Haptic Poetics

Abstract

Haptic Poetics David Fredrick Sigma is an unattractive, disagreeable letter, very offensive when used to excess. A hiss seems a sound more suited to a brute beast than to a rational being. Dionysius of Halicarnassus1 Catullus 4 is a poem about a retired boat. It does not employ erotic, grotesque, or invective imagery: no Lesbia, no Gellius, no dread Mother Goddess, no befouled orifices, no stolen napkins, and not even any food. It is similarly apolitical—no Cicero, Mamurra, or Caesar. As content in Catullus goes, the yacht's story is less than titillating. At the same time, the poem displays an extraordinarily dense acoustic texture, which makes it seem truly a nuga, an illustration of what the poet can do technically to embellish uninteresting, or at least benign, subject matter. Consequently, poem 4 appears irrelevant to the central issues in Catullus like love, politics, gender, and power, especially compared to the Lesbia cycle, the Attis poem, or pedicabo et irrumabo, "I will fuck you anally and orally . . ." But even in this apparently marginal poem, Catullus' use of sound is important programmatically, as is the theme of reminiscence itself. The long poems, the Lesbia poems, and the obscene poems all display in various ways a preoccupation with corporeal integrity and violation, and the voice is the place where poetry, through its acoustic qualities, intersects materially the reader's own body. [End Page 49] Reading aloud, one takes into one's mouth the language of the poems. If the content is obscene, then the os impurum becomes at least temporarily one's own.2 At the same time, themes of violation and abandonment can be generalized beyond poems with specifically erotic or obscene content to include a "Callimachean" poem like 4. I will argue that the retirement of the phaselus is a metaphor for poetics in the face of cultural transformation and, in this capacity, it resonates with other lost figures in Catullus such as Ariadne, Attis, Catullus' brother, and the Catullan ego. An examination of acoustic technique in Catullus 4 suggests fundamental links, in content and aural aesthetics, between it and poems 63 and 64, major poems that any interpretation of Catullus must consider. Finally, the issues of erotic representation and acoustic pleasure in Catullus must be situated in the physical context of Roman poetic performance. The intricate sound-patterns of Catullan verse, throughout the corpus, shape the voice as if it were a physical medium like stone or paint, rather than an optional addition to the reader's eyes and the words on the page. But the voice, as a form of "cultural plastic," is inseparable from, and internal to, the body.3 This raises the question of oral versus written performance for Catullus and subsequent Latin poets. On the one hand, Catullus' text demands visual study. Close, repeated reading is required to trace both intratextual patterns shared between poems and equally complex intertextual strategies of allusion to prior texts and poetic models. Catullus' self-conscious association of his own poetry with Callimachus certainly suggests that the techniques of writing are much more important than the requirements of oral performance.4 On the other hand, if Catullus' lyric consciousness demands a collected, written text, there is no denying the performance qualities of his work, qualities it obviously shares with much of Latin literature. As Starr has put it (1991.338): Roman literature, then, might more accurately be described as "aural" rather than as "oral." Literature was [End Page 50] appreciated primarily through the ears rather than the eyes. When Pliny compliments the voce suavissima of Piso . . . or Juvenal complains about the epic poet Cordus, whom he calls raucus, a word Ovid applies to the sounds of frogs and asses . . . the voice and the poetry are not easily separable: the experience of the poem was also the experience of the reader's voice. It is worth asking, then, not only how lyric consciousness is written and experienced as text in late Republican and Augustan Rome, but where it is performed and what it sounds like. Catullus' manipulations of the voice cannot be subordinated, in a simple way, to meaning, like ornaments to be congratulated when they help the sense...