Divine Comedy

                                                                 The Divine Comedy

Down the centuries, a work of pure literature which has aroused admiration and has survived the onslaught of passage of time is ‘The Divine Comedy’ written by Italian poet Dante Alighieri.  It is definitely a masterpiece which was given its complete title by the readers who read it, rather than the author who wrote it. An epic poem written in the early part of the fourteenth century, it finds a coveted place in the canon of classical literature.  Its completion secured an honored position for Dante amidst the coterie of classical writers like Virgil and Homer.  A majority of readers outside Italy, though, have derived pleasure from translations. The latter may miss out on the magic of Dante’s verse, but if the translation is done well, the readers have access to his thoughts, feelings and intriguing imagery.  One such eclectic translation in English was undertaken by the publishers of Vintage Books, after due thought and careful appraisal. The works of John Aitken Carlyle, Thomas Okey and P.H. Wicksteed were selected for their truth, lucidity and idiomatic prose. The arguments and the notes at the beginning and end of each Canto in the Vintage Edition, if read in tandem, facilitate the understanding of the reader.

The introduction in the book quotes that the work was originally titled ‘The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, a Florentine by birth but not in character.’  It is indeed fascinating to learn that the epithet  ‘Divine’ was given to it by the readers over the centuries  who devoured it and recognized it for its worth, beauty, divinity  and wisdom.  Dante is the author and the main character in the comedy, a narrative of a disaster and misery which ends in happiness and bliss. The poem is divided into three parts – Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso. The bitter modifier ‘not in character’ attached to the epithet ‘Florentine by birth’ is accentuated in his writings in the ‘Inferno’ wherein he attributes beastly qualities to the inhabitants of Florentine and calls them pigs, foxes and wolves. Dante was born to an important family in Florentine.  His fine schooling and exposure to art and music stood him in good stead as he took office in the municipal council and later as a member of the committee of highest administrative authority.  His political experience was bitter and full of strife, which later affected his career and he was exiled.

His acrimony with his fellow-townsmen is carried over in his work. He meets several during his journey through hell undergoing punishment.  The feeling of scorn and hatred does not include his immediate neighbors and personal family, as the references to his family and children are beautiful and sweet.  The book is written in Florentine, the language of his birth place. The language follows a series of crests and troughs, being elevated and exalted in parts, interspersed with plain vernacular.

The Divine Comedy has always been hailed as a poem of sin, reparation, redemption and salvation. It is the journey of Dante, a representative of the human race, through hell, purgatory and finally his ascent to heaven. It begins in a dark wood on the night before Good Friday, 1300. He feels fearful and distorted. The sight of a summit clothed with the light of the rising sun provides him respite and he decides to scale it. His path is blocked by three beasts who bar his way, the third being very ferocious and an adamant wolf.  Just then the ghost of Virgil, the poet of ‘Aenied’ appears and promises to guide Dante.  He explains that to be rid of his sins, he has to undertake the journey through the centre of the earth – the underworld-- traversing it from side to side before he reaches the hill of purgatory on the other side of the earth. Dante is to embark on this fearful journey which shall take him through all the punishments of the sins committed by the human soul. The punishments are distributed over the nine circles of the inverted cone of hell which becomes narrower with each circle culminating in the central pit. Each punishment is appropriate to the sin – the sins of incontinence or lack of self-control, sins of malice and the sins of fraud. The journey through hell is frightening, beset with demons of people and acquaintances who are serving their time according to their sins. He sympathizes with a few who were led by the human vice of love and attachment to commit adultery, and when he cannot withstand the suffering and horror of the punishments, he faints. The path through the centre of the earth on the other side ends in an ocean on the shore of an island where the hill of Purgatory rises. Souls who have seen the folly, hideousness of their sins and acknowledged them for themselves, the repentant souls, undergo disciplines on the seven terraces of the conical surface of the hill. Thereafter Beatrice, whom Dante loved in his lifetime and had dedicated his writings to her, appears and leads him through the revolving skies to the Garden of Eden. She is replaced by St. Bernard who finally shows him the presence of God Himself.

The story is allegorical as well as literal. The narrative begins in sin in the dark wood, escape impossible through mere human effort, compounded by the opposition by the three beasts symbolic of the human compulsions. Virgil, the guide is the human reason which confronts the soul with the hideous face of sins and their beastliness. The climb up the summit of purgatory is the break and move away from sin, and the inculcation of disciplines which incur pain and suffering to purge the soul of evil inclinations. Each suffering is a representative cure of a major human vice. A pure soul then enters the Garden of Eden – a stage of innocence where man is returned to the being of a child free of follies and sins. The various characters that guide and help Dante are characters summoned to perform the needful tasks on meeting him. Each of them is a real person with symbolic functions.  Besides Virgil, Beatrice stands for truth and revelation. St. Bernard who brings him to the vision of God is intuition, higher than human reason (Virgil) and truth (Beatrice).

The literal and the allegorical are intertwined in the narrative beautifully and significantly. If the reader were to read the Commedia as a literal piece, he would be delighted with the emotion, the story, the language and imagery. But if he seeks to imbibe the elevated and exalted in the work, for which it has been appropriately hailed as ‘Divine,’ he has to look for the symbolic in the literal presence of figures in the story. This is in keeping with the middle age conception of life and the world. They believed that everything in the universe, right from elements and rocks, had a literal and a moral meaning imbued in them by creation. Persons we meet in our journey through life are real people with symbolic functions and messages to help us in our journey of life. Dante, himself a distinct human personality, is a representative of the human race in the story, a soul with merits and demerits on the road to salvation.

The structural plan of Dante’s poetic rendition is another fascinating study. I shall serve a comprehensive frame in a few words. The poem is divided into three parts – Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. Each of these parts contains its own three sections. The poem is written in three line stanzas – the poetic form being the Terza rima. The first and the last line rhyme together and the middle line rhymes with the first and last line of the next stanza – aba bcb cdc ded efe.   Purgatorio and Paradiso each have thirty-three cantos; although Inferno has thirty-four, its first canto acts as a general prologue to The Comedy as a whole. Hell, in its entirety, divided into nine circles—three times three.

All the world’s a stage and all the men and women mere players, wrote Shakespeare. Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. We, as comedians and poor players, maybe, can be something more significant, if we were to partake of the Divine Comedy.  Heavy food for thought!

Magical Locations!

                                                       

                                       

You belong to a place and a place belongs to you. The relationship is mutually nurtured by comfort, security and familiarity. What intrigued me as evidenced in the books is that writers have created fictional places in stories with which we wholeheartedly identify. Your doubts will all be laid to rest if I were to quote one such magical place. MALGUDI – the fictional small town in south India in the novels and stories of RK Narayan . A place just as ordinary with surreal connotations attributed to its enigmatic quality of endearment in our hearts. In one of the interviews he said, "Malgudi was an earth-shaking discovery for me, because I had no mind for facts and things like that, which would be necessary in writing about Malgudi or any real place. I first pictured not my town but just the railway station, which was a small platform with a banyan tree, a station master, and two trains a day, one coming and one going. On Vijayadasami I sat down and wrote the first sentence about my town: The train had just arrived in Malgudi Station." A place, where, in the words of Graham Greene, you could go "into those loved and shabby streets and see with excitement and a certainty of pleasure a stranger approaching past the bank, the cinema, the haircutting saloon, a stranger who will greet us.”

Much speculation has been adrift since its conception and discovery by readers in the works of RK Narayan, but no concrete pinpointing has gained popularity so far. The place was imbued with details and structures of his upbringing as a child in a small town in south India. It was located on the banks of river Sarayu with a forest on the other end of the small town.  The town was inhabited by people whom he had met every day of his life. He was so familiar with their thinking that he could envisage their reactions to situations in his stories. The shops were the ones he had been to while walking to and fro from school, interspersed with buildings and houses he had frequented often. Mr Lawley’s statue seated on a horse at the railway station along with ‘Boardless’ a eating meeting place where all burning issues of Malgudi town were thrashed and  laid threadbare are the landmarks of the fictional town.

The inclination of writers to conjure up realistic fictional locations finds a precursor in older writings too. Thomas Hardy’s Wessex and William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha are familiar places we read about in their books. Hardy did not conjure up a fictional place but a FICTIONALISED WESSEX. This had me stumped the first time I registered it. A fine line exists between a fictional Wessex and a fictionalized Wessex. The latter is a real time Wessex which has been made make-believe with added landmarks, substituted names - a dream county from a realistic contemporary good old place.  Wessex is a real time location with a chequered history, the Anglo Saxon kingdom centered in the south and south west part of England before the Norman Conquest. He gave each of his Wessex counties fictionalised names, like Upper and Lower Wessex, Outer and Mid Wessex. It all began with the town of Dorset where he lived as a child, later he called Dorchester-  Casterbridge in the book ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’, and in ’ Far from the Madding Crowd’ he describes Wessex as a realistic dream county. Moreover he was primarily a poet and only wrote books to earn money, through the brand of ‘Wessex Novels’ as his books came to be branded and capitalized commercially. A clear indication of the mass appeal that a core geographical area with a political identity acquires, with populist brand culturing! A smart marketing gimmick!

Another monumental fictional location is YOKNAPATAWPHA in the novels and short stories of William Faulkner. Known for his famous work ‘Sound and Fury’ he was writer of southern literature of United States along with Mark Twain, Tennessee Williams and a contemporary of Ernest Hemingway. He explores the psyches of southern workers, slaves, descendents of slaves, and southern aristocrats.  The Yoknapatawpha County is recreated on the lines of his hometown Lafayette County and Holly Springs Marshall County.  

And now a peek- a- boo into the EMERALD CITY of ‘Wizard of OZ’ series written by L Frank Baum. The city is at the end of the famous yellow road. It is predominantly green, with vendors selling green lemonade for the children. Made in glass, emerald and other jewels it is fresh, and invigorating to the senses. In the stories initially, visitors are required to wear green eyeglasses but this practice is discontinued in other stories, yet the city is always described as lush and green. Fictional capital city of the Land of Oz, it is often referred to as the City of Emeralds. Built by the wizard in the story but in real life; a Baum fabrication. He especially shifted to Chicago to attend the World Columbian Exposition. He was greatly inspired by the white city, built in no time for the exposition and was fascinated enough to create something like it in his stories.

Here readers must be reminded about CASTLE ROCK in Stephen King’s series which is a small England town with dark secrets. The first story begins frighteningly with a serial killer targeting young girls. Later there is the menace of a dog affected by rabies attacking local residents. And further the horror stories are replicated in different circumstances with castle Rock as a constant setting in the thrillers. 

Writing lies at the intersection of true fact and fiction. It is a highly creative genre, with a wide playfield of ambiguity. The fertile ground of ambiguity gives writers the opportunity to create new worlds, characters, and completely imaginative environments. The play of reality and fiction, shadow and light, truth and the make-believe is a wide transcendental arena wherein writers can stretch themselves to the ephemeral and conceive out of world experiences for themselves and the readers who would but just about devour it all ravishingly.

Hi! Reader set yourself an exercise. Spin a fantasy of a place you would love to belong to for eternity. A paradise on earth with naughty corners, a lover’s street, a pub to thrash out all the world’s difference over happy hours, a gourmet’s delight . Maybe one day you could take me to your world of intriguing, beautiful and magical locations. Happy Imaginations!

Difficult Pleasures Book column

                                                     Literary Conversations!

The other day, chin in hand, I sat listening to Anjum Hasan at the International Centre. I was all ears to her narrative of imagination which, she emphasized, was the core of fictional writing. Hearing her did not really grab me so much as the act of reading her collection of short stories ’Difficult Pleasures’. A summer release, the collage is like a deluge of a heavy downpour which you may set out to read in a light vein, but with the very first story you are left wondering deep in thought. To quote John Cournos, a literary critic, ‘A short story is not a ‘slice of life. Call it a ‘roll’ if you must – but, at any rate a whole roll.’ The stories do not follow the beaten track of a beginning, middle and an end. An anticlimax in the artistic sense, at times an understatement, or a whimper instead of the bang that the reader was expecting.

The story is one of the most ancient forms of literature; but the short story as a well defined sub- genre is a modern literary form. Epics have stories in them- and tragedies, comedies and the novel may have many stories at the same time. A short story has its own distinct form, and in English literature this may be said to have happened in the nineteenth century, with the lack of time to read full – length novels as life became busier and busier. Anjum Hasan revels in the luxury of variety, of trying out so many different garbs or voices; but the perfection lies in its brevity and pointedness and really in the feeling of expansion into life that penetrates our consciousness by means of a style that produces a sense of truth and richness. She views each story as a specific invention, a liberating experience to move out of her own skin and slip into a character’s head and find the language and psychology to tell their story – that’s where all the difficult pleasure is!

The book cover is a picture postcard from Goa with coconut palms and a sandy beach with a simulation of the effect of waves on the contours of a sandy coastline which is irrevocably changed with every assault of the ocean wave in multiple ways, the pattern, the silhouette a paradigm shift in perspective; with each story. The stories have urban settings with themes of displacement, longing and alienation imbued with a melancholic search for meaning, deeper connections, flair for creativity and sometimes an escape from a claustrophobic relationship or a flight from paranoia.

The reader is easily led into the interiority of the characters and more often than not the protagonists are solitary reapers exclusively binding and unwinding their lives, singing melancholic strains………... Characters are animated in deft strokes and their muddles, paradoxes archived using the stream of consciousness which builds crests and troughs diffusing situations and moments with a fluidity of a competent writer who has complete control on the design and structure of the narrative.

‘Revolutions’ is about a precocious child turned photographer who sees pictures in everyday things and freezes them into his frames. His endeavors are a face in a coconut husk, plastic that could be water and water that could be shadow. His quest for recognition makes him cling to a mentor and he himself becomes frozen in time. ‘Good Housekeeping’ unravels the deep emotional bond in a mother - daughter relationship. Ayana views the world through her mothers eyes. Her mother’s mood swings, tears, likes and dislikes are hers too. The last part of the story when she comes into her own is rendered with great mastery and subtlety. ‘The Big Picture’ walks away with all the laurels. It is a sweet story about an older woman who has cocooned herself in her house with her art works and then suddenly she is let out in the wide world with an opportunity to travel to Europe with her selected paintings for an exhibition and the attraction of seeing master works and meeting world renowned artists. A menopausal woman stranded and lost at airports and art galleries , talking and mumbling to herself, fidgeting with tampons, with her menopausal timing gone drastically wrong……... ‘Immanuel Kant in Shillong’ and ‘Banerjee and Banerjee’ are meanderings into rich philosophy and literature wherein characters try to imbue relationships gone awry with meaning and inspiration from books. In ‘Saturday Night’  Hasan with great dexterity recounts two simultaneous stories which cross each other just before the end and become intertwined ironically. Inayat and Hina sum-up the collection in the last story with a deep philosophy. However much you may love and treasure souls related to you in your life ; your journey is lone and solitary and you have to let everything go one day………

Here I would like to enumerate a few lines from the collection which had me mulling and ruminating long after……..

Her reflection in the blank, curtain less windows follows her from room to room as she brings out her things and slowly lets them fill the empty spaces.

It is possible to feel completely at home in the world but this is only because we have laid claim to a small space- a few rooms, certain streets, a familiar town – over which our habitual wanderings create grooves that we can comfortably slip into. In truth, the world is a strange and horrifying place.

You know, like  Borges said, each of our unthinking footsteps makes its way over the Golgothas of others.

God, how well we know the rules. Words, words, words and all that. Do you know the feeling of losing it all.  One moment and everything gone. The edifice gone. The shimmer gone. Just pills and clock hands left.

When Samir is afraid , he smiles – but Samir is doubled over from terror, trying both to break free of his father and ensure his father doesn’t abandon him.

I remember expounding on Kant’s categorical imperative. Act only on that maxim through which you can; at the same time, will that it should be a universal law.

Literature imbued with seriousness and gravity, a delight to a seasoned literary enthusiast. Each story opens up new avenues of literary conversations.  A story does not end with the last page but repeats itself interminably in your mind long after. For oft upon my couch I lie in a vacant or a pensive mood they flash upon the inward eye and I begin again on the road to philosophical tunings, literary analogies; a world unto itself. KUDOS ANJUM HASAN!