Rowling and Dante: Hell is a Vacancy

Rowling and Dante: Hell is a Vacancy

Suppose you dissect the characters in Rowling’s novel according to Dante’s schema.  Dante’s description of hell has nine rings, moving in order of gravity from highest to lowest.  The rings are Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger, Heresy, Violence, Fraud, and Treachery.  Some of them are not applicable in a post-Christian novel.  Limbo, to begin: that’s for the people who led good and even holy lives, but were not baptized.  It is not a place of punishment, but there are good things that they won’t get.  Specifically, they will not see God face to face.  In a novel set in a post-Christian society, that is not a pressing concern.  Perhaps it should be, but it isn’t.  Limbo is not a part of this story.

But consider the rest.

Limbo	n/a: nearly all, or none at all
lust	Samantha, Andrew
Gluttony	Terri
Greed	no clear assignment here, but Aubrey Fawley fits
Anger	Parminder
Heresy	Fats
Violence	Oddo
Fraud	Simon
treachery	Howard and Shirley

Samantha is distracted by lust.  That’s an old-fashioned way to put it; today, we might say she is immature, refusing to act her age.  Anyway, she is middle-aged, but behaves like a teenager.  She thinks a lot about skin and breasts and sex.  What that means for the Fields and for Krystal is that she is not paying attention.

Terri is a wreck.  She doesn’t protect her kids because she is an addict.  Halfway through the book, we learn something about her background, and if we have the guts to take the step, we can extend to her the same consideration we give Krystal.

The Fawleys are not as bad as Howard and Shirley, but they are part of the same team.  They will ruin people’s lives from a distance, and not even notice, let alone take responsibility for what they have done.

Parminder does mean to pick up the fight where Barry left off.  But she can’t, largely because she can’t control her temper.

Heresy is not a major concern in a post-Christian society.  But the category fits Fats anyway.  He does not help Krystal, because he is exploring a set of destructive ideas.  He gets clear of those ideas in the end, but while damage is happening, he is making things worse – because he testing nihilism and existentialism and being cool.

Simon is not in the fight over the Fields.  But his name comes from his intent to run for Barry’s seat on the council in order to seize the opportunity to make money through corrupt practices.  His plan is to take bribes as a parish councilor – to sell the power of the parish.  Selling the power of the Church is called “simony.”  He is not opposed to the Fields, as far as we know, or opposed to the addiction clinic, as far as we know.  He wants bribes, not responsibility.  If he is elected to the council, the council is still divided 8-7; Simon’s vote is for sale.  The opponents of the Fields seem to be wealthier; if there is a sale, Aubrey and Howard will buy Simon before Parminder and Tessa do.

The Mollisons are the horror show.  Shirley is a traitor: she decides to kill her husband, and takes steps to get it done.  His heart attack saves him.  Howard is also a traitor: the people in the Fields are his constituents, and he betrays them, pushing them off to Yarvil.  He had never sworn allegiance to the Fields, but he did hold an office in which he was supposed to serve Pagford – which included the Fields, whether he liked it or not.

In Dante’s scheme, the sins of weakness are relatively less damaging than the deeper sins.  In Rowling’s story, Samantha is shocked awake by the death of Robbie, and is ready to grow up.  If/when she does become an adult, she is thinking that the addiction clinic might be a good thing.  She is putting addictions (sex, alcohol) behind, and wonders about drugs.  Her conversion to being an ally in the fight for the Fields is an adjustment, not a revolution.  Lust damages, but not deeply.

By contrast, the traitors end the story in a deep hell – and, fiction be told, in a rather satisfying hell.  Shirley does not know whether Howard, the idol of most of her life, saw her moving to stab him.  She is trapped, spending her time as the apparently loyal spouse – looking at his face and wondering what he knows.  And Howard reached the pinnacle of his life – running the council, defeating his opponents, bringing in an heir to take his place, getting rid of the Fields, expanding his business, celebrating his birthday – and then the next day, he was a helpless, voiceless victim on the brink of death.  Dante would approve.

Going back over the sins between the two extremes, Terri’s gluttony seems about right.  She does not intend to harm her kids; she does terrible damage, but the damage begins with herself.  She is a victim more than a perpetrator.  Dante would approve.

Greed: if the book were written to explore Dante’s schema carefully, greed might be handled a little more openly explored.  It’s not a major factor in the story.  The Fawley family, which profited from selling the land to build the Fields, and now wants to extract further advantage from the voters in the Fields, is background in the story, not much more.

Parminder’s anger is a sin of weakness.  She is definitely on Barry’s side, but her anger damages her friends as well as her enemies.  It carries its own punishment: she smashes where she wants to build.  Dante would approve.

The intellectualized meanderings of Fats damage him, and are devastating for Krystal.  He used her, and defended it, because it seemed authentic at the time.  But his mind does not go dead; he is young and learning, and his explorations started honestly, and end honestly.  He admits he did damage, and begins taking steps to atone.  He accepts that people consider him a coward.  He isn’t that; the problem is elsewhere.  But he has enough inner courage to face the charge without whining.  Conrad would approve.

It is the fraud that Simon intended that got me thinking about Dante in the first place.  Why does the Price family have such a collection of Biblical names: Simon, Ruth, Andrew, and Paul?  When I realized that the name could be linked to Simon Magus, not Simon Peter, I stopped trying to figure out where Andrew and Paul got their names (probably from Ruth), and started trying to put simony in context.

But having drawn the chart and assigned characters, I am not satisfied.  I do not think that Rowling’s story is built on Dante.  Rather, I think that Rowling is adept at creating characters – she created about 400 in the Potter series – and she uses them to explore her view of life.  I had a sense that she was doing something Dante-esque, and I still think that. But I don’t think she is imitating him; rather, I think she is doing her own work, and it is similar to his.  Dante wrote a story about hell.  Rowling wrote a story about what is going on inside people when they can’t/won’t/don’t help a neighbor in distress. Those concerns are not the same, but they are similar.  Her story and her characters reminded me of Dante’s, not because she was thinking about Dante but because she was thinking about humanity, with a question similar to his, and an eye similar to his.