Silence in Catullus

4. The Natural Silence of Death, Part 1: Cc. 65 and 68 (a)

123 The Natural Silence of Death, Part 1 Cc. 65 and 68(a) The silence of those infinite spaces terrifies me. Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670 I n the poems considered in the preceding chapters, we have seen Catullus responding to silences that are primarily sociocultural. As they take place between or among members of a given society, such silences are open to manipulation and representation by a skillful practitioner of cultural tradition like our learned poet. Listening for such poeticized silences has helped us to understand especially how Catullus’s occasional poems give so vivid an impression of being overheard. From the perspective advanced in this book, part of those poems’ authenticity consists in their seeming to be in direct response to, and to come directly out of, the silence of other potential speakers. The figure of the poet as speaking subject thus gains in realism, or what we might call conversational verisimilitude, as he is arranged among potential interlocutors who are, at the poem’s dramatic moment, “actually” silent for one reason or another. Of course, a given poem’s arrangement of speakers need not correspond to any historical fact. Mostly we are not in a position to decide. For our purposes, however, it is enough that poems do represent plausible moments of utterance and its necessary, complementary silence. As such they may indeed be listened to for their silences. I have been arguing, moreover, that this purpose of ours is not an imposition but matches an aspect of Catullus’s poetics. As we have seen, 4 124 The Natural Silence of Death, Part 1 poem by poem he varies the relevant silences among plausibly factual and almost certainly fictional, explicit or implicit, congenial or charged. Not every poem acknowledges its speaker’s dependence on a certain silence, and only a few seem to treat silence as a theme. But among those few are poems of metapoetic import and programmatic importance to Catullus’s corpus. Nor must Catullus treat silence explicitly in order to signal its importance. Especially in chapter 3 we saw poems in which he figures himself as engaging in complex, ironic concealments and quiet disclosures of his own. In all these ways, I would say not only that certain poems respond to silence but that, more deliberately, Catullus has a poetics of silence. He makes something of silence, doing various things with various types of it. This is a remarkable component of his poetry: he has taken an inevitable fact of utterance, the fact that it depends on a certain silence, and made it an essential feature of his poetic fictions. But even Catullus, a skillful practitioner indeed, can only do so much. If he is thus able to manipulate sociocultural silences in his poems , he reaches a limit—as poetry, language, utterance are themselves limited—in what is perhaps the most consequential kind of natural silence encountered in lived experience, the absolute silence of death. In this chapter and the next, we consider poems in which Catullus responds to that qualitatively different kind of silence: cc. 65, 68(a) and (b), 96, and 101. (For convenience I refer to these collectively as the “death poems.”) The silence that is of central interest in these poems has a sociocultural component, in that at least one person considered to be a potential interlocutor is of course unable to speak; insofar as that person’s speech is desirable, whether to the poet or to somebody else, his silence elicits an emotional response that plays out in social networks and in cultural forms. But in comparison to the silences we have considered so far, the silence here is rather more natural. It is indeed a natural force over which a cultural practice like poetry, and so the poet as practitioner , has no control. Part of Catullus’s interest here is precisely in how traditional forms of expression, even when performed innovatively, are insufficiently expressive in response to such natural silence. In poems responding to the natural silence of death, we will therefore see Catullus at his least ironic. Perhaps it would be more precise to say “at his least wittily and charmingly ironic.” Insofar as he is, as a poet, of course still operating within poetic and other cultural traditions, he evokes a feeling of constraint, against which even his impressive capacity for innovation can seem to make little headway. The problem The Natural Silence of...