Where Grimdark Got Its Start

The Divine Comedy, Volume 1: Inferno by Dante Alighieri
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My score of 4 is a bit of a fudge. As a world classic, you'd think it deserves a time-tested 5. Based on how fun it is to read (not very) it's probably a 2 or maybe a 3, and even that is due more to curiosity more than genuine reading pleasure. But the version I read--the Penguin classic--is very useful, with excellent notes throughout and helpful drawings, making the reading much easier, and that support makes me give this volume an overall 4. You wanna read the Inferno? This edition works for that.

As a story, it reads like fantasy, though there's no real plot--no main conflict, no real danger or trouble for the main character. But at least it's in a fanciful, exotic setting, if horrible, and that imagination is probably the most interesting part of the work for me. It wasn't meant to be taken as fantasy, though. Even in its time, people knew the story wasn't literally true, of course, and could read it like a dream or vision or guess about hell, but Dante treats his work as if it really could be true, as if the whole thing was mere extrapolation from church teaching. That hell existed was a given. That sinners (as defined by the church) would go to hell was also a given. That they would be punished eternally was the same thing. Exactly what that looked like was an open question; I don't know whether Dante thought he was even in the ballpark, but my guess is he kinda did.

The work serves as spectacle, like reading cosmic horror along the lines of H.P. Lovecraft, allowing the reader to imagine more fully a barely-glimpsed idea of a hidden universe. That alone is a pretty good selling point, back in the day anyway. But it also teaches religious lessons like you'd only find in fire and brimstone preaching like "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Do the right thing or you'll end up like the liars or the gluttons or the scammers in the Inferno. Probably scared a few straight.

For me, though, it reinforces the emptiness of that kind of faith, the kind of faith motivated by fear of eternal, horrible, unrelenting punishment, an idea so evil that it's hard to imagine it held in the same brain as the idea of virtue. What could be more evil than subjecting a sentient creature to horrible pain, not just for a moment or an hour or a year even but for all eternity? Be good or god will have you tortured. Forever. It's beyond my imagination, though it made perfect sense to Dante and a lot of other people for centuries.

There's a lot to think about, anyway, from art to religion to history to government, and even if you've read it before, or pieces of it, Present You might see more here than Old You did. Who knows?

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