Overview
The Third Circle is where Dante placed The Gluttons, those that did nothing else with their lives besides eat and drink. For punishment, they spend an eternity wallowing in filth and being chewed on by Cerberus, a three-headed dog.
In my Third Circle are those that fell victim to the Fallacies of Missing Evidence. Together with the Fallacies of Causality, these form the Fallacies of Insufficient Grounds. The notion of insufficient ground plays a role in the poem, as some denizens of the realm are forced to inhabit a roadbed so fractured and full of potholes that there is little room for any of them to stand.
Comments
Dante begins his Canto VI, which is primarily set in the Third Circle, with his recovery from yet another fainting spell. Dante's swoons at the horrors of hell get a bit hard to take sometimes, because it is clear that he is never really in danger of being stuck there. His trip was ordained by heaven. He is on a fact-finding mission. We know how everything will work out for him in the end. In fact, he has it even easier than Barton Fink, the hero of another odyssey down into Hell, as told in the underappreciated Coen Brothers film from 1991.
Like Dante, Barton is a writer, and he'll go through his journey accompanied by his ostensible hero and source of literary inspiration. But Barton isn't aware, going in, that Hollywood is Hell and that Charlie Meadows, the Common Man that lives there eternally, is his Virgil. That is because Barton is far too self-absorbed to realize that although he champions the Little Guy, he's just as much a snob as the Fourth Earl of Westrop and Lady Higgenbottom and Nigel Grinch-Gibbons.
Barton's ongoing interactions with a series of characters unlike any he's ever had to deal with before are his only hope to wake up from his narcissistic life. There's the Paulo and Francesca in the room next to him at the Hotel Earle, in the form of the lustful couple never seen but often heard moaning. There's a vast world of The Violent that is entirely alien to him, from the Wrestler ("I will destroy him!") to the fist-fighting servicemen at the big band dance. There's Incontinent in the form of Bill Mayhew ("sorry about the odor"), the heavenly image of a woman (Beatrice) that haunts him all the time, and the imps and demons dressed as bellhops and cops. There's Satan himself as the movie mogul behind the big desk, and of course, "there's a Good Wrestler and a Bad Wrestler that he must confront at the end."
So by the time he's reached the end of his trek (with wonderful, Inferno-like visual hints, such as the camera going down a sink drain, or down into the dark depths of the funnel-shaped bell of a trumpet) he's learned where he is and what he is. His Common Man/Virgil tells him, "You think your life is hell? You're just a tourist. I live here."
And that is all Dante was; a tourist. And like Barton, he was too self-absorbed, probably, to realize that Hell existed all around him on earth, built and supported by the irrational, mystical, and religious notions of the times.
