Punishing irony: Virgil's witness in Inferno 4

In Canto 4 of the Inferno, Dante turns to Virgil and asks him a veiled (coperto) question:

“Now tell me, master, tell me this alone,”
I said to him, wishing to be assured
Of that faith by which all doubt is overthrown,
“Have any gone from here and then secured
Salvation, by their own or Another’s fee?”*

Virgil replies:

And he, who understood my covert word,
Said, “This condition was still new to me
When I beheld a Mighty One appear,
Who was crowned with a sign of victory.
He took our first begetter’s shade from here,
With Abel, Noah, and Moses, who did show
The laws to man and how to hold them dear;
King David and Abraham of long ago;
Israel with his father and his seed,
And Rachel, for whose sake he labored so;
And many more, and made them blest indeed.
And I would have you know I can attest
That, before these, no human souls were freed.”*

This exchange is of interest for several reasons. For one, it's the witness of a lost soul to the harrowing of hell and liberation of a select few. Virgil, who had died about 50 years earlier than this event, attests first-hand to the act of a "Mighty One."

ci vidi venire un possente

The event became one of the articles of the Christian creed, but Virgil recounts it  in the words of an honorable Roman. Un possente is a generic term for anyone of power, and, while accurate as far as it goes, it is blank with regard to the unique identity of the Mighty One: the martyred Son of the God of Abraham, fresh from his trial and crucifixion.

Virgil speaks of what he sees. His natural light of human reason can and does report and support the faith Dante and all Christians practice, flowing from Scripture. What Virgil "sees" is veiled to him - the facts are reported, but their full and unique implications are not.

What we as readers find here is something I think Dante the poet does throughout his Comedìa-- a poetic enactment of the profound discontinuity between the light of reason, art and science on one hand, and revelation via the Book, on the other.

In a sense, what the moment does is reproduce Dante's reading of Virgil. In the moment that Virgil voices and demonstrates his authority as teacher, guide, prophet, poet and witness, we find a blindness, a falling short -- the irony of an inescapable ignorance. It is a punishing irony, consigning him to hopeless finality in a half-lit suspense of endless desire, and more ironic because in its helplessness (vis a vis Virgil), it helps Dante overcome doubt.

Dante dramatizes the reality that obtains in a world where human genius, nobility of spirit and incorrigible honor just are not enough. For Virgil and the rest of those in Limbo, what the mind and sense and soul can see, and what the imagination or inspiration can intimate, is merely the outward appearance of a unique event whose full import -- the breaking not of rocks alone, but of the rule of death -- remains "coperto." Another word for that might be "illegible."

We'll want to be on the lookout for further examples of this mode of poetic acting out in the Comedìa. With Revelation comes a shattering literacy.

*From an unpublished translation of the Inferno by Peter D'Epiro.

Euripides' Hippolytus and the powers of fiction

Before Theseus explicitly remands Hippolytus into exile, saying,

Go forth from this land with all speed as an exile, and come no more either to god-built Athens [975] or to the borders of any land ruled by my spear.

Right before saying this, he points to the unimpeachable evidence, the witness whose testimony is irrefutable:

. . . but why do I wage this contest against your speech when this corpse, witness most reliable, lies near?

τί ταῦτα σοῖς ἁμιλλῶμαι λόγοις νεκροῦ παρόντος μάρτυρος ;

We must consider the irony that Hippolytus, who wanted to suppress all women's voices, is here condemned by the "clearest," or "most reliable" [σαφεστάτου] words of a woman who is not merely isolated from all other women. Phaedra, though dead, has testified so authoritatively that Theseus sees any mitigation of the harsh sentence of banishment as tantamount to giving his entire life the lie:

if I am to be bested by you when you have done this to me, Isthmian Sinis shall no longer attest [μαρτυρήσει] that I killed him but say it was an idle boast, and the Skironian rocks near the sea [980] shall deny that I am a scourge to evil-doers.

This is another one of those moments when Euripides takes his theatrical creation to the limit. Just as Hippolytus gets so carried away by his scheme of using wild animals to inhibit women's speech in the city -- a suggestion so ludicrous as to nearly bring laughter -- so here, Theseus, whose entire life story is filled with fabulous tales, says that his own literary identity would be destroyed if he failed to be consistent with it.

It's a bit like Don Quixote in the second volume of Don Quixote having to grapple with the fabled Name he has acquired as a result of a book about his knightly adventures being read by his neighbors. Theseus, a figure of myth, here argues that he must condemn his son because if he did not, the dead monsters of his fables would rise and give him, as we say, the lie. He would no longer be Theseus the slayer of monsters, he would be someone pretending to be that fictional figure. A fictional figure in a play is claiming that if he does not act in accord with his fictional tales, he will be seen to be a fiction.

Theseus, in a sense, would evaporate -- as would the play -- if the spell of the performance were shattered by pointing to itself as a piece of theatrical fiction. The place where this happens in Greek theater is not usually in tragedy, but comedy. At certain moments in the work of Aristophanes, the characters leave and the chorus steps forward (parabanein) and speaks to the audience. The disruption is radical, as the chorus doesn't even talk about things or persons in the play we are watching. This is called the parabasis:

In Greek comedy, the parabasis (plural parabases; Ancient Greek: παράβασις, plural: παραβάσεις) is a point in the play when all of the actors leave the stage and the chorus is left to address the audience directly. The chorus partially or completely abandons its dramatic role to talk to the audience on a topic completely irrelevant to the subject of the play. 

For example, in the play The Wasps by Aristophanes the first parabasis is about Aristophanes' career as a playwright to date, while the second parabasis is shorter, and contains a string of in-jokes about local characters who would be well known to the ancient Athenian audience (e.g. the politician Cleon).

This breaking of the frame, of the illusion's fourth wall, is not unfamiliar to fans of U.S. comedy. Think of George Burns' direct comments to the viewer about the goings-on with Gracie in Burns and Allen, or the hilarious disruptions of story lines found in the films of Mel Brooks, committed by Mel Brooks. The moment they step outside the frame of the fiction and speak as themselves, we laugh as the illusion explodes.

When Theseus claims that Sciron would come alive to testify that he was never killed by Theseus, he is stretched nearly to the edge of his reality. Indeed, if the rocks testify that he was not a scourge -- βαρύν - to evil-doers, they are saying something like this: The root meaning of βαρύν is "weight," or "heaviness," which then extends to the sense of "grievous, stern, strict, deep, serious."

If Sciron's rocks, which are certainly heavy, were to deny Theseus's solid, massive seriousness, then suddenly he and the play itself would lose gravity. Euripidean tragedy is not at the opposite extreme from comedy, it is uncannily near by.

This adjacency becomes more relevant in light of the fact that Theseus is asserting the validity, legitimacy and truth of his own history at the same instant that he is denying all weight to the history and reality of his own son. Standing "face to face" with Hippolytus, Theseus sees only a fiction, a figment invented by Phaedra. The Hippolytus whom Theseus and all of us have known, the priggish devotee of Artemis, is a lie, a thing of no weight, annihilated by the the dead woman's script. The true boy is the lying bastard who raped his father's wife; nothing that he can bear witness to or do will make any difference.

At this moment, Theseus does not step forward, disrupting the scene with some comedic gag that would explode the tensions and gravitas of the play into a shambles. But he almost has. Though he mocks Hippolytus for reading books, Phaedra's little book is as real to him as the tales of Sinis and Sciron. The power of this corpse, witness most reliable, compels Theseus to expel Hippolytus, to put him outside the boundaries of Athens and Troezen forever (symmetrically reversing Hippolytus's expressed wish to banish all women).

Weightless, Hippolytus is sent beyond the fourth wall, outside the framed space of the play and of the state. To his father and friends, it is as if he were to fly off the face of the Earth. States and tragedies cannot exist without gravity, Euripides appears to say. The continuity of the spectacle of Theseus, of the State, and of the Hippolytus is protected, but at a very high cost.

Lair of silent women: Hippolytus's ideal polis

Theseus captures the Bull of Marathon

As Hippolytus unfolds his "argument" regarding women (Hipp. 616-668) -- how if he were Zeus, he'd delete them from human procreation; how they drain their fathers and their husbands, who spend down their wealth adorning these "statues" (ἄγαλμα), he then goes on to offer a singular word picture of how things would stand in his ideal republic:

[645] One ought to let no slave pass in to see a woman. Rather one should companion them with wild and brute beasts so that they would be unable either to speak to anyone or to be spoken to in return. 

But as things are, the wicked ones plot evil [650] within doors, and their servants carry their plans abroad. 

χρῆν δ᾽ ἐς γυναῖκα πρόσπολον μὲν οὐ περᾶν, ἄφθογγα δ᾽ αὐταῖς συγκατοικίζειν δάκηθηρῶν, ἵν᾽ εἶχον μήτε προσφωνεῖν τιναμήτ᾽ ἐξ ἐκείνων φθέγμα δέξασθαι πάλιν.

νῦν δ᾽ αἱ μὲν ἔνδον †δρῶσιν αἱ κακαὶ† κακὰ βουλεύματ᾽, ἔξω δ᾽ ἐκφέρουσιπρόσπολοι.

It's a remarkable bit of poli-sci phantasmagoria: In the ideal city of Hippolytus, women would be kept within. But not simply consigned to the house and away from the realm of public affairs, because that alone would not solve the main problem women present: their power of speech. Woman as the locus of rampant, uncontrollable desire must be prevented from uttering, i.e., outering, her desire. To imprison them and make them literally unspeakable, Hippolytus offers his novel proposal -- worthy, indeed, of Swift's well-intentioned modest Proposer -- that all women be held in solitary confinement, companioned solely by dangerous, biting (δάκη) animals that are ἄφθογγα - "voiceless."

ἄφθογγα δ᾽ αὐταῖς συγκατοικίζειν δάκηθηρῶν

This hyperbolic concept sits strangely alongside the verb συγκατοικίζειν, which carries the sense of colonizing, establishing jointly, a means of living together. It's a perfect word for one attempting to think of how cities, neighbors, even kingdoms can form civil bonds in a world of competition, limited resources, and different values and gods.

Hippolytus is in fact using a term of ancient political theory that was associated with his father, Theseus, from an early time: Synoikismos (Synoecism):

Synoecism  Ancient Greek: συνοικισμóς, sunoikismos, Ancient Greek: [syːnɔi̯kismós]), also spelled synoikism (/sɨˈnɔɪkɪzəm/ si-noy-kiz-əm), was originally the amalgamation of villages in Ancient Greece into poleis, or city-states. Etymologically the word means "dwelling together (syn) in the same house (oikos)." Subsequently any act of civic union between polities of any size was described by the word synoikismos. 

In a way, Theseus was the hero who fostered the idea of alliances, marriages, between political entities, just as he sought to bridge and unite Crete and Athens in marrying Phaedra.

By having Hippolytus echo the language of his father's inclusive political vision even as he is in fact describing a mode of exclusion that divorces womankind from all human intercourse, a dimension of irony is introduced that seems almost Swiftian in its incisive power. If like Hippolytus's devoted friends we were to envision a city in which men meet and conduct their lives while women are relegated to a lair of violent beasts, we are looking at a very strange city indeed.

It's only possible to fully appreciate how far this political vision is from even his own chosen form of life if we remember how Hippolytus spends his days. Far from the city, he loves to hunt in the wild. Aphrodite gives us a picture of him early in her opening speech:

In the green wood, ever consort to the maiden goddess, he clears the land of wild beasts with his swift dogs, and has gained a companionship greater than mortal.

χλωρὰν δ᾽ ἀν᾽ ὕλην παρθένῳ ξυνὼν ἀεὶκυσὶν ταχείαις θῆρας ἐξαιρεῖ χθονός,μείζω βροτείας προσπεσὼν ὁμιλίας.

The roving life of Artemis, free from all allegiance to men, to sexual desire and procreation, is the energetic hunting and killing of wild animals -- the triumph of sheer negative power over uncivilized creatures. Here, though, we find Hippolytus reversing all that: Coming full circle, he ends by introducing wild beasts into the heart of the polis itself, summoned into service to roam between the lips of women and the ears of anyone who might hear. The problem of women is "solved" through the complete suppression of their voice.

Nothing could be farther from Aphrodite and Artemis than this bizarre version of rus in urbe. Nor is it something to which Hippolytus's Amazonian mother was likely to have given her blessing.

Hippolytus here verges on becoming a satirical target, but the effect is passing, momentary. It's as if a door onto an engulfing possibility of dizzying irony and negation opens, then shuts. One wonders if Aristophanes' literary attacks on Euripides might not have been provoked by a certain envy, the sensing of a comedic savagery a bowshot beyond his own.

Theseus kills the Minotaur