Tying it all together.

Anybody around here ever wonder why the shades in hell or the souls in Purgatory bother to stop and chat to Virgil and Dante? I thought so. I think C. S. Lewis wondered that, too, so you're in good company. In the "hell" part of The Great Divorce the narrator has no guide, and he finds himself wandering about in a dreary city where people insist upon themselves so much that they eventually are unable to exist around any other than themselves. The city is seemingly endless, and dwellings, always drab, spring up at a thought at its edges, which by the time the narrator has come there are at almost inconceivable distances from him. People get to where they can't stand others around them, so they are steady imagining more and more of the same and same and moving on and on, and this has been going on since the fall, I reckon. I say this is "hell," but Lewis's hell and Purgatory and Heaven are not so clearly delineated as is Dante's. Typical modern, typical modern. Ooooo, I bet Lewis would hate to hear that! I don't mean it, Lewis, I don't mean it. But seriously, folks. Why do the shades speak?

One way to answer would be, "Well, Monica my good Man, because, dang it, there wouldn't be any story without some dialogue. I mean, am I right, or am I right?" Yes, you are right, you imaginary unimaginative thinker, you. But I like to work from within a story or a poem or a world which the author creates, and I go outside of it only to understand its inner workings better. T. S. Eliot says, "Hey, if one can really penetrate the life of another age, one is penetrating the life of one's own." (Okay, he didn't write "Hey," but let me have my idiom.) Eliot is talking mostly about history there, but I think the same principle can apply to literature and the "real world." If it's good, then in penetrating a work of literature, one penetrates more than just a shade. So I don't have time for your extra-literature literary rules. Stuff like, "#1: have a story." Pff. Rules. I'm Monica the Man; I don't play by the rules. I'm also not a real author. Hmmmm...

Lewis's condemned souls (again, not delineated) are sometimes keen to talk, when they're allowed to attempt justification of themselves or to go on caressing whatever pet thoughts they cherish away from God. I guess this is what people do in the Inferno as well. There's a spark of life (literally) in Dante upon which they may feed. At first Dante pities them--faints for pity in fact after he has talked to Francesca di Rimini and Paolo Malatesta, both of whom are swirling about in the storm of the Second Circle. For those who don't remember, they'd had an affair, and Francesca's husband (Paolo's brother) slew them both when he found them in...an amorous embrace. That really happened, sometime in the 1270s or 80s I think. The 70s were a crazy decade, I'm told. And what were they doing besides embracing amorously? Why, according to Dante, reading stories about Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere, of course! This has put me in mind of our Chaucerian narrator and the black knight he meets in his "sweven" (that just means "dream").

The Book of the Duchess! Ha haaaa! We're back. I really could write more about it, but I think I'll stint...after this post, of course. Remember, the knight was Love's servant from his youth and prayed to him/her/it for an object of loving, which request was granted. Now hear what Francesca, that damned soul, has to say about Love: "Love, quick to kindle in a gentle heart...Love, that excuses no one loved from loving, seized me so strongly with delight in him [she means Paolo] that, as you see, he never leaves my side." You will also remember that the whole of Chaucer's poem is framed with the desire to sleep or to pass the time away, along with a sense of poisoned wonder that the poet and the knight are still alive, since they can't sleep and, in the case of the knight, his lady is dead. Now hear again Francesca: "One day we read, to pass the time away, of Lancelot, of how he fell in love..." Now, I think Chaucer was a sensitive sort of guy, but if you read much of him, it's also very obvious that he readily seized upon the ridiculous. He was urbane and courteous, Frenchified in some ways, as was more natural then if you weren't a serf, but still, he was very English, and so had sense and sensibility knit tight together. It is said that the occasion for "The Book of the Duchess" was the death of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster and wife of John of Gaunt. She died in the horrible outbreak of plague in 1369-70. Some people think John of Gaunt asked Chaucer for something like "Duchess," and some say nay. I don't know. And here I am going outside the literature itself, but it helps me to understand it. I hope, correctly. I like to think that Chaucer did write this for John of Gaunt and his lovely wife, and by all accounts Blanche was very lovely. I also like to think that, embedded in a kind of elegy for Blanche, there is a gentle poke at the black knight, a warning lest you become not only as desperate as he is, but as silly in his extreme despair, all the while without depreciating his loss, which was no doubt great. Anyway, it might have worked. John of Gaunt remarried--twice, I think--but he directed in his will that he be buried next to Blanche.