Recreating Dante’s Commedia in VR: The Intersection between Virtual Reality and Literature

Since the development of increasingly sophisticated virtual reality technologies, the medium of virtual reality has boomed in recent years, with video, gaming, filmmaking, journalism, and marketing companies exploiting VR for its immersive and interactive potential. At the same time, academic scholars have also begun to see the power and potential of archeology VR, anthropology VR, art history VR, etc. One recent sub-field is “literary VR,” the adaptation or recreation of a textual work in an interactive, immersive, and three-dimensional space. Examples of literary VR include the NYTimes’ 360 Video representation of George Saunders’
Lincoln in the Bardo, and
Joycestick, the Boston College gamification of Joyce’s
Ulysses. My own project, and the topic of my poster presentation, explores the potentiality and the stakes of recreating Dante Alighieri’s
Commedia in virtual reality.

While literary VR as a sub-field of digital humanities is extremely nascent, scholars have focused on the implicit virtual or real qualities of literary works, as they have also begun to think critically about the process of adapting literature to the VR medium. Notably, Ricci discusses the “virtual reality” elements present in the corpus of Italo Calvino (Ricci, 1993), while Barolini focuses explicitly on Dante and virtual reality as rhetorical (Barolini, 1992, 2013). Broadly speaking, scholars have thought to some extent about the intersection between literature and virtual reality (Ryan, 1995, 1999; Beusterien, 2006; Saler, 2012), however, little critical work has been done specifically on Dante VR or on the scholarly process of rethinking literature in terms of its virtual, interactive, and immersive potential.
Through an examination in my presentation of the questions that have arisen so far in the development of “Virtual Commedia,” my own VR project and simulation of the medieval poem, I
reread Dante’s
Commedia for its VR application and focus specifically on the factors that must be considered when adapting literature to virtual reality. These questions include: How does one
map a text onto the decidedly physical space of a virtual reality simulation? What happens to the text’s narrator? What role does the VR user play within the space of the VR simulation? Does the user’s so-called “perspective” converge with or diverge from the original perspective(s) offered in the work’s textual form? To what extent does or should sound effects, lighting, and physical sensations be made a part of the literary VR experience? Finally, how can literary VR negotiate problems of textual accuracy and authenticity in the adaptation of an original literary work?

In this presentation, I argue that a text like Dante’s
Commedia lends itself especially well to VR technology for three main reasons. First, the incredibly detailed descriptions of the realms of hell, purgatory, and heaven imply a virtual visuality already: readers are invited to imagine themselves walking alongside the pilgrim, through the poet’s prolific use of rhetorical devices such as
enargeia,
ekphrasis,
hypotyposis, etc. Second, the poem’s narrative maps perfectly onto the text’s space: a VR user would be able to virtually retrace the pilgrim’s steps in both linear and chronological order, making the physical and textual journey through the realms of the afterlife one and the same. Third, the “experience” of the
Commedia for the most part involves Dante the pilgrim’s witnessing of the afterlife and its residents. His arrival in each circle of hell, for example, often triggers the speech or actions of the creatures present there. This restricted agency simplifies the process of adapting to VR: the simulation would not rely on user agency, and though interactivity would be emphasized, the user would not be able to make choices to affect the simulation’s narrative. In this way, the audience of literary VR broadly includes students and academics, Dante readers, and the general public, who may perhaps otherwise never access the poem.

My poster thus presents this project in two original ways: theoretically, I rethink the poem through the “VR technology” lens, thus coming to new conclusions about the
Commedia’s relevance and applicability to the literary VR field; and practically, as I am currently developing the simulation, I report on the real-time process and the questions constantly being raised. Overall, my presentation participates in this new field of critical theory, where literary VR becomes both a medium of interpretive scholarship and a form of art in its own right.

Bibliography

Barolini, T. (1992).
The Undivine Comedy: Detheologizing Dante. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Barolini, T. (2013). Dante and reality/Dante and realism (
Paradiso).
Spazio Filosofico, 8: 199-208.

Beusterien, J. (2006). Reading Cervantes: a new virtual reality.
Comparative Literature Studies, 43(4): 428-40.

Ricci, F. (1993). Fabulous experience and marvelous illusions: virtual reality and the urge of an ancient dream.
Merveilles & Contes, 7(1): 153-87.

Ryan, M. (1995). Allegories of immersion: virtual narration in postmodern fiction.
Style, 29(2): 262-86.

Ryan, M. (1999). Immersion vs. interactivity: virtual reality and literary theory.
SubStance, 28(2): 110-37.

Saler, M. (2012).
As If: Modern Enchantment and the Prehistory of Virtual Reality. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.