Bailey's Cafe: Hell is Repetition

Bailey’s Café: Hell is Repetition

Dante's 9 Circles of Hell

                Dr. Hobby mentioned in class today that Gloria Naylor’s second novel, Linden Hills, is loosely based on Dante’s Inferno. Though I knew this when I read the Jesse Belle chapter in Bailey’s Café, I was nonetheless impressed. Naylor’s intertextual reference to the Inferno creates layers of meaning and develops characters.  In the chapter we are introduced to Jesse Bell: the down and out junkie whom Eve saves from addiction. Eve visited Jesse in jail and told her “if she’s sick of wallowing in her own shit” to come find her. Jesse’s punishment at Eve’s boardinghouse alludes to the Inferno with haunting transparency.

Liars in the 8th Circle

                Jesse was addicted to heroin before moving into Eve’s house. The moment she takes Jesse in, Eve tells her that they are in Hell. This first reference alone does not connote Dante. However, as the narrative progresses the allusions are discernible. As in the Inferno, Jesse’s Hell is repetition. Sinners are punished with a perverted form of the sins themselves. In Dante contrapasso is pervasive throughout the text: sorcerers’ heads are twisted backwards; liars converse with mud and slime; and Satan devolves into a grotesque caricature of Evil. The sinner eternally suffers their sin. (Had Jesse been in the Inferno, she likely would have been placed in the third circle of Hell. Here, Dante places the gluttons {or heroin addicts} who forever wallow in fetid garbage).

                Eve does not go full-Dante on Jesse, but her methods are contrapasso in nature. She forces the junkie to quit cold turkey. The experience was so horrific that Jesse describes it as this: “Imagine feeling that your body gets slammed into the same wall again and again. Red-hot bricks one time. Blocks of ice the next. Image it going on for four straight days” (Naylor 139). The subtle reference to repetition in this description of withdraw is amplified in the ensuing narrative. Once Jesse was completely clean, Eve knew the desire to use was still there. So instead of threatening expulsion or criminal charges, Eve gives Jesse just what she wants: Heroin on a silver platter (literally). The velvet case holding crystal droppers and sterling syringes was Eve’s way of exploiting Jesse’s sin. And it worked; Jesse was spoon fed China White for four days (the exact duration of her withdrawal). But to quote Ray Liotta in Blow: “When you’re up it’s never as good as it seems, and when you’re down you never think you’ll be up again.”

                 After those ethereal days Eve cut off the mainline and Jesse suffered an even worse withdraw than before. She described the second one to Bailey, saying: “I sincerely prayed for death” (Naylor 141).  Eve inflicted a punishment fit for Dante’s sinners. She used Jesse’s evil against her, condemning the junkie to yet another slow death brought on by her own doing. After Jesse becomes healthy Eve offers her another dose on a Golden platter, saying: “Remember where we are”. The contrapasso of Eve’s boarding house mirrors that in Dante’s Hell. The intertextuality adds sophistication to both Naylor’s text and characters.

Sometimes You're Flush Quote

"Sometimes you're flush and sometimes you're bust, and when you're up, it's never as good as it seems, and when you're down, you never think you'll be up again, but life goes on."

Blow