The infernal

THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE SUFFERING CITY,
THROUGH ME THE WAY TO THE ETERNAL PAIN,
THROUGH ME THE WAY THAT RUNS AMONG THE LOST.
JUSTICE URGED ON MY HIGH ARTIFICER;
MY MAKER WAS DIVINE AUTHORITY,
THE HIGHEST WISDOM, AND PRIMAL LOVE.
BEFORE ME NOTHING BUT ETERNAL THINGS
WERE MADE, AND I ENDURE ETERNALLY.
ABANDON EVERY HOPE, WHO ENTER HERE.

(Inferno, Canto III)

There are a couple of things that jump out immediately from this inscription on the Gates to Hell in the Inferno: the first is that the gate demands to be read, it does not speak to those standing before it, neither is the visitor prescient. The second thing that strikes me is this idea of a self-narration, the story of oneself as told by the self-- what is this story? why is it that the story of the self often the most untrue? and why, most importantly, does the self tell a story? The gate, then, is an active agent of telling and narration whose unchanging act suggests that it somehow remains consistently engaged with the rest of the telling in the Inferno. In other words, the gate and its story of hell is one that is echoed and altered with each sub-narrated story-- eternal pain, the way of the lost, the abandonment of hope? Are these all really themes of the Inferno, or can we perhaps argue that these are themes it wishes it has, yet ones that it is fearful of embracing?


Curiously enough, the inscription of the gate is a memory of the future-- it is meant to remind us of what is to come. We haven't met the characters populating the Inferno, but the gate is not a prophecy of them, it is an altered memory of their state of being, and thus an element of the narrative that creates an important distinction between the narrative of a memory by a self and the narrative of a present. Either way, the characters are narrated by another figure. The narration of the gate, however, is unique in the way that it anticipates the narrative, telling it already but without us as the readers yet knowing it.

These are just a few ideas I've thrown out there about how to possibly approach the gate as a kind of ante-narrative or ante-Inferno, a parallel but brief vision of hell that stands at the point at which we enter. There is something else that calls out to the reader, and that is the last line of the inscription: Abandon every hope, who enter here. It might just be the translation but this one line reminds me of modern poetry, and Eliot's poems in particular. Somehow the gate seems to want to read hell as the landscape that the modernists would obsess about later on. It is a kind of wasteland where the living and breathing rot over and over again. The wasteland, of course, would be on earth for the modernists. Eliot's rotting souls utter the same words again and again: hurryup hurryup as if to somehow accelerate their torture. Yet, I would think that they are numb, feelingless compared to the characters of the Inferno who seem almost to savor this torture, to live in the future and memory of the full lives they lived. Hell is the consequence of the lives of Odysseus, Paolo, and Ugolino. Hell on earth, Eliot's Wasteland, is the consequence of a life that possibly never was, that cannot care for torture because it still cannot feel the pain.