The Death of Virgil

by Hermann Broch

  HAD THE words formed themselves in his mouth? he scarcely knew, he did not know at all, and yet he was not surprised by an echo, almost an answer: "You called?" sounding so tender and familiar, almost homelike, from a nowhere unbelievably near or unbelievably far, a sound floating into indistinctness if not into infinity, if not into the longed-for place of the universal chorus, and for a moment he thought it was Plotia, he thought he heard the floating darkness of her voice, as though he might, as though he must expect her in the re-calmed, re-dewed, reassembled night, perceiving, however, with even greater certainty and in the next moment, that it had been the voice of the boy, and the unsurprised naturalness with which he accepted his return was so lightly mundane in its nature, flowing so easily between earthly shores and for this very reason unconcerned whether they betokened joy or disappointment, that he became quite worried lest he should interrupt this flow by even a glance or turn of the head; he lay there with closed eyes and he did not stir. And he was unaware how long this lasted. But then it seemed to him as if again words were forming in his mouth, as if he said: "Why have you returned? I wish to hear you no longer." Once again he did not know whether he had spoken aloud, whether the boy was actually in the room, whether an answer could be expected or not, this was a floating sort of expectation, like that when a lyre is being tuned somewhere before the song rings out, and again there resounded quite near and yet remote as if coming hither from the sea, encompassed and glistening softly in the moonlight: "Do not push me off."— "But," he countered, "you are in my way. I want to hear the other voice, you are only a sham-voice, I want to get on to the other one."—"I was your path, I am your path," came the answer, "I am the overtone of yourself that was yours from the very beginning, vibrating beyond every death unto eternity." This was like a temptation full of sweet allure, full of simplicity, full of dream, the call of dream to make him turn back again, an echo from childland. And the soft, far-near, homelike, sorrow-dispelling voice of the boy went on: "The reverberations of your poem are eternal." Whereupon he said: "No, I no longer want to hear the echo of my own voice; I await the voice that is beyond mine."—"You can no longer silence the overtones of the heart; their echoes remain with you as irrevocably as your shadow." It was temptation and he was enjoined to cast it off: "I no longer wish to be myself. I want to vanish into the shadowless depths of my heart and into its profoundest loneliness, and therefore my poem must precede me." No answer followed, something was wafted like a dream from invisibility, dream-long dream-short, and finally he heard: "Hope desires co-hope, and even the loneliness of your heart is but the one lone hope of your beginning." "Yes," he admitted, "but it is hope for the voice which will companion me in the solitude of my dying; if it should fail me I shall be without absolution and forever bereft of consolation." Again there was an indefinite pause until the answer came: "Never again can you be alone, never and nevermore, for something has sounded out of you that is greater than yourself, greater than your loneliness, and moreover you are unable to destroy it; oh, Virgil, in the song of your solitude are all the voices and all the worlds, they are with you together with their reverberations, they have broken through your loneliness forever-more and have been woven into all the futurities forever, for from the beginning, Virgil, your voice was the voice of the god." Oh, this is how it had been fore-dreamed once upon a time in some place or other that lay in a long-lost past, it was turning back to a former pledge that he once made to himself, a pledge now being fulfilled, sorrow-dispelling and happily hopeful in its self-evidence, and withal the hope was a false one, the make-believe hope of a boy, of a child, a hope that was dissolving into self-mockery. And immediately he went on: "Who are you? what are you called?"—"I am Lysanias," came the answer, this time moved perceptibly nearer and from a direction easier to ascertain, from where the entrance door was likely to be. "Lysanias?" he repeated as if he had not understood aright and as if actually he had been expecting another name, "Lysanias .. . ," and lying there motionless, murmuring the name to himself, still amazed despite all the substantiality of the occurrence, astonished not only at the strange unfitness of the name but also that he had put the question: had he not previously decided to leave the small night-companion in the floating name-lessness from which he had been sent? had he not for the sake of this namelessness sent him away? And amazed, he questioned further: "I sent you away . . . why did you not go?"—-"I did go," sounded back and this time quite near and in the familiar, cheery, somewhat rustic voice of the boy, behind whose modesty a little peasant slyness was lurking, on guard for the next question; unaware of this he challenged him: "So you did go and for all that you are still here."—"You did not forbid me to watch beside your door . . . and now you have called." That was true and still not wholly true, a lie flickered through it, although a small and childish one, and more like an echo of the great one slinking through his own life, that sly and more than sly half-truth that sticks to the word and never does justice to actual reality, a seeming truthfulness that he had always practised, ah, already as a child, as Jae began, to dream of overcoming death; truth and falsehood, calling and not calling, nearness and farness flowed into each other, they merged together just as they had ever done; it became incomprehensible that the boy should have kept watch behind the door, while simultaneously, as if summed up for all eternity, the encircling horror had been manifested on the street beneath his window, incomprehensible that the monsters had staggered about there; ah, it was enigmatic, it remained enigmatic, incomprehensible as a simultaneity which having taken place still lasted, like a second reality without continuance, without past, without future, and which for all that reached into the newly-won earthliness, almost like a sham reality under a false name, devoid of that other-worldly compensation inherent in all loss; and fearful of this kind of paradox in the turns of fate, fearful of the laughter that had rung out there, shattering fate, fearful of anonymity and constraint, asking for the name which must again and again prove to be a random and untrue one, oh, fearful of the riddle of recognition, it was as a defense from the experience of simultaneity, it was as flight from what had happened and what was happening, it was as escape into the obviousness of the present and its physical immediacy that he opened his eyes; yonder on the window-panes strips of the receding moonlight were still showing, the room was enclosed in a wall of shadows, and though it was still unadvisable to disturb this quiescence and to turn his head, from the shadowy outlines of the door—were one to glance sidewise in that direction—the figure of the boy was emerging, delicate and barely discernible; all this was floating, a strangely floating, strangely lightened, earthly-present, lifted out of simultaneity, lifted out of the past, lifted out of the future into a here-and-now, into an undefined earthliness that had no name. The boy had led him to this point—, did he intend to lead him back a little way, now that he had again announced himself, unsummoned and under a strangely unfamiliar name? The guidance of earthly life was at an end and there was no further need of guidance for the earthly life without a future; but should such guiding help still exist, it was not the office of the boy to dispense it, for only the implored help is effectual and it cannot be granted to him who cannot call it out by name. And, as the boy's shape disengaged itself further from the shadowy doorway, he warded him off again as if to reaffirm himself: "I have not called for your help . . . you are mistaken, I have not called . . . ," and then added in a softer tone, "Lysanias." The boy thus addressed, unabashed by the rebuff, had walked out from the dark background into the calm circle lighted by the oil-lamp; at the mention of his name the overcast, young face opened to a brightly-candid, trusting smile: "Help you? Help the helper? You give help even as you ask for it . . . only permit that I mix the wine for you"; and he was already busying himself at the buffet. What did the boy know of helping? what did he know of a lifetime's incapacity for help? what did he know of the horrible sobering of the helpless one who is not even able to call out the name for help, in consequence of which it is denied him foreve
r? Or did he know that perjury shuns help and must be expiated by being expunged? or did he want to urge him to still another reversion, the fatal, inescapable false turn to intoxication? this thought was like the return of horror, and disregarding his feverish thirst he declined with an abrupt and frightened gesture: "No wine, no, no, no wine!" Again strange, and in fact strangely surprising, was the subsequent response of the boy; it is true that on meeting a hasty rebuff he had lowered the mixing-jug, only to lift it again immediately, and weighing it between his hands he remarked in a contentedly-calm and strangely calming manner: "Oh, there will be more than enough left over for the drink-offering." Oh, for the offering! Now he had uttered it! Yes, the offering had been at stake and was still at stake! the restoration of sacrificial purity, the restoration of that symbolism in which unity is reflected, the regaining control over the intoxication of sacrifice, of butchery, of wine, all these depended on the offering, depended on the complete sacrifice of self-eclipse, depended on the creative obliteration of what had been lived through and done with, through which he, simultaneously offering and officiant, father and child, man and his works in one, should himself become a supplication lodged in the consummate vigilance of the father and the consummate littleness of the child, helping by desiring to help, encircled by shadows and merged into the shadows to his complete extinction, so that with the earthly rounding-in of the image-sequences, so that in the final up-rush of the deepest darkness, arising twofold in the beastlike-plantlike creature, blood reflected in wine, wine reflected in blood, the age-old enigma might disclose itself like a light-ringing echo from the spectacle. The repurification of the sacrifice was at stake, and if he who was charged with it should try to carry out this chaste office in the fury-infected room, yes, if he who had barely escaped the horror should touch even a single drop of wine while here, it would be terribly transmuted to a blood even more terrible, the sacrifice would remain unclean, and the destruction of his work would be nothing but a senseless, insignificant burning of a manuscript; no, the place of the offering must be chaste, chaste the gift-offering, chaste the officiant, chastity enclosed in chastity, while the pure wine is poured, offered in salty blood in the rays of the rising day-star, the shell of the early morning sky quivering open in pearly iridescence; thus it should come to pass on the seashore, the poem consumed in the trembling flame—, but was such an intention not the grievous revival of that slick, aesthetic playing with words and events that had constituted the fateful treachery of life? Was not this arrangement of seashore, dawn and sacrificial-flame nothing but that somnambulistic game in which the world moves, unchastely impregnated with blood and murder, whenever it surrenders to beauty? Was this not conformity to that murderous sham-sacrifice enjoined by the gods, themselves enjoined to it, in which the inevitable sham-life is again resurrected in its changed sham-reality, the inevitable sham-real interrealm of poetry? No, a thousand times no! it must happen at once, without sacrificial arrangements, without wine-pouring, without aesthetic rites, he had not a minute to lose, under no circumstances should he wait for the sunrise, no, he must do it now, and with a desperate effort he sat up: he wanted to go immediately into the open, anywhere where a fire was burning, he wanted to move the weight of the manuscript rolls thither, maybe the boy would help him with this, and somewhere in the starry night their words would turn to ashes; the sun should see the Aeneid no more. This was his charge. He kept his eyes fixed on the manuscript-chest—however: what had happened to the chest? as if it had been removed to a great distance, the chest had become dwarfed, a dwarf's chest, lost amidst the furniture which had likewise dwindled, and although the thing stood on the same spot as before, one was unable to come near it, to reach for it. And besides, the boy stood in between, undiminished in the midst of so much that had shrunk; in his hand was the full beaker, and he said: "Take one gulp, just as a sleeping potion." This was said with all the docile solicitude with which a son, unexpectedly grown to full responsibility, might address his father, but with a childish overtone that was even slightly touching, because the boy's capacity for responsibility being unequal to his willingness for it, the result was a small arrogance which in its disparagement was a trifle comic: a sleeping potion was being offered him as if combating the fear of awakening, the fear of gods and men, were of no importance, as if this vigilance were not absolutely essential now in order to take on for the last time the duty of creation! Or might this disparagement be justified? Was this shrinking of the Aeneid to dwarf proportions, was this shrinking of his surroundings, which nevertheless did not affect the boy, not a sign that he was justified in his presumption, was this disparagement not the reflection of a higher one which stemmed from the beyond, one that intended to show once and for all that he had been proven unworthy to assume the priestly-paternal office? Consequently was he not compelled to remain confined in his dream—forbidden to descend, forbidden to return, the ivory portal bolted against him, but still more the one of horn? And nevertheless! nevertheless there was still hope, oh nevertheless even he, he the erring one, could still be led to the chastity of that grace! Certainly the corruption was still unabsolved despite his torments, but he had been released from the fore-hell of trance-death, and perhaps the boy, now that he was grown, would be the right leader who would carry him, the weak and ailing one, through the portals of grace! Oh, like a gleaming vessel of light the beaker was being held aloft by the boy, and he stretched his hand toward it. But before he could reach the gleaming thing, all maturity seemed to desert the boyish form; either the shrunken surroundings had won back their former dimensions or—this was not easy to decide—the boy himself had become dwarfed? did this portend that the boyish figure was not permitted to grow? was it threatened by all this dwarfing? But as for himself, he was left alone, without help, without guidance, so that he must bear the burden of decision alone to the end, and he was not permitted to accept the potion: "A sleeping-draught? No, I have slept enough, all too long; it is time to stop, high time to be up . . ." Again all was weariness and earthliness; no, the boy would not grow again, would not lend his help, would not support him, either at the departure or at the sacrifice, to say nothing of later—oh, disappointment, oh, fear, oh, plea for help! And nothing remained but to sink back into the pillows, tired from the disappointment, breath-robbed and voiceless, whispering: "No more sleep." Yet now for the third time, as if in succor, came an astonishing reply: "No one has been so watchfully awake as you, my Father; rest now, for rest is due you, my Father, rest and watch no more." His eyelids closed softly upon being called father, which was like a gift, like a reward for his self-abnegation, a dispensation for his vigilance, which had become valid, valid only now that its readiness had changed to the unreserved readiness of contrition, and his watchful service to past and future changed into voluntary submission, accepting the present; it was the dispensation of an ever-new start which, like atonement, lay eternally before all birth and beyond all deeds. For sacrifice and absolution were one, they did not proceed one from the other, instead they issued from each other, and he alone might become worthy to be called father, who was graced to go down into the shadowy abyss, graced therefore, having brought himself in sacrifice, to receive the priestly consecration of his sacrificial office, graced by being incorporated into the august and endless line of the fathers, which reached back to the exalted and inaccessible beginning and there received from the first ancestor, powerful in abnegation, enthroned amidst his shadowy court, the strength for perpetual renewals, the continuous blessing of human life, the grace bestowed by the ancestor, the city-founder beyond petrification, the name-giver, he who upheld the law, exempt from all beginning and all ending, exempt from birth, exempt from all desinence. Was he really chosen to appear before the exalted countenance? Was a mere boy, this boy, actually able to unlock the portals? As if they were one and the same, the doubt of himself was strangely involved with that of the boy's vocation, a doubt curiously apart from time; the glance which searched the youth's features onc
e more was a question, and it was with a question that, in response to the entreating gesture, he let himself be handed the beaker and drank: "Who are you?" he asked again, after he had put down the beaker, and the persistent , questioning going on within and coming out of him astonished him anew. "Who are you? I have already met you . . . was it a long time ago?"—"Give me the name that you know," was the response. He mused perplexedly and he knew only that the boy had called himself Lysanias, yes, that much he just managed to remember, and then everything became dim; dimmer and dimmer, and he no longer remembered the name, nor any name, not even that by which his mother had called him long ago. And still it seemed as if his mother had just called him, as if she were calling from this vanishing undiscoverable place or time, as if she were summoning him to return to a namelessness which had its home in the maternal and beyond the maternal. Ah, the child seemed nameless to its mother, and more and more she endeavored to protect the child from the name, not alone from the false one, the evil-bearing chance-name, but also, and perhaps even more, from the true one, the chance-exempted name that was preserved in the endless chain of ancestors, because he, who had raised him up and named him, was the same who had gone down into the depths, so that in the rudimental-sphere of all creaturekind he might be endowed with the consecration of paternal priestcraft, which was enshrined in all sacrifice and enshrined the sacrifice in itself; but the mother, bound to the creative sacrifice of birth that was her significance, shrank back from the offer of rebirth, she shunned it for the child she had born, she shunned another creation, she shunned the unmastered, the unmasterable, the unattainable, which she surmised might possibly lurk in the inaccessible truth that shone out from the depths of a name, she shunned the resurrection in the name as something unchaste, and she preferred to know the child unnamed. Existence became nameless, it became so when his mother called him, and shuddering from the namelessness of such fore-awakening and breathing out from some undefined fostering, he said: "I do not know of any name." — "You, my Father, you know them all, you gave a name to everything; they are all in your poem." Names and names—the names of people, the names of fields, the names of landscapes, of cities and of all creation, home names, consoling names in times of trouble, the name of the things created along with the things, created before the gods, the always resurrected name containing the holiness of the word, always to be found by the true watcher, by the arouser, by the divine founder! nevermore might the poet lay claim to this dignity, nay, not even were the sole and final task of poetry to be that of exalting the name of things, ah, even when its greatest moment sounds, were it to succeed in casting a glance into the creative fountain of speech, beneath the profound light of which the word for the thing is floating, the word untouched and chaste at the source of the world of matter, the poem though well able to duplicate the creation in words was never able to fuse the duplication into a unity, unable to do so because the seeming-reversion, the divination, the beauty, because all these things which determined, which became poetry, took place solely in the duplicated world; the world of speech and the world of matter remained apart, twofold the home of the word, twofold the home of the human being, twofold the abyss of the creaturely, but twofold also the purity of being, thus duplicated to unchastity which, like a resurrection without birth, penetrated all divination as well as all beauty, and carried the seed of world-destruction in itself, the basic unchastity of existence which came to be feared by the mother; unchaste the mantle of poetry, and nevermore would poetry come to be fundamental, nevermore would it awake from its game of divination, nevermore would poetry turn into prayer, into the sacrificially-valid prayer of truth so surely inherent in the genuine name of things that the supplicant, included in the supplication, closes off the duplicated word so that for him and him alone word and thing shall succeed in becoming one—oh, purity of prayer, unattainable by poetry and yet, oh yet attainable for it, insofar as it offered itself, as it overcame and annihilated its very self. And again as though wrenched out of him, a moan, a cry: "The Aeneid to be burnt!"—"My Father!" He took the great fright ringing through the outcry as rejection of this project, as well he might; displeased he answered, "Do not call me father; Augustus keeps watch, he is guarding Rome, call him father, not me .. . not me . .. guarding is not the poet's office."—"You stand for Rome."—"That dream of every boy was perhaps once mine also ... but I have only made use of Roman names." The boy was silent; then, of all things, he did something quite unexpected: with the somewhat awkward skill of a peasant boy, he swung himself aloft on an arm of the candelabrum, as though it were an elm-branch, broke off one of the burnt candle stumps and lit it from the flame of the oil lamp—, what did he want with it? but before an explanation could be found, the boy had fastened the stump to a plate with the dripping wax, and now he knelt before the chest: "Would you like to have the poem? I will hand it to you . . ." Was it not the boy Virgil who was kneeling there? Or the little brother Flaccus? thus they had often knelt together on the floor, sometimes in the garden under the elm, sometimes in front of the toy-box—, who was this boy? Now the box-straps snapped back smartly, the leather lid sprang open with a soft airy sough, a whiff smelling,of paper and leather, a whiff of the past doings, of softly scratching writing-sounds rushed wanly-homelike out of the opened receptacle, in the interior of which, cleanly arranged, the ends of the manuscript-rolls were visible, — roll after roll, poem after poem piled one after another in neat rows—, the familiar, seductive and calming sight of work. Cautiously the boy lifted out a few pieces and laid them on the bed: "Read them," he pleaded and shoved the plate with the candle nearer to afford a better light. Was he not still in his father's house? was that not still the little brother? why did the mother no longer live if Flaccus was alive? why in her grief had she been obliged to follow him into death? was this not the identical candle that even then on the table had brightened the shadowy room, while outside lay the soft Mantuan meadows in-gathered by the Alps as the slow autumn rain fell grayly in the dark of evening? He was to read—ah, read! was this still possible? before all, was he fitted to do it? had he ever learned to read, or even to spell? hesitatingly, almost anxiously he opened one of the rolls, hesitatingly, almost anxiously he smoothed the opened end, shyly he felt of the paper, even more shyly of the dried written characters and, with all the timidity proper to a consecrated gift-offering, he let his fingers glide over them but not without twinges of conscience, because this was like a renewing of recognition, a brief re-acquaintance with the craft and the former pleasure of craftsmanship, but over and above that, it was like a great, inadmissible remembrance that reached back beyond all remembering and forgetting, back to where there was no question of learning or performance, only planning, hoping and wishing: not his eyes, only his fingertips were reading, they read without letters or words a wordless speech, they read the unspeakable poem behind the poem of words, and what they read consisted no longer of lines, but of an endless immense space stretching out on all sides to infinity, a space in which the sentences did not follow one another in order, but covered each other in infinite crossings and were no longer sentences, they were rather a dome of the inexpressible, the dome of life, the creation's dome of the world, planned for in time unknown: he was deciphering the inexpressible, deciphering the undepictable landscapes and inexplicable occurrences, the uncreated world of fate in which the created world was imbedded as if by accident, deciphering the creation that he had wanted to re-create, that he had been compelled to recreate; yet whenever this had become manifest, unfolding to expression, at every spot where the sentence-waves and sentence-cycles crossed one another, there war, treachery and bloody sacrifice showed up also, there warfare, lifeless and callous, conducted by beings essentially dead, came to view, there the feud of the gods could be seen in its godlessness, there too was revealed the nameless murder in a nameless sphere, executed by phantoms that were merely names, executed at the behest of fate, holding the gods in bondage, executed by language, through language, fo
r the sake of illimitable speech, in the god-governed inexpressibility of which fate has its cause and completion. It made him shudder. And although he had not read with his eyes, he averted them from the page as one who no longer wishes to read: "To destroy all language, to destroy all names, so that again there may be grace,'' he said to himself, "that was the way mother wished it to be . . . grace devoid of destiny and without speech" . . . "The gods have presented you with the names and you return them again . . . read the poem, read the names, do read them . . ." He was forced to smile at the urgency of the repeated request, and it diverted him somewhat that the boy did not grasp his meaning and perhaps was not even meant to grasp where all this was leading, and he remarked, "Read? does this go with the sleeping potion, little cup-bearer? ... no, we have no more time, let us make a start, come and help me . . ." Yet the boy—and even this seemed curiously right—made no move to assist him, and when he continued to hold back it at once became clear that he had not the right to help; and even though time were to stand still, even though the cycle were to be closed, enkindling and extinguishment coming thus to be one and the same, and if in addition the child's acceptance of the maternal fostering be indistinguishable from the acceptance implied by submission, even if all completion remained only a perpetual planning, yes, even if he had never, oh never, learned to speak, leading and helpfulness do not go beyond the first turn of the cycle; the voice of the boy had become an echo that still answered back but comprehended nothing, it was a pale echo, a fore-echo prior to the awakening, it was the shining reflector in advance of the ultimate, great, unspeakable and awaited effacement, it was the advance annunciation of a voice that would be the word-in-wordlessness, uniting the not-yet-said to the no-longer-said, to the ineffable shining in, the spacious abysses of all language. Such speech was not to be learned, not to be read, not to be heard. "Take the rolls away," he ordered, and this time the boy obeyed, though not quite willingly, rather with a childish, disappointed defiance and a little reluctance that showed by his letting the manuscripts lie on the table instead of in the chest. This was even slightly amusing. And when again as though for the last time he observed the boy's features, the clear eyes which had darkened still more although they still glanced up expectantly, the familiar face became unexpectedly, noticeably strange; and in faint yielding, as it were in farewell, he again said "Lysanias." He was not impatient. The candle-light on the table was flickering out in sputtering cobwebs, a light-echo and fore-echo of the gleaming thunder from the other world to come that waited beneath the stars, waiting for the sacrifice, waiting for the flame of abnegation, while here the drizzling of the wall-fountain was murmuring, soft as a shadow. And standing bent half over the table, in this wise half reading and half from memory, at first timidly then becoming louder, the little fist beating time on the table-top, the boy began—was it a last seduction?—to recite the verses, the verses with the Roman names, and they glided into the night and into the nocturnal murmur of the trickling water: