Words Unbound

Teaching Dante's Inferno in the High School Classroom

Milton Burke

• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781610756136
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Words Unbound draws on Milton Burke's thirty years of teaching experience to help educators bring Inferno alive for today's young reader. In a conversational, "colleague-to-colleague" style, Burke shares the interpretations, questions, and exercises he found effective in his high-school classroom, emphasizing group discussion to help students, no matter their religious or philosophical moorings, engage meaningfully with the notoriously difficult text.

1

Two Dantes

CANTO 1

Dante is one of the greatest of literary architects, and the Commedia is his masterpiece. If a good book is one that begs to be read again, then Dante’s poem may stand supreme. It can sustain any number of rereadings, each one enriching your understanding of what literary structure at its most intricate can convey. Each time through, you find yourself discovering new rooms, new passageways from room to room and wing to wing, more complex design motifs of image, metaphor, language, and sound. Like an architect of the organic school, Dante built the Commedia out of local material, the vernacular Italian, shaped to a structure well-suited to the medieval Catholic landscape in which it was set. His building stones consisted primarily of a variety of parallels and contrasts. When you think about it, this could hardly be otherwise. A writer like Dante can only rely on meanings generated by relationships internal to his work. He builds these up inside a given work in meaningful patterns of similarity and difference. These two supports bear a great deal of intellectual and emotional weight in this poem. A wealth of beneficial struggle lies in store for your students as they try to grasp how, out of such fundamental materials, Dante constructs Inferno, the first section of the surpassingly elegant cathedral that is the Commedia.

The basic design of the poem seems very simple. The entire poem evolves out of the relationship between two versions of Dante Alighieri as that develops fictionally over a week at Eastertime in 1300. I’ll follow established practice in designating them Dante the pilgrim and Dante the poet. Through much of the Inferno, they contrast strongly. The poem depicts Dante the pilgrim, the protagonist of the poem, as a historical figure, thirty-five years of age, living in the year 1300 in Florence, Italy. As a prominent poet and political figure in Florence at the time, he must have seemed to be at the top of his game. But this Dante is paradoxically characterized early in the poem as so diseased in spirit as to be almost beyond help. Dante the poet, on the other hand, has made the journey through hell, purgatory, and paradise, received an education along the way from three exemplary guides, seen a bit of the divine light, and come back to the world ready to give poetic shape to his experiences. The resulting one hundred cantos of the poem gauge the diminishing distance between the two Dantes as the pilgrim gradually develops into the poet. Dissociation gradually moves toward identity. It is important to point out that both of these Dantes are literary creations. How closely either corresponds to the actual Dante, whatever that means, would be hard to determine.

With this essential distinction in mind, have your students begin with a close look at the poem’s first few lines. Greek and Roman epic poets typically used these lines to lay a foundation in tone, situation, character, and theme. Dante’s first twelve lines in canto 1 continue this tradition. Ask your students to look for anything that might be thematic, but especially for moves that begin to characterize the contrast between the two Dantes. Some significant features they might notice there:

1. Two different verb tenses, the past for the poet’s recounting of the pilgrim’s actions in 1300; the present for the poet’s more experienced comments on the action in his own voice some time later as he composes the poem. Your students who know a little Spanish or Latin might notice how Dante convolutes his word order in the second tercet, possibly to highlight the distinction between two times, by juxtaposing past and present tense forms of the verb “to be” (era e`).

2. The differing levels of experience between the poet-narrator and the pilgrim. From his vantage point in the future, the poet has a reflective handle on how things stand for the pilgrim in 1300, how the journey will go, and what its significance is. Having barely awakened from a deadly sleep, the pilgrim doesn’t know much about the terrain in which he finds himself. He needs an education.

3. The strong contrast in how the poem evaluates the respective positions of the two Dantes (fearfully lost in a dark, savage place versus speaking from a position where things have “come to good”).

4. The reflexive verb in the second line (mi ritrovai, which the Hollanders translate “I came to myself,” maybe more literally “I found myself again”). Thus the poem immediately places the same person as both subject and object of a verb. The implication is of a self, or soul, that is divisible into conceptually discrete parts. This idea echoes a long tradition in the West, going back literarily at least to Plato’s three-part soul in the Republic. You will see that the structure of hell reflects Dante’s own version of the tripartite soul concept.

Critical to Dante’s understanding of the path to God is the idea that all humans have better and worse angels of their natures. Pilgrimages like this one are for learning to think and act according to the better ones. The pilgrim can do that in part by facing up to the others, as if they were separable parts of himself, at least potentially. The pilgrim’s tour of hell will have to demonstrate how this works. So the first verb in the poem prefigures a critical feature of Dantean psychology: the multipartite self.

5. Language that complicates a little the relation between the two Dantes. No simplistic before-and-after picture can square with the poem’s first few lines. The poet still experiences in full force the fear the pilgrim felt. This renders precarious any distance the poet has achieved from his benighted younger self. The poet’s memories can still be affected by prior emotional conditioning, so he does not always succeed in maintaining his elevated stance of knowing detachment from the action. It is important to remember that the poet is also given a literary characterization.

Once you start engaging the actual language of the poem, you will see right away that no such list as the above can be exhaustive. You and your students will certainly find more to say about the opening lines. This poem everywhere rewards good close reading. For a literature teacher, that’s one of its beauties.

I have intentionally refrained from mentioning until now the poem’s famous first line. Nostra vita. Our journey. In what sense “our”? How can the poet claim universality for a pilgrim’s experiences, which are highly individualized in place, time, character, and situation? Attempting to answer that question can deliver you pretty quickly into the mire of allegorical interpretations of the poem. For those unfamiliar with the form, allegory entails two or more parallel planes of narrative: a literal level and one or more symbolic ones linked to the literal in one-to-one correspondence, more or less. To read the critics on allegory in this poem was for me a process of deepening bewilderment, so complex were the issues and varied the interpretations. Dante can be held somewhat responsible for any such confusion. A still extant letter to his patron Can Grande (Toynbee 1920) outlines four levels at which his poem can be read, one literal and three allegorical. I have yet to find a commentary dealing with more than a detail or two in the poem at all four levels. You would save yourself and your students a lot of trouble by simply skirting this morass, but that would be beating a coward’s retreat. Besides, Dante’s first line seems designed to close off that avenue of escape. Implicit in that “our” is Dante’s insistence from the start that allegorical thinking is critical to understanding the poem. The Inferno will certainly reward your students’ thoughtful effort expended on this problem.

The entire first canto seems designed to reinforce this point. Throughout most of Inferno, the poet foregrounds the historically anchored story of a certain Florentine pilgrim’s progress. The pilgrim continually encounters Italians who know him personally or who have played some significant part in cultural or political events in contemporary Italy. You are so frequently sent running to the footnote page for information on thirteenth-century Italian figures and events that you initially have to read literally to read at all. This is as it should be. What distinguishes Dante’s poem structurally from other narrative poetry of his day is not allegory itself. Medieval literature bristled with that. But Dante refuses to demote the literal story in favor of allegorical abstractions. How does a poet tell a story full of richly individualized characters and images while at the same time giving those details representational force? Dante’s Commedia surely constitutes one of literature’s most perfectly realized solutions to this perennial artistic problem. This poem distinguishes itself in the way that literal and allegorical work together in it. Among other things, this suggests that to do justice to the Inferno, you first have to read it literally.

But that will prove harder with the first canto than the others. Echoing that “our,” the poem’s first images and beings push you forcefully beyond the letter. A dark wood so bitter that death isn’t more so? A timely little hill waiting with upper slopes bathed in light from a source “that leads men straight, no matter what their course”? Progress arrested by three beasts, the last of which is explicitly associated with appetites that cause widespread human malaise? Just the right guide appearing from nowhere at a critical moment? Your students will have a hard time staying literal about such images. They seem designed to establish from the start an allegorical dimension to the poem.

But what dimension? Though I can’t claim to understand much of the critical conversation about allegory in the poem, I can propose a way of dealing with the problem that has made the poem more accessible to me personally and has worked well with my students over the years. Let Dante the pilgrim be himself in historical time and simultaneously any soul in any age. That is, first think of the pilgrim’s journey as that of a thirteenth-century Florentine poet and political figure through the lands of the dead and then as a representation of any soul’s inward movement toward the light. Literally, then, hell, purgatory, and paradise categorize destinations of human souls after death; allegorically they represent territories in the timeless landscape of every human soul.

Working out some method of dealing with allegory in the poem is part of the larger struggle to understand the poem’s architecture. To Dante, the keynote to God’s creation is structure: no attentive reader will get far in Inferno before noticing how ordered the place is. God has structured both our inner and outer worlds to give meaning to human experience and especially to human choice-making. If no structure, Dante in effect maintains, then no meaning. So Dante uses allegory to establish a structural connection between the soul and God’s cosmos writ large. He makes it a principal means of revealing the meaningfulness that suffuses divine creation.

Like the pilgrim, your students will have to work hard to understand in detail how God’s structure functions in Inferno and why he has it this way. They’ll get their education in this as the pilgrim gets his. But a few general points should be made at the outset. In Dante’s Christian schema, God grants humans limited freedom. They are free to choose but bound to experience the moral consequences of their choices. Unrepented bad choices will lead to malaise, and perhaps not just in the next life. Better choices, or genuine repentance for bad ones, can lead to a better situation. Hell, purgatory, and paradise give spatial and visual expression to this causality, literally as actual places, allegorically as a spectrum of states of inner being from damnable to blessed.

In Inferno, the pilgrim gets a very vivid and detailed education in how divine cause and effect works. Dante’s hell catalogs in graded detail the negative possibilities open to the kind of choice-making creatures God has shaped us to be. In addition to their literal historicity, the human characters Dante meets in the poem represent specific faculties or kinds of moral/spiritual choosing that are available to all humans by virtue of what a human being is. Inherent in any of us is the possibility, with considerable biological force behind it, of choosing to lead a lust-driven life like Francesca in canto 5, or to adopt a materialist perspective like Farinata (Inferno 10), or like Ulysses (Inferno 26) to misuse our gifts in serving our own needs to the detriment of others, or to cannibalize the lives around us like Ugolino (Inferno 33). All these characters are at once depictions of actual historical or literary figures and allegorical representations of features, dimensions, and tendencies in every soul, the pilgrim and your students not excluded. Tell your students Francesca lives in them — “Close, close, close!” as Simon learns from the beast in Lord of the Flies (Golding 1954, 142). That might take their minds off their cell phones a little.

But they also contain something of the pilgrim. In addition to his historical self, Dante the pilgrim represents the soul as still capable of modification. This distinguishes him from the shades he meets in hell, all of whom have lost the power to change their shape morally and must therefore languish in specific forms of eternal torment. The pilgrim still maintains (but just barely, as canto 2 makes clear) the ability to change. He is the educable self, that power in anyone to wake up, step back reflectively to take an honest look at himself, accept guidance, and make new choices that are not simply expressions of old patterns. At his best he is the self you want your students to bring to class every day. But the poet doesn’t romanticize this faculty. The pilgrim can’t always view things from a comfortable distance. His reflection is subject to obstruction by emotional patterns—habits, fears, compulsions, aversions, scores to settle, and so on. It would be hard to maintain that some such set of conditioned reactions is not eventually etched into every human soul. Even today in class, a few of your students were thumbing those cell phones under their desks.

I think something like this approach can be maintained throughout the Inferno, thus satisfying the definition of allegory. Reading this way has many potential benefits. Most importantly, it can make the poem not just accessible but sharply pertinent to a lot more of your students than just the formally Christian ones. Even your most devout secularists might find themselves pulled in by a poem read simultaneously at both these levels. I was.

In a poem that can overwhelm you with complexity of design, the pilgrim/poet contrast and the literal/allegorical parallel are architecturally fundamental. On their foundation, robust class discussion may easily rise. Operate on the premise that your students already have plenty of experience by which to unpack the images in the first canto, all of which represent in spatial form conditions or dimensions of a human soul. Your students can (and will aloud in class, I’m betting) give personal shape to the idea of being in a “dark wood.” They have some vision of where they should be as persons, up there on a lighted height. They know that little hill. Given some time to reflect, they will be able to identify those beasts that block their progress toward the light. They will be able to frame a personal response to Virgil’s (taunting?) question to the pilgrim in the story: “Why do you not climb the peak that gives delight, origin and cause of every joy?” (1:77–78). They might even be able to distinguish among their own inner voices the measured cadences of a reliable guide.

Which is not to imply that Dante doesn’t endorse specific referents for these images. The dark wood springs from Christian ideas about sin and consequent separation from God (whom Dante associates with light throughout the poem). The little lighted hill suggests the Mount of Purgatory, the medieval Catholic pathway to heaven. The beasts reflect the tripartite division of the soul originating in classical antiquity. Understanding Dante’s Virgil would require some grounding in classical thought and art, with particular knowledge of Virgil’s Aeneid, which Dante knew well and to which he often alludes in the Commedia. None of this specified content should be neglected. My claim is that it is not intended to be exhaustive. Beyond these specifics, the poem can take on a life with your students that encourages them to shape Dante’s journey to their own experience. A kid doesn’t have to be a Christian to be interested in doing that.

So your job, if you accept my suggestion, is to help your students form a coherent picture comprising all the elements in canto 1 as a story about a famous Florentine poet and at the same time as features, potentials, or tendencies in every human soul. (Dante’s God puts a lot of emphasis on coherence.) Attention to architecturally prominent parallels and contrasts will help you do this. I think your students will find what they should expect from a great writer—a picture of what a human being is that sets them to thinking in ways they haven’t before. They are not likely to encounter anywhere a more intricate specimen of literary construction.

Exercises

CLOSE READING

1. How do the first twelve lines of canto 1 prepare the reader for what is to come in the poem? More specifically, how do those lines set up the fundamental contrast between the two Dantes? What lines or images in the rest of the canto start to develop that contrast?

2. The most frequently recurring word in canto 1 is paura, fear, which appears five times. Apparently to Dante, fear constitutes a primary obstacle to movement toward the light. This must have applied to Dante personally, and it no doubt threatens to impede spiritual progress for any human soul in some fashion. So why all the emphasis on fear? What is the relation in the canto between fear and the dark wood? Judging by the word’s specific uses in the text, what particular kinds of fear is Dante emphasizing? It would be hard to find a theme with more staying power than this one. As someone who has probably accumulated a lot more emotional data than your students, you are in a better position than they to appreciate the truth of this. But events in a terror-stricken world like ours should have seeded even youthful minds with awareness of the subterranean power of undigested fears. They can strike...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Two Dantes: Canto 1
• 2. Pagans: Cantos 1 and 2
• 3. Contrapasso: Cantos 4 and 5
• 4. Structure, Person, and Emblem: Cantos 6–9 and 11
• 5. Three Literary Persons: Cantos 10, 13, and 15
• 6. That Foul Effigy of Fraud: Canto 17
• 7. A Miscellany of Fraud: Cantos 18–25
• 8. Tongues: Cantos 26
• 9. Schism: Canto 28
• 10. Ice: Canto 31–33
• 11. Dis: Canto 34
• Appendix 1: Editions of Inferno
• Appendix 2: Online Resources
• Bibliography
• Index