Rachel Jacoff

Life of Dante

The life of Dante is such a tangle of public and private passions and ordeals experienced over the fifty-six years he lived that it has always been a source of inexhaustible fascination. It is as if everything about his life - its innumerable defeats and its occasional and yet enduring triumphs - belongs to the romantic and alluring realm of legend: a love at first sight that was to last his whole life and inspire lofty poetry; the long, cruel exile from his native Florence because of the civil war ravaging the city; the poem he wrote, the Divina Commedia , made of his public and private memories; the turning of himself into an archetypal literary character, such as Ulysses, Faust, or any of those medieval knights errant, journeying over the tortuous paths of a spiritual quest, wrestling with dark powers, and, finally, seeing God face to face. Many are the reasons why generations of readers have found the story of Dantes life compelling. His relentless self-invention as an unbending prophet of justice and a mythical quester for the divine is certainly one important reason. The fact that in his graphic figurations of the beyond (rare glimpses of which were available in only a few other legendary mythmakers - Homer, Plato, and Virgil) he was an unparalleled poet also greatly heightens our interest in him. Yet none of these reasons truly accounts for what must be called - given the extraordinary number of biographies Dante has elicited over the centuries - the literary phenomenon of “The Life of Dante.”

Introduction to Inferno

A dark and menacing forest dominates the Comedy s opening scene: In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself in a dark wood, for the straight way was lost. The character who says “I” does not tell us how he got there. He himself does not seem to know; indeed he only suddenly becomes aware of the alien, nightmarish reality that surrounds him. But who is this character? He is both the protagonist of the story and its narrator, a character who has survived his adventure and is now in the process of writing it down: a character-poet. Unlike Homer and Virgil who always say “he,” never “I,” and unlike Ulysses and Aeneas who went to Hell but did not write the stories of their own journeys, the protagonist and the narrator of the Comedy are one and the same. They are one but they undertake separate journeys within the poem: the journey of the character from the dark forest to the Empyrean heaven, where God dwells with all the blessed; and the journey of the narrator through the one-hundred cantos of the poem, from canto 1 of the Inferno to canto 33 of the Paradiso . The first journey lasts one week; the second, to the best of our knowledge, took at least a dozen years (circa 1307-20). In fact, we are given to understand along the way that, whereas the experience of the journey was willed and facilitated by Divine Providence, the poem, the work of the narrator, is in a sense a far more difficult undertaking, a task that costs him “hunger, cold and vigils” ( Purgatorio 29, 37-38): the poets daunting task is to find words adequate to his experience, “so that the word may not be different from the fact” ( Inf . 32, 12).

Allegory and autobiography

Among the last words spoken by Jesus in the Gospel of John are those directed to Peter, predicting the disciples martyrdom: Verily, verily, I say unto you that when you were young you girt yourself and walked wherever you wished; but when you are old you will stretch out your hands and another shall gird you and lead you where you would not go. (John 21:18) In his commentary, St. Augustine explains that these verses mark the passage in Peters life from youthful self-reliance to humility, from the sin of presumption to confession and contrition. In middle age (for Peter is neither young nor old), he is called upon to demonstrate his love by caring for the Lords sheep and by being willing to accept crucifixion. The conversion from presumption to humility is also the theme of Dantes descent into Hell, which likewise takes place in middle age: “nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.” The landscape of the prologue scene borrows several details from book 7 of Augustines Confessions , where philosophical presumption is distinguished from confession: “it is one thing, from a wooded mountain top, to see the land of peace and quite another to reach it, when ones way is beset by the lion and the dragon.” It is likely that casting off the rope girdle halfway through the Inferno signifies a surrender of self-reliance analogous to Peters, while the rush with which the pilgrim is girt at the beginning of the Purgatorio is a traditional emblem of humility (“umile pianta”.