Nicole has done a fine job summarizing and taking apart Part I of The Death of Virgil. I am delinquent in posting on the section myself as I am almost done preparing a program that will examine the text of the novel and break it out sentence by sentence, giving an analysis of average and median sentence length, number of sentences, unusual word choices, and other somesuch. I haven’t quite got it to work yet, so I’ll have to have an addendum to this post in a couple of days in which I’ll offer this data.
In the meantime, let me just add a couple of thoughts to Nicole’s analysis. Suffice it to say there’s not a lot of action in Part I; indeed, The Death of Virgil makes The Wings of the Dove look like Hunt for Red October. At the start of Part I, Virgil is on a boat in the port of Brundisium; by its end, he is in some kind of quarters, not too far away, having been borne through the teeming streets by a cohort of porters with the assistance of an unnamed urchin-servant.
Part I has five subsections, separated not by numbers much less titles but only by a couple of extra blank spaces. In the first of these, Virgil lies on the boat, seemingly feverish. The oddities of Broch’s style become immediately apparent. First is the occasional but jarring use of compound past participle-present participle neologisms. For example, Broch describes Virgil’s fatigue as “quieted-quieting” and the atmosphere of the ship (in a different form of this) as “damp-draughty.” Second is the repetition of word upon word, phrase upon phrase, as in this excerpt, chosen almost at random and which comes in the midst of a multi-hundred word sentence (emphasis added):
…the furled sails, dead in their rigidity, living in their repose, a strange, dusky, knotted and confused network that lifted itself darkly from the shiny oily-dark surface of the water toward the unmoved evening brightness of the heavens, a black spiderweb of wood and hemp reflected spectrally in the waters beneath, flashing spectrally above from the wild flickering of the torches swung all about the decks with the shouts of welcome, spectrally lit from the splendor of lights on the land-place: in the rows of houses surrounding the harbor, window after window was illuminated even up to the attics, illuminated the osterias ranged one after the other under the colonnades….
This example is more or less typical of the prose style of Part I.
The second subsection finds Virgil leaving the boat and entering the hellish city. The metaphor of water is not abandoned, though—remember, Part I is called “Water—The Arrival”—as the litter on which he is carried seems to surf on the filth and degradation of the Roman crowds. All about him Virgil sees the “gulp-muzzles, the shout-muzzles, the sing-muzzles, the gape-muzzles, the opened muzzles in the closed faces, all of them opened, torn apart, beset with teeth behind red, brown, or pallid lips, armed with tongues.” The “mass-beast” Virgil calls these crowds. He also smells (ah, the repetition) the “dusty dryness of the corn-sacks, the wheat-sacks, the barley-sacks, the spelt-sacks, one could smell the sourish mellowness of the oil-tuns, the oil-jugs, the oil-casks….” Near the end of this subsection, Virgil reflects, or rather hallucinates, on his mother, his father, and his bucolic youth, lamented in its loss.
In the third subsection of Part I, Virgil and his bearers enter a dark “alley-gorge” in the city. Virgil again is arrested by the pestilence of it all:
Here at the very spot where house after house discharged a beastly excremental stench from the opened doormouths, here in the dilapidated dwelling-canal through he was being borne in the high-held litter so that he could look into the squalid rooms, must look into them, here, met by the furious and senseless maledictions flung into his face by the women, ….
The style changes and rather noticeably, too, in these few pages. The third subsection is the first to see any direct quotations and they come from the howling chorus of demons that surround Virgil, who yell profane imprecations (“Suckling!” “Diaper-pisser!”) at the passing poet. These are interspersed with Virgil’s impressions of the taunts, impressions which most of the time agree with the crude accusations against him.
The palace of Augustus, where “hope and disappointment counterbalance one another,” is reached in the fourth subsection and, by the fifth subsection, Virgil finds rest in a room of the palace, ministered to by the young boy who has accompanied him, watching the nightfires of the city from a bay window. Here the novel takes a more realistic turn; for the first time a conversation takes place. (The previous few quotations in The Death of Virgil are more like overheard fragments.)
“You are Virgil,” says the boy. “I was once,” says Virgil, “perhaps I shall be again.” “Not quite here but yet at hand,” came like a corroboration from the boy’s lips.
By the final subsection—the sixth—this readerly respite has been taken away, and Part I ends with a rambling, dense meditation on death, poetry, the meaning of Aeneas.
This summary hardly does justice to the novel, which fills up the page like a vessel; there are few white spaces here, as the text typically starts at the top left and goes without break to the page’s conclusion. For this reason, among many, The Death of Virgil is a long 500 pages! It is also, as I have talked about in earlier posts, deeply philosophical. And I will conclude this discussion of Part I with a passage that comes from the first subsection. Virgil hears a song (Nicole discusses this) amidst the gluttonous feast taking place on the deck of the ship that carries him. Music, of course, is the ultimate art for Viennese pessimists; more than any other art, music encompassed the world in all its totality (paging Dr. Faustus) and it in Vienna that atonality flourished as a response to the destroyed philosophical harmonies of the common practice era. Well, so, too, for our Viennese-inflected Virgil:
Forward on the bow a young slave, one of the musicians, was singing…mildly flowing the song, floating insubstantially, like rainbow tints in the nocturnal heavens, mildly flowing the strings, soft-hued as ivory, human accomplishments, both the song and the strings, but removed beyond their human source, delivered from mankind, delivered from suffering; this was the music of the spheres singing itself… guidance the song; secure in itself and for that reason guidance; just for that reason exposed to eternity, for only the serene may guide, only the singular, wrested, nay rescued, from the flow of tings, lays itself open to immensity, only that which is held fast—ah, had he ever succeeded in getting such an actual, guiding grasp? — only the truly comprehended, even though it be only for a momen in the ocean of milleniums, onl the firmly-retained becomes timeless, becomes permanent, becomes a guiding song, becomes guidance; on, for a single life-moment enlarged to eternity, enlarged to the limits of understanding, susceptible of immensity: high above the shining song, high above the shining sunset breathed the heaven, whose sharp-clear autumnal sweetness had repeated itself unchanged for milleniums past and would repeat itself unchanged for milleniums to come, nevertheless unique in its manifestation here and now as the silky bright shimmer of its dome was overcast by the silent breath of the oncoming night.
The brush cleared, or maybe thickened, Part II nevertheless beckons!
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