Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers. Trans. by Willa and Edwin Muir. North Point Press. [1931.]
"Without much doubt here is one of the few first-rate novels of our generation. (...) There is no wavering, no blurring, no unevenness or lack of proportion about The Sleepwalkers: its weight is perfectly distributed, its structure shows magnificent fore-planning, its psychology is acute and convincing, its themes ar developed with clarity and power." - Louis Kronenberger,
"(T)he moral impulse behind The Sleepwalkers does not detract from the book's esthetic appeal. On the contrary, Broch's moral seriousness gives the novel a vitality that raises it from the level of historical fiction. (...) It is an intellectual adventure of the highest order, the book on which Broch's claim to greatness rests." - J.P.Bauke
"The Sleepwalkers, a massive and gloomy trilogy, which he calls a philosophical essay, is his big book. It is written with a calm, thoughtful air, describing in great detail the mental processes and the doings of some of the unloveliest people ever seen outside the caricatures of George Grosz." - Time
"The book is a powerful and often eloquent symposium of contemporary thought and manners, admittedly "Teutonic" in its taste for massive synthesis, but rich in both humanity and intellectual suggestion." - Times Literary Supplement
Hermann Broch's novel, The Sleepwalkers, is one of the most remarkable works of modern times. Like Alfred Döblin's November 1918 or Musil's Man without Qualities it is a novel of an epoch. Like Joseph Roth's novels it follows the transformation of Central Europe from its last fin-de-siècle glory to its post-World War I decline. It is very much a novel of ideas, but it is also a work of art.
In three connected volumes it spans the period 1888 to 1918, revisiting that world at fifteen year intervals. Two volumes are realistic, straightforward narrative. In the third this approach will no longer do. In Huguenau oder die Sachlichkeit (translated somewhat unfortunately as The Realist) Broch pushes form -- not to breaking, or to incomprehensibility, but to best represent a new world (dis)order.
Mathematically minded, Broch always aimed for and achieved clarity. Obfuscation could not serve him. His novels -- and The Sleepwalkers especially -- are novels of ideas, but it is almost an injustice to them to emphasize the fact. What astounds, perhaps, is that The Sleepwalkers is so successful as a novel of ideas -- a rarity.
Broch was a talented writer. Characterization is not his strongest point, but the novel is dominated by strong, well-drawn, and memorable figures. Each of the central figures in each section -- Pasenow, Esch, and Huguenau --, be they sleepwalking through the times or resisting them, are fully realized figures. As are many of the others, including an unlikely Salvation Army girl, and the child, Marguerite.
As an evocation of the period and the place -- a collapsing Mitteleuropa, where the center will no longer hold -- The Sleepwalkers is also a complete success, though Broch's dark vision of those dark times is not one all agree with.
In an attempted review in The Spectator L.A.G. Strong wrote: "The Sleepwalkers is too large and indigestible for the ordinary fiction review." Undoubtedly so. To merely recount its plot-outlines, its themes, its approaches does a disservice to Broch's grand accomplishment. It deserves much closer and more careful analysis, as perhaps we will eventually be able to offer. For now we merely suggest: The Sleepwalkers deserves to be and should be read. It is indisputably one of the great novels of the 20th century, one of a handful that defined Western culture in our time.
Note too the publication history and reception of this enormous and difficult novel: though Broch was unknown at the time, the book was immediately translated into English and widely reviewed and acclaimed. In contrast, one the few comparable German novels of recent times, Peter Weiss' Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (see our review) -- a trilogy, too, the most significant German novel since Grass' Tin Drum, and by an author well-known to English-speaking audiences (as author of Marat/Sade (see our review)) -- has not yet been translated into English, more than 25 years after the first volume appeared in German. Despite having so far been translated into eleven foreign languages it remains inaccessible to American and English audiences. Sad times indeed.
Note also that despite nominally being a trilogy, The Sleepwalkers should be seen (and read) as a whole. Note also that the translations of the titles of the three sections do not completely reflect the German original. Penguin, in particular, by presenting the novel in tripartite manner place even greater emphasis on the titles -- but don't express them true to the original. Dispensing with the names -- Pasenow oder die Romantik (1888) becomes merely The Romantic -- is already a problem. Worse is that they make of, for example, of Esch oder die Anarchie (1903) (literally: "Esch, or Anarchy") an Anarchist And Sachlichkeit is also not quite "Realism" (or Realist) -- a word for which there is also a perfectly good German word which Broch decidedly did not choose -- "Realismus". - The Complete Review
I’m taking a break from the José Saramago Month event because I also joined Caroline and Lizzy's German Literature Month. I figured this would be a good occasion to finally read Austrian writer Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers (1932). I first came across this novelist’s name thanks to Milan Kundera, who is a huge admirer of his. Kundera’s interesting analyses of the novel can found in The Art of the Novel, Betrayed Testaments, The Curtain, and I think also in Encounter.
The Sleepwalkers is really a trilogy of novels composed of The Romantic, The Anarchist and The Realist. The novel’s time encompasses the period in European history from 1888 to 1918 and is Broch’s attempt at showing and meditating on the ‘disintegration of values,’ as he puts it in the long essay of the same name inserted amidst the narrative of the final book. The novel has three interesting protagonists, each one representing an aspect of European culture either in its crepuscule or in transition into something else. Broch writes in clear, fluid sentences and the tone is generally ironic. Some of the observations about the human condition are impeccable. I will admit right away I was expecting to enjoy it more, perhaps my expectations were too high. But let’s not allow that to get in the way.
The reader first follows the romantic misadventures of Joachim von Pasenow, the younger son of a rich man. He has difficult relationships with his mother and his father, a tyrant, and lives under the shadow of his older brother, who manages the estate, as tradition demands it, whereas Joachim was sent to the army. After his brother is killed in a duel, Joachim is expected to take his place, and he starts feeling the weight of duty and honour upon his freedom and plans for happiness. At the same time he falls in love with Ruzena, a Bohemian prostitute that he tries to rehabilitate and intends to marry, his father is preparing his marriage to the rich Elisabeth, a beautiful woman that Joachim nevertheless doesn’t love. “Chaos and disorder everywhere, without a hierarchy, without a discipline, and, yes, even without punctuality,” he thinks as he senses the horizons of his life shrinking. In his attempt to find stability away from the emotional turmoil around him – love for a prostitute, duty to marry a woman of his social condition, the prospects of a miserable and unhappy domestic existence - he seeks comfort in the order his military world gives him, often symbolized by the uniform he wears (except when he changes into muftis to visit brothels). And yet the motives of his love for Ruzena are the same reason why he can’t have her. He’s acutely aware that they belong to different worlds, and that he can never join her world or take her away from hers:
What did it all lead to? And with a jerk regaining his prescribed military bearing, he suddenly thought with relief that one could love only someone who belonged to an alien world. That was why he would never dare to love Elisabeth, and also why Ruzena had to be a Bohemian. Love meant to take refuge from one’s own world in another’s, and so in spite of his jealousy and shame he had left Ruzena in her world, so that her flight to him should be ever sweet and new.
Keeping the Joachim-Ruzena-Elisabeth triangle intact is Herr Bertrand, Joachim’s dissolute friend, his whoring and drinking buddy, who abandoned the army to become a successful businessman. He doesn’t care much about duty, thinks only about pleasure, and ridicules Joachim for his lofty feelings. First he flirts with Ruzena, who nearly shoots him dead, and then with Elisabeth, who loves him. Thanks to his machinations, Elisabeth and Joachim finally marry, doing what is expected of their social condition, but it is assumed that theirs will be an unhappy and miserable married life.
Herr Bertrand is seen again in the next novel, as the owner of a company and the boss of August Esch, an accountant clerk who, in 1903, is seeking for a great meaning in life, greater than himself. Esch has just been fired after a colleague, Nentwig, convinces his former boss that he was cooking the books. Esch spends most of the novel planning the best way of handing him to the authorities, but always lacking the will to act, until he shifts his hatred of Netwing onto Bertrand. This happens after he befriends Martin, a social democrat cripple who is also a unionist and moves in the socialist circles and participates in the proletarian struggles. Martin helps him get a job in Bertrand’s company and Esch originally admires him as a great man. Esch, like Pasenow, also worries about the disorder in the world, the ‘anarchical condition of the world,’ and this convinces him to try to join the socialists, but the group’s own inaction disillusion him and he continues his search of meaning elsewhere, until he finds God. The entire novel is Esch trying to change his life, and always failing. He tries to become a circus manager but his partner runs away with the money. He dreams of going to America to start a new life but never takes any decisive steps. He finally gains a sort of focus after Martin is arrested during an illegal workers’ meeting. Esch blames Bertrand and tries to destroy him. Little by little his hatred of the world is concentrated in the figure of Bertrand, after it had been concentrated in Nentwig’s. But even his plans to murder Bertrand fail.
Somewhere Kundera wrote that ‘Esch is Luther,’ but I’ve thought of another comparison: Esch is Travis Bickle. If you think this is absurd, watch Taxi Driver and then read this novel and you won’t believe the similarities, the list of similarities practically write themselves. Esch and Travis are two lonely and deranged individuals incapable of stable human connections. Esch originally admires Bertrand and Travis admires Palantine, then they try to kill these men. Both fail. Travis is also Iris’ protector and in the novel Esch tries to protect vaudeville actress Iona from her knife-throwing partner. Both Esch and Travis see themselves as warriors in a world that has lost all moral values. Esch starts by despising the ‘parsons and their morality’ and claims to have embraced the Freethinkers, but his dialogue is peppered with religious vocabulary: he speaks of the world needing a redeemer, of evils that need expiation, of sacrifice, and always of decency. In his worldview ‘people melted into one another’ and since the ‘wrong done existed apart from the doer’ it was the ‘wrong alone that had to be expiated,’ which is he how he ends up justifying turning his hatred away from Netwing to Bertrand:
Perhaps it was really Nentwig who should be made to pay. For if the world was to be redeemed one must attack the virus at its source, as Lohberg said: but that source was Nentwig, or perhaps even something hiding behind Nentwig, something greater – perhaps as great and as securely hidden in his inaccessibility as the chairman of a company – something one knew nothing about. It was enough to make a man angry (…).
Then Esch grows old and finds religion. In 1918, he’s living in a small village, married and running a newspaper, to which Major Joachim Pasenow contributes articles, when deserter Huguenau arrives. Huguenau is the final dissolution of all moral values: besides being a deserter, he’s a killer and a scammer, and he treads gaily through the world with his smile and persuasive spiel and manipulates events in order to get everything the way he wants, without ever wearing a villain’s mask. Pretending to be a businessman he steals Esch’s newspaper from him, narrowly avoids being revealed as a deserter at the end of the novel thanks to a well-timed murder, and returns into the civilian life rich and innocent. It is with wonderful irony that this final novel is called The Realist.
The final novel was the one I enjoyed the most, perhaps because Huguenau has such a powerful presence and charisma, but also because it was the least conventional of the three. The former two were rather outdated for the time Broch was writing them, perhaps deliberately in order to mimic the historical periods they’re set in, but The Realist is a polyphonic creation that mixes prose, poetry and drama, interweaves several parallel narrative and includes Broch’s long essay “Disintegration of Values.” This is where I can finally see what attracted Kundera so much to it. One of the things I immediately liked about Kundera, when I started reading him a few years ago, was exactly the way he mixed an essayistic voice with his fiction, becoming a detached commentator of the stories he kept remembering us were mere fictions created by him. Another thing that unites Broch and Kundera: emotional distance, the strength to resist the persuasiveness of sentimentality, being in control of the characters’ feelings so that they never descend into pathos, a gentle ironic tone where other writers would use a solemn tone to emphasise the seriousness of the narrative. Huguenau defeats anyone’s attempt at taking him seriously. As the novel opens he shepherds the reader into an ‘overwhelmingly senseless world.’ Major von Pasenow has the army and Esch has his Bible classes to continue to devote themselves to something higher than themselves, to continue to live with the sacred in their lives still, and Huguenau has himself and his total ruthlessness, amorality and ability to bend with reality to better find a place in it that will grant him stronger chances of surviving. He surpasses them because they’re clinging to institutions that no longer have vitality, because the religious fervour of the Middle Ages, when God was everything, will never return, and because the honour of the war has finally been soiled by the use of an ‘unchivalrous weapon’ like poison gas. There’s nothing bigger or higher than man, just man himself, terribly alone. This novel is about loneliness, from Joachim to Huguenau, the protagonists are all alone, but only Huguenau isn’t affected by this situation, whereas the others try to create bonds with the world and other humans, Huguenau ferociously protects his individuality and takes it to the extremes of caring for nothing, feeling for no one, which gives him advantages to survive the collapse of eras better than others whose existences are intimately attached to the institutions that disappear when they collapse.
Esch asks, “Oh, God, is there no possibility of one human being reaching another? is there no fellowship, is there no understanding? Must every man be nothing but an evil machine to his fellows?”
And the novel resoundingly says, no, there is no fellowship, no understanding, Huguenau is the future of man. And the reader can agree or not, but that doesn’t steal anything from the novel’s excellent argument in favour of this grim prediction. - St.Orberose
IT is a paradox that two of the most boldly innovative novels of the 20th century were written by a man who regarded literature as a poor substitute for philosophy. Hermann Broch undertook ''The Death of Virgil'' (1945), a fictional vision rivaled only by ''Finnegans Wake,'' because the radio station that commissioned him in the mid-30's to address the problem of literature at the end of a cultureal epoch insisted on a story rather than a lecture. When his narrative led him, like his hero Virgil, to the conclusion that poetry is immoral in an age of decline, Broch rejected literature and devoted himself until his death in 1951 to the study of mass psychology and politics.
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I once said that The Death of Virgil exists on its own plane of reality, and that is what makes the book worth reading. As a novel of ideas it is behind most of Thomas Mann’s work, and doesn’t even approach Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. As a historical excursion into the classics, it’s detailed and panoramic, but that is hardly Broch’s main concern here. He uses Virgil and the Aeneid to give weight to his subjects. He views imperial Rome as a better testing ground for his thoughts than contemporary Europe, which Broch increasingly loathed and saw as decaying and diseased. But he mostly needs solitary territory, and in The Death of Virgil he finds it.Text:
Broch initially wandered into fiction out of what he called an ''impatience for cognition.'' Born in 1886, he was a product of that fin de siecle Vienna that he analyzed devastatingly in his brilliant study ''Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time'' (recently available in English). The dutiful son of a Jewish textile manufacturer, he attended the local technical institute, took his engineering degree at a textile school in Alsace-Lorraine, traveled to the United States to observe milling procedures and in 1907 patented a cotton-milling device. When his father retired in 1915, Broch took over the business and in the next 10 years became what he cynically termed a captain of industry.
At the same time, he nurtured ambitions for an intellecutal career. For years he sporadically attended courses in mathematics and philosophy at the University of Vienna and wrote essays and reviews for various liberal journals. In 1927 he dismayed his family by selling the plant and declaring his intention to pursue a doctorate. But within a year, disenchanted by the disdain for ethical questions displayed by the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, he gave up his academic plans and turned to fiction. As he wrote in a ''Methodological prospectus'' for his publisher, he had become convinced that those realms of experience rejected by contemporary philosophy can best be dealt with in literature.
''The Sleepwalkers'' (1931-32) is a thesis novel with a vengeance. According to Broch, sleepwalkers are people living between vanishing and emerging ethical systems, just as the somnambulist exists in a state between sleeping and walking. The trilogy portrays three representative cases of ''loneliness of the I'' stemming from the collapse of any sustaining system of values. ''The Romantic,'' a subtle parody of 19th-century realism, takes place in Berlin in 1888 and focuses on the Purssian landed gentry. Joachim von Pasenow is a romantic because he clings desperately to values that others regard as outmoded, and this ''emotional lethargy'' lends his personality a certain quaint courtliness but renders him unfit to deal with situations that do not fit into his narrow Junker code, such as his love affiar with a passionate lower-class young woman. ''The Anarchist'' moves west to Cologne and Mannheim in 1903 and shifts to the urban working class. The accountant August Esch, who lives by the motto ''business is business,'' seeks an escape into eroticism when he realizes that double-entry bookkeeping cannot balance the ethical debits and credits in the turbulent society of prewar Germany.
Toward the end of World War I, both men end up in a small village on the Mosel River - Pasenow as military commandant and Esch as publisher of the local newspaper. Their inability to come to grips with the new reality brings them otgehter for consolation in a religious sect. Their precarious harmony is disrupted when Huguenau, ''The Realist,'' arrives in town, his break with the past symbolized by his desertion from the army. He swindles Esch out of his newspaper and bullies Pasenow into submitting to his authority. When the November Revolution of 1918 is over, the romanticism and anarchy of the past have given way to the forces of objectivism. Broch does not admire Huguenau, but he presents this whooy value-free man as ''the only adequate child of his age'' adn the inveitable harbinger of fascism.
A plot summary does justice neither to the narrative power of ''The Sleepwalkers'' nor to its experimental origniality. Hoping to achieve what he called ''polyhistorical totality,'' Broch included, after the manner of Dos Passos, a number of parallel plots involving characters who exemplify the theme of existential loneliness - the esthete Eduard von Bertrand, a shadowy figure on whom the others project their hopes and fears; the shellshocked sholdier Godicke, who must reassemble his personality in The veterans' hosptial; the architect Jaretzki, who loses an arm in the war and with it, symbolically, his sense of proporation; the alienated young wife Hannah Wendling; the orphan Marguerite; and others. And the three parts are unified through a complex set of images involving uniforms (security) and the Statue of Liberty (freedom), a small reproduction of which Esch dreams over.
BUT multiplicity of narratives was not enough for Broch. He wanted to demonstrate that rationalism and irrationalism are also among the fragments that litter the psychic landscape when ethical unity falls apart. To represent these poles, he incorporated into the lengthy third part 16 chapters that sometimes rise to pure lyric poetry and 10 chapters of an essay titled ''Disintegration of Values.'' While the essay expounds the philosophical theory underlying the novel, the ''ballad'' tells a story seemingly unrelated to them main narrative - the love of a Salvation Army girl in Berlin and the Jew Nuchem is doomed by irreconcilable differences in religion. We come to realize that the narrator of the ballad, Dr. Bertrand Muller, is also the author of ''Disintegration of Values.'' Since the essay embraces the various plots, he is by extension the author of the entire novel. Through this series of encapsulations, Broch sought to create an ''absolute'' novel that, as in Einstein's theory of relativity, contained its own observer within the filed of observation.
"The book is a masterpiece because it is that rare thing -- an attempt never before made, an attempt realised through the most rigorous craft and insight, perhaps valid for itself only, yet a work which changes the nature of the medium and shows its endless possibilities." - Sharmistha Mohanty
"In the wide reaches of the American nation there must be surely many readers who will appreciate the immensity of an adventure story such as this. It should be a corrective to our fundamentalism, our departmentalism. The work (...) should command a vast respect." - Marguerite Young
"(T)he argument of The Death of Virgil is so abstract, assertive yet evasive, so highflown and yet so narrow in compass, that one hardly feels inclined to study it with the closeness that a critical appraisal would require. It is safer to exclaim, 'A great European novel !' and leave it at that. Which, fair enough, will serve to warn off the great majority of potential readers." - D.J.Enright
"Author Broch's involved stream-of-consciousness method and philosophical ponderings make The Death of Virgil intensely difficult reading." - Time
"The fevered meditations and dreamings of the poet, in spite of the jungle of imagery, seldom lose clarity. The deep and pregnant symbolism of the Aeneid is skilfully exploited. For all its turgidity and repetition -- it is much too long and its essential virtuosity would have been enhanced by a greater regard for economy of line -- this book is manifestly a labour of insight and of love." - Times Literary Supplement
"It is as though only now those purely artistic elements which always gave the traditional novel its literary validity, the lyrical passion and the transfiguration of reality through the universal, have emancipated themselves from the merely informative and found a new and valid form." - Hannah Arendt
"(A) strong candidate for the least readable alleged masterpiece in the European canon" - John Lanchester
The Death of Virgil is a grand, complex accomplishment. A symphonic novel, its language closer to poetry than prose, it recounts Virgil's dying day. The span covered of the novel is a very short one, but Broch brings in much of Virgil's past (as well his work) as the poet reflects on and remembers the past in coming to terms with the inevitable end just ahead of him. It is one of the ultimate novels about art and artistry.
The Death of Virgil is a daunting novel, very different from The Sleepwalkers (see our review) and Broch's other work. Broch here does push language to its extremes (leading to the inevitable comparisons to Joyce's Ulysses), while maintaining a surprising control over it. The subject matter -- the classic poet and his work -- ground the novel, though modern unfamiliarity with Virgil and The Aeneid mean the work is not as readily accessible as it was for better educated readers of yore.
Where The Sleepwalkers or The Spell were also decidedly political and contemporary novels, Broch's Virgil, written during World War II, transcends time. Politics play a role in it, but the focus is tightly on the artist and the art. Strikingly modern in its approach, The Death of Virgil is also "classic", arching from Virgil to modernity, transcending any historical moment. It is, in all senses, a timeless work.
The English translation of The Death of Virgil is also a remarkable achievement, created almost concurrently with the German original and in close collaboration with Broch himself. The significance of the work was understood upon publication, as it was immediately hailed as a work of great significance. From the front-page review in The New York Times Book Review to the international acclaim it received, The Death of Virgil was recognized as one of the most significant novels of our time.
(Acclaim -- and a front page, full page review in The New York Times Book Review -- only go so far, however. In his book, The Business of Books (see our review), André Schiffrin writes about the 1945 publication of the book:
Pantheon published this admittedly demanding book in two editions -- 1,500 copies were printed in English and the same number in German. The German edition sold out immediately; it took over twenty years for the English-language copies to be sold.
Apparently neither quality nor good and prominent reviews can move Americans to read true literature -- then and now.)
More experimental and less approachable than The Sleepwalkers, The Death of Virgil is an important and worthwhile but not always easy or fully satisfying read. Readers should be aware of what they are getting into, prepared for a demanding, lyrical, dreamy, and referential narrative. - The Complete Review
This is a strange work, difficult to classify, comprised of elements of greatness and passages of unbelievable dullness, yet withal an example of contemporary European literature, related in some ways to the work of Joyce, Mann and Rilke. Broch, an Austrian now in this country, is the author of this somnambulistic prose-poem; Jean Starr Untermeyer is its translator. It describes the journey of the dying poet Vergil from the boat that carries from Athena to Brindisim, through mobfilled streets to the palace of Caesar Augustus who has ordered the journey. There in the royal apartment, the poet lies in dream-ridden illness, waited on by a new found slave-friend, visited by his Roman intimates, called on by the emperor. They indulge in discussions of art versus statecraft, Vergil wishes to destroy his own work, he expresses apprehension of the coming of Christianity, he deprecates the coming of the new element of ""perception"". Caesar dissuades him from destroying his manuscript. And Vergil dies, with a final dedication to love and Plotia. It is difficult to convey the levels of experience this reveals, wrapped as they are in words and sentences of deep musical content, a drenched dreamlike quality. The work of a gifted, sensitive man, a recapitulation of a life and an age, but it mournfully lacks any lightness or lucidity or even great originality. Appeal to poets chiefly. - Kirkus Reviews
Broch, the author of The Sleepwalkers, is one of the few modern writers from whom a great thing is to be expected. Now here is this endless and arduous monologue of the dying Virgil, the work of many years and long awaited by serious readers. It is a book shot through with the troubles and personal revaluations of one who, like many others, was shaken by the persecutions of the last years. Below the surface this is its main theme: that it is necessary to take seriously, to give oneself to, the troubles of one’s fellows.
After a single reading, I cannot fairly judge of the importance of The Death of Virgil. The main “obvious” failing is that it seems to have so many words and so little content, so much philosophy and so little novelty or subtlety of thought (though what there is is true), so much feeling described and so little dramatic compulsion. If this failing really exists, we have here a very dull book; and yet it is possible that a better reading might reveal a deeper system of meaning, and then much that now seems to me dormant would spring to life.
Certainly the book has certain traits that belong to major literature. First, an enormous simplicity of outline. The dying poet repents of his self-defensive dedication to art, understands that it is necessary to give oneself in love, wants to bum the Aeneid as a sacrifice toward our salvation, is dissuaded, and hears at last the saving Word. The many thoughts, images, and passions, the endless sentences and plenty of verbiage, never blur this simple plot.
At the same time, like several other important modem works, the book is a dialectical lyric. Its plot is polyphonically expanded in many voices: as a physiology of the dissolving body; a cosmology of the animals, plants, and rocks; a psychoanalysis of the kinds of eros; a politics and a theology.
Most important—and usually defining a major work—the book has a persistent characteristic narrative method. The story moves in a continuum of three kinds of events: an outward physical action, the fantasies associated with the action, and an objective introspection of the fantasies. These three are presented all as one scene, so that we do not have, for instance, an external event giving rise to certain reflections or dreams, but the figures of dream or the insights of reflection act also in the apparently external event. Now this narrative method is, of course, precisely another way of expressing the theme outlined above: “He won a new identity in a new stillness. . . . The transformation which had taken place was the transformation of outside to inside, the merging of the outer with the inner face, always striven for, never attained, but now fully achieved by this final exchange.” Or to express the same in a sample of Broch’s imagery:
“An entwinement that abolished every incongruity and therefore suffered no sort of separation; and behold, thereupon the goblet changed from ivory into one of firm brown horn, only to evaporate again into a light brown vapor, and along with the goblet all the past vanished also”—the image being taken from the sentence in the Aeneid that sleep has two doors, one of ivory through which pass false apparitions, one of horn through which pass true visions.
The imagery, like the dialectic, is carried systematically through the lyric. The Ship of the beginning is the bed of the middle, is the ferry to the Isles of the end; and so the Goblet, the Ring, the Star, etc. The inevitable comparison that one must make is to the Wagnerian motifs. (To my sensibility, however, Broch does not succeed in doing the one thing that Wagner does beyond any artist: create an homogeneous space.)
For the most part, to repeat, I do not yet find that in all this admirable, unified complexity and over-all simplicity there is much new thought or exciting perception. An exception is the particularity of the objective introspection of certain states of semi-consciousness, e.g the place towards the end where the “slabs” of stillness give way to the development of stillness within stillness, and this to a “growth” into immutability, etc. Anyone who has done hypnoid introspection will see that the author is faithfully exploring a new field. The theme of the book is of course universal and Broch is justified in reading it into the life of Virgil. But I must say that his Virgil, though akin to the medieval magician and prophet of Jesus, is not the melancholy and compassionate Virgil that I read, who is crying when he tells how the peasant ruined by the weather must live on acorns—crying although (that is, because) the hexameters smoothly roll. -
''The Sleepwalker'' was reviewed respectfully in 1932, when it appeared in a fine English translation by Edwin and Willa Muir, and it has been admired since World War II by serious European critics, who put Broch in the company of Kafka, Mann and Musil as well as Joyce and Proust. But despite reprintings in 1947 and 1964 (the second time with an introduction by Hannah Arendt) the book has never found a following in the United States. In part, no doubt, this failure can be attributed to Broch's own ambivalence about his literary works during his emigre years in the United States (1938-51). In part it can be attributed to the style and philosophical content of the work, which seemed more difficult 40 or 50 years ago than they do now to a generation that has read Joyce in high school. Having a convenient edition ready for Broch's centennial year should help acquaint Americans with a classic that enlarged the scope of 20th-century fiction by focusing with unparalleled precision on the profound transformation of values that produced the modern consciousness. - Theodore Ziolkowski
‘The Sleepwalkers’ is a long and complicated novel presented by the author in three parts. It could be seen as a trilogy or even as three separate novels but can better be viewed as a whole. The action takes place in 1888, 1903 and 1918 and charts what Broch refers to most strongly in the final part as ‘a disintegration of values’. Each separate section is written in a different tone and style and yet each three combine in their separate ways to the stylistic richness of the whole.
The first, ‘The Realist’, is set in late nineteenth century Prussia and is outwardly written in the manner of nineteenth century literary realism, not dissimilar in tone from Theodor Fontane’s ‘Der Stechlin’. It tells the story of Joachim von Passenow, a cavalry officer, who has to chose between his mistress, Ruzena, and Elizabeth the bride chosen for him by his parents and by his station in life. The other main character is the somewhat shadowy Eduard von Bertrand, who seems to flout conventional values and who is both an attraction to Joachim and Elizabeth and a warning to them of what not to become.
By the second volume the action has moved to the Rhineland and the so called ‘anarchist’ August Esch. This is the colourful commercial world of shipping businesses, restaurants and theatres. Esch glides through this world both faithful and faithless as he adheres to his own singular code of values. He variously tries to do the right thing by a socialist friend imprisoned for organising a strike and by various friends who invest in a dishonest scheme for organising female wrestling tournaments. At the same time he eventually marries Mother Hentjen who he does not love and to whom he cannot remain faithful but to whose conventional bourgeois morality he is drawn. Over all this hovers again the shadowy figure of the homosexual von Bertrand whose discarded lovers commit suicide. ‘The Anarchist’ is the most amusing of the three volumes as Broch engages the reader with his acute observations of the lower strata of the commercial world creating interesting and unusual characters who he describes with ironic detachment.
The final volume, ‘The Realist’, is the least conventional in construction. Broch cuts swiftly from the Western Front to Trier and Berlin all the time interspersing the narrative with passages of philosophical observation on the disintegration of values. Huguenau, a cynical opportunistic deserter from the trenches, is the main character but von Passenow and Esch return from the previous volumes. We are now in 1918 as the war is coming to an end and with the corresponding collapse of German culture and values the cynical Huguenau prevails but the reader is left with the feeling that his victory is hollow.
‘The Sleepwalkers’ is a large but not unwieldy novel. It is a novel of ideas as each of his main characters attempts to come to terms with their worlds of changing values and rapidly moving situations. The action in each section is very localised but at the same time Broch imparts a certain universality as ‘mitteleuropa’ buckles and cracks under the strains of industrialisation and total war and the centre can no longer hold. Von Passenow, Esch and Huguenau seem to be almost automatons, set on a fatalistic course of action, and sleepwalking to their inevitable conclusions. But in spite of the weight of ideas Broch’s characters are no mere ciphers, they are robust and believable, well drawn and engaging. The narrative thread is not disrupted by the philosophic digression. This is an important book and one that should be read by as many non Germans as possible in order that they might acquire even a small understanding of one of the most troubled European countries of the last century. - liberreview
I first read The Sleepwalkers when it appeared in this magnificent translation of Edwin and Willa Muir, in 932. Since then, it has been an experience which has lingered in my mind and which I have meant to go back to. But an uneasy fear that I might be disappointed, that I might feel that this trilogy was chaotic, has held me back until a few days ago.
On re-reading this book, I find that it is one of the few really original and thoughtful novels of this century. If it owes a good deal to Joyce and Proust, then Broch has transformed their interior techniques and many-faceted sensibilities into something as harshly German as the painting of Bosch. For him art is not an end, it is an instrument of language which transforms the crudest, ugliest reality of actuality into another reality of religious vision. The great difference between the French and the Germanic genius lies really in this: to the French art is an end which transforms experience, insofar as it is contained in art, into an aesthetic object, so that the aim of life itself can appear as the transforming of real experience into such objects of contemplation and enjoyment. To the Germanic genius art is an intermediary, a kind of funnel which connects hell with heaven, heaven with hell. The basest material, in Gruenewald, Bosch, Brueghel, or even Klee goes into the machine at one end, and is sublimated into the divine at the other. So that if I go on to criticize The Sleepwalkers as an imperfect work of art, in which several stories having no interior relationship with each other, but only an external parallelism, are tacked together, and into which a philosophic essay is inserted with a crudity even more obvious than Tolstoy’s reflections on history in War and Peace; when I have said all this, I must add that these apparent artistic defects add to the impressiveness of Broch’s whole achievement in imposing a philosophic message upon his massive material. This is a novel hewn out of the life of the years between 890 and 1920 which leads into a view of history wider than political theories.
The theme of all novels is, I suppose, change. But what holds together the very disparate times and plots of Broch’s novel is his preoccupation with the conditions which produce very intensive change in his characters, complete changes of personality, almost the change of one character into another, the change of the individual into historic event, the change of consciousness into dream, and of life into death.
His characters are sleepwalkers because their own lives are shaped by the forces of the nightmare reality in which they live. A Marxist would define this reality as the breakdown of German capitalist-materialism during the years 1880-1920. But to Broch, the social forces are themselves only one element of a far profounder breakdown of the whole of modern life, a breakdown which consists of the disruption of the idea of man as a being who lives by faith in God, into the idea of him as a specialized function who devotes his life to becoming the logic which modem society requires of him: “In this absolute devotion to logical rigor, the Western world has won its achievements, . . . and with the same thoroughness, the absolute thoroughness that abrogates itself, must it eventually advance ad absurdam: war is war, l’art pour art, in politics there’s no room for compunction, business is business, . . . all these signify the same thing, all these appertain to the same aggressive and radical spirit, informed by that uncanny, I might almost say that metaphysical, lack of consideration for consequences, that ruthless logic directed on the object and the object alone, which looks neither to right nor to left; and this, all this, is the style of thinking that characterizes our age.”
Thus Broch’s characters are driven by two forces pulling in opposite directions: the ruthless logic of becoming their social function and their unavoidable religious vocation as human beings.
The first section of the trilogy, The Romantic, is in some ways the strangest and most dreamlike. On the surface it is the love story of a young officer, Joachim von Pasenow, with Elizabeth, the girl who afterwards becomes his wife but who really loves and is loved by Joachim’s best friend, Bertrand, who is a homosexual. Broch’s extraordinary power is perhaps best shown by his ability to make his most stupid-seeming characters those who in the long run are most able to be transformed by events. Joachim von Pasenow seems a singularly stupid and suspicious man, who is unable to love either his friend or his wife, and who has the rigidity of the Prussian conception of honor. But it is his very inability to understand, his bewilderment, which opens his mind to visions, to the transformation of his fiancée into her surroundings: “Now an almost insoluble problem confronted him, and it was no use trying to decipher it in Elizabeth’s face, for her face itself constituted the problem. Lying back in her chair, she was gazing at the autumn landscape, and her up-tilted face, thrown back almost at a right angle to the taut line of the throat, was like an irregular roof set upon the pillar of her neck. One could perhaps say just as well that it rested like a leaf on the calyx of her throat, or that it was a lid covering the throat, for it was really no longer a face, merely a continuation of the throat, an extension of the throat, with a far-off resemblance to the head of a serpent. . . . He shut his eyelids a little and peered through the slits at the landscape of that extended face. It blended at once with the real landscape, the woodland verge of the hair bordered the yellowing leaves of the forest, and the glass balls that decorated the rose-beds in the garden glittered with the same light as the jewel that in the shadow of the cheek—ah, was it still a cheek?—shone as an earring. This was both startling and comforting, and when the eye combined these separate things into a unity so strange, past all disjoining, one was curiously reminded of something, transposed into some mode that lay beyond convention far back in childhood, and the unsolved riddle was like a sign that had emerged from the sea of memory.”
This elaborate image beautifully illustrates the change which is preparing itself under the uniform surface of the Prussia of 880. The whole of Joachim’s world is haunted by a strange uncertainty, where, in this book, the most ambivalent character, Bertrand, hovering between the two sexes, becomes almost a point of security, because he accepts in his own personality the principle of transformation.
It is in the second part, The Anarchist, that Hermann Broch creates his most memorable character, the clerk Esch, who is the true hero of The Sleepwalkers. Esch, the philanderer, the immoral moralist who wants to make the columns of his accounts balance, the drifter whose eyes are opened to the injustices of society by the imprisonment of Martin Geyring, the trades-union agitator; Esch, who becomes the mother and the lover of Mother Hentjen, the restaurant proprietress, who attacks Bertrand because he is head of the Rhine Shipping Company, and who finally joins the Bible-reading group of Major von Pasenow: he is the most curious, poetic, and convincing of Broch’s inventions. Like von Pasenow he is a very stupid man who is reserved by life nevertheless for the most illuminating revelations, because he is made as it were of stubborn granite, honest material upon which events hew the form of his character.
The pages which describe Esch’s journey with Mother Hentjen down the Rhine are among the most beautiful in the book, immensely moving in their mixture of detached irony and sympathy. Here Broch is perhaps at his best. The extraordinary scene between Esch and Bertrand has a dreamlike intensity but it seems to press, as do several other passages, beyond the limits of that which can be expressed in fiction. There is a certain repetitiousness in The Sleepwalkers which seems to arise from the author not being able to say something, which he therefore tries to express in a dozen different ways. Perhaps as a counsel of despair, he resorts in the last volume to a philosophical journal which is introduced in fragments into the story, without any explanation as to its connection with the action.
This journal is so remarkably interesting in what it says, that one can almost forgive its inartistic intrusiveness. Yet it is not a completely successful device, because although it says much which is related to the theme of the novel, the lack of any dramatic relation to the action leaves the reader at a loss. To borrow a phrase from painting, it has no tonal relation to the other tones of the canvas. It is not within the character of any of the persons whom Hermann Broch has created, and it therefore remains stubbornly outside the rest of the novel. In itself, considered outside the novel, it is intensely interesting: but within the novel it remains a lecture, interrupting the course of the action, and therefore difficult to read.
The description of the breakdown of 918 Germany in the last part of the trilogy reads strangely true today, not just of Germany, but of the world. Broch shows here that he is a great writer of scenes of war and revolution. The character of Hugenau, the Alsatian deserter who becomes editor of the Kur Trier Herald, who instinctively and almost unconsciously supports every cause which supports his own interests, is a terrifying characterization of the post-war profiteer. And the drawing together of the two great stupid men, von Pasenow and Esch, symbols of the Germany which raised money for war by people subscribing a mark for the privilege of hammering a nail into a wooden figurehead of Marshal von Hindenburg, symbolizes, with their death after religious conversion, the theme of redemption which is the ultimate transformation of the sleepwalkers.
This difficult, beautiful, highly intelligent novel is, with all its imperfections, a masterpiece. Amongst its imperfections, one must count the fact that certain of the characters, particularly Elizabeth and Bertrand, are unconvincing, because although they exist on the level of a hallucinated reality, they seem hardly to have a convincing material existence. With some hesitation, I also consider the philosophic journal a defect. Among Broch’s great achievements are the creation of the characters of Esch and Hugenau, worthy to exist beside Stephen Dedalus and Molly Bloom, and less “literary” than either of them: the creation of a massive historic scene; and the description of states of consciousness where human life seems trembling upon the edge of a significance wider than that of the individual. -
Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil. Trans. by Jean Starr Untermeyer. Pantheon Books, 1945.
It is the reign of the Emperor Augustus, and Publius Vergilius Maro, the poet of the Aeneid and Caesar's enchanter, has been summoned to the palace, where he will shortly die. Out of the last hours of Virgil's life and the final stirrings of his consciousness, the Austrian writer Hermann Broch fashioned one of the great works of twentieth-century modernism, a book that embraces an entire world and renders it with an immediacy that is at once sensual and profound. Begun while Broch was imprisoned in a German concentration camp, The Death of Virgil is part historical novel and part prose poem -- and always an intensely musical and immensely evocative meditation on the relation between life and death, the ancient and the modern.
"Broch is the greatest novelist European literature has
produced since Joyce, and...The Death of Virgil represents the only genuine
technical advance that fiction has made since Ulysses." - George Steiner
"Hermann Broch belongs in that tradition of great
twentieth-century novelists who have transformed, almost beyond recognition,
one of the classic art forms of the nineteenth century." -Hannah Arendt
"In the wide reaches of the American nation there must be surely many readers who will appreciate the immensity of an adventure story such as this. It should be a corrective to our fundamentalism, our departmentalism. The work (...) should command a vast respect." - Marguerite Young
"(T)he argument of The Death of Virgil is so abstract, assertive yet evasive, so highflown and yet so narrow in compass, that one hardly feels inclined to study it with the closeness that a critical appraisal would require. It is safer to exclaim, 'A great European novel !' and leave it at that. Which, fair enough, will serve to warn off the great majority of potential readers." - D.J.Enright
"Author Broch's involved stream-of-consciousness method and philosophical ponderings make The Death of Virgil intensely difficult reading." - Time
"The fevered meditations and dreamings of the poet, in spite of the jungle of imagery, seldom lose clarity. The deep and pregnant symbolism of the Aeneid is skilfully exploited. For all its turgidity and repetition -- it is much too long and its essential virtuosity would have been enhanced by a greater regard for economy of line -- this book is manifestly a labour of insight and of love." - Times Literary Supplement
"It is as though only now those purely artistic elements which always gave the traditional novel its literary validity, the lyrical passion and the transfiguration of reality through the universal, have emancipated themselves from the merely informative and found a new and valid form." - Hannah Arendt
"(A) strong candidate for the least readable alleged masterpiece in the European canon" - John Lanchester
The Death of Virgil is a grand, complex accomplishment. A symphonic novel, its language closer to poetry than prose, it recounts Virgil's dying day. The span covered of the novel is a very short one, but Broch brings in much of Virgil's past (as well his work) as the poet reflects on and remembers the past in coming to terms with the inevitable end just ahead of him. It is one of the ultimate novels about art and artistry.
The Death of Virgil is a daunting novel, very different from The Sleepwalkers (see our review) and Broch's other work. Broch here does push language to its extremes (leading to the inevitable comparisons to Joyce's Ulysses), while maintaining a surprising control over it. The subject matter -- the classic poet and his work -- ground the novel, though modern unfamiliarity with Virgil and The Aeneid mean the work is not as readily accessible as it was for better educated readers of yore.
Where The Sleepwalkers or The Spell were also decidedly political and contemporary novels, Broch's Virgil, written during World War II, transcends time. Politics play a role in it, but the focus is tightly on the artist and the art. Strikingly modern in its approach, The Death of Virgil is also "classic", arching from Virgil to modernity, transcending any historical moment. It is, in all senses, a timeless work.
The English translation of The Death of Virgil is also a remarkable achievement, created almost concurrently with the German original and in close collaboration with Broch himself. The significance of the work was understood upon publication, as it was immediately hailed as a work of great significance. From the front-page review in The New York Times Book Review to the international acclaim it received, The Death of Virgil was recognized as one of the most significant novels of our time.
(Acclaim -- and a front page, full page review in The New York Times Book Review -- only go so far, however. In his book, The Business of Books (see our review), André Schiffrin writes about the 1945 publication of the book:
Pantheon published this admittedly demanding book in two editions -- 1,500 copies were printed in English and the same number in German. The German edition sold out immediately; it took over twenty years for the English-language copies to be sold.
Apparently neither quality nor good and prominent reviews can move Americans to read true literature -- then and now.)
More experimental and less approachable than The Sleepwalkers, The Death of Virgil is an important and worthwhile but not always easy or fully satisfying read. Readers should be aware of what they are getting into, prepared for a demanding, lyrical, dreamy, and referential narrative. - The Complete Review
This is a strange work, difficult to classify, comprised of elements of greatness and passages of unbelievable dullness, yet withal an example of contemporary European literature, related in some ways to the work of Joyce, Mann and Rilke. Broch, an Austrian now in this country, is the author of this somnambulistic prose-poem; Jean Starr Untermeyer is its translator. It describes the journey of the dying poet Vergil from the boat that carries from Athena to Brindisim, through mobfilled streets to the palace of Caesar Augustus who has ordered the journey. There in the royal apartment, the poet lies in dream-ridden illness, waited on by a new found slave-friend, visited by his Roman intimates, called on by the emperor. They indulge in discussions of art versus statecraft, Vergil wishes to destroy his own work, he expresses apprehension of the coming of Christianity, he deprecates the coming of the new element of ""perception"". Caesar dissuades him from destroying his manuscript. And Vergil dies, with a final dedication to love and Plotia. It is difficult to convey the levels of experience this reveals, wrapped as they are in words and sentences of deep musical content, a drenched dreamlike quality. The work of a gifted, sensitive man, a recapitulation of a life and an age, but it mournfully lacks any lightness or lucidity or even great originality. Appeal to poets chiefly. - Kirkus Reviews
Broch, the author of The Sleepwalkers, is one of the few modern writers from whom a great thing is to be expected. Now here is this endless and arduous monologue of the dying Virgil, the work of many years and long awaited by serious readers. It is a book shot through with the troubles and personal revaluations of one who, like many others, was shaken by the persecutions of the last years. Below the surface this is its main theme: that it is necessary to take seriously, to give oneself to, the troubles of one’s fellows.
After a single reading, I cannot fairly judge of the importance of The Death of Virgil. The main “obvious” failing is that it seems to have so many words and so little content, so much philosophy and so little novelty or subtlety of thought (though what there is is true), so much feeling described and so little dramatic compulsion. If this failing really exists, we have here a very dull book; and yet it is possible that a better reading might reveal a deeper system of meaning, and then much that now seems to me dormant would spring to life.
Certainly the book has certain traits that belong to major literature. First, an enormous simplicity of outline. The dying poet repents of his self-defensive dedication to art, understands that it is necessary to give oneself in love, wants to bum the Aeneid as a sacrifice toward our salvation, is dissuaded, and hears at last the saving Word. The many thoughts, images, and passions, the endless sentences and plenty of verbiage, never blur this simple plot.
At the same time, like several other important modem works, the book is a dialectical lyric. Its plot is polyphonically expanded in many voices: as a physiology of the dissolving body; a cosmology of the animals, plants, and rocks; a psychoanalysis of the kinds of eros; a politics and a theology.
Most important—and usually defining a major work—the book has a persistent characteristic narrative method. The story moves in a continuum of three kinds of events: an outward physical action, the fantasies associated with the action, and an objective introspection of the fantasies. These three are presented all as one scene, so that we do not have, for instance, an external event giving rise to certain reflections or dreams, but the figures of dream or the insights of reflection act also in the apparently external event. Now this narrative method is, of course, precisely another way of expressing the theme outlined above: “He won a new identity in a new stillness. . . . The transformation which had taken place was the transformation of outside to inside, the merging of the outer with the inner face, always striven for, never attained, but now fully achieved by this final exchange.” Or to express the same in a sample of Broch’s imagery:
“An entwinement that abolished every incongruity and therefore suffered no sort of separation; and behold, thereupon the goblet changed from ivory into one of firm brown horn, only to evaporate again into a light brown vapor, and along with the goblet all the past vanished also”—the image being taken from the sentence in the Aeneid that sleep has two doors, one of ivory through which pass false apparitions, one of horn through which pass true visions.
The imagery, like the dialectic, is carried systematically through the lyric. The Ship of the beginning is the bed of the middle, is the ferry to the Isles of the end; and so the Goblet, the Ring, the Star, etc. The inevitable comparison that one must make is to the Wagnerian motifs. (To my sensibility, however, Broch does not succeed in doing the one thing that Wagner does beyond any artist: create an homogeneous space.)
For the most part, to repeat, I do not yet find that in all this admirable, unified complexity and over-all simplicity there is much new thought or exciting perception. An exception is the particularity of the objective introspection of certain states of semi-consciousness, e.g the place towards the end where the “slabs” of stillness give way to the development of stillness within stillness, and this to a “growth” into immutability, etc. Anyone who has done hypnoid introspection will see that the author is faithfully exploring a new field. The theme of the book is of course universal and Broch is justified in reading it into the life of Virgil. But I must say that his Virgil, though akin to the medieval magician and prophet of Jesus, is not the melancholy and compassionate Virgil that I read, who is crying when he tells how the peasant ruined by the weather must live on acorns—crying although (that is, because) the hexameters smoothly roll. -
The most striking portrait of Broch was given by Elias Canetti in his memoirs, where he describes Broch as fiercely moral but unguarded and emotionally transparent. The contradiction plays itself out nobly in The Death of Virgil, as conservative political statements clash with modernist techniques on a huge swath of territory that is Broch’s alone.
The book is divided into four sections named after the four elements. In the short first section, the sick and dying Virgil arrives in Rome and is brought to rest. The blind Virgil is preternaturally aware of his surroundings and the section is oriented around pure sensory language as he slowly progresses from the ship to the palace. Rome is vibrant but immoral, and Virgil, in his sensory immersion, achieves a sort of inhuman alienation from the people and society around him, connected but only partly conscious.
It’s scant preparation for the second section, one hundred and fifty pages of tumbling, disorienting language dealing with half-formed abstractions and conjunctions of art, life, love, feeling, infinity, and more. What’s most remarkable is how Broch keeps it from coalescing. Any approaching “payoff” of a unified vision is discarded before it’s reached for a new set of jumbled conceptual atoms. A sample:
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…
What impresses are not the ideas, which derive from Friedrich Schiller as well as Plato, but the writing that is constantly at war with them. This is the sort of stuff that you write when you must write, or even more, when you are driven to fill up the page out of agoraphobia or a fear of silence. Somewhere in the middle of it, Virgil decides to burn the Aeneid, lost as he is inside a transient but autonomous language that provides effect without impact, divorced from “the world” and focused on metaphysical existence. It is as pure as Rilke, and just as difficult.
The third section is just as much a shock: Virgil returns to reality, as it were, and there follows lengthy passages of dialogue between him and his friends Plotius and Lucius, and then then with Augustus, who all attempt to convince him not to burn the Aeneid. Augustus paints the poet’s relation to the state; Virgil tries to negate it. Augustus flatters Virgil; Virgil will have none of it. Torn between his unattainable obligations and aspirations, Virgil’s positions appear pompous next to Augustus’s rhetoric: they are having a dialogue, but it binds the section to the sort of discourse found in The Sleepwalkers and The Unknown Quantity, in which Broch attempts to raise the state of humanity first through Burkean criticism, then by sheer force of intellectual will.
I’ve never found either tactic wholly successful. Broch’s strength, at its peak in the other sections of The Death of Virgil, was the sort of comprehensive, complex emotional state of being of an artist; when he tries to rationalize its place in the world, either in Vienna in the 1930’s or in Augustan Rome, he can be callow and even petty. After the autonomy of the first two sections, his attempt at worldly engagement and debate in the third doesn’t–really, can’t–justify itself. Thomas Mann’s philosophical debates in The Magic Mountain may be caricatures (of people like Johann Nestroy), but they reflect a certain compromise with the terms of the world that Broch is not really capable of. In The Sleepwalkers there was a conservative nostalgia for the supposedly moral uprightness of past ages; in The Death of Virgil, Broch abandons even that.
This is if anything emphasized in the last, short section. Having divested himself of his possessions and freed his slaves, Virgil surrenders to the inhuman abyss and is thrown into the realm of the essential, a conflation of the cosmos, creation, and language. The placement of language there is a forthright statement of where Broch aims to be and what he sees as Virgil’s proper place.
I don’t know. The high-minded but pedestrian third section helps illustrate how extreme Broch’s position is. It is obviously very impractical, a book that nearly negates its own existence in the world. (Even if Broch does not side with Virgil in the third section, the rest of the book makes it clear that Broch is not hosting a debate.) But the same single-mindedness makes it the closest fictional analogue to Rilke I’ve read, and sui generis. The Death of Virgil is not something to engage and certainly not to argue with, but it has its effects, and they are unique. - David Auerbach
I’ve had this book on my shelf for a long time – since December 2001, I think, when I bought it with a copy of The Sleepwalkers, which I read much more promptly. I found The Sleepwalkers through Gaddis’s J R, which repeatedly references that book; I remember reading it on a trip to Chicago and being astounded by the way Broch’s novel unfolds, starting prosaically and becoming increasingly lyrical across all three sections. Somehow The Death of Virgil seemed imposing and I put it off, the same way I put off Proust at that point; I did find a copy of The Guiltless and enjoyed that as well, though not as much as The Sleepwalkers. Broch’s two volumes of non-fiction didn’t do quite as much for me, especially Geist and Zeitgeist; a couple years ago, I found an old copy of The Unknown Quality and found that I disliked it: Broch seemed disdainful of his characters in a way that didn’t seem artistically productive at all. In the meantime, I’d finally read Robert Musil, and decided that I liked Musil’s open-ended approach to The Man without Qualities better than what Broch had been doing. Last year I intended to re-read The Sleepwalkers to see if the book had changed; but I didn’t get around to that. Packing for Libya, I realized that I’d have an increasingly valuable chance to read without interruptions; so I threw my long unread copy of The Death of Virgil in my bag. But I also went into this book with the feeling that I was reading something that was good for me that I didn’t especially want to read. And another caveat: my experience with Virgil is dusty. I read a decent chunk of the Aeneid in high school, but I’ve forgotten most of whatever I knew. I did some poking around online after getting an Internet connection back, and at some point I’ll get around to re-reading the Aeneid; but for the present reading, my lack of knowledge was embarrassing.
The Sleepwalkers has a reader-friendly arc: it starts out normally and becomes more and more lyrical. The idea of progress can be read into Broch’s style. The Death of Virgil is more difficult, as it starts in the same mode that ends The Sleepwalkers. The reader can work out what’s going on easily enough, but the effect is to make the book daunting to the reader, who hasn’t been eased into it. The sentences go on and on; there are few paragraph breaks, and it serves as a stream-of-consciousness record of sensation of the titular Virgil, who is, as promised, dying. The Death of Virgil is divided into four sections; the third section, where Virgil is talking to Octavian and his friends, deviates from this formula by bringing in much more dialogue. Most of the book, however, is from the perspective of Virgil; not all of Virgil’s interlocutors actually exist.
There are passages here that are immensely beautiful. A sentence from an early section where Virgil considers hands:
Oh, unbridled became the desire to stretch out the hand toward those still so distant shores, to reach into the darkness of the shrubbery, to feel the earth-born leaf between his fingers, to hold it tightly there forevermore—, the wish quivered in his hands, quivered in his fingers with uncontrollable desire toward the leafy branches, toward the flexible leaf-stems, toward the sharp-soft leaf edges, toward the firm living leaf-flesh, yearningly he felt it when he closed his eyes, and it was almost a sensual desire, sensually simple and grasping like his masculine, raw-boned peasant’s fist, sensually savoring and sensitive like the slender-wristed nervousness of this same hand: Oh grass, oh leaf, bark-smoothness, bark-roughness, vitality of burgeoning, in this branching out and embodiment ye are earth’s darkness made manifest! oh hand, tingling, touching, fondling, embracing, oh finger and finger-tip, rough and gentle and soft, living flesh, the outermost surface of the soul’s darkness opened up in the lifted hands! (p. 18)
This goes on – this is only the first quarter of the passage, in the middle of a four-page paragraph – and it builds as it progresses. The insistent repetition is part of what makes this works: “leaf” throbs through, as does the modulation of “sensual” through “sensually” to “sensitive” and then “slender.” Broch’s style is maximalist: the pile of gerunds (“tingling, touching, fondling, embracing”) is typical of the book. The “ye” in the apostrophe in the second half seems to be an off note in the English, maybe pushing things too far; a dozen pages later, a passing peasant is overheard to say “Dat kind charm you’ll get from me” which reminds the reader the book was translated in 1945. There’s a 1946 essay about the translation of this novel in Geist and Zeitgeist; it’s rendered slightly hilarious because Broch evidently wrote it in the voice of his translator (“I simply want to tell you some of my experiences in translating The Death of Virgil and give you some of the ideas that came out of this, particularly from conversations with its author, Hermann Broch”); Untermeyer evidently refused to read it as her own. It’s not an especially helpful essay – Broch never inserted the demonstrative passages he intended to – but it does present the idea that the strange style of The Death of Virgil is in part related to bringing German sentence structure into English. I don’t speak German; to me, the book’s style reads as incredibly baroque in a way that doesn’t generally exist in English. (It might be worth noting in passage that Joshua Cohen seems to have borrowed the style for his earlier novels from Broch, which might explain the strange feeling of the prose of those books.)
The plot of the book, such as it is, hangs on Virgil’s deliberations about whether or not to burn the Aeneid before his death. Whether this would actually efface his work is left unclear: the text makes it clear that earlier sections of the book have already been copied, which makes it seem like Virgil would be choosing to leave the Aeneid unfinished rather than destroying it. That doesn’t make as nice a plot, of course. Virgil’s friends (perhaps intentionally similar to Job’s counselors) appear to try to convince him not to destroy the book; the third section is a long dialogue with Octavian, to whom the book is dedicated, who would like the book as tribute to his empire. Virgil doesn’t come off especially well (I’ll confess that I’ve always thought of the Aeneid as a cut-rate copy of Homer conceived to glorify an empire), and I’m not tremendously convinced that the argument is interesting. But the final section, where Virgil finally dies, is lovely; though weirdly here and elsewhere in the book, Virgil is made into the precursor of Christ that he was in the Middle Ages.
For me, the book survives on style: it’s a beautiful book, even though there are hints that the politics are a bit strange. I don’t know that I love it – I suspect I’ll go back to The Man without Qualities before this one – but this is a nice book to get lost in. - ithhiddennoise.net/2011/01/30/hermann-broch-the-death-of-virgil/
What Hermann Broch so poetically explores in The Death of Virgil is art, its promise of knowledge and its inevitable failure…
I don't expect much feedback about this one, most of the bookworms whom I talk to haven't even heard of it, but its elegant prose and sober pondering of a poet's life leave a remarkable impression in me.
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. - A Guy's Moleskine Notebook
The book is divided into four sections named after the four elements. In the short first section, the sick and dying Virgil arrives in Rome and is brought to rest. The blind Virgil is preternaturally aware of his surroundings and the section is oriented around pure sensory language as he slowly progresses from the ship to the palace. Rome is vibrant but immoral, and Virgil, in his sensory immersion, achieves a sort of inhuman alienation from the people and society around him, connected but only partly conscious.
It’s scant preparation for the second section, one hundred and fifty pages of tumbling, disorienting language dealing with half-formed abstractions and conjunctions of art, life, love, feeling, infinity, and more. What’s most remarkable is how Broch keeps it from coalescing. Any approaching “payoff” of a unified vision is discarded before it’s reached for a new set of jumbled conceptual atoms. A sample:
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…
What impresses are not the ideas, which derive from Friedrich Schiller as well as Plato, but the writing that is constantly at war with them. This is the sort of stuff that you write when you must write, or even more, when you are driven to fill up the page out of agoraphobia or a fear of silence. Somewhere in the middle of it, Virgil decides to burn the Aeneid, lost as he is inside a transient but autonomous language that provides effect without impact, divorced from “the world” and focused on metaphysical existence. It is as pure as Rilke, and just as difficult.
The third section is just as much a shock: Virgil returns to reality, as it were, and there follows lengthy passages of dialogue between him and his friends Plotius and Lucius, and then then with Augustus, who all attempt to convince him not to burn the Aeneid. Augustus paints the poet’s relation to the state; Virgil tries to negate it. Augustus flatters Virgil; Virgil will have none of it. Torn between his unattainable obligations and aspirations, Virgil’s positions appear pompous next to Augustus’s rhetoric: they are having a dialogue, but it binds the section to the sort of discourse found in The Sleepwalkers and The Unknown Quantity, in which Broch attempts to raise the state of humanity first through Burkean criticism, then by sheer force of intellectual will.
I’ve never found either tactic wholly successful. Broch’s strength, at its peak in the other sections of The Death of Virgil, was the sort of comprehensive, complex emotional state of being of an artist; when he tries to rationalize its place in the world, either in Vienna in the 1930’s or in Augustan Rome, he can be callow and even petty. After the autonomy of the first two sections, his attempt at worldly engagement and debate in the third doesn’t–really, can’t–justify itself. Thomas Mann’s philosophical debates in The Magic Mountain may be caricatures (of people like Johann Nestroy), but they reflect a certain compromise with the terms of the world that Broch is not really capable of. In The Sleepwalkers there was a conservative nostalgia for the supposedly moral uprightness of past ages; in The Death of Virgil, Broch abandons even that.
This is if anything emphasized in the last, short section. Having divested himself of his possessions and freed his slaves, Virgil surrenders to the inhuman abyss and is thrown into the realm of the essential, a conflation of the cosmos, creation, and language. The placement of language there is a forthright statement of where Broch aims to be and what he sees as Virgil’s proper place.
I don’t know. The high-minded but pedestrian third section helps illustrate how extreme Broch’s position is. It is obviously very impractical, a book that nearly negates its own existence in the world. (Even if Broch does not side with Virgil in the third section, the rest of the book makes it clear that Broch is not hosting a debate.) But the same single-mindedness makes it the closest fictional analogue to Rilke I’ve read, and sui generis. The Death of Virgil is not something to engage and certainly not to argue with, but it has its effects, and they are unique. - David Auerbach
I’ve had this book on my shelf for a long time – since December 2001, I think, when I bought it with a copy of The Sleepwalkers, which I read much more promptly. I found The Sleepwalkers through Gaddis’s J R, which repeatedly references that book; I remember reading it on a trip to Chicago and being astounded by the way Broch’s novel unfolds, starting prosaically and becoming increasingly lyrical across all three sections. Somehow The Death of Virgil seemed imposing and I put it off, the same way I put off Proust at that point; I did find a copy of The Guiltless and enjoyed that as well, though not as much as The Sleepwalkers. Broch’s two volumes of non-fiction didn’t do quite as much for me, especially Geist and Zeitgeist; a couple years ago, I found an old copy of The Unknown Quality and found that I disliked it: Broch seemed disdainful of his characters in a way that didn’t seem artistically productive at all. In the meantime, I’d finally read Robert Musil, and decided that I liked Musil’s open-ended approach to The Man without Qualities better than what Broch had been doing. Last year I intended to re-read The Sleepwalkers to see if the book had changed; but I didn’t get around to that. Packing for Libya, I realized that I’d have an increasingly valuable chance to read without interruptions; so I threw my long unread copy of The Death of Virgil in my bag. But I also went into this book with the feeling that I was reading something that was good for me that I didn’t especially want to read. And another caveat: my experience with Virgil is dusty. I read a decent chunk of the Aeneid in high school, but I’ve forgotten most of whatever I knew. I did some poking around online after getting an Internet connection back, and at some point I’ll get around to re-reading the Aeneid; but for the present reading, my lack of knowledge was embarrassing.
The Sleepwalkers has a reader-friendly arc: it starts out normally and becomes more and more lyrical. The idea of progress can be read into Broch’s style. The Death of Virgil is more difficult, as it starts in the same mode that ends The Sleepwalkers. The reader can work out what’s going on easily enough, but the effect is to make the book daunting to the reader, who hasn’t been eased into it. The sentences go on and on; there are few paragraph breaks, and it serves as a stream-of-consciousness record of sensation of the titular Virgil, who is, as promised, dying. The Death of Virgil is divided into four sections; the third section, where Virgil is talking to Octavian and his friends, deviates from this formula by bringing in much more dialogue. Most of the book, however, is from the perspective of Virgil; not all of Virgil’s interlocutors actually exist.
There are passages here that are immensely beautiful. A sentence from an early section where Virgil considers hands:
Oh, unbridled became the desire to stretch out the hand toward those still so distant shores, to reach into the darkness of the shrubbery, to feel the earth-born leaf between his fingers, to hold it tightly there forevermore—, the wish quivered in his hands, quivered in his fingers with uncontrollable desire toward the leafy branches, toward the flexible leaf-stems, toward the sharp-soft leaf edges, toward the firm living leaf-flesh, yearningly he felt it when he closed his eyes, and it was almost a sensual desire, sensually simple and grasping like his masculine, raw-boned peasant’s fist, sensually savoring and sensitive like the slender-wristed nervousness of this same hand: Oh grass, oh leaf, bark-smoothness, bark-roughness, vitality of burgeoning, in this branching out and embodiment ye are earth’s darkness made manifest! oh hand, tingling, touching, fondling, embracing, oh finger and finger-tip, rough and gentle and soft, living flesh, the outermost surface of the soul’s darkness opened up in the lifted hands! (p. 18)
This goes on – this is only the first quarter of the passage, in the middle of a four-page paragraph – and it builds as it progresses. The insistent repetition is part of what makes this works: “leaf” throbs through, as does the modulation of “sensual” through “sensually” to “sensitive” and then “slender.” Broch’s style is maximalist: the pile of gerunds (“tingling, touching, fondling, embracing”) is typical of the book. The “ye” in the apostrophe in the second half seems to be an off note in the English, maybe pushing things too far; a dozen pages later, a passing peasant is overheard to say “Dat kind charm you’ll get from me” which reminds the reader the book was translated in 1945. There’s a 1946 essay about the translation of this novel in Geist and Zeitgeist; it’s rendered slightly hilarious because Broch evidently wrote it in the voice of his translator (“I simply want to tell you some of my experiences in translating The Death of Virgil and give you some of the ideas that came out of this, particularly from conversations with its author, Hermann Broch”); Untermeyer evidently refused to read it as her own. It’s not an especially helpful essay – Broch never inserted the demonstrative passages he intended to – but it does present the idea that the strange style of The Death of Virgil is in part related to bringing German sentence structure into English. I don’t speak German; to me, the book’s style reads as incredibly baroque in a way that doesn’t generally exist in English. (It might be worth noting in passage that Joshua Cohen seems to have borrowed the style for his earlier novels from Broch, which might explain the strange feeling of the prose of those books.)
The plot of the book, such as it is, hangs on Virgil’s deliberations about whether or not to burn the Aeneid before his death. Whether this would actually efface his work is left unclear: the text makes it clear that earlier sections of the book have already been copied, which makes it seem like Virgil would be choosing to leave the Aeneid unfinished rather than destroying it. That doesn’t make as nice a plot, of course. Virgil’s friends (perhaps intentionally similar to Job’s counselors) appear to try to convince him not to destroy the book; the third section is a long dialogue with Octavian, to whom the book is dedicated, who would like the book as tribute to his empire. Virgil doesn’t come off especially well (I’ll confess that I’ve always thought of the Aeneid as a cut-rate copy of Homer conceived to glorify an empire), and I’m not tremendously convinced that the argument is interesting. But the final section, where Virgil finally dies, is lovely; though weirdly here and elsewhere in the book, Virgil is made into the precursor of Christ that he was in the Middle Ages.
For me, the book survives on style: it’s a beautiful book, even though there are hints that the politics are a bit strange. I don’t know that I love it – I suspect I’ll go back to The Man without Qualities before this one – but this is a nice book to get lost in. - ithhiddennoise.net/2011/01/30/hermann-broch-the-death-of-virgil/
What Hermann Broch so poetically explores in The Death of Virgil is art, its promise of knowledge and its inevitable failure…
“Everything came to him, everything was here, washed in the chaotic light from the landing place, breathed at by the unbreathable, bawled at by the incomprehensible, assembled to a single unity in which the far-off easily became the near-at-hand, the near-at-hand became remote, permitting him who was balanced above it all and surrounded by savagery to come to an untroubled balanced-swaying awareness…He himself in the centre of the plaza as if someone had wanted to bring him to the centre of his own being, to the cross-roads of his worlds, to the centre of his world, compliant to fate. For all that it was only the harbour of Brundisium.” Virgil, the poet of the Aenid, is being carried in a litter through the port, to the palace of Augustus Caesar. Over nearly 500 pages, Hermann Broch moves through the largest to the minutest movements of this poet’s consciousness in the hours before his death, to make this remarkable German novel, The Death of Virgil (Der Tod des Virgil, 1945.)
A different attempt
Broch fuses narrative elements and that of a searching consciousness in a way that the novel’s sensual world and its enquiry arise from the same place. This makes him immediately different from his great contemporary Robert Musil, who is perhaps better known, because Musil is so clearly a novelist of ideas that a reader can take from him a certain tangible understanding of the times. Broch was perhaps far closer to Musil in his first novel, The Sleepwalkers, where he actually interrupts the narrative repeatedly with an essay on the disintegration of values in early 20th century Europe.
There are certain unusual facts intertwined with the writing of this novel and its translation. It was begun in a concentration camp where Broch was imprisoned. It was first published in English in 1945 and only later in the German world. Its clearly gifted translator, Jean Starr Untermeyer, in her afterword, calls it a poem. “The Death of Virgil is a poem, although neither in the sense of a single lyrical outburst nor a sequence of poems on a single theme, yet one that sustains its tension through nearly 500 pages.” Untermeyer and Broch met at Yaddo, the American writer’s retreat, in 1926, and remained very close friends. One assumes that he approved of his novel being described in this way at its very first publication.
Broch’s way of entering consciousness was indeed through a language which is as close to poetry as prose can possibly be. He is a master of the long sentence, and has certainly written some of the longest in a work of fiction. At times in the earlier part of the novel, he actually goes into a kind of free verse. It is not surprising that these are the only places where he seems far less a master. His grasp of the line and the sentence are not the same. This teaches us something about the tenuous border between the most poetic prose and verse, a border not of the spirit but its manifestation. Whether The Death of Virgil is a poem or not is a matter for long discussion. But it certainly uses the elements of poetry with a profundity almost never seen in a novel. The long sentences are intensely musical, and they make for a striking incantatory quality, as well as a distinct slowing down of time, all of which combine with the matter of the prose to touch an inner world that normally only a poet would attempt to touch. “…here the empty surface of unmastered existence was suddenly laid bare…”
But The Death of Virgil is as much a novel because of the way in which Broch creates narrative, with a keen sense of drama, the particularity of situations, encounters and dialogues. He does not abandon any of the devices of the classical novel, but he transforms it through his poetic attitude and by sheer depth of philosophical enquiry. This is often present even in the simplest dialogues.
“You are Virgil.”
“I was once and may be again.”
And The Death of Virgil does what only the novel can do: live within a life and a consciousness over time, dilating and compressing that time as it needs, because it is only in the novel that time is allowed fully, so that we can begin to understand its functions of change, reversal, decay, hope, and transformation. In his visions as he falls ill, Virgil sees the world moving through its histories, fantastic beings and things, he sees diverse landscapes; in the long dialogues with Caesar, with his friends, his slave boy, he is a reflective and cogitative mind. But in the last section, when Virgil is actually coming closer to his death, Broch slows down everything, there is only Virgil’s consciousness in which every movement seems to have endless duration, and a sense of the spreading sea and sky.
The book is a masterpiece because it is that rare thing — an attempt never before made, an attempt realised through the most rigorous craft and insight, perhaps valid for itself only, yet a work which changes the nature of the medium and shows its endless possibilities. Broch’s contemporaries were Musil, Kafka, Rilke, Robert Walser, and Mann in German, and outside it James Joyce, who helped him to emigrate abroad. Born in the 1880s, all these writers were solitaries, but they did know each other, and sometimes met, and would have known each other’s work. One wonders whether the awareness of each other’s pioneering attempts gave them strength and ability in their work.
Understanding life
For all of these writers the novel was a way of understanding existence, nothing less. The Death of Virgil places itself in one of the innermost spaces of that enquiry. Paradoxically enough, what Broch explores in it is art — its promise of knowledge and to Broch, its inevitable failure. Virgil wants to burn the Aenid, and Caesar will not let him. Over the course of the book, Broch’s Virgil awakens to his life even as he is dying, to his work as a poet, and the immense spaces in between.
Sharmistha Mohanty is the author of two novels, Book One and New Life, and the forthcoming Broken Nest and Other Stories (Tranquebar Classics), translations of the fiction of Tagore. She is the founder-editor of the online literature journal Almost Island. - SHARMISTHA MOHANTY
I don't expect much feedback about this one, most of the bookworms whom I talk to haven't even heard of it, but its elegant prose and sober pondering of a poet's life leave a remarkable impression in me.
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. - A Guy's Moleskine Notebook
Trading Comfort for Knowledge: Jean Starr Untermeyer and the Translation of The Death of Virgil by Josh Billings
Herman Broch, Geist and Zeitgeist, 2003. [1948.
As John Hargraves notes in his introduction, Hermann Broch remains best known, especially in the English-speaking world, for his fiction (in particular the novels The Sleepwalkers (see our review) The Death of Virgil (see our review), two of the towering works of the 20th century), but of the twelve volumes of the German edition of his collected works four are devoted to his essays (and one to his poetry) -- and almost none of that, except the long piece Hugo Hofmannsthal and His Age, has been translated.
Geist and Zeitgeist offers a Broch-essay sampler: six pieces (including a chunk of the Hofmannsthal essay) first written between 1933 and 1948 that display many of Broch's preoccupations, interests, and approaches.
Broch's background -- in business, in philosophy and mathematics -- and his intense interest in other fields (including sociology and psychology) are reflected in his fiction, but come much more obviously to the fore in his essays. The Sleepwalkers is already a work that imposes a great deal of theory on its art; in the essays Broch elaborates on theory unencumbered (and unassisted) by fictional trappings.
Like few authors of recent times, Broch's entire output reflects a deeply thought-through and often persuasive Weltanschauung, different aspects of which are best illuminated in different works (though all the works (fiction and non-fiction alike) are linked in this comprehensive world-view that Broch is continuously trying to relate and explain). Awareness that Broch was such a masterful practitioner of creative art also lends additional credence to his analytic approach, its success in itself a validation of his ideas.
The essays collected here serve as a good introduction to his works and thoughts. They are mainly rooted in that evolution from fin-de-siècle decadence through a collapse of values (as came with the collapse of the Hapsburg empire), culminating in the horrors of Nazism. But for Broch these are also only moments from history and from the history of civilization, and he generally looks at a much bigger picture, detail serving only to illustrate what are more general points.
Particularly striking is his understanding of a need to strive for the new (as he champions Joyce's efforts, including both Ulysses and the Work in Progress that became Finnegans Wake -- and as is also demonstrated in his own work) while also recognizing the inherent limitations of the new, a point repeatedly (and well-) made in these pages.
Art, and specifically literature, plays a central role in Broch's world, allowing for a reflection and analysis of reality that he finds particularly significant in these times (roughly 1900 to 1950). Art is, in all senses of the word, a "representative phenomenon of the time" -- and, he finds, in these times "the problem of art itself has become an ethical one". The first essay in the collection specifically addresses this idea, differentiating between art that is 'beautiful' and art that is 'good'. Beyond these there is also 'evil' art -- and it is this, in the form of kitsch, that Broch emphatically decries -- and how can one not be thrilled by his passion when he writes, for example:
The maker of kitsch does not create inferior art, he is not an incompetent or a bungler, he cannot be evaluated by esthetic standards; rather, he is ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil. And since it is radical evil that is manifest here, evil per se, forming the absolute negative pole of every value-system, kitsch will always be evil, not just kitsch in art, but kitsch in every value-system that is not an imitation system
The second essay, from 1934, is on The Spirit in an Unspiritual Age, and begins: "Humanity today has been overtaken by a peculiar contempt for words, a contempt that is almost revulsion." It's a contempt that, as described by Broch, is remarkably similar to the one one finds today (complete with the same dispiriting consequences), and it's the one essay here that will strike the strongest chord among contemporary readers, mirroring so horribly closely the current state of affairs (especially in the United States). Again, Broch invests a great deal in the power of the word (and of art): he understands the limitations too -- he's no wide-eyed romantic -- but his belief (or even: understanding) is a convincing one.
The third essay is on Joyce and the Present Age, written in 1936, and discusses the author with whom Broch clearly had the greatest affinity. It is an insightful piece, and of particular interest because Broch shared many of Joyce's aspirations in his own artistic endeavours, especially in his striving for new means of artistic representation. But Broch is also aware of the dangers, both for Joyce and himself, and he doesn't simply offer blind praise, acknowledging, for example:
The dangers of increasing aloofness are real and are to be found both in his pessimism and in the power of the artistic resources he has placed at the service of this pessimism.
The Style of the Mythical Age is was an introduction for a book on the Iliad (by Rachel Bespaloff) -- and is the only piece in the collection originally written in English. It is another fairly good summary of Broch's ideas on literature and myth, usefully also considering older examples (including Homer).
The fifth essay, Some Comments on the Philosophy and Technique of Translating is the one essay that Hargraves substituted from the original German version of Geist und Zeitgeist -- and a good choice that was. The piece -- amusingly written to be presented by Death of Virgil-translator Jean Starr Untermeyer (so there are many third-person references to author Broch, despite the fact that he wrote the text) -- is of great interest because it specifically does discuss the Death of Virgil-translation. Some insight is offered into that incredible undertaking (though not enough ! -- someone should devote a book just to that story), and Broch also writes more generally about translation issues.
The final piece offers the beginning of Broch's longer essay, Hugo Hofmannsthal and His Age (previously published in its entirety in 1984 in a translation by Michael P. Steinberg). Focussing on Art and Its Non-Style at the End of the Nineteenth Century, Broch offers a useful survey and analysis of what led up to this fin-de-siècle period -- though regrettably there's little of Hofmannsthal to be found here. From literary ideas (and ideals) -- "with inadequate means, namely those of naturalism, the novel pursues an unattainable end, namely the mythical" -- to broader cultural and historical ones he offers an impressive picture of the times, leading to the present he writes from (both as artist and as citizen). Specifically, the Vienna of his youth and his formative years (Hofmannsthal's Vienna), is clearly presented, from being "less a city of art than a city of decoration par excellence" to the very "center of the European value vacuum" (and metropolis of hated kitsch)
Broch is a writer well worth looking up to, a firm believer in the power and importance of literature (and a man who, amazingly, was able to create fictions that stood up to his high ideals). One always has to be wary when people write of, for example, the "mission of literature", but authors (and others) would do well to heed his clear and strict ambitions:
It is at this point that the mission of literature begins; the mission of a cognition that remains above all empirical or social modes of being and to which it is a matter of indifference whether man lives in a feudal, bourgeois or proletarian age; literature's obligation to the absoluteness of cognition, in general.
Where philosophy had failed, Broch saw literature assuming that mantle. Sounds good to us.
We weren't entirely thrilled by the translation(s) in this volume (despite what it says on the cover, there were three different translators at work here, which doesn't help) -- and the stylistic problems should already be apparent from the quotes above, but then the precision of Broch's German isn't easily transformed into English.
Geist and Zeitgeist is certainly a worthwhile collection. It's not always easy going, and many readers may not be receptive to these arguments (or Broch's presentation), but for those willing to make the effort it offers ample -- indeed: great -- reward. (But read the novels too !) - The Complete Review
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