Darkness Visible

A Study of Vergil's "Aeneid"

W. R. Johnson

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226252377
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

One of the best books ever written on one of humanity's greatest epics, W. R. Johnson's classic study of Vergil's Aeneid challenges centuries of received wisdom. Johnson rejects the political and historical reading of the epic as a record of the glorious prehistory of Rome and instead foregrounds Vergil's enigmatic style and questioning of the heroic myths.With an approach to the text that is both grounded in scholarship and intensely personal, and in a style both rhetorically elegant and passionate, Johnson offers readings of specific passages that are nuanced and suggestive as he focuses on the "somber and nourishing fictions" in Vergil's poem. A timeless work of scholarship, Darkness Visible will enthrall classicists as well as students and scholars of the history of criticism—specifically the way in which politics influence modern readings of the classics—and of poetry and literature.

III

VARIA CONFUSUS IMAGINE RERUM: DEPTHS AND SURFACES

The inner image of the verse is inseparable from the numberless changes of expression which flit across the face of the teller of tales as he talks excitedly.

MANDELSTAM⁴⁸

In reading Virgil, I often cry: “Out hyperbolical fiend! How vexest thou this man!”

HOUSMAN to Mackail (1920)

novae cacozeliae repertor

Vita Donati

After sketching a quick, sure portrait of the melancholy Victorian Vergil, R. D. Williams issues this shrewd and timely warning: “The twentieth-century critic, immersed in this pool of tears, may well look longingly for a dose of the hard and robust Dryden, asking to be allowed to disinvolve himself, to be permitted a little distance. And this surely is what Virgil gives him, provided that he does not substitute for the Aeneid an anthology of the most intense parts of the second, fourth, sixth, and twelfth books.”⁴⁹ As I look over the passages chosen for discussion in this chapter and the way I have organized those passages, I realize, with some chagrin, that I have been busily constructing the forbidden anthology. But the portrait that emerges from the following pages bears no resemblance to the portrait that Williams correctly designs from the Victorian (and later) readings of this kind. In examining Vergil’s style and narrative structure in these “intense parts” of the books in question, in looking at Vergil’s concern with nescius, vacuus, umbra, imago, res, I have found strong traces of—and have chosen to emphasize—the harsher aspects of Vergilian “unreality” and “deliberate confusedness,”⁵⁰ a bitterness in the famous lyricism that borders on despair—in other words, the muscle beneath the “softer emotional mode”⁵¹ that is strained almost beyond its limit in a fateful and unequal struggle against madness, anger, profound ignorance, vulnerability, and malevolent darkness. In choosing to emphasize these qualities of Vergilian poetic I am not denying the existence or the importance of wistful lyricism or melancholy lustre or tender humanism; still less am I seeking to pretend that the tough and dynamic aspects of Vergil’s art which Williams stresses so strongly and brilliantly do not exist. What I want to investigate here are the dark places of Vergil’s impressionism and the mordancy of the stiff, almost expressionistic gestures of his language and narrative, for these parts of Vergil’s poetic have not yet, I think, received the attention they merit. And until we have a clear notion of the forms these poetic modes may take, we are apt to mistake them for modes that are deceptively similar to them. Specifically, what interests me most in this chapter is what I call the negative image: what it is, what it looks like, how Vergil goes about shaping it, and, finally, the kinds of things it tends to signify.

1. THE OPENING OF BOOK 12

at regina nova pugnae conterrita sorte,

flebat, et ardentem generum moritura tenebat,

“Turne, per has ego te lacrimas, per si quis Amatae

tangit honos animum, spes tu nunc una, senectae

tu requies miserae; decus imperiumque Latini

te penes; in te omnis domus inclinata recumbit:

unum oro: desiste manum committere Teucris.

qui te cumque manent isto certamine casus,

et me, Turne, manent; simul haec invisa relinquam

lumina, nec generum Aenean captiva videbo.”

accepit vocem lacrimis Lavinia matris

flagrantes perfusa genas, cui plurimus ignem

subiecit rubor, et calefacta per ora cucurrit.

Indum sanguineo veluti violaverit ostro

si quis ebur, aut mixta rubent ubi lilia multa

alba rosa: tales virgo dabat ore colores.

ilium turbat amor, figitque in virgine vultus:

ardet in arma magis paucisque adfatur Amatam….

(12.54–71)

But frightened by the terms of this new duel,

the queen, weeping, prepared to die, held fast

her raging son-in-law: “Turnus, by these

tears and by any reverence you still

feel for Amata—you, the only hope

and quiet left my sad last years: the honor

and power of Latinus is with you,

this house in peril stands or falls with you;

I beg one thing: you must not meet the Trojans.

For in this duel that you so wish to enter,

whatever waits for you waits for me, too;

together with you, I shall leave this hated

light; for I will not be a captive, see

Aeneas as my son-in-law.” Lavinia’s

hot cheeks were bathed in tears; she heard her mother’s

words; and her blush, a kindled fire, crossed

her burning face. And just as when a craftsman

stains Indian ivory with blood-red purple,

or when white lilies, mixed with many roses,

blush: even such, the colors of the virgin.

His love drives Turnus wild; he stares at his

Lavinia; even keener now for battle,

he answers Queen Amata with few words….

At the opening of Book 12 Turnus confronts Latinus and reaffirms his decision to fight Aeneas in single combat. Latinus, torn by bad conscience since he knows what Fate has commanded and knows, too, that he has been impotent to fulfill those commands, begs Turnus to desist from his plan and to submit to the will of Heaven, both for the good of the Latins and for his own good. Latinus’ passionate plea fades with a skillful compressed echo of Iliad 22.38–76, Priam’s shrewd appeal to filial love:

miserere parentis

longaevi, quem nunc maestum patria Ardea longe

dividit.

(12.43–45)

Pity your aged father: even now his native

Ardea holds him far from us, in sadness.

So, far from convincing Turnus to yield to the inevitable, Latinus’ common sense and his concern serve only to inflame Turnus the more:

haudquaquam dictis violentia Turni

flectitur; exsuperat magis aegrescitque medendo.

(12.45–46)

Words cannot check the violence of Turnus:

the healing only aggravates his sickness;

his fury flares.

The oxymoron (“he sickens because of the cure”) emphasizes Turnus’ irrationality (this is the second use of violentia in this scene: haud secus accenso gliscit Turno [9]) even as it illumines much of what is strange about the opening scene as a whole. If aegrescitque medendo corresponds to anything in its Homeric model in Iliad 22, it can only be to the two occurrences of oud’ Hektori thumon epeithon (78 and 91). The spare precision of Homer’s phrase gains force with repetition (neither Priam nor Hecuba can change Hector’s thumos with their separate pleas), and its lack of imagery brings into clear focus the heightened imagery of sickness with which Vergil chooses to complete the confrontation of Turnus and Latinus. It is not enough to say that Vergil desires to show by his oxymoron the wide difference between Turnus’ state of mind and that of Hector (Turnus’ unbridled passion as against Hector’s controlled excitement and resolve: amoton memaōs Achilēi machesthai [36]) in order to emphasize, by this artful contrast, the full force of Turnus’ violentia. The chief function of the oxymoronic metaphor is to dissolve the outlines of a scene that never quite gets under way. As we move from Turnus’ second outburst to Amata’s outburst, to Lavinia’s blush, and, finally, to Turnus’ third and last speech, we sense that Latinus’ gesture is, like all of his gestures, futile: not because it is in itself unreasonable, but because Turnus suffers from an irrational sickness that is beyond this help or any help.

In the case of Hector, the fact that both Priam and Hecuba fail to persuade their son to desist from his resolve does not mean that persuasion could not possibly work in this instance; it means only that it happens not to work in this instance because both Fate and Hector’s own character are more powerful even than the cunning, honest, and elemental rhetoric of his parents. Homer’s world in this scene, as in his other scenes, is the common world where health and rational discourse are the norm from which sickness and irrationality deviate. In this world the outlines of events and the motives of the human beings who participate in those events are generally extremely clear. Priam and Hecuba know what they are doing, and what they are doing is reasonable. Hector knows what he is doing, and his choices and behavior are at once utterly rational and utterly honorable. But the motives, the behavior, and even the dilemmas of Turnus are far less clear than are those of Hector.

Vergil cannot present them with the clear outlines and exact articulations that Homer uses for his scene because Turnus is sick, as Vergil emphasizes with his powerful oxymoron, and because the causes of this sickness (and indeed the fact of the sickness itself) are unknown to Turnus himself, to Latinus, to Amata, and even, in a way, to Vergil and to us. The sickness that destroys Turnus, that is in some ways the central concern of Book 12 and therefore in some ways the central concern of the epic as a whole, is not susceptible to rational analysis and is therefore not susceptible to firm design and the sequential clarity that are the hallmarks of Homer’s mode of beholding. Vergil will not, or, as I propose, cannot show us what Turnus suffers and does in this scene. Rather, what he does is to suggest the emotions that Turnus unconsciously suffers while under the illusion that he is performing a conscious, rational act. In saying this I do not mean to suggest that what Vergil offers us here is a psychological analysis of Turnus; that he is, to use another metaphor, being subjective rather than objective; or, to alter the same metaphor slightly, that he is turning from the outward appearance to the inward reality.

What Vergil offers here are clusters (not a series or groups) of blurred images that suggest but do not and cannot try to define the fluctuations and uncertainties of Turnus’ distorted perceptions; what Vergil offers are not inner realities, but illusions. The fact that these perceptions are distorted from the outset (from, say, the moment when Allecto’s magic firebrand becomes ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• About the Author
• Dedication
• Contents
• 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. Varia Confusus Imagine Rerum: Depths and Surfaces
• IV. The Worlds Vergil Lived In
• Notes