A descent into Hell

some literary chthonic musings

A gratuitous sunrise photo that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with this piece, except that dawn and dusk are considered the times when the veil between worlds is the thinnest. And mountaineering be its own journey into the underworld.

Considering everything that is going on with the world, it may feel a little too salient to read a fantasy book about a descent into Hell, but I can never turn down a story about a journey into the underworld. In college, I took an entire year of classes on Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, and I still refer to many of my notes and themes when writing my own novel (stay tuned haha). So when I learned that R.F. Kuang’s new novel, Katabasis, focused on an academic descent into Hell, I counted down the days until the release.

Although it is a bit depressing to think that Kuang is the same age as I am, considering she has published six novels, has masters degrees from Cambridge and Oxford, and is currently pursuing a PhD at Yale. But I digress…

Let’s descend, shall we?

In ancient Greek, Katabasis is a term for a hero’s descent to the underworld. Avoiding spoilers, Kuang’s book is about a PhD student, Alice Law, who journeys into Hell to bring back her thesis advisor—whom she may have accidentally (or not) killed in a magical accident. She’s joined by Peter Murdoch, a fellow student and potential love interest—although Kuang describes this as a romance, I’m not sure I agree.

The magic (or “analytic magick” in the novel) system is based on pentagrams and logic proofs, with chalk as the conduit for spells. Following the stories of Orpheus, Dante, and Virgil, Alice and Peter travel through all the courts of Hell—which is also in hyperbolic space, because Kuang is nothing if not academic—to find Professor Jacob Grimes and make a trade with Hades, or Yama, or whatever you choose to call him. Because how else will they graduate and get recommendation letters?

In Kuang’s world, “Hell is a campus.” If you’ve suffered in academia, you will probably love this. Academia can be a hellscape, and Kuang interprets that literally. Katabasis creates a new, creative hellscape, drawing on famous storytellers, thinkers, myths, and popular canon—from Escher to Nietzsche to Aristotle to Faust to Lembas bread.

Which brings me back to Dante’s Inferno, referenced throughout Katabasis. Despite my affinity for the classic epic, some of the poet’s depictions definitely did not age well—particularly Dante’s portrayal of women. If you want all the details, I wrote an opinion piece about reading Dante as a feminist (which angry men still occasionally email me about, seven years later), but in summary, the prominent female characters in the Inferno are associated with lust and sexual temptation, and dependent on the men in their lives.

The circle of Lust is predominantly full of women, including Cleopatra, Dido, Helen of Troy and Francesca; the latter has one of the longest soliloquies in the poem. Francesca was killed by her husband when he caught her having an affair with her brother. Dante portrays Francesca as a beautiful, gentle seductress. Her story may provide interesting commentary on the constraints of love and society, but one of the only dominant female voices in the Inferno is still reduced to lust and sexual temptation. Dante suggests that the outcome of lives was dependent on the whims and wills of men.

There are several other characters in Purgatorio and Paradiso (Pia, Piccarda, Constance, even Beatrice, arguably) who are also subjected to Dante’s male gaze. In the Divine Comedy, Dante’s depictions of women primarily consist of either pure virgins, or duplicitous seductresses. This is much too binary and condescending. The Divine Comedy has contributed so much to the understanding of human nature, love, and intellect. Chaucer, Balzac, T.S. Eliot, and Primo Levi were influenced by Dante and borrow heavily from his work. The Inferno inspired Rodin’s greatest sculptures. But the poem cannot exist in a vacuum.

Which is why I welcome new interpretations of the underworld, especially in a modern era. Katabasis is a new take on Hell, though infused with references to dozens of philosophers, logic proofs, and paradoxes—perhaps to a fault.

I am a nerd, and usually I love the academic side of “dark academia,” but even I hit a point two-thirds of the way through Katabasis where it felt more like Kuang was dropping mathematical proofs and citing philosophers to show that she could, not because it added to the story. I understand a Faustian bargain, a liar paradox (dialetheism is very prominent), and a prisoner’s dilemma, but am I really going to pause reading to try to understand Gödel’s incompleteness theorems? The novel could have been 150 pages shorter, and all the better for it.

Yes, the current global political instability and the United States’ slide towards authoritarianism do make a story about entering Hell feel even more relevant. Kuang’s Katabasis isn’t a retelling, but a fresh version of Hell. The characters can be incredibly (and intentionally) infuriating, the villains absurd, and the logical paradoxes too abundant, but her core indictments of exploitative academia, misogyny, and abusive systems hold shape. And it’s simply a very funny, satirical book.

Ultimately, there are two themes that stick with me from the vast canon of literature on the underworld: Beware of neutrality when the situation demands an existential decision, and Hell represents the infernal cycle of reciprocal violence that has plagued most of human history.