The vain embrace

in the first chapter we learnt to think of the opening cantos of Purgatorio as a ghost-story in reverse. Instead of the ghost returning to his earthly haunts to terrify the living, it is Dante, a creature of flesh and blood, who penetrates the realms of the afterlife and alarms the souls of the newly dead who populate the shores and lower slopes of Mount Purgatory. They marvel and ask themselves by what miracle he has come among them. But with one exception the character Dante does not express wonder at the miracle by which they may survive and subsist as individual beings. This one exception comes of course at the moment when Dante seeks to embrace his old friend, Casella, and is dismayed to find that his arms return three times empty to his breast. The shades are delusory except to the eye: ‘ohi ombre vane, fuor che ne l'aspetto!’.

Like the passages in the Aeneid and the Odyssey on which it is modelled, the episode is a little unsettling to the reader. It raises doubts about the nature of shadow-bodies that had not presented themselves before; for when most people read the Inferno or the sixth book of the Aeneid, they simply accept the souls in the underworld on the same terms as other characters in any work of imaginative fiction.