5
Aug 07, 2017
Dante? Awesome! I’ve always wanted Brent to review a game from the Devil May Cry series! Which one did you play?
Er…
well, let me explain. I wanted a space with my new website design to
talk about video games—I love them. But I also want to, from time to
time, engage with other media. “What I’m Playing?†fits in a shorter
space than “What form of media is Brent playing or reading or watching,
and what particular title currently, and what is his take on that?â€
So, uh, really this sidebar is “Brent’
Dante? Awesome! I’ve always wanted Brent to review a game from the Devil May Cry series! Which one did you play?
Er…
well, let me explain. I wanted a space with my new website design to
talk about video games—I love them. But I also want to, from time to
time, engage with other media. “What I’m Playing?†fits in a shorter
space than “What form of media is Brent playing or reading or watching,
and what particular title currently, and what is his take on that?â€
So, uh, really this sidebar is “Brent’s Brain at Play†… so, yeah, it’s false advertising. Sorry.
I’ve
just re-read The Divine Comedy for the first time since four miserable
weeks in 1995. Miserable not because I hated Dante. I read the Dorothy
Sayers translation in terza rima, and I loved much of it. The misery
came from the class: Freshman Honors English, semester 1. This was my
introduction to college. One semester, one class: 4,200 pages of
reading.
I still believe this was the class that convinced the
smartest student in the college—I’m talking ‘pun in Latin and expect
others to laugh along with you’ smart—to drop out and become a priest.
Little known fact: that kid punched me in the face once. (A little known
fact that will doubtless come up when he’s up for canonization—he was a
pretty darn good guy. Is still, I assume!) It was not the only fight I
got into in college, oddly enough, though it was the only one where I
didn’t hit back… So I guess you could say I… lost?
But c’mon, you
try to hit back after a future pope punches you. If the word
‘discombobulating’ had been invented for any legitimate purpose, it
would have been for that moment. (But that’s a pure hypothetical. Don’t
combobulate if you hope to copulate, nerds.)
But I digress. Every
student in Honors English 101 had a B or lower. (B- here.) Our
professor was a poet. He really liked the word “wenâ€. No further
explanation needed, right? The end of the semester was fast approaching.
Panic set in for all these kids who’d never earned less than an A- in
their 18 blesséd years, sir, by my troth!
The professor said we
could add AN ENTIRE LETTER GRADE to our grade if we… outlined the entire
Divine Comedy. That’s… a trilogy of epic poems.
It was an assignment that would later save my soul. But that’s another story.
Imagine
thirty sweating honors class freshmen, some of whom had scholarships
riding on their GPA, others—far more importantly—had their entire
self-worth riding on their GPA. All of us faced Thanksgiving Break with
the shame of a B. It had just become Thanksgiving “Breakâ€.
There
were three weeks from Thanksgiving until finals, when the assignment was
due. Three weeks in the inferno—or, if one paced oneself correctly, one
would only spend one week in Inferno, one in Purgatorio, and the last
in Paradiso.
Oh, let me tell you, how those freshmen rejoiced
their way through Paradiso. Well, maybe the final canto. Paradiso’s a
bit of a slog, dramatically.
Want to see a textbook definition of
subclinical triggering? Just whisper “Bernard of Clairvaux†to any
veteran of Dr. Sundahl’s H ENG 101.
*insert meme here*
The angel on my right shoulder: *No, really, don’t.*
All this is prologue. (Dizzam, bruh, that’s some Jordan-esque level prologue.)
On to the review.
I
was glad to see that after 20 years, Dante hasn’t become dated. Ages
well, Ol’ Danny Alighieri. Okay, fine. I should say, “more datedâ€. One
thing in particular struck me repeatedly about Dante, reading him now as
a 39-year-old fantasy writer, versus reading him as an 18-year-old
college freshman, and I mean so oft-repeated I felt like my face
belonged to a P.I. in a noir novel–I mean repeatedly like the bass
thunder from the stereo in a 75hp Honda owned by that pepperoni-faced
dude who thinks he’s auditioning for Fastest and Even More Furiousest
Than Evar:
The chutzpah. The sheer audacity. Dante was writing
the work without which he would be forgotten by most everyone except
Italian lit majors. He’s coming into this famous but soon to be
forgotten, like the English Poet Laureate Robert Southey–you’ve heard of
him, right? No. So before Dante’s written his Great Book, he presumes
himself into the company of the all-time greats. (He deserves it, but he
jumps into that place like that kid challenging Mario Andretti to a
quick couple laps for pink slips.)
But not only that. He, a
Christian (if one who finds himself lost along the Way in the dark wood
of middle age), readily consigns foes and even acquaintances—some not
yet dead, if I remember correctly—to Hell. If there’s one thing the
modern mainstream Christian doesn’t do, it’s to presume the eternal
destination of others. As C.S. Lewis said, (paraphrasing) “When we get
to Heaven, there will be surprises.†That lack of presumption is
bolstered on our culture’s favorite partial Scripture “Judge not lest ye
be judged†which goes on “For in the same way you judge others, you
will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to
you.†Most Christians today are like, “Yeah, I’d prefer a really lenient
measure, thanks. So I’ll just not presume to judge anyone else, either.
Plus, not judging at all gets me thrown out of way fewer parties.â€
Dante, not so much. He’s like, “This pope from a few years back? Totally
burning in Hell, right now. Look at the evil he did!â€
Dante does
this while, as far as I can tell (as a non-medievalist, and no longer
even a Roman Catholic) remaining himself orthodox. He doesn’t question
the pope’s authority as it was understood then. Check this example out:
that evil pope who himself is burning in hell? He’d corrupted one of his
own courtiers, who had previously been some kind of shady guy, but
repented, turning his back on all the evil he’d done earlier in his
life. (Think like Godfather 3.) The kicker? Evil Popey makes him go
back! (“I try to get out and the Pope (!) keeps pulling me back in!â€)
Evil Pope gets him to betray some folks, by promising our repentant
Michael Corleone, “Hey, yeah what I’m asking you to do is evil, but I’ll
forgive you for all this evil you do for me. I’m the Vicar of Christ,
so I can totally give you an Evil Pass.†So the courtier does said evil
stuff. And gets ‘pardoned’.
Now the demons in hell that Dante
encounters are super pissed, because “Hey, that guy should totally
belong to us! He did evil stuff!â€
But Dante DOESN’T question that
the evil pope effectively uses a loophole to get around God’s perfect
justice. Nope. That courtier guy is heading for heaven—except the demons
later tricked him into committing suicide by demons, a sin for which
the pope apparently forgot to preemptively forgive him for.
This
whole episode is listed as proof that the pope was evil: he used his
authority to pervert eternal justice. That’s really, really bad. Later
Protestants would say, “This is redonkulus! No one gets to use a
loophole to escape God! That’s the whole point of eternal justice: often
on Earth justice isn’t served, but we can deal with that because we
know no one can escape God’s justice. If your doctrine lets people fool
God, your doctrine is wack, yo. [Also, that you have Evil Popes in the
first place seems to point out a problem in your system.]â€
Dante’s
audacity though, goes further than merely presuming himself in the
company of the greatest of the greats, and also being comfortable
judging the quick and the dead: Dante sets out to out-epic Homer and
Virgil.
Homer [with a battered old harp, ratty beard, and
mismatched sandals–dude’s blind, give him a break on the fashion
policing, people]: “Friends, Achaians, countrymen, lend me your ears.
I’mma tell you about big war and a big voyage with the ideal Greek man.â€
Homer’s
poetry and story-telling, his nuance and his imagery would capture and
define an entire culture, and deeply influence many others through the
present. It’s hard to overstate his impact.
Virgil [strides forth
in a solid gold toga, taking a bit of snuff from a slave]: “No offense,
old sport, but your hero was bollocks, Homes. He was actually the bad
chap, and not nearly as wonderful as you make him out to be. Let’s talk
about that Trojan War thing, and I’ll subvert the Hades out of your
narrative.â€
Oh snap.
Virgil is a master of poetry and
storytelling who is self-consciously telling the story of an entire
people and their founding mythos, (small) warts and all (sorry ’bout
that, Dido! a real James Bond always loves ’em and leaves ’em…
burning!). Virgil meant his epic to be studied and admired by audiences
high and low, and he meant to define his Romans as the best of the best.
Sort of “the arc of history is long, but it bends toward Rome.â€
Dante
[ambles up in a Led Zeppelin t-shirt and bell-bottoms]: “You guys are
far out. Wish I could have heard your stuff, Home-bre, I’ve heard it’s
real groovy, but the Saracens haven’t invaded yet with their hippie zeal
to give us the LP bootleg translations of your work from the Greek.
Sing it for me sometime. I’m sure I’ll dig it. Anyway, bros, thanks for
inviting me to your drum circle here, but never start a land war in Asia
unless you’re the Mongols, never get in a wit-fight to the death with a
guy named Westley, and never, ever invite John Bonham to your drum
circle. You guys thought small. Nah, it’s cool and everything, but
really? Some guy on a boat? Some other pious guy on a different boat who
lost a war to the first guy? I’mma let you finish swiftly here, but I’m
going to tell the story of all creation, do world-building that
includes the entire universe—both the physical and metaphysical worlds:
earth, hell, purgatory, and heaven, AND show how my main man Jesus
changed everything, aided in my quest by numerous holy Jesus groupie
chicks and the spirit of Virgil himself. Hope you’re down with that,
Virg. I mean, you’re an Italian, I’m an Italian, we’re pretty much bros,
but I’m like your intellectual successor and stuff? Oh yeah, and
because I’m after Christ, I really have an unfair advantage on you,
because you were the bee’s knees. Seriously, love your stuff, I even own
the b-sides of your pastoral poetry. So if I’m a little better than
you, it’s purely happenstance: You came before Ludwig drums and Remo
drumheads, man! If someone told you ‘More cowbell!’ you’lda been like ‘A
cowbell? In music? What’s next, balancing a shield on a post and
banging on it with a stick?!’ By the way, I use Paiste cymbals. I’ll
show you later.â€
That story of all creation includes the pagans.
Dante also sets about to reconcile, or at least appropriate, the gods
and monsters of antiquity—though sometimes not very successfully. I’m
like, Hey, big D, if some of the figures of Greek mythology are real,
are all of them? If they’re real and they did some of the stuff we’ve
heard they did, where was God in that? Are these all actually just
demons just playin’ around? Fess up, c’mon. You can tell me, buddy, I
understand. You just wanted monsters, didn’tcha? You got stuck on that
one part and were like, How can I get Dante and Virgil out of this one?
Oh, I know! A big ass dragon flies up out of the pit, scares the
bejeepers out of them, and then totally lets them become the
Dragonriders of Burn and head on down further!
Oh, did I mention
that while doing all this, Dante maintains that he’s writing on four
levels at once: 1) The literal (which, you know, literally means the
literal, the stuff that happens—hey, I write on that level too!). 2) The
allegorical (that is, there’s what he calls “truth hidden beneath a
beautiful fictionâ€) so being lost in a dark wood in your middle years
might be an allegory for getting lost in your life, or even a mid-life
crisis. 3) The moral (which explores the ethical implications of a work
of fiction) so what do you think about Odysseus sitting on the beach
crying to go home to his wife every day, and then banging goddesses
every night? What do you learn about the power of hope or forgiveness
when Luke Skywalker confronts Darth Vader? That’s the moral level; and
4) The anagogical. Yeah, you’re not going to see this word unless you’re
talking about Dante, I’d guess. I had to look it up again. I was
honestly proud of myself for merely remembering the word. The anagogical
is a level of spiritual interpretation. This is when the work captures
something that is eternally true. In a Platonic sense, it would be when
you step out of the cave and instead of looking at shadows on the wall
of thing that are True, you look at the things themselves. For Dante,
this is of course expounding scripture in a way that captures “a part of
the supernal things of eternal gloryâ€. (Supernal: being of, or coming
from, on high.)
This is the level where you say, the characters
Dante and his guide Virgil are hiking up Mt Purgatory, but Virgil is
literally Virgil, a great poet who lived before Christ and thus is a
pagan, so when Dante and Virgil get to the top of Mt Purgatory, Virgil
can’t get into Heaven—you need Jesus for that. “I am the Way, the Truth,
and the Life. None come to the Father except through meâ€. (Virgil’s not
exactly being punished for being a pagan; he gets to hang out talking
with all the other awesome pagans forever.) But Virgil is ALSO an
embodiment of Reason, so when Virgil and Dante reach a rad curtain of
fire up on the top of Mt Purgatory, Virgil can (as Reason) say, “Bro,
you got this. You know there’s people on the other side. You know this
is the only way to get there. You therefore know they jumped through
this curtain. Ergo, you won’t get fried. Probably. Well, at least not
everyone who jumps through gets a thermite sun-tan.â€
But Reason
can’t go through that curtain himself. The thing that makes you jump
through a curtain of fire isn’t, ultimately, reason. Reason can’t get
you to Heaven. Thus, the anagogic lesson is that belief is, ultimately,
an act of the will. Or, in the common phrase of which this scene may be
the origin, one must take a Leap of Faith.
Did I mention Dante’s
doing this while writing poetry? And apparently his poetry is pretty
good? (Not knowing Italian, I can’t say. The Sayers translation I read
in college was way more beautiful than the Clive James version I
listened to this time. Sorry, Clive, personal preference.)
Now, I
should probably address the world-building, too, seeing how
world-building is something fantasy writers ought to know something
about. (Yes, hecklers in the back, I hear you. Notice the caveat ‘ought
to’? Now run along and play. With scissors.) In the mind of your
inconsistently humble correspondent, Dante’s world-building is bold,
presumptuous, brilliant, and a blithering mess.
Whereas Dante’s
treatment of pagan mythology would likely appeal to the common reader
and just as likely outrage scholars who knew enough to ask questions, in
his world-building, he seems to completely ignore the common readers,
and go straight for the art- and map-geeks. You’ve probably seen those
elaborate medieval drawings of the world Dante lays out.
(I don’t
even know if most of them are faithful to the text or even agree with
each other, other than the order of the circles of hell and the like.)
On the one hand, this world-building is ingenious. Stunning. (Anyone
know if he borrowed most of this, or invented most of it? I know he was
synthesizing a lot of speculation and Christian cosmology, but I don’t
know how much of his work on this is original.)
It all hangs
together, literally and symbolically and morally. Satan is at the center
of gravity? Like, literally? At first, you’re like, “Huh?â€
Well,
he’s got to have his head visible in hell; he’s the king there, and
he’s got to be scary. How scary is a guy with buried head-down with his
butt in the air like a North Dakotan bike rack? (Sorry, old Montanan
North Dakota joke there.) But when you think further, well, hell has
inverted values, so after you come past him at the center of gravity,
and into a vast crater–he left a giant crater when he was thrown out of
heaven. Of course he did! And here he IS head down and not so scary, but
he’s also head down because he’s buried in his sin. He’s at the bottom
of a pit. Of course he is! He’s denied the light of heaven, his face
must be buried. And so on.
But most of the things that I caught
on this second listening, I caught only because of the art I’d seen, and
the explication of college professors and footnotes back when I’d read
it before. Those professors taught me that the common way for people to
experience a book during Dante’s time was most usually that someone
would stand and read it to everyone else. (Audiobooks go WAY back.) This
is a terrible way to experience what he’s doing, though.
When
you only listen to the Divine Comedy, there’s no way for you to
understand a lot of the imagery. Not a real quote, but a realistic one:
“Then I turned left 90 degrees, and saw, up at the point where the sun
was crossing the mountain, another path veering to starboard under the
sign of the Cygnus at the fourth hour of the morning†oh, and time moves
differently in Purgatory. Or something. I still don’t get that part.
This
kind of world-building doesn’t work at all for the medium. Certainly
the first listeners wouldn’t have any art or maps to help them figure
this stuff out in real time, while the reciter continues reciting the
poetry describing this weird journey. So it’s definitely weird, it’s
opaque, and it’s kind of bad art–at least, bad world-building for what
is, at core, more of a travelogue than an epic adventure.
But it works… for the artists and the map-geeks, who fan art the hell out of it.
Now,
I call Dante’s world-building presumptuous because leaving the
explanations for all the weirdness intelligible ONLY to those geeks ONLY
works because Dante was famous. If he hadn’t been famous already,
people would go, “Huh, this doesn’t make sense to me. So it probably
doesn’t make sense. What garbage.â€
So it kind of works in the way
Ikea instructions work–if you’ve got a bunch of Ikea engineers in your
living room to help you out: “Oh, that was a concise way to explain
that… now that you did it all for me.â€
Dan, my boy, that is some…
what’s the term for accurate hubris? Oh, self-confidence. I guess it’s
still that even when the SELF-CONFIDENCE IS GIANT, YO!
All this! Look at all that! He’s doing all that… and more. At the SAME time! All that, and then… Dante flinches.
Dante gets daunted.
Bro!
Bro.
When
this pilgrim who has had to fight past so many lesser demons (using his
special access badge that says,
I’m-on-a-holy-mission-one-of-the-roadies-from-JC-and-the-Sonshine-Band-says-it’s-cool)
finally makes it to Satan’s circle and crosses the frozen lake of
Coccytus, do you know what Satan says?
Do you know how Satan
addresses the first non-traitor to visit Satan since he was thrown out
of Heaven? Satan himself… just doesn’t notice. Sure, the big guy is busy
gnawing on Judas, Brutus, and Cassius but he’d been gnawing on those
guys for thirteen hundred years!
But nope. Satan says nothing.
There’s no, “Yeah, I let you come all the way down here by my satanic
will. It was all a trap. Now you can rot with the worst of them. I am
literally going to eat your idiot face for eternity!â€
There’s no
big rescue from the monstrously huge arms and hands as that giant is
stuck in the frozen lake of Coccytus. No last minute rescue by an angel.
Nope,
Satan just doesn’t notice. Even when Dante grabs onto his hairy ass and
climbs around him through the center of the universe where gravity
reverses itself and climbs out to go to Mt Purgatory, literally past his
butthole. Satan. Doesn’t. Notice. Doesn’t notice the man playing George
of the Jungle on his hairy hip. And climbing…Past. His. Butt.
Weaksauce, Ali D! Lotta buildup to go limp at the finish! It’s like you’ve never played a video game in your life.
I’m
sure someone can defend it. Great literature of this magnitude will
always inspire defenders. But just because something is great in...
(READ MORE AT http://www.brentweeks.com/2017/08/wha...)
...more