By William Porter
If I had my way, about half of the sinners in Dante’s Inferno wouldn’t be there. Virgil would have a comfortable spot up in Paradiso, and Cacciaguida the pious crusader would be in for a long fall. All in all, I have very little in common with Dante when it comes to personal moral belief. Yet I return to the Commedia again and again, and I likely will for a long time to come. It speaks to me not because I am in tune with Dante’s vision, but rather, in a sense, because I am not.
It can be argued, as Teodolinda Barolini has, that Dante treats behaviors (including sexual ones) with greater complexity and depth, often with greater tolerance, than one would expect. He is often quite radical. Dante does in fact save sodomites in Purgatorio 26; thus Barolini asserts that, to Dante, “limited and moderated homosexual behavior is not sinful, just as limited and moderated heterosexual practice is not sinful” (185). Brunetto Latini’s presence, then, in a circle of Hell reserved for sodomites, remains rather a mystery.
One thing seems clear: we should not ignore that mystery. We shouldn’t, on the one hand, labor to preserve the integrity of the work as unimpeachably, transcendently great. Nor should we stop reading and teaching the Commedia because its fourteenth-century author was not prescient enough to anticipate identity categories used by many Americans 700 years later. We can’t expect all authors to be our contemporaries, nor should we want them to.
In my own experience, Dante’s ability to engage the moral imagination has been a source of deep reflection and considerable pleasure. Affronts to my moral outlook—including, I should note, the whole idea of Hell—only become sites of productive inquiry once I can transform instinctive opposition into efforts to understand perspectives far removed from my own, to encounter difference and think about what it means to do so.
To condemn Dante to the circle of unread authors (for him a punishment worse, at least, than Paolo and Francesca’s) would be to deprive students not only of the captivating aesthetic experience of the Commedia, but also of a powerful opportunity to reflect on what literature can and cannot do, an opportunity to examine the reader’s necessarily active role in reading. The forces that limit a thinker as perceptive as Dante are at work shaping all other perspectives, including our own; I can think of no better starting point for ethical inquiry, nor, in getting there, can I think of a better guide than Dante.
William Porter will begin the English Ph.D. program at Harvard this year, where he will focus on Early Modern literature.
Comments