From Detheologizing to DecolonizingToward a Reading of Dante and AlterityAkash Kumar

Detheologizing as a method of reading Dante remains as vital now as it did when The Undivine Comedy was published in 1992. Barolini’s fundamental insight that we must ‘break out of the hermeneutic guidelines that Dante has structured into his poem, hermeneutic guidelines that result in theologized readings whose outcome has been overdetermined by the author’11Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 17, hereafter UDC. Subsequent references given in parentheses in the main text. provides the clearest path forward for new research and possibility in the ossified field that is Dante studies. In my view, this is applicable not only to theologizing as a praxis rooted in religious orientation, but also in the positioning of Dante as the father of Italian language and culture, the defining figure of Italian national identity. In other words, I view decolonizing Dante as a method of reading that is derived from Barolini’s detheologizing, with the purpose of opening our reading of the poem out to global and cross-cultural currents as a way of moving beyond the overdetermined readings that stem from a nationalist and Eurocentric reception history.

This essay will draw inspiration from chapter 2, ‘Infernal Incipits: The Poetics of the New’, to dwell on how Barolini’s meditation on Beginning of page[p. 340] narrative difference has much to offer with regard to Dante’s interest in cultural difference. I argue that attention to Dante’s postcolonial readers, especially Caribbean poets Derek Walcott and Lorna Goodison, may serve as a way to bring us back to the Commedia itself and attune ourselves to Dante’s love of difference with a decolonizing sensibility. As a way of framing that approach, I would like first to consider one of the epigraphs from that chapter of The Undivine Comedy: a citation from the 1949 P. G. Wodehouse novel The Mating Season. As one can appreciate after many readings, there is a whole world in the epigraphs of Barolini’s book. In this case, a citation from the comic mid-century English novel brilliantly introduces the narratological problem of beginnings and the dynamic between author and audience:

But half a jiffy. I’m forgetting that you haven’t the foggiest what all this is about. It so often pans out that way when you begin a story. You whizz off the mark all pep and ginger, like a mettlesome charger going into its routine, and the next thing you know, the customers are up on their hind legs, yelling for footnotes. (Wodehouse, quoted in UDC, p. 21)

I had never heard of P. G. Wodehouse when I first read The Undivine Comedy, and it would be a few years before I read my first Jeeves and Wooster novel (the 1934 Right Ho, Jeeves). Now, many years later, I can place this novel as occupying (quite aptly) a middle position in the complex of Jeeves and Wooster short stories and novels, ranging from the 1915 short story that marks the first appearance of Jeeves to the 1974 novel, Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen, published shortly before the author’s death. It now seems to me that this epigraph has more to it than the droll evocation of a narrator who realizes that he has forgotten to clue in his audience to the background of the story that he tells.

The Jeeves and Wooster dynamic is one that relies upon difference: Bertie is the bumbling London gentleman who goes to his club, visits family and friends in the country, and always manages to find himself in awkward situations as a result of well-intentioned meddling; Jeeves is his Spinoza-reading, poetry-quoting, unflappable gentleman’s gentleman who always manages to save the day. The mere fact of their social difference — Bertie the gentleman, Jeeves his valet — is made far more apparent by the study in contrasts that they provide: we can feel assured that Jeeves would not find himself in the predicaments that Beginning of page[p. 341] Bertie does, for he would be far too prudent for that. We might also imagine how Jeeves as narrator would fail utterly: his version of the story would be clinical and dry, matter-of-fact to the point of boredom. All of this, of course, resonates with a Dantean contention that nobility cannot possibly be conferred by birth alone (‘Rade volte risurge per li rami | l’umana probitate’; ‘How seldom human worth ascends from branch | to branch’, as we read in Purgatorio 7.121–22).22Quotations from the Commedia are from Dante Alighieri: La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. by Giorgio Petrocchi, Società Dantesca Italiana, Edizione Nazionale, 2nd rev. edn, 4 vols (Florence: Le Lettere, 1994). English translations come from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. by Allen Mandelbaum, 3 vols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980–82).

In this light, the link between narrative difference, the poetics of the new, and issues of identity evoked in the social difference between Bertie and Jeeves makes of this epigraph a lens through which we might consider Dante’s difference-making in a broader sense. Jay Ruud draws attention to Wodehouse’s use of chivalry as a kind of medievalism that creates an otherworld not dissimilar from that of the Commedia: ‘Wodehouse is fully aware that his chivalry is an anachronism, practiced by his more idealistic characters against the modern, realistic, and mercantile interests of the powerful older women in his stories. But then, so is his Edwardian world: his characters adopt an outmoded sense of nobility, filtered through a by this time outdated Victorian sense that perfectly fits Wodehouse’s Victorian society which is also an imagined, idealized place no longer existing in reality.’33Jay Ruud, ‘“Never Built at All, and Therefore Built Forever”: Camelot and the World of P. G. Wodehouse’, Connotations, 24.1 (2014–15), pp. 105–21 (p. 106). This sense of Wodehouse’s medievalism extends not only to gender and social class, but can even move in the direction of cultural difference. The end of The Mating Season finds Bertie Wooster, as is very often the case, having operated in a way that has undoubtedly enraged his aunt. Contrary to the usual paradigm, Bertie decides not to make a quick escape but instead to stay and confront the aged relative. The very last line of the novel frames this encounter as a medieval one: ‘I squared the shoulders and strode to the door, like Childe Roland about to fight the paynim’.44P. G. (Pelham Grenville) Wodehouse, The Mating Season (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 2001), p. 272. The Robert Browning poem ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ (first published in 1855) is certainly part of the reference here, but the antiquated word ‘paynim’ never appears in that poem and seems to be part of Wodehouse’s expanded approach to satirizing this Crusades dynamic at the conclusion of his novel. Wodehouse at once evokes a Crusades paradigm,Beginning of page[p. 342] pitting Christian knight against ‘paynim’, and complicates the binary by making it a comic encounter between a bumbling nephew and peevish aunt, thus making familial conflict out of what might otherwise be framed as a clash of civilizations.

I will come back to this complicating of cultural difference, but first I want to dwell on what it is that Barolini establishes about difference and newness as lying at the very heart of Dante’s poetry. She characterizes the Commedia as being more self-conscious than most narratives in its embrace of the poetics of the new, and insists on this as a profoundly human quality that is linked to difference. In dwelling on the difference between angelic and human forms of knowledge as evoked in Paradiso 29, she connects these two qualities. Angels do not have their sight interrupted by new objects and so do not need memory to distinguish between the old and new, unlike the human need to create narratives bound in time for ourselves: ‘The new (“novo obietto”) comports difference (“concetto diviso”), and both are essentially human’ (UDC, p. 23). Barolini tellingly finds this idea of newness and difference to be part of the very rhyme scheme of the Commedia and draws attention to its insistent music: ‘This process, whereby an alterity, the new rhyme, becomes the identity of the subsequent tercet, imitates the genealogical flow of human history, in which the creation of each new identity requires the grafting of alterity onto a previous identity’ (UDC, p. 25). This connection between terza rima, alterity, and identity is powerful on its own. Finding that it imitates the genealogical flow of human history is something far more powerful, in that we can see in the very flow and movement of the poem a constant reminder of Dante’s devotion to difference, his awareness of the non-fixity of human identity in time and, indeed, in cultural crossings.

In this regard, it is perhaps of greater importance still that Derek Walcott adopts and adapts terza rima for his 1990 epic novel Omeros. In a work that dwells upon the creation of St. Lucia’s identity through the grafting of alterity in language, commerce, and culture by colonial violence, it is Dante’s meter — or rather, Walcott’s version of terza rima Beginning of page[p. 343]— that persists and pervades throughout the various evocations of Homeric and Virgilian epic.55On Dante and Walcott, see especially Maria Cristina Fumagalli, The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and the Impress of Dante (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001). To dwell on what Walcott does with respect to the grafting of alterity onto a previous identity, we might look to a moment early on in Omeros, where the poet narrator (here, too, a telling use of the Dantean personaggio-poeta device) dwells on the relationship between the modern and ancient with a beloved who is soon to leave him:

The name Homer is revealed to be a translation, a domestication that robs the original of its identity. Yet, that ‘original’ Greek form of the name and the marble bust of the long-dead poet are connected to the blind fisherman Seven Seas and the reek of drying fishnets, and to a living oral tradition of St. Lucia. In a broader sense, the anglicized forms of Homer and Virg (instead of Omeros and Vergilius) as New England farmers, along with a reference to Pegasus having long been used by Mobil Oil in its logo, ask us to think about the constant grafting of alterity onto previous identities, to interrogate the absorption of such alterity to the point of hiding the difference that lies beneath. As the encounter continues, the name ‘Omeros’ is made creole, a combination of different languages and of nature itself.

By so parsing the name, fusing the elemental language of conch-shell and surf with Latin and patois, Walcott orients us not only to the incantatory possibilities of such cultural and linguistic fusion, but also to the inherent alterities in places such as his island of St. Lucia.

This embrace of difference, revealed by the unraveling and creolizing of a seeming cultural monolith such as the name of Homer, might ask us to turn to issues of language with respect to Dante as well. I would like to do so by way of Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison, who has adapted select canti of the Commedia for some decades now. In the essay ‘Some poems that made me’, Goodison evocatively looks back at her poetic influences from childhood and beyond. Toward the end of this short piece, she writes the following about Dante: ‘I would say that the poem that has had the greatest impact on my adult life is The Divine Comedy. My engagement with it began when I was one of several poets invited by the Southbank Centre in London to rewrite one of the Cantos from Dante’s masterpiece. To date I have rewritten seven cantos, setting them all in Jamaica and employing Jamaican dialect in tribute to the great Italian poet who wrote in the local language of his people’.88Lorna Goodison, Redemption Ground: Essays and Adventures (Brighton and Hove: Myriad Editions, 2018), p. 29. Goodison’s attention to issues of language and setting in her telling adaptations asks us to look at the language of the Commedia with perhaps a different sensibility. In her 2013 collection Oracabessa, Goodison rewrites Inferno 1 to stunning effect. Here is her version of the first simile:

We can note how Goodison makes the extended simile her own, shifting the gender of the poetic subject (as she maintains throughout the canto) and subtly infusing the moment with a Jamaican vernacular Beginning of page[p. 345] sensibility. As Jason Allen-Paisant puts it, ‘We witness Goodison articulating a sense of personal identity, putting herself, instead of Dante, at the centre of the poem’.1010See Jason Allen-Paisant, ‘Dante in Caribbean Poetics: Language, Power, Race’, in The Oxford Handbook of Dante, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati, Elena Lombardi, and Francesca Southerden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 668–85 (p. 680). This is no wholesale transformation with patois at every turn, but we nonetheless register shifts such as ‘in big sea’ lacking a definite article and expressions like ‘reach to shore’ and ‘blow for breath’. This is neither ‘pure’ English nor ‘pure’ Jamaican creole; rather, it is a mix of languages, a blending that might, in fact, ask us to reconsider Goodison’s own characterization of Dante as a great Italian poet who wrote in the local language of his people. Instead, through this hybrid poetics, we might extend Dante’s love of difference to the poetic verve that insistently blends languages together throughout the Commedia. Through this insistent mixing of languages and poetic registers in the work of Caribbean poets such as Derek Walcott and Lorna Goodison, we might think of Virgil’s apparent use of dialect in Inferno 27, Arnaut Daniel’s Occitan in Purgatorio 26, and telling hybrids of Latin and vernacular throughout the poem as important ways of combating the nationalist ideology of Dante as the father of Italian.1111For more on this line of reading, see Akash Kumar, ‘Authentically Speaking: Dante and the Politics of Language in Meloni’s Italy’, Dante Notes, November 21, 2022 <https://www.dantesociety.org/node/176> [accessed 28 May 2025].

Goodison dedicates this published version of her Inferno 1 to Derek Walcott and, indeed, goes on to transform the figure of the guide into someone who seems to be none other than Walcott himself.1212Goodison has just published a full version of Inferno in which she has made the decision to move away from Walcott as the Virgil figure, instead choosing Jamaican poet Louise Bennett. We can certainly think further about the gender implications of this transformation. My thanks to Lorna Goodison for our inspirational exchanges and to Elizabeth Coggeshall for our discussions about Goodison’s work over these past few years. When we come to the end of the canto and Virgilio’s reveal of the journey that will follow, we find that Goodison most tellingly expands upon the terms of the guide’s outsider status. Virgilio’s statement of difference that marks the terms of his exclusion ‘perch’i’ fu’ ribellante a la sua legge’ (‘since I have been rebellious to His law’; Inf. 1.125) is expanded and transformed into a far greater rebellion: ‘[…] I who Beginning of page[p. 346] rebelled | against all forms of hierarchy and divisions of class and race’.1313Goodison, Collected Poems, pp. 561–62. Heaven is depicted as a corrupt political regime in which straw bosses make biased decisions about who is permitted entry and who is excluded. Goodison thus relates the exclusion of Virgilio on religious and temporal grounds to a form of rebellion that rails against excluding alterity, particularly the sort of alterity based in class and race. This poignant adaptation might take us back to what Barolini observes as Dante’s ‘institutionalizing of difference’ that causes critical overreach and his ‘love of difference’ (UDC, p. 33) that challenges all of us as readers. Goodison as a reader of Dante is perhaps picking up on the drama of Virgilio as one that implicates and elides the temporal, cultural, and geographical. As Barolini points out in her treatment of Inferno 4 and its seeming lack of excitement, ‘its drama unfolds as the story of Vergil and the virtuous pagans unfolds and culminates in Paradiso 19’s agonized questioning of the justice that condemns those deprived of the knowledge of God through no fault of their own’ (UDC, pp. 37–38). Taken in this way, the rebellion is indeed oriented to more far-reaching hierarchies and forms of division, ones that include the man born on the banks of the Indus river who seems to be unjustly condemned through no other fault than a lack of access.

I would like to conclude this essay with one more postcolonial reader of Dante who, in a sense, combines a decolonizing and detheologizing approach to the Commedia: Salman Rushdie. Rushdie, by his very name, asks us to look with eyes more attuned to Dante’s love of difference at the last name in the catalogue of non-Christian excellence that dominates Inferno 4: ‘Averoìs, che ’l gran comento feo’ (‘Averroes, of the great Commentary’; Inf. 4.144). In his 2012 autobiography about his time under police protection in the wake of the Khomeini fatwa, Rushdie writes the following about his late discovery of the origin of his name:

Anis renamed himself ‘Rushdie’ because of his admiration for Ibn Rushd, ‘Averroës’ to the West, the twelfth-century Spanish-Arab philosopher of Córdoba who rose to become the qadi or judge of Seville, the translator of and acclaimed commentator upon the works of Aristotle. His son bore the name for two Beginning of page[p. 347] decades before he understood that his father, a true scholar of Islam who was also entirely lacking in religious belief, had chosen it because he respected Ibn Rushd for being at the forefront of the rationalist argument against Islamic literalism in his time; and twenty more years elapsed before the battle over The Satanic Verses provided a twentieth-century echo of that eight-hundred-year-old argument.1414Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 2012), pp. 22–23.

Rushdie’s dwelling on his father’s choice, his framing of Ibn Rushd as embodying rationalism that opposed dogma and literalism, highlights the radical nature of Dante’s choice in his own time and in ours. This is something made all the more apparent in the wake of the horrific attack on Rushdie in 2022. On a more direct front, we might look to Rushdie’s essay ‘Proteus’, in which he frames his relationship to Shakespeare with a look to Dante.1515For more on Rushdie’s own reflections on the attack and his recovery, see Salman Rushdie, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (New York: Random House, 2024). He contrasts his relationship to Ben Jonson and Shakespeare in the following way:

I acted in Jonson but he hasn’t remained useful to me, whereas Shakespeare is both my door knocker and the owner of the domains to which the knock admits me, at once my Virgil opening the gates of hell and heaven, and the devil, and God, and I say this as a person who believes in neither God nor the devil, I believe only in Virgil, but I understand the nature of the contract of fiction, so I can agree to suspend disbelief in what I know is not to be believed in the hope of finding, by doing so, some truth on which I can rely, in which I can have faith.1616I cite from the version collected in Salman Rushdie, Languages of Truth: Essays, 2003–2020 (New York: Random House, 2022), p. 34.

Rushdie is a detheologized reader of Dante. He also serves important decolonizing purposes. Indeed, what it means to believe in Virgil is nothing short of understanding the slow burn of the poem’s drama that stretches from first to last, that asks us to see, as Goodison does, what it is to expand Virgil’s rebellion to encompass a rebellion against all forms of hierarchy and division. By so embracing Dante’s love of difference, we might continue to hope, as Rushdie does, to find some truth on which we can rely.