Posts Tagged Dante

Dante 2009: Paradiso

Dante 2009: Purgatorio

Dante 2009: Inferno

Dante 2008: Paradiso

Dante 2008: Purgatorio

Dante 2008: Inferno

Those of you who read my blog over at Hardly the Last Word for the last few years (I love both of you!) remember that, every summer since 2002, I’ve read Dante’s comedy from start to finish, and for the last couple years I’ve also blogged about each canticle as I’ve finished it.  I’ve put links to those posts above.

A couple of things have changed since summer 2009.  Most obviously, I’m doing most of my blog work here at the Christian Humanist, so for the foreseeable future, I’ll be writing those summer posts here.  Less obvious is that this summer, I elected to finish all three before I started my Inferno post.  I’m not sure whether the posts’ quality will improve or suffer, but I wanted to try out a global view of the poem this time around, so I have.  As with last summer, the translation I’m using is John Ciardi’s paperback edition (whose footnotes I especially like).

Every time I read through this magnificent poem something new occurs to me, and this time what stood out was that Dante’s journey arises not mainly out of his own midlife crisis (though that’s certainly a part of it) but because of the advent of “the Greyhound,” as the poem calls a figure that most scholars identify as Can Grande of Verona.  This apocalyptic figure, born in Dante’s own epoch, will be a true Aristotelian king, providing the strong government that will eliminate the dominance of human vice in the realms of power.  I don’t think that even Dante is naive enough to assume that his reign would entirely eliminate human sinfulness, but the poem does seem to assume that life in the city-states of northern Italy has become so wretched that God has elected to anoint a king to bring those vices under rein.  Since I’m writing this after completing Paradiso, I notice this time around that Can Grande, though Dante never names him, occurs over and over again through the poem, connecting this grand journey far more particularly to the life of Florence and the surrounding areas than I’d ever noticed before.  To exercise as much humility as I can muster, when I said on our podcast that I don’t think of the Comedy as a national epic the way that I think of the Iliad or The Faerie Queene as national epics, I think I might have underplayed this end of things pretty seriously.

I also noticed on this run the strong insistence throughout the poem on the will and its nobility.  I use that word because “free will” in American English more often than not loses the old sense of “free,” the idea that there are men who are neither slave nor free, the peasants of the ancient world who own no property.  Freedom in that ancient and medieval use carries with it the idea not only of non-interference (the extent to which “free” means anything in the political conversations I overhear as I wander the world) but also of domain.  Lost is the sense that Hegel assumes when he says that in the Persian Empire only one was free, in the Roman Republic a few were, and in a liberal democratic society all were: what counts here is not an absence of “gummint” but the ability to hold sway in matters of importance, something that comes with nobility.  In Dante’s underworld, to get back to the poem, Hell is “the gate denied to none” (14.83), and the souls who go from Ostia to the river Styx go there not under pain of the lash but because their sin-hardened souls result in their own willing themselves into Hell.  Nobody especially enjoys being in Hell (understatement, I know), but all of the people there decided to be there.

The usual alienness of the medieval still strikes me as I go through what remains my least favorite of the Canticles: I still can’t figure out why Caiaphas, who among other things abuses the power of the priesthood and leads to the conspiracy to get Christ crucified, is in the circle of the hypocrite-friars (Canto 23).  I can’t figure out why falsifiers of currency and alchemists get a far worse punishment than do pimps, seducers, and those who counsel kings to initiate wars (Canto 29).  But Dante’s mastery of the horrifying still amazes me: without Stephen King’s penchant for describing human viscera, Dante creates true existential horror not only with the circle of thieves who steal one another’s bodies (Canto 25) but with the story of Guido da Montefeltro (Canto 27), whose reticence to tell his story is the epigraph to T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”   Montefeltro’s heart-wrenching story begins with a career advising kings in their bloody conquests, then a turn from the sword to the monastic life for the sake of his soul.  But when a deceitful Pope needs an advisor to run his own military endeavors, the wicked Boniface promises him absolution for the blood that will be shed by his counsel.  When Montefeltro dies, as the angels are about to carry the Friar off to the mount of Purgatory, a demon-logician arrives and snatches him away.

In sum, although Inferno is the Canticle that I read through with the least pleasure these days, nonetheless it’s still Dante, and his sense of the strong systemic connections between all realms of human life still make it some of the best poetry that one could hope to read.

SPOILER DISCLAIMER: Out of respect for Hulu watchers, TiVo devotees, Netflix subscribers, and other folks who didn’t watch the Superbowl-length extravaganza on May 23, I’ve waited until now to start writing about LOST for this blog.  That said, this series of posts is going to begin with the last scene of the last episode of the last season of the show, and I’m going to work elements from the show’s entirety into these posts.

I’ve made a studied effort not to look at any bloggers’ theories about the entity on LOST known variously as Jacob’s brother, the smoke monster, Smokie, the Man in Black, and (in my mind anyway) Esau.  I might go looking after I finish writing this, but I haven’t yet.  I wanted to take this stab based entirely on my own take on the show, modified of course by my own literary background but uninfluenced by what might prove to be more compelling takes on the phenomenon.  I’m vain that way.

What I Won’t Say about Smokie

To begin with, I think it’s fairly obvious that there’s little sense in doing a Carl Linnaeus-style genus-and-species taxonomy of Smokie (that name I’ll use as a default, largely because Sawyer’s pet name for the phenomenon is fun and doesn’t carry any more particular baggage).  In the universe of LOST Smokie seems to be sui generis or at the most (and I’ve not read any theories about Jacob and Smokie’s mother either) an entity of which there can only be one at a time in the world.  Moreover, given that he spends the entirety of the series wandering in the island’s hidden places, there’s not much sense in pondering what a laboratory examination might yield.

I note these things not merely for the sake of an academic’s peculiar caution with categories (though I do exhibit that trait, I’m sure) but because Smokie is an entity that the LOST writers have shielded from the rather clinical view of the superhuman that sometimes characterizes shows like Smallville, Angel, and Battlestar Galactica (with the notable exception of whatever becomes of Starbuck).  In the universe of LOST nobody ever puts Smokie on a table to do a DNA analysis or traces the origin of his species.  Smokie’s origins have something to do with a woman who murders the mother of newborn twins and raises the latter-day Castor and Pollux to be guardians of the island, but the actual nature of Smokie–why he can’t go through sonic fences or go any farther out in the water than where a freighter anchors–remains a mystery in terms of the show.  In some sense Smokie is a being of the angelic order, in Thomist terms: he is his own species.

So, limited in my angles of approach, the rest of this post is going to examine Smokie from two sides, one being an empirical examination of phenomena within the show and some deductions therefrom; and the other being a look at some literary antecedents for such a critter.

What the Show Revealed

This will not by any means be an exhaustive list, but some data and inferences about Smokie (mainly from the last season) lead me in particular literary directions:

1. The bones of Jacob’s brother and the woman who raised him remain in “the cave” for the two thousand years (I’m assuming that Jacob and his brother had something to do with the Roman Empire since everyone in their episode was running around speaking Latin) that Smokie is active in the lives of those who live and die on the island, so Smokie and the person who was Jacob’s brother are not identical.
2. Even when Smokie takes on the appearance of John Locke, he seems to maintain the personality that he had during the Roman chapter and in 1867, when Richard Alpert arrived on the island.  When Jack tells him he’s nothing like John Locke, Smokie doesn’t object.  So Smokie and the person who was Jacob’s brother are not radically separate.
3. Although the audience first sees Smokie when Jacob floats his brother’s unconscious (dead?) body into the Heart of the Island, the Rebekah figure (who was not Jacob’s mother biologically  but who raised both boys) does seem to be the main suspect when an entire human settlement ends up murdered and their dwellings burnt, so something with superhuman destructive capabilities predates Jacob’s brother’s becoming Smokie.
4. Smokie is able to pick up objects as heavy as human bodies and fling them, and he also breaks stones apart in a fight scene with Jacob’s disciples.  Moreover, the Dharma Initiative and later Charles Widmore seem to be able to keep Smokie at bay by the use of electronic technology.  So Smokie is neither pure spirit nor entirely a hallucination but an entity who occupies this position rather than that and who can act upon material objects.
5. Although whatever entity (the show seems to indicate it was Rebekah) destroyed the human village also buried the wheel house, Smokie seems to have excavated it to the point that, after Locke time-shifts from before the well was filled to after, Smokie can guide him to the wheel itself.  So he seems to retain both his desire to leave the island and his ability to manipulate the forces of the island.
6. When the system that sustains his existence as Smokie breaks down, the entity, still in the form of John Locke but retaining the personality of Smokie, becomes mortal again (as does Richard Alpert).

Monsters with History

I highlight these things because Smokie’s being within the show seems to follow in certain literary traditions, Smokie taking on the role of an allegorical Sin articulated most materfully in medieval literature.  In William Langland’s Piers Plowman, during an early vision, Reason (which in the allegory seems to be Right Reason, or Reason as illuminated by God’s Law) comes to hear confessions, and the seven sins themselves come forward and confess.  The interesting thing about the scene is that each of them was at one time a person with a name, and each stands, upon repentance, to return to human community when shriven.  But as each advances, its human form (there are former men and former women here) has been distorted by the sin and by the stories of sin that it tells so that the bodily form has taken on the distortion of Sin just as the soul is distorted by Sin.  So these pitiful souls share continuity with their human histories even as the sin that defines them has rendered each monstrous.

Although his scenes take place in the post-mortem world (which the island in LOST is not, I assert), Dante’s monsters also share in this tradition.  Two notable monsters in Dante’s Inferno (which will get its own post here soon–I’m midway through Purgatory in my annual summer reading) are Minos and Geryon, one a Minoan and the other a Spanish king who, in the underworld, lose their human forms entirely but continue to act in manners that indicate a continuity of personality.  Minos is transformed into a snake-man but nonetheless retains his personality as the harsh judge, and Geryon becomes a chimaeric creature with a human head, dragon’s scales, and lion’s claws; but his deceptive character makes him one of the lords of the circles of frauds deep in Inferno.

Later, Renaissance writers would pick up on these things, notably Spenser in Faerie Queene with Jealousie, the monster who began his career as husband to a licentious woman; and Milton’s version of Satan and the host of Hell, who transform from angelic forms into monstrous demonic ones as their sins become their essence.  In all of these instances, the characters retain genuine and distinct human (or angelic) histories even as their bodies or forms distort and become sub-human (or sub-angelic), terrifying to those who would behold them and often more capable of destruction than their former bodies.

So although LOST (wisely, I think) will never put Smokie on an examination table to see what his DNA structure looks like, a close look at the narrative data indicate that Smokie is an embodied creature whose superhuman powers warp but do not annihilate the humanity that gives shape to his activities.  The Smoke Monster will never again be the human body that he left behind in the Roman era, but he will never be rid of the things that drove him to spite his brother and adopted mother, and in some respect he becomes in the universe of LOST the embodied sin Spite.  As an act of moral storytelling, this brilliant and ancient move allows the show to take an entity at its first appearance entirely disconnected from the human beings on the show and demonstrate that, in times at first masked, the Smoke Monster, like Geryon and Envy and Jealousie and perhaps even Grendel, has in his narrative roots the same mothers and brothers and loves and hates that the beloved Jack and Kate and Sawyer (and on some days even Ben Linus) have.  So the nature of the smoke monster and the nature of the Oceanic 815 survivors is ultimately not a difference rooted in cells and molecules but in story and choice and circumstances and those other human, all too human moments that make us what we are.

There but for the grace of God go all of us.

SPOILER DISCLAIMER: Out of respect for Hulu watchers, TiVo devotees, and other folks who didn’t watch the Superbowl-length extravaganza on May 23, I’ve waited until now to start writing about LOST for this blog.  That said, this series of posts is going to begin with the last scene of the last episode of the last season of the show, and I’m going to work elements from the show’s entirety into these posts.

You know what that means, you with the last two episodes sitting on your DVR hard drive: bookmark these posts and come back to them, because I am going to talk about the episodes you haven’t watched yet.

Alright.  Now on with it.

In The Last Battle, the final novel in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, Eustace and Jill, along with other characters from Narnia, find themselves locked in an apocalyptic battle for the fate of Narnia.  (I don’t think that’s a spoiler, since the novels are fifty years old, and since the book’s called The Last Battle.)  By circumstances that each of you should read, many of the characters find themselves in a new world, a place where human beings and centaurs alike can run without growing weary, can enjoy the presence of Aslan the Lion uninterrupted, can remain together after experiencing a life that tears people apart from one another.

Elsewhere in Lewis’s corpus, specifically in The Great Divorce, Lewis makes modifications to Dante’s version of Purgatory.  Dante’s vision of Purgatory is a place for those already saved by the grace of Christ, so there’s no sense that people are “working” for their salvation, for God’s favor, or for anything else.  However, because of their choices while living among men, the souls in Purgatory still desire wrongly, be those desires misdirected (such as the prideful man’s desire for his own glory rather than God’s) or out of proportion (such as the lustful man’s desire for women or men, as the case may be, that overcomes his desire for God).  Their term in Purgatory in most cases is not set by judicial fiat but lasts until they want to go to Heaven, which in turn means that their desires have grown strong enough (as in the case of the slothful) or have reoriented themselves (as in the case of the avaricious) to the extent that they can genuinely enjoy Heaven.  Lewis, a Platonist at his core, modifies the picture slightly (influenced, I think, by G.B. Shaw’s Man and Superman, but there’s no proving that) in that his Purgatory is also his Hell.  The desire to ascend is, in theory at least, available to all in the “grey city,” but most people in Lewis’s allegory seem perfectly content to dwell eternally with the shadows of real things, while the desire for reality (the signature mark of a Heaven that is reminiscent of Plato’s world-beyond-the-Cave) is relatively rare among the dead.  So, like Shaw’s Heaven, Lewis’s is for those who have decided that they want something more than the shadows of Hell, and Hell is for those who are comfortable living in those same shadows.

I’m sure that by now, the evangelical blogosphere will have commented at some length on the visual elements of that last scene in LOST–the fact that the stained-glass window in the “church” where Jack finally arrives has (among other things–you can find these blogs, I’m sure) a Menorah, a cross, a crescent and star, a Yin-Yang, and other religious symbols, communicating as heavy-handedly as one could imagine that, in this universe, the content of religious traditions is effectively irrelevant.  So I’m not going to start there.  Far more interesting in that last sequence is the marked borrowing from C.S. Lewis, something that certainly does not start with the last episode or even the last season but nonetheless dominates the last fifteen minutes or so of the series.

That the “flash-sideways” world of season six is the afterlife became more than evident in the final episode.  After all, Christian Shephard, Jack’s father who is also dead, tells him he’s died.  In order to account for the presence of people who survived longer than did Jack, Christian tells him that in the place he’s entered, there is no “when,” that people who died long before Jack and people who died long after Jack simply exist there together.  (Granted, the writers could have gotten that from Boethius, but the locution on the show sounded more like Lewis.)  So far, that establishes the Boethian eternity of the place.  But the actual narratives that occur in the “sideways” world point to this afterlife as at least kin to Lewis’s purgatory.

Each of the characters who persisted through all six seasons (along with some others, but not all of them by any means) come into contact with one another, especially those whom they have loved in the world of the living, they become aware that they’ve lived in the world of the island, but some of the characters that the viewer finds familiar do not leave the sideways-world for the final reunion.  As the newly-aware spirit of Hurley has an encounter with the spirit of Ana Lucia, one of the Oceanic 815 survivors who died in the second season, she takes the bribe that Hurley offers to free Desmond, Sayid, and Kate.  When Hurley silently motions his confusion, Desmond says to Hurley that she’s “not ready yet” to join the awakened.  At the door of the “church,” Ben Linus watches the others go in but does not himself enter.  When Hurley invites him, he says that he’s got a few things “to work out” before he can come.  Finally, the characters wandering lost (get it?) in this world seem entirely unaware of their previous existences until near-death experiences, physical contact with others from the island, and other moments bring them to the awareness that here, in this world, they can indeed have what the other world denied them.

If that jumble of character-names baffles you, that means that you’ve not watched the show.  Join Netflix, start with season one (the first five seasons are available both as DVD’s and as Internet feeds), and realize what some of us felt like over the last ten years when people discussed Harry Potter novels!

So where Dante’s purgatorial souls need to cleanse their souls so that they only desire God, and where Lewis’s souls in the “grey city” need to extend their desires outward from shadows to reality, the “sideways” souls in LOST need to let go of those things that kept them from connecting with one another in the land of the living, embracing one another so as to replace obsession with community. Folks rightly point out that this is the communitarian thrust of the show, and the marginalization of particular spiritual traditions in the final scene makes the most sense as the natural outgrowth of a universe in which those traditions no longer serve to connect people, a place where a pretender Catholic priest and a mostly-atheistic physician and various devotees of a magical island are not brought together by those powers that transcend the relationships between people but stand secondary to them.

As a parting thought, I have read some commentators on the Internet who worry that the “sideways” world and its last word in the series threatens to render the comings and goings on the island meaningless.  Once again I’d point to Narnia as the inspiration for that relationship between Island and Purgatory.  When Eustace and Jill and the Calormene warrior pass on to be judged by Aslan, their bliss in the world-after does not mean that all that has happened in Narnia is meaningless; it simply means that all of that, just as all of the realities that define Peter’s and Susan’s and Nathan Gilmour’s world, stand not absolutely but in some sense related to Eternity.  Although LOST (to nobody’s surprise) will not even send Ben Linus to whatever would be the equivalent of Hell in that reality, nonetheless Ben’s delay in entering into communion with those whose communion he needs in that Purgatorial existence seems connected to his ruthless and manipulative treatment of other human beings in his quest to connect himself to the Island and to Jacob, whose only concern for him was to ask the dismissive question, “What about you?”.  Ultimately the souls in the Purgatory of LOST, like the souls in the Purgatory of Dante, must suffer greatly before they realize that there is only one desire worthy of enjoying.  For Dante, following Augustine, only God is to be enjoyed.  For LOST, what leads one out of Purgatory is connections to other people.  Purgatory is… OTHER PEOPLE!

I don’t know how many of these posts I’m going to write, but this one has been fun, so look for more over the course of the summer.  I should point out now that the real LOST bloggers out there have been writing about the show as it took place, that I’m at most a Johnny-come-lately commentator.  Go look at those blogs for a glimpse at just how complex and fun this series has been, and come back here when you’re ready for another dose of LOST-and-theology musing.