CUP (2016) h/b 175pp £64.99 (ISBN 9781107080850)
This expanded doctoral dissertation explores familiar ground: Virgil’s debt to Theocritus, the relationship of the Eclogues to contemporary events, the supposed literary skills of herdsmen, how far Tityrus ‘is’ Virgil, and so on. There are four chapters. The ‘World of the Work of Art: reading the Eclogue Book’; ‘Worlds apart: dialogue in and on the Eclogues’; ‘The authors of the Eclogues’: ‘Love and other problems: the limits of pastoral representation’. Throughout, K. inches towards the unsurprising conclusion that the Eclogues are a work of imaginative fiction (or ‘fictiveness/fictionality’), in which the elements involved in the construction of a bucolic world are compounded with those of politics and reality, the whole demanding a constant imaginative engagement on the reader’s part. Despite his attempts to separate the different strands of this texture, K. is forced to admit—with some humility, it must be said—that in general they are all present much of the time. After a good deal of hare-chasing, he finally quotes Roger Mynors on the Georgics:
‘All [Virgil’s] material, things read, things seen, things felt, goes into the cauldron of his mind, perhaps below the level of consciousness; and thence it emerges as the spirit wills, sometimes just as it went in, sometimes combined and changed beyond recognition.’
This, says K., is ‘essentially…the creative impulse behind the Eclogues, as I have argued. In Iser’s drier nomenclature, “the text is permeated by a vast range of identifiable terms, selected from social and other extra-textual realities. The mere importation into the text, however, of such realities…does not ipso facto make them fictive.”’
This is a fair example of the level on which this book is argued. K.’s central problem, at any rate to this reviewer’s mind, is his preoccupation with ‘text’, and what he and his fellow critics mean by fiction. Trying to distinguish between the kinds of fiction represented by, say, Virgil’s imaginary pastoral landscape and the language of Corydon’s song throws no useful light on the poems. One has the suspicion that, deep down, K. would perhaps have liked to distance himself from the army of literary theorists he quotes in footnotes of impenetrable meta-language, and to affirm, simply, that of course the text is there and we have to start from it, but that subjecting it to the kind of micro-archaeology popular among current theorists is a pretty pointless undertaking.
Occasionally a common-sense observation does unexpectedly break the surface: ‘The reader is not entirely free. The text does matter: it is not there just to nudge us off onto an unrestrained flight of fancy and then be ignored.’ Sympathetic reading, as Mynors implies, is a matter of holding more than one thing in your mind at the same time. Buried some way under K.’s modish litcrit language there is, one suspects, a sensitive reader, willing to open himself to the complex richness of Virgilian invention, though too often the dry seriousness (solemnity?) of his approach suggests he is unaware that he is actually dealing with poetry. He quotes, with approval, Virgil’s retrospective judgement on himself at Geo. 4.559-566, without perhaps realizing the full implications of the verb in line 565: carmina qui lusi pastorum.
This book will interest theorists who work in the same world as K., but has a limited appeal for schools or enthusiastic amateurs of Latin literature.
Anthony Verity