WCU - Spring 2006 Goodbye to Dante's Imaginary World

Dante is a little like Ovid, reworking the stuff of ancient Greek mythology for his own literary purposes.
He’s a little like Tolkien, creating an entire “secondary” world where every action is infused with significance and meaning.
He’s surprisingly not unlike Huxley or Beckett, two major authors we’ll study soon, in that he has a powerful sense of our precarious humanity and the dangers of dehumanization. In Huxley, it’s the social order that dehumanizes us; in Beckett it’s the suspected emptiness of the cosmos. Dante understands that people can become dehumanized, but his vision shows how we do that to ourselves.

Most of all, I think of Dante as a mythic writer, although the Divine Comedy is obviously a literary rather than a sacred text. But like the mythic tale, Dante’s work creates an entire cosmic order. Dante doesn’t invent this order, but he brings it to life in a vivid way. No doubt, he borrows heavily what he can from classical sources, but he extends the material he borrows in new ways, creating new meaning, a new moral code. For Dante imagination is (paradoxically) a valid source of truth—the visions we imagine are as true to our inner, abstract, invisible reality as our vision of the outward we reality we think of as “reality.” Imagination is the key to this inward truth. It is how we can save ourselves from an encroaching despair over what might seem like cosmic injustice and meaninglessness.

At the root of Dante’s Inferno is a profound sense of individuality, free will, and personal responsibility.

In a letter to his patron, Can Grande della Scala, Dante wrote: “The subject of the whole work, taken according to the letter alone, is simply a consideration of the state of souls after death; for from and around this the action of the whole work turns. But if the work is considered according to its allegorical meaning, the subject is man, liable to the reward or punishment of Justice, according as through the freedom of the will he is deserving or undeserving.” Not a bad summary. Cliff Notes should take notice.

Just think of the countless characters who populate the Inferno, biblical, classical and contemporary (for Dante, anyway)—human and partly human—they are all reflections of us in one way or another. Dante sees all of humanity in the Divine Comedy (the Inferno is only one third of the full work). The Inferno overflows with Dante’s unique perceptiveness, his compassion and deep understanding of the various ways we are flawed, and his profound moral righteousness at the various ways we are not only flawed but disastrously flawed. Written in the language of the people, about the people and for the people, this was a great work for the ages even as it was leaving Dante’s pen, embodying and surpassing in form and content every cultural and literary tradition that precedes it. To gain a detailed appreciation of this work, and those traditions, you’d have to work your way slowly and spend the better part of an entire semester. But there you have it. At the very least, you have peeked through the gate.

Questions? Contact me.

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