Inferno XVI, 124

Sempre a quel ver c’ha faccia di menzogne
de’l’uom chiuder le labbra fin ch’el puote,
però che sanza colpa fa vergogna;

ma qui tacer nol pooso;

To a truth that bears the face of falsehood
a man should seal his lips if he is able,
for it might shame him, through no fault of his,

but here I can’t be silent.¹

Dante’s rhetoric swells just as Virgil summons a mythical monster from the abyss. He then swears to us, his readers, that he saw the monster with his own eyes, even though he must have known that we would know that he didn’t see it. But he doesn’t tell us why he couldn’t seal his lips, and we are left to guess what truth he’s trying to tell.

There are clues which I’ll try to follow. He swears “per le note di questa comedia” (“by the strains of this Comedy”), not by God or his own honour. And he swears this so that the Comedy will find favour. What he has to say must therefore relate to the whole purpose of the poem. So too does the risk of shame from telling apparent falsehoods: the monster is hardly the first or last fictional part of the poem. He continually risks his reputation as he writes.

This comes soon after Canto XIII, when Dante speaks to Pietro della Vigna, a man with a tarnished reputation. He was chancellor to Frederick II until he was accused of betraying the emperor. He was driven to suicide, he says, out of despair from being falsely accused. As punishment, his soul takes the form of a tree, harassed by harpies. Pietro is presumably innocent of the accusations, since he is in hell for suicide rather than treachery, and in Dante’s telling treachery is the greater sin. He pleads with Dante to restore his reputation among the living. This scene echoes Canto I, when Dante is lost in a dark wood “tant’ è amara che poco più morte” (“so bitter death is hardly more so”). Was he considering suicide before Virgil came to guide him? In any case, Pietro’s story shows us that shame can lead to despair.

The problem for Dante is that he might be misinterpreted. He isn’t lying to us when he says that he saw the monster with his own eyes, but it’s easy to understand him that way. His message is intricate and subtle, whereas a literal reading (or misreading) of each verse is easier to understand. If Dante understood this, but wrote anyway, it’s because he believed in the power of poetry to renew our life.² The poet Virgil, he says, rescued him from the dark wood and is guiding him home.³ They are headed toward heaven, to see Dante’s beloved Beatrice. Since Dante also acts as the reader’s guide in narrating the Comedy, reading his poetry is itself a pilgrimage. He wants us to reflect on human life, which means confronting monsters and learning the fates of different people. It also means learning for ourselves the straight path which Dante had lost, the one guided by true art and love. This, I think, explains the refrains from so many of the damned souls Dante meets, either asking that he send a message to the living, or saying that he’s lucky to be able to leave hell unscathed. And it explains why the monsters guarding the ways deeper into hell, each of which has associations with some human vice, try to keep him from going on. Maybe it also explains why Dante feels such sympathy for the souls he meets, though I’m not sure.

The language appropriate for this pilgrimage is poetry, rich in metaphor and allusion. So Dante seems to be arguing. Somehow the language of treatises and clear argument isn’t adequate.⁴ We need to risk the shame of being misinterpreted to get at what matters. This thought haunts me a little, not because I have any distaste for poetic language, but because whenever I abandon the language of clear arguments, my writing feels contrived and unfocused, like there is nothing behind the face of falsehood that it’s wearing. But I’ve often felt something similar about the arguments I’ve written: what I’m saying may be true and focused (after long hours of hard work to make it so), but it has no obvious bearing on anything that matters. It has lost another kind of clarity, the kind which Dante so masterfully captures in his Comedy. And fearlessly, too, since he knows what he risks.