Near the end of Hades Bloom thinks, "There is
another world after death named hell." This is by no
means a remarkable observation to make about the Christian
afterlife, but the sentence contains a surprise for attentive
readers: it is structured like a line in the Inferno.
Introducing a new region at the opening of canto 18, Dante
writes, "There is a place in Hell called Malebolge (Luogo
è in inferno detto Malebolge)." The allusion is easy to
miss but almost certainly intended. Although Gifford, Slote,
and other annotators have not noticed it, Mary Reynolds does
in the appendix of allusions at the end of her book on Joyce
and Dante (275).
Readers may do a similar double-take when Bloom, after
thinking that cemeteries generate poisonous miasma ("Air of the place,
maybe. Looks full up of bad gas"), unnecessarily repeats
himself: "Must be an infernal lot of bad gas round the
place." The word "infernal" evokes other scenes filled
with foul vapors. In the last circle before the City of Dis,
Virgil and Dante cross a "filthy bog" (7.127) covered with
"marsh-fumes" (8.12). Inside the city, as they prepare to
descend into Lower Hell, they stand above a pit whose "stench
offended even at that height" (10.136), and then they are
forced to take cover from "the unbearable foul stench belched
from that bottomless abyss" (11.4-5). Entering the first of
the Malebolge, where panderers and seducers are immersed in
shit, they find that "The banks, made slimy by a sticky vapor
/ from below, were coated with a mould / offending eyes and
nose" (18.106-8). Victorian-era fears of miasma were
overblown, especially in spacious suburban cemeteries like
Prospect, but the memory of Dante layers a different kind of
"bad gas" over the scene.
Joyce's most resonant evocations of the Inferno are
inspired by lines 55-57 of canto 3, where Dante witnesses "so
long a file of people / that I could not believe
/ death had undone so many (sì lunga tratta / di
gente, ch'i'non averei creduto / che morte tanta n'avesse
disfatta)." Dante's word tanta appears to
reverberate throughout Hades. Bloom thinks, "Funerals
all over the world everywhere every minute. Shovelling them
under by the cartload doublequick. Thousands every hour. Too
many in the world." Mr. Power exclaims, "How many broken
hearts are buried here, Simon!" The caretaker asks the
undertaker, "How many have you for tomorrow?" These
references to the many human beings shoveled into the ground
every day culminate in a passage near the end of Hades
when Bloom reflects, "How many! All these here once
walked round Dublin. Faithful departed. As you are now so
once were we." A draft of Hades containing the
first two sentences was published in The Little Review
in September 1918, so Eliot must have known them. His
sepulchral pedestrians show the influence of Bloom's Dublin's
walkers.
Purgatorio also may figure in Hades, though
here it is harder to say definitively that Joyce is alluding
to the work. When Bloom thinks, "We are praying now for the
repose of his soul. Hoping you're well and not in hell. Nice
change of air. Out of the fryingpan of life into the fire of
purgatory," the reference may simply be to Catholic doctrine,
and not to Dante's poem. But there are much clearer traces in
the passage in which Bloom ponders how suicides are treated.
He thinks, "Yet sometimes they repent too late. Found in
the riverbed clutching rushes." These sentences remind
Gifford and Slote of Ophelia's
watery death in Hamlet, arguably relevant since
the subject is suicide. But if Shakespeare is lurking in the
passage, he is probably sharing space with Dante.
In canto 5 of Purgatorio Dante meets those who have
repented at the last possible moment. Jaccopo del Cassero
tells him how murderers pursued him through the countryside
and he fled into a marsh: "Entrapped in reeds / and mire I
fell, and in that mud / I watched a pool of blood form
from my veins" (5.82-84). Just after this, Buonconte da
Montefeltro tells a similar story of how he was mortally
wounded in battle and made his way to a mountain tributary of
the Arno, where he died with arms folded in a cross and Mary's
name on his lips. A flood created by hard rain "found / my
frozen corpse and swept it down the Arno," left it at "the
bottom, / then covered and enclosed me with its spoils"
(5.124-25 and 128-29). The fact that these men repented late
and died "in the riverbed clutching rushes" strongly suggests
that Joyce was thinking of them.
In Telemachus and
again in Aeolus, Stephen precisely recalls lines from
the Paradiso. These are self-conscious references from
a character who appears to know Dante's writing quite well and
is using it to think about his own promise as a literary
artist. The allusions in Hades are different. Nothing
in Ulysses suggests that Bloom has read the Divine
Comedy. Here it is Joyce who is bringing Dante into the
picture. The author joins Stephen in using structures from the
great Christian epic of the Middle Ages to inform human lives
in 1904.
