Henry Day defines the sublime literary experience to be found in Lucan's De bello civili by comparing Longinus’ treatise, early modern theorists of the sublime (particularly Burke and Kant) and Lucan's poetic predecessors, especially Lucretius. Freudian readings of Longinus (Hertz) and Bloom's positioning of the sublime as central to Freud's thinking sharpen the phenomenology of the reader's sublime experience, while its ethical and political dimensions are explored through post-modern theory (Lyotard) and in various responses to modern atrocities. D.'s opening discussion ranges across more ground than will be applied to Lucan's text, but offers a useful primer of the sublime aesthetic experience.
Ch. 2 posits the sublime as the poem's subject matter and primary effect. Its fundamental dynamic arises from the attempt to give voice to the inexpressible, a familiar concept in Lucan studies, here given a fresh framework. Lucan's opening simile of cosmic dissolution (1.67–82) is made programmatic for the totalizing scale and dynamism of Lucan's sublime. D. locates this sublimity in the rupturing of the universe's boundaries and the confounding of the reader's imaginative powers. D. argues that Lucan's discors machina shows the same associative principles of scale and vacuity attributed by Longinus to Homer. The murder of Marius Gratidianus attains its horrific sublimity via its own excess, and by allusions to the opening simile and Ennius’ Discordia. It is proposed that Lucan's idiosyncratic style and syntax facilitate a counter-Caesarian sublimity by withholding ‘natural’ or ‘normal’ modes of representing his victory. The chapter closes by presenting the Bacchic matrona, Phemonoe and Erictho as models of the poetic experience claimed by the narrator. Here the ‘sublime effect’ of ‘surmounting’ the gap between Books 1 and 2 is unconvincing (96), and the matrona seems a better model of the sublime experience of reading the poem (93–8).
Ch. 3 treats Caesar's representation as a subject of sublime experience and as a sublime object. Caesar is associated with the sublime forces of the natural world. He meets the challenge laid down by Lucretius’ godlike Epicurean by achieving parity with the divine and supplanting the genre's traditional gods. D. illustrates how Caesar's sublimity is driven by an agonistic principle to overcome other sublime objects (the Massilian grove, the Adriatic storm, the Nile). Lucan's Caesar is a natural fit for the sublime, and D. is better able here to shed light on how a commonly agreed representation of Caesar works than to present a new model. Stat., Silv. 2.7.66 (to Lucan) detonabis is ignored but chimes with and warrants inclusion among the Latin texts adopting thunderbolts as a figure of literary ὕψος (107–16). The discussion here and throughout is sophisticated and convincing. An atypical exception is the suggestion that Lucan's one word superauerat ‘out-sublimes’ Livy's ‘many paragraphs’ to describe Hannibal's crossing (120). Errors are very few but note (159) that Luc. 10.443–8 is not the second time that Caesar falls prey to fear in the poem: that is at 7.245–8, lines whose language is further developed in the scene at Ptolemy's palace.
D.'s superb fourth chapter presents a differently conceived Pompeian (better ‘Republican’) sublime, constructed out of Porter's ‘exponentially heightened form of remembrance’ (180) and Ankersmit's work on sublimity, pain and pleasure in the origins of historical consciousness (Sublime Historical Experience (2005)). Ankersmit's proposal that contemplating the trauma of violently transformative events can make good the losses of the past offers a particularly accessible point of contact with Lucan's project. D. first treats the sundered identities and suicides in the poem as reflecting the larger historical rupture from Republic to Principate. Greater initial emphasis on Ankersmit and the subject's suicide (at 183–9) might have set D.'s discussion more clearly apart from recent studies of the body and subjectivity in Lucan. The section on 7.385–459 is highly recommended. Here is a powerful framework (co-opting Ankersmit and Longinus on Dem., De cor.) for understanding the narrator's impassioned interjection: for D. this marks the original moment of Roman self-estrangement, ‘of a previously stable identity splitting in two’ (210); here the narrator is transported by an awareness of Rome's greatness on the verge of its destruction. Some minor points: the issue at 7.415 is not that exceedingly great numbers died at Pharsalus, but that ‘pure’ Roman blood was irrecoverably lost. Regarding Rome's wish to forget at 7.411 (cf. 7.849–50) more might have been made of the fact that Pharsalus was, on the fasti of Lucan's day, commemorated as a victory (e.g. CIL 12 244, 248). On Lucan's reluctance to recount individual deaths at Pharsalus at 7.617–18 (209), it would be helpful to note (F. Ahl's point (Lucan: an Introduction (1976), 50–1)) that so few names worth mentioning actually did die there. The chapter ends by applying to Pompey Ankersmit's notion that ‘something's essence is to be situated in what it possesses no longer’. Thus the decrepit ruination of the Pompeian oak only points to its stature and immensity, while Pompey's humble grave achieves sublimity by reflecting the intangibility of his greatness. At 227–9 the sublimity of Pompey's limitless grave might have been contextualized by Caesar's fantasy of a watery grave (5.668–71; mentioned on 152). Some small typos obtrude (at 113 n. 23 ‘7.155–6’ = 7.155–60; at 228 Pompey's ‘turn-off head’ = torn-off).
This is an important and valuable study. It should be essential reading for students of Lucan because it offers a compelling model for understanding the peculiar aesthetic experience of his epic and because it contains a number of significant readings of its most important figures and scenes.
