5. This chapter focuses on Foes ending, a book designed to confront with the limits of the novel form. It explores in new detail the evolution of this work from Coetzees drafts.

An introduction to the book’s thesis of the role played in Virgil’s Aeneid by engagement with the Stoic, specifically Chrysippean, concept of human responsibility or freedom as a means to allow the poem’s gods and heroes to assent meaningfully to providential World Fate. This, it is suggested, becomes a model for Virgil’s guardedly optimistic conception of the Augustan Empire. A bibliography follows of the key pertinent modern literature on the field including works by R. Heinze, M. Bowra, M. Edwards, R. Rabel, M. Schauer, D. Quint, H.-P. Stahl, C. Nash, and J. Farrell. It is concluded that the literature so far has not adequately appreciated the full significance of Virgil’s adoption of Chrysippus’ belief in human responsibility and in World Fate and providence.

The chapter looks at Virgil’s Aeneid and the American Western The Outlaw Josey Wales to identify a Roman and American shared founding narrative of a community of Strangers dislocated from history and place. What emerges from Virgil, and gives us insight into America’s founding experience, is that the connection between past and future hinges on a paradox. The community is defined neither by a lineage of a people nor by a place, but is forged by the experience of dislocation. The sense of a future, which for both Rome and America lie in the promise of a new age, does not rest on a continuity with the past but on the experience of discontinuity. The power of these narratives is that they provide a basis for the incorporation of new peoples and new territory. But the myth haunts the Roman imagination like it does the American. If there is nothing natural, fixed, or visible about who is included as Roman or American, then it is not clear what constitutes a We rather than a They.

Is there room for weaklings in Darwin’s theory of evolution? The “survival of the fittest”—that muscular phrase taken from Herbert Spencer—would seem to suggest not. A more nuanced and counterintuitive picture emerges, however, when fitness is remapped: as a form of mutuality between the human and the nonhuman, rather than an exclusively human attribute vested in a single individual. I explore that possibility in the contemporary novel, a genre evolving steadily away from its Victorian antecedents, and circling back to the epic to reclaim an elemental realism, alert to the reparative as well as destructive forces of the nonhuman world. In Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible and Richard Powers’s The Overstory, these nonhuman forces turn the novel into a shelter for disabled characters, granting them a testing ground and a future all the more vital for being uncertain.

The central chapters of this book focus on the development and growth of insular origin legends over time by studying a key subset of themes that came to take on particular significance within this corpus. Tracing the expansion and increasing centrality of these themes over time allows us to witness the influence that individual texts within the corpus of material containing early insular origin legends had on the development of these legends themselves. Chapter Two focuses on exile, first tracing the influence of the biblical myth of Exodus and the classical legend of the Aeneid on early medieval authors before examining contemporary evidence for exile in early medieval legal and historical texts. The chapter argues that as the corpus of insular works containing origin narratives grew and developed over time, the concept of exile took on central importance. Arising from Gildas’s foundational description of Britain as an island on the outermost fringes of the known world, the centrality of exile to insular origin stories grew after the ninth-century Historia Brittonum introduced the influential legend that Britain’s founding ancestor was Brutus, an exile from Troy. From there, the concept of exile gained increasing thematic importance within insular origin narratives.

In the wood of the suicides, Pier della Vigna, secretary to the emperor, swears on the thornbush that has become his body that he never broke faith with his lord. Though he is not a traitor, his body will hang from this tree like that of Judas, who was also a suicide. What is at stake in both crimes is a breaking of the fragile bond of faith that makes communication possible. How is it that people believe one another’s words, gestures, and protestations? and what can restore a trust once it is lost? This suicide violently broke the bond between his body and his soul, of which his body was the truest expression, because he could no longer make people believe him by means of his words. On what bond of trust can the emperor’s propagandist rely, if words and truth, like body and soul, have been severed from each other?

This chapter investigates modernist biofictions, with a particular focus on Hermann Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil (The Death of Virgil, 1945). Engaging with Virgil’s texts and the ancient biographical traditions about him, Broch’s novel neatly foregrounds the interactions between biofiction, classical reception and the literary, intellectual and political preoccupations of the first half of the twentieth-century. The novel’s title proleptically echoes Roland Barthes’ famous essay on the modern ‘Death of the Author’, self-consciously bringing techniques of intertextuality to bear on the biofictional reception of Roman poetry, as, in Broch’s words, Virgil’s text and biography are ‘continuously interwoven’ (‘fortlaufend eingewoben’) with his own. It is steeped in the author’s reading of Freud, engaging with contemporary psychoanalytical techniques to construct Virgil as a biofictional subject. Finally – written partly in a Gestapo prison – the novel puts biofiction at the heart of twentieth-century political concerns. As the ostensible biofictional entity ‘Virgil’ merges in an interauthorial dialogue with ‘Hermann Broch’, biofictional reading of Roman poetry becomes a medium for interrogating the role of art at a time of cultural and political crisis.