Words Unbound by Milton Burke

Author:Milton Burke [Burke, Milton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610756136
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press

After he turned back he seemed like one

who races for the green cloth on the plain

beyond Verona. And he looked more the winner

than the one who trails the field.

The double use of the verb parve (“seemed”: the Hollanders unhelpfully translate the second occurrence as “looked”) can express both the pilgrim’s admiring view of Brunetto in the narrative past and the poet’s implicit reservations about him now. The pilgrim thought him a winner, but that was only seeming, as the poet’s scorching placement of him in hell suggests.

I hope these details and others you can draw from canto 15 support the case I’d like to make about the poet’s intentions. Dante is never a single-valence poet. Throughout the Commedia, he is interested in the proportions of whole human lives. In Inferno, this produces pictures of how some uncontrolled human leanings can disfigure and finally destroy whole personalities. Brunetto’s “scorched face” when Dante meets him is the very image of that disfigurement of a once-revered countenance. Then Dante would be concerned not as much with a character’s specific sinful actions as with the disposition that dominates his life. Not just the act of suicide but the mind of a light denier. Not just a self-centered heresy but the fundamental denial of basic human communion. And so on.

I’ve been claiming that the theme in this canto is procreativity as applied to father figures. It judges how those in a paternal position discharged that responsibility. Allegorically, the canto would then deal with the parental faculty in every human soul, that part of us that responds to the call to subordinate our own interests to those of others depending on us for nurture or guidance. You have been in that position when you raised kids, guided any subordinate or follower, taught students in a high-school classroom, or acted as anyone’s role model. It’s a responsibility everyone has to assume at some time or other. A metaphorical sodomite fulfills his parental duty negligently, narcissistically, or otherwise detrimentally so as to produce nothing healthy from interaction with people whose welfare depends on him. This creates a desert where there should be flora.

For this interpretation to hang together, you’d expect the other desert runners in this canto to be in Brunetto’s category: eminent people positioned in life to influence younger minds. And that, according to Brunetto, is what you do find: bands comprised entirely of “clerics or great and famous scholars.” Brunetto mentions three particular companions, Francesco d’Accorso, Priscian, and Andrea de’ Mozzi. All three were renowned in their day, and as with Brunetto, none is characterized as homosexual in any other source. So maybe specific homosexual acts are not the point, or not the main point. Dante may consider homosexuality as naturally correlated with unproductive parenthood, but on the logic here, it would be a supporting condition and not a necessary cause. You could take it away and still have something deplorable, and you could find it present in something good. Then you could find non-literal sodomites in this canto and unrepentant homosexuals in purgatory or paradise.

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