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Literary Imagination – Fall 2006

The Review of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics

Volume 8 Number 3

Fall 2006

annual

Miles Clark

Any journal sponsored by the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics is going to require a decent amount of attention to enjoy. And this issue seems to take academic contentiousness one step further by first devoting an entire issue to Virgil, and then, in the second paragraph of the introduction, claiming that Virgil’s influence in the practical arena has diminished to the point of irrelevance—not even Harold Bloom can find use for Virgil in his canon. If that sentence sounds like cannon-fodder for the deeply cynical, pointing to the essays may quiet the booms slightly. Why doesn’t Virgil appeal to us in these imperialistic times? To be perfectly (unfortunately) consumerist (or Franzenian) about it, perhaps it’s American pragmatism that’s to blame. We want our reading to “multi-task” for us. The Aneid, we know, is an analysis of Empire; and we, as readers, are interested in how his classical conception coincides with our image of America. However, we are disappointed to find that the Aneid is not prescriptive of Republican ideals of Government, as its conception of violence (a necessary prerequisite for Empire) is entirely unlike our own. It is seen primordial and incapable of destroying either the spiritual or physical sustenance of life: a literary, as opposed to lived violence, alien to a contemporary culture accustomed to conceiving of war as a totalizing experience.

Any journal sponsored by the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics is going to require a decent amount of attention to enjoy. And this issue seems to take academic contentiousness one step further by first devoting an entire issue to Virgil, and then, in the second paragraph of the introduction, claiming that Virgil’s influence in the practical arena has diminished to the point of irrelevance—not even Harold Bloom can find use for Virgil in his canon. If that sentence sounds like cannon-fodder for the deeply cynical, pointing to the essays may quiet the booms slightly. Why doesn’t Virgil appeal to us in these imperialistic times? To be perfectly (unfortunately) consumerist (or Franzenian) about it, perhaps it’s American pragmatism that’s to blame. We want our reading to “multi-task” for us. The Aneid, we know, is an analysis of Empire; and we, as readers, are interested in how his classical conception coincides with our image of America. However, we are disappointed to find that the Aneid is not prescriptive of Republican ideals of Government, as its conception of violence (a necessary prerequisite for Empire) is entirely unlike our own. It is seen primordial and incapable of destroying either the spiritual or physical sustenance of life: a literary, as opposed to lived violence, alien to a contemporary culture accustomed to conceiving of war as a totalizing experience.

But Virgil’s pragmatic failure in an age of “nucular” anxiety was hardly the dawn of his decline; this begins substantively with the arrival of Milton, who, by extracting an epic poem from several lines of biblical text, shifted the grounds of the aesthetic from imitative to creative principles. Neoclassicist tastes set the critical nail in the coffin; Johnson explains that while in science achievements are based on the back of prior discovery, ancient mythology has been very seldom augmented by new evidence. Virgil’s crime is not that he writes badly; his crime is that he takes his subject material—as did all of ancient Rome—from Greek sources.

These are enlightening conceptions, but they do not furnish a reason to continue reading Virgil in the future. So why should you? In order to find out why, I’ll recommend that you read Literary Imagination yourself.
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