[MUSIC]
This is KZSU Stanford.
I'm Robert Harris and for entitled opinions coming to you with the third
episode of our mini series on Dante's characters.
In the previous episode, I spoke about Dante's Ulysses as a character who
was ahead of his time.
It suggested that in Inferno 26, the divine comedy takes a
proleptic leap out of its own time into the looming future of
Renaissance humanism, of early modern trans-oceanic exploration,
the age of scientific discovery and much else besides.
This vortex of anachronism carries over into the next
Kanto in some remarkable ways. Here in Inferno 27, we meet the
shade of Guido de Montefelthro, who in my mind is the most
complex character in the entire poem.
Who was Guido de Montefelthro? In real life, he was a brilliant
gibbling general from a provincial region of Italy, Romania.
In the Inferno, Guido is punished in the same pouch of the eighth
circle of hell and in the same manner as Ulysses.
In other words, Guido 2 was a fraudulent counselor and his soul
wanders around enveloped in a flame from within which he speaks.
This in itself is bizarre for nowhere else in the Inferno
do we find two major characters punished for the same sin,
both of whom offer extended monologues.
There are some dramatic differences between those monologues, historical,
stylistic and psychological differences, which I would like to reflect on in this episode.
So let's get started.
Referring to Ulysses in his tongue-like flame, Inferno 27 begins,
"Jah" is a great thing for me to be a great person.
Already the flame was erect and quiet, no longer speaking, and already
it had left us with the permission of my sweet poet.
When another, coming after it, made us turn our eyes to its peak because of a
few sound coming out of it.
As the Sicilian bull, which first bellowed with the cries of him who had
tempered it with his file, used to bellow with the voice of the afflicted one,
so that though made of brass still it seemed transfixed with pain,
so not having any path or outlet from its origin within the fire,
the anguished words were converted into its language.
But after they had found their way up to the tip,
imparting to it that wriggling which the tongue had given them in their passage,
we heard it say, "O you to whom I direct my voice,
and who were just now speaking Lombard, saying, 'Estro, you may go,
I incite you no further, though I have arrived perhaps somewhat late,
let it not grieve you to stay and speak with me, you see it does not grieve me,
and I am burning.'"
Now, something unusual is going on here.
Guido has apparently overheard the exchange with Ulysses in the preceding
canta in a modern Lombard dialect.
"O you," he says to Virgil, who were just now speaking Lombard,
saying, "Estro, you may go, I incite you no further.
There is no way that the author of the Aniid would address Ulysses in that provincial idiom.
Hence the subtle scorn of Virgil, when he turns to Dante and says, "You speak, this one is Italian."
This confusion of linguistic registers alluded to in the analogy with the Sicilian bull.
This confusion points to what the medieval skull discursive cantami-natsu,
and Guido's speech, as we'll see, without doubt, represents a case of rhetorical cantami-natsu.
So when Dante asks him to identify himself so that news of him may reach the world above,
the flame from within which Guido speaks, roars,
moving its sharp tongue here and there.
Guido begins his speech with two torsets that have become famous in literary history.
"I believe that my reply were to a person who would ever return to the world,
this flame would remain without any further shaking.
But since never, from this depth, as anyone returned alive, if what I hear is true,
without fear of infamy, I answer you."
We have here an example of Hezzitat'sio to use another medieval rhetorical term.
We got no such hesitation from Ulysses.
When I departed from Chirstir there near Gaietat,
Ulysses we recall delivers a forward-moving narrative that unfolds through a series of actions in wide open external landscapes.
Here are the scene shifts inwards and the action, if we can even call it that,
coils in on itself, self-reflexively.
Guido's first words, "Cio kredesse," if I believed,
set the stage for the drama to follow, which revolves around believing, not believing, and make believing.
Guido is the only sinner in Infette who does not believe that Dante will get out of hell and return to the world of the living.
For some reason, he prefers to believe what he has heard,
namely that no one here gets out alive.
In that sense, one could say that Guido's speech is more like a Shakespearean soliloquy,
namely a self-speaking aloud to itself.
However, as we'll see, Guido has a special talent for believing what he knows is not true.
At some deeper level, he knows that his words are going to reach the world of the living.
Here is what Guido goes on to tell Dante in his meandering speech.
I was a man of arms, and then I was a Franciscan, believing so girt to make amends,
and surely my belief would have been fulfilled, had it not been for the high priest,
may evil take him, who put me back into my first sins,
and how, in Qua-re, I wish you to hear from me.
The high priest that Guido is referring to here is Pope Boniface VIII,
Dante's arch-enemy in the divine comedy.
I continue in the voice of Guido.
While I was the form of bone and flesh that my mother gave me,
my works were not those of a lion, but a fox.
The tricks and the hidden ways I knew them all,
and I so plied their art that the fame of it went out to the ends of the earth.
When I had reached that part of my life where every man should lower the sails and coil the ropes,
by the way, this is that part of the life that Ulysses had reached,
but he decided not to bring down and lower the sails, but to go on adventuring the world.
When I had reached that part of life where every man should lower the sails and coil the ropes,
what earlier pleased me then grieved me,
and I gave myself up repentant and shriven.
Ah, miserable, wretched that I am, and it would have worked.
The Prince of the New Pharisees, Boniface.
Making war near the Lateran, and not against Saracens or Jews,
for each of his enemies was a Christian, and none had been to take Acra nor a merchant in the Sultans land.
Regarded neither his highest office nor holy orders in himself,
nor in me the rope that used to make its wearer's thinner.
That's the cord of the Franciscan order.
But as Constantine asked Silvester and Sarac did to cure him of leprosy,
so he asked me to teach him to recover from his proud fever.
He asked my advice and I was silent for his word seemed drunken.
Then he said again,
"Let not your heart fear henceforth I absolve you,
if you teach me how to raise Patistrina to the ground.
Heaven I can unlock and lock as you know.
For that reason the keys are too, which my predecessor did not prize."
Then his weighty arguments impelled me for silence seemed to me the worst course,
and I said,
"Father, since you wash me of that sin into which I now must fall,
a long promise with a short keeping will make you triumph on your high throne."
Francis came later when I had died.
That's St. Francis because Guido had become a Franciscan friar.
Francis came later when I had died for me,
but one of the black cherubim told him,
"Do not take him, do not wrong me.
He must come down among my slaves because he gave the fraudulent counsel.
Since when, until now I have been at his locks,
for he cannot be absolved who does not repent,
nor can one repent and will together because of the contradiction which does not permit it."
So spoke the black cherubim, namely the devil.
"Oh, wretched me how I trembled when he seized me,
telling me, 'Perhaps you did not think I was a logician.'
He carried me to Menos, and that one twisted his tail eight times about his hard back,
and after he had bitten it in his great rage, he said,
'This is one who deserves the thieving fire,
so that I am lost here where you see me, and thus clothed I go tormenting myself.'"
When Edad finished speaking, thus the grieving flame departed,
twisting and beating about with its sharp horn.
Many of Dante's sinners have complex psychological make-ups,
yet nowhere is the modern psychological self,
more on display than in this content in Fair Note 27,
where Grito's self-consciousness contrasts sharply with Ulysses Pagan gravitas.
I don't know whether T.S. Eliot, when he chose the opening torsets of Grito's speech
as the epigraph for his love song of J. Alfred Proofrock,
was fully aware that this is the one and only place in the entire divine comedy
where Dante probes the insecurities of the self-conscious modern self.
Yet there is no doubt that Grito and Proofrock inhabit the same mental hell of fear, shame, anxiety, and self-doubt.
Proofrock's unhappy consciousness is no more modern in nature than Grito's is in In Fair Note 27.
The love song of J. Alfred Proofrock is considered a manifesto of literary modernism,
which in the early 20th century radically broke with traditional forms of narrative,
versification and representation of character.
How is it possible that Dante, the consummate medieval poet,
precisely in the conta from which Eliot extracted his epigraph,
draws us into modernism stream of consciousness almost seven centuries
Before its advent in writers like T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf,
Marcel Pousse, James Joyce, and the rest of them.
Am I stating the case too strongly?
Hardly.
Under the rubric of modernism and postmodernism in his glossary of literary terms,
M.H. Abrams writes that modernist fiction writers like Joyce "subvert the basic conventions
of earlier prose fiction by breaking up the narrative continuity,
departing from the standard ways of representing characters,
and violating the traditional syntax and coherence of narrative language
by the use of stream of consciousness and other innovative modes of narration."
And I would suggest one could hardly offer a more exact characterization of Grito's speech
in Inferno 27, especially as it relates to Ulysses, classical performance,
rhetorical performance in Inferno 26.
Reduce to its essential storyline, Grito's monologue recounts the following events.
When he reached his older age, Grito decided to make amends for his former sins
as a man of arms by becoming a Franciscan friar.
Pope Boniface VIII later approached him for advice about how he could destroy his enemies
in the town of Pinestrina, Grito Balks.
Boniface tells him not to worry, since as God's vicar on earth, he can absolve him of the sin
before he commits it.
Grito then advises the pope to make promises and then not to keep them.
The evidence, the fraudulent counsel, for which Grito's punished in the 8th pouch of Malibuuljid.
When Grito dies, St. Francis comes for his soul.
But the devil, the black cherubim, intervenes insisting that Grito must go down to hell,
for one cannot will enact and repent of it at the same time.
The law of contradiction does not allow it.
The devil wins out over Francis and Grito ends up among the fraudulent counselors in Malibuulj.
If one were to perform a similar narrative reduction of the love song of J. Alfred Proofrock,
it would yield the following.
A man sets out in the evening through the streets of a modern metropolis to make a declaration of love
to a woman of high social standing.
Fearing that he will be rebuffed, he gives up on the idea and tells himself that it would not have been worthwhile to go through with it.
As in the Proofrock poem, there is a lot more going on in Grito's narrative than what a streamlined account of its plot conveys.
The monologue consists of a maze of parenthetical clauses, subjunctive exclamations,
conditional phrasings, hypothetical constructions,
invectives, all of which has the effect of placing us inside a mind fraught with anxieties and misgivings.
By contrast, we never enter into Ulysses's mind. Ulysses is conscious, but not self-conscious.
The externalized action that propelled Ulysses' linear and coherent narrative gives way in Grito's case to a psychodrama of internalized guilt.
The events here, if we may call them that, are thoroughly psychological, regret, repentance, conversion, self-justification.
Grito declares himself the master of covert paths, as he calls them.
Those paths are anything but linear. The stream of consciousness here turns back upon itself in a series of digressions, qualifications, and interruptions that put on display modernist techniques of narrative fragmentation and disorganization.
Every bit as much as this modernist descendants, Grito breaks up the narrative continuity and violates the traditional syntax and coherence of narrative language, as Abrams put it.
As for Grito's psychology, Jean-Paul Saath could not have given us a more compelling representation of the internal mechanisms of what he called "moviz fwa" or "bad faith,"
which is not an innate human faculty, but a quintessentially modern one.
In the deeper sense of the term "bad faith" or "self-deception," refers to the capacity to believe what one knows is not true, or to refuse to believe what one knows is true.
We observe this capacity at work a number of times in Grito's speech act.
I drew attention earlier to the crucial word "crede de de" to believe, which occurs at the beginning of Grito's response to Dante, where Grito clearly chooses not to believe Dante will return to the world, choosing instead to believe what he has heard about Hell's no exit.
Grito's bad faith comes forth implicitly in his remarkable utterance, "I was a man of arms, then I was a Franciscan."
Eofui Wong-Datme, poi fui kordidliero.
In its archetype, Christian conversion shatters the continuity between the past and present self.
Think of Saul on the way to Damascus or Augustine under the fig tree.
But the perfect symmetry of that verse, "I was a man of arms, then I was a Franciscan," suggests that no such conversion took place when Grito docked his military uniform and dawned a Franciscan robe with its noted core.
Grito adds, "I believed that so girt I would make amends," that word believe again.
Yet like any Christian-born person of his time, Grito would know that one does not make amends by girding oneself, but by sincere contrition.
Did Grito really believe that a change of costume would secure his soul a place in heaven? Yes and no.
If he did not truly believe it, he truly believed he would get away with it.
And surely my belief would have worked out had it not been for the high priest, may he be damned who drew me back into my former sins, he says.
The master military strategist had devised a master plan for his salvation, but just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in.
In the critical moment of his encounter with Pope Boniface, Grito advises Boniface to make a promise in bad faith.
Father, since you wash me of that sin into which I must now fall, a long promise and short keeping of it will make you triumph on your high throne.
Question, how could Grito, the great fox of his age, allow himself to be deceived by Boniface, who requires his superior strategic advice?
Answer, Grito chose to believe what he knew was not true.
Namely, he chose to believe Boniface's fraudulent promise of everlasting life in heaven through provinian absolution.
Pope Boniface had enough coercive power to frighten a fox like Grito, who, by his own admission, did not possess the lion's courage.
Yet let's put things in focus here, since Grito keeps muddling them up in his speech.
Boniface cannot deceive a master of deceit from whom he seeks nefarious counsel.
Grito can only be deceived by his own willful self-deception.
What motivates as self-deception is fear.
About Boniface Grito says his weighty arguments impelled me for silence seemed the worst course.
If Grito de Montefelthra is the grandfather of J. Alfred Prufrock, it's because Prufrock's monologue, like Grito's, follows the stream of consciousness of a self that indites itself with its self-justifications.
And also because in both cases, the bad faith at work in the two character psychology stems from a lack of courage.
In Grito's monologue, the revealing words are silence seemed the worst course.
In Prufrock's case, in short, I was afraid.
Words uttered after I have seen the eternal footman, whole-my coat and snicker.
Self-deception is a prodigious logical contradiction.
A self-deceived by its own willful deceptions defies the unity of a perception as can't called it, which makes the eye a first person singular.
That is why self-deception represents such a conundrum for analytic philosophers.
They're obsessed by that phenomenon of self-deception.
Because it defies the law of non-contradiction.
The black cherubin who comes for Grito's soul upon his death offers a perfectly logical reason why Grito must come down among my slaves.
He cannot be absolved who does not repent, nor can one repent and will together because of the contradiction which does not allow it.
He seizes the trembling Grito and adds, "Perhaps you did not think I was a logician, local."
Drawing an inference from that premise, the logician should declare, "Perhaps you did not think I was a devil."
Anyone who has spent time with the analytic school of philosophy has seen the black cherubin up close and knows that the spirit of St. Francis,
the flower child of the Middle Ages, has no place in their rancorous disputations.
The truth of the matter is that one can will and repent at the same time.
If not logically, then psychologically, we do it all the time.
Grito's problem in Dante's portrait of him is not that he wills and repents at the same time,
but that he wills and repents for the wrong reasons.
In other words, he does not repent his sin, but the fact that his sin puts his plans for getting into heaven in jeopardy.
Maybe in his own mind, he simply can't distinguish between an authentic and inauthentic conversion and truly believes that one can stand in for the other.
All this to say that Grito is damned not because of the black cherubin's logic, logic is hopelessly out of its depth when it comes to human motivation,
but because Grito's repentance was never genuine in the first place.
His embroilment with Boniface put him in a double bind and thereby unrobed him, exposing him to the unforgiving law of non-contradiction.
In the eighth pouch of the eighth circle of hell, Grito has changed a tire once again and once and for all.
As he tells Dante at the end of his speech, "Thus I am lost here where you see me, and thus clothed within his flame, I go tormenting myself."
The reflexive verb indicates that the hell Grito inhabits is none other than his own conflicted psyche.
That psyche re-emerges from the depths, or perhaps one should say, "Redecends into the depths six centuries later as the you and I of T.S. Eliot's dramatic monologue."
Grito and Ulysses are punished in the same manner for the same sin, fraudulent counsel.
Yet most of us, I have to believe, would prefer the searing heat of Ulysses' flame to the emulation of Grito's self-recriminating torments.
By rule, the sinners in Dante's Inferno are exactly where they want to be, exactly where their will wills them to be.
Grito is a rare exception. He's not where he wants to be, for his will is too divided against itself to be at home, either in hell or in heaven.
And that's why Grito stands beyond Dante's poem as a paragon of the modern psyche in its self-inflicted wounds and why J. Alfred Proofrock is Grito de Monteffélthro in another century and another culture.
Another cultural context.
[Applause]
[Music]
Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is spread out against the sky like a patient, etherealized upon a table.
Let us go through certain half-deserted streets, the muttering retreats of restless nights in one night, cheap hotels, and sawdust restaurants with oyster shells.
Streets that follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent to lead you to an overwhelming question.
"Oh, do not ask, what is it? Let us go and make our visit."
In the room, the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.
"The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-pains, the yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-pains, looked its tongue into the corners of the evening, lingered upon the pools as stand in drains.
Let fall upon its back the suit that falls from chimneys.
"It is lifted by a terrace made a sudden leap and seeing that it was a soft October night, curled once about the house and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time for the yellow smoke that slides along the street, rubbing its back upon the window-pains.
There will be time, there will be time to prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet.
There will be time to murder and create and time for all the works and days of hands that lift and drop a question on your plate.
Time for you and time for me and time yet for a hundred indecisions and for a hundred visions and revisions before the taking of a toasting tea."
In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo.
"And indeed there will be time to wonder, do I dare and do I dare?
Time to turn back and descend the stair with a bald spot in the middle of my hair.
They will say, 'How is hair is growing thin?'
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin, my necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin, they will say, 'But how is arms and legs or thin?'
Do I dare disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all.
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
I know the voices dying with a dying fall beneath the music from a farther room, so how should I pursue?"
I have known the eyes already, known them all, the eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase, and when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, when I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, then how should I begin to spit out all the but ends of my days and ways, and how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all, arms that are bracelet-ed and white and bare, but in the lamplight down with light brown hair, is it perfume from a dress that makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table or wrap about a shawl, and should I then presume?
And how should I begin?
Shall I say I have gone at dusk through narrow streets and watched the smoke that rises from the pipes of lonely men in shirt sleeves, leaning out of windows?
I should have been a pair of ragged claws, cuddling across the floors of silent seas.
And the afternoon, the evening, sleep so peacefully, smooth by long fingers, a sleep, tired or it malingers, stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed, though I have seen my head grown slightly bald, brought in upon a platter, I am no prophet, and here's no great matter.
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, and I have seen the eternal footman hold my coat and snicker, and in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all, after the cups, the marmalade, the tea, among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me?
Would it have been worthwhile to have bitten off the matter with a smile, to have squeezed the universe into a ball, to roll it towards some overwhelming question, to say, "I am Lazarus come from the dead, come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all."
If one, settling a pillow by her head, should say, "That is not what I meant at all, that is not it at all."
And would it have been worth it, after all?
Would it have been worthwhile, after the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, after the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor, and this, and so much more,
it is impossible to say, "Just what I mean."
But as if a magic lantern through the nerves and patterns on a screen, would it have been worthwhile, if one, settling a pillow, or throwing off a shawl, and turning to the window, should say, "That is not it at all, that is not what I meant at all."
No, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.
I am an attendant Lord, one that will do to swell a progress, start a scene or two, advise the Prince, no doubt an easy tool, differential, glad to be of use,
politic, cautious, and meticulous, full of high sentence, but a bit of juice, at times indeed almost ridiculous, almost at times the fool.
I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaid singing each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves, coming the white hair of the waves, blown back, when the wind blows the water, white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea by sea girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown, till human voices wake us, and we drown.
[Music]
Come now tell me, Mr. Proofra.
Why don't you stop and turn around?
[Music]
I say Mr. Proofra, why in the world did you turn around?
[Music]
I saw you climb my way up my stairs, then I saw you head back down.
[Music]
But I'll fog all down the street and draw the way up to my door.
It's the place where ashes meet before then you draw back to shore.
I'm sitting here bare, I'm sipping whisking.
Waiting for you to knock on the door.
[Music]
I've walked the halls, heard the calls, the voices shine with the dine fall.
There will be a time for you and time for me.
Time to go back down to the sea.
I heard the voices scream in woman, and in my name scream at me.
I've heard the voices scream at me, and I'm sitting there.
[Music]
Mr. Prove Rock, I say Mr. Prove Rock.
It won't be time when you come to the cruel hands, will that end?
Mr. Prove Rock, no more of this no more.
I'm done waiting for you to knock on my door.
[Music]