A Book Group For Two
On the value of a reading buddy and 'The Divine Comedy' as the original Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“Now, Muses, now, high Genius, do your part!
And Memory, faithful scrivener to the eyes,
Here show thy virtue, noble as thou art!”
[Dante, “Inferno”]
Hell might not actually be other people, but it’s best experienced in their company. Dante, making his way through the underworld in the first book of The Divine Comedy, is accompanied by the poet Virgil; on my first reading of Inferno, I was glad to have my own guide in the form of Dorothy L. Sayers, whose commentary on the poem staved off loneliness and enlightened my ignorance. Reading her endnotes felt like being in the enthusiastic presence of one of those schoolteachers we’re sometimes lucky to have, who actually believe in their mission and haven’t had the idealism beaten out of them.1
There’s an interesting sense in which this whole “readerly guide” idea found within Inferno also describes Inferno itself. In the poem, Virgil is a stand-in for the highest of human wisdom and artistic achievement, representing art and philosophy as modes of approaching the world. Virgil can’t enter Heaven himself nor lead Dante the whole way there, because (and here I’m inhabiting Dante’s worldview, not necessarily expressing my own) art and philosophy cannot substitute for religion. At its best, however, art can point us towards the Divine. Dante himself, no doubt, would tell his reader that The Divine Comedy is no replacement for the Bible and that his work is poetry rather than formal theology — but he also obviously hoped his writing would guide the reader towards higher and greater things.
Not so long ago, a friend expressed her interest in reading Inferno. We talked it over, and I lit up at the prospect of knowing someone else who’d read it, and I worried that I might have been too fervent in my evangelism. I’m not known for moderation. However, she went hunting for the same translation I’d read and we planned a book group for two: we’d read a canto a day, which felt like the right pace for becoming neither distant from the story nor overwhelmed by it. We would chat about our reading along the way, and when we get to the end of the book, we’ll meet for lunch and to get really into what we’d read, how it made us feel, and what it made us think.
I suppose in some sense I’ve become, as someone who’s read Inferno, a guide for somebody who hasn’t — but I see the situation as something far more mutual. We will guide each other, keep each other on the right path, keep our feet moving forward as we plunge deeper into the readerly Heaven of reading about Dante’s Hell. And already, having read just the first few cantos, I can see that this is absolutely how it will be. A few days ago, I met with my friend at the cinema and afterwards we talked not about the film but about Inferno. Her insights were percipient and lucidly expressed, and it was energising to hear about the lines and the characters that most spoke to her. It made me see the poem anew, shaking off the anaesthesia of familiarity.
Here’s some of what I’m looking out for in this re-read of Inferno and how I’ll be reading it a little differently this time.
First, I want to get into Dante’s own headspace to consider what I read from the viewpoint of his intentions about what he wrote.
The obscurity of certain passages in Dante is thought to result from his many esoteric references to the politics of his time. The Divine Comedy is something like the MCU of the 14th century: a multi-instalment saga full of Easter eggs that only the nerdiest of his audience pick up on. Yes, there is a lot of that (what the hell does “Pape Satàn, pape Satàn aleppe!" mean?), but I think those cryptic references to political feuds and religious schisms are relatively easy for a modern reader to understand. If you don’t get the stuff about Fillippo Argenteni or Saladin, you can just look them up and a fairly literal explanation will see you through that difficulty.
What a modern reader of The Divine Comedy will have the toughest time wrestling with is the religious/philosophical outlook on which the entire poem rests. Just as the sign over the gates of Hell cautions all those who enter to abandon hope, Sayers tells us in her introduction to Inferno that Dante expects us to “abandon any idea that we are the slaves of chance, or environment, or our subconscious; any vague notion that good and evil are merely relative terms, or that conduct and opinion do not really matter”. Instead, we must “view ourselves as responsible rational beings”. Free will and objective morality were vital parts of Dante’s theology, and that couldn’t be much further from the cultural waters in which we swim today.
It’s a huge ask of a modern reader to inhabit the worldview of someone who knew nothing of evolutionary psychology, who was unburdened of Freud, and for whom the epistemic and ethical relativism of our postmodern society would have been seen as mere cowardice. Learning the historical details of Dante’s beef with political figures in 14th century Florence is a matter of adding some facts to one’s knowledge; reading as if you’re the kind of person the poem was written for means overhauling one’s whole worldview.
It is, however, very much worth attempting to do just that. The first time I read Dante, I was like a tourist collecting snapshots of interesting moments and scraps of beautiful language, so I missed the fundamental reality of the poem. As Sayers puts it:
“If we ignore the theological structure, and merely browse about in [The Divine Comedy] for detached purple passages and poetic bits and pieces we shall be disappointed, and never see the architectural grandeur of the poem as a whole.”
That’s another thing I’m attempting with this re-read of Inferno: I’m trying, as far as possible, to get a sense of the whole. I’m standing back from time to time to see the entire edifice — the depths of its foundations and the height of its ceiling and the construction of its walls — instead of myopically marvelling at the intricacies of the moulding in that one corner.
I’ve also noticed this time around that what I’m doing with Inferno isn’t quite reading — at least not in the usual sense. It doesn’t involve the ordinary and automatic process I go through with other books, which to various degrees always involves some sense of “losing myself” in the text. With novels, I’m absorbed by the prose, dazzled by the language so that I forget my own mind; sometimes my self-awareness is overcome by the story, and that irritating “I” that insists on itself in every one of my conscious moments is subsumed by the “I” of the novel’s narrator. The first person becomes the only person.
Reading Dante, there is essentially none of that. I am always aware that I am Matthew, that I am reading Dante, that I am trying to glean something of value from this poem. This experience of parsing its lines for wisdom (of the poetic or sacred kind rather than the noetic or secular) is a blend of reading fiction and reading non-fiction. Now that I think about it, I see that it’s incredibly close to how I read Scripture.
So, on this go-around with Inferno, I’m trying to read it more like a story and to keep my intellectualising of it restricted to reading Sayers’ commentary. Which means — I now realise, with some apprehension and the desire to kick myself — that I’ve set myself the goals of standing back to get a large-scale view and simultaneously, somehow, losing myself in the immediacy of its plot. These seem at odds with each other.
But a solution to this paradox comes quickly to mind: my reading buddy. I can focus on the details of the story while turning the book’s pages, and my friend can help me get a sense of its architecture whenever we meet to talk about how the reading’s going. Not only that, but I’ve just managed to bring this column full circle to where it began, with the value of a travelling companion on a reading journey.
So, with eyes set on Heaven above, I descend with Dante and with my friend into Hell below. It’s going to be fun.
I’ll have more to say on my re-read of INFERNO in the next edition of Notes on a Reading Life. Until then, there’s this piece I wrote a while ago on Dante and the delights of difficult books:
My own wonderful teacher was, coincidentally, also a Mrs Sayers. She was my English teacher in secondary school, and she let me read whatever novel I was lost in whenever the curriculum mandated teaching something I’d long ago learned. She recognised my passion for books and understood that, in a loud and superficial world which made the quiet seriousness of reading near impossible, sometimes her role was to give me a space for an hour a week where books could do their magic.
She also encouraged my writing, even the stories I scribbled during class, which got me detentions from other teachers who caught me imagining fictitious worlds instead of memorising formulae or learning how to answer a GCSE question well enough to pass the exam, whether I retained useful knowledge or not.
She nicknamed me “the human thesaurus”, and while it hasn’t caught on, I liked it when classmates timidly asked her what a word meant and she said, “Ask the human thesaurus.” Here’s a brag that counts as one only to fellow word-nerds: I don’t think I ever failed to supply the right meaning. She encouraged my strange proficiency with language and gave me the only opportunity I had to be useful, maybe even faintly impressive, to the other kids.
I’m not exaggerating one iota when I say that Mrs Sayers’ class was the best — often the only good — part of school for me.