Sine Fine: Vergil's Masterplot

Abstract

Sine Fine: Vergil’s Masterplot Robin N. Mitchell-Boyask Kent: Is this the promised end? Edgar: Or image of that horror? —King Lear, Act 5 scene 3 . . . the raging and incredulous recounting (which enables man to bear with living) . . . —Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! 161 Psychoanalysis has not been brought to the bear on the study of Roman culture as thoroughly as it has engaged Hellenic studies, and to date most work has consisted of the psychoanalytic literary study of symbolism or character, as witnessed recently by the Vergilian studies of Gillis (Eros), Putnam (“Possessiveness”), and Mitchell (“Violence”). 1 These studies have often yielded important insights into the Aeneid, and while they provide a foundation for the present examination, I believe that we can now further develop this line of thought by engaging such approaches as the psychoanalytic dynamics of reading, or the function of language in the unconscious, areas outlined in the important collection edited by Felman (Literature and Psychoanalysis) which presents Peter Brooks’ preliminary version of a Freudian practice of reading narrative. 2 In this paper I shall investigate Vergil’s narrative project in the light of [End Page 289] the model proposed more completely by Brooks in Reading for the Plot, whose focus on issues central to reading the Aeneid, such as the desire for the end and the function of repetition, could further our understanding of how the Aeneid works and why, in particular, its ending is so disturbing. 3 I intend this study as a contribution to the larger discussion of closure in classical texts that Don Fowler initiated recently in a more general survey of the prospects for such endeavors. 4 The Aeneid, I submit, problematizes the idea of an end through its deployment of the word finis, and then frustrates the reader’s desire for diegetic closure by merely stopping, not ending, the narrative, despite clear signals of its completion. 5 This inquiry thus engages the techniques of traditional literary formalism in the service of a text-centered psychoanalytic theory of narrative in the belief that the older forms of literary formalism and psychoanalysis are occasionally deficient in their rigidity, their reductiveness, their lack of concern with the relationship between text and reader, and simply because the older forms of psychoanalytic literary theory have been at times, in Brooks’ words (Psychoanalysis and Storytelling 20), “something of an embarrassment.” Far from the idea that a plot is a static self-sufficient entity, Brooks sees narrative emplotment as “a form of desire that carries us forward, onward through the text” (Reading for the Plot 37) in pursuit of meaning, a pursuit that gives pleasure. Stemming from the Freudian Eros of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, this desire seeks, as Brooks quotes Freud (37), “to combine organic substances into ever greater unities.” Our need for coherence, for knowledge, drives us continually toward discovering the “Masterplot” of the origins, unfoldings and ends of the plots of our lives and our stories. A plot’s beginning arouses certain desires and expectations that carry the reader to the end. “The sense of a beginning” [End Page 290] is “determined by the sense of an ending,” and present moments have “narrative meaning only because we read them in anticipation of the structuring power of those endings that will retrospectively give them the order and significance of plot” (94). Repetition, one of the most powerful narrative tools for the pleasurable ordering of the plot, can also be a disruptive, painful force; Brooks recalls Freud’s account of the child’s game of throwing and returning a toy, an activity designed to master the unpleasant, regular disappearance of the mother. Similarly, neurotic patients, in narrating dreams, repeat distressing trauma, attempting to move from passivity to mastery. The pleasure principle thus conflicts with, and often yields to, the repetition compulsion. Narrative repetition both advances the plot and returns it to its origins, or it is a return of some repressed material. Repetition functions as a “binding of textual energies that allows them to be mastered by putting them into serviceable form” (94). Plot, like organic life, striving to “restore an earlier state of things” (Brooks quoting Freud, 102), thus aims at quiescence—the plot’s end...