Recapping Dante: Pilot Episode, or Canto I

This fall, we’re recapping the Inferno. Read along!

Really, this is how you want to begin? With a trope? And do you really think that we’ll let you get away with it because you decided to double down, fold it over on itself, and begin not only in medias res but in the middle of your life, too? We see what you’ve done there. Very fancy; but couldn’t you have at least started at the end, like Sunset Boulevard?

“Midway in the journey of our life”—the cascade of allusions, and all in a single line, creating some sort of referential trifecta, or fourfecta, or whatever the highest number of fectas is. Is it meant to alert a reader that this probably isn’t an airport book—to chase away the ill-suited, like the opening sequence of 8½?

So far this character has no name, but for the sake of it, let’s call him Dante I. He finds himself in a dark wood, and that he isn’t quite able to remember how he got there feels a bit like an easy, preemptive fix to a plothole. Nevertheless, he goes on his “firm foot always lower than the other” (watch out for phrases like these; it’s safe to assume that whenever any piece of satellite or even self-explanatory information is given, it is probably a giant X telling the savvy reader to dig in that spot).

Suddenly our character is accosted by a leopard, or lonza (a lion-leopard superbeast), and obviously he’s a bit disoriented and doesn’t want to deal with it, so he walks away. But then, a lion appears, and then a she-wolf, and it’s by now such a strange mix of creatures (do they even have leopards in Italy?) that we are left to assume either Dante blacked out and came to in a zoo, is witnessing an ecological disaster miracle, or that these three beasts have some sort of metaphorical significance as well. There’s a chance the beasts each represent a sin, but that feels like a bit of a stretch, so let’s just say that the leopard is Florence; the lion, France; and the she-wolf, the papacy. (Dante, though a Florentine, was in the middle of a battle between two warring houses, and so even at home there were enemy forces out to get him.)

Dante takes off. As he flees, he comes across a figure, and Dante speaks to it. Have mercy, he says, but the English subtitles obscure the fact that Dante is in fact saying this as Miserere, in Latin, and this is when things start to get out of hand. Read More »