Wednesday
Dr. John Reishman in my Dante study group recently pointed out that the poet is profoundly disturbed by the negative impact romances can have on readers. We learn from Francesca and Paolo, the two lovers who are killed by a jealous husband and end up in the second circle of hell, that the story of Lancelot and Guinevere contributed to their infraction. I’m pretty sure that Chrétien de Troyes’s The Knight of the Cart is the offending text.
Many people over the centuries have pointed out the danger of illicit love stories. Francesca blames this one of being a pander, which is to say, a procurer or intermediary in sexual affairs:
But if there is indeed a soul in Hell
to ask of the beginning of our love
out of his pity, I will weep and tell:
On a day for dalliance we read the rhyme
of Lancelot, how love had mastered him.
We were alone with innocence and dim time.
Pause after pause that high old story drew
our eyes together while we blushed and paled;
but it was one soft passage overthrew
our caution and our hearts For when we read
how her fond smile was kissed by such a lover
he who is one with me alive and dead
breathed on my lips the tremor of his kiss.
That book, and he who wrote it, was a pander.
That day we read no further.
Like a film made in Hollywood’s Hayes Code days, the passage strategically fades to black when things get interesting.
Here’s the passage I’m pretty sure Francesca refers to. Lancelot has just pulled out a set of iron bars to get to the Queen’s chambers:
First he finds Kay asleep in his bed, then he comes to the bed of the Queen, whom he adores and before whom he kneels, holding her more dear than the relic of any saint. And the Queen extends her arms to him and, embracing him, presses him tightly against her bosom, drawing him into the bed beside her and showing him every possible satisfaction; her love and her heart go out to him. It is love that prompts her to treat him so; and if she feels great love for him, he feels a hundred thousand times as much for her. For there is no love at all in other hearts compared with what there is in his; in his heart love was so completely embodied that it was niggardly toward all other hearts. Now Lancelot possesses all he wants, when the Queen voluntarily seeks his company and love, and when he holds her in his arms, and she holds him in hers. Their sport is so agreeable and sweet, as they kiss and fondle each other, that in truth such a marvelous joy comes over them as was never heard or known. But their joy will not be revealed by me, for in a story, it has no place.
Francesca and Paolo are in the second circle of hell (their murderer is destined for the ninth, joining others who treacherously kill relatives). Slaves to a desire than can never be fulfilled, they lament ceaselessly as they are blown about by strong winds:
Now the choir of anguish, like a wound,
strikes through the tortured air. Now I have come
to Hell’s full lamentation, sound beyond sound.
I came to a place stripped bare of every light
and roaring on the naked dark like seas
wracked by a war of winds. Their hellish flight
of storm and counterstorm through time foregone,
sweeps the souls of the damned before its charge.
Whirling and battering it drives them on,
and when they pass the ruined gap of Hell
through which we had come, their shrieks begin anew.
There they blaspheme the power of God eternal.
And this, I learned, was the never-ending flight
of those who sinned in the flesh, the carnal and lusty
who betrayed reason to their appetite.
Francesca vividly describes what such love feels like:
Love, which in gentles hearts will soonest bloom,
seized my lover with passion for that sweet body
from which I was torn unshriven to my doom.
Love, which permits no loved one not to love,
took me so strongly with delight in him
that we are one in Hell, as we were above.
John pointed out that Dante uses the image of starlings blown by the wind to capture their psychological state:
As the wings of wintering starlings bear them on
in their great wheeling flights, just so the blast
wherries these evil souls through time foregone.
Here, there, up, down, they whirl and, whirling, strain
with never a hope of hope to comfort them,
not of release, but even of less pain.
Our group then discussed other literary characters who are caught up in endless whirling. Dante mentions Dido (who is bewitched by Cupid), Cleopatra, Helen, Paris, Achilles, and Tristan. We identified Catherine and Heathcliff, Anna Karenina, and Emma Bovary, the latter being particularly apt as she, like Francesca and Paolo, is swayed by her reading. Why settle for a dull, colorless marriage when adultery promises such magic?
Unfortunately for Emma, she learns, in one of literature’s bleakest lines, that unfaithfulness isn’t an improvement: “She found again in adultery,” Flaubert writes, “all the platitudes of marriage.” Creating his own infernal circle for his protagonist, Flaubert has her illicit liaison take place in a room overlooking the fairgrounds, where her love talk is intercut with bureaucrats exhorting farmers to apply themselves “to the amelioration of the soil, to good manures, to the development of the equine, bovine, ovine, and porcine races.” Romance is reduced to slabs of meat.
That relationships must have a spiritual as well as carnal component is made clear by Christopher Marlowe in Doctor Faustus. After selling his soul, Faustus asks Mephistopheles for a wife, only to be presented with “a hot whore.” Faustus cannot have a soulmate once he has rejected soul, which is what Francesca and Paolo have done.
To differentiate the lovers mentioned above with, say, Romeo and Juliet, the latter are anchored by wedded love. “If that thy bent of love be honorable,/
Thy purpose marriage,” Juliet conditions, while Romeo says to Friar Lawrence,
Then plainly know my heart's dear love is set
On the fair daughter of rich Capulet:
As mine on hers, so hers is set on mine;
And all combined, save what thou must combine
By holy marriage: when and where and how
We met, we woo'd and made exchange of vow,
I'll tell thee as we pass; but this I pray,
That thou consent to marry us to-day.
Similarly, Jane Eyre, while sorely tempted, ultimately rejects Rochester’s offer to become his mistress because there are more important things than gratifying one’s feelings. Here’s the key moment in her interior dialogue:
[Feeling] clamoured wildly. “Oh, comply!” it said. “Think of his misery; think of his danger—look at his state when left alone; remember his headlong nature; consider the recklessness following on despair—soothe him; save him; love him; tell him you love him and will be his. Who in the world cares for you? or who will be injured by what you do?”
Still indomitable was the reply—“I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. I will keep the law given by God; sanctioned by man. I will hold to the principles received by me when I was sane, and not mad—as I am now. Laws and principles are not for the times when there is no temptation: they are for such moments as this, when body and soul rise in mutiny against their rigour; stringent are they; inviolate they shall be. If at my individual convenience I might break them, what would be their worth? They have a worth—so I have always believed; and if I cannot believe it now, it is because I am insane—quite insane: with my veins running fire, and my heart beating faster than I can count its throbs. Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot.”
Mentioning Jane Eyre reminds me of a superb essay by a student who compared and contrasted the novel with the Twilight series, which had enthralled her as a high school student and which she now found dangerous. (Read my account of her story here.) She spoke from experience, having been in an abusive relationship before pulling herself out of it. Author Stephenie Meyer regards as a happy ending Bella’s decision in the third book to allow herself be bitten so that she can spend eternity with her vampire lover. Tessa, essentially making Dante’s point, points out the dangerous lure of total absorption
Dante acknowledges the lure by showing his own fascination with the Francesca-Paolo story. As he sees it, they shouldn’t be in hell and he must hear their story:
And when I had heard those world-offended lovers
I bowed my head. At last the Poet [Virgil] spoke:
“What painful thoughts are these your lowered brow covers?”
When at length I answered, I began: “Alas!
What sweetest thoughts, what green and young desire
led these two lovers to this sorry pass.”
Then turning to those spirits once again,
I said: “Francesca, what you suffer here
melts me to tears of pity and of pain.
But tell me: in the time of your sweet sighs
by what appearances found love the way
to lure you to this perilous paradise?”
After hearing Francesca’s account, Dante is so overcome with emotion—just as these lovers were—that he faints:
I felt my senses reel
and faint away with anguish. I was swept
by such a swoon as death is, and I fell,
as a corpse might fall, to the dead floor of Hell.
People have been swooning over love stories for hundreds of years. It’s why Samuel Johnson wanted novels kept away from young people and why German parents railed against Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, fearing their sons and daughters would follow the protagonist into suicide.
They are not entirely wrong, as Tessa’s story makes clear. The greatest love literature, however, like Dante’s handling of Francesca and Paolo, warns against losing self and soul in a grand passion. We’ve seen how Jane Eyre resists, and Tolstoy counterposes Anna’s affair with Levin and Kitty’s wonderful marriage, which is far more compelling and life-affirming. Goethe too warns against the narcissistic self-absorption that leads Werther to take his life.
Literature captures love’s passions but the best works also provide us critical distance. In this way they guide us towards better living.