Aesthetic Experience and Ideas: Death in Literature - Dante's Inferno and Descent Narratives

Introduction to Literary Afterlives

  • Definition: The literary afterlife is a specific genre where a place and time following death are imagined and populated with deceased characters. This tradition spans thousands of years and includes various forms:

    • Epic poetry regarding purgatory.

    • Myths detailing descent into the underworld.

    • Narratives concerning reincarnation.

    • Dream visions of paradise.

  • Theological Premise: These narratives assume that eternal life is accessible to mortals in a realm existing beyond their present reality.

  • Cultural Content: The history of this genre is influenced by legacies of imperialism, appropriation, and cross-cultural exchange.

  • Intertextuality: This is one of the most significant features of literary afterlives. It refers to allusions to or differences from the structure or content of other texts. Examples include how Milton’s Paradise Lost relates to the Bible or how The Chronicles of Narnia functions.

  • Common Narrative Forms:

    1. The Physical Journey: Main characters seek an ‐Earthly Paradise‐ through the physical world (e.g., Journey to the Centre of the Earth).

    2. The Death-like Trance: A protagonist in a coma or trance experiences an alternate reality where they recognize their sins and seek redemption (e.g., Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol or Adam Sandler’s Click).

    3. The Temporal Entrance: Characters enter a literal, physical site that serves as an entrance to the underworld (e.g., Disney’s Hercules).

    4. The Message Delivery: The dead return to provide information or messages to the living (e.g., various stories in the Bible).

Tropes and Characteristics of the Afterlife

  • Standard Tropes:

    • Dead narrators.

    • Interest in famous deceased historical figures.

    • Encounters with large groups of people (invoking the phrase ‐Hell is other people‐).

    • A distorted sense of time/eternity.

    • Protagonists subjected to difficult tasks.

  • Allegory and Symbolism: Every element of the setting is meaningful. The afterlife is represented as a supernatural space filled with symbolic structures. In The Divine Comedy, morality is mapped directly onto the geography.

Descent Narratives and Katabasis

  • Descent Narratives: Central to the Western literary tradition is the idea of a transformative passage through hell. It involves the destruction and rebirth of the self through an encounter with the other-space. This horrific journey provides the narrator with the perspective to identify the space as hell—an unimaginable catalyst that severs the present self from the past self.

  • Katabasis:

    • Derived from ancient Greek, meaning ‐a going down.‐

    • Latin term: descensus ad inferos.

    • Refers to a story where a living person visits the land of the dead and returns physically unscathed but psychologically changed.

  • Katabatic Imagination: A narrative construct involving an infernal journey and a subsequent return.

  • Story Structure of Descent:

    1. Protagonist is lost (physically or psychologically).

    2. Protagonist descends into the underworld.

    3. Protagonist faces a series of seemingly impossible tests.

    4. Protagonist confronts the darkest facets of themselves.

    5. Protagonist returns to the ‐real‐ world or paradise unharmed but altered.

  • Philosophical/Scientific Applications:

    • Darwin used the term ‐descended‐ regarding creatures.

    • Freud and Marx suggested truths lie hidden underground, analogous to archaeological digs or mining.

    • Infernal Revelation: Adversity reveals our ‐truest‐ selves.

Dante Alighieri and "The Inferno"

  • The Author: Dante was an Italian poet and scholar born in 12651265. His Divine Comedy is considered a masterpiece that shaped modern conceptions of the afterlife.

  • Structure of the Poem:

    • Three sections: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

    • Structure: 3333 cantos per section (plus one introductory canto).

    • Verse Scheme: Terza rima (ABAABA, BCBBCB, etc.).

    • Allegory: Represents the fall of humankind and the pursuit of redemption.

  • The Geography of Hell:

    • Imagined as a massive funnel with nine descending circular ledges.

    • It is a meticulously organized torture chamber where sinners are classified by the nature of their sin.

    • Dante posits that those who recognize and repent their sins have an opportunity to reach Paradise after passing severe tests.

  • Specific Cantos and Punishments:

    • Canto III (Gate of Hell): Cowardice and hopelessness. Sinners chase a black banner while being attacked by wasps and flies; worms consume their blood and tears. Charon, the ferryman, conceptualizes death as cyclical, comparing falling souls to leaves in autumn.

    • Canto V (Second Circle): Lust. Features Minos, who judges souls by wrapping his tail around himself. Uses aviation metaphors (infernal hurricane, cranes, starlings). Francesca da Rimini claims love and lust are intricately connected, with love leading to her descent and death.

    • Canto VI (Third Circle): Gluttony. Involves the beast Cerberus. Sinners are doused in excrement, representing the literal and figurative product of their greedy consumption. Language focuses on the body (nails, beard, heart, hands) and taste (sweetness, bitterness).

    • Cantos XII-XIV: The area of violence, malice, and bestiality. Canto XIII describes a landscape of absences (gnarled boughs, thorns with poison, no fruit) to emphasize lack of life. Canto XIV features a desert with ‐huge flakes of fire‐ falling like snow.

    • Canto XVI: Geryon provides access to the lower pits of fraud.

    • Canto XXXIV (Final): Treachery and treason. Satan (Lucifer) is described as a giant demon frozen in ice up to the waist. He has three faces and six wings, chewing on Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. Here, language fails; Satan is wordless (‐he speaks no word‐).

Dead Narrators and Characters

  • Conflicting Mental Structures: Writers blend the fact that characters are deceased with the fact that they can still think, speak, and influence the living.

  • Functions of a Dead Narrator:

    1. To emphasize that many people among the living are not truly living.

    2. To demonstrate how the deceased can still impact the world they left.

  • Revenge Tragedies: A genre that flourished during the Renaissance. Ghosts return to right a wrong or finish ‐unfinished business‐ (e.g., Hamlet, The Lovely Bones).

  • Suspension of Disbelief: Readers activate a cognitive coping mechanism, attributing the ability of the dead to speak to the supernatural realm.

Motifs and Inhabitants of the Underworld

  • Ordo poenarum: The concept that punishment is specifically matched to the crime.

  • Physical Features of Hell: Extreme cold/heat, infinite darkness, eternal punishment, spatial confinement, and ‐sluggish‐ bodies.

  • Chronotype: Represents narrow movement, absence of future orientation, and alienation despite being surrounded by crowds.

  • Classic Underworld Motifs:

    • A lost protagonist and a guide.

    • A talisman to assist the journey.

    • Threshold and river crossings (River Styx and River Acheron).

    • A bad-tempered ferryman (Charon).

    • A lake of forgetfulness.

    • Both fiery and icy zones (Dante’s ice lake symbolizes the absence of love/God).

  • The Significance of Beasts:

    • Monsters symbolize sin and reveal insecurities or chaos.

    • The word ‐monster‐ stems from monstrum or monstrare (to show or reveal).

    • Beasts in Dante's Inferno:

      • Cerberus: Three-headed dog (Gluttony).

      • Furies: Vengeance goddesses with snakes for hair; they call upon Medusa.

      • Centaurs: Half-man, half-horse creatures led by Chiron; they guard violent sinners because they were violent in life.

      • Harpies: Human-headed birds that feed on those who committed suicide.

      • Minotaur: Represents mindless, bestial rage.

Analytical Response I Assignment Instructions

  • Due Date: Friday, May 15 by 11:59 p.m.11:59\text{ p.m.}

  • Required Length: 400400 to 500500 words maximum.

  • Weight: 10%10\%

  • Format: Two paragraphs, each answering one of the following prompts:

    1. What is one connection between Flannery O’Connor’s ‐A Good Man is Hard to Find‐ and Dante’s Inferno in their representation of death?

    2. Choose one allusion in Inferno and analyze how Dante makes it his own to emphasize his conceptualization of the afterlife.

  • Criteria: Include specific textual evidence, avoid plot summary, and focus on analysis.

Group Discussion and Homework

  • Discussion Prompts:

    1. Interpret the phrase ‐lost the good of intellect‐ from Canto III.

    2. Identify allusions in Dante’s Hell.

    3. Describe Dante’s literary afterlife.

  • Homework for Next Class:

    • Read: ‐Because I Could Not Stop for Death‐ (Dickinson), ‐Remember Me‐ (Rossetti), ‐The Death Bed‐ (Hood), and ‐Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow‐.

    • Draft Analytical Response I.

    • Begin reading course novels.