Part IV of Death of Virgil is called “Air—The Homecoming.” At its opening, Virgil lies supine on a boat, voyaging into the underworld, his friend Plotius manning the oars in the boat’s fore, an unnamed and (to Virgil) unseen helmsman in the aft guiding the trip. The dying, maybe already dead, Virgil sees old friends—Horace, Lucretius, Sallust—greeting him. But Virgil has a newfound ability to see these men from the “inside,” shorn of inessential parts, all part of an irreducible common humanity.
The funeral barge loses speed, but increases in mass, ultimately reaching an infinite size (Broch was fascinated with physics and mathematics, and one goal of his art was to represent relativity). Lysanias, the boy-servant who has attended Virgil, stands on the prow of the boat; his ring, Virgil’s own and given as a bequest at the end of Part III, becomes a star, a transformation followed by Lysanias flying away toward a “night-rainbow” portal of seven colors. In his stead, Plotia, the woman who appeared in Part III as a former lover, materializes to guide Virgil’s continued trip. She takes Virgil’s hand, and, together, they walk into a magnificent landscape, one populated by peaceful animals and abundant vegetation and crowned by a tree full of golden fruit. Virgil falls asleep, and, in his dreams, finds a mystical union with Plotia; she enters his flesh, bones, and marrow. When he awakens, the woman (Woman) has disappeared.
If it seems to the reader as if Virgil and Plotia have happened into the Garden of Eden, well, that seems exactly right. But the story told is not that of Creation, but of Creation-in-reverse. Plotia/Eve does not spring from the rib of Virgil/Adam, but rather is absorbed back into the bones of that original man. And the six days of creation unfold distinctly but in rewind. The animals become not docile but ferocious; they march through valleys that unfold behind them. The birds and the fishes merge into the void. The sun, moon, and stars lose luster. At the end (beginning) of this devolution, on the first/last day, only the crater of creation remains – even light is swallowed up by the primal night. Virgil, now have lost any human uniqueness himself, is part of the womb of the “precreational godhead.” This might seem like a fine place to end the novel. But it is Virgil’s rebirth not his dissolution that concludes Death of Virgil. Creation is re-enacted in the final pages of the book. Virgil’s humanity is restored. The animals appear, and they are peaceful again. Restored, both man and beast look to the east, where they see a vision of mother and child, radiant with beneficence: the Logos.
Thus ends Death of Virgil. Let me make just a few discursive comments in concluding my contribution here.
1. I owe Nicole many thanks. I suggested Death of Virgil for her reading challenge, and I must confess that I didn’t know the size of the task that awaited us. I’ve now written more than 6,500 words on her blog; that’s valuable space, I know, and I appreciate her offering me the chance to write about it. She probably has found things she disagrees with in my discussion of the book, so I’m doubly grateful for her intellectual indulgences.
2. My understanding of the book (including what I’ve written about Part IV here) has been indispensably aided by secondary sources. Hermann Weigand, a professor of German literature at Yale, wrote about the book in several reviews, which I have drawn upon. I’ve already mentioned two biographies: Hermann Broch by Lutzeller and the Unfortunate Passion of Hermann Broch by Perez Gay.
3. The translation by Jean Starr Untermeyer has already been lauded by Nicole. One rather fascinating aspect of the Death of Virgil is that the book was written and translated almost simultaneously. Broch, in exile from Austria, was invited to Yaddo, the artist colony in New York, where he met Untermeyer. The novelist had hoped that Edwin and Willa Muir, who had translated his The Sleepwalkers, would agree to work on his new novel as well. But the Muirs were busy, and they didn’t like the book much either. So Untermeyer, a poet, agreed to do the forbidding endeavor. The final drafts of The Death of Virgil benefited from her input in what was no doubt a frustrating task of translating a section, finding Broch to have rewritten it overnight, and then beginning once again. Untermeyer was by no means a German scholar; she was a singer by training and had learned the language mostly through Lieder, which she had studied as a professional singer at an earlier stage of life. As she wrote of Death of Virgil, “I began with a sentence. It turned into a life sentence.” Nevertheless, she realized, as memorialized in her Private Collection: A Personal Reminiscence of Literary Figures, which has a chapter devoted to Broch called “Midwife to a Masterpiece,” that the novel would be her most lasting artistic achievement.
4. Last week, Nicole reviewed All Things Shining. While I’ve only read reviews, it does seem that the concerns of this new, popular philosophical work are the same as those of Broch, the novelist. What to do when all the traditional modes of meaning have eroded (or been erased)? How to live a life amidst these ruins? This was a great concern for the intellectual milieu of early 20th century Vienna—a world whose inheritance is incontrovertibly carried by Dreyfus, one of the authors of All Things Shining, and probably this country’s foremost scholar of Heidegger. Broch believed that life was impossible without a system of meaning; no happiness in nihilism for him (Nicole, defend yourself!): totalitarianism was the inevitable response to the demise of values, as an ethically unstable people were vulnerable to irrational appeals. The rise of Hitler reinforced this sentiment, with great personal consequence to Broch (not only his exile to America, but his mother died at Theriesenstadt). The case for Broch’s greatness is that, more than any other novelist, he saw the possibilities of, and the requirements for, a new literature appropriate to a “time of crisis.” As we’ve noted before here, Broch saw the era of Virgil—with its declining faith in traditional gods—as a time parallel to his own. (I think it significant too that the book takes place in Brundisium, a place where the influences of Rome and Greece were joined.) At the same time, it is hard not to conflate the situation of Virgil and Broch: artists at a time when art was incapable of achieving a cosmic unity; rootless exiles, desperate to escape the insane masses.
Hermann Broch was occasionally mentioned as a possible recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature; his cause was advanced in the United States by some of his fellow émigrés (like Einstein and Mann, both friends of Broch). It is said that, in the 1950s, the Nobel Committee asked the Austrian cultural authorities about Broch. But the Austrians said they’d never heard of the man. Both far behind and distantly ahead of his own enfeebled time, anonymity, undeserved but not unexpected, was to be Broch’s fate. If for no other reason (and there are many), thanks to Nicole for helping put together—for the first time on the internet—a discussion of The Death of Virgil, In so doing, we’ve done our small part to rescue Broch from oblivion.
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