Wednesday, October 28, 2020

More on Black Artists Doing Well in the U.S. at Present

 A couple of posts ago, I quoted Brooklyn sculptor Simone Leigh as saying how amazing it was to be a Black artist at present. My point was that, at least when it comes to the high-culture art scene, the much bandied about notion of "white privilege" appears to have been replaced, for the time being at least, by "Black privilege." In other areas of life, probably not so much.

"Mea culpa," or "it's about time," or "lots of ground to make up," or whatever.

An artist who would probably agree with Leigh is painter Sam Gilliam, a Black abstract expressionist credited with introducing draped and wrapped painted canvases in the mild 1960s.  An example can be seen below.

See the source image 

 According to a recent Wall Street Journal Magazine article,  Gilliam, now 86 years old, was for the first time represented by a New York Gallery, Pace, only last year. Apparently as a result, his art appears to be commanding significantly higher prices than before.

"This May, his 1973 "Patched Leaf" painting, for instance, sold for $905,000 against a high estimate of $500,000," the magazine article noted.

A selection of new Gilliam paintings and sculpture will be exhibited at Pace from Nov. 6 through Dec. 19, 2020.

Moreover, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC is scheduled to mount a retrospect of Gilliam's work next year.

"It's a real beautiful ending," Gilliam told the WSJ.

Gilliam is a distinguished artist with a long and productive career and appears fully deserving of wider acclaim -- and greater financial success. I bring this to the attention of readers only because there is so much commentary out there that seems to suggest nothing has changed.


Friday, October 16, 2020

A Play on the Murder of Emmett Till Brings to Mind Faulkner

 In 1955, a 14-year-old Black boy named Emmett Till, down from Chicago to visit relatives in Mississippi, was abducted and killed for allegedly flirting with a 21-year-old white woman named Carolyn Bryant who was working in a family grocery store. The two men, her husband and brother-in-law, who mutilated Till, shot him and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River were acquitted by an all-white jury. Protected by the decision from being charged for the same crime again, the two men admitted about a year later to having done it.

Because of his age, the nature of the trail and the fact that Till's body was found and put on display in an open casket in Chicago, the atrocity was of great significance to the civil rights movement.

Ironically, Till's father,  Louis Till, separated from Till's mother, was executed for the rape and murder of an Italian woman in 1945 when he was in the Army. That's according to Wikipedia.

I mention this because "The Carolyn Bryant Project," a 2018, two-person play on the subject is currently available for view via streaming, and also because I recently read, for a seminar, a 1931 short story called "Dry September" by William Faulkner, which you can read by clicking on this link.

In some respects, Faulkner's story, illuminating what had long been happening in the South, also foreshadowed what happened to Till. As a New York Times review of the play put it, at issue is "the potent, poisonous myth of fragile white womanhood — in particular, the Southern belle as damsel in distress."

Neither Bryant nor Minnie Cooper, the woman in question in Faulkner's story, were Southern belles in the sense of "Gone With The Wind," which is to say plantation-owners' daughter flouncing about in crinoline dresses. But no matter: its the illusion that counts. While there appears to be no mention of what Bryan was wearing when the incident with Till occurred, Faulkner repeatedly depicts Minnie as going to town in a new voile dress, voile being a lightweight, sheer or semi-sheer fabric suitable for the very hot weather, but arguably also a bit provocative.

In both cases what actually transpired was beside the point. The maintenance of a caste system was at stake.

"Happen? What the hell difference does it make? Are you going to let the black sons get away with it until one really does it?"  So says a man named McLendon in Faulkner's story as he leads a rapidly formed gang of men out of a barber shop to get the Black suspect.

Has much really changed? "The ritual we watch (in the play) Emmett and Carolyn repeat is emblematic of an American cycle that shows no signs of stopping," Laura Collins-Hughes, who reviewed the play for the NTY said.




Thursday, October 15, 2020

The Arrival of "Black Privilege" When It Comes to the Arts

 "Despite the really horrific climate we've reached, it still doesn't distract me from the fact of how amazing it is to be a Black artist right now,'' Brooklyn sculptor Simone Leigh told the New York Times upon being selected to represent the U.S. at the 2022 Venice Biennale.

She's right about that. 

Even if one only reads the arts sections of major American publications episodically, one thing is crystal clear. Museums, theaters, operas, galleries, the film and television industries etc. are falling all over themselves to feature Black artists and Black subject matter.

In the last couple of years or so, we have repeatedly encountered the phrase "white privilege" -- the notion that whites are showered with benefits, thanks to a county having been founded on "systemic racism." While there may be some truth to that, there are plenty of whites who have not been at all privileged and many of them seem to have voted for Donald Trump on the view that it was time for change. Experiencing now prolonged economic stagnation or decline, they see immigrants and minorities as a threat from below (fears Trump plays upon), but they also feel totally dismissed by the coastal elites who are for the most part, but not exclusively, white.

Many of these people, particularly in the Middle West, are descents of immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island with no money in their pockets and started their American journeys in New York garment industry sweat shops, in coal mines, in lumber camps or on hard scrabble farms. 

But back to the arts.  The pendulum is swinging and many are probably saying it's about time. Blacks in particular, but also other U.S. minority groups, of one definition or another, are finally getting their due. At the extreme of this trend is the "cancel culture" movement -- not just getting rid of statues of Confederate military heroes and removing the names of people like Woodrow Wilson and Flannery O'Connor, deemed to be unacceptably racist, from buildings, but at its extreme, dumping pretty much anything deemed to be "Eurocentric" in nature. We may be back to book burning before it's over, but maybe climate change will get us first.

There's nothing wrong with selecting Simone Leigh -- clearly a sculptor of distinction -- to represent the U.S. in Venice. Interestingly, as the Times article points out, Blacks represented the U.S. in the last two Venice Biennials as well: Martin Puryear, a sculptor in 2019, and Mark Bradford, a painter, in 2017. They also are artists of distinction, but how many points on a line does it take to make a trend, some might ask? Still lots of lost time to make up, others would say.

But as I read the arts pages and material sent to me by various opera, theater and music groups, one cannot help but wonder if, in the current environment, the race, sexual orientation, and gender of artists has a lot more to do with the prominence that they currently achieve than the works of art they produce, many of which are hailed more for sociopolitical messages than for aesthetic values.  But that's another topic. One that I have addressed before and will probably return to.

To be fair, however, aesthetic considerations are a major element in the work of Simone Leigh and her statues can be fairly evaluated on such considerations alone.   

Here's an example - a photo I took of her sculpture "Brick House" (emblematic of the character of a strong Black woman) near the north end of New York's High Line Park.

The bottom line: in at least one area of American life -- the world of high-culture arts -- "Black privilege" has arrived. As Ms Leigh put it: "how amazing to be a Black artist right now."

Monday, October 12, 2020

Where Matters Stand When It Comes to Culture

The Oct. 11, 2020 New York Times Magazine, which comes with the Sunday paper if you still get it delivered, is identified as "The Culture Issue" and it contains a number of articles on where the editors think matters currently stand here in the U.S. For instance: can Hollywood successfully make a film about slavery in view of prevailing controversies about American history and racial identity?

Although I read most of the articles and skimmed one other, what struck me most forcefully was a full-page ad on the back cover by First Republic Bank. Not surprisingly these days, it featured a large photo of two smiling folks identified as satisfied customers: a tall, thin black gentleman and an attractive bespectacled woman, apparently of Asian family origin, who is evidently his wife.

There's a pretty clear cultural message right there -- not necessarily all that new, but one meant to send a signal nonetheless. You don't have to be one of those "privileged" white people to do business with First Republic, which, in the current environment may be making a concerted effort to visibly diversify its customer base. As a culture, that's where we are these days and perhaps rightfully so.

But who are the bank's two customers, shown in what appears to be their tastefully decorated home, and what can we learn about our prevailing culture on that basis?

The man is identified in the ad as Rod Brewster, the Founder and CEO of a company called Pingtumi (think "ping to me") that evidently has availed itself of the bank's services. It makes an app that allows users to push messages out to groups of people who signal they want to receive them by scanning a QR code -- a Quick Response code, or one of those things that looks vaguely like a square finger print. They can be printed on almost anything, or appear on a website.

Receiving ever-more messages of one sort or another via smart phones is probably a lot more about where American culture is these days than what the NYT Magazine articles talk about. But there is more. The Pingtumi app also allows users to poll subscribers about topics of interest "and gain insights into their thinking." In other words, collect presumably usable data, and that's definitely where we are, culturally speaking.

The woman, identified as Ghia Griarte, is a Managing Partner of Ponte Partners (think "bridge"), a San Francisco-based firm that puts investors together with firms in need of capital, with a priority on confidentiality (according to it's website), and also makes investments on its own behalf.

Conveniently, the website shows the logos of a handful of the companies with which Ponte Partners has been involved and by looking at what these companies do, we can get additional cultural insights.

As it turns out, they facilitate small business finance by means of an online platform that matches up potential borrowers and lenders; make programmable robots for the education of children; make avatars for those who wish to "level-up their digital personality;" make software that helps accelerate how fast website content can be pushed out to potential buyers; make digital three-dimensional scenes and animations (think virtual models for swimwear), and, necessarily in view of most of the above, provide security for digital content.

Think about those products and services in the context of culture. It's pretty much the directions in which society is going.

But there is more. If you want to be "with it" from a cultural point of view, perhaps so you know what to wear and what to do, or perhaps for business purposes, Ponte Partners has also been involved with a firm that focuses on identifying consumer and design trends -- both current, and future. These include things like fashion, beauty products, lifestyle interiors, health, etc. This outfit has, among other things, "on-the-ground trend hunters" (you heard about that occupation at your high school job fair, right?) to help customers keep abreast of global trends.

Next year, perhaps the NYT Magazine's culture issue will focus on some of these topics and tell readers what it all means.

Saturday, October 10, 2020

A Few More Thoughts About the Prevailing Climate for Art

In recent posts, I've been talking about the notion that at present (in the U.S. at any rate), the significance or worth of a piece of art is determined more by the racial/gender/sexual orientation of the artist than by the attributes of the object in question. Pictures, music, literature, whatever -- don't stand on their own merits when it comes to critical acclaim. It's an approach, one could argue, that stands what was once the very nature and meaning of art on its head: the art in question stood on it's own. Of course one might then be interested in who created it because more works of equal or even greater beauty could be forthcoming.

Which brings me to the Oct. 10, 2020, "Arts" section of the New York Times, the lead article of which, plus a lengthy sidebar, is all about Louise Glück, an American poet, who was just awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

How did she feel about that?

 "Completely flabbergasted that they would choose a white American lyric poet. It doesn't make sense.... I come from a country that is not thought fondly of now, and I'm white, and we've had all the prizes. So it seemed unlikely that I would ever have this particular event to deal with in my life."

Glück, who has been writing poetry for decades and has won an array of other prestigious awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, would certainly seem to be a candidate in the Nobel tradition -- except, that in her view, reflecting the tenor of the times, her race would be a more important factor than the quality of her poetry. Well, it apparently wasn't in this case, but her comments are nonetheless revealing.

The NYT identified Glück as a poet who isn't afraid to use her work to explore cruelty. And an excerpt printed in the paper from one of her poems includes the line "I ask you, how much beauty can a person bear?"

Well, it's an interesting question these days because in the age of Political Correctness, pretty much everything or everyone that isn't downright evil is "beautiful," more or less by definition. In the article, Glück said she didn't want to be like the early American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow because his poetry was too easily understood. So, who knows, perhaps that line has a double meaning.

If Glück frequents major art museums these days to see exhibitions of contemporary work, she won't be troubled by too much in the way of beauty.  That's not what it's about.

For instance, another article in the same section of the NYT, notes that a group of prominent museums recently decided to postpone a retrospective exhibition of Philip Guston's work because of the current sociopolitical climate. Guston's work contains, among other things, images of the Ku Klux Klan.

According to a joint statement by the museums, the exhibition was postponed "until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Guston's work can be more clearly interpreted."

In other words, art these days is primarily viewed, evaluated and judged not on the basis of aesthetic considerations, but rather as just another form of politics.

Guston, by the way is white, and the main subject of the article noted above was how a group of Black trustees of American art museums have formed an alliance aimed at bringing greater diversity to such institutions. The goal, a statement quoted by the NYT  said is "to increase inclusion of Black artists, perspectives and narratives in U.S. cultural institutions by: addressing inequalities in staffing and leadership; combating marginalized communities lack of presence in exhibitions and programming; and incorporating diversity into the institution's culture."

Well, it is hard to argue that such goals don't have merit, but at the same time, one can't help wondering what, in the current climate of who the artist is matters more than the nature of the art, whether the Guston exhibition would have gone forward on schedule if the artist were Black.


Friday, October 9, 2020

Amy Sillman and the State of the World of Art

 In the preceding post, on Flannery O'Connor, I wrote the following:

"In the age of Cancel Culture, the significance or worth of a piece of art is determined far more by the racial/gender/sexual orientation of the artist than by the attributes of the object in question. One need only read the arts pages of the New York Times in current times to see how that works."

To reinforce that notion, the lead article of the "Weekend Arts" section of the Oct. 9, 2020, NYT, about the painter Amy Sillman, contained the following observation by the author of the piece, Jason Farago:

"Yet the rolling crises of the past few years have brought along a shift in art galleries toward easy-to-read, politically forthright imagery, some of it righteous, some just agitprop. It's a time more prone to the certainties of rage than the ambiguities of art."

Farago positions Sillman's abstractions -- full of ambiguities one might argue -- as a counterpoint to that trend. "I was thinking about looming," the artist said in response to the off-center, somewhat out-of-balance images that dominate her current show at Manhattan's Gladstone Gallery.  In other words, like the current U.S. presidential election, things that seem about to happen but haven't happened yet.

It's an evergreen notion so if you acquire one of these images, it won't get stale -- from that perspective, at any rate.  Bur there is no need to rush to buy a Stillman image, it would appear. Farago reports that Sillman has made "hundreds" of abstract paints during just the past 12 months.

The NYT piece also serves to illuminate another aspect of the art world that is far from new.  It's as much about celebrity as it is about imagery. The accompanying picture of Sillman herself is far larger than the pictures of her art and the only image on the front page of the Arts section.

While details of Sillman's personal life are scarce to non-existent in what one can easily read about her, some of her work appeared in a 1978 exhibit entitled "A Lesbian Show" that was curated by an artist named Harmony Hammond.

According to Art News, "the show was an energizing political statement about lesbian visibility, creating a community of artists who publicly identified as lesbian -- and risked professional discrimination by doing so."

Well, that was over 40 years ago and how times have changed!

To Sillman's credit, however, she is not riding that horse. Unlike a number of others in the art and entertainment worlds these days, she does not explain her paintings as images seen through "the lens" of her sexual orientation, or gender, or race, or whatever. Rather, she talks, in the NYT piece and elsewhere, rather refreshingly as to how they fit into the history of art.


Thursday, October 8, 2020

Flannery O'Connor as a Displaced Person

 Earlier this year, Loyola University Maryland removed the name of author Flannery O'Connor from a residence hall, making her in effect a displaced person.  I mention that because I recently read her story "The Displaced Person" for a literary seminar and will have a couple of things to say about it.

O'Conner, a Catholic who died in 1964 at age 39, repeatedly used the word "nigger" in her stories set in the South because that's how the characters she was writing about often referred to Black people back then. But that is not what purists in the age of Back Lives Matter/Cancel Culture have found to be the subject of concern.  Rather, some comments she made to friends in personal correspondence that has become public have been deemed to show that she was a racist.

In the age of Cancel Culture, the significance or worth of a piece of art is determined far more by the racial/gender/sexual orientation of the artist than by the attributes of the object in question. One only need to read the arts pages of the New York Times in the current times to see how that works. To my knowledge, there has been no outcry against O'Connor's published novels, stories and essays. Falling into the now highly unpopular genre of literary fiction, they are not what one would call "page turners" and perhaps are now not widely read.

But on to "The Displaced Person," a story set in the American South in the wake of World War II that was first published in 1955. It centers on two women: Mrs. McIntyre, an older widow who runs a farm, and Mrs. Shortley, who, with her husband, works for Mrs. McIntyre as do two Black men.

The displaced person is a Pole who, with his wife and two children, have been, through the offices of a local Catholic priest, placed with Mrs. McIntyre who has apparently sought to have them on the view the man may be a better worker, and less expensive, than the help she has been able to hire locally. This is cloaked in humanitarian considerations, leaving Mrs. McIntyre somewhat confused about her own sentiments.

But readers are introduced to the situation first and foremost through the eyes of Mrs. Shortley and what she sees corresponds to prevailing currents, and especially since Donald Trump ran for President on an anti-immigrant platform. Although there is some rather nobleness-oblige-type sympathy for those trying to flee horrible circumstances abroad, and some thought that immigrants can be useful (especially in high-tech and agriculture at present), they are "not us" and if not a potential drain on government resources, a threat to the employment and wage levels of existing Americans. They are also viewed as source of cultural and social disruption and even an outright threat of one sort or other -- potential terrorists if they come from certain countries or subscribe to certain religious beliefs, or "rapists," drug dealers, etc, if they arrive from elsewhere. 

And sure enough, the displaced Pole, despite or perhaps because of his admirable work ethic, is soon viewed as a threat, even by Mrs. McIntyre. It's a good read.

Flannery O'Conner is generally identified as a member of the "Southern Gothic" school of fiction and one characteristic of that style of storytelling is the employment of grotesque characters or situations to shed light on the human condition by, in effect, amplifying certain of it's characteristics.

In "The Displaced Person," the grotesque appears most notably in the sexuality of the two women mentioned above.  This is most explicit with respect to Mrs. Shortley, clearly not a particularly attractive women. "She stood on two tremendous legs, with the grand self-confidence of a mountain, and rose, up narrowing bulges of granite, to two icy points of light that pierced forward, surveying everything." 

What gets Mrs. Shortley's sexual juices flowing?  

One day, in the story, she encounters her husband smoking a cigarette in the cow barn, which, she warns him, he shouldn't be doing.  "There was about a half an inch of cigarette adhering to the center of his lower lip. ... Mr. Shortley, without appearing to give the feat any consideration, lifted the cigarette butt with the sharp end of his tongue, drew it into his mouth, closed his lips tightly, rose, stepped out, gave his wife a good appreciative stare, and spit the smoldering butt into the grass. ... This trick of Mr. Shortley's was actually has way of making love to her."

This stunt, it turns out, was the manner in which Mr. Shortley had courted his wife. He didn't give her anything pretty, but sat on her porch steps smoking. "When the cigarette got to the proper size, he would turn his eyes to her and open his mouth and draw in the butt and then sit there as if he had swallowed it, looking at her with the most loving look anybody could imagine." 

"It nearly drove her wild." 

What about Mrs. McIntyre?  When she was 30, she married a 75-year-old man after working as his secretary for a few months "because of his money, but there had been another reason she would not admit then, even to herself: she had liked him."

Known as "the Judge," what was he like?

"He was a dirty, snuff-dipping Court House figure ... His teeth and hair were tobacco colored and his face a clay pink pitted and tracked with mysterious prehistoric-looking marks as if he had been unearthed amid fossils. There had been a peculiar odor about him of sweaty folded bills ..."

"The three years that he lived after they had married were the happiest and most prosperous of her life, but when he died his estate proved to be bankrupt."  Despite having married him in part for his money and getting left with nothing but a mortgaged house and 50 acres from which the timber had been cut, Mrs. McIntyre had buried the judge on the property and preserved his home office untouched through two subsequent marriages, one to an alcoholic and the other to a man who ended up in a mental institution. She didn't hold it against him. Other considerations had evidently been more important.

While O'Connor provides no details of Mrs. McIntyre's sex life, one can easily imagine that what turned her on was equally grotesque to that of what stimulated Mrs. Shortley and perhaps that is one reason that of all her hired help over the years, Ms. Shortley was the person Mrs. McIntyre got along with best.

 




Sunday, October 4, 2020

Does Francesca da Rimini Deserve to be in the Inferno?

In the preceding post, I talked about a woman known as Francesca da Rimini who Dante Alighieri placed in the circle of his Inferno reserved for the lustful. There, she and her lover are condemned to swirl around in the winds of Hell forever as a result of their supposedly transgressive behavior.

Why continue this topic?  An important aspect of character development involves motivations, and questions of who or what is really responsible for any particular outcome. And how reliable is the narrator?

While you can read about Dante-the-poet's justifications for the outcome in question in the previous post, legitimate questions can be raised as to whether it was actually justifiable, whether it was prejudiced by certain, debatable  assumptions about the human condition and whether the poem's sketchy account of what happened told the whole story.

Was Francesca's Punishment Justifiable?

First, one can ask whether what Francesca and her lover Paolo did really constitutes "lust." Their affair was hardly a one-night stand.  Rather it lasted for ten years and presumably would have gone on even longer had not Francesca's husband caught them together and immediately killed them both.  It sounds more like two people very much in love with each other, sex being a natural expression of such sentiments.

But it was nonetheless adultery some might say, and that's that. Maybe so, but that portion of hell -- not deep into the abyss to be sure -- is for the lustful. One could argue there is a difference and Dante was most definitely a man to make distinctions. His Commedia is endlessly about distinctions and gradations,  even in Paradiso  One might not immediately imagine there to be different degrees of beatitude, perhaps leaving Saints aside, but that's apparently the case up there.

Not much seems to be known about the state of Paolo's marriage -- how it came about why it seems to have been unsuccessful, in one respect at any rate. But it is known that Francesca's father, head of the Italian city of Ravenna, married her off at about age 20 to the very unattractive older son of the head of the neighboring city of Rimini to cement an alliance -- not an uncommon practice in the Middle Ages.

Since Francesca apparently had no choice in the matter (she was simply an asset to be deployed to the advantage of the family), it seems hard to characterize her love for her husband's younger brother as adultery.  She didn't first choose her husband and only after he had accepted her, reject him for another man. Her political marriage was something of a legal technicality, serving society, but not her. It's hard to believe Francesca was married "in the eyes of God."

Dante's Catholicism didn't expect mere mortals to be perfect even if God had given them the means, through reason and love, to be so.  Indeed, Dante-the-pilgrim as he wanders through the afterlife with various guides has much to atone for and only after he has satisfactorily done so, does he reach a level of Paradise where he can get a glimpse of God.

Indeed, there is a whole realm of the Commedia, known as Purgatorio, where people who have repented, often at the last minute of their lives, are given time to make amends and eventually reach heaven.  And the only way out of Purgatorio is up: once there, you aren't going to Hell although it could take a long time for you to work things out, as it were.

And further, there is a special level or zone of Purgatorio for the lustful.  So why isn't Francesca there? Because her vengeful husband didn't give her a chance to recant. Bad luck I suppose, but should one be consigned forever to the Inferno on the basis of luck? It doesn't seem right, and especially when it appears her husband is going to end up in one of the deepest and most dreadful regions of the Inferno, not for killing Francesca (of course), but for murdering his brother as Cain did to Abel in the Bible. (The region in question is named after Cain.)

Where is the justice in all of this? 

Is Dante Right About The Human Condition?

Now let's turn to the poet Dante's underlying assumptions about the human condition and how they could be dead wrong. 

Dante-the-poet (as opposed to Dante-the-pilgrim who comes across as clueless much of the time) operates on the basis of the following assumptions: God endowed mankind with love, reason and free will. Because of the last mentioned and because love engenders strong desires, if reason isn't properly applied, it is easy to go astray. For our purposes, the key notion here is that love is internal to a person and controllable. So by failing to use her reason properly -- to understand the moral of the story of Lancelot and Guinevere -- Francesca misdirects her love and is condemned on both accounts.

That's not the way Francesca experienced what happened to her, which could call into question Dante's assumptions. Why should we think he knows what he's talking about, or telling the truth, when we know he had an agenda in writing the Commedia?

Francesca sees love as an external force that can take control of a person. Maybe Dante-the-pilgrim's guide at this point, the Roman poet Virgil, a pagan, should explain the role of Cupid to him.

"Love, who [an external entity] which so fast brings flames to human hearts, seized him [Paolo who first kissed her] with feeling for the lovely form, now torn from me [she's just a "shade" now with no substance]. The harm of how [she was murdered] still rankles.

"Love, who no loved one pardons love's requite, seized me for him so strong in delight that, as you see, he does no leave me yet."

The message here is that Francesca had no control over what happened, and my guess is it's a feeling shared by any number of readers, and especially with respect to the first time they fell in love.

As we know from the previous post, Francesca and Paolo were alone, reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere "for pure joy" and "we knew no suspicion." But when they read "the longed for smile of Guinevere -- at last her lover kissed," they were swept away in passion for each other. 

While Dante-the-poet is scornful of this outcome, his chief protagonist, Dante-the-pilgrim, can't imagine how such love can result in Francesca's fate, and he faints. (And not for the last time. One can't help thinking the pilgrim is a bit of a beta-male, but that's another topic.)

So who is correct about the nature of the human condition when it comes to love: Dante-the-poet, or Francesca, and if Francesca is correct, she most certainly does not deserve to be in the Inferno.

Did We Get the Full Story?

As we know from scholarly commentary on the "Commedia" if not from our own reading, there are a host of characters in the poem, few of whom are fleshed out in much detail.  Rather, the poet seems to think his readers will already know enough about them (despite the fact that many are fictional) that he can use an aspect or two of their lives to make a certain point.

Such is the case with Francesca. How exactly did that political marriage come about? Was Francesca complicit initially, or perhaps just a dutiful daughter going along with whatever her father (and mother?) thought best?  It would seem to be important to know in view of what happened to her.

In 1370, about 50 years after the Commedia appeared, the Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio, author of the Decameron and an admirer of Dante Alighieri. decided to flesh out the story and in a fashion arguably very sympathetic to Francesca. 

You can read a full account of Boccaccio's version as well as much, much more about Francesca on the website Dante Poliglotta, but in short, Boccaccio claims she was tricked into it. He says she was married by proxy, thinking she was wedding the attractive Paulo, and only on the morning after, discovered that her husband was instead his unattractive, lame older brother.

If that was the case, there is ample reason Francesca shouldn't be in the Inferno.

Well, one could go on and on because as you can see from Wikipedia's account of Francesca, her story inspired numerous plays, operas and other works of art. Which is another reason for knowing all about her.

I don't know about you, but I don't think she's really in the Inferno. Let's just mark it down to artistic license on the part of Dante.