boydrudolo - Tumblr blog

[boydrudolo]

[cicero voice] caesar's new sumptuary law sucks because now everyone serves vegetables at dinner parties and i had to eat weird mushrooms which made me shit myself

[boydrudolo]

“what was the most legendary threesome of all time?”

Obssessed with the impact of the title of this book. Makes me want to write an essay.

[boydrudolo]

As it should be.

Im sorry I had to do it.

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happy go punch a fascist day from Italy

[boydrudolo]

we need more songs about erectile dysfunction

[boydrudolo]

So I suppose today it's appropriate to watch my favourite anti fascist italian movie

✨✨✨✨Salò or the 120 days of sodom✨✨✨✨

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[boydrudolo]

fruice,,, 🥭🍎🍏🍑🍐🍊🍇🍓

,,, vegdebles 🥦🍆🥑🥒🥔🥕🫑🌽

[boydrudolo]

filling the cavalghieri playlist but spotify does not seem to know 60s garage rock so sad

[boydrudolo]

New Dante design drop ‼️🫶

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[boydrudolo]

just followed you a few minutes ago and i really like your blog!! i have not read the divine comedy yet (guilty, but i’ll read it after i finish the book i’m currently reading) but i know some things about it, and just enough to understand what it is about, and of course i have seen people on the internet compare it to fanfic, and i hadn’t given it much thought until now but now i’m curious. why are you so against it? why is it bad or what makes it a negative comparison?

no pressure to answer ofc! <3 i’m asking from my own ignorance but i understand if this question comes off as annoying lol. have a nice day!!

hi! your question is not annyoing at all, actually thank you for asking, i wish more people had your approach. this is the perfect chance to lay out the issue a bit better, i apologize if this is a bit long, but i really care to get the point across. and btw there's nothing wrong with not having read the divine comedy! you're very welcome here, i hope my danteposting makes you curious to check it out eventually <3

first, a short premise: there is of course nothing wrong with making jokes or memes about literature. hell, 90% of my own posts are literature shitposting. and there isn't anything wrong with fanfic either, both as a genre in general and as in literature fanfic.

the main issue i and many others have with this one specific joke is essentially how it's been used. it originated in predominantly usamerican fandom spaces, mostly from people who barely ever interacted with the text outside of (non italian) pop culture references. there isn't anything inherently bad in trying to find something in older literature that relates to our modern or personal experience, but it's a risky operation that needs care in handling, or at the very least, knowledge of the subject, and a lot of the originators and perpetrators of this joke barely have any, as is exemplified by the fact that most of them refer to it as "dante's inferno" and define it specifically as "bible fanfiction", when it has nothing to do with the bible - what they are trying to render is that it is a christian theological poem, but again, since they aren't informed and don't bother to try when corrected (ignorance isn't a crime, but refusal to learn is) they end up stating incorrect information. it is not even an adaptation of any preexisting story. it simply doesn't even stand as a comparison.

the divine comedy is basically the most important work of the entire italian literature, it was instrumental in shaping not just the literature (mainly poetry) that came after it, not just our cultural imagination, but most crucially our very language, so much so that dante is called the father of the italian language. i'm pointing this out to say that as much as it is a fundamental work for all of western and even world literature at large, it is also a cultural heritage for italians, perhaps the most important.

with that said, it might even have been funny the first time, but as the joke spread like wildfire and got repeated ad nauseam by anyone and everyone, across all of the internet, for years, it became evident that it took a derogatory form and started getting taken seriously. essentially what is being unironically implied (or outright said sometimes), is that the divine comedy literally functions in the same way and has the same structure, tropes and character types as a modern fanfiction, and is therefore not to be considered a "classic" anymore, and those who erected it to classic status or don't agree with this take are either elitist academia snobs who give the comedy too much credit (that it doesn't deserve, clearly, since it is simply a bible fanfic of some guy who really wanted to meet his dead girlfriend), or are simply pesky annoying italians whining about everything and victimizing themselves. so here are our main issues: one, the fandomification of older literature, the forceful insertion of classic art within the framework of something more "pop", less "intellectual", and therefore more familiar and understandable, like fanfiction, rather than engaging with something outside of your comfort for what it is; two, an anglo/usamerican centric, at times even xenophobic, attitude towards foreign culture, italian specifically (and we could open a pandora vase of nuance about how anti italian sentiment plays into this - here's a good post that touches upon this). as others have pointed out already, you don't see these people making the same joke about the english literary canon, like shakespeare for example, who did in fact write plays based on preexisting stories; or even milton's paradise lost, which is more comparable to the comedy in that it deals with a christian subject and takes place in hell, but also, PL is literally based on the story of the fall of lucifer from the bible. if people wanted to make a "bible fanfic" joke, milton was right there. the core of the fact is, of course, that the anglousamerican actually knows and has probably studied these texts and considers them familiar, part of their cultural canon, which explains why, when confronted, their typical response is "italians being annoying, what else is new".

'the divine comedy is fanfic' joke ultimately serves to dumb down a foreign piece of art that is perceived as unfamiliar and intellectually threatening. in one word, it is anti intellectualism.

[boydrudolo]

My three girlfriends. And yes, they smoke weed.

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[boydrudolo]

All this talk about Dante made me want to draw Paolo and Francesca.

But of course I couldn't leave it at that.

So here, have Dante - Guido disagreements through Paolo and Francesca.

I have to say, medieval hungarian music helped a lot during this.

Also, let me explain a few things because I love symbolism and it's fun:

Of course, red symbolizes lust. Yellow symbolizes betrayment, thus the most socially important parts of their clothes are yellow. Green is nature and this refers to the profane nature of their love. White is purity and it's concentrated on the upper-parts of the bodies, where the gaze tends to fall, and therefore shows their distorted perception of their act in that moment (as it was sinful according to Dante, and is a death sentence according to Guido).

Francesca is pallid, which is a reference both to 'scolorocci il viso' (Inf. V, 131) and to the effects of love on the body according to Guido. Still referencing Guido, she also has an expressionless face because did he or did he not, in all his chewableness, compare the condition of a man in love to that of a puppet, an object??

The blood in the background is a reference to 'noi che tignemmo il mondo di sanguigno' (Inf. V, 90).

The sword and the blood on it are a reference to the couple's physical and spiritual death (the writing on it is the reasoning that brought them to the act, so in a way it's the inscription of their crime on the object that condemned them and at the same time, from a human point of view, delivered justice).

If you look carefully, the handle of the sword has a small red lily, symbolizing Florence. Now, hear me out. That recent post about Dante's 'homicidal' instincts towards Guido have haunted me, so I had to depict this deathly disagreement.

The fancy purple background, I'll be honest, was mostly because I found it pretty but you can also say it is an abstraction of an upperclass environment. While the floreal background with red-stained leaves and red berries indicate the violent nature of their story.

The general structure of the drawing vaguely resembles the page of a manuscript.

The extract from Donna me prega in the background has two functions: the most immediate one is giving Guido's point of view on the nature of Love, as this is essentially what this drawing's theme is, and it 'answers' Dante's quotations; however it's also there, in the background, because Guido is the invisible thread that runs throughout the canto and the whole commedia.

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Rae Klein

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