Scholarship on Latin literature could be accused of egomania in several senses, the most germane here being excessive attention to the artist formerly known as ‘I’. But infamously Latin-specific arguments about ‘poet’ and ‘persona’ have burnt out by 2021. And in the world beyond our collective ego, interesting recent work in literary studies has pointedly eschewed the search for ye olde rhetorical-fictional ‘speaker’ (e.g. J. Culler's 2015 Theory of the Lyric). So does I, McCarthy, have anything more to say on the matter?
The answer is yes. This book is a romp through a selection from three poets — Catullus, Propertius, Horace — to sketch some new ways of thinking about the various relations between speakers, addressees and readers in Latin poetry. McCarthy's main contribution is to let go of facile notions of constructed first-person personae, and instead attend to the intra- and inter-poem jerks between two poles of a hugely important structuring binary: on the one hand, ‘story’ and ‘storyworld’, the part of a poem bent inwards and focused on its characters, and on the other ‘discourse’, the part of the poem furled outwards and reserved for its (later) readers. In other words, the project seeks ‘to describe how first-person Latin poems produce their distinctive charisma by intertwining social and literary communication’ (4). McCarthy shows, through a thousand different permutations, how the uniqueness of many of these first-person poems consists in the swing between their orientation ‘not-for-us’ — rooted in their own storied and historical moment — and ‘for-us’ — reaching out to a posterity of readers actively envisaged as not like their contemporary audience. Although the abstraction-prone McCarthy does not offer much evidence of how these poets actually project this different future — I can only think of instances where the readers of posterity are desired as depressingly identical to those of the present, i.e. more boring Romans (cf. Hor. Carm. 3.30.8–9; Ov. Met. 15.877–8) — her introductory remarks in this key are thought provoking; as is the suggestion that Latin poets’ new distributed approach to story and discourse was prompted by their experience of reading a corpus that managed to be both not-for-them and for-them (i.e. Greek literature). By introduction's end, we are fired up.
The rest of the book is a slower, gentler burn. Ch. 1 ‘Poetry as Conversation’ explores patterns of poems inclining towards the ‘conversational’, i.e. featuring a speaker immersed in the speech context of the storyworld, and apparently unconscious of the status of his words as context-transcending poetry. Propertius book 1 is the main event, with Catullus’ different use of ‘conversational’ address brought in as palate cleanser. Ch. 2 ‘Poetry as Performance’ moves on to poem-speakers in the performative mode, i.e. more conscious of their authorised and special status as capital P Poet. McCarthy here pits Catullus’ invectives against Horace's hymnic and dedicatory poems to show up different patterns of alignment between poet and speaker. Ch. 3 ‘Poetry that Says “Ego”’ takes up the issue of poet-speaker alignment again, and expertly explores the different phasing of the two entities in the Ego of Propertius book 2 (contrasted with book 1), Catullus (e.g. the notorious 16), and Horace's symposium poems. Ch. 4 ‘Poetry as Writing’ moves from oral to written ‘storyworld communication’, which interestingly aligns the internal (story) medium of transfer with the external (discourse, later reader), i.e. writing. McCarthy marshals smart observations on Catullus’ and Horace's epistolary poems as parading the mediations, intermediaries and privacy violations of writing. A short epilogue on the situation of Ovid's exilic for-us/not-for-us ‘I’ rounds us out.
McCarthy's method is to use combinations of two or three poems at a time — whether within the same author or across them — to throw into relief her different patterns of animating binaries: story/discourse, for-us/not-for-us, speaker/poet, conversational/performative. The frame and mode are structuralist-narratologist: diagrammatic yes, schematic no. The signature discursive move of the book is a generous ‘both-and’. McCarthy throughout holds attentive to the Latin poem's qualities as trained on both present and future, its simultaneity of social embeddedness and literary long view, even in cases where one might seem clearly privileged over the other (e.g. Ov. Tr. 2's For Augustus). More often than not, this both-and technique works stunningly well, especially at the level of the individual poem: McCarthy's analysis of Catullus 37's mid-poem shift from addressive/storyworld orientation to reader-discourse level is tight and enlightening (123–5), as is her analysis of apostrophe and quasi-sphragis in Propertius 1.22 (74–5). Sometimes, however, the reader starts to lose purchase on how meaningful or useful these categories really are. I for one got lost in a number of dense displays of the ‘both-and’ technique (e.g. the remarks on conversational versus performative modes at 87–8). McCarthy's arguments are certainly subtle and fine-grained. But with the quick leaps between poems and the strange lack of conclusion (a suggestive epilogue does not quite fill its shoes), it is hard to distil a takeaway. Nor will readers interested in the historical evolution of first-person form, or the relations between form and history, find much to go on. It almost seems irrelevant that Catullus, Propertius and Horace wrote in a fifty-year window wherein the politics of the textual ‘I’ was heating up, and there is precious little historical in the rationale for ‘why these three poets?’ (36). For a work of significant ambition, bibliography is also a touch light. But the contribution is heavy. It lies in the first-rate application of an interesting frame to some classics of Latin first-person poetry. More self-work to do; thanks to McCarthy, much more to do it with.
