Beauty of Life

Link:  Life is Beautiful (film). Can be watched on Netflix and is also available in the mulitmedia center. 

           Life is Beautiful is a film set in Italy during WWII. The film takes the audience through sad, but triumphal journey of Guido Orefice and his family as they are forced to reside in a concentration camp. There are several of connections between the film and Dante’s Divine Comedy, the first one being connection between the main character and Guido Calvacanti. Guido Orefice is a poet who came from Arezzo, Italy before being forced into the camp. Guido Calvacanti was also a poet during the time of Dante.

            The bigger connection lies within the film’s genre and the title of Dante’s epic. Comedy, as most of modern society knows it as, is a genre that highlights on comic performances or literature that evokes laughter among the audience. However, for Dante, he takes on the more ancient Greek and Roman definition of comedy, which is stage-plays that have happy endings. In the time of Dante, this definition was furthered by including comedies as long narrative poems with happy endings. In Inferno, Dante and Virgil talk about their different styles of writing, where Virgil tragedies that are serious and Dante writes comedies. Dante goes on to tell Virgil that although Dante writes comedies, his comedies are very serious and not necessarily happy. Dante adds that tragedies can also end in good things, which alludes to the ancient Greek and Roman definition of comedy.

            In the film, Guido is a Italian Jew who is taken away to the concentration camp with his very young son, Joshua. Because Joshua still had that childlike innocence in him, Guido did not want that to be taken away, despite everything else that was taken from him. What Guido did was trick his son into believing that they were being taken away to play a game. He told Joshua that in order to win this game, he had to hide from the German soldiers (since the rest of the Jewish children were incinerated) and be completely silence. His father tells him that the first prize is a real tank (Joshua’s love) and Joshua fervently obeyed. Joshua had no idea of what was really going on. His father was beaten and put to work daily, while some prisoners died in the process, yet Joshua had no idea. To Joshua, everything was fine and part of this game. This was the serious part of the film, the tragic life (Joshua was oblivious too) of Jewish individuals during WWII in fascist Italy. But throughout the film, there are comic reliefs that take the audience away from the tragedy, which Dante does incorporate in his Divine Comedie. Dante ends his Comedie on a more positive note to teach his audience something important and Guido Orefice tugs on that element as the audience sees at the end of the film. Although a German solider executed Guido during the camp’s riot, Joshua is reunited with his mother after Joshua spotted on her while he was riding in an American (one of the Allies) tank. He shouts, “We won,” because in his mind, he got the prize, the tank. But what Guido did for Joshua was show him that even amongst tragedy, Life can still be beautiful. This was not the same as Dante’s message, but theme is the same. Comedy can be serious as well because it can help show that even at the end of a tragedy, good can still emerge. 

The Reproduced Manuscripts of Dante's work

Link: http://www.danteonline.it/english/home_ita.asp         No document signed by Dante has been preserved for us today. In addition, none of the original manuscripts of the Divine Comedy and no other original copies or even a signature exist today. Luckily, just after he died Dante's acclaim was great enough to circulate hundreds of copies of his work throughout Italy. The only other text that has has many copies of manuscripts in existence as the Comedy is the Bible. These copies exist both reproduced by famous copyists like Boccaccio, as well as simple scribes working in manuscript workshops during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. However, this mass and wide spread reproduction also lead to some versions being drastically changed. Therefore, it is impossible to be certain of the original text.        The Societa Dantesca Italiana has created their website in order to open up the existing manuscripts of Dante's works to the access of millions of people. This collection brings all the manuscripts of Dante's work into one convenient Digital library free to the public.

Above is the title page to Dante's Comedy, reproduce by Boccaccio.

As you can in the image above, these copies were very well preserved. I especially appreciate the elaborate additions to dress up the text, but I wish that the lines were shown in their tersets, although maybe Dante did not have them written like that.

Above is a later reproduction, done in the fifteenth century. This version of the Inferno was made richly decorated on purpose; most manuscripts were not decorated to make them affordable. However, this edition was made especially for the Duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti. It is one of the works by a miniaturist of high regard who lived in northern Italy in the first half of the fifteenth century known as the Master of the Vitae Imperatorum.  At the end of the century, it was passed into the hands of King Louis XII of France with the French descent into Italy, and was routinely passed around as gift and family heirloom until being preserved at the Bibliotheque National de France. 

Dante's Paradiso and Modern Readers

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2007/12/paradise_lost.html

Virtually any book has some conflict that the author resolves in the course of the book, be it a war between factions or an unexplained problem.  Robert Baird’s piece suggests that the disparity between Earth’s chaos and Heaven’s peace causes Paradiso’s conflict.  In other words, the globe is the antagonist, and Heaven is the protagonist, which might be why few people enjoy Paradiso because few people enjoy playing the stupid antagonist.  Although his analysis is accurate, the problem I see is that our culture doesn’t see opinions with various degrees of merit; instead, every opinion is equal to the next. Thus, a world where everything runs perfectly according to divine omniscience is foreign to modern readers who live in a culture wracked by myopic violence and greed without a solution in sight. 

In the events after Purgatorio, Dante is no longer the everyman but a prophet to the unlearned, which distances himself from us, because he has divine revelation that we are not to privy to.  Because no living individual is perfect, a perfect person is foreign to the human experience.  However, the individual might be in the middle of purification, such as the recovering addict or reforming slob. Nevertheless, the person never becomes perfect but simply graduates from one metaphorical terrace to another, from drug addiction to procrastination to evil thoughts.  During Purgatorio, Dante becomes increasingly foreign because he approaches closer and closer to perfection.  At the summit, Virgil cannot guide him because Dante’s soul is perfect.  His behavior and intent is no longer human in the sense that humans are imperfect creatures.  In Paradiso, his occasional gaps in knowledge remind us that he is still human; however, those gaps also remind us that Dante is separate from us because the shades fill these gaps without the reader’s knowledge while Beatrice instructs Dante to become a prophet or messenger.  Thus, our opinions lack footing because we lack knowledge.  Today, the political rants and anti-intellectual streaks could only come about in a culture that believes the opinion of a mommy blogger somehow equals the PhD virologist who spent 7 grueling years to get those 3 letters and another 5 years in limbo to secure a lab position.  Accepting a lecture by an omniscient shade would be unthinkable in this culture since PhDs are the closest to omniscience within a given field, which is still very far from actual omniscience.

Problems of relating to the reader would not be so bad if Dante’s time meshed with our time.  However, 700 years separate him from us, which the Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, urbanization, World War I and II, etc. occurred in that time. Despite the constancy of human nature, historical events radically shift human values.  The politics and culture in his day would have made Paradiso at least accessible to his audience.  Still, heaven portrayed by Dante would still lose some of them.  He consistently points out that his narrative is not for the weak and beyond human experience.    People today are removed from Paradiso’s context even if the problems are identical because Dante’s solutions are antithetical to American values, such as free will, limited government, and separated branches.  Furthermore, Dante’s theology further removes most American readers who are probably non-Catholic.  Thus, modern readers must acquaint themselves with the context that Dante’s contemporaries would have understood. 

God Complexes of Dante and The Doctor

This is another blog about Doctor Who and Dante. I will examine a question that has been puzzling me from the start of reading The Divine Comedy.

            I have noticed in the Comedy that Dante likes to place certain individuals who committed similar sins in one category and another in a different category. For instance, Cato committed suicide, which is a sin Dante categorizes in Inferno, yet Dante places Cato in Purgatory. It would make sense for Cato to be in Purgatory, if he was working off his sin, but he is not working off his sin. Cato is the guardian of Ante-purgatory and is proclaimed by Dante to be a “saved” soul. How can Cato be saved if he died a pagan man? This is what confuses me. It seems to me that Dante does suffer from a God complex in which he feels he has this privilege to decide who belongs in Hell or Heaven as well as thinking he is above the evils in humanity.

            The God complex can also be descriptive of The Doctor from Doctor Who. The Doctor is a Time Lord who is able to travel through time and space with his TARDIS. Because of this, The Doctor feels that he has the right to change history as well as save humanity (and extraterrestrial beings) from destruction.  How this relates back to Dante is through Dante’s punishment of Brutus and Cassius in the Inferno. Dante punishes these men for changing history and fate when they assassinated Caesar. If Dante punished Cassius and Brutus for changing history, would he punish The Doctor as well? That question for me becomes hard to answer because of the way Dante arbitrarily punishes individuals in his epic. The Doctor, from what I watched, does encompass the moral virtues while lacking one of the holy virtues, faith. An example would be when The Doctor constantly puts himself in danger to either save a planet, a race, or even the entire universe without asking for anything in return. This does sometimes lead him to develop a God complex such as in the special, “The Water of Mars” where he purposely changed a fixed point in time because he wanted to. For individuals that had all the moral virtues and no or little of the holy virtues, Dante placed them in Limbo, where Virgil resides. However, given the current state of how Dante places sinners, I am not to entirely sure if The Doctor would be placed in Limbo. Clearly, The Doctor does have a God complex that Dante looks down upon, but does that justify a place in Hell, where Brutus and Cassius reside? I cannot tell because of the constantly changing criteria Dante seems to have for sinners. God sets out his laws on what He feels deserves punishment and favor. He does not change them on a person-by-person basis. Documented stories of thieves in the Bible show that they all get punished in some way and none are rewarded for their sin. If Dante really wanted to portray himself as righteous, he should at least stick to the rules he laid out in his epic.

A final question that I would like others to answer or think about is: If Dante punished others for having a God Complex or pride, why doesn’t he punish himself as well?

John Flaxman, The Procession and the Twenty Four Elders, Purgatorio Canto 29

John Flaxman's drawing depicts the procession that Dante describes in Canto 29.  In the drawing, a number of men with long beards follow the “torch bearers” in front.  The verses that describe this scene are found in lines 49-87.  The lines especially relevant to Flaxman’s drawing are ll. 82-87:

   “Under the beautiful sky that I describe,

twenty- four elders, two by two, were coming,

crowned with lilies.

     All were singing: “Benedicta are you among

The daughters of Adam, and blessed in eternity

Be your beauties!”

The men in Flaxman’s painting are holding what seem to be scrolls.  It is not clear at first glance whether they are singing.  Some seem to be studying the scrolls, others looking up at the light – it is a very solemn picture, whereas Dante’s description, especially in the surrounding verses, is much more jubilant and celebratory. 

The “torches” that lead the way are described in the text as candelabra, which recalls the Catholic church service where candle bearers lead a procession down the aisle during mass.  Flaxman depicts the streams of light that trail behind them in the air as Dante describes in lines 73-81 –

    “I saw the flames move on, leaving the air

Behind them painted, and they seemed like

brushes drawn along,

    So that the air overhead was marked with

Seven stripes, all in those colors with which the

Sun makes his bow and Delia her belt.”  [in other

words, the stripes were in the colors of the rainbow].

   These banners extended backward further

Than my sight; and, in my estimate, the outer

Ones were ten paces apart.”

Flaxman interprets the “stripes” as (what look like) beams of light that shine backwards.  Dante describes them as banners, so I imagined them as wavy and spreading laterally rather than vertically.  Nonetheless, Flaxman’s drawing captures the regal nature of the whole procession, which – in my opinion – is the climax of Purgatorio.

John Flaxman, Procession, Rainbow Streamers

http://danteworlds.laits.utexas.edu/purgatory/gallery/1003procession.jpg

Dante in Anime

Link: http://fma.wikia.com/wiki/Dante

Entry:
    Dante's comedy has been adapted into a modern anime TV series Fullmetal Alchemist. The show draws on many of the concepts presented in the original epic poem, but also radically changes the context being talked about. The anime series is very fantastical, involving humans and non-humans, such as witches. What is most striking about this, in its connection to the comedy, is that the character named Dante opposes Dante Alighieri almost completely.
    In Fullmetal Alchemist, Dante is an ancient old woman that has all the knowledge of ancient alchemy and practices alchemy to get what she wants and control those around her.  
Dante's main mission in life is to reach immortality. She and her husband create the Philosopher's Stone which allows them to transmute into different bodies and to continue to live on. He husband eventually leaves her however, but not before they have a son. Unfortunately, the son gets mercy poison at a young age and almost dies, but Dante tries to save him and transmutes him into this human-looking magical creature called Envy. Envy is the only magic person to have a name of one of the deadly sins. Other characters that appear include Pride and Greed.
Dante's personality are very enigmatic, because she constantly changes form. Most of the time, however, she is a heartless person who looks down upon everyone else. Throughout the series, Dante commits every one of the Seven Deadly sins found in Inferno:
Pride: as I said, she looks down upon everyone, and thinks that all the blood shed that goes into the philosopher's stone doesn't matter because others' lives are pointless
Envy: her husband leaves her for another lover, "envy" actually becomes the name of their son
Wrath: she uses her alchemy powers to punish her servants and ex-husband
Sloth: she often sends lesser alchemists to do works to get her the philosopher's stone, having a cool demeanor about her, and leaving the footwork to everyone else
Greed: she will stop at nothing to get the stone
Lust: she takes over bodies that are attractive instead of matching her 400 year old soul, and sometimes uses them to sleep with unsuspecting lovers of those she has replaced
Gluttony: the desire to live longer is just the desire to all these lives, but waste them, accomplishing nothing but attaining more life