The Correctional Facility is an illustrated novella updating Dante Alighieri’s 700-year-old classic The Inferno. Our guide however is not Virgil but Walt Whitman and Dante’s flaming pits are succeeded by modern brutalist prison architecture. Many of the sins of Dante’s time persist today, but mankind has scaled old ones and invented new ones. Invention, technology, economics, and politics have, since Dante’s time, nuanced and scaled our concept of evil.
Raised as a Catholic in rural Vermont, I was infused with an awareness of sin and penitence, but also absolution and forgiveness. My late teenage encounter with Dostoevsky’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor shattered my youthful allegiance to Catholic dogma, but it’s one thing to walk away from Catholic doctrine and quite another to lose the weight of its beauty, fear, and guilt.
Shortly after I read The Brothers Karamazov, in which The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor occurs as a story told by Ivan Karamazov, the sybarite, to his novice monk brother, Alyosha, I read Dante’s Inferno. I was fascinated by the vivid portrayal of the hell I’d heard about so graphically from the Quebecois sisters who came down to teach Saturday morning catechism. I saw in Dante’s work and the extraordinary illustrations of Gustav Dore the hell I had imagined in catechism, a hell that haunts my imagination to this day.
Is sin a temporal concept? Some of the sins of Dante’s time are not viewed as such today: heresy, suicide, concupiscence. His simple architecture of human sin is lost today in scale and technology. In 1320, one killed with one’s hands or with a piercing weapon like a stiletto, battle-axe, or sword, or with poison. Today, we have drones, nuclear bombs, and industrial toxins leaching into our soil, water, food, and air - and Pharma: subliminal mass homicides.
The Correctional Facility comes after a lifetime of living with Catholicism and Dante’s weight of sin, evil, punishment, expiation, and redemption, and is my effort to make sense of it all.
