650 Dante's Divine Comedy (with Joseph Luzzi)

The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglamourate Network and LitHub Radio. Looking to strengthen your health and wellbeing, tune in to the Dr. Tina Show, one of Apple Podcast's top alternative health shows. I'm Dr. Tina Moore, naturopathic physician and chiropractor, and I cover topics like metabolic health, chronic diseases, pain management, and more, with expert interviews and solo episodes. They keep it known on-sense with a science-backed approach to empower you to improve your health and resilience. New episodes every Thursday, produced by Drake Peterson and Wellness Loud. Hello, today on the podcast, the life and times of Dante's soaring poetic allegory of the soul's redemptive journey toward God. Plus, a legendary filmmaker provides a cautionary tale for why not to bribe a fortune teller. That's coming up today on the History of Literature. Okay, here we go. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson, your host. Thank you everyone for being here and for being you in general. I'm glad that's who you are. I grew up fascinated with Peter Sellers, mostly because of the pink Panther movies when he played Inspector Cluzo. I was too young to see those in the theater, but they played on television a lot on those weekly movies on one network or another, and my dad was a good laffer. He still is a good laffer. There's nothing quite as fun as watching something British and dumb with my dad, Mr. Bean, for example. Well, that's not dumb exactly, but you know what I mean? Slapstick. My dad will laugh hard and loud when some brits getting a pie in his face. Cluzo cracked us up, and then I got into the Beatles, and those guys were huge fans of Peter Sellers too from the Goon show. There was a really awkward moment when Peter Sellers came to visit the studio during the Let It Be sessions. You can see that on the Peter Jackson film. Sellers was, he was kind of a strange guy. A great actor and comedian I mean truly brilliant, like Daniel Day Lewis crossed with the Robin Williams, but also someone who in real life was a little frightening, almost psychotic, seeming. To me, he was, he's a fascinating creature. He died age 54, quite young, but legendary with Dr. Strangelove and Cluzo, the Goon show, Lida being there quite a career. His parents were in the theater. He was on stage at two weeks old. He claimed to have no identity outside of his acting parts. That was him. And he does seem like kind of a blank sometimes. And drugs and alcohol and depression fed into all of that. I didn't know any of that when I was watching Inspector Cluzo, but maybe I intuitive it because I believed that he was Cluzo. He was such a good actor. It was hard to see him as anything, but the parts he was playing as he himself felt. When I got a little older, I also grew fascinated with the director of the Cluzo movies. That was a huge fan of the sound of music. That movie is in my DNA and Julie Andrews was like my nanny/loveinterest from the age of I don't know how far back that goes. Five. And she was married to this guy Blake Edwards. She would talk about him on talk shows and things. And then I learned that he directed the Cluzo movies and there you go. The most interesting man in the world suddenly married to Mary de Maria and directing Cluzo. And he directed ten. Another movie I wasn't allowed to see. And something with John Ritter that was kind of risqué and all these movies were a little too risqué for me to go and see. They seemed smart and funny and grown up and had nudity apparently or something that a nine year old wasn't allowed to know about. So Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers. And then I grew up and these guys weren't really heroes of mine. But I retained that nostalgia for the time that they had been when I was nine or ten. And then here's something I just learned. I hadn't heard this story before. Blake Edwards was saying that he desperately wanted Peter Sellers to do a sequel to the Pink Panther movie. So the Pink Panther movie Sellers was kind of a bit player in that. David Niven was the star but Sellers ran away with the show and they wanted him to do the sequel and he wasn't sure he wanted to do it. So Blake Edwards found out that Peter Sellers went to see he was going to see to visit a psychic medium. So he bribed this medium to tell Peter Sellers at their say on or their session that someone with the initials be will become very important to you be like Edwards. And then Peter Sellers met Swedish actress Britt Eklund, a bond girl and they were married within weeks. Careful with what you wish for be be be might not be be be be. We don't need a psychic medium to tell us that we have a great guest today and a great topic. Dante's divine comedy a biography. This is what I love about literature a biography of a great book that is right up my alley. There should be more of these. I've read the work. Dante's divine comedy. I've learned all about the author. Those are usually the first two things I do. Sometimes the order is reversed and I read criticism. So I know more about what it is than I'm reading. But if you truly love literature or a particular author or a particular work and in the case of Dante and the divine comedy, I can say yes to all three of those. Then there's another thing that might interest you and that's how this book has made its way in the world. What did it mean for people who first read it? What did it mean for the people who came later? We did a similar exercise with the Bible. Not too long ago, these great books that have a life of their own across space and time in different eras, different groups of people with different needs and desires and responses to that great book that fascinates me. And it's what our guest Joseph Lootsie has written a book about. We'll talk to him about it after this. [Music] Okay, joining me now is Joseph Lootsie who is a professor of literature at Bard College. His past books include Botticelli's Secret, The Lost Drawings and the Rediscovery of the Renaissance. And in a dark wood, what Dante taught me about grief, healing and the mysteries of love. He's here today to discuss his book Dante's Divine Comedy, A Biography. Joseph Lootsie, welcome to the history of literature. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here. So I love the approach that you've taken with this book, which is to look not only at the divine comedy itself, but at how it's been received throughout the years. It's actually kind of why I started the podcast because I'm interested both in the work of literature as well as the impact that it's had on different people at different time. I find that fascinating. But before we dig into that, I wanted to ask you about your own relationship with Dante. When did you start reading Dante? So if I look back to my first encounter with Dante, I can say that ever since I started reading books seriously in high school, I was aware of the name. And of course, you know, I have an Italian background. So Dante always kind of loomed large. My parents had immigrated from Italy in the late 1950s. And my younger sister and I were born in the United States. But we had four older siblings that were born in Italy, both my parents were born in Italy. So it was kind of like the lost homeland. So we stuck in my mind. When I finally got there for the first time was on a junior abroad program when I was an undergraduate. And I went to Calabria where my family sprung. Oh, yeah. And I met my uncle, my uncle, George, Joe. And he had never, you know, he had been a, I think he'd been a shepherd and he'd been a a rail worker and had never really studied in school in his life. But when I told him that I was starting to read Dante, you know, seriously for the first time, I'll never forget he looked at me and he said, Dante. And then he said La Bocca solevo dal furopasto. He quoted the inferno. As he was the inferno, this famous moment when in Uguilino who's cannibalizing his enemy, Archbishop Regiri in Hell in Inferno, that's the line is he lifted up his mouth from the savage meal. And I was like, wow, this is, and maybe that was a kind of signal that Dante was so part of culture in Italy that my uncle could quote a line of it verbatim and never having studied him. And that was the time I was really starting to fall under the spell of Italian literature and Italian culture. I went to Florence as an under, you know, in a junior or a broad program. In an odd way, I never really left because I came back, had no plans to be a professor of Italian literature to do anything with it. But when it came time to choose a career and a program of study later on in graduate school, I was increasingly drawn to Italy, Italian culture and Italian literature. And so I think of that first encounter with Dante in Florence as an undergrad was not literally the first moment that I began to, you know, was it like, I knew that I was gonna be a Dante scholar, but it definitely something clicked then that kept me coming back to the poem over the years. - Yeah, I love that because it's kind of like, we all know when we open up Dante, we will learn something about Dante, we'll learn something about Christianity, we'll learn something about, you know, what it meant to be alive in 1300 and all of that, but to also have such a direct inspiration of that you're going to learn something about people who are alive today. And obviously there's a corner of your uncle's mind that has been occupied by Dante. You know, I think it was interesting to hear about your own interest in reception. A reception sounds like such a technical literary term, but how a work is read over time, but I think we, you know, I'm meeting you for the first time here on the air as we're discussing, but I think those of us who are interested in reception, the more I think about it, 'cause my dissertation in graduate school ended up being on Dante's reception. And I'm always fascinated by how literature lives in the present tense. And I think those of us who love literature who are believers in it, I think we're naturally drawn to reception because it's how books are constantly remade and reinvented. You know, Shelley, who was a brilliant Dante scholar, Percipes Shelley, the English poet, in his defensive poetry from, I think it was 1821, said something along the lines, "A great poem is a fountain forever flowing with the waters of wisdom and delight, and once one generation has tasted of it, you know, another comes." I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but you get the gist of it. It's that sense of this remarkable capacity for renewal that paradoxically great works have, because they don't change. You know, they're the same thing. And yet we, and what's amazing about work on Dante's reception to see how differently he's been read it different times, even to the point where at times he wasn't read in the Enlightenment, Tbilteir, really in French critic in the age of rationalism, said famous read in 1755, no one reads Dante anymore. 'Cause he sort of didn't really speak to that culture, which was much more rationalist, which was, you know, rejected the Middle Ages and supposedly dark ages, that was the fiction that sort of arose in the Enlightenment. And it was, Dante was rescued during the romantic age, and we've really never looked back since that, since the 19th century, his popularity has pretty much remained a constant. But I always tell my students, the state of these books is never fixed. We're, yeah, it's up to you, up to us, in the present tense, to read them or not read them. And if there's no law, as we have to read Dante or even Shakespeare, you know, if we don't, they will disappear. And that I think is surprising for a lot of, especially young readers who, you know, they hear these names that they have all the cultural weight of statues, but literary works are much more fragile than that. They depend on us to keep them alive. Right. So I get the impression with some authors that they do think, you know, I want to write something that's going to be read, I don't know if anybody is quite as arrogant as to say 700 years from now, but certainly they think, you know, I'm not writing this for this year only, I'm expecting future generations to read it and so on. Where was Dante in that? Do we have a sense of whether he was writing for his contemporaries or if he thought, maybe I won't be understood for a while, but posterity is going to find me or what do you think he had in mind when he was writing? - It's a really good question. I think it's an important question too, because you sort of diagnose that pushing pull that authors feel on the one hand, they want to be read. You know, they want to sort of have an audience of the present tense. On the other hand, they also, you know, they want their work to last, they want it to speak to the future to posterity. I think Dante was very, very conscious of that. So what happened to Dante was that he was a good writer. He had written a beautiful book called the "Vitain-Wolva" when he was in his 20s, which I'm actually, I translated this coming out in December, right after this book on Dante's Reception. And so that established his reputation as one of Florence's leading writers. He was also a major politician. He became prior, which is highest elected official in the city. So he had a rich life as a political and a cultural figure. Everything changed for Dante in 1302 when he was exiled. And at that point, he lost everything. You know, he lost his city Florence, which is like losing his homeland. He wandered throughout Italy for the rest of his life, for the last 20 years of his life. And a few years into his exile, he started writing the divine comedy. We don't know how or why, but we can kind of date it around 1306, 1307, so four or five years into his exile. And he worked on it for the rest of his life. He finished right around close to when he died in 1321. So over a decade, we'll call it, of working on this 14,000 plus line poem. I think at a certain point, two things happened. One, portions of it were starting to be read. And so some people were aware of it. Two, I think by the time he got to Paradiso, there's a sense that he knew he had written something next year. Right. There's this beautiful moment in Paradiso 25, where he says, should it ever come to pass that this sacred poem, that's what he calls it, "Sakurapaleima," to which heaven and earth have both set their hand so that it is made to be leaned for many years, should overcome the cruelty that bars me from the fair sheepfold, where I slept as a lamb, which he's referring to Florence there. So, you know, this idea of having written a sacred poem, I think he knew, or by that time, that this was truly an ethical work that he had written. I heard a story once that Picasso went to see some of his paintings that were hanging in the museum in Madrid. And it wasn't until he saw them kind of on the same walls as Goya and Velasquez that he-- The story I heard was that he broke down in tears and said, they fit, they belong. And you do think that Dante, probably by the time he got there, because the poem is so ambitious and so well executed, that he probably thought, you know, this is on a scale with the Aniad or Homer. I guess he had access to Homer as well. I know he had access to Virgil, obviously, but he probably thought this is the kind of work that lasts through the centuries. This is a really interesting point. So he definitely-- Virgil's his favorite author. He's memorized parts of the Aniad. Virgil is his guide in Hell, which is a really unusual choice to make a pagan poet. The poet of those who had persecuted the Christian, Bedbimto the Lion, is your guide. But it shows you just how much Dante loved and revered Virgil and the Aniad. So the Aniad is his role model. He doesn't re-greak. So he doesn't really have access to Homer. He has a sense of who Homer was and what his work was. There were circulating in the Middle Ages. There were sort of crude summaries of the original text. So it's really Greek literature's off-limits to him. But Latin literature and the great name of antiquity, he's certainly aware of. And even as a young man, when he wrote the beat in "Wolva," he was-- the amazing thing about Dante, you mentioned the word ambitious. he was ambitious from the beginning of his career. he saw himself on the ground. kind of cultural mission. The language of the learned is Latin. He would have found more readers writing in Latin because Latin could be written in Paris, in Germany, and you know, throughout Europe, in England, Dante writes in Tuscan. Why? I think for two reasons. One, and one is my intuitive sense. He knew he could really talk about the soul and the questions that really matter in a kind of scholarly language. You know, that was fine for treatises, that was fine for learned dispositions, but for intimate poetry, it had to come from the heart, had to be in his own language. And secondly, he was on a mission to establish Tuscan. Flash, there was no such thing as Italian back then, so we'll call it the Italian dialect Tuscan, as a language of culture. So he is on a mission. He's not just writing a book. He wants to write a book in a language that is going to be the start of something. And so that is really risky because in a way, he was sort of limiting himself. Who could read Tuscan? It's his people in Tuscan. And yet he bet that this book would be so great and engaging that it would soon be translated into other languages, it would circulate, it would circulate Italy and he was right. He won that bet. But he could have failed. And I always, that's another thing I tell my students, remember, great writers, great artists, they're so often rule-breakers and risk-capers. We see them now, the finished product, the burnished placks and marbles and statues, but it could have gone very differently, had those very risky bets not paid off. Right. And it shows what kind of confidence he has in his own judgment because he must know there will be a sizable number of people who just won't get over the idea that it's in this regional dialect instead of in Latin. And we'll just dismiss it without even engaging with it. And that those people could be very influential people. And to be able to sort of say, well, I could take the easy path where I know I won't get that criticism, but I have a reason for doing what I'm doing. And so I'm going to stick to it, even though I know not everyone will get it, not everyone will understand why I'm not doing it that way. You're so right. I mean, think about it. One of the founders of the Renaissance, Petrarch. So, Dante dies in 1321. Petrarch is born in 1304. And so by the mid-1300s, we have a strong sense of this new Renaissance humanism, these writers like Petrarch and Volcaccio who are returning to antiquity, celebrating man's secular life, all those things that we associate with the Renaissance. Petrarch, he criticized Dante because he was in this kind of war with him. Dante had died. Petrarch wanted to be number one. And he knew that his biggest challenger was the ghost of Dante. And so he would make these cutting remarks like Dante was a great philosopher, but he was also a vernacular love poet, which is like a total put down. He wrote these beautiful poems about love in Cuskin. And so Petrarch was like a serious language that he's Latin. So his plan was to go down in history as the heir to Virgil by writing this long epic poem called "Africa," "Africa," about Cipio-Africanus and in the Punic War. It turned out to be a complete miscalculation. No one really today reads that poem unless you're a specialist in Petrarch, even then you're not likely to spend much time on it. What do they read of Petrarch? His vernacular love poetry. He comes to Laura that he kind of kept hidden from the world and didn't think we're going to make his reputation. So I think you're absolutely right. I think what Petrarch really was jealous of and Dante, and he had a much better life than Dante. Petrarch was this famous scholar. He was always getting these prestigious appointments. He was very well-known and he lived a kind of cushy life abroad in France. I think Petrarch saw that Dante had this sense of cultural mission that was unstoppable. And the faith that Petrarch, though he professed to be Christian and certainly wrote about his faith, Petrarch never had Dante's burning conviction as a Christian writer that's on every page of the divine comedy. So who was giving Dante praise that could make Petrarch jealous? So we're talking now, I guess, about the few decades after Dante's death. Was the divine comedy being recognized by scholars or church leaders or lay readers, I guess, as a possibility since it was written in Tuscan, or who was making the book popular in a way that would make Petrarch uncomfortable? It's a great question because Dante, he dies with his reputation on the ascent. The word has gotten out about this amazing poem that he'd written. He dies in 1321. By 1399, there's already over 800 manuscripts of the divine copy in circulating in Tuscan. A lot in Florence, but not just Florence, Tuscan even into Bologna. We find notes made by professional workers in the manuscript quoting Dante. And it's the poem he's basically sick of him as kind of the medieval version of a bestseller. 800 doesn't sound like that much, but their hand written manuscript. And long. Yeah. And they're long. So after his death, his reputation just takes off. He's taught in the schools, especially in Florence. He's revered as this cultural icon. He's always had a kind of popular appeal. I think that's what Petrarch's appeal was sort of the academic crowd. Petrarch, I think of it today, there's those writers that the critics love, that the scholars love, that don't sell a ton of books, right? That's sort of, that was Petrarch's crowd. And then there's writers that for whatever reason, touch a nerve and their work circulates in the people of them, even though their work is very demanding. So there was this, I think it was published in the late 1300s. It's called "Les Chentos Noveslèles", the 300 stories by this writer called "Saccape". And in his stories, in one story, there's a garbage man basically who's going around Florence picking up the trash and singing the divine comedy while he's doing his work. And another one of blacksmiths is hammering away his tools. And he's also chanting the divine comedy. So that shows you Dante's popular appeal. But with so fast things that in both stories, Dante's really upset with both the garbage man and the blacksmith because they're messing up his poetry. When he takes the blacksmiths tools and throws them in the street, he gets into a kind of shouting match with the garbage man. So it shows you Dante's personality with very, very volatile. Now, before we move on into throughout the decades, I wanted to talk about a few things that might be common themes that we're going to see. And one of them is the religious aspects, or the church's attitude toward the palm, or because it strikes me that for most readers, they bring into it a religious viewpoint that unlike some other works, you really can't deny that side of yourself when you're reading it, whether it's, you know, but I guess what I'm wondering is, was Dante viewed as a prophet? Was this viewed as he is delineating hell, purgatory, and heaven, and you know, this is sort of officially sanctioned. And this is what it's like. This is the structure. Or was it, was he ever viewed as blasphemous? Or was he viewed as, you know, well, this is all a work of a fevered imagination. And it's fascinating, but we can view it as kind of a metaphor. Or how do the different audiences deal with the religious aspects of the work? So my answer is to your questions, all of the above. All of that. There was debates in Dante studies and Dante criticism was Dante like a prophet, you know, who had a vision and set it down the way that religious figures will get a vision of something and record it for posterity. Who was he a poet? Who was writing about religious things, but using his imagination? That's always, and a more, as we interpret Dante in a more secular world, the sentiment certainly swings towards him being a poet who was interested in religious and theological issues. But that doesn't change the fact that throughout history people have taken that question about Dante's gay gift or lack thereof of prophecy very seriously. There's this one famous article by an Italian Collins. Bruno Nadvi, an ARGI who wrote an essay called Was Dante a Prophet. And his answer was, you know, he was, he just wasn't a very good one. That's all the things that he predicted in religious terms. None of them ever came out, but the religious intent was there. So there's that tension in reading Dante. You know, we can call it the "Seal Lojin vs. the Poet." There's the reaction to Dante and the 1300s Dominican by the name of the Rnani. Made Dante basically a personal enemy. He criticized Dante for being blasphemous. He called him one of the devil's vessels. And he, interestingly enough, it was not the divine comedy, but the convivio, which is Dante's work about politics, where Dante argued that the emperor, and the Pope should split control of the world, the emperor would control all secular politics and the Pope would control religion. And a lot of religious people did not like that. They didn't like the Pope having to share with anybody. So Dante was condemned for that by this individual. What's interesting to me in writing the book, though, is just how much kind of freedom and latitude Dante's religious vision was given. Because it really is a transgressive one if you think about it. He nominates himself to go to Heaven Hall in Brewery. A. B. He makes Beatrice Beatrice. You know, this sort of. Yeah. She's hanging out with the Virgil. She's spending time with the Virgin Mary. Right. Right. We have no record of Beatrice's actual religiously. Yeah. We can assume she was religiously. We have no record of her being a saint. We have no record of her being this exalted religious figure. Dante makes her that. Yeah. So there are a lot of perks. I mean, a lot of idiosyncrasies to Dante's religious vision that kind of escaped censorship. My sense is that most people read it. And they understand this isn't a work of doctrine. It's a poem. And it's a work of imagination. And that the poet took some liberties. I think the most visceral reactions to the poem came from people whose family Dante had put in hell. When Bocaccio was asked, and Bocaccio was other great writer who was a jacameran in the mid-13th hundreds when he was asked to lecture on Dante in the 1370s. He got a lot of grief for it. Some said that Dante's religious vision was too idiosyncratic, too unusual. But other people just didn't like Dante because they were descendants of people who he had put in hell. You're not going to make a lot of friends if you do that. So he definitely, definitely, been a divisive figure for both his religious views and his political views. And his, I think it's part of our own push in poor with Dante. Shlagel, the great HW Shlagel once said, we are both at one with Dante yet divorced from him because of our modern understanding. And I think by that he meant we don't live in that categorical world most of us. And I think that's the only way to understand the relationship between the two of us. And I think that's the only way to understand the relationship between Dante and Shlagel. Because it's different from our own world, you should, thankfully, more relativistic on a lot of these issues. Dante's world view was cut and dry. And what I would say is proof of that is of all the canticles, the one that people read the most by far is hell. Not even close. Right. Inferno. We're drawn to inferno much more than purgatory, although poets especially love purgatory. And paradiso, which T.S. Eliot said, is the most beautiful poetry ever written. And which I also agree, I think is probably the most beautiful of all three canticles. But it's very, very, it's tough. There's a lot of doctrine in there. It's incredibly demanding intellectually, but has sublime poetry in it. And yet, you know, most people would rather find out about the sin, transgression, punishment. Because we can all relate to that, those weaknesses, those foibles, those frailties, hell is filled with such fascinating characters. And they remind us of our world. Right. And we can believe in punishment and judgment and accusations and seeing people get there, they're just desserts, even if we don't necessarily believe that there is a heaven that we will ascend to. And this is what we need to do to get there. And so on. It appeals to people on a kind of secular level as well, I think. Yeah, I think it's a world of absolute order. However you want to interpret it. You may not agree with it. You may find elements of it. Think of Kanto 5, the famous Kanto 5, Colin Francesca, or Kandemps, essentially for falling in love. That's something that doesn't really resonate with our world today. So there's certainly moments of where Dante seems cool or categorical. But I do think there's something about the appeal of a, the internal logic of Dante's universe. Even if it's not a universe, we would want to inhabit. I think that is a, that does draw people, especially to inferno. Okay, let's take a quick break and then come back with more from Joseph Lutzie. Okay, we're back. So Joseph, we talked about religion as being one of the things that we will see throughout the centuries of reception to Dante's work. But there was one other thing I wanted to ask you about because it also seems like this is going to be a recurring theme. And that is, we've already touched on it without specifying it or without saying it directly. That is the, in your words that for Dante, the words poetry and persona were inseparable. And I feel like we were touching on that when we talked about him putting his enemies in hell and the family's being upset or him using Beatrice as kind of this radiant figure who's presiding over heaven and so on. I've always found that to be a real draw for me that this is that I like seeing that because by the time I'm working my way through the poem, I just find Dante to be so charismatic. And I want to know more about him. And this isn't exactly an autobiography or anything like that, but it does feel like there's a personal touch here that comes through in the prose. So how have people responded to that? That's a great question. You're right. The word autobiography would have meant nothing to Dante. It wasn't by any stretch of imagination writing a memoir or anything like that. At the same time, you know, he's one of these writers. Do you think of James Joyce? You think of Proust? Would they have this one project that consumes them? They're not writing different books. They're basically writing one book, variations on it. Everything Joyce writes pretty much is about his relationship to Dublin, his relationship to English and other languages. And so you have this body of work, which revolves around this one figure, Stephen Deadlylis in so many different forms. We see a portrait of the artist. We see it in the Elysees, et cetera, et cetera. Portrait of the artist is a young man. And Dubliner is also all those stories about Joyce's Dublin. He's writing at a distance about Dublin from his exile. Proust, you have this remarkable cycle of novels in his search of lost time. I think Dante is very similar because the thing about Dante is pretty much everything he wrote throughout his life was a kind of reworking of trying to have an understanding of himself and his place in the world. He wasn't always writing about himself. He wrote a brilliant language treatise, David L. Garry eloquenty, which basically means unelequence and number of acuilers. One of the things of it is a history of the romance languages and trying to understand Italian/Tuskin in the dialect of Italy. He wrote a philosophical treatise, the convivio, he wrote Daemon Arquia, which is about government. But they're all so personal, all these works. So if you think of his first work, the Bikin-Wolva, which is autobiographical, in his last work, the Divine Comedy, which is deeply about his life. about the Dante the person. You have this entire body of work that is trying to make sense of Dante's understanding of his place in the world, his soul, his personal history, how it relates to his history writ large. And yet, what's amazing about it, as my advisor, Josephi Matsota, so beautifully wrote, Dante is also an encyclopedic poet. He writes about history, he writes about politics, he writes about ancient literature, medieval literature. There's so many different things that are, so he has what I would call a prismatic sense of the self. It's not like, you know, Rousseau's confessions where he's just plumbing the depths of the interiority, that that would have been completely alien to Dante. He's writing about himself as it relates to all these different matrices. And I think that's so fascinating. It's always about a self and dialogue with the world. So I think those two terms, poetry and persona kind of sum it up for Dante, because it's the poem that brings everything together. It's his great mature work, the divine comedy. And yet, it's Dante's at the center of it, you know, Dante the poet, and Dante the character. And it's sort of a summation of his entire life's work. I think some writers are just obsessed by a set of issues that drive their entire career. And all their works are a meditation on that set of questions, rather than writing one book here and other book there. There's a kind of consistency and a coherence in Dante's lifelong project. And I think that relationship between poetry and his own self is persona sits at the center of that. So how did you go about organizing yourself in putting together this book? I mean, we're talking about seven centuries and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of different responses. Did you select some of your favorites? Did you, did you divide it into periods and eras? Or how did you go about constructing a biography of the divine comedy? It was a very challenging book to write. And I, it's not a long book, but it took me a long time to write it. And what happened was that, you know, when I started the book, I was at a part in my career where I was in the early stages of my career. I was focused on intensely scholarly work. And then at a certain point, I changed direction a little bit and started to write for more general audiences. So there was a kind of transition in my own career. I was still doing scholarship and still drawn to that, but I was also very much committed to writing in a way that was accessible to non-specialists, non-ecidentic audiences. So this book is almost a diary of that because it started when I was more in the scholarly camp. And as I moved to more general writing, the book took that trip with me. And what I would say is that I struggled with putting all this material together, getting into a managed before. Because the book could have run into the tens of thousands of pages. And also there's a lot of wonderful work on different areas of Dante's reception. That's been an area of study for centuries. So what happened was I decided to do two things. One, I couldn't cover everything. So I was going to try to cover everything. So instead I wanted to tell a story. And so because I've been writing more narrative based work. So I thought, let's write a book in which the chapter is kind of establishing implicit conversation with one another. Where there's a relationship between them where ideas that have developed and one chapter picked up in another so that the book reads, it has this kind of implicit narrative holding it together. And second, I picked these reppers, I call them, you know, "Topoli." Going back to the idea of the topos, this kind of specific patterns that we find in Dante. These things that recurring ideas, recurring motifs that allow us basically to map Dante. So Dante as a hero for those who are suffering. That was part of my chapter on Premolevi, Antonio Gromshi, and also Mondelstam. Dante as a linguistic experimenter. That was sentry to my chapter on the Modernist Poets like Yates and Modernist Riders like Joyce and PSL. So and then Dante as a religious thinker was a big part of my chapter on how the papacy has read Dante. And then just to give you one more example, Dante as the embodiment of an intensely visual imagination. I talked about how film directors, especially O'Turk film directors and visual artists have responded so powerfully to Dante's work. So I tried to find those topo, those sort of larger patterns, those larger points of critical mass around Dante that helped me shift as it were seven centuries of robust and intense interpretation. Between 1950 and 1970 alone, one scholar calculated that there were 10,000 articles written on Dante. So that gives you a sense of just how much material is out there. And I think once I let go of the need to say it all, then I said, okay, I know this is going to be subjective. I know stuff is going to be left out, but this will just be my story, my take. And going back to your question, I think I didn't really think about it until now, but these were the episodes that most affected me as a reader. And as someone who loves Dante, you know, the ones that stayed with me when I think of Gromschy meditating on Dante as a fascist, kept him in prison when I think of Mendelstom, you know, as a medical piece of gulag, Stalin puts him in and Dante's central to his work when I think of Primo Levi in Auschwitz meditating on Dante and thinking about Dante as he struggles to stay alive. These were deeply affecting to me. And those of these of the episodes I decided to write about of my book. Where do things stand today? Would you say, do you think that are you able to kind of see the 21st century and the readership and to see how our responses might fit into the pattern that you've been seeing with the responses to Dante throughout the years? I still think we are in a romantic mode of reading Dante. By that I mean, the romantic celebrated Dante as a hero. Rightly so. I mean, he's an incredible story. He endures exile. He writes his great poem, but for the Romantics in the early 19th century, Dante was the poet of exile, the poet of endurance, the poet of overcoming all the odds, the poet of zero. And that really appeals to American readers going back to the creation of the American Dante society in Cambridge and Harvard in the mid 19th century by Longfellow and that illustrious group. People like Emerson had translated the Vieta Noelle in the 1840s. So there's always been that sense of Dante in the American culture as the great individual, the great heroic poet. So I still think we're in that where that's so shadows are long that the romantic Dante cast. I still think in a way I think it's great because he's very, it's a very charismatic image. People, most students I know are most lay readers I know aren't pouring over the doctrine of paradiso. They're drawn to Dante at this kind of larger than life figure with a dressed in crimson and enjoy the style of the view of the real life. Yeah, that kind of someone not to mess with. And you know what, I think it's probably good for Dante's enduring reputation that he has such a kind of charisma and this public relations machine behind him that is sort of you know celebrating him as a person. You know, we can't really separate Dante from his poem. Of course it's not like Shakespeare there's so many plays, so much to draw from. But with Dante, there's that one massive work. And you know, you can kind of compare it to a writer whose fate hasn't been as robust as Dante, who also wrote an extraordinary epic poem, religious poem, "Fick of Milton," you know, John Milton, who actually has an astonishing story. He went blind and he wrote the Pirate Sloth when he was blind, which is a remarkable achievement. And yet, Pirate's loss is red, less and less, whereas Dante's reputation seems to keep taking off. I come across so many references, Dan, in popular culture and literature. I mean, I just read James Pizzer's "The Pole," which is inspired by the "Vitain Lola," and Jesban Ward's "Let us descend," which has a lot of references to Dante. So I see so many surging signs of life of Dante's reputation and contemporary culture. Do you find the same? Yeah, I do. And I think it's for all the reasons we've talked about. It's funny when you said that it was, we're in an age that still basically is viewing Dante as the heroic poet. And I found that to be so natural I had to check myself and think, well, what else could it be? But as you mentioned, the doctrine, or you could read him in the different ways that you've mentioned. I have a surprise bonus question for you. I just want to go back to one thing you said, because it's so interesting. I could even play demos, I have to give a little bit and say one of the points of the divine comedy is for Dante to overcome his sense of individualism. Because Virgil has to constantly remind him, you know, Dante has a strong opinion of himself. At one point he sees the great writers of antiquity and says, and I was six among so much wisdom. He can really seem like he's touting his own horn. So as the poem progresses, he learns more and more to be humble and to move away from that heroic mode. But it's undeniable that the image that he creates is, it has that appeal. And it continues to enhance so many readers. And the things he's wrestling with are things that we all wrestle with. Even those of us, you know, depending on how Christian you are or not, I think probably changes that calculus a little bit. But I never felt even though I'm not much of a churchgoer, I never felt like I was alienated. I felt like I was on the quest with him and just some of the questions of of morality and the afterlife and and who we are and how we fit into the world. I felt like those were questions. I wanted to know what Dante was asking and the answers that he was finding. It's so true. You know, think about it like the opening of the poem, Nel Medjo del Camino Estravita, Medito Raváipinuna Selvo Escura. In the middle of our life's journey, I found myself in a dark wood. That dark wood is that universal space that unfortunately, you know, we all end up in at some point in our lives. That idea of suffering, crisis, it could be the death of a loved one, it could be an illness, it could be a crushing disappointment in one's career. You know, everyone would fill in the blanks differently. But that is, I think, what makes Dante so appealing across so many different religions and cultures, he's read all over the world. It's certainly not just a poem that is read by Christians. Today, the appeal is so prodigiously broad because he manages, I think, to capture that universal space that so many of us can share. Now, you've read a lot of responses to Dante. And my surprise bonus question is if you could choose one person in history past or present to give us his or her response to the divine comedy, who would you choose? What a great question. The one person who's reading of Dante, you know, that's a great question. There's writers who have addressed Dante directly, you know, you read Chaucer, obviously Milton has read such a strong relationship to Dante, read about them in my book. I always wondered what deep down, if Shakespeare, let's say, took a course on Dante. The one person in the Shakespeare, like, that squirreled himself away from the month and read all of the divine comedy. What would he say? You know, I believe there's been some work on Shakespeare and Dante, but to really get a sense of Shakespeare, if he kind of engaged with the poem directly. And if you say, okay, William, we're going to put you in a room now for a week and no writing. We're going to feed you your few meals a day, but we want you to read all of the divine comedy. What would he have to say about it? I think that would be fascinating because in some way, there's so difference. The idea of religious vision in Dante is so powerful, as Shakespeare, you know, this keeps as that negative capability. He deals with the gray areas of life, love, ambition, all those conflicting emotions. And yet, they have so much in common. They both were brilliant linguistic experimenters. They both were rule-breakers. Didn't play by the rules. Shakespeare rejects at a certain point the unities of time, place, and action, or rights to sprawling tragedies. Dante writes basically, "Invents this genre, the epic poem of the self." If Shakespeare got into the DNA of Dante, what would his thoughts be? I think that would be really fascinating. And, you know, the other thing I would say if I could kind of go into a time machine and create this alternate universe in Dante, as I was writing my book, I would love to see what would happen if and when we ever find the original divine comedy in Dante's hand. Because we don't have it. We've reconstructed the divine comedy based on copies, but that original Dante. What that would be? He imagined the aura of that for the original handwritten text. That would be pretty special. I had a couple of ideas. I need to use the time machine even more than you do because my runner-up was that I wanted to see what Virgil would think of the divine comedy. And my winner was that I wanted to see what Beatrice would have made of it. I like your answers. I thought of Virgil, but then I thought, you know what? I feel Virgil knows Dante somehow. And the weird thing about that is that he's like, they're separated by 1300 years. They seem so intimate buddies. But I was joking with my students. It's like us to Charlemagne. You know, it's that remote 1300 years, but they have this intense bond. But I think that second one is really super interesting. What would Beatrice think? By the way, we know so little about Beatrice. I know. So little. She is a very mysterious figure in history. And Beatrice and the Vieta Nova and Beatrice in the divine comedy are like almost two different people. So it's fascinating to me. I think a lot about this. Who was the real Beatrice? That's a great, great time machine hypothetical journey to take. Yeah. Well, when you get your hands on the original copy of the divine comedy, you and I can go visit Beatrice and hand it off to her and watch her read it. If I do, if I find that original, I'll be able to have a time machine. That's right. I think it would be extremely extremely thought after. I think some of these would be on the phone. Okay, Joseph Lucy. Thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature. Thank you. It's been a lot of fun. I really, I've enjoyed it. Thank you. [Music] Okay, there we go. Dante has been in our archives before with Beth Kaga-Shal and a long ago episode on Lovita Nova. With my dear friend and former guide to all things Italian, Ellen Nuremberg. I don't know that I've had a better period in my life than when I was learning Italian with Ellen and Rebecca. And then I went to Italy and fell in love with every one and everything. That launched me. You can hear my appreciation for it in those two episodes I did with Ellen and Rebecca. Way back when. Again, coming up soon another influential former teacher of mine, Charles Baxter will be here. But before that, we will have a look at the hero's journey revisited for women. Girl protagonists, are they on a journey? Or are they in something called a heroine's "elebrance?" We will find out next time. Speaking of next time, it's that time. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening. And we'll see you next time.