The comedy of Hell: Pasolini and Sanguineti's rewritings of Dante's 'Inferno'

In his seminal work on "The Power of Influence: Aspects of Dante's Presence in Twentieth-Century Italian Culture", Zygmunt Baranski underlines how often, within the debate on the nature and limits of the relationship between authors in the name of Dante, only the aspect of the "marked", "learned", "intentional borrowing from Dante" is highlighted, thus limiting any investigation of Dante's presence to the lexical surface of a text, to a taxonomy of occurrences that seldom go beyond the revelation of a source. Furthermore, possible Dantean ideological influences are often removed from consideration and Dante's presence is again confined to recognizable utterances.Because of this theoretical approach, a number of parodic, 'disguisedi' rewritings of Dante's Comedy have been neglected or dismissed, since the 'linguistic' quality of the text was not immediately apparent. This is especially true of some texts written by Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose opus would otherwise bear Dante's stamp in its very DNA. In its first two chapters, this study offers a sample investigation of Pasolini's "dantismo" (limited to two texts: La mortaccia, 1959, and La divina mimesis, 1965) that goes beyond the lexical census to examine how Dante informs Pasolini's view of literature and controls his poetic system. Pasolini's vision of society as a consumerist Hell, that nullifies any opposition and banishes the intellectual, dictates the choice of a Dantean subtext, here studied in detail both in its linguistic and ideological implications. Pasolini fully identifies with Dante, who becomes the utopic voice of liberation from intellectual passivity and acquiescence to any established power.Chapter Three discusses the difficult relationship between Pasolini and Edoardo Sanguineti (Pasolini's literary opponent during the years when he was writing La divina mimesis), and underlines many otherwise overlooked analogies in their highly politicized 'narrative' reading of Dante (versus a Crocean, 'lyrical,' a-political reading of the text). The chapter then studies Sanguineti's own adaptation of Dante's Inferno (1989), primarily seen through the lens of his own scholarly writings on that subject and in contrast with Pasolini's work on the subject.