|
|
|
|
|
|
|
at a higher level, and see the exposure of Roman 'reality' as a way of legitimating the fictions that clothe that reality: by acknowledging his real position, Horace enables us accept the myths of Caesarism. Or we may feel in a more vandalistic mood, and choose to pick at the fissures and rents in Horace's discourse to stress how this doesn't work, how we cannot establish a stable view of the new imperial world from his poems. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
What the problems of Epode 2 show is that the question of the poem's ending in relation to Romantic Irony is again ironically a very open one. They also show that as always in literary criticism, formalism inescapably leads us into the realm of the political and the ideological. To put it negatively, irony avoids commitment. What does Horace think about his relationship to the men of power? What story are we to tell of his engagement? It is not very clear, is it? More positively, irony can be viewed as a way of rendering commitment necessarily incomplete and unstable. When reality is exposed, we have to come to terms with it: and we may well feel that both acceptance and denial of our fictions are unacceptable. Somewhere in the middle is the ironist's stance. |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
'Despite the difficulties of my story, despite discomforts, doubts, despairs, despite impulses to be done with it, I unceasingly affirm love, within myself, as a value. Though I will listen to all the arguments which the most divergent systems employ to demystify, to limit, to erase, in short to deprecate love, I persist. "I know, I know, but all the same . . .' R. Barthes.32 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Other poems of Horace are more easy to read as relatively straightforward Romantic Irony, notable the famous endings of Odes 2.1 and 3.3. The endings to some of the Epistles are similarly clear-cut in their effects: we meet the irony of the moralist, who breaks the tension of preaching with a joke, as in 1.1: |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
ad summam, sapiens uno minor est Iove, dives,
liber, honoratus, pulcher, rex denique regum;
praecipue sanus, nisi cum pituita molesta est.
In short, the wise man is inferior only to Jupiter, rich, free, honoured, beautiful,
king of kings; healthy especially, except when a cold is troubling him. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
inter spem curamque, timores inter et iras,
omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum.
me pinguem et nitidum bene curata cute vises |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
32 Barthes (1979) 22. |
|
|
|
|
|