The Taste for Nothingness: A Study of Virtus and Related Themes in Lucan's Bellum Civile

by Robert John Sklenar

Overview

Lucan, the young and doomed epic poet of the Age of Nero, is represented by only one surviving work, the Bellum Civile, which takes as its theme the civil war that destroyed the Roman Republic. An epic unlike any other, it rejects point by point the aesthetics of Vergil's Aeneid and describes a society and a cosmos plunged into anarchy. Language was a casualty of this anarchy. All terminological certitudes were lost, including those that traditionally attach to the Latin word virtus: heroism on the battlefield, rectitude in the conduct of life.
The Taste for Nothingness traces Lucan's own analytical method by showing how virtus and related concepts operate—or rather, fail to operate—in Lucan's appropriations and distortions of the traditional epic-battle narrative; in the philosophical commitment of Cato the Younger; and in the personalities of the two antagonists, Pompey and Caesar. Much recent scholarship has reached a consensus that Lucan's literary method is mimetic, that his belief in a chaotic cosmos produces a poetics of chaos. While accepting many of the recent findings about Lucan's view of language and the universe, The Taste for Nothingness also allows an even bolder Lucan to emerge: a committed aesthete who regards art as the only realm in which order is possible.
Robert Sklenár is Visiting Assistant Professor of Classical Studies, Tulane University.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472113101
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	05/09/2003
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

R. Sklenár is Visiting Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at Tulane University.

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THE TASTE FOR NOTHINGNESS
A Study of Virtus and Related Themes in Lucan's Bellum Civile

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By R. SKLENÁR
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2003
University of Michigan
All right reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-472-11310-1

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Chapter One LUCAN THE NIHILIST

Je contemple d'en haut le globe en sa rondeur, Et je n'y cherche plus l'abri d'une cahute.

Avalanche, veux-tu m'emporter dans ta chute? -Baudelaire, Le goût du Néant

Recent scholarship, influenced by developments in literary theory, has replaced the pro-Stoic, pro-Pompeian Lucan of an earlier day with a dark, sinister, at times grimly parodic poet for whom reality is chaotic, fragmentary, and ultimately meaningless. His rehabilitation in the classical canon, moreover, results in part from the ability of a readership whose own tradition includes Kafka and Beckett to appreciate the nihilism of Lucan's art, much as the Middle Ages, which also furnished him with a receptive audience, valued him as an author scarcely less grotesque than its own gargoyles. The present study, while partially adopting what has become the orthodox view of Lucan, attempts a heretical (because more traditional) presentation, necessary for two reasons. First, close reading figures not much more prominently in the recent line of Lucan criticism than it did among its predecessors, and it remains the largest single gap in the vast secondary literature. Second, much recent analysis proceeds from the fundamentally erroneous postulate that Lucan can only describe his incoherent universe by imitating it. This premise overlooks the paradox on which Lucan's aesthetics depend: that it is possible to describe chaos without being chaotic, to document with clinical precision the absence of precision in language, to make a logical case for the absence of logic. In a word, Lucan need not, and therefore does not, resort to the stylistic practices of some of his (post-)modern champions to get his point across. And Lucan has a point, a perfectly lucid one: sheer randomness governs the universe; civil war is a manifestation of that randomness; and-as the current orthodoxy rightly insists-in a random universe, the associations between words and their meanings are completely arbitrary. This randomness, however, does not prevent Lucan from being systematic in his exposition of a world without systems, and he is particularly systematic in his integration of moral terminology into his nihilistic scheme, as evidenced by his careful positioning of two programmatic statements. In the proem, iusque datum sceleri canimus [we sing of legality bestowed on crime] (1.2) announces the equivalency of moral opposites as a major theme of the epic; toward the end of book 1, the astrologer Figulus reads the same message in the stars: scelerique nefando / nomen erit virtus [unspeakable crime will be termed virtue] (1.668-69). Few things more vividly exemplify Lucan's jumbled cosmos than the semantic misadventures that befall virtus during the course of his epic. For him, virtus is a paradigm of disorder; I intend here to search for the order in its presentation.

As a governing term of my inquiry, nihilism must not be allowed to fall victim to itself. In the spirit of Lucan's own paradox, therefore, I begin by defending it against the very semantic indeterminacy to which it gives rise. The use of the term nihilism by recent interpreters of Lucan has, unfortunately, been as casual as it has been enthusiastic, as if consensus and repetition sufficed to validate it; the term still needs to be defined and its applicability to Lucan justified, especially since it goes back no farther than the nineteenth century, thus inviting a charge of anachronism as well as incoherence. To the first charge, one can readily respond that the mere absence of an ancient counterpart for a modern term does not mean that the concepts covered by that term are not operative in an ancient text, provided, of course, that a close reading can show them to be operative. As for nihilism, the term has two possible denotations; it can refer either to the doctrine that "moral norms or standards cannot be justified by rational argument" or to a belief in "the emptiness and triviality of human existence." It is in this second sense that I speak of Lucan's nihilism, for ultimately, as my reading of him will show, he does believe that human existence is empty, that all striving-whether for glory, for excellence, for power, or for principle-comes to naught in the crushing randomness of the universe.

* * *

Lucan's image of the cosmos as a malfunctioning machine has understandably captivated many of the scholars who adopt the nihilist approach. Johnson, for example, refers aptly enough to "the Stoic machine gone mad" (1987, 10). I offer a different mechanical metaphor: the machine stands not so much for the universe itself as for the conception of it that Lucan has rejected. The instrument with which he demolishes the Stoic machine is not the sledgehammer but the screwdriver: piece by piece, he dismantles the Stoic cosmological formulations in order to reveal the nullity behind them.

He begins the exposition of his antirational cosmology in a prominent section of the Bellum Civile's long proem:

Fert animus causas tantarum expromere rerum, immensumque aperitur opus, quid in arma furentem impulerit populum, quid pacem excusserit orbi. invida fatorum series summisque negatum stare diu nimioque graves sub pondere lapsus nec se Roma ferens. sic, cum compage soluta saecula tot mundi suprema coegerit hora antiquum repetens iterum chaos, [omnia mixtis sidera sideribus concurrent,] ignea pontum astra petent, tellusque extendere litora nolet excutietque fretum, fratri contraria Phoebe ibit et obliquum bigas agitare per orbem indignata diem poscet sibi, totaque discors machina divulsi turbabit foedera mundi. (1.67-80)

[My mind prompts me to expound the causes of such great events, and an immeasurable task opens up: to say what drove a mad populace to take up arms and what jolted peace out of the world. It was the jealous sequence of fate; the fact that the highest things are foreclosed from standing upright for long; overwhelming collapses under sheer excess of weight; and Rome unable to sustain herself. So too, when the structure of the universe has disintegrated and the final hour, reverting to primeval chaos, has brought to an end so many of the world's ages, will the fiery stars fall seaward; the earth, unwilling to spread out her shores, will shake the ocean off; the moon, scorning to drive her chariot along her slanting orbit, will travel athwart her brother and demand the day for herself; and the whole unmeshing gear-work of a universe blasted apart will confound its own laws.]

As many commentators have noted, the imagery in this passage is strongly reminiscent of the Stoic theory of ekpyrôsis, in which the celestial fire draws the other elements up toward itself and thereby consumes the entire universe. Hence Lucan imagines the stars falling into the sea (ignea pontum astra petent): in fact, the sea would be rising up toward the stars, but Lucan adopts the perspective of a terrestrial observer, from which the stars would appear to be falling. The world-conflagration, moreover, is a metaphor for the civil war and its causes. These causes, though multiple, are not discrete; instead, they comprise a chain of causation, as indicated by series in the reference to the first cause (invida fatorum series) and further suggested by the paratactic arrangement in which all four causes are listed. The semantic force of series does not confine itself to the first cause, but rather governs a sequence in which each cause results directly from its predecessor. Summisque negatum / stare diu and nimioque graves sub pondere lapsus, then, are both consequences of fate's jealousy, which imposes ruin as the penalty for excess, a penalty that Rome, grown too great to sustain itself (nec se Roma ferens), must inevitably pay. Yet beyond exploiting ekpyrôsis for its metaphorical value, Lucan depicts it as an eventual certainty, as the future verbs introduced by sic indicate. Ekpyrôsis is not merely a cosmological image that civil war resembles but a reality that must and will occur.

Lucan formulates this reality in such a way as to contradict the Stoics' rationalistic concept of fatum. A cornerstone of Stoic doctrine is that nothing is arbitrary; thus, fatum, casus, fortuna, and natura in Stoic Latin signify the providential order and are regularly interchangeable with terms for divinity itself, god being inseparable from nature and reason (logos). Lucan, by contrast, postulates a fatum whose destruction of Rome corresponds to the return of primeval chaos, a concept that has no place in the Stoic scheme. Like everything else in the Stoic scheme, ekpyrôsis is a rational process, part of a regular cycle of death and regeneration. The same fire that consumes the cosmos constitutes the seed of a new cosmos organized in exactly the same way as its predecessor. Thus, even as it destroys the cosmos, ekpyrôsis also inaugurates the cycle of renewal. At no point does it allow the cosmos to become disordered; it is not a disruption, but a rigorous working out, of the foedera mundi, hence "a phase in the life of god." Lucan has reversed the significance of ekpyrôsis, transmuting it into a terrifying vision of the fire at the end of time (suprema hora). Nowhere does he suggest that this stage will be followed by a restoration of cosmic order: rather, he supplants the Stoic model of a rational cycle with images of an irreversible descent into cosmic anarchy, thereby pressing his Stoic imagery into the service of an explicitly antiStoic position: that the universe is governed not by logos but by alogia.

To be sure, in the lines immediately following 1.67-80, Lucan seems to suggest that something can still be recuperated from his cosmic wreckage:

in se magna ruunt: laetis hunc numina rebus crescendi posuere modum. (1.81-82)

Taken literally, these lines state a universal proposition that the collapse of great things is divinity's way of limiting excessive growth. That this law has resulted in Rome's destruction and will result in cosmic destruction is a pessimistic enough doctrine, but it leaves open the possibility not only that we may mercifully die before the final cataclysm but that the cataclysm itself represents the operation of some divine logic. No sooner has Lucan offered this consolation, however, than he begins to withdraw it and to accelerate his nihilistic view of the universe toward the present. Book 2 opens with the complaint that the dreadful events of the civil war were revealed by portents (with specific reference to the succession of bad omens at the end of book 1):

cur hanc tibi, rector Olympi, sollicitis visum mortalibus addere curam, noscant venturas ut dira per omina clades? sive parens rerum, cum primum informia regna materiamque rudem flamma cedente recepit, fixit in aeternum causas, qua cuncta coercet se quoque lege tenens, et saecula iussa ferentem fatorum immoto divisit limite mundum, sive nihil positum est, sed fors incerta vagatur fertque refertque vices et habet mortalia casus, sit subitum quodcumque paras; sit caeca futuri mens hominum fati; liceat sperare timenti. (2.4-15) [Why, ruler of Olympus, did you resolve to inflict on tormented mortals the further distress of apprehending through frightful portents the disasters yet to come? Whether, when he first took in hand the shapeless realm of raw matter as the fire died down, the artificer of the universe fixed the causes into place for all eternity, regulating himself by the same law by which he governs all things, and with the immovable boundary of fate parceled out the universe, which accepts the ages prescribed for it; or whether nothing is ordained, but random chance strays hither and thither, bringing one change after another, and accident rules mankind-either way, let whatever you have in store be sudden; let humankind's intellect be blind to future calamity; let the fearful have license to hope.]

Lucan's position here is agnostic, committing him to neither a regulated nor an unregulated universe, as the sive ... sive correlative clearly indicates. But one of those two correlatives entertains a possibility not considered in the proem's cosmology, namely, that the lack of cosmic governance is a present fact, that the universe might be random even now, contrary both to Stoicism and to traditional theology. Lucan further crystallizes his anti-Stoic position by establishing an antithesis between casus, on the one hand, and parens rerum, on the other-between chance and governing divinity. For a Stoic, this would constitute a false antithesis, since both terms designate the divine logos. For Lucan, however, either chance rules, in which case the universe is random, or there is some sort of governing divinity, but the one leaves no room for the other. Lucan has, in other words, rejected the Stoic definition of casus just as surely as he rejected the Stoic conception of fatum in book 1, and he has redefined as their own opposites these Stoic synonyms of cosmic order.

The demolition of Stoicism's terminological certitudes enables Lucan's nihilism finally to appear without qualification:

sunt nobis nulla profecto numina: cum caeco rapiantur saecula casu, mentimur regnare Iovem. (7.445-47) mortalia nulli sunt curata deo. (7.454-55)

These lines, which Lucan utters just as the narrative of the battle of Pharsalia begins, have proved especially troubling to critics, even the astutest of whom have hesitated to acknowledge the literal meaning of the text. D. C. Feeney (1991), for example, interprets the passage to mean that "the gods exist, but have no care for human affairs, and events in the world are therefore random chance" (282). Feeney ultimately concludes that "Lucan maintains Stoicism's belief in providential government of the natural world; the absence of divine regulation of human affairs is an exposed exception to a comprehensive system" (284). Yet the plain sense of sunt nobis nulla numina is "we have no gods"; the following sentence flatly declares the doctrine of a supreme being to be a falsehood: "because the ages are swept along by blind chance, we lie in saying that Jupiter rules"; and there is nothing in the text to indicate that nulli deo differs in meaning from nulla numina: human affairs are of no concern to any god, because there is no god. Nor is it possible to salvage Lucan's faith by postulating a providence that regulates the natural world but ignores human events. As the dysfunctional ekpyrôsis of book 1 shows, Lucan accepts-for the purpose of destroying Stoicism-the Stoic position that human affairs and the natural world are inextricably linked. If alogia so governs human events as to allow for civil war, then it must govern the cosmos as well. In reality, Lucan's outburst in book 7 fulfills his initial prediction of an aleatory universe; he has pursued his antilogical premise to its logical conclusion.

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As was true of the Stoics, Lucan's theory of language is subordinated to and reflective of a larger worldview. For him, complete arbitrariness reigns in language as in the cosmos, and the nihilism of Lucan's linguistics is, like the nihilism of his cosmology, systematically anti-Stoic in character. The Stoics distinguished four elements of the sign: the sêmainon, or signifier; the sêmainomenon, or signified; the tynkhanon, or external object/referent; and the lekton, or "thing said," "statement." The Stoic theory of the sign thus anticipates that of Saussure in many respects, with one crucial difference: for the Stoics, arbitrariness in signification manifests itself only so far as the connection between the first and third elements cannot be understood except by a speaker of the language to which the sêmainon (as spoken word) belongs, and, obviously, the lekton depends on this connection. What is important is that the connection is always there, even if unperceived. Of course, Stoicism, in its extreme rationalism, cannot admit the doctrine of the floating signifier: in a rational universe, the various elements of the sign must add up; if a sign is incomprehensible to me, it is because my understanding is inadequate, not because the sign's elements are out of joint. To this view Lucan opposes a complete arbitrariness of the signifier, a linguistics in which the same chaos that governs the universe also governs the relations between sêmainon and sêmainomenon. By this process, the traditional moral terms gain the ability to mean their own opposites and hence lose the ability to mean anything.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Contents 1 Lucan the Nihilist....................1
2 The Paladins of Decadence....................13
3 The Futility of Goodness....................59
4 Aemula Virtus....................101
Bibliography....................153
Index of Passages Cited....................157
Index of Names and Subjects....................158