Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  Augustus turned around impulsively with an unusually vehement gesture: “Stick to the point, Virgil,… why is it that you want to destroy the Aeneid?”

  This came as such a surprise that for a moment he did not know what to answer.

  “You have talked of inadequacies; I grant them to you although I do not believe in them, but there are no artistic inadequacies that Virgil should be unable to cope with … that was only quibbling.”

  “I have not achieved my goals … I have not reached them.”

  “This is another explanation that means nothing to me … what goal is it that you seek?”

  This was said quite sharply and directly; Augustus had again come nearer the bed, he seemed like a stern, questioning father, and the intimidation that he inspired was strange in the extreme, not only because of the actual difference in their ages, but still more because everyone who knew Augustus had to be, and was, far too familiar with this habitual sort of cross-questioning to regard it as frightening. Perhaps the intimidation lay in the unavoidable justness of the question; he who does not know how to answer is intimidated; where did his goals lie? they were not to be found, they had evaporated under the palpable weight of the moment! “Alas, where are they? Oh, Plotia, oh, sibylline voice, which goals?!”

  And Plotia said, and it sounded like recollection: “I bear your destiny; in my knowledge lies your goal.”

  Again Augustus—and this was something he liked to do in a cross-examination if he was trying to gain a certain point—hanged his tone and shifted to the winning amiability which was so much his: “There are many aims, Virgil; I myself have a goodly number of them, and among them your friendship is truly not to be reckoned as least, indeed, it will yet be part of my future fame that I was the friend of Virgil … but now confess to me what dreadful goal is that which lures you on, permitting you to harbor such an inconceivable resolution …”

  The fever was mounting again, he could feel it between his hot fingers, the ring hurt; nevertheless he must answer: “My aims? … knowledge … truth … the end of all searching … perception …”

  “And this is the goal you believe you have not attained?”

  “No one has attained it.”

  “Well … as you confute yourself, it is inconceivable that you continue to have qualms; … mortals are not meant to achieve everything.”

  “But I have never even taken the first step toward perception, nor once made an attempt to take the first step … it is incongruous, everything has been incongruous.”

  “What do you mean? you do not even believe that yourself; no more of that.” The voice of Augustus had become annoyed; he was displeased.

  “It is true.”

  “My Virgil …”

  “Yes, Octavian …”

  The lamp swung softly, although there was not a breath of air stirring, the silver chains tinkled softly: Was an earthquake coming along with the eclipse? He felt no fear; like a lightly swaying bark was his body, like a bark making ready to sail, and from the shore Augustus reached a friendly hand, while outside the mirror-like sea, smooth and unruffled, reflected the livid light in its unbroken surface as it moved up and down.

  And Augustus, also giving no heed to the earthquake, said pleasantly: “Listen Virgil, listen to me as your friend and also as a connoisseur of your work: your poem is filled with the most exalted knowledge; Rome is proclaimed in it throughout, and you comprehend Rome, comprehending it in its gods, its warriors, as well as in its peasants, you encompass its glory and its piety, you encompass the whole extent of Rome and the time of Rome as far back as its powerful Trojan ancestors, for you have retained everything … isn’t this perception enough, even for you?”

  “Retained, retained … yes, … yes, I thought to hold fast to everything, everything that was happening, everything that had happened, and that was why nothing could succeed.”

  “You have succeeded, my Virgil.”

  “I was impatient for perception … and that is why I wanted to write down everything … for this, alas, is what poetry is, the craving for truth; this is its desire and it is unable to penetrate beyond it …”

  “I agree with you, Virgil, that poetry is just this, it encompasses all of life, and therefore it is divine.”

  Caesar did not comprehend, no one grasped the truth, no one knew that the divinity of beauty was only a sham-divinity, the shadow cast by the coming of the gods.

  “There is no need of poetry, oh, Caesar, to understand life … Sallust and Livy are more competent with regard to the extent and time of Rome, as you call it, than are my songs, and though I may be a peasant, or rather I might have been one, a work such as the admirable Varro’s is far more valuable for the understanding of agriculture than my Georgics … how insignificant are we poets compared with them! I have no wish to disparage any of my colleagues, but nothing is achieved by mere glorification, least of all for perception.”

  “Everyone contributes his share to the store of knowledge, every creation does this, and mine likewise; but the greatness of poetic perception, and therefore also your greatness, Virgil, lies in being able to grasp all of life—as I said before—in a single survey, in a single work, in a single glance.”

  Writing down, writing down everything that happened within and without, and yet it had led to nothing: “Ah, Augustus, I too once thought this, just this, to be the perceptive task of the poet … and so my work became a search for perception, without becoming, without really being perception …”

  “Then I must ask you again, Virgil, toward which goal have you been striving with your poetry since it seems it was not toward an understanding of life.”

  “The understanding of death.”—It was like a re-found, a re-recognized, a homecoming enlightenment and had been said quickly as if springing from a state of illumination.

  A pause ensued; the soft seismic swaying of existence kept on, although Caesar still did not heed it, seeming to be far more struck by what he had just heard, and it took quite a while before he answered: “Death is a part of life, he who understands life, understands death as well.”

  Was this true? it sounded like truth, and still it was not true, or rather it was no longer true: “There has never been a moment of my life, Octavian, that I did not wish to hold onto, but also not one in which I did not feel that I wanted to die.”

  Caesar’s perplexity was struggling back to pleasantness: “It is just your good fortune, Virgil, that your wish to die has so far come to nothing; this time also it has only sufficed to make you ill. With the help of the gods, your will to live will prove itself the stronger.”

  “Yes, … yes, certainly I cling to life, yes, I have to admit it; I am insatiable for life just because of my great hunger for death … yet I know nothing of death …”

  “Death has no meaning; it is futile even to talk of it.”

  “You have seen a great deal of death, Octavian; perhaps that is why you know more about life than most people.”

  “Possibly I was shown just a little too much of death, because, really, my friend, life means as little as death; life leads to death and both amount to nothing.”

  Had this not been so casually and wearily said, it would have been astonishing, because it was quite in contradiction to Augustus’ general views; but spoken thus it was surely not meant to be taken seriously: “This does not quite fit in with the teachings of the Stoics, whose disciple you have often called yourself.”

  “If the obligation to be good continues to hold, it will somehow be able to be brought into conformity with Stoicism. But actually that is hardly important for us, and certainly not very essential.”

  Augustus seated himself, and again with a somewhat tired and not altogether heroic gesture. For a short time he closed his eyes, his hands sought support and found it on the wreathed candelabrum, his fingers, playing about, rubbed a laurel-leaf into tatters. And when he opened his eyes again his glance was languid and a bit empty.

  Oh, this also one should retain
and be able to set down, one ought to write it down just like all else that had flowed past throughout these many years without having been written down, like all other human traits that now were scarcely a memory, an indistinct multitude of heads and face-shapes, peasant-faces, city-faces, all of them hairy and covered with skin, wrinkled and smooth and often quite mottled, an indistinct multitude of figures that had been drifting past, slinking past; an eternally invariable, multifarious circle of men to which even Augustus, the earthly vessel of divinity, irrefutably belonged, he quite as forgotten as this whole impenetrable, innumerable, undepictable multitude of living creatures, just as unremembered as any of them, as unnoted as the basic carnality that was inherent in them all, feeding and sleeping, filled with fluids and semi-solids, unrecollected the bony frame under the fleshy covering, the erected framework of bone that helped them to move, unrecollected the human being, oh, the human being in whose smile divinity dwelt in spite of everything, this smile in which man divinely recognized the fellow-man, the fellow-soul—the essence of human compatability, the birthplace of human language: the smile. Nothing of all this had been retained, and in its stead a moderately successful imitation of the Homeric model had been erected, an empty nothing filled with gods and heroes of an Homeric cast, compared to whose unreality even the weariness of the grandson who sat here was still an indication of strength: for even the weariest smile flickering in Caesar’s countenance was still divine, whereas in the poem the hero of Actium possessed neither a countenance nor a smile, he possessed nothing but his armor and a helmet; the poem was without truth, his hero, Aeneas, was far from reality, and also the grandson of Aeneas as therein depicted; it was a poem lacking any depth of perception, incapable of it because light and shadow are sundered by perception only for the sake of form—, the poem remained leaden and shadowless. However, a voice was speaking and it was not that of Plotia, but a stranger’s, no, oddly enough it was the voice of the slave, who had no business to be here, and the voice was saying: “You need no longer retain anything.”—“Why is it you who counsels me, why not Plotia?” And now it was really Plotia who answered with the same airy gentleness as before: “Obey him, it is not for you to write down things any more.” In this way it became binding, although he surmised that possibly Plotia herself was afraid of being reckoned among the forgotten, and that was her reason for reinforcing the slave’s advice with her own; yet it was nonetheless binding. Yet, why this binding command? why? For even now, yes, even now, he might succeed in catching up with his neglected task so that the poem could still be saved, and even though it was in a manner of speaking the last moment, already too late for further effort, one must succeed if only one could retain this very moment, this unique moment of the here and now, perpetuating the palpability of the surrounding existence, the stony permanence of the walls, the floors, the houses, the town, all so firmly grounded yet afloat and flowing off into immobility, if one could take note of the seismic swaying over which one rode as if in a boat on a mirror-smooth surface, reflected in the light of noon now gone leaden; oh, if one could perpetuate it, retaining the earthly weariness beneath the surface of the hard, yet gentle, Caesarly countenance, actually retaining just a tiny fragment of the conversation which like an invisible chain had reached from one to the other, retaining this give and take between two creatures who had arisen from the dank multitude, incomprehensible their communion, as incomprehensible as the divinely streaming glance of their meeting eyes; oh, if one could hold fast to this, if one were permitted to do so, if this could actually be accomplished, it would be like a first and final shedding of light, a real perception of life. Would this come to pass? “Whatever you may yet accomplish on this earth will no longer satisfy you,” said the slave, and this was so comprehensible that it seemed unnecessary for Plotia to confirm it: for though the perceptive spirit should penetrate existence ever so profoundly, though he even dissect the primal elements, separating the passive from the active, earth and water on one side, fire and air on the other, though he should dissect it into ever so many of its living parts, even groping into the secret of the atomic vortex, and though, going further, he might uncover the motives of men, these creatures subdivided into members, though he might scrutinize fragment after fragment of this divine life, the self-betraying actions, the self-betraying speech, though he might strip all this down to its deep and final nakedness, peeling off the flesh, blowing out the very marrow of the bones, pulverizing the thoughts, so that nothing remained save the winnowed, the divinely contrite, the incomprehensible ego, though the perceiving spirit might accomplish all this, exploring it step by step, retaining it and able to describe it, no further step would have been taken; perception remained a thing of this world, bound to terrestrial things, it was still only a perception of life and not the perception of death; the flashes of truth were joined to one another in an endless chain, casting light on fragment after fragment of the nocturnal chaos of the beginning, a chain as endless as life itself and just as meaningless, so long as the light of undying death did not deliver to all of them, who know and are known by death, the simple truth of their existence: the unity of the creation. For the perception of life, earthily bound to the earth, never possessed the power to lift itself above the thing known and to endow it with unity, the unity of an enduring meaning, a meaning by which life was and is maintained as creation, eternally to be remembered as such.

  For only he who through his knowledge of death became conscious of the infinite was able to retain the creation, to retain the single part within the whole creation and the whole creation in every single part. For the part could not be retained by itself; it could be retained only in its connotations, only through its lawful context, and it was the infinite which bore all the connotations within existence, bearing the law, bearing the form of the law, and precisely for this reason bearing faith itself; the infinite forever hidden, but for all that the soul of man.

  Augustus sat there as before, he was rubbing a laurel leaf between his fingers and seemed to wait for some agreement or at least for an answer.

  “Oh, Augustus, you spoke of what is essential … you would not be you, should you not realize that neither life nor death can or may be considered as nothing, or if you failed to realize that just the reverse of what it pleased you to say is applicable to perception … in truth, only he who is able to perceive death is also able to perceive life …”

  A somewhat absent smile indicated an indifferent, casual assent: “It may be …”

  “But surely, that is how it is, and life’s immeasurable meaning can come only from the fullness of meaning revealed by death.”

  “So that is what you mean by the goal of your poetry, that is where you have placed it.”

  “Insofar as my performance was really poetry, this was its goal, for it is the goal of all genuine poetry; were this not so, were it not so utterly compelling to grope one’s way toward death, and to do so with every thought, with each act of the imagination, were not this enormous compulsion always at hand, this compulsion to draw nearer to death, there would have been no tragic poets, no Aeschylus.”

  “The people may have other ideas about the ends of poetry. They look for the beauty and wisdom to be found in it.”

  “These are adjuncts, effortless and even cheap; the people think it is for these they are searching, and yet they sense what lies beneath them, the real end which is essential, because it is the goal of life itself.”

  “And this goal you have not attained?”

  “I have not attained it.”

  Stroking his brow and hair, as though just waking and trying to collect his thoughts, Augustus said: “I am familiar with the Aeneid and for that reason you ought not to misrepresent it; the poem contains every metamorphosis of death, you have pursued death into the shadows of the underworld.”

  Never, never was this man to be persuaded that the sacrifice of the poem was an unavoidable necessity; he had not even once noticed the darkening of the sun and the Posei
donian heaving of the ground, he had no intimation of the calamitous conflagration of the earth which had been in evidence and continued to be, he divined nothing of the coming overthrow of the creation, and never would he admit that sacrifices—and not only that of the Aeneid—must be consummated, so that the sun and stars should not halt in their day and night courses, and that no darkening should ensue, so that the creation might endure and death be transformed to rebirth, the creation resurrected.

  Aeneas pursued death to the shadows of the underworld and returned thence with empty hands, himself an empty symbol, without salvation, without truth, without the truth of reality; oh, his undertaking was no less futile than that of Orpheus, although he had not descended like the latter for the sake of the beloved, but for the sake of the ancestor who had established the law—; the force to send him deeper had been lacking and now it was necessary to consummate the sacrifice; it was necessary that he himself reach the nothingness along with his poem, in order that death appear and shatter the empty metaphor: “I have only hemmed in death by metaphor, Augustus, but death is craftier than the symbols of poetry, and knows how to escape them … metaphor is not the same as perception, metaphor follows perception though sometimes it precedes it, rather like an inadmissible and incomplete forecast brought into being by words alone, in which case metaphor becomes nothing but a dark screen standing in front of truth and concealing it instead of shining out from its midst.”