Et tu, Dante?

"As pilgrims wrapped in meditation pass
someone they do not know along the road
and turn to stare and then go quickly on,

so, from behind us, move swiftly, came
and passed us by with a quick look of doubt,
a band of spirits, silent and devout,

their eyes dark-shadowed, sunken in their heads,
their faces pale, their bodies worn so thin
that every bone was molded to their skin."
Purgatory, Canto XXIII.
Two repeats today: Gustav Dore and Dante Alighieri. On reading Purgatory and Paradiso, I realized that these canticas are far more complex and spread out than the Inferno. Whereas those damned to eternal punishment exist in structure those half forgiven and those rewarded seem to occupy (naturally) a far more sprawling and meandering route to Empyrean. But T. S. Eliot has summed up Dante in one very powerful sentence, "Dante's is a visual imagination." One way of understanding Dante, specially if one exists outside of his historical and political loop is through images that resulted from artists' immediete understanding of Dante's elaborate word.
The Gluttons are amongst the groups that roam the higher echelons of the Mountain of Purgatory-- their sin is one of excess, but interestingly enough is told through the element that will later dominate completely the journey through Paradise, i.e. love. Purgatory, then, is the place of imbalanced love and the gluttons are amongst those who had an excess of it. Directly after introducing this group, Dante characterizes them through Ovid's King Erysichthon who out of starvation ate first his daughter and then his own flesh, and Josephus's Miriam who during the seige of Jerusalem ate her infant son. It is this likening, this establishment of relationship that interests me the most here. Even though Dante encounters a literary colleague Forese Donati as one of the group, his first instinct as a narrator is to remove this group from "the journey of our life." Of course, the Divine Comedy is rife with this trend, but when it comes to the gluttons Dante is deeply torn. They are at one point a group who is devout, and penitent, and yet their punishment, and their state of starvation is worse than that of the man who ate his own flesh. So the question that comes up here how can a character at once be so damned and so close to redemption? Or if we shift this to the level of the narrative, how is it that Dante achieves this peculiar neutrality in his telling of the gluttons' state?
I want to read this moment in Purgatory through the figure of Dante himself. I read Dante as succumbing to the sin at this point in the narrative as he pesters Donati for information. Donati's presence is an additional reminder of Dante's own earthly misdemeanours (see Robert Hollander's commentary on this episode). I want to think of Dante no longer as a special guest, but as one of the many characters he encounters throughout his journey. Also of note at this point is that Dante walks with not just Virgil, but also Statius, an early A.D era poet who forms a kind of bridge between Virgil's paganism, the pre-Christian moment, and Dante's own desire for a Christian salvation. In other words, Dante's own figure is failing at this point. His guides are not guides, but companions.
I would answer my own question then by thinking about the figure of a narrator as it becomes engrossed in its own narration. It would also be of interest to think back to other figures in the Comedy who were somehow related with food-- Ugolino comes to mind. How does Dante's figure change with respect to Ugolino? Similarly, does Paulo and Francesca's earthly love somehow attract Dante in the earthly moment of the Inferno?
I haven't said much about Dore, except for using him as a means to understanding the layout and words that run in the Divine Comedy. I'll leave this image up-- it suggests a complete opposition to what I've just argued.