The Everyman’s Epic

On Dante's Commedia

History is written by the victors, but the literary canon is written by the audacious. The timeless works that surpass their own cultures, their original tongues, their authors took enormous swings and somehow managed to connect with their targets. Works of such magnitude make a value proposition to their readers: if you are willing to undertake a monumental challenge, to disrupt your life and train your intellect and memory on this text, you might unlock something profound within. In every mental library, there are two shelves of these sorts of books: a short, well-lit shelf of works the reader has made it through at least once, and a dusty, dark one where plenty more tomes lie in wait, offering to change their perception of the world if they have the guts, and the time. Moby Dick, The Canterbury Tales, War and Peace, everything Proust ever wrote; all of these sit on my own second shelf. There will always be plenty of options, so when a reader decides that they’re up for a challenge, choosing which work to commit to requires some serious consideration.

            Before each great author can propose their audacious exchange of time and attention for perspective, they must make some critical decisions of their own. What is the optimal permutation of medium and message for their purposes? That is to say, what format, style of prose and narrator will most consistently guide readers towards the experience the author wants them to have? This is certainly a dilemma that all thinking writers face on a regular basis, but when an author deliberately sets out to claim their place among the canon, the stakes are exponentially higher. As The Wire said, “you come at the king, you best not miss”. In the classical era, there was a straightforward option: stick to dactylic hexameter, employ rhetorical devices with artful precision. Perform at the highest level within the strict parameters of format and success would follow, fitting for the time when poetry was an Olympic event. The Homeric Cycle established the precedent. Centuries later, Virgil’s Aeneid proved that one man could, in fact, produce a work of that caliber. Skip forward to modernity, though, and literary convention has been irrevocably muddied. There is no optimal format for telling a story, and for an author to earnestly choose and commit to one of the ancient rigid structures would be historical reenactment more than anything else, like competing in a cooking show while dressed as an 18th century scullery maid, using only the cookware and ingredients available in that period. Playing with format is an option, one Joyce perfected in countless ways in Ulysses.

            Between the rigidity of the ancients and the borderless play of the twentieth century lies the great transition, the explosion of civilization, full of evolution and progress. From his temporal seat in the Middle Ages, Dante Alighieri took one of the boldest swings in literary history. La Divina Commedia makes earth-shaking claims. It’s an epic that ties the classical lineage directly into the Christian one, using traditional rhetorical devices and experimenting with first-person storytelling. The Commedia is aggressively political in ways that its spiritual ancestors like the Aeneid could never be, describing specific prominent Florentines’ eternal punishments and explaining why they deserve them. All of that barely scratches the surface of Dante’s audacious scope of work. Given that ambition, Dante’s determination to sit next to Virgil and Homer on the great shelves of eternity, the question of format was crucial. Dante’s response synopsizes his literary footprint: a play on the classical epic structure written in the vernacular. What a radical choice to write in Italian instead of Latin, abandoning the highbrow written language that had been standard for more than fourteen centuries in favor of the common tongue! Consider Dante’s work from the perspective of a prospective Florentine reader: a fantastic adventure through the layers of the afterlife, conversations with some of the greatest individuals in history, vivid and gory depictions of political figures known to them, and they don’t even have to muddle through esoteric Latin to enjoy it. Even his naming conventions in the structure of the work are approachable: instead of sections being labelled libri or versi, each one is a welcoming song. The intellectual vegetables with which Dante wants to nourish his readers, the themes and commentaries of the work, appear far tastier when presented this way. The steep price of admission to other classics in Latin and Greek is gone for the Italian reader. They can dive right in.

            After the choice of language lowers the first barrier to entry, the reader discovers this is a very different epic right away, one where the narrator himself is the relatable protagonist. Where Virgil begins the Aeneid by establishing thematic grandeur from the perspective of a performer, “I sing of weapons and a man, driven by fate, who first came from Trojan shores to Italy”, Dante opens: “When I had journeyed half our life’s way, I found myself within a shadowed forest, for I had lost the path that does not stray” (Virgil, translation mine; Mandelbaum, I 1-3). Not a hero like Aeneas chosen by the gods to escape the greatest war in history, destined for more violence to come, described from afar, instead Dante presents… himself. A middle-aged man thrust into terrifying circumstances out of his control. A relatable character already, made even more so by the perspective. First person narration encourages the reader to believe: everything you are about to read is true, it happened to me. The reality of that claim is another matter, but there is a compulsion towards trust. While the modern reader, familiar with the concept of the unreliable narrator, may feel less trusting of the first-person perspective, “[a]ctually, first-person narration is generally more reliable than unreliable,” writes James Wood, “[a]s soon as someone tells a story about a character, narrative seems to want to bend itself around that character, wants to merge with that character, to take on his or her way of thinking and speaking” (Wood 5). This is one of the great magic tricks of the Divine Comedy: Dante cuts himself in half, becoming Author-Dante and Traveler-Dante, and does everything he can to erase the former from the reader’s mind. Using his own name and likeness aids in this obfuscation, the first person acting as additional reinforcement If Dante is following Virgil through the Inferno, then he can’t also be writing the rules of the afterlife! What we’re reading are merely his observations, not his own designs, right? Watch both hands move, though, and the misdirection fails, but there’s plenty of insight to be gleaned from analyzing the ways in which Author-Dante weaves his magic, as this bifurcation of self is one of the fundamental techniques he employs to further his thematic messages to the reader.

            The distinction of Traveler-Dante is cemented by his first conversation with a damned soul in the underworld. He arrives in the first zone of punishment, “a place where every light is muted, which bellows like the sea beneath a tempest, when it is battered by opposing winds. The hellish hurricane, which never rests, drives on the spirits with its violence: wheeling and pounding, it harasses them. When they come up against the ruined slope, then there are cries and wailing and lament, and there they curse the force of the divine” (Mandelbaum V, 28-36). There he finds the first sort of sinners: “those who like to practice carnal sin, when reason is by furtive lust ensnared”, and plenty of figures from history and legend. (Carson V, 37-39). Dido, Cleopatra, Helen, Achilles, Paris, Tristan. Author-Dante is saying “Look, cautious reader, this journey will be filled with characters you already know!”, but Traveler-Dante does not concern himself with celebrities and heroes. “No sooner had I heard my teacher name the ancient ladies and the knights, than pity seized me and I was like a man astray. My first words: ‘Poet, I should willingly speak with those two who go together there and seem so lightly carried by the wind’” (Mandelbaum V, 70-75). This pair to whom Dante calls out are linked closely, when all of the other historical figures are named as individuals. Helen and Paris, the only other pair who even could be considered jointly, are separated by Achilles in a clearly deliberate (and delightfully winking) manner. Yet Francesca and her lover are intertwined at an essential level, which Dante reflects in his presentation of them as they leave the course and approach him. As Lucan introduced Pompey in Civil War, “like in a fruitful field a lofty oak, bearing the people’s spoils of old and generals’ hallowed dedications; clinging with roots no longer strong, by its own weight it stands firm, and spreading naked branches through the air, it makes shade with trunk, not foliage; and though it totters, ready to fall beneath the first Eurus, though all around so many trees upraise themselves with sturdy trunks, yet it alone is venerated”, Dante continues the classical tradition of resounding natural simile with his introduction of the lovers (Lucan I, 135-142). “Even as doves when summoned by desire, borne forward by their will, move through the air with wings uplifted, still, to their sweet nest, those spirits left the ranks where Dido suffers, approaching us through the malignant air” (Mandelbaum V, 82-86). By taking that Greco-Roman tradition of nature-based characterization and blending it with an image laden with Christian meaning, Author-Dante here provides the reader with another echo of his entire effort: an epic poem deeply rooted in the classical structure that incorporates the progress of society since that era. The paired, romantic essence of the doves is spelled out even more plainly in Carson’s translation since he takes some liberties with the verse, saying “when, summoned by desire, they swoop into their nest like loving groom and bride” (Carson V, 83-84). All of this work is done ahead of Francesca’s first words to establish clear concepts in the mind of Dante the traveler and subsequently, the reader themselves: not every crime, and not every punishment, in the Inferno were created equally, and even in the midst of torment, the souls about to speak move with love that is plain to see.

            When Francesca begins to tell her story, she opens with some potent anaphora. “Love, that can quickly seize the gentle heart, took hold of him because of the fair body taken from me— how that was done still wounds me. Love, that releases no beloved from loving, took hold of me so strongly through his beauty that, as you see, it has not left me yet. Love led the two of us unto one death” (Mandelbaum V, 100-106). That is not a nuanced English translation of the lead-off nouns: Author-Dante used amor here with intention to create doubt around Francesca’s sin. Traveler-Dante is immediately struck by this declaration, admitting that “I bent my head and held it low until the poet asked of me: ‘What are you thinking?’” (Mandelbaum V 108-111). (As an aside, the dynamic of that moment is carried to more modern literature. When Scrooge is taken to see others’ celebrations, the ghost of Christmas Present is often forced to prod him to share his internal struggles aloud. The awkward silence of strong emotion, followed by a polite “ahem” from a host, transcends time and place.) When Dante does finally speak, he is filled with pity. “Alas, how many gentle thoughts, how deep a longing, had led them to the agonizing pass!” (Mandelbaum V, 112-114). The matter of right and wrong is never addressed outright, for how could it be? Justice has been meted Francesca and Paolo’s actions resulted in their damnation. Though Francesca claims love led to her death, the great decider declared those same acts to be lust deserving of punishment. That was the divine sentence, but the reader finds a subtle invitation to question the couples’ sentence themselves. Where everyone else in the hurricane is alone, these two have remained together. They do not deny that they committed their sins or bemoan their circumstance, but instead, Francesca frames them both as victims: they did not fall in love, love seized them. Marriage, an economic and political framework more than anything resembling an emotional relationship, happened to get in the way. In that time and place, this was certainly a crime and a sin, but what a common one! The reader, if they have ever been in love, must surely see some reflection of their own passion here. Compassion will follow inevitably close behind. Francesca continues on, relating how she and her lover read the story of Lancelot and the text swayed them into adultery. “Time and time again that reading lead our eyes to meet, and made our faces pale, and yet one point alone defeated us. When we had read how the desired smile was kissed by one who was so true a lover, this one, who never shall be parted from me, while all his body trembled, kissed my mouth” (Mandelbaum V, 130-136). Their story becomes even more relatable! Two people drawn together, tempted by erotically thrilling text, fall into one another’s arms. They were not seducers, like Cleopatra, nor did their love cause a decade of war like Paris and Helen. So the reader can surely pity them like Traveler-Dante, and perhaps even take the next step, questioning whether or not they deserve the same sentence as those others damned by their lust.

            Francesca’s appeal is full of details worth exploring, but Dante’s response as he bears witness to her and Paolo carries a great deal more weight. For all the power of Francesca’s story, it ends here. Traveler-Dante has a lot more to see and respond to, and this early encounter sets the tone. His immediate description of them to Virgil, “those two who go together there and seem so lightly carried by the wind” has an awestruck tone (Mandelbaum V, 74-75). Francesca and Paolo are visibly different from the rest of those ensnared by furtive lust, to paraphrase Carson, and Dante approaches them with a personal interest. He, too, has an extramarital love, and the reader can infer an air of hopeful curiosity here. If Francesca and Paolo could end up together in torment, why couldn’t the same happen for Dante and Beatrice? When he finally speaks after that awkward silence, his pity is filtered by his own perspective. “Alas, how many gentle thoughts, how deep a longing, had led them to the agonizing pass!” (Mandelbaum V, 112-114). Then, after Francesca recounts the literary impetus for their first encounter, Traveler-Dante responds even more severely. “And while one spirit said these words to me, the other wept, so that —because of pity— I fainted, as if I had met my death. And then I fell as a dead body falls” (Mandelbaum V, 139-142). After waiting for his charge to verbalize his dismay, Virgil must now deal with an unconscious Dante. If this weren’t a chance for him to roam the rest of the underworld, I’d imagine that he would be peeved. At first, Dante’s shock at the cause of their sin seems extreme. A romantic tale led to a romantic encounter, is that so bad? But Dante is preoccupied with his own future destination in the afterlife, and if the reading of a romance could lead to a rain-whipped eternity, what would the punishment be for not just having an affair, but actually writing such a romance? Would the tortures compound? That logical train of thought quickly becomes dizzying, and the fainting makes more sense.

Wait a moment, we’ve been fooled by the illusion. Author-Dante smirks from beyond the grave as we pity Traveler-Dante, empathizing with him like we do with Francesca. Snap out of it and remember: while Traveler-Dante pities Francesca, Author-Dante is the one who put her in Hell. The writer pulls off tricks along multiple axes of reality in this Canto. First, he injects his own avatar with enough naïveté and remorse to become immediately relatable. By his extreme response to Francesca’s tale, Dante demonstrates the shock and paranoia expected from a writer and lover and takes it to an almost embarrassing extreme to reinforce that Traveler-Dante (the only Dante that the reader should be observing) is affected by the cruelty of this world just like everyone else. No special treatment or absolution for the narrator.

            Then, by comparing himself to the dead not once, but twice in that final verse of the Canto, Author-Dante is hammering home that Traveler-Dante is just like the reader, a normal man who will one day die. Compare his protagonist with Aeneas or Odysseus, god-blessed heroes who achieve superhuman feats of strength and charisma, and this “hero” comes up short. Just as in the opening verses, Dante doesn’t tie his fictional self to fate or glory. Instead, he lets that character bumble about, the circumstances of his adventure getting the better of him. Melodramatic, certainly, but also approachable for readers looking for a point of reality to connect with in such a fantastic story. All of the relatability and humanization of character-Dante makes the real Dante recede even further.

            Finally, Dante’s use of Francesca and Paolo as the first punished souls eases the reader into the torments of the underworld. It sets the threshold of challenge low. The levels of violent and traumatic imagery will build, as will the complexity of the concepts and vision Dante has in store. In the canti ahead, there will be souls boiled in blood and shot down by centaurs, others disemboweled and buried in shit. Dante couldn’t have met those flatterers or violent murderers first; it would have scared off every reasonable reader. By opening with a love story instead, he lures them in and establishes a channel for empathy with the damned.

            It may seem cynical to describe an author of such a significant work as a hustler trying to hoodwink his readers, but the role of a great writer is to craft a remarkably story that pushes boundaries of discourse and imagination, to produce an immersive experience at the frontier of the reader’s mind. All of the choices of format that Dante made were for the sake of approachability. That aspect of the work was key, if he could ever hope to sell the reader on his vision of a healthier Florentine society and a better mode of individual life. By welcoming those demonstrations of fallibility and humility in his protagonist, Dante sets the tone for his unique form of epic poem. There is divine grandeur, but mundane humanity also, echoes of the glory of the Roman Empire, long-standing marble temples now inhabited by the denizens of the messily complex Middle Ages. This is a work he could have written in Latin but chose to write in Italian, so that contemporary readers would feel welcome in the world he’d built. By seizing every chance to impress that Traveler-Dante is the only iteration of Dante that matters, that he’s a journalist recording firsthand experience and not the legislator of this reality, Author-Dante achieved his rhetorical goals. For his ethical and moral proclamations to find purchase on the other side of the page, he needed people to believe those were observations of divine will, not the manifestation of his own opinions. The great magic trick certainly worked, at least in the sense of legacy. Dante secured his place in the canon next to Homer and his guide Virgil, their spiritual successor perpetuating the epic tradition yet updating it for the second millennium.