Hiding in Plain Sight: The Satirist Who Wouldn't Be Seen

Abstract

Hiding in Plain Sight: The Satirist Who Wouldn’t Be Seen* DAN HOOLEY Hamlet’s Juvenal is a “satirical rogue,” who “says here that old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plumtree gum and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams” (Hamlet, II.1.193–96). The dig at the young prince’s interlocutor Polonius is satirically reinforced to sharpen the point: “yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down, for yourself, sir, should be as old as I am, if like a crab you could go backward.” Polonius, feeling the barb of Hamlet’s Juvenal, has wit enough left to recognize the “method” in Hamlet’s madness even while remaining largely at sea in the disrupted world focalized and finally imposed by Hamlet’s grief-addled mind. One dynastic murder and, for Hamlet, nothing can be the same; his personal revolution explodes the fatuous adages of platitudinous old age, the empty reassurances of restored status quo. Juvenal here is of Hamlet’s party, put to good revolutionary use, but how different he is from the Juvenal classicists have lately seen, the xenophobic, discontented, and displaced rentier who rails eloquently, pointedly, wittily against all elements of the new Rome: Greeks, Jews, Egyptians, liberated women, upstarts, the new learning, new rhetoric, the crowded, dangerous, bewildering, mad city itself. Juvenal is useful to us this way; he can be, historically has been, employed in the service of any number of causes and disposi- *James Uden, The Invisible Satirist: Juvenal and Second-Century Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). xi + 260 pages. arion 23.3 winter 2016 tions. Early church fathers found his language useful in Christian denunciation; the Pléiade poets found him helpful for their vernacular revolution in French poetry; the early 17th century in England employed his sharp epigram in its own satire and invective, while the 18th century found in Juvenal the very model of the truth-to-power patriot. All that is possible, in part, because there is in fact so little of personal identity known about the poet: a few references (probably) to our Juvenal in Martial, scattered pieces of dubious epigraphical and biographical evidence elsewhere. In this regard he differs fundamentally from his predecessors in Roman verse satire, all of whom have some kind of verifiable life outside their own verses; Horace most especially, of course, but even Lucilius and Persius can be triangulated from other sources. But what is “known” is not the real issue. Our other satirists write from within an identity, both real and crafted for public consumption. However scholars qualify and question those identities, and they do a lot of that, we do know that these are faces meant for readers, and are crucial parts of the puzzles the satires offer us. Juvenal too presents faces, but they are never anchored to a systematic autobiographical narrative, never (beyond referencing a rhetorical education) self-referential or identifying, and they contort to different, inconsistent expressions that are hard to read: a smirk, cynical laugh, a grimace, a poisonous glare, a disapproving frown, a wink that says, or may say, this is not what he means at all. So that what Juvenal may mean, or intend to mean, is the part criticism has to fill in on its own. “Is Juvenal a moralist?” H. A. Mason once famously asked. “No” was his answer, distancing his conclusions from a longstanding tradition of ostensible “moral” principle somewhere near the real character of Juvenal. Further criticism of a few years ago, abandoning that assumption of central morality, posited a maker of masks, evolving or metamorphosing masks that occluded real intention and identity but presented coherent personae in various stages of the Satires. “Juvenal” could thus be distanced from the more obnoxious hiding in plain sight 124 passages of his satires, and his satirical program rendered all the more subtle and sophisticated for that. Others have sought to understand Juvenal through his manipulations of his chosen genre. The real and identifiable generic themes, manners, dispositions—and these the poet does conspicuously reference—offer keys to the larger goals of the...