have the point of view of the
souls encountered, many of which have a different point of view than their
reality, the unreliable narrator, if you will.
All oif this happening simultaneously.
Modern fiction has nothing on Dante.
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One
of the most interesting set of lines are those inscribed above the gate of
hell.
1 THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE CITY OF WOE,
2 THROUGH ME THE WAY TO EVERLASTING
PAIN,
3 THROUGH ME THE WAY AMONG THE LOST.
4 JUSTICE MOVED MY MAKER ON HIGH.
5 DIVINE POWER MADE ME,
6 WISDOM SUPREME, AND PRIMAL LOVE.
7 BEFORE ME NOTHING WAS BUT THINGS
ETERNAL,
8 AND
ETERNAL I ENDURE.
9 ABANDON ALL HOPE, YOU WHO ENTER HERE.
(III. l. 1-9)
The
first three lines beginning with “Through me…” are what the dead soul expects
to find when entering. The seventh and
eighth lines speak to its eternalness, and the last line is a command to the
entering soul that his time for change is over.
But the middle three lines (4-6) are possibly the most intellectually
rich: “Justice moved my maker on
high/Divine Power made me/Wisdom supreme and primal love.” Line four is a statement of why God created
hell – for justice. Line five is a
statement of who made hell, and line six is a modifying phrase to why He made
it. If you were to write the sentence
out it would look like this, “Divine Power made me, wisdom supreme and primal
love.” If you were to replace the comma
and use a prepositional phrase, it would go like this: “Divine Power made me
through wisdom and primal love.” So
there are three abstract qualities that caused God to create hell: justice,
wisdom, and love.
Now
that’s how I read it, but Hollander in his notes seems to read the fifth and
sixth lines differently. He doesn’t read
“wisdom supreme and primal love” are not modifying the predicate but the
subject. If he were to write it in a
prose sentence it might be, “Divine Power, wisdom, and love made me." Under Hollander’s logic then the three
attributes of God are power, wisdom, and love and justice is the means of which
things were created. He supports his
argument by citing St. Augustine as attributing those three to the
Trinity.
Now
I don’t think that’s how it should be read.
I’m not saying that St. Augustine is wrong, but I think Dante is
creating his own Trinitarian attributes of justice, wisdom, and love. Power it seems to me is the acting force that
creates as a result of the attributes.
But take my brain noodling here with a grain of salt. Hollander is a PhD with a expertise in Dante
with scores of experience.
Now
I bring this up because embedded in those words are the themes that apply to
all of The Divine Comedy. Everything in
the poem works in concordance with justice, wisdom, and love. Now come down a few lines from the words on
the gate to where Virgil is explaining to Dante what they are about to get
into. He says, “We have come to where I
said/you would see the miserable sinners/who have lost the good of the
intellect” (16-18). Those in hell are
there because they have misused their intellect in their application of
justice, wisdom, and love. But this will
also go beyond hell. It can be said that
those in purgatory are there to repair (or perhaps relearn may be more
accurate) their use of intellect, and those in heaven are there because they
properly used their intellect.
It’s
all very highly condensed, but the themes of the entire Comedia are there in the first eighteen lines of the third Canto.
Amanda
Commented:
I wonder if this comes
down to a matter of translation. Longfellow and Musa both use
"Omnipotence" instead of "power."
From Longfellow, the
lines read" Justice incited my sublime Creator; Created me divine
Omnipotence, The highest Wisdom and primal Love." So for me, that
translation indicates the creation of hell by the Trinity.
But your argument for
justice, wisdom and love is also interesting. It seems (to me at least) that
you can argue that God the Father represents justice based off the old
Testament. From there, it would be the Trinity working together in Divine Power
to create Hell.
My
Reply:
Hi Amanda, thanks for
commenting. I think what you present there was one of the variations Hollander
listed that at one time or another was brought up. I find the allegory
concerning the three ladies that Musa and Grandgent advance as even less
satisfying. Can't Mary be Illuminating Grace or Revelation? Can't Beatrice be
Divine Mercy or Illuminating Grace? Yes, I know Lucia means "light"
but then why is it illuminating grace and not illuminating wisdom? It all seems
so arbitrary.
I am definitely sold on
Hollander's "Biblical allegory," which I consider typology, rather
than simple (literary?) allegory. The difference between Dante's The divine
Comedy and Spencer's The Fairy Queen is immense. You can pin down the allegory
in Spencer; you can't pin down the allegory in Dante.
Dante's technique of
these triple analogues that run throughout the work is incredibly rich. It
almost replicates the mystery of the Trinity! I may say this a dozen times
before we finish the read, this is the greatest work of literature.
Longfellow:
"Justice incited
my sublime Creator; Created me divine Omnipotence, The highest Wisdom and
primal Love."
Hollander:
“Justice moved my maker
on high/Divine Power made me/Wisdom supreme and primal love.”
Look at the difference!
If you have an ear for poetry, the Longfellow is stilted. All I can say is
"yuck." The Hollander just rolls so fluidly, and it never sacrifices
accuracy. Notice the alliteration with the "m" words. I make it a
habit to compare translations, and I have not found anything better than the
Hollander duo. God bless Jean Hollander, she was the poet of the two.
Yes, power or
omnipotence is an ability; justice, wisdom, and love are qualities. Even in
college I was not afraid to disagree with PhD's. ;)
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One
other thing I wanted to examine was this fainting that Dante has at the closing
of two out of the last three cantos.
Twice in the very first five cantos.
For those reading this for the first time, I hope you don't think this
is going to be a regular routine, that this is some melodrama. I don't remember if it happens again. I have an inkling that it happens one more
time, but I'm not sure. Let's take a
look at the two occurrences in some detail.
In
Canto III, Dante the character has been led into the underworld, read the sign
which warned his to "abandon all hope" for those that enter, come
through the pre-circle of the Neutrals where for the first time he is seeing
mass numbers of dead souls walking about, even recognizing some, realizing now
that "death had undone so many."
Here's what he actually reports:
Now sighs, loud
wailing, lamentation
resounded through the
starless air,
so that I too began to
weep.
Unfamiliar tongues,
horrendous accents,
words of suffering,
cries of rage, voices
loud and faint, the
sound of slapping hands --
all these made a
tumult, always whirling
in that black and
timeless air,
as sand is swirled in a
whirlwind. (III. l. 22-30)
That's
pretty horrific and oppressive to the senses.
I'm sure we would all be rattled, even if it were not in the world of
the dead. But then Dante comes up on the
demon ferry driver Acheron who tells him and the souls around him "to give
up all hope of ever seeing heaven."
Despite that he's reassured by Virgil, board the boat along with all the
dead, and before landing on the other side thunder claps.
When he [Virgil] had
ended [speaking], the gloomy plain shook
with such force, the
memory of my terror
makes me again break
out in sweat.
From the weeping ground
there sprang a wind,
flaming with vermilion
light,
which overmastered all
my senses,
and I dropped like a
man pulled down by sleep. (III. l. 130-36)
It
seems that thunder is so loud that the concussion causes him to drop, or
perhaps it's the terror which rises to a crescendo and overcomes him. Either way, his sense, which have been on
edge, have been overwhelmed.
Now
let's look at the faint in Canto V. The
pilgrims (Virgil and Dante) are in the first circle where the sinners of lust
reside. This is one of the great and
memorable scenes in Inferno. Dante,
after seeing some famous souls in literature and being moved to
"pity" so that he almost loses his "senses," comes across
the souls of Francesca and her lover Paolo, and asks to hear their tale. Francesca is more than willing to tell her
story. (By the way, that's a common
attribute of most of the souls in hell; they want to tell their story and spin
it to how they were either wronged or were trapped into it.) So Francesca says,
'Love, quick to kindle
in the gentle heart,
seized this man with
the fair form taken from me.
The way of it afflicts
me still.
'Love, which absolves
no one beloved from loving,
seized me so strongly
with his charm that,
as you see, it has not
left me yet.
'Love brought us to one
death. (V. l. 100-106)
Notice
how she offloads responsibility from herself.
Nixon spoke of Watergate as "mistakes were made," as if he had
nothing to do with it. It's
"love" that "seized this man," and "love" that
seized her, love that "absolves no one beloved from loving." Did love make them take off their clothes
and do what they did? How different is
the love that Francesca talks about than the love that moved the three ladies
in Canto II to come to Dante’s aid. That
chain sequence of love really does show how love moves the universe, but that
is true love, caritas, not lust.
But
why does Dante the character faint?
Francesca goes on to explain further.
'One day, to pass the
time in pleasure,
we read of Lancelot,
how love enthralled him.
We were alone, without
the least misgiving.
'More than once that
reading made our eyes meet
and drained the color
from our faces.
Still, it was a single
instant overcame us:
'When we read how the
longed-for smile
was kissed by so
renowned a lover, this man,
who never shall be
parted from me,
'all trembling, kissed
me on my mouth.
A Galeotto was the book
and he that wrote it.
That day we read in it
no further.' (V. l. 127-38)
The
book made them do it. The “book and he
that wrote it” was a “Galeotto,” who was the knight go-between in the adultery
between Lancelot and Guenivere. The book
and the author were in essence pimps.
And what is Dante? Among other
things, an author of love poetry, a pimp himself. Dante realizes he has been responsible for
bringing people to sin. What he must
have thought as innocent youthful expression has brought people down the very
real hell that he is passing through.
And so, this realization shocks him, and he faints from the horror.
Notice
also this comes right after Canto IV where he has been immortalized with five
of the greatest poets who ever lived.
That was a moment of high honor – some variation of the word “honor” was
used seven times in 28 lines. And now in
Canto V, all that honor has been reduced to the disgrace of a pimp. It’s as if Dante the author needs to bring
humility to Dante the character.
WHO....HOW!?
ReplyDeleteManny, I would need to write at least three books before commenting on this post alone...
Long story short, I've read all of this post and it looks like you don't need any help... Just continue to remember that most of the souls in hell; they want to tell their story and spin it to how they were either wronged or were trapped into it... some of them will go as far as to even try to reduce God and our Heavenly Mother' Honor as being no more important than a pimp because they can't help themselves. :)
WHO'S LAUGHING?
God Bless you and yours and for what it's worth... keep UP the good words.
It never ceases to amaze me how well read you are.
ReplyDeleteGod bless.
Thank you both and God bless everyone named Victor. ;)
ReplyDelete