Silence in Catullus

6. “Feminized” Voices and Their Silences, Part 1: C. 64

203 “Feminized” Voices and Their Silences, Part 1 C. 64 Hear my loverly complaints! 64.195: meas audite querellas I n the preceding chapters we have seen how the poems’ impression of being overheard comes in part from the attention Catullus pays to various silences. When he seems to speak aloud, it is in the context of at least one other potential speaker’s silence. Examples of this basic situation have ranged from the pauses that help to structure conversation by making it a true “turn taking”; through the sort of concealment that, ironically, conduces to outrageous poetry by provoking in the poet a desire for disclosure or other violation of linguistic taboos; to the absolute silence of death, whose meaninglessness would seem to call all meaning into question. Whether the arrangement of speakers, utterances, and silences in a poem corresponds to historical fact, including any personal feeling on the part of the poet, is strictly irrelevant to the poem’s success as a fiction. It bears emphasizing that, as a result, silences in Catullus are subject to intentional fictionalizations. I have therefore tried to argue that, as a result, an interest in silence should be reckoned among Catullus ’s most intentional literary acts. In this way Catullus may indeed be described as having a poetics of silence. At the same time, however, Catullus is not completely free to fictionalize as he chooses. He as well as his characters are in a way fictionalized— fashioned—more profoundly by silence. We have examined this 6 204 “Feminized” Voices and Their Silences, Part 1 limitation on the poet’s agency primarily in terms of the problem of expression: searching, as Eliot puts it, for “the least wrong words,” the poet finds his or her personal expression limited by discourses and cultural practices. Insofar as the poet figures himself as an exemplary language user, he must experience this as quite profoundly limiting indeed . Not only is his wonted, wittily ironic language ultimately limited in meaning, but also affected is his own and his subjects’ more fundamental being-in-language. While ordinarily one is called into being by language, a poetics of silence makes clear that one’s being is also defined—literally limited—by silence. Indeed it seems that language or utterance and silence are inseparable: if it is our nature to be heard or listened into being, then the fact that we are variously and ultimately subject to silence cannot but have serious consequences for our being.1 Try as we might to be heard or to hear others, a part of our being-in-language consists in its going unheard. From this perspective, Catullus cannot completely control the silences experienced by potential speakers. Much less may he overcome those silences: in fact he depends on them, via processes of suppression, exclusion , and appropriation. In this way Catullus’s poetics of silence stands to reveal not only the intentionality of his art but also his awareness of the limits imposed on language users precisely as they are entered into discourse. To develop this argument further, in this chapter I focus on poems featuring the voices of women or otherwise “feminized” figures, including the poet himself as he is figured at certain points. In general, we may say that a traditionally masculine discourse, and with it those soundscapes that likewise privilege the masculine, operate in part via the suppression, exclusion, and appropriation of feminine voices and sounds. Although certain women are singled out as having had effects on the public realm, in general women’s entrance into discourse in antiquity was, by modern standards, heavily constrained. This sort of “silencing” has received much critical attention.2 Catullus himself has been a rich source in this connection because of the wide range of his appropriations, including poems and narrative persona(e) who speak in voices ranging over traditional masculine and feminine types as well as more innovative developments and mixtures. We have seen, for example, that in c. 16 (discussed in chapter 2) Catullus frames his sense of an ideal poetry’s wit in part along an axis of masculinity and femininity, insisting that the former open to redefinition in terms of the latter. We have also seen that Catullus may adopt as his own a feminized , even biologically female, perspective more explicitly: in c. 68(a) “Feminized” Voices and Their Silences, Part 1 205 (discussed in chapter 4) he describes his...