Listening to Encolpius: Modes of Confusion in the Satyricon

CHARLES A. KNIGHT Listening to Encolpius: Modes of Confusion in the Satyricon The Satyricon of Petronius simultaneously fascinates and mystifies, and the difficulties of interpreting it are intensified by the fragmentary nature of its text and the uncertainties of its authorship. The identification of its author with the Petronius Arbiter described by Tacitus is an unverifiable probability.1 The significance and even the spelling of the title have been subject to debate.2 The text survives in imperfect manuscripts, most of which do not contain the Cena, others little else.3 There is little evidence, beyond the numbering ofbooks in several manuscripts, the existence of a handful of quotations in later writers, and several references in the text to lost episodes, thatthe original work was completed in the very long form traditionally supposed.4 The problems of interpreting the Satyricon are still more uncertain. It is apparently suigeneris: we have few other fictional works of antiquity, and none resemble the Satyricon closely enough to provide a reliable generic guide to interpretation. The longest fragment of Petronius, the Cena TrimaIchionis, seems generically and stylistically distinguishable from the other fragments. It is hard enough to describe parts of the Satyricon, but it is truly difficult to describe the work as a whole (especially as we cannot know what the whole work comprises). My purpose here is to address two crucial problems of interpretation, both of which may have implications that extend beyond the Satyricon. One central issue of critical debate is stressed for readers of the Satyricon by the speculative nature of our information regarding the authorship and performance of the work, the extent of classical familiarity with it, and the state and transmission of its fragmented or unfinished text. The absence of such contextual factors raises sharply the question of how to fill the spaces created by historical ignorance. In more familiar situations gaps are hard-edged, and readers can postulate reasons for the deliberate omissions of material or explanations for its inadvertent absence. With the Satyricon one is uncertain about the nature of one's uncertainty because the gap may be an inadvertent omission or an accident ofhistory. One may, in the manner of Fellini's movie, seek to create a Satyricon of one's own out of the textual shards left by Petronius, or one may look at the shards in archaeological terms and seek to recover their historical meaning for Petronius and his contemporaries. Both possibilities are UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1989 336 CHARLES A. KNIGHT appealing, butboth are dangerous. My effortis to read Petronius in a way that allows a dialogue to emerge between the fragments of an ancient text and the uncertainties of a modern reader. More specifically, interpretations of Petronius encounter the intersection of satiric and fictional genres in the Satyricon. Readings of the text as fiction tend to project upon it generic possibilities that may have been unavailable to Petronius. Readings of it as satire yoke it to Varronian models which are hardly as available to criticism as is the Satyricon itself. I will explore these generic possibilities with some scepticism, only to conclude that the place of genre in interpreting Petronius may be more usefully supplied by its rhetoric. In rhetorical terms the place of generic uncertainty is taken by the relationship of speech to silence, but rhetoric, as I seek to illustrate, can generate a reading of the text that avoids anachronism. The crucial interpretive test is to account for the relationship of the Cena to the rest of the text. That test in turn depends on an adequate identification ofsubjects that are common to the work as a whole, in terms of which the moral nature and functions of the Satyricon may be described. I cannot promise that this program for investigation will result in clarity, for I share the notion that confusion is a deliberate aspect of the Satyricon that paradoxically clarifies it and gives it in every sense a perverse sort of coherence.5 But I do hope to specify the nature of the meaning inherent in its rhetoric. The Satyricon's variegated stream ofunresolved action suggests a number of interpretive problems. Encolpius is...