Dante in the Knowledge Society

The Gates of Hell Redux

The Gates of Hell by Auguste Rodin

In Rodin’s “Gates of Hell,” which you see here , the Romantic sculptor depicts the passions and emotions of Dante’s characters upon them. Rodin chose well-known figures from the Inferno – Paolo and Francesco, Ugolino, The Shades and the Thinker (Dante himself) to depict on the gates, which he finished in a wooden model in 1882. This model was set aside however, and as Le Normand-Romain in her essay “The Gates of Hell” ( http://www.musee-rodin.fr/senf1-e.htm) writes, the eventual unveiling of the sculpture in 1900 gave “the general public . . . the surprise of discovering The Gates of Hell stripped of its figures . . . at a personal exhibition organized by Rodin in Place de l'Alma in Paris. In twenty years, Rodin's concept of the relief had changed drastically . . . . he had taken the habit of stripping away from his works any detail he felt was superfluous, and just as he had done in the case of the armless Inner Voice, he decided to remove from his Gate all the attributes which contributed to its immediate understanding.” The “difficulty” here, perhaps, for the early 20 th-century observer, was separating Dante’s characters from their reinterpretations as romantic heroes.

The Gates of Hell by Sandow Birk

In Sandow Birk’s “Gates of Hell,” which you see here , we see Dante and Virgil seeing, as they are depicted in front of an obliquely rendered billboard below an underpass in Los Angeles’ bleak urban landscape, amidst trash and pollution. Here, meaning is “hard” because it is obscured by man’s modern, material engagements.

These 19th- and 20th-century gates are being translated here in front of you as you are asked to assess your own critical stance, or ethical persuasion, as you “stand” in front of this website and the world of the new technology. In what ways may we take these gates and their epitaph – "abandon all hope, ye who enter here" – as a cipher for our stance on cyberspace? This site asks you to “read” your own position in the “knowledge society” and assess the importance of a critical mode in its inexorable growth. Dante is typically invoked as a “classic,” his text seen as universal for the ages . It is hoped that as much as Dante wished the reading of his poem to serve as an exercise in civic literacy (among other things), so the reading of his poem today in cyberspace might compel you to probe the difficulties and challenges of civic literacy in our own times.

Activity 1: Choose one of the following.

1. When one can splice and connect and create and control, literacy in the information society may seem easy. But what is lost in the process of reading and writing this way? Is it so easy to see, that is to read this information critically? What might the disconnect between reading and interpretation in Dante be taken to mean on your computer screen in the 21 st-century U.S.? Investigate a moral issue that has arisen in the age of cyberspace: child victimization, identity theft, misrepresentation (recent Wikipedia case), Napster, and analyze it in comparison with what you find to be a similar moral issue in Dante’s text.

2. Dante was an advocate of standardization, for elevation of the vernacular to the level of the classical languages. In a sense his journey is the story of the use of the vernacular to do the difficult emulating work of the epic of Virgil, to tell a utopian story of a nation (or people) in the language that people speak. Can you reflect upon how your use of the standard in global discourse implies a certain moral authenticity, if not responsibility?