SulpiciaAPA1994.docx

SULPICIA AND THE SPEECH OF MEN 1994 APA 1994 Copyright (c) William W. Batstone 1994 The following talk is the exact text of a presentation at the APA in 1994. This text is itself a reduced version of a 60 page + notes paper that has been in circulation since 1992. If you would like to see the longer paper, please email me: batstone.1@osu.edu Since 1994, the long version of this paper has been given at University of Bristol, The Classical Association, The Ohio State University, Cambridge University, University of California, Irvine, and Yale University (I may have forgotten some of my audiences). Appreciation of Sulpicia's poetry has been late in coming, but recently a few male critics have tried to recover her accomplishments: her literariness, her self-consciousness, the rich and complex effects of her syntax. The story, however, has a Lacanian twist: first it was suggested that perhaps she was a male poet in drag; then, it was argued that the Garland poet's two prosopoeia's of her were really written by her. The effort to recover her voice seems to end in our not being able to hear it. My paper cannot argue directly against these positions, but it will be an indirect response. There are three interconnected issues here. First, I am interested in Sulpicia as an object, both in how she sees herself as the object of the speech of men and in how the Garland poet makes her speak. Second, I am interested in Sulpicia as a subject, as a speaker and writer in an obstinately male genre, using a language which, if not male produced and controlled, refers in its common public performances to the world and the prizes of men. How does she struggle with language and in language; what does she say and what does she choose not to say? Third, I am interested in other side of speech, silence; for speech as a formal act of community and power shows its most brutal hand in silence, which is a formal exclusion from community and power. We begin, then, with the speech of men, fama. The explicit issue does not play an extensive role in the epigrams, but as both an issue of gender and of metapoetics it looms large in the back­ground and is the programmatic subject of the first epigram. Here we find a contest for fama inbedded in a thoroughgoing ambivalence for fama: sit mihi fama magis, she begins; famae taedet she ends. Fama is tedium and fama is desired. This division is complemented by another which begins with the rejected report, texisse pudori, and ends with the bold and epitaphic, cum digno digna fuisse ferar. The words of fama are what the poem compos­es and contests. One role for women, pudor and dress, the face made up and the tablets sealed, the bella puella and furtivus amor is rejected. In its place she claims another pudor: nakedness (nudasse amorem), the shared narration of her gaudia, and pecasse iuvat. As fama is divided, so is pudor, and so is pecasse, which becomes a strange form of error: a prayer answered, a debt paid and a deposit made. Sulpicia wrestles in language with the words that will be used against her but this effort to fix fama shows the strain. The speech she attempts to assign to posterity, to fix in monumental language resonant with alliterative permanance, wavers between defiant disclosure and cautious enticement. In fact, it is hardly clear how these words, cum digno digna fuisse ferar, will become the speech of others: "that we have met, each worthy of the other" as the Loeb puts it, or "that I was worthy to have been with one worthy of me." Did she get what she deserved or not? And then there is the colloquial idiom for intercourse: aliquam cum aliquo esse. In what way was she "with him"? Was she merely "with him"? Was she with him in one sense while he was with her in another? Can one hear a scurra mutter a joke? With the report itself so vulnerable to the speech of others, it is not surprising that her claim is tentatively figured: ferar may be "I will be said" or "It could be said that I" or "Let me be said." In fact, her opening claim on fama is also ambiguous. According to the common translations, Sulpicia says that the report that she covered her love would shame her more than the report that she revealed it. This interpretation takes sit as potential and characterizing, makes the lines confessional, and leaves Sulpicia (by her own words) the potential victim of the report of others. But the subjunctive may also be jussive and the lines aspire to an assertive control of fama: "let the report be that for me it was more of a shame to cover love than to unclothe it." She wants pudor in the report and she wants nakedness there too. The poem discloses the elusiveness and vulnerability of the fama Sulpicia seeks and the ineluctable fact that for good and ill we appear in the reports of others. It is for this reason, I believe, that this poem which claims to value nudasse amorem is in fact silent about the beloved. For this reason, her gaudia aspires to become the narration of others, while those others are already a narration: if anyone is said not to have a love of her own, let her tell the story of my joys (a tale with interesting implications if quis is masculine, for the joys are feminine). For this reason, too, there is a gap where Sulpicia's words would be. Not only is a preferred fama or a potential fama not the same as the plain truth or the deserved fama, but there is a gap in her figure of responsive and responsible intercourse: cum digno digna. But dignus of what? She omits the usual epexigetical expressions with dignus because her bold language cannot finally and precisely articulate her claim on the public sphere. Dignitas belongs to the world of men; it is ther right to their prizes -- both when Caesar crosses the Rubicon and when elegiac poets write poems worthy of triumph or of tears. Sulpicia, then, disembodies dignitas at the very moment that she locates it in the idiom of intimate and bodily intercourse. Between the tedium of fama and the desire to be valued, between public nakedness and private dignitas, the poem Sulpicia has written defies and entices; it is tangled in impossibilities, in elusive speech and elusive silence. She talks in the extreme language of nakedness about doing something she does not do in order to preempt the rumors she fears and entice the fama she desires but cannot have. The speech of men is a problem because it is the material appearance of the language of men. Sulpicia's engagement with the language of men has two aspects: the conflicts, like those I have been suggesting, inherent in the language she does use and the language she chooses not to use. Forty lines are not much, but a reminder of what is absent is nevertheless useful: love comes, but there is neither the elegiac tag, heu me miserum, nor the voyeuristic invitation to gaze on lithe bodies in half-light; there is no docta puella, docta poeta, or doctus puer; nor is there a bella puella or bellus puellus -- in fact there is no mention of physical beauty; the Tibullan dream of a lovely retreat to the lovely countryside is rejected: rure molesto. There are no victories over other poets -- in place of the victorious Propertian assertion to Ponticus that when love comes to him, alas, he will repeat Propertian words in vain, we find the generous offer made that if anyone does not have her own joys, she may tell of Sulpicia's. The refusal to undertake many of the standard topoi and cliches of the genre seems intentional, especially when seen in combination with what is said. There is no militia amoris, for instance, but inepta cadam in her fourth poem could have military conotations. Yet while it phonetically echoes ne cedam in line six, it substantively contrasts with the heroic proportions of her male patrons' sollicitude: ne cedam ignoto, maxima causa, toro. Similarly, the topos of servitium amoris makes an elusive appearance. In this poem of duplicitous irony, Sulpicia identifies herself as Servi filia Sulpicia. This is considered by some to the proud assertion of her own aristocratic privilege, but it is also the place where language tells on her and asserts her status, for while her father is always Servius, she is never more than filia servi, enslaved by her status as filia. The same language, however, is for Cerinthus is a system that asserts his rights. Sit tibi cura togae, she says, meaning in part, "Care for the whore." It is an attempt to be indifferent to Cerinthus' indifference. But her words also mean "Care for the emblem of male perogatives" and that is just what Cerinthus is doing, that is the underlying reason that Sulpicia's indifference, real or feigned, cannot make any difference. Men control and care for the toga and what it signifies. These two extraordinary moments take place in a poem that is so filled with twisted and multiple points of view that it is hard to tell, for instance, whether male inepta is the real judgment of Cerinthus, the self-accusation of Sulpicia, or a judgment ironically assigned to Cerinthus. In her second poem, her uncle wants to go to the country on her birthday. She is given no say in that matter and the violence of her condition is reflected by violent meta­phor: an uncle's sollicitous care is figured as a rape which separates body and soul (hic animum sensus­que meos abducta relinquo, 3. 14. 7). When the triste iter is removed and the invisus natalis is changed, the result is the bare assertion, natalis agatur. The unhappy birthday and the rejected countryside are not merely forms of literary finesse, a clever playing with common topics or another, belated exercise in counter-cultural panache. It reflects the larger structures that have fixed Sulpicia, and a fundamental feature of those larger structures is that they do not address Sulpicia. Already in the second poem, Sulpicia takes up the theme of silence which will occupy the rest of the sequence and is most clearly marked by her explicit and implicit questions. She does not want to go to the country, and in her protest she asks Messalla: dulcius urbe quid est? an villa sit apta puellae.... The level of generality suggests a radical failure of communication. What was Messalla doing: nimium mei studiose, she says -- did he think she would like a trip to the country? non tempestivae -- did he forget about her birthday? was he just careless and thoughtless: an villa sit apta puellae? or just acting like a guardian? There is a curious silence spread across this proliferation of possibilites. No account of Messalla's actions is offered because no account was given. After all, you don't need to be always explaining yourself to your neice. The third poem is the so-called celebration poem, natalis agatur. But in place of the Propertian vicimus and his celebration of the power of his poetry, Sulpicia says necopinata sorte, or worse, nec opinanti forte; in either case, there is no explanation, no power of discourse over Messalla, no image of successful rhetoric. But most important, her state, described in the second poem as arbitrio non esse meo has hardly changed: lack of standing is rectified by an avuncular iam licet. If the issue of speech and silence is important, it is because the value, the dignitas Sulpicia imagines for her love, her story, herself, situtated as it is in a world of words, requires responsive and responsible speech to protect it and to give it standing. From questions about what Messalla was thinking or Cerinthus planning, we come to the fourth poem. Here, she conditions her desire to get well (optarim) on [what she believes about] her beloved's desire (si te quoque velle putem). The poem imagines that her own desire depends upon a lover who will take responsibility for his beloved's desires. Yet one wonders why she does not know if Cerinthus wants her well or not. It is noteworthy, however, that she does not suggest that she will die, nor is her morbus the inattention, the securitas, of her lover. This cannot be, as some literary critics have asserted, the Catulluan and the Propertian morbus amoris: that would confound the logic of the unanswered question with which the poem ends: What good will it do to get well if you are indifferent to my ills? The same issue of responsible speech, of the expression of affection which affects the desire of the beloved, motivates the final poem of the collection. Here, Sulpicia wishes that Cerinthus' passion be diminished if ever she did anything as foolish as she did last night when she left him alone out of a desire to dissemble her passion. The poem is, on its surface, a response to her regret, an apology for what was not said and not shown, but its logic depends on the principle articulated in the preceeding poem. Her regret is the sign of her love because she assumes that Cerinthus' desire will be affected by what he imagines to be her desire. But even so, there is a certain inarticulateness about her own affections. She talks more of regret than ardor. That is because the equation works both ways, and while the poem attempts to shore up Cerinthus' fervida cura, she must aver but not aver an ardor which is itself subject to his affections, his fervida cura, and his fundamental capacity to care for her regret and for her desire. The interpenetration of desire, of ardor and pia cura, require that the full expression of ardor exceed her words and remain the implication of what is mutually shared. In this gap only mutual intimacy can speak. Sulpicia's brief sequence of epigrams moves from the claim that silence about her love would shame her more than disclosure (3. 13) to an apology for failed disclosure (3. 18). Within this frame that moves from urgency to regret, she faces and explores the language, the speech and the silence of men. The Garland poet responds with unerring precision to this female subject in an obstinately male genre, to this woman overlooked in the deliberations of men. He takes her name for his collec­tion; his Sulpicia is now dressed in proper poetic style (Sulpicia est tibi culta); she is the object of the gaze of others (spectatum); and his text will now speak for and about her. He plays the literary game well as he preempts Sulpicia's intimacy and Amor with generic indecorum and Mars magne; he renders her a venerable goddess whose erstwhile concern with a private dignitas is resituated in a public festival where she is surrounded by and worthy of the poems of men (dignior est vestro nulla puella choro). She had rejected the country in her epigrams, and had complex feelings about the avuncular permission (licet) that allowed her to stay in Rome; the Garland poet has her propose not only to follow Cerinthus to the country but to serve him there by carrying his weapons (liceat he has her say) and attending his hunt in the conventional fashion of <Bion>'s Aphrodite (Ad. 61). Her desire to publish (nudasse, she had said) is reimagined in this scene as a desire to be caught in flagrante delicto before the nets of Cerinthus. Suplicia's effort to construct an intimate space of responsible reciprocity and to speak in her own discourse is written over with a male voyeuristic fantasy, one which first dresses her and then undresses her, but in all his 114 lines never addresses her. Her poetry struggles with the public worth (fama) and even the possibility of a responsible and responsive intimacy in a world where men, especially her securus lover Cerinthus, remain silent, distant and unresponsive, and in a language that continually threatens to make her again an object in the discourse of men. These dangers and obstacles reassert their privilege in the Garland poet's response, and at one time I wrote that what made speech difficult, dangerous and abbreviated for Sulpicia also allowed him to speak freely and expansively over her themes and words. I concluded that she was reappropriated to the speech and gaze, the silence and securitas of men. This, however, gives the prize, the garland as it were, to the breezy cliches of the Garland poet. However, as a friend reminds me, not only did Sulpicia choose to write and make accessible in her poems the conflicts of speech and silence which surrounded her, but without her poems the Garland poet would have had nothing to say. It is just and fitting, then, that he, the epigonus, has no name, for she is the strong poet and his Garland does not reflect her worth.