Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
An ambitious project that attempts to assimilate Dante’s work into the modern African-American experience. Gloria Naylor, has been the most successful of those who have attempted to assimilate the structure of Dante’s work into their own narratives and to relate it to their own culture. As Naylor herself acknowledged in a conversation she had with Toni Morrison, her sense of the structure of the Inferno is itself derived from the ‘Great Books’ course she took as a student in Brooklyn.
Last is Gloria Naylor’s novel, Linden Hills, a fairly on-the-nose use of Dante as social commentary.
The reason I’ve chosen this is that a form of Dante’s impact that tends to be underrated is his presence in the novel. I think that the contemporary African-American novelist, Gloria Naylor, has been the most successful of those who have attempted to assimilate the structure of Dante’s work into their own narratives and to relate it to their own culture. As Naylor herself acknowledged in a conversation she had with Toni Morrison, her sense of the structure of the Inferno is itself derived from the ‘Great Books’ course she took as a student in Brooklyn.
Rather than a nod or homage to Dante, Naylor seems to appropriate wholesale Inferno’s structure and themes.
Yes, this is an ambitious project. Other writers such as Eliot or Heaney may appropriate episodes or lines in a way that focuses upon them as part of the agenda of their own poems. But what Naylor is doing is quite striking, as a placing of that structure in the culture of the African-American experience. Through the journey of the two central characters, the two black poets, it explores their experience of dispossession and loss of identity in a way that creates its own novelistic energies whilst drawing upon the Dantean structure.
Dante’s wandering poet seems almost be a proto-detective of the Philip Marlowe ilk – flawed and lost. Does that influence contemporary authors such as Naylor?
Although Linden Hills is not a crime novel it has the unfolding of a crime at its core and as such it shows affinity with some recent crime fiction in which the murders have some kind of Dantean resonance – for example, Matthew Pearl’s The Dante Club. I think this does suggest some degree of connection between the Inferno and crime. After all, something of the appeal of the journey through Dante’s hell for modern readers is that of following a kind of criminal investigator at work, pursuing wrongdoers and getting them to confess. And, like many detectives, Dante’s pilgrim is a dysfunctional figure.
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Nick Havely is an eminent scholar on Dante, English-Italian literary traditions and late medieval literature. He is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York, and is a widely published author on subjects concerning Dante and medieval writing. He is currently working on a study of Dante in the English-Speaking World from the Fourteenth Century to the Present for which he has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.
