I have long been of the opinion that if one is to take a trip, one ought to choose the destination with care. A sojourn in Tuscany, perhaps; a jaunt through the Alps; or, at the very least, an unhurried ramble through the English countryside, where the only fiery pits one encounters are the embers of a well-tended hearth. Dante Alighieri, however, in his infinite wisdom (or rather, his infinite misfortune), decided that a grand tour of the underworld was in order. And so, in the Inferno, the first and arguably most enthralling canticle of his Divine Comedy, we follow our hapless poet as he trudges, stumbles, and, on occasion, cowers his way through the depths of Hell.
I must confess, there’s something both comical and nightmarish about the journey. It is as if Dante, with the grim insistence of a man who has had one too many existential crises, decided to catalogue all the worst things he could possibly imagine, bind them up in tercets, and present them to posterity as an elaborate warning label. And what a label it is! Each of the nine circles is a grim tableau of the human condition at its worst, a series of grotesque punishments that seem both eerily appropriate and wildly excessive. We might accept that the wrathful are condemned to eternally rage in the swampy Styx, but do the flatterers really deserve to be buried up to their chins in excrement? One can’t help but suspect that Dante had, at some point, been on the receiving end of a particularly nauseating compliment.
Of course, as every good reader of the Inferno knows, our poet is not alone on his tour of the damned. His guide is none other than Virgil, the great Roman poet, who serves as an impressively unflappable chaperone. If I were condemned to traverse the pits of Hell, I too would want someone like Virgil at my side – a paragon of calm, a veritable satnav for the netherworld. Yet one senses, at times, that even the great master grows weary of Dante’s incessant swooning. The man drops unconscious more often than a fainting Victorian heroine. A moment of horror – collapse. A glimpse of suffering – down he goes. He is, in many ways, the perfect audience for his own drama: perpetually overwhelmed, ceaselessly terrified, and entirely incapable of keeping his wits about him.
But let us turn to the main event: the circles themselves. We begin in Limbo, the nearly-but-not-quite damned, where the virtuous pagans reside in melancholic eternity. This is Hell’s version of an exclusive club, full of the great minds of antiquity who, through no fault of their own, were born before Christ and are thus forever barred from Heaven. Dante, bless him, seems utterly star-struck, hobnobbing with Homer and Socrates as if he’s just stumbled into an elite literary salon.
The real horrors begin in earnest in the lower circles, where punishments become so wildly imaginative that one suspects Dante had a particular talent for schadenfreude. The lustful are blown about in an eternal tempest – a bit of poetic justice for those swept away by passion, though one imagines they’d rather have a sturdy windbreak. The gluttons wallow in filth, a revolting fate that makes one reconsider second helpings. And then there are the heretics, who are confined to flaming tombs – an irony so sharp you could cut yourself on it.
Yet it is in the deeper circles that Dante’s true ingenuity shines. The fraudulent are treated to a dizzying array of torments, each one tailored to their particular crime. Thieves are tormented by monstrous serpents in a nightmarish reversal of the Garden of Eden. Hypocrites must walk in gilded cloaks lined with lead – a fine metaphor for the weight of deception. And in one of the most absurdly specific punishments, the schismatics are literally cleft in twain, split open like overripe melons for all eternity.
The journey culminates, of course, in the frozen pit of Cocytus, where Satan himself resides in an icy prison, flapping his vast wings in an impotent fury. One might expect the Prince of Darkness to be a more charismatic villain, but Dante’s Lucifer is a miserable, slavering brute, chewing on traitors like an overgrown rodent gnawing on stale bread. It is, perhaps, the most perfect anti-climax in literature: the devil, reduced to a pathetic, gluttonous fool, unable to do anything but drool and masticate.
And so, with an undignified scramble down Satan’s hairy shanks, Dante and Virgil finally emerge from the pit, having survived a journey so harrowing that one imagines Dante needed a long sit-down and a stiff drink afterwards.
The Inferno, for all its horror, is a deeply human text. Dante’s Hell is terrifying, yes, but it is also absurd, petty, and all too familiar. It is the world we know, exaggerated to grotesque proportions – a grotesque, to be sure, that allows us to reflect on our own moral failings with a nervous chuckle. After all, who among us has not felt at times as though we were trudging through our own circles of torment, trapped in some bureaucratic limbo or assailed by the wind of life’s misfortunes?
I dare say that Dante’s Inferno is best enjoyed with a sense of gallows humour. There is wisdom in its pages, certainly, but there is also a distinct feeling that Dante, for all his theological rigor, is having the time of his life dreaming up these horrors. And who can blame him? If one must imagine Hell, why not make it as bizarrely theatrical as possible?
Thus, having toured the depths of the underworld with Dante, I am more convinced than ever that I shall take my holidays in less infernal locales. Tuscany, perhaps. Or the English countryside. Or, at the very least, anywhere that does not involve eternally gnawing on my enemies in a pit of ice.
Wording 