Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 34)

At the lowest pit, Judecca, the damned lie frozen under the ice. And in the darkness, iced up to his chest & still towering overhead, stands Satan. The most grotesque monster in Inferno, he's got three weeping faces above three sets of bat-wings. His chin drools blood because he's eternally chomping on three arch-betrayers: Judas, Brutus & Cassius (aha! a clue to Dante's politics). Dante & Virgil climb down Satan's pelt to the Earth's center (at Satan's groin), flip around, & climb up the shanks! Suddenly, it's morning, not evening! We're out, under a dawning sky—welcome to Purgatory.

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 33)

In an oubliette, one man sits atop another, gnawing thru the skull to his brain. The cannibal is Count Ugolino; his victim a Pisan archbishop. The prelate accused Ugolino of treachery (evidently justly, since here the Count is!). But Ugolino focuses on how he was imprisoned with his sons; it's ambiguous but probable that he ate them to survive. Dante slides downward to Ptolomea, resting place of those who murder their guests. Faces upward, their tears freeze in their sockets! Here we learn that, the moment a person betrays, a devil overtakes its body & casts its soul into Hell.

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 32)

Silence hangs over the final circle, where the rivers of Hell empty into a frozen lake. Here, the worst sinners are immobilized in icy oubliettes, thousands of heads sticking out with blue faces & clacking teeth. There are four concentric rings of sinners, distinguished only by the position of the heads. In the first, Caina (named for the first murderer & holding sinners who betrayed relatives, naturally), heads face down. In the second, Antenora (betrayers of their homelands, after a Trojan turncoat), eyes look forward. All the while, gravity grows stronger as we near the Earth's center.

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 31)

This deep into the Inferno, the murk fouls up Dante's sense of perspective: what he mistakes for towers ringing the edge of the Malebolge are actually giants, 70 feet tall or more, standing just beyond the Malebolge in Tenth Circle! One speaks a barbarous nonsense, the language of Babel; another is straitjacketed in chains; a third, the tallest yet, lowers Dante to the floor of Hell at Virgil's command. Many of them are the titans that attempted to overthrow Jove. Link that to Babel, and you realize that the Tenth Circle holds, among others, those who would depose God Himself!

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 30)

Add to the alchemists, counterfeitors and con artists of the tenth Malebolge impersonators (exemplified by Myrra, an Ovidian character who disguised herself to seduce her father) and misrepresentors (especially Potiphar's wife, who failed to seduce Joseph & so accused him of rape in Genesis). Fraud is the overarching sin of the Ninth Ring, and the most damnable fraud is false creation, a lie that impersonates or enacts a fiction and, in a sense, overwrites the truth. That's why Dante is so very careful to proclaim his creative cosmology as divinely ordained: the orthodox might accuse him of this very sin.

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 29)

Once again, Dante weeps at the sight of so many damned souls; once again, Virgil chastises him for his too-soft heart & reminds him that all the torture is divinely ordered. This repetition reminds me that Dante's in-poem self is a medieval character, not a modern one: his essence doesn't change. But in this Christian context (& the allegorical style of medieval narrative), Dante's tears & mercy ally him with the Son of God. So, clockwise and down into the final Malebolge, where alchemists, counterfeitors, & other con artists are literally plagued: covered with diseased scabs & festering sores.

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 28)

Here's a surprise: Mohammad languishes in the ninth Malebolge among the schismatics, not with the blasphemers in the seventh Ring. Evidently, Dante sees Islam as a (particularly perverse) offshoot of Christianity rather than a religion unto itself. The Prophet and his fellows in this ditch are, fittingly, hacked and severed like men on a battlefield, a concrete symbol of the dissension they fomented among the faithful. Dante begins the canto with a striking description of a battlefield. Here and elsewhere, he alludes to his service in the Battle of Campaldino, a decisive event in Florence's civil wars—another schism, of course!

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 27)

The central character of this canto goes unnamed but his actions are supplied in such detail that he must be a Dante's near-contemporary. Like Ulysses, the soul gave shifty advice with a silver tongue. And he counseled a pope who waged war upon his fellow Christians. From what I've read, I'd say Dante's not too enamored of popes, but maybe that's just because I've only read Inferno so far? There's an Italian proto-nationalism that looks back to Rome & Troy and lingers (Virgil-like) over the geography of the peninsula. But Dante's political philosophy is hard to make out.

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 26)

Into the ninth crevasse of the Malebolge and one of the most highly praised episodes of Dante's Comedy. Here, dissemblers are consumed by fire. One flame contains Ulysses (AKA Odysseus), punished for his diabolical stratagem of the Trojan Horse. Or maybe it's his hubris: Ulysses relates how he urged his sailors beyond Gibraltar. Far to the south, he saw—not Hades, as Homer had it, but the tallest mountain on Earth. It's the Mount of Purgatory, which Dante is heading towards! Dante sees himself in the intrepid warrior, but unlike the dissembler, his exploration will confirm God's truths.

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 25)

There's no break in action between the cantos 24 & 25: to punctuate his hatred of good, a thief gives God the fig with both thumbs! His burst of blasphemy prefaces the darkest, most horrific episode of the entire Inferno. A six-legged serpent scurries up to another robber and latches itself to his torso. Then it melds with him, turning him into a hideous monster. A second lizard stabs another person in the belly. The dumbfounded soul and his reptilian torturer mingle essences till they resemble each other: two deformed hybrids scuttle off. Thus does sin deform the soul!

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 24)

With the bridges in the Malebolge collapsed, Dante must climb the scree to continue. In a strange twist of medieval physics, Virgil (who is weightless, being a soul without a body) hoists Dante from below. Finally, they reach the eighth ditch, which is filled with snakes! These vipers stab right through the terrorized sinners, who catch fire, turn to ash, and then, in a parody of the Resurrection, are reconstituted. Chilling! Dante recognizes one soul, a Florentine damned for jacking a church. The man prophecies that his party, the Blacks, will triumph over Dante's Whites—and so they would.

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 23)

Virgil hustles his charge away from their demonic escort (Dante compares him to a mother rescuing her child from fire), over a berm and into the next crevasse. The Malebolge's sixth ditch holds the hypocrites, clad in lead cloaks. Dante chats with a pair of Florentine officials who sold the city out to the Pope, then he notices Caiaphas, the Pharisee who convinced Pilate to execute Christ. The priest, ironically, is also crucified: nailed to the ground so his fellow hypocrites walk over him. To the poet, then, hypocrisy is a sort of betrayal of political beliefs.

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 22)

This comedic canto is straight out of a medieval play. The damned in this ditch arch their backs to ease their cramping and so, dolphin-like, break the surface of the molten pitch. Dante's demonic escort hooks one with a harpoon and starts tearing his flesh. But like his fellows in this area, the poor bastard is a barrator (a lawyer who repeatedly files suits simply to harrass) and he manages to start an argument among the demons! As they fight, they let go of him and then, when they give chase, they tumble into the burning tar. Slapstick!

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 21)

Part one of a two-canto arc. At the Malebolge's fifth ditch, winged demons use hooks to snag & torture the unfortunate souls who lift their heads out of burning pitch. It's a folk vision of Hell, especially the runty, farting demons with ugly Italian names like Scarmiglione. Their captain tells Virgil that one of the stone bridges which span the Malebolge collapsed 1266 years ago (that's 34 AD, when the Crucifixion caused an earthquake). A squad of demons are appointed to guide them through. Dante, never a courageous tourist, thinks an escort is a bad idea…

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 20)

Another ditch in the Malebolge holds the diviners. They've had their necks twisted so they can only look backwards, a particularly gruesome and fitting punishment for false prophets. Dante is horrified, but once again he's admonished by his guide for his tears. We're to understand that pity for the damned is a form of blasphemy. The Comedy stresses that Christian justice exists, & that it's the guiding principle of the cosmic order. Also, Virgil gives an extended description (20 lines) of the rivers of Italy. Dante glorifies Florence a lot, but he's also got a streak of pan-Italian patriotism.

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 19)

The Malebolge is divided into ten ditches; we've come to the third, which houses the simoniacs. They're wedged upside-down into holes; new arrivals get stacked upon the old, crushing them into the rock. FYI, simony is the practice of selling posts in the Church. A century later, Chaucer also sounded off against this type of sin, but I'd say he portrayed their corruption as part of the fallen nature of Man. Dante views them as truly wicked holy men who follow “a god of gold and silver”, putting them into a cosmic perspective, not a human one.

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 18)

We're at the volume's halfway point! The Eighth Circle is a massive network of trenches, moats, and earthworks called Malebolge (or “Evil Ditches”). Like the demon Geryon in the previous canto, the Malebolge is entirely Dante's creation, and at 13 cantos, it's the single largest corner of Hell in his Inferno. That adds to the sense that Dante is getting more confident in his writing. His metaphors are more robust and his descriptions are more vivid. Traversing the Malebolge, he recognizes pimps, seducers, and flatterers from Florence, while Virgil points out the mythical Jason.

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 17)

Even to a modern imagination, used to seeing unreal creatures rendered through CGI, this episode is a triumph of the fantastic. At the precipice of the Seventh Circle, Virgil hails a massive demon called Geryon. The size of a barge, it's part man, part serpent, and part scorpion. Virgil & Dante mount the beast and ride it off the cliff into the void! Adding to the tension, Dante thinks of Icarus & Phaeton, two mythic flyers who tumbled to their deaths. But Geryon wheels down to the next ring like a falcon, depositing a terrified Dante safely at Ring #8.

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 16)

A trio of “sodomites” recognize Dante's Tuscan accent & ask him how the city of Florence fares. Dante must reply that it's riven by political dissent. Sinners like these gay men aren't simply defined by wickedness, even in Hell. They're citizens and partisans, and they reflect some better aspect of Florence than currently (c. 1310) existed, in Dante's opinion. Unlike most poets, he's happy to comment on current events in his work, even though the purpose of his Comedy is to chart an eternal cosmic hierarchy. It makes the book both intimate & relevant to his contemporaries.

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 15)

Throughout the Inferno, there's a tension between the justice of God's punishment & Dante's pity for the damned (both in his explicit reactions and implicitly through his humane descriptions). For the modern liberal and for Dante, this comes to a head in Canto 15, where men are punished for homosexuality. Dante won't controvert Christian doctrine, so instead he paints a compassionate portrait of Brunetto Latini, a friend & mentor. Dante deliberately elides Brunetto's sin, cites his service to Florence, commends the man's poetry, and ends, “he looked more the winner than the one who trails the field.” Well finessed.