The Death and Damnation of Poetry in Inferno XXXI–XXXIV: Ugolino and Narrative as an Instrument of Revenge

Dante has an increasingly hard time progressing on his journey and in writing poetry about it as he approaches the bottom of the Inferno. Symbolic expression loses its grip before the nullity of absolute evil. Language returns to a pre-semiological state of signifying like a brute thing — especially by virtue of the concrete, literal, root senses of words that are reactivated as their conventional sense fails. Most penetratingly, Dante dramatizes in Ugolino the way that narrative, as used for revenge by the damned self, can kill meaning. Rather than opening events to being understood in their true purport, Ugolino’s narrative attempts to fix one hate-driven conclusion and blot out all other potentially redemptive meanings of events. Thus, the raw significance of eating flesh is stripped of the sacramental significance it has for his sons, whose gestures imitate those of the Son of God. Ugolino’s rage blinds him to every meaning other than revenge. Dante runs a similar risk: this episode exposes his own penchant for using narrative as an instrument of revenge. He thereby indirectly confesses to the damning sin of producing narrative that serves his own anger, thereby opening his poetry to redemption by grace and purgation in the sequel.