✧ CAETH ✧

first, a short premise: there is of course nothing wrong with making jokes or memes about literature. hell, 90% of my own posts are literature shitposting. and there isn't anything wrong with fanfic either, both as a genre in general and as in literature fanfic.

the main issue i and many others have with this one specific joke is essentially how it's been used. it originated in predominantly usamerican fandom spaces, mostly from people who barely ever interacted with the text outside of (non italian) pop culture references. there isn't anything inherently bad in trying to find something in older literature that relates to our modern or personal experience, but it's a risky operation that needs care in handling, or at the very least, knowledge of the subject, and a lot of the originators and perpetrators of this joke barely have any, as is exemplified by the fact that most of them refer to it as "dante's inferno" and define it specifically as "bible fanfiction", when it has nothing to do with the bible - what they are trying to render is that it is a christian theological poem, but again, since they aren't informed and don't bother to try when corrected (ignorance isn't a crime, but refusal to learn is) they end up stating incorrect information. it is not even an adaptation of any preexisting story. it simply doesn't even stand as a comparison.

the divine comedy is basically the most important work of the entire italian literature, it was instrumental in shaping not just the literature (mainly poetry) that came after it, not just our cultural imagination, but most crucially our very language, so much so that dante is called the father of the italian language. i'm pointing this out to say that as much as it is a fundamental work for all of western and even world literature at large, it is also a cultural heritage for italians, perhaps the most important.

with that said, it might even have been funny the first time, but as the joke spread like wildfire and got repeated ad nauseam by anyone and everyone, across all of the internet, for years, it became evident that it took a derogatory form and started getting taken seriously. essentially what is being unironically implied (or outright said sometimes), is that the divine comedy literally functions in the same way and has the same structure, tropes and character types as a modern fanfiction, and is therefore not to be considered a "classic" anymore, and those who erected it to classic status or don't agree with this take are either elitist academia snobs who give the comedy too much credit (that it doesn't deserve, clearly, since it is simply a bible fanfic of some guy who really wanted to meet his dead girlfriend), or are simply pesky annoying italians whining about everything and victimizing themselves. so here are our main issues: one, the fandomification of older literature, the forceful insertion of classic art within the framework of something more "pop", less "intellectual", and therefore more familiar and understandable, like fanfiction, rather than engaging with something outside of your comfort for what it is; two, an anglo/usamerican centric, at times even xenophobic, attitude towards foreign culture, italian specifically (and we could open a pandora vase of nuance about how anti italian sentiment plays into this - here's a good post that touches upon this). as others have pointed out already, you don't see these people making the same joke about the english literary canon, like shakespeare for example, who did in fact write plays based on preexisting stories; or even milton's paradise lost, which is more comparable to the comedy in that it deals with a christian subject and takes place in hell, but also, PL is literally based on the story of the fall of lucifer from the bible. if people wanted to make a "bible fanfic" joke, milton was right there. the core of the fact is, of course, that the anglousamerican actually knows and has probably studied these texts and considers them familiar, part of their cultural canon, which explains why, when confronted, their typical response is "italians being annoying, what else is new".