Love - Unfortunate
Dante, Francesca, et al.
I am obsessed with the Inferno. I’ve taught a course and published a bit of scholarship on it, but really I have no expertise on either Dante or the Middle Ages. My relationship with this book is less as a devotee than a first love. I try to put it behind me and move on. But I never really move on, because I’ve never gotten over the initial infatuation. All kinds of improbable things keep bringing me back to it.
This time, the culprits are three books unrelated and very much unlike one another. I just finished Scott McClanahan’s The Sarah Book (mentioned in a previous post), as well as Sharon Old’s beautiful collection of poems about the dissolution of her marriage, Stag’s Leap. Earlier this year I read Marguerite Yourcenar’s spectacular Memories of Hadrian, which got me to reading seriously for the first time the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. McClanahan, Olds, Aurelius. None of them really have anything to do with each other, but, as tends to happen to me, I’ve been starting to think they all have to do with Dante. Mostly, I’ve been thinking about Francesca.
In the Anglophone world, Dante evokes images of devils and sadistic torture. But in Italy, the Inferno’s most harrowing figure is a woman who cheated on her husband and tells us about it in the loveliest of ways. When Life is Beautiful’s Roberto Benigni performs from memory sections of the Inferno—as I saw him do at the Hammerstein Ballroom in 2009—he tends to stick with Francesca. If you’ve read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, you may recall the dalliance between the young monk and the peasant woman. The culmination of that episode is a direct quotation of the final line of Francesca’s canto—e caddi come corpo morto cade. Or, “I fell like a dead body falls” (it’s much prettier in the original). This is the moment when Dante is so overwhelmed by the sad story Francesca just told him that he faints.
By the time Dante began writing the Inferno, the real Francesca da Rimini had been dead some twenty-five years and her story was well known throughout the Italian peninsula. As a young woman, she was contracted into an unhappy marriage to one Gianciotto Malatesta, who murdered both her and his brother Paolo when he caught them in bed together. In the poem, Dante meets Francesca in Canto V, the circle of the Lustful, where she is trapped together with her lover in a violent storm that will batter and break them indefatigably for all of eternity. (Gianciotto, meanwhile, is still alive, but not to worry, as Francesca tells Dante, when her husband dies he’s headed to a much lower, more heinous, part of Hell).
Francesca is among the so-called charismatic sinners of the Inferno—characters whose crimes should make them unsympathetic, but whose stories and speeches win over Dante, as well as us readers.
According to legend, she was duped. It was Gianciotto’s brother Paolo who arranged Francesca’s marriage, and it was Paolo whom she thought she was getting (though how anyone could make this mistake has always duped me). Paolo is better looking—the name Gianciotto is a combination of Giovanni and a word that means “lame,” or “deformed”)—and his crime less grotesque. The one may have slept with his brother’s wife, but that’s nothing compared to a double-murder. Plus, wasn’t Paolo’s crime committed out of love?
That’s the second part of Francesca’s charisma. While her lover stays silent, she recounts her story in the parlance of a Medieval love poem. And it is irresistible. Even Dante, traveling through Hell with his guide Virgil, cannot hold back his pity. At the end of Francesca’s speech, Dante loses consciousness, collapsing to the ground come corpo morto cade—as a dead body falls.
But should he have?
For centuries readers have maintained that Francesca is a positive character. This tradition culminated in the Romantic period, when poets and critics argued that we’re supposed to sympathize with her plight. But the trend in the last few years has been to reverse this stance. Francesca is in Hell. And this is the Middle Ages. Dante is in no position to question God’s judgment, and neither are we. When Dante’s hero faints, he is succumbing to his own frailty. The point of the Francesca episode is not to be swayed, not to succumb to her rhetoric, which, let’s be honest, is very persuasive:
Amor, ch'a nullo amato amar perdona, mi prese del costui piacer sì forte, che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona.Love, which absolves no one beloved from loving, seized me so strongly with his charm that, as you see, it has not left me yet.
As most contemporary critics point out, all this talk of capital-L Love is really Francesca’s way of shirking responsibility. Love did this to me; Love did this to us. But she wasn’t damned for Love. She’s in Hell because of Lust.
And yet, if her crime is so great, why does her punishment seem so tame? —floating around in the air while a storm tosses her about. That’s it? That’s all she gets?
So much of Dante’s underworld teems with unbearable suffering—souls swarmed by insects, bodies ripped in half. That’s the kind of thing that would have been more in keeping with tradition. In Dante’s time, sinners of the flesh were usually depicted undergoing grotesque sexualized tortures. Multiple altarpieces—yes, these would have been the images you’d see when you went to church with your mom—show sodomites impaled on spits and roasted over flames.
But Francesca and Paolo do not have to suffer through such depravities. Instead, their's is a psychological torture. As the two adulterers got caught up in the frenzy of their physical passion, so they will be tossed and turned in a frenzied tempest for all of eternity. Hell has transformed their desires—with all their metaphorical turbulence—into the vehicle of their suffering—a literal storm.
And so, when you peer past Francesca’s sorry tale and her elegant words, when you look a bit closer at Dante’s fainting and the punishments these sinners undergo, you come to the conclusion that this is not a sympathetic depiction of hapless lovers forced to suffer for a crime any other ethical individual might have committed in similar circumstances. What you get, instead, is a depiction of morality giving way to passion and spiritual companionship deforming into carnal desire.
As Martha Nussbaum puts it, Paolo and Francesca “do not regard life as something involving agency or deliberation at all, because they are captivated by the idea of surrender to the forces of passion.”
In other words, don’t feel bad for Francesca.
I buy the argument, in theory. You can convince me that this is the most ethical way to interpret the encounter, even that this is how Dante would have wanted us to interpret it. Dante is definitely a moralist. But, to pilfer a description from Erich Auerbach, he is also a realist, and Canto V is one of the most realistic depictions of passion.
As Francesca says:
Amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende, prese costui de la bella persona che mi fu tolta; e ’l modo ancor m’offende.Love, quick to kindle in the gentle heart, seized this man with the fair form taken from me. The way of it afflicts me still.
Notice how enamored she seems, still. This is Love gone wrong, as told from inside of that wrongness. What convinces me about Francesca’s canto isn’t the wrongness of her passion so much as the insideness of it. The affair has long since past, but the Francesca Dante encounters is not taking stock of her actions with any sense of calm or self-awareness. We are getting a depiction from within the whirlwind of that passion, which has not dissipated and, according to the logic of Hell’s punishment, never will. It is, in fact, her punishment for it never to dissipate, for her to continue to feel the urges that caused her damnation.
Doesn’t being inside love feel like this? —as though the physical laws of the universe were such that there can be no other way to respond to what is happening.
I read the depth of his character, not knowing how else but by beauty to read it,
This is Sharon Olds, describing her initial attraction for her ex-husband in a way that reminds me of Francesca, or anyone else really. Because don’t we all read character that way? At least when we are in the middle of our frenzy? And then time passes and we pass judgment on our lunacy: That wasn’t true Love, we say. But that’s nonsense.
“True love ends when I change,” writes Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “or when the object of affection changes.” If that love transforms into something else, it’s because either you or the other person is now different, not because the initial infatuation was different from what you thought it was.
Dante is messaging us from within the eye of the storm, and forcing us to respond in like manner. When Dante faints, he’s reacting like a besotted lover himself. However wrong that response may be, it’s nonetheless what’s most likely.
The conversation surrounding Francesca has always centered on a kind of resistance. Be better than you believe you can be. Show us that you won’t succumb. As though if Francesca had been stronger she would not have had the affair, and if Dante had been shrewder he would not have felt bad for her. As though what was needed were a kind of stoic resolve. But who on earth can boast of such callous self-sacrifice? Who would ever really want to?
In Stag’s Leap, Olds likens the passion she and her husband once felt to an almost miraculous destiny, as though the spheres had aligned to bring them together:
Maybe it was an arranged marriage, air and water and earth had planned us for each other—and fire, a fire of pleasure like a violence of kindness. … What precision of action it had taken, for the bodies to hurtle through the sky for so long without harming each other.
—until of course, the heavens could keep up that level of precision no longer, until, almost just as inevitably, bodies began hurtling into one another with a new kind of violence.
Dante’s Francesca is a story of an impossible redemption. Did she ever really have a chance? Maybe. According to the dogma of Dante’s time, she could have been saved had she confessed. Alas, her husband burst in and killed her before she could. And now she’s in Hell, where her life’s single consolation has been turned into her eternity’s overriding misery. So what’s the moral? Be stronger? Or just admit you never had a chance and at least try to make the whole thing look good—use some beautiful words to tell your story.
You can tell me that sympathizing with Francesca is not the correct, Christian way to interpret her episode. But you can’t fault me for needing a whole lot of convincing to see it.
A line from Aurelius’ Meditations I think gets at what I’m talking about:
“no one loses any life other than the one he lives, or lives any life other than the one he loses.”
Isn’t this particularly true with Love?
When the spheres seem to align in or out of your favor, are you losing who you are? or no longer pretending who that person could have been? Isn’t the Inferno, and especially Canto V, about this? —about the ways we lose and find ourselves, often time, after it’s too late to do anything more than reminisce.
I’ve been given love and had it withdrawn, and in both cases, it felt like I was losing something that only really became my own after it was gone. Only in memory was it really mine. Francesca I think understands this better than anyone.
PS: The English Dante is the Hollanders’, while the Aurelius comes from Martin Hammond's translation. The title of the essay comes from a recent newsletter by The Honest Broker.