Silence in Catullus by Benjamin Eldon Stevens (review)

Benjamin Eldon Stevens asks us to see value in silence and to be willing to attend to its meaning by bringing silence to our attention as a paradoxically loud element of literary history. The main thesis of the book, in Stevens’ words, is to show that “Catullus’s interest in silence is an intentional and significant aspect of his poetics: we may say that Catullus has a ‘poetics of silence’” (ix), and then to explore the ways in which that “poetics of silence” shapes the poetry of Catullus and allows new or more developed interpretations of many of his poems. Stevens states that his intended audience ranges from scholars and advanced students of Catullus, of Latin and Latin poetry in general, and of silence to all those “who are interested in silence as it figures in literature and other arts as well as in our lived experience” (ix). There is no explicit definition of “silence” in the Introduction, though a picture does emerge over the next few chapters of what Stevens considers the term to encompass; depending on the context, it seems to cover the absence of perceptible sound, general quietness, the absence of human voices, the absence of meaningful speech, and the forcible silencing, or drowning out, of another person’s speech. Further, in several poems, Stevens focuses on silences “broken” when “something is spoken unusually, that is, when it otherwise is not, may not, or should not be spoken” (8), such as when taboo subjects or words appear in the poems.

The book is divided into seven chapters, mostly organized around several poems that share a thematic connection in their use of silence: natural and sociocultural silence in Catull. 6; orality and sexualized silence in Catull. 5, 7, 16, 74, 80, 88, and 116; poets, poems, and poetry in Catull. 22, 36, and 50; two chapters on the natural silence of death in Catull. 65, 68(a), 96, 100, 101, and 102; and two chapters on “feminized” voices in Catull. 51, 63, and 64. These groupings work well and lend themselves to attentive close readings of the poems that are focused on, though the omission of the bulk of the poems does raise a question about how the “poetics of silence” inform Catullus’ poetry as a whole. Not that Stevens should have gone through the whole corpus poem by poem, but he does not make clear whether we should see this “poetics of silence” as being applicable to most of the poems, in the same way that it has been argued that Alexandrian or Callimachean poetics applies to everything Catullus wrote, or if we should view it as concentrated in these twenty poems he examines, and not really at issue in the rest.

Like many large projects on a single theme, there are sections of this book that seem to be only tangentially related to the main subject of “silence,” or that push the definition of “silence” too far, or that push an interpretation of an individual poem beyond what the text will bear. But even so, the book succeeds in demonstrating the importance of attending to the silences in Catullus’ poetry, and not taking for granted the single, surface voice of the poem as the only possible expression of its content. It contributes valuable nuance to many established interpretations and provides new perspectives on some poems that challenge received assumptions. Stevens draws on a number of theoretical frameworks, suiting the models to the material rather than the other way around; so, for example, he engages with sensorial anthropology (Chap. 1), social exchange (Chap. 3), and fetish theory (Chap. 5).

One concern, however, is that in spite of acknowledging the impossibility of knowing the true relationship between biography and poems, and the issue of persona vs. poet, Stevens frequently speaks about how Catullus feels about or reacts to events in his life and then argues for how that has affected the poetry–even though Catullus’ emotions can only be...