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Inferno I: Breaking the Silence DENISE HEILBRONN-GAINES The Divine Comedy opens at an extraordinary moment of moral awakening , in the midst of a crisis. Dante has found himself again:' he is in a dark wood, because the straight path has been lost. Conscious of his own perilous situation, he is filled with fear. This event is described retrospectively as having occurred in the past, "in the middle of the road of our life." The dread Dante felt then is renewed now, in the retelling. Just how he entered that dark place is hard to say, so full of sleep was he when he abandoned the true way. Dante, an anonymous character until Beatrice pronounces his name at the top of the mountain of Purgatory, is a wayfarer whose fear is powerfully real. Yet the transparent moral symbolism of the opening verses of Canto I raises the question whether the wood in which Dante finds himself is literally a "place," or rather a symbolic wood that serves primarily to represent the wayfarer's spiritual condition. The darkness is so bitter as to resemble death. Such darkness precisely describes a state of sin, the death of the soul. The road the wayfarer has abandoned (abandonment implies a willful act) is the "straight" or "true" way. It readily calls to mind its opposites , the many crooked, false paths he must have taken to arrive at his sinful state. The darkness too evokes its opposites, the light and life, the state of happiness in the divine presence, to be reached at the end of life's journey when the right path is chosen. The first three tercets do not express these positive values but imply them by their absence, while the text focuses on the protagonist's overwhelming sense of fear. Nevertheless, the dark wood does hold some good, and Dante will deal with this by talking about the other things he saw there-things other than the good (vv. 8-9). The story seems to arise from a negative moral landscape, in which a real wayfarer, truly terrified, realizes that he has lost his way. Besides creating the implied moral contrasts of darkness and light, straight and crooked, true and false, good and something other than good (its absence, or evil), the twelve initial verses contain two additional important dichotomies. Dante has lost his way along the road of our life. It is 286 his journey as well as ours. He represents himself, the one, and all humanity, the many who participate in his condition and his experience, including the reader. Furthermore, it is hard (now) to talk of that dark place where he was lost (then), for the thought of it renews his fear (vv. 4, 6). Dante is the lost wayfarer in the narrative, and he is also the narrator, the poet, who remembers and retells his experience for the sake of revealing the good that he discovered in it. By that fact alone, the reader knows from the outset that, as dark and oppressive as the story's beginning may be, its outcome will be good. And since this is the story of a remembered experience, we are to accept it as something that literally happened. Yet, in the first half of Canto I, it is difficult to grasp an objective, literal meaning. Its dreamlike or symbolic quality has often been commented upon.2 The wayfarer looks up from the dark wood to see a sunlit height. The wood has become a valley, a low place, in contrast to the hilltop illuminated by the sun, the planet which, in its symbolic reflection of the divine light, "leads men straight ahead on every road." The "road of life" may now be seen as an ascent, as the sinner struggles to flee from the darkness of sin to the light of salvation, no longer implied but expressed in visible symbolism.l Here the shifting metaphors become increasingly perplexing. The hill, the valley, the rays of light that briefly allay the wayfarer 's fear, the panting swimmer emerging from a dangerous sea, the deserted slope, the firm foot (the lower one in an attempted uphill climb), all seem to mean something more than themselves while lacking a clearly objective reality of their own. They have been explained allegorically in spiritual and moral terms, in terms of the soul, its strivings, its higher and lower faculties that direct the soul either to God or to the things of this world.' In the unfolding...

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