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Prompt for October 28

Cari Dantisti:

Attached, a prompt for next Wednesday. Also, below, an article from today's Washington Post about studying literature in Zoomtime. It made me think of us. washingtonpost.com/magazine/2020/10/20/meaning-college-literature-class-during- pandemic-always/?arc404=true

I look forward to being with you next week.

Peter

PS Some of you have Italian, if you would be willing to read for us just let me know.

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INFERNO 16b-23a (Note the slight change in reading assignment)

Yale Alumni College Prompt

For October 28, 2020

Our reading for today takes us onto the back of the monster Geryon and down into Malbolge, the INFERNO’s citadel (or, rather, sinkhole) of fraud. And what a rogue’s gallery we meet in that downward sloping pit! There are panders and seducers (men “coining” women), flatterers (liars covered in merda), simonists (the upside down popes trading in holy office), sooth-sayers (false prophets), barrators (payola perpetrators), and hypocrites (in an abundance of clergy). Quite a crowd.

The sinners in these cantos are those who abused intelligence and wit (ingegno); who betrayed the trust of those who relied on them to tell the truth, to uphold a civic or ecclesial calling. Although reproved once for showing pity before the contortions of the soothsayers (20. 25-30), the Pilgrim is either self-contained in these precincts or on the attack (in cantos 19 and 23b)

As we move further down, the demonic guardians become increasingly fierce and cruel, with whips and pitchforks aplenty. (It is as if the Poet were becoming more savage in his depiction of eternal punishment in proportion to the elevation of the human faculty perverted by the damned.) Unlike the somewhat elevated figures from the classical world we have seen thus far in the outskirts of hell or within the city of Dis –Charon, Minos, Plutus, the Centaurs –they are the devils familiar to all of us from medieval art or even New Yorker cartoons. And speaking of cartoons, the poet is quite obviously having fun amid the Malbolge misery. There is a good deal of perverse, low humor in these cantos, and it is nowhere more hilarious than in the gang of demon clowns unsuccessfully trying to skewer the barrators in the pitch of cantos 21-22. (I love their ratpack nicknames and inept hijinks, their pointless activity and laughable ineptitude.) Question: What is the place of humor in the portrayal of evil?

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And while I am posing questions, here are a few to orient our discussion. What do you make of the narrator’s stance on the brink of the appearance of Geryon, that is, where he swears to the reader “per le note/di questa comedìa” (16. 128-129) that he “actually” saw the blatant figment of imagination rising up from the depths? This is the first time the name of the poem is given; it seems like there is a lot at stake. Recall that Pier della Vigna swears by the roots of his persona-tree that he never broke faith with his lord (13. 73-75). How is this earlier swearing on oneself different from Dante’s, or is it? Which is a way of asking about the purported truth status of the poem we’re reading. Do we “believe” what Dante says he saw? What about the poem do we take as true?

In INFERNO 19, Dante Poet opens the scene with all kinds of prophetic flourishes and autobiographical confessions, but then our attention moves to Dante Pilgrim -- who suddenly seems to have become The Poet Dante! No more scaredy cat! He speaks suddenly as one who has authority, willing to take on the papacy of his day (layperson nobody though he be) with utter conviction and an arsenal of Scripture. Where does he get such authority or, rather, how does he construct it?

Even if not front and center in the churchy context of INFERNO 19, Virgil has a role to play. What is it? Likewise, what do you make of what happens in INF 23, when once again Virgil picks up Dante in his arms (as in INF 19) and with the Pilgrim in tow hightails away from the pursuing demons (23. 37-51)? More specifically, what do you make of the epic simile that likens this dramatic rescue to a maternal mission (vv. 37- 42)? Finally, is there a dry eye in the house when we are told that the ancient Roman Virgil carried Dante “along on his breast like his son, not his companion” (“sovra ‘l suo petto/ come figlio, non come compagno”)? Keep track of the ebb and flow of their relationship as master and guide become parent and child, as the poem for all its gravity becomes a buddy road trip, an “excellent adventure.” .

You will have your own questions and comments to bring to the table on Wednesday evening, but perhaps some of mine will spur your thoughts.