Bested By Beatrice, Bested By Virgil: Inferno, Canto II, Lines 115 - 141

Beatrice has bested Virgil. Virgil has bested Dante, our pilgrim.

Virgil not only told the pilgrim about Beatrice, but he also diagnosed his main problem (cowardice). And he's offered him hope. So Dante can do nothing else except set off across the universe.

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, as we finish Canto II of Inferno on the podcast WALKING WITH DANTE and get ready to descend into the mouth of hell (or at least Canto III of Inferno, the first true descent in COMEDY).

Here are the segments to this episode:

[02:14] The passage for this episode in INFERNO: Canto II, Lines 115 - 141. If you want to see my translation, check it out on my website, markscarbrough.com.

[05:49] Why did we have to have this rhetorical battle?

[07:20] Beatrice's final salvo--and a bit of irony. She didn't ultimately win with words. She won with tears.

[08:37] Virgil confirms that the she-wolf was Dante's main antagonist. What does that mean? How does that clarify the allegory of the she-wolf?

[09:58] Virgil states his final case--and maybe overstates it, putting himself on a par with the blessed ladies in heaven. There's a lot here about the so-called anxiety of influence (à la Harold Bloom, the American provocateur/literary critic). I love the notion here that as an artist, you imagine your mentor would be, not thrilled, but irritated with you.

[14:53] A bit about Dante-the-pilgrim and desire (and maybe Dante-the-poet, too). Desire is the foundation of the universe in Dante's scheme.

[16:09] Dante speaks in a plain, straightforward way, indicating that he finally gets it, that he finally has what it takes to start the journey (both across the universe as a pilgrim and on the page as a poet).

[17:54] An backward glance at Canto II--and some points about its structure (to use the fancy word, the chiasmus of the canto). A canto highly concerned with rhetoric is itself rhetorically structured. It's more meta than we might first imagine!