I sometimes publish things about Rutilius Namatianus. Since nobody knows who he is, I’ll just link to the wikipedia entry, which is a little out of date but basically fine. As far as we know, he only wrote one thing, which is a long narrative poem about his trip from Rome to Gaul in 417. The title, De reditu suo, is a little misleading, since Rutilius claims to be “returning” to a place he’s never been before.
My girlfriend edits these pieces and says they’re incredibly depressing. I’d say that’s about the biggest emotional response anyone’s ever had to my scholarship. Rutilius himself is about as chipper as they come, but if you dig a little bit – and it’s not just me who’s noticed this – you hit a rich vein of something else. He knows a change is coming to the Roman world, and he’s kind of anxious to get out ahead of it (as I see it, by reinventing Rome as a network of rural aristocrats – descriptions of aristocrats and their estates take up more than half of DRS). What makes this depressing is that he doesn’t seem to realize what deep shit the Empire is in. His world republic of letters is going to get blown to pieces over the next sixty years. Imagine monks in abbeys, not learned scholars in villas.
This is a retrospective view. Still, the question everybody asks – what’s wrong with this guy? – is hard to avoid. It seems like anyone who can claim, in 417 CE, that the Western Roman Empire has another thousand years ahead of it must be dense.
There’s an argument to be made that this isn’t so, since Rome hadn’t lost its major grain-producing territories in Africa yet and since it could still, even now, put larger armies into the field than anyone else. Maybe Rutilius’ optimistic guess might have turned out right, if things had gone a little differently.
Well, whatever. Writing in a non-academic vein, I still wonder why no fourth-century author – not Rutilius or anyone else – seems to have been able to imagine that the Roman Empire might just up and disappear. Even Augustine, who tended to be deflationary about Roman power, wrote as though things were going to go on in pretty much the same way forever. He was also deflationary about his parishioners’ apocalyptic expectations.
Now I’m reading this extremely excellent collection of essays by Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement. The question that gets him going is why modern fiction hasn’t been able, for the most part, to respond to or incorporate climate change. His brilliant answer, to simplify things a lot, is that the bourgeois novel has a stake in things staying the same as they’ve always been. Novels represent the travails of normal individuals against a background of normalcy. If what happens to or within the protagonist is going to matter, there can’t be too much going on in the background.
There are some obvious counterexamples – Coetzee, Stendhal, even (for god’s sake) Thornton Wilder – but for the most part Ghosh’s argument holds, especially when it comes to the kind of ultra-contemporary world-lit you see self-consciously educated people reading on airplanes. It even holds for Ghosh’s novels. I think it holds for DRS too, though for different reasons.
What are the conditions of possibility for writing a poem in Late Antiquity? In Late Antiquity, what is a poet? He’s a person who knows things, and the condition for his poetry is that the world needs to respect what he knows. The DRS isn’t so much a tour of the coast of Italy as it is a rag-picking expedition through the attic of the Roman encyclopedia. Rutilius knows (and tells us) something about everything he sees. Salt-pans work by evaporation. The hot-springs at Thermas were unleashed by a bull sticking his horn in the ground. The city of Cosa was once depopulated by a plague of mice.
These are all basically Roman histories. Without Rome, they don’t scan; only a Roman audience would recognize Rutilius’ tall tales as a form of knowledge. For us, it’s basically impossible to take this poem as seriously as it was meant to be taken. Without Rome, there’s no Roman audience. Rutilius writes within a certain horizon of epochal stability and can’t see beyond it to Rome’s fall.
So that’s another way that a literary form can resist catastrophism. I wonder if it too isn’t operative in the present, and beyond the genre of the novel. You might even say that our everyday spoken discourse depends (though obviously to a much lesser extent than the DRS) on certain fixed forms of knowledge as its conditions of possibility. To talk about certain catastrophes would be to talk about ourselves talking nonsense. This characteristic of discourse might even render us incapable of speaking about catastrophes that have already come to pass.
As usual, I’m going to bring this back to politics. After last year’s election, a friend of mine wrote that history wasn’t a moment towards progress but rather a “wheel of fire.” True enough, but it’s usually a wheel that judders back and forth; only rarely does it really get to turning. When it does, we, like Rutilius, probably won’t be able to recognize or at least to talk about what’s going on. To do so would require us to abandon our very language, which would in a way also be an admission of defeat.
The likelier alternative, as I’m arguing in an article I’ve been working on for a few months now, is that we’re going to have our language taken from us.