Dante Aligheri's Inferno, the famous personal account of the author’s trip through hell to the centre of the earth, is incontrovertibly among the greatest works of fiction ever written. It is also a very early example of historical fiction. Dante enters this genre through the rather modern technique of mingling historical characters with fictional ones. To demonstrate his scope (and to broaden ours to include the entire work, of which Inferno is only the first part of Dante’s fourteenth-century poem Divine Comedy) here is a selection, taken more or less at random, of the people we meet: Ulysses, the Emperor Justinian, the Prophet Mohamed, several popes, the Furies, King Minos, a few Florentine politicians, Homer, selected casual acquaintances of the author, Alexander the Great, the Devil, Julius Caesar, Dante’s best friend’s father and Adam.
Quite which of the above you regard as fictional and which real may depend a little bit on your personal beliefs, but you get the idea: it is an impressive range. All those characters – real or imagined – interact inside Dante’s fictional world but what they talk about is real history and real events. And so Dante finds himself in the classic historical novelist’s quandary: for credibility he needs to maintain a feeling of historical accuracy but, to hold the audience, he is tempted to bend the facts.
Even more important for Dante than dramatic tension is the over-arching message that he wishes his narrative to promote. The exact nature of that message is beyond the scope of this blog but suffice it to say that the bottom line is that the human race should pull itself together and stop being so stupid, greedy and violent. It turns out that you can’t send a message like that without using all the available power of fiction. So Dante, even by the standards of the Middle Ages, does quite a lot of fact bending. Wicked popes become more wicked and political heroes become more heroic. In the fourteenth century, just as in our own times, the exigencies of narrative frequently outweigh the rigours of fact.
This brings us to Dan Brown. In his next novel, Inferno (Doubleday, May 2013), the mega-selling novelist has chosen to weave his plot using references to Dante and his work. He has been derided in the past – possibly as an inevitable consequence of those sales figures – by historians and others who give him no credit for at least bringing historical issues to a wider audience. I, on the other hand, find that my reaction almost wholly positive: I am pleased that Dante, thanks to Brown, will be considered by millions instead of hundreds for a change (at least in the English-speaking world where he has always been under-represented).
So the great story-teller of Heaven and Hell will soon himself become the object of historical fiction. And, if there is any lapse from total historical accuracy on Mr. Brown’s part, Dante himself will really have no grounds for objecting. It is, after all, just what he did.
James Burge is the author of Dante’s Invention (The History Press, 2010)
Further reading:
* Dan Brown's Inferno translated in an underground Italian bunker
* The Nine Circles of Dan Brown: Who Will Be Most Inconvenienced by the Release of Inferno?