Dante, Thom Gunn, and the Politics of Mourning

Frey Kalus (University of Cambridge / Freie Universität Berlin)

Dante Notes / July 31, 2024

This brief intervention will explore depictions of illness and death in Dante and the transatlantic modernist poet Thom Gunn, examining the ways in which the poets memorialise subjects society deems ungrievable. In the Commedia, Virgil’s paganism excludes him from Christian redemption, denying Dante the opportunity to mourn his disappearance. Gunn’s 1992 collection The Man With Night Sweats is a series of elegies to friends the poet lost to AIDS^[1] – queer people, who, as Jaclyn Pryor suggests, were widely viewed as ‘non-people’, rendering their deaths unworthy of social recognition.^[2] Gunn drew heavily upon the Commedia in his poetry, writing prolifically in terza rima, and the influence of Dante on AIDS literature more broadly has been documented by James Miller.^[3] In the analysis that follows, I endeavour to show that for Gunn, Dante paradoxically provides insight into a historical tragedy that took place centuries after his death. In turn, reading Dante alongside Gunn will shed light upon the political nature of mourning in the former’s poem.

Examining embodiment in Purgatorio can provide useful insight into Gunn’s depiction of bodies in illness. The pilgrim discovers the immateriality of purgatorial bodies when he fails to hug Casella in Canto II:

Ohi ombre vane, fuor che ne l’aspetto!
tre volte dietro a lei le mani avvinsi,
e tante mi tornai con esse al petto. (Purgatorio II. 79–81)^[4]

Casella’s body is empty in all but appearance, precluding embrace. The impasse this forges is both physical and affective, in that it denies Dante the ability to express his compassion through gesture. The pilgrim’s endeavour to touch his friend ironically brings him back to his own body (‘mi tornai’), which, unlike Casella’s, is tangible. This episode demonstrates that bodies in Purgatorio are relational; it is only through the return of his hands to his own body that Dante pilgrim is able to detect the nature of Casella’s.[5] The subject of Gunn’s ‘The Man With Night Sweats’ arguably reenacts Dante’s failed hug; he awakes alone ‘hugging my body to me’ (p. 57). Here a gesture normally associated with community comes to represent isolation, the subject hugging himself to ward off the threat of disease, ‘As if hands were enough / To hold an avalanche off’ (p. 57). Both Gunn’s poem and the Casella episode demonstrate the paradox by which individuality and community are mutually constituted. Much like Dante pilgrim, Gunn’s subject is conscious of the materiality of his own body only when he registers the absence of others.

This phenomenological understanding of embodiment arguably extends to the poets’ understanding of literary texts as bodies, which define themselves in relation to one another. Just as Gunn’s hug perhaps draws upon Dante, the failed hug of Purgatorio II, as multiple critics attest, is based on Aeneas’ unsuccessful attempts to embrace his lost loved ones in Aeneid 6.^[6] Following Stephen Guy-Bray, who proposes a ‘connection between poetic influence and homoeroticism’, we can view Dante’s intertextuality as an expression of queer desire for his predecessor.^[7] Gunn’s allusion to Dante, in turn, can be viewed as a re-enactment of the homoerotic tribute the pilgrim pays to his guide.

Dante’s harrowing encounter with the emaciated gluttons in canto XXIV demonstrates further resonance between purgatorial embodiment and Gunn’s depiction of bodies in illness:

e l’ombre, che parean cose rimorte,
per le fosse de li occhi ammirazione
traean di me, di mio vivere accorte (4–6)

This presentation of bodies as hollow shades that elude touch is pertinent from the perspective of the AIDS epidemic, in which the infected body was often depicted as ‘undead’.^[8] The adjective ‘rimorte’, moreover, proposes an alternative phenomenology of death by suggesting that it can be experienced multiple times. This, too, bears resonance in Gunn’s context, AIDS sufferers experiencing both a ‘social’ death from the stigma associated with diagnosis, and a medical death from the disease itself. Gunn’s portrayal of his dying friend in ‘Lament’ could aptly describe the gluttons of canto XXIV:

How thin the distance made you. In your cheek
One day, appeared the true shape of your bone
No longer padded. (p. 61)

AIDS, as Susan Sontag argues, ‘flushes out an identity that might have remained hidden’.^[9] This is made literal in Gunn’s poem by the unnatural protrusion of the subject’s skeleton, by which the latent becomes visible. Just as the physical symptoms of AIDS came to symbolise deviant sexuality, Dante’s gluttons, too, have their identity written on the body, in the form of the word ‘omo’ which appears on their foreheads (Purgatorio XXIII. 32). Gunn’s collection, however, is concerned not only with the ways in which illness marks the bodies of the dying, but also with the manner in which it becomes legible on the bodies of the grieving. In ‘The Missing’, the mourning body is defined in relation to the corporeality of the dead:

Now as I watch the progress of the plague,
The friends surrounding me fall sick, grow thin,
And drop away. Bared, is my shape less vague
– Sharply exposed and with a sculpted skin. (p. 79)

Just as Dante pilgrim becomes aware of the materiality of his body via the immateriality of Casella’s, the speaker becomes conscious of his body as those of his friends are changed by illness. He is ‘sharply exposed’, ‘sculpted’, as if cast in relief against the fading forms of the dead. Yet, the poem’s overarching sense is one of obscurity rather than definition. The immediacy of the present tense opening ‘Now as I watch’ creates the sense that we have been plunged into the middle of a narrative sequence, rather than starting at the beginning. Like the body of the speaker, the textual body lacks delineation. The negative comparative ‘less vague’ does not immediately evoke its meaning ‘clearer’; rather we focus on the stressed syllable ‘vague’, rhymed with ‘plague’ in line one. Even in its relief, the speaker’s body is defined by negation, the past participles ‘bared’ and ‘exposed’ suggesting lack rather than presence. This negative language demonstrates the representational impasse forged by death, symbolised graphically by the caesura at the beginning of line four.

Indeed, the speaker’s relational self-understanding is precluded by death, which troubles his sense of self. Gunn’s depiction of the mourning body as a sculpture is a negative inversion of ekphrasis, in which the artwork eludes definition:

But death – Their deaths have left me less defined:
It was their pulsing presence made me clear.
I borrowed from it, I was unconfined,
Who tonight balance unsupported here,

Eyes glaring from raw marble, in a pose
Languorously part-buried in the block,
Shins perfect and no calves, as if I froze
Between potential and a finished work. (p. 79)

The speaker’s distance from his deceased friends and from his own body is demonstrated by the distinct temporalities they govern. The past perfect ‘have left’ and the simple past verbs ‘made’, ‘buried’ and ‘unconfined’ are associated with everything the speaker has lost, whilst the progressive present ‘balance’ and the subjunctive ‘froze’ belong to his compositional present. For Gunn, personhood is ‘borrowed’ and ‘unconfined’, presenting self and other as mutually constitutive subjects. The speaker’s narrative distance from his body creates the impression that he is observing it from without, having lost the capacity for sensation. Without the ability to perceive others, his body becomes an inert object, for which subjective experience is impossible. Indeed, his friends’ death is something he can access only objectively, the coldness of ‘raw marble’ and the verb ‘froze’ suggesting an absence both of emotion and of sensory perception. The image of the speaker ‘part-buried’ in marble recalls the stasis of Dante’s Satan submerged in ice at the pit of the Inferno. Whilst Hell for Dante is isolation from God, for Gunn it is isolation from others, without whom personhood cannot be fully constituted. Like Hell’s citizens, Gunn’s narrator occupies a liminal position between life and death, tortured by the static prolongation of his consciousness as the consciousness of those around him ceases.

The final stanza of ‘The Missing’ is marked by absence:

– Abandoned incomplete, shape of a shape,
In which exact detail shows the more strange,
Trapped in unwholeness, I find no escape
Back to the play of constant give and change. (p. 80)

The dash that begins this quatrain represents the emotional chasm in which the speaker has found himself. It is grammatically and metrically out of place, coming at the beginning of a sentence and adding an extra foot to an otherwise regular sequence of ten-syllable lines. The speaker’s body is defined by negation; the tautology ‘shape of a shape’ presents it as an undelineated form, in which the specificity of ‘exact detail’ is incongruous. The two verbs that conclude the poem – ‘give’ and ‘change’ – are exactly the processes which for both Gunn and Dante are central to the constitution of the human subject. In the absence of reciprocity and of variation, the speaker’s body becomes impossible to distinguish from that of his dead friend.

The sense of lack which characterises this stanza reminds us of the disappearance of Virgil at the end of Purgatorio:

Ma Virgilio n’avea lasciati scemi
di sé, Virgilio dolcissimo patre,
Virgilio a cui per mia salute die’mi (Purgatorio XXX. 49–51)

We read Virgil’s name three times in quick succession, which paradoxically heightens his presence in the poem once he has disappeared. This repetition echoes Dante’s three attempts to hug Casella; in both episodes Dante pilgrim is confronted by the absence of his interlocutor and must instead turn back to himself. In light of the queer eroticism that underpins Dante and Virgil’s relationship, explored in more detail by Gary Cestaro, Gunn perhaps finds in Dante pilgrim’s grief a point of commonality with his own sorrow.^[10] His elegies can thus be read as an attempt to resurrect Virgil into the late twentieth century as a queer person with AIDS. The end of Gunn’s ‘The J-Car’ could well describe the pilgrim’s guide at the end of Purgatorio:

Unready, disappointed, unachieved,
He knew he would not write the much-conceived
Much-hoped-for work now, nor yet help create
A love he might in full reciprocate. (p. 77)

Gunn’s subject is unfulfilled both as a poet and as a lover, occupying a state of death-in-life as he awaits the culmination of his illness. The sense of prematurity conveyed by this passage reflects the strange temporality of Virgil’s disappearance, which occurs with little narrative preparation. What is more, Beatrice’s criticism of Dante’s tears – ‘pianger ti conven per altra spada’ (57) – mirrors the relegation of those who died from AIDS to less-than-human status. Virgil, like the subjects of Gunn’s poetry, is ‘unready’ for his departure, and Dante is denied the possibility to mourn, his grief a threat to the social order. Read alongside Gunn’s poetry, Dante’s depiction of Virgil’s disappearance generates affective responses contrary to those dictated by medieval Christianity. A comparative reading of Dante and Gunn reframes the conclusion of Purgatorio as a tragedy, allowing it to speak to queer readers in Gunn’s time and beyond.