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In title opinions coming to you from the underworld of KZSU on the Stanford campus.
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Speaking of underworlds, today's show marks the first installment of a miniseries devoted
to the great wafer of the nether regions.
I mean our medieval comrade Dante, author of the divine comedy.
[ Speaking of world ]
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At a time when English departments are struggling to get students into courses on Shakespeare,
the romantics, and the Victorian novel,
Dante continues to max out.
He may be the only dead white male in the literary canon who stalk keeps going up in our post-Christian age.
Go figure.
I've been teaching the divine comedy for decades,
and many of the poems characters have become like family members to me by now.
So I thought I would offer the brigade a handful of scattered episodes
about the most fascinating, original, and complex sinners in Dante's Inferno.
One thing you can say about hell is that its denizens are more interesting and seductive,
and certainly more perverse than the paragons of moral virtue in Dante's other
tentacles.
So stay tuned, our first episode on Francesca de D'Imini,
who else?
Coming right up.
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What makes the characters in Dante's Inferno so compelling are above all their monologues.
Almost all of the major monologues contain bruises of one sort or another,
bruises by which the sinners offer misleading, manipulative, or meritricious accounts
of the motives and actions that landed them in hell.
Since they know that Dante the journeyman will eventually return to the world
and report what he has seen and heard in the underworld,
and since their worldly reputation still matters a great deal to them,
these sinners find themselves in the incongruous position of trying to curate
their self-serving narratives from within a framework of damnation.
In other words, their confessions are permeated by an infernal irony,
by which I mean an insidious discrepancy between what the sinners say
and what they mean between what they show and what they tell,
between what they hide and what they reveal.
This type of infernal irony is what distinguishes the Inferno's monologues
from the soliloquies in Shakespeare's major plays.
In one case, we have the presence of an interlocutor,
namely Dante's waferrer.
The presence of an interlocutor gives the sinners an incentive to be duplicitous
and even at times deceitful.
In the other case, Shakespeare's characters speak aloud their inner thoughts
to themselves without an interlocutor,
and in so doing they coerce the audience into an uneasy complicity with them,
by laying bare the secret intentions, doubts, guilt, or motivations
that they conceal from other characters in the play.
It's the difference between opaque and transparent self-revolations.
However, villainous or treacherous, they may otherwise be,
we can trust Shakespeare's characters when they invite us into the inner sanctum of their psyches.
For example, as King Claudius does in Hamlet, I quote,
"Oh, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven.
It hath the primal eldest curse upon it, a brother's murder.
Pray, can I not, though inclination be as sharp as will?
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent,
and like a man to double business-bound,
I stand in pause where I shall first begin and both neglect."
It goes on like in that vein, and this is what you could call an honest confession.
We find the same kind of honest divergence in King Lear,
when Edmond uses aloud about his perfidious machinations,
"Wherefore should I stand in the plague of custom and permit the curiosity of nations to deprive me,
for that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines, lag of a brother,
or when McBeth confesses, I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent,
but only vaulting ambition which overemates itself and falls on the other."
Or when his wife, Lady McBeth prays,
"Make thick my blood, stop up the access and passage to remorse.
Feel no guilt that no compunctuous visitations of nature,
shake my fell purpose nor keep peace between the effect and it."
The opaque nature of the confessions in Dante's Inferno by contrast
obliges us to bring a hermeneutics of suspicion
that would rest the truth from the web of infernal irony that informs their speech acts.
One could say that the reader of Inferno must become like a psychoanalyst dealing with an
"anali-zand" whose discourse shows more than it tells, or reveals more than it declares.
As the American psychologist Roy Schaffer puts it in an essay of his called "Narration in the
Psychoanalytic Dialogue," if we are forever telling stories about ourselves
and others and to ourselves and others, it must be added that people do more than tell.
Like authors, they also show.
And there is no hard and fast line between telling and showing,
either in literary narrative or psychoanalysis.
The competent psychoanalyst deals with telling as a way of showing and with showing as a way of telling.
I'll take this as my cue to show how the show and tell dynamic permeates one of the most famous
speeches in Dante's poem.
I'm in the speech of Francesca Deremini and Inferno 5.
We meet her in the circle of lust, where she and her lover are buffeted by the infernal world-wind of passion
that sweeps up the lustful in this region of hell and deprives them of any rest or peace.
That world-wind includes the likes of Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Diodo, Tristan,
the soul, Paris, and other great heroes and heroines of love in the literary tradition.
Dante notices a couple of shades who, as his text says, seem so lightly carried by the wind and desires to speak to them.
"O battered souls," Dante calls out, "if one does not forbid, please speak to us."
So did they emerge from the flock where Diodo is, coming to us through the cruel air so compelling, was my deep felt cry.
And here in Francesca's voice, "O gracious and benign living creature who through the black air go visiting us who stained the world,
blood red, if the king of the universe were friendly, we would pray to him for your peace since you have pity on our twisted pain."
Of whatever it pleases you to hear and to speak, we will listen and speak to you while the wind is quiet for us now.
The city where I was born sits besides the shore where the pole descends to have peace with its followers.
Now for centuries readers have been swept up by Francesca's charm and blandishments,
much the way that she and her lover palore swept up in the whirlwind that buffets the souls and Dante's circle of lust.
Now I say "pallow," but in fact the lover alongside Francesca during their encounter with Dante's wafer remains unnamed and speechless.
We know from strong circumstantial evidence that he is "pallow" Malatesta.
It's not just a character, he was a real individual.
And he was the brother of Francesca's husband, Jean-Chot-Dumalatesta.
Francesca and Paolo in life fell in love with one another, and in one of the great areas of the divine comedy, Francesca tells Dante how love sees hold of the two of them back on earth.
I'll read those three tersets first in Italian.
I'll read the story of Francesca, and I'll read the story of Francesca, and I'll read the story of Francesca.
I'll read the story of Francesca and I'll read the story of Francesca, and I'll read the story of Francesca.
I'll read the story of Francesca and I'll read the story of Francesca.
Love which is swiftly kindled in the noble heart sees this one for the lovely person that was taken from me and the manor still injures me.
Love which pardons no one loved from loving and return sees me for his beauty so strongly that as you see it still does not abandon me.
Love led us to one death.
Kaina awaits him who extinguished our life.
Now, given the Annafara and Asinuses on which the poetry takes wings here, it seems petty to point out that Francesca displaces the blame for her
affair with Paolo onto a personification, namely the God of Love, whom a gentle heart cannot help but obey.
That affair got them both murdered by Francesca's husband who was destined to end up in Kaina, which is at the very bottom of hell, where the murderers of family members are punished.
When Dante and one of his many Barbara Walters moments inquires how and when the two lovers first succumb to their dubious desires, Francesca responds as follows.
And she to me there is no greater pain than to remember the happy time in wretchedness and this your teacher knows.
But if you have so much desire to know the first root of our love, I will do as one who weeps and speaks.
We were reading one day for pleasure of Lancelot, how love beset him.
We were alone and without any suspicion.
Many times that reading drove our eyes together and turned our faces pale, but one point alone was the one that overpowered us.
When we read that the year and four smile was kissed by so great a lover, he who will never be separated from me kissed my mouth all trembling.
Galleo Tto was the book and he who wrote it that day we read there no further.
Then Dante concludes in fair enough five saying while one spirit said this, the other was weeping so that for pity I fainted as if I were dying and I fell as a dead body falls.
So let's review Francesca says that she and Paolo were reading one day for pleasure.
That phrase, pere de lette, already raises flags in a medieval context.
We're reading for moral edification was encouraged, but pleasure reading was viewed with suspicion.
She and Paolo were reading the romance of Lancelot. They were alone, she says, and without suspicion.
That's to say they didn't suspect what was about to happen.
This despite the fact that the story made them blush at many turns.
We know that Lancelot's adulterous affair with Queen Guinevere brought about the downfall of King Arthur's court.
Yet Francesca and Paolo did not read that far into the book that day, a case of Lectio interu, so what kind of punctuality is Francesca referring to when she declares one point alone is the one that overpowered us.
How can a point overpower what is a point in fact?
All we can say for sure is that the point in question is coincidental, namely that literature and reality coincided when Paolo kissed Francesca at the moment or point when they read that Lancelot kissed Winnevere.
Galleo Toh was the book and he who wrote it that day, we read there no further. Who was Galleo Toh?
He was Galahot, the character in the romance of Lancelot, who is the go-between who in fact facilitated the affair between Lancelot and Guinevere.
Here it's the romance itself that does the go-betweening.
There's a long one could say about the mediating role literature plays when it comes to providing models of emulation for romantic courtship and behavior.
In our day, that role has been taken over mostly by movies, television shows, music videos and pornography.
Yet I'll leave aside that consideration here and simply point out that Francesca was a great consumer of romantic literature.
Not only of the Arthurian romances, but of the love poetry of her own age.
She does not tell us this, but she shows it.
She shows, for example, that she had read Dante's predecessor, Guido Guineet Cedli, a famous Tuscan poet who made the gentle heart, the cornerstone of his theory of love.
Francesca has also read the other poets of the still-noveous school of poetry associated with Guineet Cedli, including Dante himself in the earlier part of his career when he was still a lyric poet.
Francesca shows furthermore that she had read Dante's poems about Beatrice and his Vitanova, as well as the poetry of Dante's friend Guido Cavalcante, whose lyrics connect love to death
and occasionally pun on the word Amor by conjoining the indefinite article Una with the noun Morte, "um Amorte".
Just as Francesca does, when she declares love led us to one death, Amor Cecondu Céadun Amorte.
Furthermore, she refers to Dante's teacher, "to a d'otore", showing that she's also read Virgil, most likely book for the Aniad, which tells the story of the love between Diodo and Anias.
Indeed, there's every reason to believe that Francesca had read the stories of all the famous love heroines, whom Dante places alongside her in that circle of lust.
Diodo, Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, Gisolde, among others. None of them had a happy end any more than Guinevere did.
Francesca's literacy raises a question. What did she really desire when she plunged into her affair with paul?
The question is pertinent because according to Dante's theology, it's a person's desire or inner will that moves them to sin.
In Fairnofive, reminds us of this theology when it deploys a simile to describe how paulo and Francesca came toward Dante, "like doves called by their desire, with wings raised and steady come to their sweetness through the air, born by their will."
Francesca's speech leads us to believe, let's say it tells us that she wanted what all lovers want when they love, namely unending union with the beloved.
I refer here to the authority of Aristophanes in Plato's symposium, where he imagines a festus, querying two lovers who are lying together in a bed.
Yes, is this your heart's desire then for the two of you to become as near as can be and never to separate night and day?
Because if that's your desire, I'd like to weld you together so that the two of you are made into one.
Then the two of you would share one life and you would be one and not two in Hades having died a single death.
Aristophanes concludes, I quote, "no one who received such an offer would turn it down."
There's every indication that Dante's pair, paulo and Francesca, would not or did not think twice before accepting such an offer.
If that much is true, one could say that the author of the divine comedy, Grant's Francesca, her ultimate jouisauce, namely, "oneness in Hades through a single death" and "eternal togetherness with," I quote, "he who will never be separated from me."
Yet, Francesca's deepest desire and motivating will were fully realized in her solipsistic union with paulo in the afterlife.
She would not be likely to respond to Dante's call to engage with him.
A couple's bliss, after all, is complete and non-relational.
Why then would Francesca respond so wincely to the solicitation?
Oh gracious and benign creature who, through the black air, go visiting us, who stained the world, blood, red, if the king of the universe were friendly, we would pray to him for your peace and so forth.
And why would she show herself so eager to tell Dante her story? Clearly, union with paulo is not the beall and end all of her desire.
There is something in her will that outruns it.
It's important to note here that before she comes forth from the world-wind to speak to him, Francesca knows exactly who Dante is, namely one of the best love poets of the Florentine school.
In her full-throated idea, she practically quotes his Vitanova back to him.
She knows furthermore that Virgil is leading him through hell.
So there's every reason to believe that Francesca understands that this encounter with Dante represents her one opportunity to inscribe herself into literary history and join as an equal, the illustrious heroines of the love stories she was schooled in.
The least we can say is that she makes the best of that opportunity.
In fact, her flawless performance in Inferno 5, Catapults her to the very front of the line of the great love martyrs named in that contour.
I doubt that anyone has ever, before or since, aged an audition more decisively than Francesca does when she meets Dante in Inferno 5.
It's for a reason that I speak of Francesca as a person with her own autonomous agency rather than merely a literary character created by Dante.
Before they are realized in the work of art, characters are born in the author's mind with independent wills of their own.
Pidandello says as much in his preface to six characters in search of an author.
We have no idea what went on in Dante's mind at the time.
Yet Francesca comes to life in Inferno 5 as a character with an over-weaning will to self-authorship that is to say with a will to establish herself as a modern literary heroine on a par with those of antiquity and the Arthurian romances.
This is no easy feat for someone who is neither a queen nor a princess but a minor aristocrat from provincial Riemini.
What Francesca has going for her is not her pedigree but her lyrical intensity.
The gentle heart, after all, marks the nobility of poetic sensibility, not a nobility of blood.
In that respect, she's as noble as they come. Nothing can compete with the condensed poetic e'lawn of her self-noration.
We need only compare Daito's long and overdone lements and loves little equation book four of the Ani'id to Francesca's compact, diamantine speech in Inferno 5.
It's the difference between Edward Everett's two-hour long or ration at Gettysburg and Abraham Lincoln's two-minute tour de force on the same occasion.
The only way to fully appreciate what gets accomplished in Inferno 5 is by taking a step back into Inferno 4.
In Inferno 4, we enter Limbo, the first circle of hell where unbaptized infants and virtuous pagans live out their after-lives in desire without hope as Dante puts it.
Something highly unusual takes place in that canto.
As they approach the noble castle of the illustrious pagans, Virgil points out to Dante a group of poets who welcome Virgil back into their coterie.
Those poets are Homer, Avid, Horus, and Lucan.
Virgil steps away from Dante to rejoin this beautiful school, Labilà Scola.
After exchanging some words with Virgil, the poets turn toward Dante and smile.
Then they do him, I quote, "an even greater honor for they made me one of their band so that I was sixth among such wisdom."
Now think of this, the image of Dante as the sixth member of such a tribe doesn't strike us as preposterous today, since he went on to make himself worthy of that association.
Yet when he composed that early canto, he had not yet authored the divine comedy, he was far from being the great epic poet that he would go on to become.
He was just a Florentine rhinester known in select circles for some fine love lyrics, some of which were almost as good as those of his friend Guido Cavalcante.
Just as Francesca needs Dante to provide her with a platform to realize her ambitions as a literary character, so too, Dante needs Francesca to make good on his boast in Inferno 4.
With all this pressure bearing down on her, she comes through for him brilliantly.
In one and the same speech in Inferno 5, Francesca claims her place among the likes of Dido, Cleopatra and Helen of Troy, while Dante, thanks to that speech, justifies his inclusion among the likes of Homer, Virgil and Abbot.
I have to assume that the figure of her character Francesca had already been born in Dante's mind before his audacious gambit in Inferno 4.
And since we are in the realm of speculation here, I have to believe that it was Francesca's independent will to self-realization, her confidence in her own agency, and her faith in her own self-authorship, that sent Dante on his way to authoring the poem.
That would place him among the greats.
More in 30 seconds.
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I have claimed that the monologues in Inferno call for a hermeneutics of suspicion that takes into account the infernal irony that both frames and pervades their speech acts.
What makes Francesca's monologues so fascinating and also so unusual is that despite its infernal irony, it remains fiercely resistant to demystification.
Over decades of teaching the divine comedy, I've worn my students against falling under the spell of Francesca's magnetic charm.
I've pointed out how she displaces the blame for her actions.
I have harped on how her imitation of her literary models belies the spontaneity of her passions for Paolo.
I've shown in textual detail how she is Madame Beauvare
a v'on la lette. Yet all attempts to deconstruct Francesca's thoroughly mediated persona almost invariably prove feckless.
Why?
Why is it nearly impossible to break the spell she casts even on 21st century students?
I believe it's because those students are responding to an ethos or character trait that they perceive in Francesca.
An ethos or character trait they admire and morally approve of, namely her resolute affirmation of the law of self-determination.
At first glance it seems altogether paradoxical that this mimetic and mediated character should appear to them as a champion of personal autonomy and authenticity.
And yet I've come to the conclusion that the students are in fact right.
They are responding to something that can't be taken away from Francesca by the commentaries, namely her existential authenticity.
She is who she is. Her romantic mysticism, her seductive charms and herself excalpatience are all part of her unapologetic will to own her sentiments, to will her fate, to embrace her damnation, and to accept without regret or compunction the consequences of her actions.
Whatever a hermeneutics of suspicion might reveal about Francesca, it does not change the fact that she chooses herself.
We see that choice at work in her free adoption of her literary models.
We don't hold it against aspiring writers that they admire and emulate literary predecessors.
Whether Francesca's spires to romantic idealism or to literary heroism is not all that important, what is important is how, in her assertion of sovereignty over her own desires and aspirations, she reveals a quintessential modern subjectivity.
For a medieval woman to assert her subjectivity against the laws, norms, and institutions of a society that smothered female autonomy amounts to an act of insurrection.
Francesca pays the ultimate price for that insurrection, yet like Camus Cissifus at the top of the mountain before the boulder rolls back down.
She appears to us in the Inferno Five as the master of her fate.
It's this assertion of agency that defines her as a proto-existentialist of sorts.
The irony here is that she, in fact, stands up to the rigors of a sartrean ethic of self-responsibility.
Jean-Paul Satt wrote, I quote, "The existentialist will never regard a grand passion as a destructive torrent upon which a man is swept into certain actions as by fate, and which therefore is an excuse for them."
With all her talk about the book, the irresistible power of the God of love and the point that overpowered us, Francesca would seem to stand under indictment by that statement.
And yet, if her true ambition is to make it into the divine comedy, where her story will live as long as humanity endures, then there is no doubt that Francesca aligns herself with Satt.
And he asserts that the existentialist, quote, "things that man is responsible for his passion."
She assumes that responsibility and through that unconditional commitment realizes her ambition to become the superstar of a poem that had yet to come into existence.
An aphorism of Nietzsche's reads, "My formula for happiness, a yes, a no, a straight line, a goal."
We find that formula at work in Francesca's speech, and for all her tears, we have to conclude that in the end, she is happy.
I'm Robert Harrison for entitled opinions. Thanks for listening.
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I hear words the face that ended the world of his new dreams of that pretty girl, life was such a bore.
So I started war in the last day, when I started again.
Now time has come, every power wants it to our will and the sun, and the heart stays.
All the broken, alive, rich through.
It's a home truth, everything is through.
All because of you.
I need it something new, but now it's true, but it could be you.
What left was stories, millions of stories, I need something new.
I thought it was you.
I couldn't stand the way the days back into one.
I started war in the last day, when I started war in the last day.
I love you.
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