On the question of my favourite required reading this semester, little seems more appropriate than Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. On a whim, I – who have not taken a medieval history course since pre-Honours – discarded my summer-long hope of spending the year with Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird, drawn in by the opportunity to descend, circle by circle, into the depths of Hell.
Having previously been only faintly familiar with Dante’s Inferno, and unaware of it constituting only one of three parts of the Comedy, I have eagerly immersed myself in the opening cantos and the few known details of Dante’s life. In the Comedy, the reader is repeatedly pulled between the otherworldly and the familiar as Dante the pilgrim is ushered by Virgil, of the Aeneid, through the Vestibule of Hell, followed by Upper Hell, and, finally, inside the walls of the City of Dis into Lower Hell. The effect is remarkably immersive. As Lino Pertile observes, one almost “forget[s]” it is Dante the poet who has created the figures and scenes encountered by his pilgrim counterpart.
Even within this extraordinarily architected journey, however, Dante manages humour. I have particularly enjoyed telling friends about the Antinferno, where those rejected by both Hell and Heaven are relentlessly chased by hornets. It is an absurd image, and one I am eager to delve into in the coming weeks.
While so, the opening cantos couldn’t have been assigned at a more fitting time. Here, Dante attempts three times to climb a hill, and three times he is forced back by increasingly fearsome beasts: first a leopard, then a lion, and finally a she-wolf. This creates a kind of “stuttering” narrative, each attempt frustrating his ascent.
Dante saw his contemporary society as corrupted by an insatiable craving for wealth and power. The she-wolf, in particular, as a symbol of greed, seems an appropriate image with which to begin this final year in Edinburgh amid exasperation and disruption, which have made the prospect of a straightforward return hard to foresee.
Photo by Iñaki del Olmo on Unsplash
