Ugolino, II

"But after we had reached the fourth day, Gaddo,

throwing himself outstretched, down at my feet,

implored me: "Father, why do you not help me?"

And there he died; and just as you see me,

I saw the other three fall one by one

between the fifth day and the sixth; at which,

now blind, I started groping over each..."

(Inferno, Canto XXXIII)

We're back with Ugolino and the penultimate events that led up to his punishment in the Inferno. But here is a man who is already punished, and I want to try an understand whether this earthly punishment of seeing each child starve and die before his eyes is somehow worse than the eternal ordeal of gnawing helplessly on the bones of the man whose betrayal led him to the death and dying acts that he had. The most arresting part of this brief excerpt is Ugolino's blindness coming directly after the deaths of his children. In other words, his punishment is to see, and to a lesser extent, to hear, the excruciating deaths of his children. There have been other blind fathers before Ugolino and there will be some after him-- Oedipus comes to mind in the former category and Lear in the latter. Their blindness, however, is a kind of gift. Lear carries Cordelia's dead body without seeing his daughter actually die. The blind Oedipus is led by Antigone whose death comes after his. Ugolino, however, must see each child die before blindness sets in. The role of the auditory is equally interesting here: what is heard cannot be responded to. Gaddo's plea for help, for some kind of rescue or relief from not death, but the pain of dying, paralyses his father, who only after the death of his son, possibly does what he was asking him to do in the first place.

It is to touch and taste that Ugolino must turn in the last few moments of his own life-- senses that incidentally are closely associated with sin-- lust and gluttony. In Hell, Ugolino is the glutton who is never satiated, gnawing and chewing but never, ever will his hunger end. But let's come back to my original issue with this passage: is the earthly punishment somehow worse than the eternal? I think, yes, for the eternal is a kind of reprieve from what Ugolino hesitated to do on earth. In hell, Ugolino is a saintly figure, who saves even the dead from their fate. On earth, he was suffering towards this sainthood, tested for the spiritual by the deeply physical.