100 YEARS OF PURGATORY:
DANTE IN ELIOT, CAMUS & PLATH
near-exactly seven-hundred years ago, Dante wrote his Divine Comedies. in this “metadramatic” (1) world, he paints the three destinations for souls in the afterlife: inferno (hell), purgatorio (purgatory) and paradiso (heaven). (2)
purgatory and inferno parallel one another in their seven concentric terraces, each a sin — sloth, lust, envy, gluttony, et. al..
a soul housed by inferno has no hope of transcension.
souls in purgatory, however, suffer in the hopes of redemption and subsequent transcension into paradiso. this promise is what lends meaning to the protagonists’ suffering.
through this systematic fabrication, Dante devises a manner of adapting morality to the edifice of religion. he aligns literal categories of behaviour, dividing them into “overlapping actions and appropriate punishments” (1). herein, the virtues of catholicism are reinforced, enacted, and preserved.
herein, justice is achieved, all scales are balanced, and Dante can sigh a breath of relief.
Dante’s elaborate interpretations of heaven, hell and purgatory can be traced in allusion throughout history. of these, one seems to have wedged itself most stiffly in modernity, and that is purgatory.
one hundred years ago, in 1922, T.S. Eliot wrote The Hollow Men. (4) his epigraph, “penny for the Old Guy,” alludes to paying Charon — “the Old Guy” — a gold coin to ferry one’s soul down the river Styx, to the afterlife.
he describes the “tumid river” which, in Dante’s mythology, leads either to purgatory or to inferno. it comprises the “last of meeting places” for the hollow men.
we’ll begin here, in the arid desert of modern industrialism, a geography which frequently reflects the landscape of Dante’s canon.
subsequently, we’ll make two jumps, each of which comprising two decades. at the first, we’ll visit Albert Camus in brief; at the second, we’ll linger on Sylvia Plath, as she stands in a graveyard, under The Moon and the Yew Tree.
these three artists I have chosen because they extricate themselves so gradually from the grasp of religious artifice, and present a journey along the border of the afterlife. I wonder, though, if any have found themselves free? or did they wake up from death in a ferry, staring at the back of Charon’s head?
at the crossroads between the living world and purgatory itself, in this awkward breath between revolution and depression, Eliot’s narrator speaks in words that begin to shake: “lips that would kiss / form prayers to broken stone.” this is an inversion of Shakespeare’s line “lips that they should use in prayer,” originally an admonishment of bashful young lovers who must turn themselves closer to God.
gone, however, are the days of defying divinity in sensual acts; Eliot’s narrator is perpetually suspended “between the desire / and the spasm.”
in place of pleasure is prayer. prayer, hushed and stuttered, “form[ed] to broken stone” — a supplication to statues he suspects cannot hear him.
here lies the predominant demarcation between Dante’s text and the others with which we are concerned: Dante’s appropriation of divine myth to a sensical, methodical afterlife allowed him solace in his living world.
his own virtues are upheld by the cosmos and all action has a fair and just reaction — souls are sent to purgatory in order to repent their sins and struggle toward a goodness which will earn them a place in heaven.
so, if Eliot’s stone idols be “broken,” if the “supplication” be of a “dead man’s hand,” his suffering is no longer toward goodness, nor toward salvation, and is meaningless.
in twenty years, Camus will bend his ear to the weary ground and conduct the faint whine of misery. Eliot’s hollow men live, in Camus’ words, “in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights.” their “exile is without remedy, since [they are] deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.” (6)
Eliot’s men live in the “dead land / the cactus land.” it is in his “hollow valley / this broken jaw of our lost kingdoms” where we find Plath.
writing four decades of purgatory later, she no longer recognises the image of the faith to which Eliot still clung.
in The Moon and the Yew Tree, (7) she stands “separated from [death] by a row of headstones.”
softly, her narrator sings “how I would love to believe in tenderness,” to fall amongst the “blue garments” of Mother Mary, look into her marble eyes, “gentled by candles.”
but Plath’s girl has “fallen a long way.” far from solace, from salvation, these religious edifices are poised like marble statues, enjambed into lifeless fragments: “inside the church, saints will all be blue, / floating on delicate feet over cold pews, / their hands and faces stiff with holiness.”
religion has never held the meaning it would need to have disillusioned Plath; it stands black and still as it always has. the light in her eyes is “the light of the mind, cold and planetary.” she invokes Christ, here, projects his enlightenment onto detached celestial images, “distant” and “solemn” like Eliot’s “fading star.” (4)
her only familiar is the moon, “quiet / with the O-gape of complete despair,” “dragging the sea after it like a crime.” she colours her landscape with this same despair; the yew tree, usually a symbol for life, is shown here representing death - the fallen leaves, its “gothic shape.”
by virtue of severing the self from the divine, Plath portrays a lifetime of lingering in the doorway.
“the message of the yew tree is blackness —
blackness and silence.”
therefore, where Dante intersects with modernity, the first face we see is that of death.
in 1924, during his conversion to Christianity, Eliot laments, “he who was living is now dead / we who were living are now dying / with a little patience.” (5)
here, Eliot chronicles Christ’s definitive crucifixion.
in our twentieth century, God may longer stake his claim to faith, nor to existence.
in this unremarkable moment, a hairline crack forms where sunlight hits a broken column, and all is lost.
manning the trenches of this great cataclysm, Eliot is gripped with fear. he is truncated and stuttering, “for Thine is / life is,” singing circular nursery rhymes.
The Hollow Men is thus a muttered incantation of fragmented prayers. it is saying a word time and time again until it tastes strange in your mouth, or writing it over and over until you become convinced it’s spelled wrong — it’s a lament delivered in an empty room, a line you write just to cross it out again.
“the eyes” of foe or friend which Eliot’s narrator “dare[s] not meet” make their rounds every stanza, taunting him with the promise of an afterlife, if only he were to direct his gaze.
as such, he prays not only to “broken stone,” but to “those who have crossed / with direct eyes, to death’s other kingdom,” imploring them to remember him not as “lost” or “violent” but only as “hollow” —
emptied, scooped out, by a world devoid of the divine.
we’re far enough, now, from the fantastical inventions of good and evil, to know that they are machinations only of men, and not of gods.
camus tells of how “a world that can be explained, even with absurd reasons, is a familiar world,” (6) and it saddens us that we may no longer hand a penny to an old guy and be ferried through a tunnel carved out of rock.
we wanted these elaborate systems, these “phantasmagoric” (1) creations, these all-knowing purveyors of human justice. we wanted to believe the sky and night were alive, the sun rose only for us, the moon knew the names of men.
these twenty odd years have placed three figures along the same tumid river.
while the first stares at the clouds which flower over the moon, another reclines in soft sun, and the last is bent in prayer, both soiled palms facing up toward the sky.
