Auden and the Muse of History by Gottlieb Susannah Young-ah;

Author:Gottlieb, Susannah Young-ah;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Connolly was not, of course, the first to lament the “decline of the west,” to cite the title of Spengler’s lugubrious work, which both captured and contributed to a general atmosphere of cultural pessimism when it was published at the end of the First World War. A similar mood was evident after the Second World War, particularly in Britain, which won the war but “lost” its Empire. Despite its massive size, Spengler’s Decline of the West is based on a simple schema: a vibrant “culture” gives way to a sprawling “civilization,” which collapses as a consequence of its aimless expansion.21 When Freud begins The Future of an Illusion by disdaining to distinguish between culture and civilization, he is directly taking aim at Spengler’s work and indirectly registering its immense influence, which can still be perceived in Connolly’s lament over the “closing time” of the West.22 The appeal of Spengler’s schema depends in large part on a simplified interpretation of classical civilization, in which ancient Greece, which embodies “culture,” gives way to the Hellenistic “civilization” adopted by Rome, as it became an imperial power. The fall of the Roman Empire thus functions as the prototype of declining civilization. But—and this is, of course, an inevitable objection—there is no single “fall of Rome.” Because the Empire split apart into an Eastern and a Western side in the late third century, the Roman Empire disintegrated twice: first in the West during the sixth century and then again a thousand years later in the East, where the Empire, still calling itself Roman but with only intermittent control of Rome itself, had developed a new form of civilization that acquired the numinous name of Byzantium.

The thousand-year reign of the Roman-Byzantine Empire requires a revision in the simplified interpretation of the ancient Mediterranean world. An imperial civilization can survive by making decline into the paradoxical principle of its preservation; for as long as it declines, it fails to fall. When Gibbon entitles his massive work The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he alludes to the split in the Empire, after which one side declines, while the other falls. By calling his poem “The Fall of Rome” Auden appears to amend Gibbon’s broad perspective: only images of the falling Empire of the West emerge; none appear of its declining counterpart in the East. A high degree of semantic tension is thus inscribed into the title. Even as the fall of Rome represents the prototype of all collapsing empires, including the British Empire circa 1947, the name in Auden’s title means what it says: the city of Rome, which is the only geographical name in the short poem. Nevertheless, the concluding stanzas of the poem move away from the singularity of Rome, first of all by using the singular of the noun city to imply a multiplicity of cities, and secondarily by identifying the multiplicity of cities with a destructive force that is strongly associated with the Byzantine world: “Little birds . . . / Eye each flu-infected city” (N 32).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.