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. 

 

Elena Ferrante's Exceptionally Dark View of Humanity

The popular Italian writer known as Elena Ferrante has an exceptionally dark view of the human condition and of society, believing, among other things, that violence is "an essential trait of the human animal."

Violence in her view stems from nature rather than nurture, or to put the world nurture another way, from how societies happen to be organized. And each generation, she believes, is obligated to rediscover and verify the horrors of society, only to also discover their impotence to correct them.

Ferrante, which is a pen name, is most famously the author of four books known as "The Neapolitan Quartet," but she also earlier published three other novels.  While she has declined to reveal her real identity or appear as Elena Ferrante in public, she has provided written answers to many questions and a great number of these have been collected in a book called "Frantumaglia," and subtitled "A Writer's Journey."

As a representative of her publisher explains: "The little problem was that, having promised the first publishers to whom we sold the rights that Elena would do an interview for each of those countries, the author suddenly found herself having to respond to some forty interviews, from all over the world."

In this post, I'm going to cherry pick her responses to various questions, starting with one from 2003 and proceeding forward in time.

Asked whether her fiction was undergoing a change after she had described the arrogance and insolence of a particular character and compared the character to the Italian politician Silvio Berlusconi, Ferrante replied as follows:

"I don't know, I hope not. Let's say that I am interested in understanding the fact that everything in life is turning into a show, draining the very concept of citizenship. I'm also struck by how the person is more and more unhappily dedicated to becoming a personage. And it frightens me that a classical effect of fiction -- the suspension of disbelief -- is becoming an instrument of political domination in the very heart of democracies."

Then, in 2006, a reader asked Ferrante how would she explain what the reader viewed as an increase in violence in Naples. Ferrante's response was:

"In Naples nothing more and nothing less is happening than what has happened for decades: an increasingly vast and well articulated intertwining of the illegal and the legal. The new fact isn't the explosion of violence, but how the city, with it's ancient problems, is being traversed by the world and is spreading through the world."

Then, at one point in 2014, Ferrante was asked to comment on the then-current state of Italy. Here is what she said:

"Italy is an extraordinary country, but it has been made completely ordinary by the permanent confusion between legality and illegality, between the common good and private interest. This confusion, concealed behind verbose self-promotion of all kinds, runs through criminal organizations as well as political parties, government bureaucracies and all social classes."  That makes it difficult, she went to say, to be a truly good Italian, but the country does still have some excellent citizens.

Asked again, in 2015, about violence in Southern Italy, Ferrante replied:

"Violence is an essential trait of the human animal and it's always lying in wait, everywhere even in your marvelous country [Norway]. The perpetual problem is how to keep it under control." Later in the same interview, she declared that "our fundamental rights have to be won over and over again."

Again in 2015, Ferrante is asked why she finds the theme of "erasure" -- erasing oneself, or being erased by others; disappearing or being disappeared -- so compelling.  The answer, in part:

"Every day we find ourselves faced with the intolerable, and no promise of utopia -- whether it be political, religious or scientific -- is capable of calming us. Each generation is obliged to verify this horror anew for itself, and to discover that it is impotent."

Later in the same year, Ferrante is asked, in effect, why she doesn't write more optimistic stories.

"I'm always surprised," she responds, "when somebody points out as a flaw the fact that my stories contain no possibility of transcendence."

By way of explanation she says: "Since the age of 15, I haven't believed in the kingdom of any God, in Heaven or on earth -- in fact, wherever you place it, it seems dangerous to me."  But at the same time, she says, she believes most of the concepts we work with have a theological origin and that she is comforted stories than emerge through horror to redemption. "But I tried to write a story like that, long ago, and I discovered that I didn't believe in it. … I cling to those that are painful, those that arise from a profound crisis of all our illusions."

"Human beings are extremely violent animals, and the violence they are always ready to use in order to impose their own eternal, salvific life vest, while shattering those of others, is frightening."

Ferrante's stories are full of people quarreling and on that topic she sees a quarrel as a rhetorical device that metaphorically represents a suspension between two sides [or states of being], "and it effectively summarizes the time we live in."

Continuing … "With the concept of class consciousness and class conflict defeated, the poor, the desperate, whose wealth consists only of angry words, are kept, by means of words, on the threshold -- between the degrading explosion, -- which makes them animals, and the liberating one, which humanizes and initiates a sort of purification.  But in reality, the threshold is continuously breached, it becomes a bloodshed, a bloody war among the poor. Or it leads to acquiescence, to subservience of the weak toward the strong, to opportunism."

Asked her view of the last 40 years of the 20th century, which in the view of one questioner, were a favorable period relative to the "violent widening of gap between rich and poor" in the early years of the current century, Ferrante responded as follows:

"History and stories are written from the balcony of the present, looking out on the electrical storm of the past; that is to say there is nothing more unstable than the past. The past, in its indeterminacy, presents either through the filter of nostalgia or through the filter of preliminary impressions. I don't love nostalgia; it leads us to ignore individual sufferings, large pockets of misery, cultural and civil poverty, widespread corruption, regression after minimal and illusionary progress. I prefer acquisition to acts.  The forty years you cite were in reality very difficult and painful for those who started from a position of disadvantage. And by disadvantage, I also mean, above all, being a woman. Not only that, starting in the seventies, the masses that endured inhuman sacrifices to climb a few rungs up the social ladder were already experiencing the torments of defeat, as were their children. Not to mention a sort of latent civil war; so called world peace, always at risk; and the beginnings of the most devastating technological revolutions, which paralleled one of the most devastating deconstructions of the old political and economic order. The new fact is not that the millennium begins with the widening of the gap between rich and poor -- that is a given.  The new fact is that the poor no longer have any horizons in life besides the capitalist system, or any horizons for redemption besides religion."

Asked about the family, Ferrante responds:

"The family is violent in itself, as is everything that is based on blood ties -- that is to say ties we don't choose, ties that impose on us responsibility for the other even if we never chose to take it on. … Principally, it's hard to accept that bad feelings are provoked not only by the stranger, the rival -- the one who is on the other shore of 'our' body of water, who is not on our soil and does not share our blood -- but, perhaps with even greater compulsion, by those who are close to us."

What is at the bottom of this seemingly hopeless situation?  Once again we are back to Pogo and his observation that "we have met the enemy and he is us."

"What corrupts us is the passion for ourselves, the urgent need for our own primacy," Ferrante says.

Welcome to the "it's-all-about-me" culture where we are all supposed to create, develop and ultimately monetize our own personal "brand." Collective approaches to betterment are passé.