This was an act of “trans-shifting”, as poet Alice Oswald has put it, and it is an approach that Joyce himself alludes to in Ulysses in the phrase “agenbite of inwit” – this is a prick of the conscience, like that which Stephen sees in the overtures towards himself from the Englishman Haines, but behind Joyce’s phrase too is punningly concealed the idea of “again biting” a work of “in wit”, or a chewing over again of the classics. One reason I set Dante’s Inferno at Essex was architectural: the walled cities of the Italian city-states in the middle ages, typified by Montereggione with its 14 high towers, to which Dante makes allusion in the Inferno, also, by a happy coincidence, underpin the architecture of Essex University, where a number of towers surround a central campus, divided up into squares modelled on Italian campi (the origin of our modern word “campus”). [ Straight to Hell: Elliot Murphy’s sonic journey through Dante’s Inferno Opens in new window ] Another was the strange synchronicity between Essex and Dante’s poem – Dante’s Hell has a river of blood, the Phlegethon, Colchester has the river Colne which local myth claims had once literally run with blood, when the Roman city was sacked by Boudicca; and Dante’s suicides, whose souls are reborn as the seeds of trees, later to be preyed on by harpies, are distantly echoed by the trees which today are planted at Essex University to commemorate untimely student deaths.
The work qu.
