Darkness Visible - A Study of Vergil’s Aeneid

187 Pages·2016·4.49 MB·English

by  W. R. Johnson

W. R. J O H N S O N
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Darkness Visible
A Study of Vergil’s
Aeneid
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los Angeles, California
University of California Press, Ltd.
London, England
Copyright © 1976, by
The Regents of the University of California
ISBN 0-520-02942-9
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-30523
Printed in the United States of America
For
L. A. MacKay
And how brave men are with their
dim reflectors: they see nothing
and simply say: it is dark here,
we must make a light!
... yet from those flames
No light, but rather darkness visible
Serv’d only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell....
MILTON
... usque adeo taetra nimborum nocte coorta
impendent atrae formidinis ora superne ...
LUCRETIUS
CO N TEN TS
Preface
Abbreviations Used in Notes
I. Eliot’s Myth and Vergil’s Fictions
II. Lessing, Auerbach, Gombrich: The
Norm of Reality and the Spectrum
of Decorum
III. Voria Confusus Imagine Rerum:
Depths and Surfaces
1. THE OPENING OF BOOK 12, 50
2. DISSOLVING PATHOS, 59
3. BLURRED IMAGES, 75
4. AENEAS AND THE MONUMENTS, 99
5. THE END OF BOOK 12, 114
IV. The Worlds Vergil Lived In
1. Quod Credas: The Social Order, 136
2. Quo Tendas: The Metaphysical Order, 141
3. Quod Agas: The Moral Order, 149
Notes
PREFACE
In writing these essays on the Aeneii, I have not aimed much at
originality, and I have tried to avoid argumentation. What I have
to say about the surfaces of Vergil’s poem, about its narrative and
stylistic modes, has been said or adumbrated by Poschl, Otis,
Clausen, Quinn, Anderson, Putnam, and other contemporary
readers of Vergil who have worked hard and well to recover as­
pects of Vergil’s poetic that have been lost or obscured both in the
recent and in the not so recent past. I see this aspect of my work,
then, as essentially concerned with the qualifying and modifying
of emphasis of recent formulations of Vergil’s poetic.
When I turn from the poem’s narrative and stylistic modes to
what the poem means, I naturally lose my equanimity from time
to time: each reader feels that each of his favorite poems somehow
belongs to him and therefore resents any intrusions into his pri­
vate and special gardens. Even here, however, what I am mostly
trying to do is to synthesize and mediate rather than to define and
to prescribe. I am keenly aware that the Aeneii means all kinds of
things, and I am also aware that the meaning or meanings that I
find in it—though I am sure that they are present in it—are in
some sense my own meanings, not because I have created them
but because I, like other readers, select and emphasize them in
a personal (but not subjective) way. What I am specially engaged
in when I discuss the meanings of the Aeneii is to mediate be­
tween varieties of pessimism and optimism, and here too I am
mostly elaborating the mediations and syntheses of Perret and
MacKay.
The Greek texts for Homer are from the Cambridge editions
of Arthur Platt (lliai, 1894; Oiyssey, 1892); for Apollonius the
text is that of R. C. Seaton (Oxford, 1900). I am very happy to
be allowed to reprint sections from Allen Mandelbaum’s superb
IX
rendering of the Aeneid. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971). I am
very grateful to the Oxford University Press for its kind permis­
sion to use passages from T. E. Shaw’s rendering of the Odyssey
(1932). The versions of the Iliad, the Argonautica, and Longinus
are my own.
It is a great pleasure to record my debt to T. G. Rosenmeyer,
August Fruge, Frederick Williams, my wife Sabina, and my
anonymous reader for their careful and kind criticisms. For the
errors and infelicities that spurned their warnings and remain,
they are not, of course, in any way responsible. I should also like
to thank Elizabeth Block for her help in preparing some of the
manuscript, Lois A. Benson for her extraordinary care in editing
it, and all of my smdents in Comparative Literature at Berkeley
for their grand enthusiasms and their fresh, bright minds.
Finally, I call attention to two books that I wish I had seen
before my book was completed: J. W. Hunt’s Forms of Glory
(Carbondale, 1973), which offers excellent descriptions of Ver­
gil’s “unique fusion of triumph and regret,” and Jean Pepin’s
Mythe et Allegorie (Aubier, 1958), which provides splendid de­
scriptions of the nature of ancient allegory and is particularly rich
in its meditations on multiple allegories.
ABBREVIATIONS
USED IN NOTES
AJP American Journal of Philology
CJ Classical Journal
CR Classical Review
CSCA California Studies in Classical Antiquity
CW Classical Weekly
GR Greece and Rome
GRBS Greek, Roman and Byzantine Studies
HSCP Harvard Studies in Classical Philology
JRS Journal of Roman Studies
REL Revue des Etudes Latines
ΤΑΡΑ Transactions of the American Philological Association
YCS Yale Classical Studies
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I
ELIOT’S M YTH AND
V ERG IL’S FICTIONS
... as every half-truth at length produces the contra­
diction of itself in the opposite half-truth.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Myth operates within the diagrams of ritual, which
presupposes total and adequate explanations of things
as they are and were; it is a sequence of radically un­
changeable gestures. Fictions are for finding things out,
and they change as the needs of sense-making change.
Myths are the agents of stability, fictions are the agents
of change. Myths call for absolute, fictions for condi­
tional assent. Myths make sense in terms of a lost order
of time, illud tempus as Eliade calls it; fictions, if suc­
cessful, make sense of the here and now, hoc tempus,1
It may seem an injustice that Eliot should be made to serve as the
instigator of a wild-goose chase that, in a sense, he only strayed
into and out of accidentally. But he cast himself as the defender
of the grand orthodoxies. He glories in that role, and so it is not
wholly unfair that he should be taken as a representative figure
when we examine the major approaches to Vergil that developed
during the age of Eliot, that period between the two wars (and a
little before and a little after) when Western civilization was lost
and reviled and recovered and sentimentalized with all the pas­
sion and imprecision that the millennistic sensibility is capable
of. My object in this essay is to sketch the fortunes of Vergil’s repu­
tation in the last century and a half with a view to showing that
the Aeneid, having been reduced from a poem to a myth, was first
rejected as a bad myth and then exalted as the good European
(Western) myth, and that the habit of reading the poem as a
political and cultural allegory (however much the debate over
the meaning of the allegory alters its direction) persists to the
present day, obscuring the quality of the poetry and limiting, dis­
astrously, the range and depths of the poem. Having briefly sur­
veyed the general outlines of this reductive allegorical approach
to the poem and having described and assessed the results of this
approach in its most recent flowering, I shall attempt to show
how and why the Aeneid, in all the complexity and rich configura­
tion of its multiple allegories and its dialectical movement, will
not allow its living fictions to be transformed into a dead myth—
into Eliot’s Aeneid, the emblem of a vanishing, vanished world
whose death the young Eliot announced and whose rebirth the
middle-aged and elder Eliot, not to his discredit, undertook to
fabricate. What follows may seem tendentious, frivolous, unfair.
I can only plead that, having come to find that the myth of Vergil
is as dangerous as it is unreal, I grow ever more certain that the
fictions of Vergil remain as potent and as useful as they were
when, out of the courage of his despair, he struggled to imagine
them.
1
The history of how the Aeneid—or, to be more precise, the his­
tory of how the first six books of the Aeneid—became essentially
a high-school textbook in the nineteenth century and in the first
half of the twentieth century is a droll and complicated affair. The
broad outlines of this story are fairly well known, but the signifi­
cance of the story, for a variety of reasons, is generally ignored.
Parts of its meaning are amusingly discussed by Ogilvie and
brilliantly defined by R. D. Williams,2 but so far as I know
there is no methodical study of the entire story, perhaps because
it is not only funny and complex but also faintly depressing. In the
interests of brevity and at the risk of oversimplification, I suggest
that the major reasons for the demotion of the Aeneid from a great
living epic to the role of co-drudge with Xenophon, Nepos, and
the Gallic Wars were Homer redivivus (again) and the Roman­
tics, poets and professors alike (it was once the fashion for young
living professors to read the work of recently dead poets ). Vergil’s
main problem after the French Revolution was that he was clearly
the darling of the neoclassical establishment. The late eighteenth-
century Homer, on the other hand, a dim adumbration of our