Author: JOHNSON, W.R.,
Title: Momentary Monsters. Lucan and his Heroes.
Description: Cornell University Press, Ithaca / London, 1987. 1st ed. XIII,145p. Original lilac cloth with dust wrappers. Dust wrappers partly discoloured. Small stain to tail spine dust wrappers. Edges slightly rust stained. "?This is a provocative and ambitious book which is based upon the author's Martin Lectures for 1984. Johnson displays his customary with and enlivens his argument with a formidable range of literary and critical allusion. The result is entertaining and often illuminating, but the book as a whole is not as convincing as Darkness Visible. Johnson reads Lucan on the poet?s own terms, an admirable basis for criticism of this particular poet, who had uniquely suffered from most of his critics the indignity of being judged exclusively by Vermilion criteria. (?) Johnson focuses upon Lucan?s abolition of the conventional hero, who becomes ?wittily multiplied in a wilderness of mirrors.? Lucan?s epic world is without unity, its structures rising only to be dissipated, its characters inadequate to carry the burden of the action, symbols of refraction and instability. It is a world without logic, threatened with annihilation. (?) In such a world the conventional hero can have no place, for he represents a kind of unity and rationality: the recognisable patterns of the worlds of Achilles or Aeneas are replaced by disorder, in which time and predictability have yielded to chaos and illogicality. To record in epic form the disintegration of the Roman world was Lucan?s ambitious undertaking. Ultimately, Johnson maintains, he failed, for he could not control the diverse and shifting material of his epic of dissolution. Johnson examines the three major characters - Cato, Pompey, and Caesar (?). His conclusions are negative. (?) Johnson?s subtitles to their chapters indicate his negative approach: ?Cato: the Delusions of Virtue?; ?Pompey: the Illusions of History?; ?Caesar: the Phantasmagoria of Power?. (?). This is entertaining, but for this reader it trivialises the poem. Lucan was attempting, however inadequately, to portray Stoic ideals. One may accept the wooden arrogance of Lucan?s Cato, with all the repulsive insensitivity of his virtue, without rejecting the sincerity of Lucan?s efforts to maintain the dignity of the Stoic hero in defeat. In the same way, the ascent of Pompey?s soul at the beginning of Book 9 becomes for Johnson ?Sentimentalisation of Pompey at its most outrageous? (?). If the three leading characters are to be explained in such negative terms then the conclusion inevitably follows that the poem itself represents the disintegration of epic. It has no unity of action, only unity of mood, which is the creature of ?an age of dung, of power become insane.? Johnson invokes Oscar Wilde to illustrate Lucan?s mood of Decadence, which is the stage when Life gets the upper hand, and drives Art out into the wilderness. Lucan?s world is disorder, in which the loss of freedom and rationality have brought with them the destruction of the ordered universe (?). Johnson portrays brilliantly Lucan?s vitality and horror. He attempted to express poetically the collapse of Roman freedom, and with it the disintegration of the ordered world of the Senators Populusque Romanus. But there are ambiguities that weaken this interpretation. (?) Johnson is enthusiastic about Lucan?s poetic gifts, yet he finds scenes ?hilarious? or ?funny?, epithets which undercut the seriousness of Lucan?s anger. (?) This is a most enjoyable book to read: Johnson can weave words with bewitching skill, and even when he is being most provocative one cannot ignore his challenge to rethink comfortably held opinions. Nevertheless, he has not succeeded in proving that Lucan so whole-heartedly dismissed the Homeric-Vergilian conventions. There is still a place for the old-fashioned approach to this historical epic that related it to traditional epic without invoking deliberate destruction of the genre. (?) At the very least this engaging and urbane book compels its reader to think about Lucan.? (MARK MORFORD in The American Journal of Philology, 1989, pp.371-375)."

Keywords: 9780801420306