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Death of Virgil

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Hermann Broch began writing this book under extraordinary circumstances as a prisoner in a German concentration camp in World War II. What emerged from that horrifying experience is one of the preeminent literary works of the 20th century.

The book is about Virgil's infamous deathbed request that his magnum opus, The "Aeneid," be burned because it was imperfect. Most of the book is told in a dazzling but recondite stream-of-consciousness mode, but the best section is Virgil's deathbed discussion with Caesar Augustus.

Broch invokes 20th century ideals such as the "authenticity" of art as a mirror to the natural world. We also encounter the dilemma of works of art that are incomplete & not polished completely. Aristotle said that in a perfect art work, every word contributes to the organic whole. Arbitrarily remove or add one word, says Aristotle, and the whole work comes crumbling down. Virgil uses this motif as his justification for wishing his beloved poem burned. Juxtaposed with this paradigm are the pleadings of Augustus that it is Virgil's duty as a Roman citizen to let his poem be read by all the world. After all, the literary excursion was to be Rome's national epic. The scene is, unmistakably, magnificent.

A considerable amount of background reading is required before attempting to take on this work. At a bare minimum, read the entire canon of Virgil, especially the "Aeneid." A workable familiarity of Roman history up until and including Augustus is necessary and a biography of Virgil (I would recommend Peter Levi's) would also be helpful. I am a fairly well-read guy, but some of the allusions went over my head.

The stream-of-consciousness style is interesting, but can make the book rather dense. Many of the sentences go on for pages and pages. The book attempts to capture the free-thought attributes of the machinery of Virgil's mind. An engrossing work of prose.

Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil revolves about the poet's wish to burn his masterpiece, The Aeneid, and creates out of his signified keen senses and heightened perceptions a rich vision, with full actuality, the religious, philosophical and political impulses of the time. The novel should be read as an epic poem in four parts (water, fire, earth, air) that parallel to four movements of a symphony in which the manner of the theme and variations of each successive part serves as some kind of commentary and reiteration on the parts that have preceded it.

The book is arduous in reading, strenuous in contemplating the richly lyrical prose. Woven and sifted throughout are reflections and perceptions of Virgil's febrile yet lucid thoughts in such rocking rhythms that illuminate, to the full actuality, the macabre sensation of the drifting journey on which the poet is being carried by the bark of death. Death's signet was graved upon his brow. The epic closely accounts for the last 24 hours of Virgil's life as soon as the near-death poet returns to Rome from Athens. The uninterrupted flow of lyrical speculation begins at the port of Brundisium where the bark docks, lingers in the mental suspension between life and death, between the "no longer alive" and "not yet dead", and ends with the journey to death, to nothingness, to a dimension of non-recollection and stillness.

Truth seems to be the recurring theme. The notion of truth is being illuminated and brought to full elaboration through the repeating insistence of reflections on life, death, memory, knowledge, perception, and philosophy. As the poet approached death, he admits with bitterness and cold sobriety that he has pursued a worthless, wretched literary life. The Aeneid, which is acclaimed by Caesar and to whom it is dedicated, has been a mere indulgence of beauty, self-sufficiently limited to the embellishment of concepts long since conceived, formed, and known, without any novel contribution in it. The truth of artistic inadequacies, lack of perceptions, thirst for superficialities, and egotism yields the decision to mock his works. Despite Caesar's effort to cajole Virgil, the poet comments that he lacks the perception, to which he never takes the first step, and yet nobody has ever attained the knowledge of truth of such perception.

The stream of consciousness technique renders the poet's final hours to the full actuality. In fact, Virgil regards death as the most significant event of his life (perception and knowledge of truth?) and is full of anxiety lest he miss it. His sense of time seems to be warped and each passing second has grown to some immense, throbbing, empty space which is not to be linked. The body and its human qualities are denuded and are stripped to the naked soul with the most naked guilt. For Virgil, death is part of life and the understanding of death enlightens meaning of life. Strong than death and the shackle of time is fate, in which the final secret of time lay hidden. It is for this very secret of time (and death) that the suspense and tension of the book not being thwarted.

The conversations are reproductions of external events and actual dialogues (Aeneid, Georgics, Eclogue, Horace Carmina) and their inclusion into the book's inner monologue (the narrative seems to have proceeded in the third person but soon has discerned that narrative constitutes to an inner monologue made up of Virgil's dreams, reflections, visions, and delusions) gains them an abstract touch. The flow of the book presses on through various tempi according to the degree of Virgil's consciousness. The more headlong the tempo (which usually occurs during Virgil's conversations with his friends, attendants, and Caesar), the shorter the sentence. The slower the tempo becomes, the more complicated the sentence structure (i.e. Part 2 - Fire). Virgil's reflections and musings manifest some interminable, richly lyrical prose that mirrors the dying poet's thoughts and ravings.

The writing also deftly alludes to the religious impulse at the time of Virgil. Talks of the coming of salvation bringer prevail in Virgil's conversations with Caesar, who denies the need of such salvation. In various occasions Virgil forebodes the coming of a savior who will not only live in the perception, but in his being the world will be redeemed to truth, whom will conquer death and bring himself to the sacrifice out of love for men and mankind, transferring himself by his own death into the deed of truth. Virgil's audacious statement signifies the turning point in history, the crisis of the godless era between the no longer antiquity and the net yet of Christianity.

From Broch's own words, nothing is really "reported or perceived" in the book but what "penetrates the invisible web of sensual data, fever visions and speculations." The richness of the writing and its lyrics sharpens the contours of the concrete and brings to full actuality Virgil's musings and memories. It's a strenuous, challenging read that requires undivided concentration. 5.0 stars.

"Burn the Aeneid" Virgil instructs his friends from his deathbed. Broch, as Dante did before him, uses Virgil as a spiritual guide in this exploration of the metaphysical and moral imagination. Here, the dying poet, reflects feverishly, consciously transcending his decaying form into the infinite universe-- and despairs of hope, as his sheltering idealism is confronted with the reality of human existence, the limits and futility of his understanding. Virgil's trust in a civilized humane society, one that, at its source, springs from the individual's seeking of beauty, freedom and wisdom, disintegrates, into one represented by the predations of the mob of the streets of Rome, as does his confidence in the Aeneid, his opus. A dialogue on the fate of the Aeneid ensues between Virgil and Augustus, forming a complex debate on art and government. Virgil defends the purity of the perceived world as metaphor, free of the allusions of art; Augustus proposes the nobility of art as symbol for government. A delicate lattice of oppositions and constructive contradictions braces the book. This is, though, ultimately, a story of the human journey, a struggle with darkness and doubt, reconciliation, and a rise to salvation. The remarkable final section has the celestial translucence of 'Paradiso'. The Death of Virgil is among a handful of true literary masterpieces this century whose reach, that of the entire compass of human impulse, consciousness and conscience, has equalled its grasp. It is a work of intellectual and spiritual adventure. Broch orchestrates an inquiry and fugue, sombre and passionate, into life, encompassed in a sensuous poetic oration-- and Virgil continues to cast his spell on the divine and the aesthetic order, employed by masters to illuminate our deepest perplexities and aspirations.

No doubt, it's boring. It's one of those fabulously boring books.

I'm going through my margin notes, looking for why I love this book so much.

First--Virgil wants to destroy his works because he feels he missed the point. He recognized the power of the new love-movement under way. He felt that he was always just sucking up to the Emperor. (In the end, Virgil is well loved for being enough of the new movement, despite the clearly propagandistic side of his work.)

It was a revelation to me that the Axial age (characterized by a softening, a movement away from the brutality of the heroic age) was so Christian in tone, and before Christ.

I later realized that Christianity is Hellenized Judaism. (Got this from a book called, *Early Christianity and Greek Paidea*)

Putting all this together was part of the excitement, for me, in Broch's D or V. Basically, just like the baby boomers got sick of war and (for the most part) rejected it; so with the Romans.

Death of Virgil reminded me of the Horace ode about Pompeius. Pompeius, the poor sucker, goes on fighting in one of the bloody Roman wars. He's almost killed, while Horace himself, who fought beside Pompeius briefly, soon put down his shield, gave up the fight. (He was later pardoned, because he was useful as a poet, and he was high born.)

But there's so much more to this book.

There are leitmotifs. Pg. 101--"knowing" is the leitmotif. The word is planted innocently, and keeps growing and growing in weight and import, until:

"verily man is held into his task of knowing,
and nothing is able to dissuade him,
not even the inevitability of error,
the bound nature of which vanishes
before the task beyond all chance;"

Broch's language (in Jean Starr-Untermeyer's translation, too) is so wonderfully giddy. German culture was in a fabulous inflation that did not end until Hitler was killed in his bunker. And part of this inflation was even in the knowing German/Austrians' forbodings about the ridiculous ending that was in store for the whole thing. (Goethe was the first to forsee this.)

Then "error" is the leitmotif. (pg. 102)

pg. 124-->
"the inadequacy of the earthy symbol be revealed,
the sadness and despair of beauty laid bare,
beauty stripped of intoxication and sobered,
its perception forfeited and itself lost in impercipience,
and with it, the sobered self,
its poverty--,"

How far is this from Emerson's idea of poverty? Broch is wise to so very much of the current of ideas that ran between Goethe and Nietzsche. German culture is ripening so beautifully even as it unravels. This is all viscerally potent (to me, anyway).

Page 127:
"god found himself again in man and man found himself again in the animal,"

Broch is toying with an angle on Nietzsche's idea of the death of god.
This leitmotif evolves in Mahlerian/Wagnerian style--pg. 131:

"god tumbling down into a false-humanity or the man catapulted toward a false-divinity, both lured toward evil, toward calamity, toward the uncreated state of the animal...."

These problems lead to a discussion of beauty and art. (pg. 141)

Around pg. 180, Virgil starts to hallucinate two boys. Lysanius and a slave. They play interesting roles in his dialogue. (When the emperor comes with some literary sycophants, they can't see Lysanius & the slave.)

It is the Lysanius and the slave who speak to Virgil about "the new time arising". Beholding them (Lysanius & the slave), is the act that consummates Virgil's embraced of the new mode of being.

"For you have beheld us, Virgil, and in looking you saw the fetters, weeping the while you looked, you saw the new time arising, saw the beginning-anew that is destined to spring from our tears."

This kills me. I don't need to go on.

I will say that I understand only a small percentage of what Broch is talking about. One is half asleep most of the time while reading this book, but that is a blessing. I know there's always more to take in.

One more bit, about the animals:

"the snowy bull, the luckless Pasiphae, who lingered there beside the cows? Or the bucks stirring about and mounting the she-goats? Pan's midday quiet lay soundlessly over the flowering groves and yet it was already evening, for the fauns had begun their gambols, stamping their hooves, their heavy pahlluses stiffly erect."

This reminds me again of Emerson's, of his lines from Merlin II, "The animals are sick with love, lovesick with rhyme..." These things slay me.

That is a feeble translation of Virgil's phrase `plurima mortis imago'. Those three words show a special way he had of using language not as a vehicle for thought but to convey something outside and beyond thought, and it is something that this book seems to be trying to replicate on a large scale. It is not something I find in Milton, still less in the collective folk-poetry of the Homeric epics, and the nearest to it that I can think of might be in Blake. It is not the normal idiom of the Aeneid by any means, but something that gleams through unpredictably now and again, and I am no nearer now than I was 50 years ago to getting an adequate translation of such a line as `Sunt lacrimae rerum, et mentem mortalia tangunt'.

This book is hung around the legend that the dying Virgil wanted his incomplete epic the Aeneid burned as being imperfect, but it is about much more than Virgil, or his poem, or even death itself. It is about totality, something completely shapeless, senseless and even immortal - immortal partly because death itself is permanent and cannot be killed or destroyed, partly because there is always, has been always and will be always an infinite universe of what is. The book divides into 4 sections, each named after one of the 4 elements that some ancient philosophers reasoned to make up the world - water, fire, earth and air. This division actually seems to me rather contrived and unimportant to the book, and it is nothing remotely resembling the way the ancients themselves viewed their `elements'. Ovid explains them clearly if we just correct his text to read what he must have been saying `...aer, qui quanto est pondere terrae/pondus aquae leuius, tanto est onerosior igni' - `air which is heavier than fire by the same margin as the weight of water is less than that of earth'. The ancients found exact aliquot ratios like this to be intellectually satisfying, but the last thing this book is about is exactness. In the `fire' section we are engulfed in a drifting mist of ideas, concepts and abstractions, each forever changing its identity and merging randomly into the next. The only connection with fire seems to be that this is where the question of burning the manuscript of the Aeneid first arises. The first section relates the arrival of the dying poet by barge from Greece and has nothing more about water. The third section brings us abruptly back to earth with the dialogue between Virgil and Augustus, who does not want the poem glorifying his new Rome destroyed for very worldly political reasons. The fourth resembles the second in a more pictorial way as the flotilla of boats carrying the characters of the book, losing their identities as they go, sails into the infinite; and air was the one to fill the last slot.

At one point I read the phrase `the shadow that is language', and it is worth remembering that this edition is a translation. Translating a work like this is nothing like translating directives on food-labelling or fishery quotas in the European Commission. It is an art in its own right, it must have been superbly done, but what it simply cannot be is the same as the original. I hope it is the original that George Steiner is talking about on the back cover, because if not what he says does not deserve a moment's notice. There is nothing abnormal in the least about the English syntax here, although many sentences are certainly very long. I also doubt whether there is any useful concept of `technical advance' in fiction. There are untold million ways of being original, Joyce himself did not change the basic development of English one iota, and I don't read this work, at least in translation, as representing any more of a step-change in fiction-writing than, say, Stapledon.

I credit Broch with a good knowledge of his poet, of Latin and of the period, although I don't know who perpetrated `Sallustus' (for Sallustius) twice on one page. He seems to associate himself with the view that the poems Aetna and Culex are Virgil's and I would rather believe that he had never read them (for which I could blame nobody) than that he could possibly have taken that stuttering rubbish for the work of the master. I dare say I would have read the book differently if I had not been familiar with Virgil's own style, but it is only a side-issue whether I am right in seeing its influence here or not. Not all the knowledge of Latin in the world will make this book an easy read, and none is necessary really. Do not make it more obscure or complicated for yourself than it already is. The previous owner of my copy was some hapless student trying to make a connection with the Divine Comedy, as forlorn a quest for mares' nests as I ever saw in my life. I wouldn't dream of `recommending' such a work, which is bound to be of minority appeal, and if I have conveyed something of the feel of it that is as much as I can hope to have done.

This work stands firmly as one of the masterpieces of 20th century literature, and is not to be missed by the thoughtful reader willing to spend some time with a great book. As mentioned by other reviewers, the writing, especially the feverish second part (it's a book of four parts), is dense and can be challenging to get through, though that effort will be well paid by the discussion with Augustus in the third, and the sublime death trip of the fourth and final part. The first part documents Virgil's arrival into burning Rome, and sets up what is to follow. One needn't have read anything by Virgil in preparation for this book, and to the best of my knowledge, Broch, though running from the Nazi's, never spent time in a concentration camp. And, for the curious, Broch's grave is in Connecticut.

Broch twists the concept of "novel" here to throw at us a very long prose poem -of the highest order. Virgil arrives in Brindis with Augustus's naval convoy, coming from Greece, to spend there what will become his last 18 hours on Earth. Suffering from a strong fever, Virgil is in an almost constant delirium, dreaming with a young peasant (his guide from boat to palace), with Plocia, a former lover, and with an imaginary slave. The three of them will guide him to death. The central subject of the book is Virgil's obsession with the destruction of "The Eneid", for considering it imperfect and not worthy of survival. His two best friends, Lucius and Plocius, come to visit trying to confort him and to convince him not to destroy that major work of art (which in real life they actually did). Then Augustus himself arrives, and sustains with Virgil a long philosophical conversation, full of digressions and of Virgil's own hallucinations. The subject here is the nature of Art. Augustus maintains that "The Eneid" is the property of the people of Rome, as its national epic, while Virgil insists that any work of art is the sole property of its author and, in that capacity, he has every right -even more, the duty- to destroy it, by virtue of its imperfection. The long passage is full of Virgil's delirium in which he remembers his bucolic childhood and discusses with his phantoms the nature of love, happiness, success and life. Augustus, in turn, pronounces long and profound statements about the State, politics and community.

The final chapter, a mesmerizing one, is a long hallucination depicting the process of dying, in an absolutely vivid, hair-rising and beautiful way. I don't think there can be around another narration as impressive as this one about the passing from life to death. Virgil's soul sets sail in a ship, surrounded by the people he knew, who are left behind until Virgil metamorphoses into animal, vegetal, mineral, and spirit.

This is a hard reading, long, slow and obscure, and nevertheless it is a master treaty on death and what it means to be dying. That it will never have a mass of readers seems to be clear. But it is also clear that it pays to stay with it and get lost in the magic.

I would actually have to disagree with the reviews calling this book difficult or arduous. I read it very quickly, completely entranced. Don't believe the hype that makes Death of Virgil into Finnegans Wake without the jokes. Whatever else it may be, it is NOT a tome for masochistic professors (I read it on my own time, without its being assigned by anyone other than Hannah Arendt and Elias Canetti). It's a deeply affecting work. Many times throughout the book I had to stop reading to catch my breath, stunned by the sheer beauty of the language and the sense that Broch was taking me perilously close to essential realities that otherwise hardly ever appear in literature (or life for that matter). I'm a staunch atheist, but after The Death of Virgil I was able understand why someone might believe in God. To speak about "spiritual" realities usually means to drivel on in embarrassing cliches. That's decidedly not the case with The Death of Virgil. I would call this a spiritual masterpiece, perhaps the highest compliment an atheist can give.

Not really a novel and not really a poem, this is a work of radical freedom. It opened me up to new possibilities of what literature can do, and unlike a lot of formally innovative literature, this book is by no stretch a work of aesthetic detachment. On the contrary, it takes an unusual form because the traditional forms are not adequate to express what the author means to express. Broch was clearly influenced by Joyce, but he had a moral and spiritual seriousness that the great Irishman plainly lacked.

One of the great novels (for lack of a better word) of the twentieth century.

This novel reads more like an epic poem than a novel, which is only right as the novel deals with the demise of the Aeneid's brilliant author. A sensitive and patient reader will be generously rewarded by the sheer poetry of the rich and meaningful language written by a first-rate, unheralded genius in Hermann Broch. One sees many shades of Aeneas in this tale about Virgil's trip to visit Caesar to present him the Aeneid. There is much in this tale about the challenges of writers to capture the true essence of life and the torment by Virgil about his inability to truly capture it in the Aeneid. Virgil is so tormented by the inadequacies he finds in his masterpiece that he threatens to burn the Aeneid but is forbidden by Augustus to do so. If it were not for Nora Barnacle, wife of James Joyce, much of that work of genius would have been lost to a fire from which in a bit of quick witted work she managed to retrieve it. Broch presents the rich, dense, intellectual sensibilities of Virgil with a style that will challenge and immensely satisfy readers of gorgeous literary novels. The innovative, prose style of Broch reminded me of Proust with some of the longest and most beautiful sentences that I have ever read. As beautifully as this book is written, the translation by Jean Starr Untermeyer utterly blew me away -- this is a highly nuanced and complex novel about poetic sensibilities which dive deep into the abyss and float high into the "second immensity" of the "cupola of the stars". Untermeyer provides full poetic justice in her translation to richly bring to life in English a truly memorable work and one of life's greatest literary treasures. Broch's novel ranks near the very top of the world's most masterfully articulated, literary novels and is truly worthy of the high critical acclaim it has received on this site by extremely bright readers. Seize the day: this novel is truly one of a kind --like the Aeneid, which so deeply inspired Broch, this novel is one for the ages.

Every few years one might come across a book that is so extraordinary that you feel that you have been changed by reading it. This is such a book. The topic is an ambitious one: a meditation on what it means to be human, but Broch brings such a wealth of ideas into his work that at times are full of intense significance and meaning.