We've danced around the notion of Dante as the pilgrim and Dante as the poet and their competing voices in COMEDY for so many episodes--quite literally, years now. But does this split in Dante hold up? Why do we allow something to occur in interpretation which never occurs in the poem?

Join me, Mark Scarbrough, for this interpolated episode of WALKING WITH DANTE. I want to engage in some rather high-level narrative theory to talk about why we need to make the split between pilgrim and poet, a split that COMEDY itself never makes.

Here are the segments of this podcast episode:

[01:15] My thesis: the pilgrim/poet split is a convenient fiction to allow us to come to terms with a polyvalent or multivocal work.

[04:10] Nowhere in COMEDY is there a distinct moment when we see Dante the pilgrim and Dante the poet differentiated.

[07:38] Sordello's lack of categorization (which sort of penitent is he?) gives Dante the narrative space to break the sequence of events (the "walk") and offer his invective.

[11:39] There are wildly contradictory moments in COMEDY that break our neat pilgrim/poet split.

[13:50] What are other examples of polyvalent or multivocal works? And why do we so value them?