You would think Hell eviscerates individuality. Sinners lose their mobility. They do not eat. They do not rest. Their human complications are boiled down to one wrong. They are forced to repeat an action or exist in the same state for eternity: the indecisive souls’ chase has no finish line, and fire and ice never let up for those in lake and lava. Hell’s project is to stratify and simplify, in short, to dehumanize humans. But, the underworld is full of souls with immutable characters and distinct ways of responding. Dante doesn’t chat with muttering masses. Instead, he charms, listens, recoils from the passionate and demure alike. Ulysses upholds curiosity, Master Adam is combative, Francesca refuses to renege on her love, and Farinata’s and Cavalcante’s differing physicalities embody confidence and diffidence, respectively. Their individuation/human expression is a form of resistance to Hell’s order.
Ulysses’ speech to Dante and Virgil is a defiant defense of human investigation of truth. The Greek hero relates how he convinced his men to seek the Pillars of Hercules:
‘O brothers,’ I said, ‘who through a hundred thousand perils have reached the west, to this so brief vigil of our senses that remains, do not deny the experience, following the sun, of the world without people. Consider your sowing: you were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge (26. 112-119).
Augustine, arch-skeptic of indomitable curiosity, would quake in his boots if he heard Ulysses’ challenge. Readers, though, do not get Dante’s or Virgil’s reflections. Ulysses’ story stands alone. A connection might be drawn between Dante’s journey and Ulysses’ quest. Negative commentary on Ulysses would naturally lend itself to a questioning of Dante and his own morally ambiguous curiosity. There are other ways to interpret the scene, but that is to the point: Dante gives his reader a live idea from a dead soul.
Master Adam retains the antagonistic, incorrigible spirit that sent him to the lower depths. His punishment is eternal thirst. Oh, how he must crave a sip from a fresh spring or a dive into a running river. Even so he claims he would directly reject salvation, literal holy water, if he had the chance for revenge: “But if I might see here the wicked soul of Guido or Alessandro or their brother, for Fonte Branda I would not trade the sight” (30.76-78). Hell failed to make him into another nameless, repentant soul. The back and forth between him and a fellow fraudster sounds as rambunctious and lively as a heated barter on market day:
“If I spoke falsely, you falsified the coinage,’ said Sinon, ‘and I am here for one fault, but you for more than any other demon!’ ‘Remember, perjurer, the Horse,’ replied he of the swollen liver; ‘and let it be bitter to you that the whole world knows of it!” (30.115-120).
As with any rap battle/babble one feels a natural urge to tune in. Virgil condemns Dante’s like response: “if it happen again that Fortune find you where people are in such a squabble: for to wish to hear that is a base desire”(30.145-148). Virgil confirms the human/daily quality of Adam in conversation when he refers to “people” and suggests the possibility of a similar situation in the future (not in hell).
In the episode with Farinata and Cavalcante, physical presence distinguishes two distinct personalities. Farinata commands Dante to stop: “O Tuscan who through the city of fire, alive, walk along speaking so modestly, let it please you to stop in this place” (10, 22-24). Every one of Farinata’s expressions tell of his supreme confidence: “rising with his breast and forehead as if he had Hell in great disdain” (10.31-36). “Who were your forebears?” (10.42) he demands before asking Dante’s own name. Farinata’s boldness is accentuated as he presents alongside sorrowful Cavalcante. Cavalcante shrinks next to his giant partner: “I think it had risen to its knees” (10.53-54). He questions Dante quietly, nervously: “It looked around me, as anxious to see whether another were with me, and after its peering was entirely spent” (10.51-57). Dante uses “it” for Cavalcante, not the dominant “he” pronouns addressed to Farinata. The contrast between the two shades is drawn mostly clearly “when [Farinata] perceived a certain delay I made before replying, he fell back supine” (10.70-72). The physical statures, one upright, one lying down, reflect two differing manners. Farinata’s assurance cracks for a second: “After he had moved his head, sighing, ‘in that [the slaughter of Guelfs at Montaperti] I was not alone’” (10.88-89). Dante ascribes Farinata’s break in composed self-presentation to his little revealing shake of the head. It is Farinata’s only physical movement in conversation. Farinata reclaims the corporeal when he speaks with his body like humans up above with their revealing smiles and narrowed eyes.
Francesca’s resistance to massification comes in the form of her faith in love. Hell cannot beat it: “Love, which pardons no one loved from loving in return, seized me for his beauty so strongly that, as you see, it still does not abandon” (5.103-5 ). Francesca removes agency from herself. Love, as an actor, surpasses God’s authority. She recalls the fresh force of passion without regret: “When we read that the yearned-for smile was kissed by so great a lover, he, who will never be separated from me, kissed my mouth all trembling” (5.133-136). Ironically, she mentions she and Paolo did not finish the story of Galeotto, in which forbidden passion leads to disaster. Her myopia is a symptom of love. She is oblivious to everything else except her lover. We do not learn about Paolo’s brother, her husband, and how he sent Francesca and Paolo to Minos. Young love and its self-obsession is not consumed in the hell fire, (or specifically blown away by the circle of lust’s eternal wind).
“Why do you kick back against that Will whose ends can never be cut short and which has many times increased your suffering? What is the good of butting against fate?” (9.94-97), asks the angel who opens the gates of Dis. He cannot understand the devils’ rebelliousness, and nor would he understand Ulysses’, Francesca’s, Farinata’s, and Master Adam’s. If he asked our cast of hell resisters—why keep loving if it is wrong? why show strength in pain?—he might receive a response like the one Dante gets from a Paduan usurer. “Here he twisted his mouth and stuck out his tongue, like an ox licking its snout” (17.67-75), it is a perfect nonsensical, human response to authority. Hell is set up to quash defiance like the Paduan’s. Its contrapassos, guardians, and king (Satan) are supposed to frighten its subjects into submission. Satan, however—nothing much more than a large windmill, with three munching heads—seems to be a sorry manifestation of evil personified. He has nothing to say or do to his living guest, and he is not disconcerting like Geryon with his human face and beastly body. Satan’s power exists on an elementary scale, violence and size. There is something much more soul-chilling about the suicide forest as a force: “[I] plucked a small branch from a great thornbush; and its stem cried out: ‘Why do you split me?’ When it had become dark with blood, it began again: ‘Why do you pluck me?'” (13.32-35). Metamorphosis is a jump into the unknown, far from the comfort and familiarity of opposing thumbs and squirming tongues. Della Vigna’s fate, though, scares, too, because it puts him completely at another’s mercy: a world of pain comes from a broken branch. Della Vigna also struggles to speak: “the broken branch hissed loudly, and then that wind was converted into these words: ‘Briefly will you be answered’” (13.91). Hell’s forest, despite its fantastical element, is so poignant in part because it has equivalents in the world above. When at the mercy of one or all, we lose our ability to express ourselves. To those of us locked on assembly lines, mired in wars, lost in mob moments, Dante’s unabashed souls from the underworld may serve as models—vocal guides talking back from the past to the voiceless living half-lives now.