In class today we were talking about the differences between
Vergil and Homer. The difference between the deep administrative state that
Vergil is describing, and the eternally contextualizing hierarchy against which
Homeric personal relations play out. Dr. Johnson sees the silence of Dido in
Book VI of The Aeneid as one of the clearest ways in which
Vergil ornaments his poem with sparkling Homeric lusters that he can't resist,
and complains of how much less affecting it is than the silence of Ajax in Book
XI of The Odyssey. But he misses the lesson of one of his own
points: Vergil unites the beauties of The Iliad and The
Odyssey, yes, but he reverses the order: the intense personal experience
that burgeons throughout The Iliad and culminates in The
Odyssey is in Vergil a turn away from that experience to the violence
that the always emerging possibilities of political violence that state
develops from and resists. The end of the Vergilian Odyssey is in Book VI
of The Aeneid, at which point Aeneas turns away from the Homeric
characters in the underworld and leaves them behind forever. Dido's
silence is a recognition of this, and a forerunner of Lavinia's equally
conspicuous silence in the last six books. It's not about her, and barely
about Turnus or Pallas or even Lausus and Mezentius, the Vergilian equivalents
of Hector and Priam. (We get something like Achilles's point of view,
remembering his own father when Priam supplicates him, as Aeneas thinks of his
own son when he kills Lausus and sees Mezentius's intense mourning and desire
to die. Achilles threatens to kill Priam but takes pity on him and gives him
safe-conduct back to Troy; Aeneas takes pity on Mezentius by killing
him, so he needn't out live Lausus very long. Another farewell to the
Homeric characters.)
The deep state administers and monopolizes and so restricts
the violence that threatens everywhere. That insight is what leads to the
proto-Miltonic moments in Vergil, the moments when the narrator speaks, for the
only time, from the perspective of the first person plural: we Romans, in
Vergil, we fallen humans ("all our woe") in Milton. And the
place where I saw that today is in this moment which, of all people, Henry James
may be picking up on in The Golden Bowl. Vergil's narrative
insight is to narrate any intense incident, more and more as The Aeneid progresses,
from the perspective of those in distress or pain or despair. This is
particularly true in the shifts in perspective in the last moment of The
Aeneid, the loss and death of the supplicating Turnus. We go from his
perspective to Aeneas's when he sees Pallas's belt: of course the very last
moment is the flight of Turnus's indignant (indignata) soul
down to the shades.
But even before that Turnus has the nightmarish experience
of being unable or barely able to hold his own:
...velut in somnis, oculos ubi
languida pressit
nocte quies, nequiquam auidos
extendere cursus
velle videmur, et in mediis
conatibus aegri
succidimus (XII.908-911)
...as in dreams, when languid rest
has pressed our eyes at night, we seem in vain to wish to stretch forth our
eager running, and in the middle of our efforts we sink down exhausted.
As has been pointed out (e.g. by Christine G. Perkell), this
is a Vergilian recasting of a description of dream-frustration in The Iliad (22.199-200)
James's omniscient (or near omniscient) narrator uses
the first person far more frequently (singular and plural, though the plurals
are a bit more specific, designating narrator and readers, not all human
beings), but not like this, except perhaps for this passage near the end of The Golden Bowl:
He was so near now that she could
touch him, taste him, smell him, kiss him, hold him; he almost pressed upon
her, and the warmth of his face--frowning, smiling, she mightn't know which;
only beautiful and strange--was bent upon her with the largeness with which
objects loom in dreams. (Chapter XLI)
The first person here is latent but all the more powerful
for that: James knows, and we know, what our
experience of dreaming is like. This is
James’s version of the Proustian nous,
as impersonal a first person plural as we ever find in Proust, since it applies
to all of us in our lonely and isolated dreams: a universal loneliness, a
universal separation. So too is Turnus
all alone, as all are. For Vergil this is the birth of the administrative
state, the real entity that has replaced Homeric human relation. Blanchot says the choice in Homer is violence
or speech. In Vergil, in the modern
state, our choice is only violence or silence.
