Silence in Catullus

5. The Natural Silence of Death, Part 2: Cc. 65 and 101 (with 96, 100, and 102)

161 The Natural Silence of Death, Part 2 Cc. 65 and 101 (with 96, 100, and 102) . . . and address the mute ash in vain . . . 101.4: et mutam nequiquam alloquerer cinerem R eading c. 68(a) in the context of c. 65, we have seen Catullus confront a situation that is intolerable in light of his poetics of silence: whereas the poet seeks to produce charming or witty poetry in response to the sorts of sociocultural silences that characterize ordinary social interaction, he is, like any ordinary language user, stymied by the natural silence of death. As a formerly potential interlocutor is permanently silenced, death quite naturally represents an interruption of conversation, the sermo that was considered perhaps the most essential function of human language and the very expression of human being-in-language. The result of death is a silence that, in a way unlike all others, does not seem to conceal a story that may be told in poetry. For the poet who aims to be overheard saying just such tacit things aloud, the effect is a profound disorientation. Faced with the absolute , natural silence of death, the poet finds not only his expertise but also his efficacy as a language user called into question. Since mastery of language is, in a way, the very reason for his being, his agency, too, is called into question. Janan puts a fine point on this situation as it applies to Catullus in c. 65: “The kenosis of Catullus’s beloveds in c. 68, their reduction to this or that luminous feature as signifiers in an ongoing discourse of love, 5 162 The Natural Silence of Death, Part 2 points forward to a palliation of their loss with other signifiers—with poetry itself.”1 Such palliation is a function of the capacities of language, not limited to poetry, to equate two things via metaphor and to evoke something via metonymy. As we have seen, although this sort of palliation may result in imagery that is artistic and therefore pleasing to the poet who seeks an artistic expression of emotion, it cannot but be unsatisfactory and insufficient to the person whose emotions are at stake. Since this palliation depends on substitution, it inevitably signifies absence , distance, or displacement. In this way poetry recalls and may actually reinforce the person’s feeling of disorientation. Indeed, insofar as poetry is influential enough to set the terms of lived experience, this sort of palliation by substitution risks reifying loss by permanently expressing only desire for what has been lost. Metonymy emphasizes the strict impossibility of desire’s fulfillment. In this connection I have called the death poems “post-erotic,” pointing to their subordination of Eros, the principle of desire, to Thanatos , the death principle. Disoriented by his brother’s death, Catullus seems to displace his wonted desire for sexual, sexualized, or otherwise loverly experience of a certain joyful breadth onto symbols whose narrower scope suggests the person’s and the poet’s feelings of limitation . This is a well-recognized feature of Catullus’s poetry and other ancient literature. Once again we may quote Janan, who refers here to our crucial c. 65: “Catullus models this odd picture upon his abandoned erotic heroines. . . . Thus the image of an abandoned lover—like Catullus himself—superimposes itself upon the lost brother’s image, which in turn floats above the picture of Lesbia as the beautiful goddess. . . . These equations are made possible, in part, by Catullus’s fetishistic concentration on representative features—paleness, borders, feet—as metonymic substitutions for his beloved others.”2 Janan has in mind here a singular image in which Catullus’s brother is visualized in terms of his “small, pale foot” (v. 6: pallidulum . . . pedem). We consider that image in some detail later in this discussion. In the meantime, we may say that since Janan writes with psychoanalysis , too, in mind, the problem with “fetishistic concentration” is precisely that such concentration is hardly meaningful. As the fetish is—emphatically or quietly—not the object of the desire it replaces, displacement and disorientation take over. From this perspective, the death poems are not so much responses to the absolute, natural silence of death as attempts to produce concrete substitutes for the stories that are, disquietingly, not suggested by that mute silence. Thus we saw The Natural Silence of Death, Part 2 163 Catullus in c. 68(a) not so much addressing his brother...