Dante in the Knowledge Society

Gustav Doré. Inferno 26: The Flaming Spirits of the Evil Counsellors

Ulysses and Guido de Montefeltro in cantos XXVI and XXVII of the Inferno are “Evil Counselors,” civic leaders who have manipulated both language and their followers. Again, as we have seen in other cantos in the Inferno, the role of rhetoric in creating or inhibiting a just society is paramount for Dante. Giuseppe Mazzotta shows how consistently rhetoric is thematized in 26, as “the tongues of fire that conceal the sinners; the oblique allusions to Elijah’s prophecy (1.35); the formal décor in the exchange between the poet and the hero of the epic world, Vergil and Ulysses; the frequent allusions to the epics . . .; the more obvious fact that the canto tells the story of the mind-bewitching orator . . . who moves men by rhetorical blandishments and incantatory language to the pursuit of ‘virtute e canoscenza’” (Dante, Poet of the Desert 71-72). Dante’s fascination as he watches Ulysses through the tongues of fire suggests how closely Dante identified his own task in the Commedia as a rhetorical gambit (see Mazzotta 93-94).

In this survey you are asked to consider the wiles of rhetoric in a contemporary context. Mazzotta reminds us that the use of oratory calls upon shared metaphors between speaker and audience, or recognizable images with which members of a shared culture may deeply identify (87). Dante, who was writing in the vernacular, was certainly conscious of “sharing metaphors” in a common cultural and political context. His attitude towards Ulysses can be read as a warning: language can lead people not towards “virtute e canoscenza” but into disaster. Can you think of ways in which figures of authority in our time have wielded language for ambivalent ends? What kind of a lesson would you take from this in your own use of language in speech or in writing?

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Sandow Birk. Inferno XXVI