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.

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 14)

In a desert raining with brimstone, Dante notes that one man ignores the cinders falling like snowflakes upon the damned. It's Capaneus, one of the kings who beseiged Thebes (see Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes). Capaneus stood against Jove (ie the godhead) & remains blasphemous even in Hades! But back to that desert. Virgil plans to traverse the scorched earth along a stream that connects hell's various rivers. In a flourish of cosmology, Dante explains that the rivers are fed by the wound of a monumental titan beneath Mt. Ida. It's breathtaking how wide the poet's scope & imagination are!

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 13)

Ready for a horrific image? Further into the seventh circle, harpies patrol a wilderness of thorns. When Virgil snaps a twig off one, it bleeds and screams in pain! Virgil explains that each bush is a soul; when Judgment Day comes, the resurrected bodies of these suicides will hang from their own branches (an echo of the arch-suicide, Judas). The thornbush weezes its tale through its broken stalk—he belonged to the court of Frederick II—but never gives his name. We're meant to deduce it, but the omission also suggests to me that Hell's punishments simultaneously emphasize and annihilate the self.

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 12)

After last canto's disquisition on sin, Canto 12 picks up the action. Sidling past the Minotaur (I love all the monsters!), Dante & Virgil come to a vast, boiling stream of blood: the River Phlegethon. Centaurs ring the strand, firing arrows at bobbing souls of the violent. Virgil enlists one to ford the river with Dante on its back (remember, Virgil is insubstantial & needs no help). How are the violent distinct from the wrathful of Circle #4, swimming in the Styx? It's more than mere degree: here are tyrants like Alexander and Attila along with career criminals.

Summer Reading: Inferno (canto 11)

Commenting on a ripening stench, Virgil notes they're descending into the seventh circle. The final three rings are a class apart from the first six: here are sins of violence & treachery against others (including God), not merely sins of the mind. The book careful parses the sins in its deepest probe of metaphysics so far. It's hard to comprehend this position from our humanist point-of-view. When Dante shows pity for the hellbound, he's chastized by Virgil. The damned deserve their God-given punishments. But I can't help seeing an ambiguity in Inferno, because it describes them with such humanity.