Infernal Metamorphoses: An Interpretation of Dante's "Counterpass"

Abstract

This is an essay in the poetics of pain and punishment, in the symbology of sin. I do not have anything new to add, as might otherwise be expected, to scholarly accounts of the philosophical system which informs the horrific, orderly landscape of Dante's Inferno, and the machinery of suffering deployed within it-the progression downwards, that is, from sins of Incontinence to those of Violence and Fraud, from Lust to Treachery. Rather, I want to explore a way of describing the conceptual and metaphoric logic underlying Dante's mode of representing such suffering, a logic which must bridge the gap or muddle any easy distinctions between the theological and the poetical. My investigation starts from the realization that the pains of the damned are in truth their own living sins, but sins converted to torturing images by what Dante would persuade us is the allegorizing eye of eternal Justice. These pains become portions of a total metaphoric vision of human evil, one in which the damned souls' existence is doubly circumscribed,

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