-
7. Unsatisfying Fulfillments: Satires 1.10 and the End of Satires 1
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Horace’s last poem of the first book of Satires, ., needs to do the work of finishing off the book. Horace does this finishing work partly by summarizing what his genre is and how he has done satire. This summarizing takes the shape of a poetic theory consistent with the poetics we find in all of Horace’s oeuvre, but in . it is done specifically in the terms of satire’s poetic theory. The last poem is an ars satirica of sorts. Crucial to this ars satirica (reprising what he has said and demonstrated in the first book) is the pun that Horace makes on the name of his genre, satura. Horace never calls this poetry satura in the first book of Satires, referring instead to hoc genus (this genre, .., ) or to sermo (conversation, speech, .., ). But throughout book , Horace puns on satis/satura when he is speaking of his genre either as an ethical medium or as an aesthetic/poetic medium.1 Horace’s idea of what is sufficient is fundamental to his theoretical formulation of his satire; this satiric formulation of fulfillment applies to the technical definition of satire, but it also applies beyond that to a larger ethical-poetic outlook. What is satis, what is enough, is defined by the fines—the boundaries and limits—on the other side of which lie excess and violence. Horace’s moral and poetic formulations in book may be seen as belonging to the map of what is within and without satis: health and unhealth, reason and madness, good poetry and bad, even the right and the wrong relation between a poet and his audience.2 So satire itself becomes a genre of boundary markers in Horace’s hands. To know what is enough is also to recognize when you have reached the end. If the last poem of Satires I has the role any final poem in a book has, to finish and let the performance end, then this is Unsatisfying Fulfillments Satires . and the End of Satires a particularly significant task in a book of poems whose theoretical principle has consistently adverted to the need for finitude and boundaries. Satires ., constituting the outside boundary of the book, is itself a speech act of completion. Each poem in the first book of the Satires provides a different context for satiric sufficiency, but . has a double task: to develop the idea of satiric limits, and to provide a satisfactory terminus to his book of poems. Satires . must limit and fulfill both programmatically and structurally. Like each of the other poems in Satires I, this one needs to limit the genre’s invective impulse; but in addition it needs to limit the desire for more poems and, by so doing, end the book. Let us begin with the end of the ending poem of Satires I. The firstperson narrator of the poem (whom I call Horace) has spoken for ninetyone lines about Lucilius, Roman poetry, his poetic competitors, and related issues. He stops short suddenly and says, “Go, boy (slave), and quick write all this down in my little book”—“i, puer, atque meo citus haec subscribe libello” (). Here ends book . This final line has an ironic, undermining effect; it seems a reversal of the poetics that Horace has presented with care and craft throughout the first book of Satires and especially in this poem. In ., Horace gives aid and comfort to every writer then or since, by noting that good poets scratch their heads, bite their nails to the quick, and erase a lot (–). But the final line of . suggests that this poem wasn’t written at all, that it is not a poem but rather transcribed speech, a harangue delivered to an unidentified addressee for a slave to get down on a charta before the speaker changes his mind, or loses the thought, or perhaps something else. So the book ends mendaciously: Horace did write this poem and he probably did turn over his stylus as he composed it. The final line is also anticlosural in nature. The boundary of this poem and this book is made to seem equivocal and arbitrary. Just as in Satires . (the final poem for the first half of the ten poems of book ), there is no narrative premonition that the end is approaching, and the indeterminacy of . is echoed here too. Satires . ended with an allusion in the last line to the poem...