Exoriare Aliquis

Abstract

Exoriare Aliquis Daniel O'Quinn (bio) Perhaps the best way that I can describe Cities of the Dead is to say that, like other virtuoso performances, it stops you in your tracks. Despite the book's propulsive drive across fields, disciplines, locations, and historical moments, my experience of reading it is one of constant self-imposed interruption. My copy is full of marginal comments, sticky notes, dog-ears: physical signs of stopping to allow thought to catch up. What fascinates me is that when I go back to the book the relationship between these indicator marks and the text is never clear: rather than being signs of summation, realization, or skepticism, they are simply traces of the need to rest and testimony that I did indeed go on. I want to think about the need to rest in a book that is constantly moving by looking closely at the analysis of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas in "Echoes in the Bone," the book's crucial second chapter. This chapter is crucial because it sets the pattern for how Roach embeds his arguments on the effigy and on surrogation firmly in an eighteenth-century repertoire while addressing current social formations in the circum-Atlantic. It arguably sets the expectations for everything that follows; attending to its rhetorical structure, therefore, unlocks much of Roach's modus operandi. Cannily holding Purcell's music in reserve, Roach enters the opera via Nahum Tate's libretto to quickly establish, first, the importance of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain to Tate's play Brutus of Alba, and, second, the degree to which the story of how Aeneas's grandson Brutus loves and leaves the Queen of Syracuse to found Britain echoes Aeneas's prior abandonment of the Queen of Carthage to found Rome. They are two origin stories set in parallel about two ostensibly comparable empires. But Tate's act of aligning Virgil and Geoffrey of Monmouth performs a historical sleight of hand: "The epic account of the Trojan Brute, with its echoes of Virgil, narrates the transoceanic movement out of the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic."1 Tate's alignment of these two stories rhetorically transfers the imperial vortex from one global system to another in a way that perfectly echoes Giovanni Arrighi's account of the shifting spatial [End Page 33] dynamics of capitalism in the seventeenth century; but it also radically alters both Dido and the ground underneath her feet.2 As Roach states, "Although Africa in fact plays a hinge role in turning the Mediterranean-centred consciousness of European memory into an Atlantic-centred one, the scope of that role largely disappears… Dido and Aeneas hinges on the narrative of abandonment, a public performance of forgetting."3 Throughout Cities of the Dead one can discern this kind of argumentative strategy. Roach frequently opens in obscurity—Tate's Brutus in Alba is not within most scholars' working repertoires—and then makes a crucial evidentiary alignment to a more well-known text. The energy of fruitful comparison is then accelerated by an expansion of geographical scope and/or by drawing that energy into his key theoretical concern regarding the relationship between performance, memory, and forgetting. In this case, both gestures amplify the argument to a point where a new register is needed to achieve resolution. That resolution comes from what Roach has been holding back all along; it is now time for music. Citing Dido's final lines "Remember me, but ah! Forget my fate," the intrication of memory and forgetting that lies at the core of the book's argument is now manifest in the opera's most affecting moment: "As Aeneas sets sail for Rome and Empire, Dido's last words seem to speak for the victims of transoceanic ambitions."4 That word "seem" is important. Supported by a detour through Dryden, the argument suggests that the opera at this moment "appositely expresses the agenda of the departing Trojans" in that it stages a sacrificial expenditure of Africa. What makes Cities of the Dead so distinctive is the sudden and very precise discussion of Purcell's ground bass accompaniment for the vocal line of Dido's lament...