Reading Mills’ and Peter Santiago’s brilliantly insightful introductions to Chris Love’s retelling of Dante’s Inferno admittedly left me at a loss to add; both have beautifully related the importance of Chris’ work in the dilemmas he asks us to consider while enjoying his con-temporized adaptation; as Mills states, “… it is from Love’s gently prodding questions that one realizes that a deeper kind of moral and aesthetic experiment is taking place, one I’ve found engaging and often hilarious, and one which -especially if one is loathe to believe that some of the figures in the boiling pitch deserve it- problematizes casual assessments of good and evil.” Both spoke of the enjoyment derived in anticipating what contemporary figure Chris would plug into Dante’s ageless tale next, in the process making it relatable and comedic to a modern audience. In doing so, both Mills and Peter remind me of a great responsibility, one Chris has thankfully taken upon his shoulders. For millennia, man has educated and entertained through the art of storytelling. Technologies in the art have evolved and morphed, what was a cave wall became a campfire, became a scrawl on parchment, became a quill on paper, a play on stage, a publication in hardback, a voice on radio, a face on a cloth screen, an image on television, and for now, the internet and here we are on Tumblr. What has remained wonderfully constant as Hell through all these incarnations of media is the passing of the literary torch in the form of fable and allegory. We entertain. We teach. We learn to learn. We consider moral lessons and constants. As Peter so adeptly put it, “Here is where Tragos poses philosophical, moral, and political questions that illuminate Dante’s Divine Comedy and challenge us to think about how these questions relate to us and to our world today.” I applaud Chris for recognizing the duty we have to re-tell, and for the imaginative, entertaining, artful, comedic way in which he’s taking us all to hell. Thanks Chris.
Currently, Chris has us in Canto (Chapter) 24, where we’ll meet one of the greatest thieves of out time and learn how he bilked millions out of their life fortunes. However, if you haven’t been following, I’d ask you to begin at Chris’ Introduction, and take the full ride with him and Shakespeare. You’ll be glad you did.
