Dante

Use in the book

In the long December 10 entry, thoughts become a shadowy multitude chasing an attractive sign that never lets itself be reached. The image is drawn from Dante but transformed by its new use. Guérin’s banner becomes a wavering luminous form, and the pursuing thoughts retain an irresistible fascination with it even while he suspects a deceptive guide and a cruel trap. The passage does not simply condemn imagination. Almost immediately it also claims access to nature’s secret dwellings, the origins of movement, and the first song of beings. The uncertainty is central: the same faculty seems capable of intimate revelation and endless pursuit of a lure. Dante’s scene gives spatial and kinetic form to that divided judgement. The writer then compares his own pages to passing cloud-shadows and a vessel carrying too much sail, refusing to let one borrowed image settle the matter. This use of Dante is a self-comparison within a shifting meditation, not an assertion about the moral status of the historical souls Dante describes.

Places to read

1. 10 December 1834 · ¶4The banner and crowd figure restless pursuit; the paragraph then oscillates between distrust of the lure and claims of privileged imaginative access.

Translation in this edition

Guérin calls the scene a circle of Hell. Translator note 16 identifies Inferno III 52–57 and notes that Dante places it in the vestibule before Acheron. The discrepancy should be explained, not silently corrected in the French.