Readers may be interested to know that a 300-page study of Catullus' poetry has been published on the topic of what the poet has not written. ‘Silence’ in Catullus, it turns out, covers a great deal of ground. As ‘an essential aspect of his experience as a person, a poet, and, more generally, as a being-in-language’, it includes ‘the silences that precede, structure, and follow utterance’ (p. 6). It runs the gamut from ‘the work's own sense of negation, selection-against, and suppression as necessary preconditions and co-conditions of its own being as an utterance’ (p. 12), to the ultimate, natural silence of death, not to mention more difficult concepts like the silence of articulate speech, the poems' sounds ‘as they must rise up from, relate to, and ultimately recede into a background of silence’, sexualised silence, gendered silence, internal silences, pauses, sociocultural silences imposed on characters (including the speaker and ‘ideal audience’) that mark ‘what may or may not be said according to cultural traditions and social controls’, and abstract or philosophical treatments of silence as a theme (pp. 6, 14–5).
S. explores these silences in seven chapters. ‘Natural and Sociocultural Silence in C. 6’, studies a poem to the otherwise unknown Flavius, who wishes to keep his girlfriend secret from Catullus. S. argues that the poem illustrates the difference between natural silences (what cannot be said or what goes unsaid) and sociocultural silences (what may not or should not be said, but could/can be). Catullus requests information, but at the same time Flavius and his girl are silenced by Catullus, while that very silence is the factor enabling the poem's existence. All we perceive, in synaesthenic technicolour, are the perfumed scents, the worn-out pillows and the creaky bedframe. The bedroom in fact cries out, clamat, using ‘the same root found in the kleos of “undying fame”. Etymologically … it is as if Flavius's story is worthy of epic memory’ (p. 28). So vivid is Catullus' imagination that one ‘may think, then, of Catullus truly wanting not his own imagination or even Flavius's story but precisely the sex Flavius has evidently had’ (p. 33). The poem illustrates a theme S. returns to throughout the book: ‘For Catullus … the combination of “can” and “may not be said” is tantamount to must’ (p. 35).
Like much of the book, this is ingenious and thought-provoking but problematic. The roots of clamare and Greek kleos (*kelH- and *k'leu-) are not, in fact, related, and lepido in line 17 makes it clear enough that memorialisation in epic is not the game being played here. Reading silence appears to mean playing psychological sleuth and intuiting what Catullus means from what he does not say; i.e. that in reality he is jealous of Flavius. The motivation for the poem's obscenity is reduced to a kind of churlishness that seems unfair to the poet. The analysis here (and throughout) is free of any reflection on generic considerations that might license the language, what one might call a ‘Silence of the Iambs’.
Chapter 2, ‘Orality and Sexualized Silence’, discusses ‘silences that involve orality, the physical involvement of the mouth in things other than speech, and above all oral sexuality’ (pp. 47–8). This means the kiss poems (5, 7), the Gellius poems (74, 80, 88, 116) and of course poem 16, which is described, earnestly, as a ‘masturbatory fantasy’, a ‘graphical fellacy, as the poem puts itself as words into our mouths and makes use of our tongues to bring its written meanings to others’ ears' (pp. 79–80).
Chapter 3, ‘Poets, Poems, and Poetry’, takes up metapoetic poems, ‘treated less for their language – in a way they are silenced – than as material, as objects that serve in part to figure social interaction’ (p. 83). These are poems 22 to Suffenus, 36 about Volusius and 50 to Calvus. Here we have ‘examples of stories that Catullus does not speak completely aloud but keeps at least partially in silence’ (p. 84). The real focus is on poems 22 and 36. In the former S. finds Catullus jealous of Suffenus' simple happiness and fearful that he is not so different from the inferior poet. The poem ends, claims S., in a call for humane fellow-feeling that saves us from ‘pitiless systems of control’ such as ‘preclusive discourse’ (p. 98). In 36 Catullus is also jealous of Volusius' supposed popularity and perhaps somewhat embarrassed by his own provincial background. Together these poems supposedly show a ‘positive feeling of congenial competition in conversation, mastery of utterance and sociocultural silence together, among peers’, a feeling that ‘includes a kind of sympathy for fellow poets and other exemplary language users’ (p. 119).
Chapters 4 and 5 examine ‘The Natural Silence of Death’ (a phrase repeated over 50 times). In the poems on his brother's death (65, 68a, 101), Catullus finds himself helpless before the absolute silence of death, ‘reduced to traditional modes of expression, and as a result even his poetry can offer little comfort’ (p. 125). While ‘sociocultural silences seem to lend themselves to the poet's investigation or have provided a setting for the exercise of his active imagination’, they ‘conduce to meaningful fiction. By contrast the natural silence of death seems to shut down the poetic imagination by being too real’ (p. 125). The facts of life ‘set a limit to his artistic freedom’ (p. 134), impinge upon his agency as a poet, and Catullus is ‘reduced to a kind of historiography’ (p. 152).
‘“Feminized” Voices and their Silences’ (Ariadne in 64, Attis in 63, Catullus, Sappho and Lesbia in 51) are the subjects of Chapter 6 and 7, specifically the privileging of a traditionally masculine discourse and the suppression, exclusion and appropriation of feminine voices of women, feminised figures and even the poet as he figures himself in what S. calls ‘intersubjective ventriloquism’.
Writing silence in Catullus seems to be an exercise of the creative imagination much like fan fiction; new stories fill the authorial gaps in ways that make it difficult to assess whether the derivative work sheds much light on the original. S. gives a provocative and sometimes uncomfortably psychological and biographic reading of the poet. The poet/persona division is acknowledged but in practice blurred, even by Catullus (S. suggests), since there are times when he ‘could not extricate himself, as a person, from the act of writing poems enough to be able to document’ his experience as a persona (p. 154). By some hermeneutic necromancy it is said of one interpretation that ‘Catullus himself draws this conclusion and, as part of his poetic of silence, invites us to overhear it as an unvoiced concern’ (p. 90). We read about Catullus ‘quietly wishing us to understand’ (p. 5), about ‘his delight in being overheard’ (p. 9), that he is ‘haunted’ (p. 217), ‘deeply invested’ (p. 262), that he loves how poetry-as-peep-show feels (p. 38), that he's an ‘écouteur’. He is overwhelmed by the silences ‘over which even the sophisticated poet has no control, and so out of which even poetry seems unable to manage any meaningful speech’ (p. 46). His poetry is motivated by unsuccessful attempts to integrate himself into elite society, by jealousy of Suffenus' simple happiness, or by a sense of guilt and shame for playing the poet in the big city while shirking family responsibilities back home and wasting the chance at a meaningful relationship with his poor, dead brother. We read that the burning faeces kindling Volusius' bad poetry in poem 36 somehow reveal Catullus' embarrassment of his own rustic origins. A broken grammatical rule ‘symbolizes Catullus’ heartbreak' (p. 182).
‘Catullus takes the fact of language's dependence on silence, a simple inevitability, and makes it a central feature of literature’ (p. 45). I am not convinced Catullus does any such thing, but S. has brought a new perspective to the collection that will certainly spur further reflection on the nature of silence in Catullus.
