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4. Satire as Conflict Irresolution: Satires 1.7
- University of Wisconsin Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
This chapter contends that within the satirical view of Satires ., words may act as the equivalent of blows, containing no more reason and giving rise to no more justice than Billy Budd’s inarticulate fist. The seventh poem in Horace’s first book of Satires, often slighted for its brevity, raucous mirth, and the stupefying pun at the finish, continues to elaborate the program for satire that Horace is constructing in that book of poems.1 The echoes within the poem of Lucilius and of Horace’s critical treatment of Lucilius in Satires . and . place . in Horace’s ongoing debate with his genre in Satires I. The poem’s satiric frame, its Lucilian combatants, and the dark allusion to Brutus each participates in an elucidation of Horace’s ambivalent stance toward his genre and his model, Lucilius. Moreover, the poem’s epic parodies and the implication of the murderous proceedings of the Roman civil wars in the regicidal pun provide a deeper commentary on the human conflict that motivates both epic and invective combat. Horace is concerned with conflict in the Satires, and I will argue that the analysis of conflict that is visible in Satires . is at the heart of Horace’s objections to Lucilian satire, in regard to both its stylistic and its invective nature. But we need to note first that the appeal of invective for Horace is evident. Unlike persuasive speech, which, however manipulative or overbearing , must depend on the needs of the listener in order to be effective, Satire as Conflict Irresolution Satires . If I could have found my tongue, I would not have struck him. . . . I could say it only with a blow. — , Billy Budd invective is powerful speech, a medium through which the speaker asserts himself against another and thus identifies himself positively as a separate self; as such it may serve as a defensive weapon, as Horace notes in Satires . when he compares his pen to Canidia’s venenum (..).2 Though we never see Horace use his speech, in propria persona, in such a way in the Satires, he promises us that he can. And invective has the appeal, obvious in its exposition in Satires ., of sheer pleasure, like the explosion of fireworks , in the tumbling boisterous verbiage of invective exchange; it is a pleasure of transgression, of limitlessness, of speaking that no longer needs to hear, and is a proposition of the self unbounded by the ear’s obedience to another speaker. As . will show, the invective speaker uses his speech as if it were a material weapon against another, and claims the whole verbal field with the obliterating exuberance of his assault. Invective thus provides a source of merriment for its audience, as long as the audience is not the object of its attacks. But while invective appeals to Horace as a powerful tool in the poetic arsenal, his awareness of that appeal is complicated by a consciousness of the deadly pleasures of conflict and of how invective enacts conflict. The dangers of invective for Horace are akin to its pleasures. Those dangers have received a critical exposition in Satires ., where Horace first addresses the problem of his satiric predecessor Lucilius. The expansiveness of invective is mirrored in Lucilius’s stylistic unrestraint. In ., Horace contrasts his criticism of Lucilius, that Lucilius’s verses flow like a muddy stream (“flueret lutulentus,” ..),3 with a boast of his own verbal poverty : “di bene fecerunt inopis me quodque pusilli / finxerunt animi, raro et perpauca loquentis” (–). The gods did a good thing when they made his spirit short on resources, a wee thing, as it were, speaking a few words infrequently. It is a curiosity of Satires . that Horace, who might have simply established himself in the genre of his predecessor with praise and imitation of Lucilius, instead establishes a relation of conflict between himself and his satiric predecessor. He writes what amounts to a recusatio of satire in the genre of satire. Where Lucilius flows muddy, Horace is spare.4 Overtly, stylistic objections are the only ones Horace allows himself to make of his satiric model. Potential ethical objections to Lucilius’s invective practice are hidden in the convoluted arguments of ., concerning the status of this genre as poetry, and the fear and hatred that Horace presents as the predictable response first to satire (“hoc genus,” ), and then to poetry and to poets Satire as Conflict Irresolution (). So in ., Horace mounts a campaign...
