The paper will address the idea that we have a new ‘stable’ world
order, which apparently coincides with the fact that it is no longer quite
seemly to read the Aeneid as tension-ridden, let alone as a subsersive,
or pessimistic, text. Following from this I will consider the implications
of the projected (?) shift from Virgil to Ovid as our central Latin poet.
My idea is to show that Virgil’s politics, his ‘dilemmas’, as the prospectus puts it, are best understood if we read his texts as a Book, as a totality which alone (in providing a picture of the range and parametres through which Virgil expresses himself) can give us the whole picture. I will offer, as context, a discussion of how Virgilian criticism this century, particularly in Germany, and the US, has dealt with the idea of Virgil’s Book, and will show how attitudes towards (and selection from) the Book of Virgil may by deeply political.
As a continuum, much like a human life, Virgil’s Book might be said to be constantly changing its mind. To be sure, I do not want to endorse the idea of the Eclogues as a form of ‘early’ pessimism, but to show that if read as part of a continuous oeuvre the Virgilian texts ask us to constantly reconsider our, as well as their, politics.
To the reader of Virgil’s Book, an imperialist reading of Virgil therefore
makes the mistake of regarding the text as the expression of a fixed ideology,
when in fact it is always, undendingly perspectival. We might say then
that the imperialist Virgil is a function of the error through which ideology
makes the contingent appear as the natural or eternal order of things.
(It is the same error of course which at this moment makes the new world
order, the American hegemony, appear unassailable when in fact the demise
of the Asian tigers, and third world debt, amongst other catastrophes,
suggest urgently that this may not be the case.)
To end I want to consider the implications of moving from an unfashionably
unstable Virgil to your ‘accommodated’ Ovid. Having rid ourselves of the
binary politics of the cold war, there is something left to say, surely
for political ‘idealism’. And Virgil, ‘civilised’ though he may be in the
most pejorative sense of the word, must still be very good to think with
as indeed is a problematic, ‘unaccommodated’ Ovid.