Silence in Catullus

2. Orality and Sexualized Silence in Cc. 5, 7, 74, 80, 88, 116, and 16

47 Orality and Sexualized Silence in Cc. 5, 7, 74, 80, 88, 116, and 16 Whoever tells such stories keeps more quiet. Martial 12.35: quisquis narrat talia plura tacet I n the first chapter, an approach to reading Catullus with an ear to his silences was exemplified mainly by c. 6. With silence taking its place among various modalities of speech, c. 6’s self-consciously outrageous violation of traditional linguistic taboo—it does say what one can say but, traditionally, may not say—served as a partial definition of what is, for Catullus, “charming” or “witty” in poetry. As we extend our reading to poems representing a wider range of types, we will expect to encounter both natural and sociocultural silences of various kinds. We will likewise see these responded to, and evaluated, by Catullus and his characters in various, indeed divergent ways. Like the poems themselves, Catullus’s poetics of silence is complex. A first natural step toward that complexity is to consider poems that, like c. 6, consist in outrageous utterance of things that might ordinarily go unsaid in more traditional poetries or in public discourse. This stepwise approach allows us to develop incrementally a clearer image of how that tantalizing combination of “can be said” and “may not be spoken” is, at certain moments, tantamount to “must be spoken aloud”: violation of linguistic taboos is virtually an obligation for the innovative poet. In this chapter, then, my main examples are certain poems interested in those silences that involve orality, the physical 2 48 Orality and Sexualized Silence in Cc. 5, 7, 74, 80, 88, 116, and 16 involvement of the mouth in things other than speech, and above all oral sexuality. These poems form a natural thematic grouping because of how certain sexual activities involve the mouth and thus interfere with articulate speech by precluding it (although speech is possible, another activity is preferred) or occluding it (speech is blocked completely). Since, as discussed in the introduction, “articulate speech” is more or less the ancient definition of “human language,” such oral activities and their sexualized silences involve transgressions not only of linguistic boundaries but also of lines separating human from other, generally lower, orders of being. Just as c. 6 allowed us to raise some serious questions, so too will certain other poems on sexual topics thus serve to get us closer to Catullus’s engagement with other consequential aspects of silence. By way of transition I begin with further consideration of the triplet constituted by cc. 5, 6, and 7, focusing on how an ear to silence helps us to hear cc. 5 and 7 especially for their charged oralities. Our task is to hear cc. 5 and 7 as “kiss poems,” indeed, interested in orality as a source of vivid imagery and as a figure for poetry. I then turn to a group of poems—cc. 74, 80, 88, and 116—all of which insult a certain Gellius for what Catullus alleges are truly perverse sexual activities. This group of poems helps us to understand more clearly how Catullus figures oral sex in particular as involving silence. Since oral sex by physical definition precludes or occludes speech, it imposes a kind of silence; moreover , since oral sex is charged in late Republican Roman culture with anxieties about masculinity, femininity, and power, it is a potent symbol for the politics of performance in society as well as in poetry. Sexualized silence is thus closely linked, in Catullus’s poetics as in other Roman literature, to public discourse. As I will argue Catullus puts it punningly in Latin, there is a link established between rumor, “rumor,” and irrumatio, “enforced fellatio.” All of this is given its perhaps most vivid, single expression in c. 16. As my final example in this chapter, then, c. 16 will serve to put a fine point on the links among orality , oral sexuality, sexualized silence, and the rumormongering or gossip that formed an important part of public discourse. As perhaps the single best expression in antiquity of the difference between historical poet and his poetic persona, the “biographical fallacy,” c. 16 will also help us to draw together certain metapoetic threads and thus to transition to a focus in chapter 3 on silence, metapoetry, and the society of poets. Given these poems’ subject matter, versions of the difficulties that pertained to our encounter with c. 6 may also apply in this chapter. We will see that in certain poems Catullus...