Marius and the Varieties of Stoic Will: "Can the will itself be an organ of knowledge, of vision?"

MARIUS AND THE VARIETIES OF STOIC WILL: "CAN THE WILL ITSELF BE AN ORGAN OF KNOWLEDGE, OF VISION?" By Sharon Bassett (California State University, Los Angeles) Narrative, the deliberate making and unmaking of significance in language , is one of the means human beings have of possessing themselves or of refusing to be possessed. The brilliance and variety of Victorian narrative testifies not only to the genius of the individual narrators, but also to the cultural and personal chasms of un-meaning into which they gazed. Distinctive features of the narrative pattern in Pater's Marius the Epicurean provide an insight into the intellectual and cultural environment of the period we can get from no other source. I intend to work backwards from the narrative to the problems and situations it was meant to address. Specifically, Pater structures the narrative patterns of Marius in such a way as to present the reader with a different impression of the will, especially the stoic will, than was common to Victorian writers and intellectuals , who were often uncritically accepting of Kant's reworking of the Stoic position. When the maturing Marius asks himself the question "Can the will itself be an organ of knowledge, of vision?"1 and answers in the affirmative that indeed it can be, he has removed himself from the stoic ethos inhabited by other heroes of Victorian fiction. Of all the themes that occupy Pater in the 1880s the one which integrates the lesser concerns is a renovated concept of the will. Marius' slow progress toward Rome, his movement geographically and spiritually from the periphery to the center of cosmic significance, to the heart of the social structure that symbolized for the Victorians the essence of civilized—if regrettably pagan—power, represents a carefully worked out narration (or argument, if you will) of the encounter between individual psychic will and the perceived forces of social need. Early in the century, the raw ethos of Byron's Manfred provided a context where conflict could be experienced in a relatively unmediated way. For Byron the individual will in its full expressiveness encompasses, as an inevitable consequence of its unfolding, certain death and destruction of the wilier. The momentary exhilaration of defiance (or, later on, its middleaged analogue, ironic detachment) is the only compensation available for seeing into the undifferentiated vacuity of history. Having been mocked by Spirit ("We are eternal," says Spirit, "and to us the past/Is as the future, present . . ."), Manfred with his bleak gift for arbitrary assertiveness replies : . . . Slaves, scoff not at my will! The mind, the spirit, the Promethean spark The lightning of my being, is as bright, Pervading, and far darting as your own, And shall not yield to yours, though cooped in clay. (I, 1. 153-57) Victorian responses to the terrorism and solitude of Byron's personae (responses that ordinarily do not take into account Byron's own parodie 52 53 version of his ego-mania in Don Juan) were many, but perhaps the most characteristic is Carlyle's much cited resonant command to his readers that they should close their Byrons and open their Goethes. Carlyle's advice popularizes and dramatizes Kant's categorically imperative resistance to Rousseau's deconstruction of secular and religious authority. The forceful voice of sublimation is socialized in Carlyle, and the mind-forged manacles are reforged with the more vigilant psychic ore of the super-ego in place of the mere physical force of the state and family. Kantian stoicism, like Carlylean dutifulness, is a mode of perception that sees human will as a threat to order and rationality as they are embodied in a particular set of social conditions . Culture is to be preserved by snatching it from the devouring maw of the solitary ego. As we know, Pater proposed Marius as an elaboration of and antidote to the complexly received reputation of the "Conclusion" to Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873). And yet its importance to us as a narrative in the present context does not reside entirely in the distancing effect achieved by the late Roman setting. Marius is certainly an apology for Studies in the History of the Renaissance, but it should be...