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Have taken the spoilers warning on board and denied myself a reading of this gorgeous thread because I finished Tehanu, having found each successive Earthsea book more beguiling than the last, and have yet to track down The Other Wind, which I presume comes next. Am I going to see Therru go to live with “her people”? At the moment I'm feasting on The Left Hand of Darkness so will return to Le Guin's Hell later, perhaps.
However, read lots of Dante as a boy, studying Italian. I had the Doré engravings in the first text I read and, wonderful as they are, I suspect they fixed my take on the imagery prematurely.
It’s a very concrete imaginary cosmogomy where the denizens of Hell are punished according to Dantean Divine Justice, the contrappasso idea matching the punishment suffered to the nature of the sinner’s faults, such as Paolo and Francesca, adulterous lovers in life led astray by literary fantasy (very Emma Bovary), now buffeted by an infernal, everlasting storm. As the sodomites walk in a trench of burning sand, gorgeous boys promenade just out of reach (or did my memory invent that detail?)
I like the idea that he populated Hell with the Florentines whom he blamed for his exile, the political enemies like Farinata and Dario Argenti. I’m a sucker for wish fuilfilment fairy tales and would love to rewrite it with some modern inhabitants like Gary Rhodes, being kebabbed by a salivating and demonic Nigella, or George Bush being devoured from the inside by pretzels with little rodent teeth. innercircle would be pursued relentlessly by a Greenlander with a megaphone… hehehe.
I think Judas is portrayed as leading the field in the anti-Christian traitor stakes, masticated eternally by one of Satan’s three great mouths, and that has always pissed me off. Throughout Christian literature there’s never a murmur of pity for the poor sod who was only doing his job in the egomaniacal narrative Jesus scripted. No Judas, no Resurrection after all – just two doddering old Palestinians reminiscing about their nights out with the lads in Jerusalem, as they fished and farmed by the Galilee and learned to crochet. The device of having Lucifer chomping perpetually on sinners does deny him any good lines too, which was a craven literary conceit IMHO. I like the image of the giant satanic bottom dangling out of a plughole at the very bottom of the underworld though.
He had a fair number of Popes in there which was brave for the early fourteenth century: Celestine, who abdicated and thus is sent to the burny fire (if I remember aright), and Boniface, not that unusual for your standard mediaeval Pope in confusing his spiritual pontificate with imperialist conquest and temporal power.
The story of Count Ugolino is probably my favourite, the most gruesome and most pitiable: gaoled by an Archbishop, along with his two young sons, and denied food, he cannibalises his sons to survive. In Hell he snacks on the Archbishop’s high protein, ever-regenerating head. Preferable to gnawing on his starved children, I’d have thought.
Given that there are so many JK Rowlingesque creatures of classical mythology in his Hell (centaurs, minotaur), even the River Styx for Charon to row him over on the way in, I also have a gripe about his abuse of Virgil. Born in pre-Christian times, Virgil can only go irredeemably to Hell, which sucks, frankly. Talk about Divine Justice – where’s the justice there? Dante gives Virgil a great deal of reverence for his mastery of the poetic muse but, at the end of the day, the author of The Aeneid must stand back and let a vapid non-entity and Barbie doll like Beatrice lead D.A. through Purgatory and into Paradise. All because he caught a glimpse of her on the Ponte Vecchio one day on her way back from church and she inflamed his ardour. Gah!
I would love to thrill you with some description of the glories of the prose but since I was in first year when I read it, dictionary ever to hand, I never really got much sense of the poetry beyond the first few beautiful stanze.
It is fairly clearly signposted that he’s going to Hell, tra la perduta gente, but he still trots merrily off into the dark wood. Why? It’s the Renaissance version of teen-splatter-horror when they always go down into the cellar, despite the storm outside and it’s Hallowe’en and they’re both attractive young things who’ve had sex recently. Arse…
Must be a good book though, The Inferno, for so much to have stuck in my senescent brain after nearly thirty years. I’ll go dig out Matt Groenig’s Life is Hell now for my next discourse… |
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