Silence in Catullus

7. “Feminized” Voices and Their Silences, Part 2: Cc. 63 and 51

237 “Feminized” Voices and Their Silences, Part 2 Cc. 63 and 51 . . . nothing is left over for me / 51.7–8: nihil est super mi / C. 63: Attis on the Shore The figure of Attis in c. 63 confirms our impression that, in the context of Catullus’s poetics of silence, feminized figures are subjected to an overpowering silence.1 Like Ariadne in c. 64 and Catullus himself at several points, including c. 51 as discussed later, Attis is heard into being in ways that deviate from his desires and that subordinate his utterances to unmeaningful silence. Like Ariadne, Attis is depicted as virtually disappearing into a background of sounds whose exotic provenance is alienating to the ear. This acoustic alienation serves to symbolize the character’s more consequential disorientation and distance from being-in-language. In Ariadne’s case this feminization is to some degree natural, in that her biological gender strongly conduces to how she is silenced, or even otherwise entered into discourse, by masculine figures. Like Penelope and in a way like Philomela, Ariadne is subjected to a certain silence by virtue of the very poetry, male-authored, that would preserve her abandoned utterance at all. The similar silence that applies inAttis’s case is perhaps more disturbing to participants in ancient discourse for operating with greater disregard for the person. Attis is figured as alone on the shore; meaningful 7 238 “Feminized” Voices and Their Silences, Part 2 utterance is weighed against meaningless sound and found wanting; and we know this since all is overheard and repeated by virtue of the masculine poet’s greater capacity to break certain silences including those applying to feminized figures. The silence experienced by Attis is thus above all a matter of positioning relative to discourse, while biological gender is involved only artificially. Attis was originally a man but has achieved a kind of feminized status by castrating himself. This artificial feminization gives Catullus the chance to show off a bit in his poetry, changing personal pronouns and adjectives—which in Latin must match their modified noun in grammatical gender—midstream to attest to Attis’s new femininity. In a sense, then, Attis contains two figures who are silenced simultaneously: the “he” who has disappeared by becoming “she,” and the “she” who is like Ariadne. Which of these silences more closely models, in Catullus’s view, the feminized silence to which utterance in general may be subjected is an open question. It may be that Catullus himself does not wish to identify quite so closely with Attis, hoping that the latter can serve as a kind of cautionary figure. C. 63 thus concludes with the narrator’s prayer not to suffer as has the main character: “may your madness, goddess, be in its entirety far from my household” (v. 92: procul a mea tuus sit furor omnis, era, domo). But this prayer may be read as suggesting the narrator’s fear that he and his feminized character may not be so different after all, precisely in that the prayer does not assert, as if with any power, but rather asks more humbly for distance. Indeed, not just the narrator but his “household” (domus) is evidently felt to be at some risk, at least in the fiction of the poem. In this connection, we may recall that the gloom of certain of Catullus’s poems comes in part from his feeling, consequent upon his brother’s death, that his whole household has been lost. It may be, then, that he feels himself to be, like Attis, exposed to forces that, if handled improperly, could swiftly and completely overwhelm him. This is emphasized by the way in which Attis is introduced in c. 63, a way strikingly similar to how Catullus begins his own story in c. 101: Attis has “been carried over deep seas in a swift ship” (v. 1: super alta uectus Attis celeri rate maria). Attis would thus serve in a way like Ariadne, as a vivid, literal figuration of the somewhat more metaphorical possibility of Catullus’s own subjection to silence. M A S C U L I N E P O E T A N D / A S F E M I N I Z E D F I G U R E On this reading of c. 63’s opening line, Attis represents one version of what Catullus suspects may await all language users including himself, [18.191.234.191] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 11...