#38. A Year in Hell
Dante, Gaza, and Lebanon
The damned in Dante are not figurative, not allegory; they are as human as you or I, and in their specific reticulated humanness — the deft sketches of their tortured bodies, the hazy, Lethe-drunk memories, their habits of speech and personality, unchanged from life — there lies no small part of the poet’s genius.
This characterism in death is an observation of Erich Auerbach’s famous chapter on Dante in Mimesis, the critic’s second sustained visit to Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise following his book-length study Dante: Poet of the Secular World. (That first book was written in Marburg, a snowglobe hillside town where the Grimm Brothers lived; the second was written in Istanbul, where Auerbach lived as a refugee from Nazi Germany.) Dante’s damned, Auerbach writes in Mimesis, may belong to broad categories of sinners, “but in their utterances, their individual character is manifest in all its force.”
Despite this vividness, the poet’s encounters in the Inferno can be estranging and bizarre for the modern reader, especially in those moments where he combines into a single image features both high and low, comic and tragic, in a distinctly unmodern tableau. In Canto XX, encountering the astrologers and other heretical magicians who are forced to wander with their heads turned completely around on their bodies, he responds with pity to the oddly comic sight of the souls he sees weeping, observing that their tears, which had coursed “down from the eyes, / bathed the buttocks, running down the cleft.” Dante continues as though unaware of the ridiculous image he has painted for us, the poem’s tone ricocheting in several directions at once: “Of course, I wept, leaning against a rock / along that rugged ridge, so that my guide / told me: ‘Are you as foolish as the rest? / Here pity only lives when it is dead: / for who can be more impious that he / who links God’s judgment to passivity?’”
From horror to slapstick to melodrama to incensed sermon — Dante is a poet of unmatched compression. We can’t get a lock on this poem, so alien to our sensibilities; we keep reading to find out what it is. The book contains, in the words of Dante’s contemporary Benvenuto da Imola, every division of philosophy and poetry: “if one look narrowly, here is tragedy, satire, and comedy.”
It is Dante’s great dramatic innovation to contrast the force of the individual with what Auerbach calls their “eternal and changeless fate,” a fate nothing can be done to alter:
We behold an intensified image of the essence of their being, fixed for all eternity in gigantic dimensions, behold it in a purity and distinctness which could never for one moment have been possible during their lives upon earth.
This, too, is part of God’s judgment in Dante, the persistence of an earthly being in all its “grandeur and hopeless futility” with no possibility of change. Hell is a climate of stasis in which the changeful mind must live forever.
Virgil’s rebuke at Dante’s sympathy for the magicians is ambiguous. Certainly he means that these unpious souls do not deserve pity, and that for Dante to express sympathy for the heretics amounts to questioning God’s divine judgment in condemning them. Virgil may also be referring specifically to those pseudo-prophets who claim to control the future, a power known onto to God (and so these prophets have — disastrously for them — assumed God’s “passivity”). Dante would be wise to avoid associating with such beliefs. But the phrasing (in this and other translations) is strangely open.
Meanwhile the narrator of Dante’s poem makes nothing happen, only observes. His passivity—the passivity of the poet is real; God’s is not—has few major literary analogues until the arrival of postmodernism. He can only gape, converse, and pity. And
Here pity only lives when it is dead*
We can only pity what is already dead? Or—we can only pity once we have killed what is pitying within us?
//
My first encounter with the Divine Comedy was around twelve years ago, when I was in my late twenties. A professor of mine in my MFA program, the poet Jim Galvin, described what I later learned was a common experience of literary love and language acquisition. He had learned Italian in order to read Dante in the original. This was enough of a recommendation for me. I determined I would some day do the same, but for the time being I picked several verse translations (among them Robert and Jean Hollander, W.S. Merwin, Mary Jo Bang, Robert Pinsky, and John Ciardi) and read them simultaneously, slowly each evening, one or two cantos per day.
More than a decade later, I have still not learned Italian, or have learned exactly enough to buy a train ticket or order dinner in Rome (“quel che non ammazza, ingrassa”). So I am re-reading in a different English translation (Allen Mandelbaum in the Everyman’s Library edition—source of the quotations here), around one canto each night, and I am finding it true what is often said of great works of expansive maximalist literature, whether Dante or Proust or Joyce, that you revisit them not to deepen your understanding of the text but in order to learn how you and the world have changed over time, an experience of bilateral transformation. First you are Stephen, then you are Leopold.
In revisiting Dante now, at 39, I find myself roughly as many years older than his protagonist as I was years younger on our first meeting. My readings both find me, approximately, halfway through life, but while in the first I was anticipating the dark wood of my mid-thirties I am now past it, feeling more anxious than I was about — the poem’s central concern — the machinery of justice that exists on earth.
That concern is transposed to the divine machinery which it is Virgil’s, and later Beatrice’s, task to explain and demonstrate to Dante, but I see now, as I could not on my first reading, the despair over worldly injustice that animates his journey, his attempt to envision a corrective that nevertheless often surpasses human understanding.
I wonder if one unconscious motivation for revisiting Dante was the experience of despair we have shared this past year, despair over the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, and now the invasion of Lebanon, all of the useless destruction and unpunished slaughter. (By we, obviously, I mean those of us watching from afar, in positions of personal safety, moral culpability, and helplessness—those experiencing genocide need no reminders of hell.)
What could be more Dantean, for example, than the drudgery of the Gazan’s endless meaningless exile—now forced north, now south, placed in refugee camps only to be attacked there, starving and suffering from manmade plagues, fleeing Israel’s rain of bombs? Like the souls in Canto XV endlessly crossing fiery sands beneath a rain of fire, one of whom pauses just long enough to speak to Dante: “‘O Son,’ he said, ‘whoever of this flock / stops but a moment, stays a hundred years / and cannot shield himself when fire strikes.”
There is the obvious difference that, unlike in Dante’s cosmology, the people in this Hell on earth have done nothing to deserve their punishment. Most of the dead, injured, and dying are civilians, women, children…and the question of whether Israel’s pursuit of enemy fighters, dutifully labeled terrorists in Western media, justifies the mass death of the innocent never arises in mainstream discussion of this “war.”
The invasion of Lebanon has expanded the known circles of Hell to include other “Iranian proxies” whose adjacency to Israel has justified the accelerated killing of thousands of civilians. Again, what could be more Dantean that the grotesque episode of the exploding pagers — at once both monstrous and ridiculous — somehow intended as cosmic punishment for Hezbollah bureaucrats, although of course among the dead were not only paper pushers for the region’s de-facto governing body but several children and medical workers?
Dante did not intend to condemn the innocent, but a secular reading — the way I suspect most of us encounter Dante today — can’t help but find many of his condemnations and punishments likewise unjust, abhorrent to behold. The pitiable souls in Canto XV, quoted above, are sodomites; those in Canto XIII, transformed into knotted, leafless trees, are suicides. When we read Dante today, we are as much reading about the Christian moral universe of his time, a universe most of us find indefensible, its machinery a perfect pocketwatch of inflexible wrongness. The avaricious, the sullen, the prodigal, the unchristian—all are doomed. Yet perhaps we read Dante today not to console ourselves with the promise of final justice served, but to make sense of suffering by way of this senseless alien world called the Middle Ages.
To stop the carnage today, to participate somehow in changing the course of events, with no clear path toward effecting change — to free the unjustly doomed — produces paroxysms in the discourse, transferring the energy of protest to other domains: free speech on campus, the bias of media coverage, the right to assemble and protest (and, in the U.S. and Germany, the governments abdication of basic constitutional principles of expression), celebrities’ equivocations or endorsements of presidential candidates who fund and supply the bloodshed, and of course the election itself. None of it matters compared to the bombs and bullets, the blood and flesh, about which we — citizens of “the world’s most-advanced democracies” — can seemingly do nothing whatsoever.
These subjects are difficult to write about, or think about, from a distance. What can we say? Those on the ground can add firsthand reports to the argument for genocide, accumulating evidence for a dreamed-of and improbable day of Nuremberg-style justice. To report on the ground is heroic; Israel kills journalists with frequency and impunity unseen in modern history. Palestinian and Lebanese voices can commemorate or accuse. The rest of us can only fret or opine, it often seems, uselessly. We Jews may feel special implication or rage that this violence is purportedly committed “in our name,” with our safety, transposed onto the expansionist dreams of a belligerent nation-state, its justification, but we are not the protagonists of these events and to write of our own response, whether in approval or horror, is, per the discourse, to “center ourselves.” Yet the thoughts intrude on us — on me — every day. How can I, or anyone, write or even think about anything else?
//
In n+1, Pankaj Mishra sums up the situation:
THE HISTORIAN OMER BARTOV has pointed out that Israel, ostensibly responding to an unprecedented terrorist attack from Hamas, sought from the very beginning “to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory.” Today, with all the two-thousand-pound bombs lavished on them by the United States, Israel’s far-right leaders seek to further militarize their occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and to provoke their enemies, through acts of terrorism, in Lebanon and Iran into a wider war. But all these obvious realities, and even the liquidation of Gaza, which unlike many atrocities, has been livestreamed by both its perpetrators and victims, are daily obfuscated, if not denied, by the main organs of the Western media.
That obfuscation continues, incredibly, this anniversary month, with major American newspapers publishing flatly deceptive analyses of these wars that not only credit Israel with a fantastical degree of moral restraint and keen military objective, but wholly invent justifications on their behalf. The word “Palestine” is literally stricken from the paper of record. These writers present Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran as a many-headed Hydra of incommensurate terror rather than what they are: authoritarian and theocratic but wholly rational governments behaving as other governments in the throes of decades-long assassinations, sabotage, or occupation always do.
Gaza remains the ne plus ultra of the archipelago of non- and para-state islands I have been calling the fugitive world. A year after October 7, tens of thousands — maybe hundreds of thousands — of Palestinians have been killed there without so much as a hiccup in the supply of weapons from the U.S. (and other allies, including Germany). To behold the photos and videos of Gaza’s destruction is to view the non-state world with “a purity and distinctness” nowhere else apparent. Unlike most of the other subjects of my reporting, from Kurdish resistance fighters to stateless boat people in the South China Sea, those in Gaza cannot flee. We are witnessing the attempted eradication of a population that is utterly trapped: they have nowhere else to go.
If there is any response other than passive hopelessness, it is action without hope, a commitment to “fight forever,” as the Palestinian Youth Movement writes in New Inquiry. On the far side of October 7,
hundreds of thousands have been mobilized, joined new organizations, confronted the campus and the state. They have Gaza to thank for this, but it is not enough. Israel is the model for a global future, of fully-realized 21st century fascist nations. Its blueprint is in reinforcing duality with the American security state: the same technologies, strategies, and rationalizations will be brought to bear on coming waves of climate refugees and the lumpenproletariat who will strain the edges of the prison or ghetto. The consolidation of the means of mass death production in the hands of the ruling class and their media accomplices is a convalescent prologue to the coming decades of catastrophe.
xo,
Ben
[*Elsewhere translated as “There is no pity here” and “Here, pity lives when it is dead to these”.]