Ugolino, I

"As soon as a thin ray had made its way

into that sorry prison, and I saw,

reflected in four faces, my own gaze,

out of my grief, I bit at both my hands;

and they, who thought I'd done that out of hunger,

immediately rose and told me: "Father,

it would be far less painful for us if

you ate of us...""

(Inferno, Canto XXXIII, Dante, translated by Allen Mandelbaum)

I've decided the Inferno and its slightly less infernal siblings should get more posts than some of the other books I've talked about. Two reasons: 1. c'est Dante, and 2. I'm teaching a course on Dante next quarter, never hurts to have some thoughts about the guy. We're coming towards the end of the Inferno here, and maybe in other posts, I'll go back to do the famous P and F scene as well as the scene of Dante's induction as an officially great poet of Western civilization.

This is, of course, one of the most heart-rending scenes of the Inferno, Count Ugolino is seen uncontrollably gnawing on a skull-- supposedly that of one of his sons who sacrificed themselves to their father's hunger and to their own misery by allowing their imprisoned flesh to become sustenance for the Count. Allen Mandelbaum asserts that it is not quite clear in either the Italian or in his translation whether Ugolino actually consumed his children or not, and I'm not going to be the one to decide. What I do want to talk about here is the effeminized figure of the father, and idea of the sacrificial flesh of sons. I don't want to make this into a discussion based off of Christian theology though I will talk about it briefly. Right now I want to think about the figure of Medea in comparison to Ugolino-- the mother who destroys her children in order to save them from a father's second marriage and to avenge herself upon an unfaithful husband, and then, the figure of a father who dying of starvation with his children thinks to appease his sons' misery by consuming their flesh. In Euripides' immortalizing play, Medea knifes her children to death and then flees to Athens where King Aegeus has promised her refuge. Here, Ugolino cannot escape the remnants of the bodies which begged his aid in their destruction. What stands out, when we place these two figures side by side, is the way each takes on characteristics of the opposite sex. In other words, these unnatural parents are unnatural also in that they evade the binds of their own gender. Medea physically kills her children, but more importantly, promises fertility to Aegeus, i.e. she takes on the male association of abundant seed. Ugolino, on the other hand, regressed to femininity attempts destruction of his own body before taking that of his children. His punishment, however, seals this gender transformation through the body: Ugolino's body will forever hold those of his children, a perverse spin on the image of pregnancy.

While I do want to briefly mention the reflection of the Christian idea of the son's sacrifice of his flesh in order to preserve, in a sense, the father or the image of the father, that idea isn't given much credence here. For this is not a divine father, but a very human one who instead of immortalizing the flesh takes it for his own private survival. The other transformation that goes on here, of course, is of the young dying before the old. It is the children who offer, (and succeed horribly) in giving their father posterity. It is on their name that he lives instead of perpetuating the generations by offering his body to his name-bearing sons.

I'm going to stop here with this passage now. On thinking more as I wrote, I've decided to do a second post about the Ugolino's continued narrative.