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Fear in Dante's Inferno. Phenomenology, Semiotics, Aesthetics.

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Fear in Dante’s Inferno.
Phenomenology, Semiotics, Aesthetics

Daniele Monticelli

Semiotician Juri Lotman opens his short essay “The Journey of

Ulysses in Dante’s Divine Comedy” with a reference to Dante’s com-
parison of himself with a ‘geometer’ in the last canto of Paradise.
Lotman comments that “we might rather say cosmologist or astron-
omer” and finally suggests his own qualification for the author of the
Comedy: “[b]ut best of all would be to call him an architect, for the
whole of the Divine Comedy is a vast architectural complex, a con-
struction of the universe” (2000: 177). In such a construction, adds
Lotman later on in his essay, “space has meaning, and each spatial
category has its own meaning” (ibid., 179).
Dante as the author of the poem certainly occupies this most
pre-eminent position of chief of the manufacturers [archè-tèkton],
designer and supervisor of the toposymbolic edifice of the literary
worlds of the afterlife. We cannot possibly ignore, however, the fact
that the infernal, purgatorial and paradisal spaces are introduced
in the narrative deployment of the architectural construction as a
discovery of the author’s literary alter-ego – Dante as the protagonist
of the poem. External design and supervision are replaced here by
full immersion in the space under construction, which laboriously
starts to emerge as being entangled with, and transfigured by, the
excited sensory and emotional experience of Dante-character and
his “direct” testimony even before it is invested with and structured
by rationalising meanings.
The articulation between these two different positions of Dante
in the construction of the Comedy’s literary space is far from
straightforward and harmonious. Dante repeatedly thematises
it in the poem in terms of what modern psychology would call a
 Fear in Dante’s Inferno 107

‘cognitive dissonance’, or a mismatch between different cognitive

faculties with disorienting consequences for the subject of cogni-
tion. In other words, the extraordinariness and intensity of Dante’s
experience in the three worlds of the afterlife provokes tensions in
the transitions from experience to memory, from memory to intel-
lectual conceptualisation and from there to linguistic expression. I
will report here only two of the many passages of the poem which
describe this troublesome passage from emotionally entangled
discovery (Dante-character) to the meaning-generating detached
description (Dante-author) of the Comedy’s architectural complex:
Who, even in words not bound by meter, / and having told the
tale many times over, / could tell the blood and wounds that I saw
now? / Surely every tongue would fail / for neither thought nor
speech / has the capacity to hold so much. (Inf. XXVIII, 1–6)

From that time on my power of sight exceeded / that of speech,

which fails at such vision, / as memory fails at such abundance.
(Par. XXXIII, 55–57)1

This paper develops the hypothesis that a crucial issue for the har-
monious reconciliation of the embedded experiential discovery and
the external rational construction of the Comedy’s literary space is
represented by the process of perceptive and pathemic disciplining
to which Dante-character’s body and mind must be subjected in
order for them to start perceiving and feeling so as not to endanger,
but rather to contribute to the realisation of Dante-author’s architec-
ture. I have chosen as a privileged place to test this hypothesis and
to follow this disciplining process the dynamics of the passion that
dominates Dante-character in the infernal part of the poem: paura

1
I use here and henceforth Robert and Jean Hollander’s translation of the Comedy
because it is very clear and closely reproduces the features of the Italian text which are
of interest for this investigation. However, my analysis always draws on Dante’s origi-
nal and, when needed, I will signal relevant divergences in the translation. Emphasis in
the quoted passages is here and henceforth always mine.
108 Daniele Monticelli

or “fear”. I will argue that the issue of fear becomes in Inferno a point
of junction where impassionate subjectivity, perception, discipline
and spatial construction enter into a complex interplay, the analysis
of which may grow into a new approach to cognitive dissonances
and narrative tensions in Dante’s Comedy.
It is highly significant in this respect that the first occurrence of
the word paura in Inferno introduces the disorientation mentioned
above for the first time in the whole poem, giving it the shape of
an infiltration of Dante-character’s diegetic experience (perception,
emotion) into Dante-author’s extradiegetic reality (memory, writ-
ing): “Ah, how hard it is to tell / the nature of that wood, savage,
dense and harsh – / the very thought of it renews my fear [paura]!”
(Inf. I, 4–6). Here fear violates the boundaries of the narrative space-
time, penetrating in the spatio-temporal realm of writing and, by
implication, reading, making the content of infernal experience
from the very beginning “hard” [cosa dura] to tell and listen to. If
the successful construction of the infernal space depends on the
harmonious articulation of its two “building sites”, this articulation
will in turn presuppose the re-establishment of violated boundaries
and distances. This means that the journey Dante embarks upon in
the three worlds of the afterlife is, among many other things, also a
way of getting rid of the kind of fear which so strongly keeps him in
its grip at the beginning of the poem. While I have investigated else-
where2 the function of thresholds between diegetic and extradiegetic
space-time in the Comedy, I will consider in what follows how Dante
comes to terms with fear within diegetic reality alone, focusing on
the origins and remedies of the dissonances in perceptive and path-
emic experience and their relations with the sensory construction of
the infernal space. The methodological toolkit I am going to put to
work here is not only the most effective for exploring the bundle of
issues just described. It is also conceived as a general contribution to
an innovative approach to Dante’s work, which would attempt to get

2
See Monticelli 2013.
 Fear in Dante’s Inferno 109

access to its literary specificity and autonomy through the unusual

combination of different theoretical disciplines and languages: phe-
nomenology, semiotics and aesthetics.
Following Edmund Husserl’s general requirements for phenom-
enological analysis (1970), a phenomenology of fear will turn to fear-
ful experience itself in order to study its constitutive elements and
the modalities of their apprehension by consciousness. A semiotics
of fear will investigate fear as already involved in a perceptive-path-
emic-epistemic system of relations, which is encoded in our case in
the narrative of Inferno, where fearful experience is unpacked and
unrolls. As semioticians Algirdas Greimas and Jacques Fontanille
have claimed (1993), passions acquire their own trajectory in textual
environments. Relating differently with other narrative elements,
they undergo a movement of fundamental transformation. Precisely
this transformation of fear within the infernal narrative consti-
tutes, as we will see, the fundamental premise for Dante’s successful
coming to terms with fearful experience itself. Under aesthetics of
fear I will finally refer, in harmony with the notion of the “parti-
tion of the sensible” [partage du sensible] in the aesthetic theory of
philosopher Jacques Rancière (2004), to different forms and degrees
of accessibility to sensory experience: what can be seen and heard
(or smelt, touched and tasted) and what has to remain invisible and
inaudible. In the text of the poem, infernal space and phenomena
are presented to us through Dante’s senses, as descriptions of places
and their inhabitants are usually introduced by verbs of perception
such as “I saw”, “I heard” or “I felt”, while the accessibility of sensory
experience and its limitations play a fundamental role in both the
emergence and the neutralisation of fear. I will show how this neu-
tralisation coincides with Dante’s ‘aesthetic education’, which repre-
sents a necessary complement to his moral, cognitive and emotional
education.
The kind of approach just sketched will be deployed in what fol-
lows through a close reading of Dante’s text at its face value, which
evokes Husserlian epochè in preliminarily bracketing established
110 Daniele Monticelli

moral and theological interpretations of the Comedy. This does

not mean that fear becomes destitute of any moral or theological
function in Inferno. On the contrary, punishment has of course to
be dreaded in order for sinning to be avoided; and if fear relates,
as we have seen, to violations of boundaries, the restoration of the
divine order cannot but represent its natural antithesis and antidote.
What I am suggesting here is rather that a preliminary and autono-
mous phenomenological, semiotic and aesthetic analysis of fear and
its functions in Inferno should be thoroughly pursued before any
attempt is made to compare its results with the traditional moral
and theological interpretations of the same and related issues – a
comparison which remains beyond the scope of the present paper.

The Phenomenology of Fear

Let us start with a philosophical detour aimed at acquiring the
instruments for our phenomenological analysis through references
to two fundamental and diverging conceptions of fear in the tradi-
tion of Western thought. Aristotle defines fear in the Fifth chapter
of the Second book of his Rhetoric – a definition that, given the level
of detail of Aristotle’s introspective analysis, can be well considered
as phenomenological ante litteram. Here are the most relevant pas-
sages for us:
Fear [φόβος] may be defined as a  pain or disturbance due to a
mental picture of some destructive or painful evil in the future.
Of destructive or painful evils only; for there are some evils, e.g.
wickedness or stupidity, the prospect of which does not frighten
us: I mean only such as amount to great pains or losses. And even
these only if they appear not remote but so near as to be imminent:
for instance, we all know we shall die, but we are not troubled
thereby, because death is not close at hand. From this definition
it will follow that fear is caused by whatever we feel has great
power of destroying or of harming us in ways that tend to cause
us great pain. […]
 Fear in Dante’s Inferno 111

If fear is associated with the expectation that something destruc-

tive will happen to us, plainly nobody will be afraid who belie-
ves nothing can happen to him; we shall not fear things that we
believe cannot happen to us, nor people who we believe cannot
inflict them upon us; nor shall we be afraid at times when we think
ourselves safe from them. It follows therefore that fear is felt by
those who believe something to be likely to happen to them, at
the hands of particular persons, in a particular form, and at a
particular time. [1383a]

So the structure of experience and consciousness that Aristotle

associates with phòbos requires 1) the dread of a big pain or loss
which 2) lies in the imminent future and surroundings and which
3) arises from a defined source, in a defined way, and at a defined
time. Returning now to the second terzina of Inferno, we immedi-
ately encounter important problems in applying Aristotle’s defini-
tion. If we decide that the wood [selva] is itself the source of the
dread, it remains unclear how and when it could bring to Dante a
big pain or loss, as in 1 above. If we decide that the wood is not
itself the source of the dread, but rather the potential place for the
manifestation of the latter, it remains unclear what Dante actually
fears, contrary to what is stated in 3 above. And the second aspect of
Aristotle’s definition remains problematic in both cases: the dread
does not seem to be close at hand from either a spatial (“near”), or a
temporal (“imminent”) point of view. Furthermore, it is interesting
to observe that Dante begins the third terzina of Inferno with a com-
parison3 of the fear experienced in the selva oscura with death itself,
which according to Aristotle should not possibly scare us because of
its remoteness.
Martin Heidegger’s properly phenomenological analysis of fear
offers a solution to these impasses. In paragraphs 30 and 40 of the
first division of Sein und Zeit, Heidegger notoriously distinguishes

3
“It is so bitter death is hardly more so” (Inf. I, 7)
112 Daniele Monticelli

between two kinds of fear that he names Furcht (usually translated

with “fear”) and Angst (usually translated with “anxiety”). Like
Aristotle’s phòbos, Furcht is characterised for Heidegger by the
definiteness of its object, the harmfulness, closeness and presence
of that object and its separateness from the subject of the fearful
experience:
Our interpretation of fear [Furcht] as attunement showed that
what we fear is always a detrimental innerwordly being, approa-
ching nearby from a definite region. […] The only threat that can
be fearsome [furchtbar] and which is discovered in fear always
comes from innerwordly being. (Heidegger 1996: 174)

This is what allows us to attribute a determined meaning to Furcht

such as the pain and loss characteristic of Aristotle’s phòbos. Angst
systematically opposes the properties of Furcht and phòbos as we can
clearly read from the next passage:
What Angst is about is not an innerwordly being. […] What Angst
is about is completely indefinite. This indefiniteness does not only
leave factically undecided which innerwordly being is threatening
us, but also means that innerwordly beings in general are not
‘relevant’. The fact that what is threatening is nowhere charac-
terises what Angst is about. […] It is so near that it is oppressive
and stifles one’s breath – and yet it is nowhere. […] In what Angst
is about, the ‘it is nothing and nowhere’ becomes manifest. The
recalcitrance of the innerworldly nothing and nowhere means
phenomenally that what Angst is about is being-in-the-world
itself. (ibid., 174–175)

The source of Angst is, at the same time, completely indefinite (noth-
ing and nowhere) and yet fundamentally closer than the definite
source of phòbos and Furcht. This is possible because in Angst the
distance between the fearing subject and the fearsome object is lost
and the two become indistinguishable. As Heidegger writes, “[b]
eing-in-the-world is both what Angst is anxious in the face of and
 Fear in Dante’s Inferno 113

what it is anxious about” (ibid., 315). But Heideggerean being-in-the-

world is notoriously a synonym of Da-sein, i.e. of the human being,
so that the passage last quoted can be paraphrased by saying that in
Angst we fear for ourselves because of ourselves. What we are scared
of is in fact the possibility of our total failure in everyday relations
with innerwordly beings and the world itself:
In particular, that in the face of which one has Angst is not encoun-
tered as something definite to be taken care of; the threat does not
come from something at hand and objectively present, but rather
from the fact that everything at hand and objectively present has
nothing more to ‘say’ to us. Beings in the surrounding world
are no longer relevant. The world in which I exist has sunk into
insignificance [Unbedeutsamkeit]. (ibid., 315)

Angst destroys, in other words, our familiarity with the world

and innerwordly beings. Heidegger employs the word unheimlich
(translated as “uncanny” or, more literally, “not-being-at-home”) to
characterise the feeling that arises from Angst. Not-being-at-home
uproots us from the everyday network of meanings that silently
ensures the effectiveness of our innerwordly activities. This is why
Unheimlichkeit basically coincides with Unbedeutsamkeit.
It should be clear by now why Heidegger’s Angst is a more con-
vincing candidate than phòbos and Furcht for a phenomenologi-
cal analysis of Dante’s paura in the sixth verse of Inferno. The dark
wood is not a definite source of fear as a particular innerwordly
being, but rather the spatial setting of Angst. First of all, we have
complete absorption – “I came to myself in a dark wood” (Inf.
I, 2), where Dante is not beside some fearful innerwordly being, but
within the space of anxiety which does not simply contain him, but
actually coincides with him.4 Hence the oppressive sense of absolute

4
The (existentially) phenomenological analysis of Dante’s paura meets here the well-
established moral interpretations of the selva oscura, which in their own terms also
state the coincidence of the experienced object and the experiencing subject – Dante
fears for himself (his salvation) because of himself (as a sinner).
114 Daniele Monticelli

imminence and closeness that is characteristic of Angst. It is pre-

eminently a perceptive deficiency, the impossibility of seeing, which
transforms here the nothing and nowhere attached to the indefinite-
ness of the source of fear into a potential everywhere – the wood
is “dark” [oscura] and, as Heidegger claims, “[i]n the dark there
is emphatically ‘nothing to see’, although the world is still there,
more obtrusively” (1996: 177). What Dante dreads in this anxious
condition of total absorption in the dark wood is actually his own
inability to attribute a meaning to what is going on, which arouses
in him a feeling of Unheimlichkeit, not-being-at-home. He expresses
this through a spatial metaphor – “the straight way was lost”, which
marks the collapse of the everyday network of significance. It is
finally interesting to observe that Dante presents the circumstances
at the beginning of the poem as a kind of inescapable contingency –
“How I came there I cannot really tell / I was so full of sleep / when I
forsook the one true way” (Inf. I, 10–12), which is somewhat reminis-
cent of Heideggerean thrownness [Geworfenheit] as the actual source
of Angst.
How should we come to terms with this kind of paura? If Hei-
degger’s analysis of Angst can be adopted as a good phenomeno-
logical description of Dante’s fear in the dark wood, the German
philosopher’s existential solution to the ontological issues raised
by Angst is inadequate for explaining what the Italian poet does
in Inferno. Heidegger notoriously sees in anxiety a positive poten-
tial as it gives us access to the possibility of an authentic existence.
This is why the question for him is not how to get rid of anxiety,
but rather how to dwell within it in the right way, which implies
the individualising decision of understanding one’s existence as
being-toward-death. Such an existential solution to the question
of anxiety is completely alien to Dante. Though, as we have seen,
Dante relates the fear experienced in the dark wood with death,
and though the Comedy is also an allegory of the spiritual trans-
formation of the protagonist triggered by the original anxiety,
Dante does not seem to attribute to anxiety as such any potential for
 Fear in Dante’s Inferno 115

authenticity.5 This is why Dante’s coming to terms with fear in

Inferno cannot possibly be based on individual resoluteness. On
the contrary, Dante’s initial irresoluteness, indecision and doubts
require in the first place the intervention of Vergil and Beatrice –
knowledge and compassion. Secondly, and even more importantly,
coming to terms with original Angst implies in Inferno its prelimi-
nary transformation into ordinary fear, Furcht, which is more easily
manageable for knowledge and compassion. But this transformation
is exactly what Heidegger criticises in Sein und Zeit as “flight”, or an
inauthentic way of coming to terms with the existential possibility
disclosed in Angst.6
Aristotle is this time of greater help. While he analyses fear in the
Rhetoric, it is in the Poetics, and more precisely in the definition of
tragedy, that he suggests a way of coming to terms with it. According
to the Poetics, tragedy has to arouse in the spectator the emotions of
pity and fear in order to effect relief (catharsis) from these emotions
(1449b). We could define this as a homeopathic solution to the issue
of fear – it is a matter of attentively and judiciously dosing amounts
of fear in order to obtain relief together with aesthetic pleasure. This
balance is granted in Aristotelian tragedy by the theatrical situation
where the position of the spectator allows the creation of the neces-
sary distance for experiencing fear without feeling endangered and
for the consequent harmonious articulation of the emotional and
aesthetic experience. In other words, theatricality opposes here what
has been described above as anxious absorption.7 This is already quite

5
In the terms of the moral interpretations of the poem: if anxiety works as the (con-
tingent) condition of possibility for Dante’s salvation, it is clear that, contrary to Hei-
deggerean authentic existence, salvation itself does not have for Dante any essential
relation with anxiety.
6
As James Luchte claims, in Heiddeger’s description of the inauthentic flight from anx-
iety, “anonymous strategies of the ‘Anyone’ orchestrate our comportments to death. They
work to turn our anxiety into fear, only then to dismiss this as weakness” (2008, 175). This
is, as we will see, exactly what Vergil and Beatrice do in the first two cantos of Inferno.
7
I borrow the terminology and opposition of absorption and theatricality from
Michael Fried’s work (1998), but I employ it with a different meaning to what Fried uses.
116 Daniele Monticelli

close to the way Dante comes to terms with fear in Inferno. It presup-
poses, first of all, the transformation of Angst into the more manage-
able Furcht and, secondly, Dante’s aesthetic and sensory e­ ducation.

The Semiotics of Fear

To start considering all this, we must move on from the first 12 lines
of the poem to discover that Angst is certainly not the only, and
not even the pre-eminent, kind of fear in Inferno and that different
kinds of fear do not oppose one another there as they do in Hei-
degger’s analysis, but rather transform into one another as a prem-
ise for that neutralisation of fear which has to be achieved through
Dante’s aesthetic education. This transformation coincides with
what I have defined above as the “semiotics of fear” or the passional
trajectory by which the pathemic pattern of fear unfolds and finds
a solution at the narrative level of the poem. The first two cantos
synthetically expose this trajectory in four stages even before Dante
actually enters the gate of Hell.
The first stage (Inf. I, 1–12) coincides with Dante getting lost
in the dark wood and his corresponding feeling of Angst. We have
already analysed all this, but we are now in a position to understand
Dante’s anxious absorption as an absence of distance or, even more
precisely, the very impossibility of establishing a distance which
would let a particular innerwordly being emerge as the source of
fear. In this respect, being lost in the wood with Angst cannot but
lead to the coincidence of the object of fear with its subject, making
it impossible for the subject to experience fear at a distance. Aes-
thetic experience cannot possibly emerge at this stage.
The second stage describes Dante’s arrival at the foot of the hill
(Inf. I, 13–30). Phenomenologically, the light of the sun is of funda-
mental importance here, and in our trajectory of fear this marks the
return of the conditions of possibility for seeing, bringing back the
presence and, possibly, familiarity of innerwordly beings. As a result,
Angst releases its grip – “Then the fear [paura] that had endured /
 Fear in Dante’s Inferno 117

in the lake of my heart, all the night / I spent in such distress, was
calmed” (Inf. I, 19–21); the re-establishment of sensory (visual) rela-
tions with the surroundings is the reason why even the appearance
of the leopard does not initially scare Dante: “despite that beast with
gaudy fur / I still could hope for good, encouraged / by the hour of
the day8 and the sweet season” (Inf. I, 41–42).
The third stage (Inf. I, 44–60) marks the return of fear with the
appearance of the other two beasts: the lion – “only to be struck
by fear [paura] / when I beheld [vista] a lion in my way” (Inf. I,
44–45), and the she-wolf – “so weighed my spirits down with terror
[paura], / which welled up at the sight [vista] of her” (Inf. I, 49–53).
The nature of Dante’s fear has, however, already changed here: it is
no longer Angst, but Furcht. Its objects are well defined detrimental
innerwordly beings which are clearly separated from the subject of
fear. The nothing and nowhere of Angst now assumes a particular
shape, thus making beings in the surrounding world once again rel-
evant for the experiencing subject. This is described in these pas-
sages with references to direct perceptive experience: ecco for the
leopard, and vista for the lion and the wolf. Sight makes the objects
of fear emerge, triggering the passage from Angst to Furcht. Fear
is, however, still difficult to control, because distance is too short
and seems impossible to maintain – the leopard “impedes and bars
Dante’s way”, the lion “seems about to pounce” and the she-wolf
“comes against” Dante, threatening to “drive him down to where
the sun is silent”, that is, into the space of anxiety. If innerwordly
beings are already relevant in Furcht, what is still lacking at this
stage of our passional trajectory is knowledge and meaning. This
kind of fear seems at any rate to be the necessary premise for the
intervention of Vergil and Beatrice.
The fourth and last stage of the passional trajectory (from line 61
of canto I to the end of canto II) coincides with the neutralisation of

8
Dante had described this before as “the hour of morning, when the sun mounts”
(Inf. I, 37–38).
118 Daniele Monticelli

fear through the establishment of the right distances and the resto-
ration of knowledge and meaning. Vergil and Beatrice clearly under-
stand and describe Dante’s fear as the result of indeterminacy and
confusion, which are caused by ignorance. They cast doubts on its
authenticity, suggesting it is groundless and explaining it in terms
of other, more blameworthy emotions. Thus when fear in the face of
the beasts prompts Dante to escape and risk falling again into the
grip of the dark wood and anxiety, Vergil asks “But you, why are you
turning back to misery [noia]?” (Inf. I, 76); and when Dante hesitates
to embark on the journey, considering it “madness”, Vergil readily
suggests that “your spirit is assailed by cowardice [viltade]” (Inf.
II, 45). Beatrice exposes the criteria for legitimate fear just as if she
were quoting from the definition of phòbos in Aristotle’s Rhetoric:
“‘We should fear those things alone / that have the power to harm.
/ Nothing else is frightening’” (Inf. II, 88–90). And Vergil follows on
from this by stating both the nefarious consequences of illegitimate
fear and the way of neutralising it:
If I have rightly understood your words, […] / your spirit is assailed
by cowardice, / which many a time so weighs upon a man / it turns
him back from noble enterprise, / the way a beast shies from a
shadow. / To free you from this fear / I’ll tell you why I came and
what I heard / when first I felt compassion for you. (Inf. II, 43–48)

Dante can therefore be freed from fear only by dispelling its inde-
terminate and insubstantial, yet very influential (a shadow which
“weighs”), nature through knowledge and compassion. This is why
the second canto is almost entirely devoted to Vergil’s and Beatrice’s
explanations.
The first two cantos of Inferno thus synthetically expose the
trajectory of fear as a movement from feeling to knowing which,
according to Greimas and Fontanille, is a common characteristic
of “passional trajectories” (1993, 1–16). This is made possible by the
fundamental intermediary of full sensory perception. Moving from
darkness and absorption toward visibility and theatricality, Angst
 Fear in Dante’s Inferno 119

(the dark wood) is replaced by Furcht (the three beasts). Furcht is

then in turn dispelled by the supplementation of sight with knowl-
edge, personified by Vergil and Beatrice – the one, as Dante writes,
“whose fair eyes see and understand [il cui bell’occhio tutto vede]”
(Inf. X, 131). This is why at the end of canto II the nefarious effects of
fear are neutralised and Dante may claim: “Your words have made
my heart / so eager for the journey / that I’ve returned to what was
first proposed” (Inf. II, 136–138).

Infernal Fear and Aesthetic Education

The certainties acquired through the neutralisation of fear in the first
two cantos of Inferno are immediately put to the test and violently
shaken in canto III, when Dante actually enters Hell. We become
then witnesses of a new constellation of fear, which goes along with
the sensory construction of the infernal space. This requires, as we
will see, renewed neutralising efforts that lead us from the epistemic
and emotional (knowledge and compassion) treatment of fear to
Dante’s aesthetic education.
The new fear which seizes Dante uncontrollably in the infernal
space lies in between Angst and Furcht: its objects are the infernal
shadows [ombre], which can in a way be considered Heideggerean
“innerwordly beings” of the strangest kind – their Being is essen-
tially contaminated by nothingness, and their innerwordly presence
is already marked by a fundamental absence.9 The sensible corre-
spondent of this intermediary status tends to be a situation where
something is partially perceived, but it is not quite clear what exactly
it is; it is neither here, nor there, but rather somewhere. The feeling
arising from this is a kind of uncanniness which differs significantly

9
Notice how “innerwordliness” itself seems to open an area of fundamental indeter-
mination in the case of infernal shadows. To which world do we refer? And can they
really be considered, from a Heideggerean perspective, as “being-in” that world? (see
Division I, Chapter 2 of Sein und Zeit on “being-in”).
120 Daniele Monticelli

from Heidegger’s not-being-at-home. It is more reminiscent of

­Sigmund Freud’s observations (2003) on the semantic spectrum
of the word unheimlich, taking in liminality and inbetweeness, a
strange and disturbing mixture of the familiar and the unknown or
something which despite its familiarity has to remain hidden, but is
unexpectedly disclosed.10
Entering Hell we are phenomenally confronted with a partial
return of darkness and the consequent impossibility of seeing clear-
ly.11 This does not mean that sensory stimulations should be miss-
ing in Hell. On the contrary, perceptive partiality co-occurs there
with perceptive intensity. Fear arises then, for instance, from a defi-
ciency of sight accompanied by an intensification of hearing, smell
and touch. We can define this in terms of a sensory dissonance with
interfering repercussions on emotional balance and cognitive func-
tion. Such a configuration is repeated in several cantos of Inferno but
the general prototype is to be found at the beginning of canto III,
when Dante enters Hell. Let us follow him with his (and our) senses:
Now sighs, loud wailing, lamentation / resounded through the
starless air / so that I too began to weep. / Unfamiliar tongues,
horrendous accents, / words of suffering, cries of rage, voices /
loud and faint, the sound of slapping hands – / all these made
a tumult, always whirling / in that black and timeless air, / as
sand is swirled in a whirlwind. / And I, my head encircled by
horror12… (Inf. III, 22–31)

10
I am referring to Freud’s general remarks in the first part of his essay on the
uncanny, as it would clearly be inappropriate to apply here the theory of uncanniness
he sketches in the second and third parts of the same essay, which focus on the dread of
castration. Freud himself mentions there the souls in Dante’s afterworld, claiming that
they cannot be considered uncanny in that sense (2003: 156).
11
It is interesting to observe in this respect that in the analysis of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s
The Sandman, Freud mainly relates uncanniness with the dread of being blinded and
losing the sense of sight (2003: 136–138).
12
Here I have slightly changed Hollander’s translation. While he writes “error”, I fol-
lowed the interpretation of the majority of scholars (see e.g. Mazzoni 1967: 52–355 and
Simonelli 1993: 27–30) who read the word error in Dante’s original as orror, i.e. uncon-
 Fear in Dante’s Inferno 121

The sounds vibrating in darkness are so intense, thick, even ‘solid’

that they turn hearing into touch, becoming the sand that a storm
painfully throws into our faces. We are confronted with the same
perceptive configuration at the beginning of canto V, when Dante
enters the circle of the Lustful:
Now I can hear the screams / of agony. Now I have come / where
a great wailing beats upon me [mi percuote]. / I reached a place
mute of all light, / which bellows as the sea in tempest / tossed by
conflicting winds. / The hellish squall, which never rests, / sweeps
spirits in its headlong rush, / tormenting, whirls and strikes [per-
cuotendo] them. (Inf. V, 25–33)

The Italian verb percuotere (to beat) describes here both the effect
of infernal noise on Dante and that of the hellish squall on the tor-
mented spirits. In the darkness of Hell, perceptive intensity blends
hearing and touch into a single experience.13 At the end of canto III
the combination of the partiality and intensiveness of the sensory
experience brings Dante’s new fear to its peak with the following
results:
When he had ended, the gloomy [buia] plain shook / with such
force, the memory of my terror [spavento] / makes me again
break out in sweat. / From the weeping ground there sprang a
wind, / flaming with vermilion light, / which overmastered all
my senses, / and I dropped like a man pulled down by sleep.
(Inf. III, 130–136)

The disorder of sensory experience and the uncontrollable fear

which emerges from it, makes feeling prevail here over perception

trollable fear. “Error” would, however, also be an interesting choice from our point of
view, insofar as a “head encircled with error” very well represents the consequences of
the sensory dissonance on the cognitive faculty.
13
Another example of the same configuration can be find in canto VIII, where Dante
and Vergil approach the city of Dis: “when such a sound of mourning struck [percosse]
my ears / I opened my eyes wide to look ahead.” (Inf. VIII, 65–66)
122 Daniele Monticelli

(Greimas, Fontanille 1993: xxv), leading to the literal collapse of

Dante’s sensory system as such.14 Regaining consciousness at the
beginning of canto IV, Dante thematises the deficiency of sight relat-
ing it to the impossibility of knowing:
With rested eyes, I stood / and looked about me, then fixed my
gaze / to make out [conoscer] where I was. / I found myself upon
the brink / of an abyss of suffering / filled with the roar of endless
woe. / It was full of vapour, dark and deep. / Straining my eyes
toward the bottom, / I could see nothing. (Inf. IV, 4–12)

Until the very end of Inferno, Dante perceives the infernal abyss
through intensified auditory, olfactory and palpatory perceptions
(the rumble of water falling to the bottom, the vapours, winds and
awful stink rising from it), while sight remains partial and hin-
dered. Whereas the complete presence of the object of Furcht in the
first canto of Inferno (the full visibility of the three beasts) clearly
opposed the nothing/nowhere of Angst, infernal fear rather com-
bines perceptive partiality, imbalance, indefiniteness and intensity.
Vergil’s procedure for neutralising this new kind of fear is more
complex than his explanatory efforts in cantos I and II. It goes
through the treatment of Dante’s senses, which the reasonable pupil
himself requires from his master in canto XI of Inferno: “O sun, you
who heal all troubled sight, / you so content me by resolving doubts
/ it pleases me no less to question than to know” (Inf. XI, 91–93).
This “healing” of the senses and amendment of sensory experience
is what I define here as Dante’s “aesthetic education”. It aims to free
Dante from infernal fear and goes through three different but essen-
tially interrelated strategies which are directed against the partial-
ity, indefiniteness and intensity of sensory experience in the infernal
space.

14
Notice that the uncontrollability of fear provokes here once again that violation of
the boundaries between diegetic and extradiegetic spaces which was similarly trig-
gered by the fear in the dark wood of canto I.
 Fear in Dante’s Inferno 123

Against Partiality: The Power of Sight

The first strategy implies the re-direction of Dante’s perceptive

attention from other senses to sight as the precondition of knowl-
edge. In his quality as a guide, Vergil is in charge of showing things
to Dante, as he explains in an almost paradoxical statement: “it is
my task to show him this dark valley. / Necessity compels us, not
delight” (Inf. XII, 86–87). This is why Vergil makes Dante look also
at things that his sight would otherwise avoid, as Dante claims at
the beginning of canto XII with a reference to the desolation and
destruction of the infernal landscape.15 A good illustration is to be
found in the well-known episode of Farinata in canto X of Inferno,
where Dante hears a voice coming from a grave, takes fright and
refuses to look, seeking refuge in Vergil: “This voice came suddenly /
from one sarcophagus, so that, startled, [temendo] / I drew closer to
my leader” (Inf. X, 28–30). Instead of offering Dante a shelter, Vergil
harshly reproaches him: “And he to me: ‘Turn back! [volgiti] What
are you doing? / Look, there Farinata stands erect – / you can see all
of him from the waist up’” (Inf. X, 31–33). The result is immediate
and described in the next verse as follows: “Already I had fixed my
gaze on his” (Inf. X, 34).
The requirement of sight as a precondition for conceptualisation
and knowledge has the function of avoiding dangerous short-cuts
from sensory partiality to imagination, which fills perceptive gaps
with fearful fantasies. Dante masterfully describes this short-cut
in canto XXIII, where he is scared by the thought that the hellish
demons Malebranche might invisibly be chasing them:
Just as one thought issues from another, / so, from the first,
another now was born / that made me twice as fearful [paura]
as before. / I thought ‘[…] they will pursue us still more cruelly
/ than the hound that sets his fangs into a hare.’ / I could feel my

“Steep was the cliff we had to clamber down, / rocky and steep, but – even worse – it
15

held / a sight that every eye would shun.” (Inf. XII, 1–3)
124 Daniele Monticelli

scalp go taut with fear [paura] / and kept my thoughts fixed just
behind me [stava in dietro intento] / as I spoke: ‘Master, can’t you
quickly / hide yourself and me? I am in terror [pavento] / of the
Malebranche; I sense them there behind us, / imagine them so
clear I almost hear them.’” (Inf. XXIII, 10–24)

Perceptive deficiency unbinds here imagination, which overwhelms

the senses so strongly to provoke terror and perceptive hallucina-
tions. The re-establishment of sight and complete visibility rule out
such dangerous short-cuts, and are the first pillar of Dante’s aes-
thetic education.

Against Intensity: Moderation and Uniform Distribution

The second strategy for the disciplining of Dante’s senses goes

through mastering the intensity of the sensory experience so as
to avoid any particular perception becoming an obsession. Vergil
explains this explicitly at the beginning of canto XI when Dante is
overwhelmed by the “unbearable foul stench” rising from the invis-
ible bottom of Hell: “‘We must delay descending so our sense, /
inured to that vile stench, / no longer heeds it’” (Inf. XI, 10–12).
In canto XXX it is hearing that needs moderation, when the souls
start to quarrel and Dante so loses himself in listening that Vergil
has to scold him with unprecedented severity and anger [ira]: “I was
all intent in listening to them, / when the master said: ‘Go right
on looking / and it is I who’ll quarrel with you’” (Inf. XXX, 130–
133). Dante is so deeply ashamed of this that it allows the feeling
of vergogna to break out of its diegetic space here – it “circles in my
memory even now” (Inf. XXX, 135). Vergil then explains himself,
explicating his guiding role in sensory moderation:
‘Do not forget I’m always at your side / should it fall out again that
fortune take you / where people are in wrangles such as this. / For
the wish to hear such things is base’ (Inf. XXX, 145–148).
 Fear in Dante’s Inferno 125

Even sight must be mastered and moderated, because it also tends

to fixate on partial fearsome objects with exaggerated intensity and
undesired consequences, such as Dante describes at the beginning of
canto XXIX: “The many people and their ghastly wounds / did so
intoxicate my eyes / that I was moved to linger there and weep” (Inf.
XXIX, 1–6). Staring at the tormented spirits with excessive intensity
transforms even seeing into an instrument of impassioning absorp-
tion and confusion – “intoxication”. Sight must on the contrary be
equally and neutrally distributed over the entire infernal landscape.
This is why Vergil once again severely reproaches Dante there, add-
ing a temporal explanation to the need for sensory moderation and
mastery:
But Vergil said: ‘What are you staring at? / Why is your gaze
so fixed upon the depths / that hold those mournful, mutilated
shades? […] The time we are allotted soon expires / and there is
more to see than you see here.’ (Inf. XXIX, 7–12)

Sight, just like knowledge and as an instrument of knowledge, must

be judiciously and exhaustively dosed, because, if misused, it can
arouse dangerous passions. This is the reason why at the end of
Inferno, Vergil can finally claim that “it is time for us to leave, for we
have seen it all” (Inf. XXXIV, 68–69).

Against Indeterminacy: Delay and Focus

The third strategy in Dante’s aesthetic education and neutralisation

of infernal fear consists of the sharpening and clarifying of sensory
experience. Perception must be focused in order to avoid that inde-
terminacy which sets the imagination free and amplifies fear. Here
is, once again, Vergil’s explanation to Dante prompted by the latter’s
taking giants for towers in canto XXXI of Inferno:
And he to me: ‘Because you try to pierce / the darkness from too
far away, / it follows that you err in your perception. / When
you are nearer, you will understand / how much your eyesight is
126 Daniele Monticelli

deceived by distance. / Therefore, push yourself a little harder.’

(Inf. XXXI, 22–27)

As the last verse clearly expresses, the suspension and delay of judge-
ment aimed at avoiding the misleading anticipated impressions that
arise from sensory indeterminacy and partiality cannot be inter-
preted as an encouragement to hesitation and doubt. They are rather
conditioned by Vergil’s efforts to make Dante move as uniformly
and smoothly as possible through the infernal landscape.

Conclusion
The phenomenological, semiotic and aesthetic analysis of infernal
fear developed in this paper was originally conceived as a partic-
ularly revealing case-study of the tensions which arise when the
rational and geometrical construction of the Comedy’s architectural
complex starts to unfold on the textual level through the sensory
and pathemic subjectivity of Dante as the protagonist of his own
poem. As Greimas and Fontanille have observed, “the mediation of
the body, whose role and activity are to feel, is far from innocent,
during the homogenisation of semiotic existence, it […] sensitises
even in parts the universe of cognitive forms that arise. […] This is
why the epistemological subject of theoretical construction cannot
present itself as a pure rational cognitive subject” (1993, xxi). This
impossibility threatens the architectural complex with dangerous
consequences: “the subject of discourse can be transformed into an
impassioned subject that disrupts its own cognitively and pragmati-
cally programmed statements” (ibid., xxiv).
In the text of the Comedy, Dante not only masterfully stages,
but explicitly thematises the tensions and interferences between the
symbolic rationality of the spatial construction of the afterlife worlds
and its sensory and pathemic embodiment. I have shown here how
the issue of fear becomes in this respect a point of junction where
impassionate subjectivity, sensory perception, spatial construction
and pathemic neutralisation enter into a complex interplay whose
 Fear in Dante’s Inferno 127

results will decide the outcome of both Dante-character’s journey

and Dante-author’s poem. The solution suggested by the latter to
this risky conundrum goes through the aesthetic education of the
former, i.e. a disciplining of the sensitive body, which must be taught
to perceive and feel in the right way in order for the textual con-
struction to be adequately accomplished according to the general
plan of the author-architect, without, at the same time, depriving
the reader of the literary pleasure which is derived from pathemic
interferences and the relative narrative tensions.
I am convinced that the combination of phenomenological,
semiotic and aesthetic approaches to textual evidence suggested
and applied in this paper could well be extended to the investiga-
tion of other aspects of Dante’s Comedy with interesting results.
Cutting across the traditional levels of interpretation of the poem,
this kind of analysis releases undeservedly neglected aspects of
the way in which the Comedy works as a literary text rather than a
philosophico-theological treatise, a summa of medieval thought, or
whatever else it is often considered to “actually” be. While historico-
philosophical investigations of the Comedy often tend to ignore the
literary nature of Dante’s text, it seems to be, conversely, important
to develop approaches like the one adopted here which claim the
legitimacy and necessity of autonomous literary analysis. It is from
this reinstituted position of autonomy that literary readings of the
Comedy may generate innovative ideas to be later tested and devel-
oped through a cross-fertilising dialogue with other, already well
established, exegetic traditions.

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