For
every calendar year we can find reasons to commemorate—if not
celebrate—the anniversary of a notable event. Last year—2014—the most notable event that cried out for recognition—if not for
celebration--was the centenary of the start of the Great War (as it
was known at the time). This year, thankfully, we commemorate—and
celebrate—the notable anniversaries of the conclusion of two bloody
wars: the Second World War ended 70 years ago and the American Civil
War ceased 150 years ago.
This
year's notable anniversaries are not just about conclusions, but also
about beginnings. One hundred years ago Billie Holliday was born. And
150 years ago, Lewis Carroll brought forth Alice in Wonderland
onto the scene. But perhaps the
most notable anniversary this year is that of a birth that took place
750 years ago: a man irreverently described by the Devil in Bernard
Shaw's Man and Superman
as one of “the
greatest fools that ever lived,” because he described Hell
as a place of mud, frost, filth, fire, and venomous serpents: all torture. This ass, when he was not lying about me, was maundering about some woman whom he saw once in the street.
Dante,
of course.
Putting
Shaw's satiric remark aside, for Dante's 750th
anniversary I wish to take a brief look at Dante's own use of satire
in The
Inferno.
*
Why
is there such a thing as satire? The simple answer is that the world
is filled with falsity: folly is applauded as wisdom; vice is
accepted as virtue. And something must be done to unmask the
deceivers and reveal their true faces. The art of satire is in the
doing.
Satire
can be general or specific. In The
Inferno Dante
targets both the general mass of mankind (all of us nameless sinners)
and specific historical and contemporary individuals. His satirical
strategy is really a simple one: he makes the figurative literal.
Before citing examples from The
Inferno,
let me illustrate the maneuver by offering the following excerpt
from one of the greatest satires of all time-- Swift's A
Modest Proposal (which,
as you know, is based on the idea that the best way to alleviate the
economic distress in Ireland is to have the children of the poor
become food for the rich):
I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children.
“Devoured”
is the key word here, as Swift morphs a figurative observation about
economic distress (the landlords have devoured the poor) into a
literal (and repulsive) action.
In
The Inferno
the controlling conceit (both literary and theological) is that the
sinners suffer punishments that are the literal equivalents of the
sufferings they endure in real life. For example, in Canto VII the
hoarders and the wasters, whose souls in life were obsessed by
(figuratively burdened by) material things, are condemned to smashing
great weights (literal material things) against each other:
I saw a nation of lost souls,
far more than were above: they strained their chests
against enormous weights, and with mad howls
rolled them at one another. Then in haste
they rolled them back, one party shouting out:
"Why do you hoard?" and the other: "Why do you waste?"
So back around that ring they puff and blow,
each faction to its course, until they reach
opposite sides, and screaming as they go
the madmen turn and start their weights again
to crash against the maniacs.*(Translation by John Ciardi)
This
is general satire—against the undifferentiated mass of material
sinners. The hoarders and the wasters, though seemingly opposites,
are just different faces of the same coin. And (segueing from
figurative to literal) coins—money, riches—are what they've given
their souls over to. In life they are suffering from the figurative
burden of their material lust. In Hell they will suffer the literal
burden.
*
Much
deeper in the bowels of Hell—in the Ninth Circle (the
lowest)--Dante (the character) comes upon sinners frozen in ice, with
just part of their faces free. They are in ice because they committed
murder calculatedly, cold-bloodedly. (Those who killed in the
hot-blooded heat of passion are in the Seventh Circle.) There, Dante comes
upon Friar Alberigo, who points out Ser Branca d'Oria to him. Their
presence in Hell astonishes Dante. He asks Alberigo, "What!
Are you dead already?" and complains to the friar about the
latter:
"I think you are trying to take me in," I said,
"Ser Branca d'Oria is a living man;
he eats, he drinks, he fills his clothes and his bed."
This
is a brilliant example of Dante's specific satire. The souls of two
living men are in Hell before their deaths. And in real life, the
eating, drinking, clothes-wearing bodies are inhabited by demons:
I will tell you this [Alberigo explains to Dante]: when a soul betrays as I did,
it falls from flesh, and a demon takes its place,
ruling the body till its time is spent.
The ruined soul rains down into this cistern.
So, I believe, there is still evident
in the world above, all that is fair and mortal
of this black shade [Branca d'Doria] who winters here behind me.(Canto XXXIII)
Here again, Dante uses the figurative/literal transfer. To demonstrate that these
living men are figurative demons, he replaces their souls with
literal demons.
As
we said above, satire—that purposeful art—aims to strip away the
false mask of virtue and expose the true face of vice hidden behind
it. Dante has gotten behind the mask, gone beyond the face, and
exposed the soul.
***
*In
an article in the Guardian,
Alex
Preston sums up his visit with one of the premier collectors of Nazi
artifacts and memorabilia as follows:
I had met a man wrestling with a hobby that had become an obsession and was now a millstone. Collecting was like a disease for him, the prospect of completion tantalisingly near but always just out of reach. If he was mad, it wasn’t the madness of the fulminating antisemite, rather the mania of the collector.
