The Douchebags of Florence

The always-entertaining Elif Batuman has written four blog posts over the last several weeks about her back-and-forth with a Harper’s editor over her use of the word “douchebags” to describe the residents of Florence as they appear in Dante’s Inferno.

There are four posts, and they are worth your careful study (start here), not only because they are entertaining, but also because they represent a groundbreaking contribution to Dante scholarship, probably the best Dante scholarship ever to come from a personal blog.

This week I weighed in with my own argument as to why “douchebags” is an appropriate word, in the comments section to Batuman’s fourth (and presumably final) post on the matter. 

Here is my argument for the douchebags:

I’m coming to this late, but I wanted to develop one more line of argument for douchebags, namely that it fits so well into the commentary on The Inferno. Here, for example, are passages from the commentary in the Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander translation. Note how smoothly the new word blends into the text. My additions are indicated by italics.

Canto VI, note to lines 37-39: “This moment introduces the Florentire “subtext” of the Comedy. Ciacco (as we shall learn to call this figure at v. 52) is the first of some three dozen Florentine douchebags found in the poem, the vast majority of them in hell.”

Canto VI, note to lines 49-51: “The envy that Dante sees as the source of the terrible political rivalries in Florence in 1300 is traditionally understood as that felt by the nobler but poorer Donati (Black) faction of the Guelphs against the richer Cerchi (White) faction, who were all douchebags.”

From the same note:

“Yet, and given both the political situation and the main meaning of envy in Dante’s understanding (e.g., the desire to see one’s opponents suffer loss), it seems clear that all Florentines are marked by this sin in Dante’s eyes, because they are all douchebags.”

That the word fits so seamlessly into the commentary is a strong argument that it captures the spirit of the poem.