Style is not a matter of form alone. Of equal importance is the communicative function that style performs. The term ‘‘pragmatics’’ refers to a set of concepts and theories that relate to whatever fills the gap between the formal properties of a text (or utterance) - its syntax, lexical semantics, genre, etc. - and how the text is understood to mean something to someone in a particular social context.
Certain pragmatic phenomena are familiar under the traditional label of‘‘figures of thought.’’ These include metaphor and simile, metonymy and synecdoche, irony, puns, double meanings, and personification. All of these tropes are important features of Catullan style, and most are used in distinctive ways. The figure of simile, for example, is employed in a manner that evokes Homeric usage. A typical example is the famous flower simile at the end of poem 11. What makes the image so rich is not the comparison of dying love to a dying flower, particularly as that image may be freighted with a literary allusion to Sappho (LGS 225), but the contextual details and their connotations: the plow, its insentience, the location of the flower, the implication of contingency in the word tactus, etc. Another example, even more elaborate, is the simile at 65.19-24, where the poet speaks of his imagined failure to remember a request for a poem. He likens the request to a suitor’s apple that slips from the lap of a young girl, when she jumps up on her mother’s entrance, and blushes. Every detail in this vivid image is suggestive. Sometimes the poet develops his ‘‘Homeric’’ similes to the point of parody, or almost. A good example is the comparison he draws between the welcome aid given by a friend and a sparkling stream that drops from a mountain-top, cascading down mossy stones into a valley, where it flows across a road crowded with people, to succor the weary traveler midst his sweat, while the oppressive heat cracks the burnt-dry fields all around (68.57-62). As the text is punctuated by Mynors, the traveler of this simile is the poet, who in hot passion has been given a place by his friend to keep a tryst with a married lady. The simile seems too grand for the context, unless perhaps the poet is playing with the trope for humorous effect. Why, for example, is the traveler’s road crowded with other people? Later in the same poem, in a particularly elaborate development of the multiple ‘‘Homeric’’ simile, the poet likens the love of Laodamia to a series of richly detailed vignettes that combine
Recherche Greek mythology and geography with the Roman law of succession, Roman testamentary practice, and the love-making of doves (68.107-23). In these and other examples Catullus displays his virtuosity with a traditional literary device, and thereby ‘‘says’’ something about the nature of his art. Space will not permit a detailed examination of other figures of thought, but it should be noted in passing that irony is an especially prominent trope in Catullus. Along with puns, vivid sexual metaphors, and double meanings, it is crucial to the poetic persona he creates.
Framing the discourse
Another important pragmatic phenomenon in Catullus is the poet’s use of coded language. The term ‘‘code’’ in this connection is used with the technical meaning that it has acquired in semiotic theory. Semiotics is a discipline concerned with how meaning is constructed through the use of ‘‘signs,’’ defined very broadly to mean anything that someone invests with meaning. For example, a text is a sign, and so are all of the constituent parts of it. How a text is presented is also a sign: e. g., if it is printed on paper or carved in stone. Systems of contrasting signs are called ‘‘paradigms.’’ For example, all of the named individuals and personified entities who are addressed or referred to by Catullus in his poetry comprise one paradigm. Elements of the same or different paradigms can be combined to create ‘‘syntagms’’ that are themselves signs (e. g., the pair ‘‘Furius and Aurelius’’), which can themselves be combined to create other syntagms (e. g., poem 11), etc. In order for a sign to have even approximately the same meaning for two individuals, the individuals must share the convention that assigns such a meaning to that sign. The sharing of interpretive conventions is called a ‘‘code’’ by semioticians. Readers who seek to ‘‘understand’’ a text ‘‘on its own terms’’ are ‘‘positioned’’ by the codes it makes use of. In a sense they accept, at least for the act of interpretation, the way the paradigms that underlie those codes ‘‘frame’’ reality.
The poetry of Catullus presents the reader with a number of different codes that are discussed in other chapters of this book. For example, terms like lepidus, nuga, doctus, and venustus fall within a code of ‘‘neoteric’’ aesthetics discussed by Johnson in chapter 10. The poet’s learned intertextual references constitute another code, discussed by DeBrohun in chapter 16. Still other codes are the argot of social relations discussed by Krostenko in chapter 12, and the use of scurrility and obscenity as invective, discussed by Tatum in chapter 18. Many of the semiotic paradigms that underlie coded language in Catullus frame a reality of stark oppositions. For example, poem 5 imagines a world peopled by two groups of individuals: ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them.’’ This paradigm is aligned with other paradigms of semantic oppositions in the same poem: alive and dead, young and old, rumor and truth, valuable and worthless, day and night, now and hereafter. Many of these same paradigms are invoked in other poems that frame the poet’s reality in terms of similar complementarities: e. g., the poet and his poetry (16), keeping and breaking faith (30), whore and respectable woman (42), optimus and pessimus (49), appearance and reality (67), truth and lies (70), friend and enemy (77), betrayer and betrayed (83), betrayal and loyalty (91), old poetry and new poetry (95), and others. In such a world there is no place for intermediate states of being, a condition that creates an illusion of passionate intensity in the poetry. The same condition accentuates the anomalous and untenable position of the poetic persona in, e. g., poems 85 (Odi et amo), 8 (Miser Catulle), 72 (Dicebas quondam), 75 (Huc est mens), 76 (Siqua recordanti), etc. All of these poems involve a persona who in a sense does not ‘‘fit’’ the dominant paradigms. A particularly good example of this tension is poem 22, where a large number of mutually reinforcing binary paradigms13 are linked together, only to be called into question at the poem’s conclusion. If we all might be Suffenus, then perhaps the poet’s other realities too are problematic.
Although the meaning attached to any sign is arbitrary and conventional, some assignments of meaning will appear to be more ‘‘natural’’ than others in particular cultures. This happens when the arbitrary linkage between signifier and signified is so familiar as to be invisible by the norms of a given social ideology. For example, as Skinner (1991: 3) has argued in discussing the function of obscenity in Catullus, the alignment of masculinity with political and social power in Greek and Roman elite societies ‘‘made it natural...to categorize asymmetrical social relations in terms of gender and to use images of sexual intercourse to articulate messages of political and financial success or failure.’’ Yet despite this appropriation of a conventional linkage, a characteristic quality of Catullan poetry is the problematizing of certain ‘‘natural’’ meanings in Roman social ideologies. As has often been noted, for example, the poet tends to blur the opposition of male vs. female and the associated paradigm of dominant vs. submissive. He does this explicitly in poem 63 and implicitly throughout the corpus by casting himself as the abandoned and helpless lover in his affair with Lesbia. This is a posture very different from the exaggerated masculinity of, e. g., poems 16 and 21.
Positioning the reader
The reader of Catullus’ poetry is explicitly acknowledged in only a single poem: 14b, an elusive fragment that characterizes the lectores as likely to be shocked by the poet’s inept compositions. Everywhere else the reader is, so to speak, left to find his or her own relationship to this highly prominent poetic persona. Although there might be disagreement on details, approximately 75 percent of the poems are explicitly addressed to someone other than the reader.14 The effect is to position the reader as an outsider who overhears a conversation, perhaps surreptitiously. In six of these poems (8,46, 51, 52, 76, 79) the addressee is Catullus himself, creating an even more illicit role for the reader, who is now in a position similar to that of a person glancing through someone else’s private diary. In 24 poems (3, 4, 10, 34, 41, 42, 53, 61, 62, 67, 70, 73, 83, 85, 86, 87, 92, 94, 95, 95b, 97, 100, 104, 114) the reader is the implied addressee or implicitly among a group of addressees.15 In these poems the reader is positioned as someone whom the poet knows, or is at any rate aware of. The remaining 14 poems (45, 57, 59, 63, 64, 66, 74, 78, 84, 89, 90, 105, 106, 115) are ‘‘public,’’ in the sense of being addressed to everyone or to no one in particular. In these poems the poet refers neither to himself nor to an addressee, and the reader is in the position of someone viewing a work of publicly displayed art, or reading an inscription on a building or anonymous graffito on a wall. The reader’s differing roles necessarily entail differences in how the poetry is engaged. In self-address, the poet’s candor or sincerity will seem complete; in an anonymous screed, the reader’s detached or amused skepticism will be at its greatest. Where the reader is put in the place of overhearing a private communication, she or he will be disposed to impute a context of ‘‘real’’ experiences and ‘‘actual’’ references to everything in the poem. Catullus is keenly aware of this pragmatic dimension to his poetry, and often exploits it within individual poems and groups of poems to shape their effects.
World History
