Linden Hills

"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. 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. She reconstructs the Inferno in terms of an African-American suburb somewhere in the Midwest, where people live in terraces or circles according to their degree of prosperity. “I expect it would be quite a dangerous thing to try to recruit Dante to your cause, whether left-wing or right-wing ” The narrative follows two central characters, a couple of African-American poets, as they make their way down through the circles of this suburb called Linden Hills, doing various odd jobs and encountering people of varying levels of prosperity – Naylor calls them, ironically, ‘the prosperous people.’ Basically, the more prosperous you get the more you lose your identity and there’s a sort of dialogue between the young poets and the suburbanites which scrutinises the loss of identity which accompanies the journey down into this modern Inferno . She’s very much seeing these African-Americans as being dispossessed by following the American dream of material betterment. 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 – that’s why he’s in the dark wood in the first place. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter But, unlike most of the detectives of fiction, he doesn’t remain dysfunctional – part of the journey is a therapeutic one, to restore him. If one’s referring just to Inferno , though, he is still very much in that dysfunctional state; his investigation – getting the wrongdoers to confess and reveal themselves (which they do) – is part of the work of getting better. I suppose not many detectives that one thinks of do get restored to society or integrated into some moral scheme in the way that Dante’s pilgrim does, in order to go on into Purgatorio and then Paradiso . But the reason crime writers got interested, and why they continue to be so, is that process of going down into that dark underworld, to work out, to investigate, and get people to talk. Which sort of brings us back to the point at the beginning, about how the power in Dante’s storytelling, when it comes to violence and horror, is what makes Inferno the text that still seems to speak to us most strongly in the present day. Well, I certainly think there’s more to be done! I recently [2014] published a book on the reception of Dante – Dante’s British Public – and that is chiefly concerned with the reception of his work in English-speaking culture, from Chaucer’s time to the present, and I think there is clearly more to be done about the nature of what Dante might mean for modern readers. The question was put to Clive James, who recently gave us another translation of Dante, when Mark Lawson, interviewing him on BBC Radio 4, said: ‘It seems strange to think of popularising Dante.’ I think this is a question which might be addressed a bit more – to what extent has Dante become a figure who has meaning for a wider audience? How can one bring Dante to a broader audience? It was a text originally designed to be performed and it’s quite striking that the Italians have preserved that tradition – particularly through the work of Robert Benigni, who is still performing Dante in Italy’s piazzas. Dante still provides a challenge for popularisers. Since I spoke first to you [Five Books] in 2009, there have been a number of attempts, including a video game, a young person’s Dante and several cartoon versions. Yes, and perhaps time has shown that it is the Inferno that is the most accessible because that’s the part that has been picked up for the video games, comics and so on. And Dante himself clearly regarded the Paradiso as a challenge. But I do want to say, as indeed the authors of the Very Short Introduction to Dante have said, that it’s perhaps time for people to go beyond Inferno, at least into the Purgatorio. The most humane passages of Dante, which have to do with souls in transition, seem now, in our age of migrants and of souls in progress between different worlds, to suggest that Purgatorio is a text for our times."