It is time to return to our definition of‘‘programmatic poetry.’’ Programmatic poetry is any poem or passage that can be read as making a general or self-reflective comment on the poetry. Identification of a programmatic statement or poem entails an assignation of intention and a degree of self-understanding together with a generalizable claim about aesthetics and value. In Roman poetry, however, statements of this kind are figurative. They depend on metaphors, figures of speech, performative juxtapositions (that corroborate or ironize). Programs, then, must be read as allegories, which is always tricky, since you are asserting that some thing (some word or image or act) is ‘‘actually’’ a reference to some other thing (poetic values): the book, the girlfriend, the act of giving a poem stands for or instantiates the aesthetic values of the poet. On the other hand, since everything can be a figure for something else, there is no limit to what can be read as an allegory or a figure of speech. Identification of programmatic poetry is both allusive and illusive.
This means, of course, that different readers find different programs, even contradictory programs, in the same poem. Each reading depends upon interpretation and upon the interpretation of other poems that corroborate it. The programmatic poem allows one to imagine the poet and his corpus in terms of a particular selfunderstanding, and requires one to read one’s own understanding of the corpus and the poet back into the programmatic poem itself. This is the familiar hermeneutic circle, and it means that you never know if you have actually figured out the program.
Consider poem 1 again. Above we found in it a figurative claim to certain Calli-machean values and an implication that, just as Catullus’ book was being offered to Nepos, so the contents were being entrusted to him as an ideal reader. As our discussion progressed we noticed that the programmatic term lepidus (‘‘charming, pleasant’’) was also a term for the pleasures of comedy, and that Callimachus rejected the popular comic aesthetic, while Catullus enjoyed playing with it. This required a revision: while Catullus generally accepts the neo-Callimachean program, he also adds to it a Roman sensibility, one in which lepidus marks the fun and trickery of comedy (see further Newman 1990: 111-18).
But there is even more potential for revision. First of all, while Catullus describes the external appearance of his book with aesthetic and programmatic terms, when it comes to the evaluation of the internal contents he is particularly coy: you thought my ‘‘stuff, rubbish, trifles’’ (nugae) were ‘‘something’’ (aliquid); ‘‘whatever a book it is’’, ‘‘whatever sort.’’ Second, within the corpus there is another poet with a lovely new book of verse, polished with pumice. It is Suffenus (c. 22), a man who is utterly deluded about the quality of his verse: ‘‘this guy’s more clumsy than the clumsy farm’’ (14). And then there is Nepos himself: a friend of Cicero and Atticus, member of the older generation, writer of prose history and moralistic biography, who may have enjoyed Catullus but preferred Lucretius to Catullus’ fellow neo-Callimacheans (Plin. Ep. 5.3.6). It’s hard to imagine that this man had any idea what Catullus and Cinna and Calvus were doing to poetic style and aesthetic preferences. Would he have heard the echo of Cinna in the last line? Would he have fully understood what a ‘‘new, slender, charming little book polished with pumice’’ might mean?
Catullus’ description does not allay doubts. To be sure Nepos is ‘‘daring’’ and his work is ‘‘learned,’’ but he also writes of kings and heroes, and his work is ‘‘laborious’’ (a term equated with the farm by Calvus, fr. 2 Courtney). When Catullus asks for immortality, he turns to his ‘‘girlish muse and patron,’’ while Nepos’ work is associated with Jupiter: ‘‘learned books, by Jupiter.’’ But Apollo is the Callimachean god: ‘‘Thundering is not my job, it’s Jupiter’s job’’ (Aet. 1.20). These features create a certain dissonance that is at odds with the claim that Nepos is an ‘‘ideal reader.’’
If the poem is making a programmatic statement by way of reference to Callima-chean aesthetics, Roman comedy, obscure and dissonant evaluations, and an oddly inappropriate addressee, it seems to be a fairly contradictory statement. But there is a different allegory available: Catullan poetry adopts and adapts the neo-Callimachean aesthetics, but its appropriate evaluation will depend not upon what the cover of the book suggests (after all, no reader but Nepos gets the polished papyrus roll) but upon the reader of the stuff inside; and Nepos is as good a reader as one should expect. He shares some values (daring, learning, reduction) but not all (he writes history, by Jupiter, and it’s laborious) or the wit (lepidus). Still, the life of poetry depends on readers who are daring, learned, reductive, and laborious just as much as it depends on readers who are new, and refined, and witty, and carefree. By this reading, the Catullan program is one that is open to many readers, each taking ‘‘whatever this is of a book’’ and discovering that it is ‘‘something.’’ It turns out, then, that the modest, self-effacing language, which lets the reader ‘‘fill in the blank,’’ is also programmatic.
This is a good place to end this chapter, since programmatic poetry can only turn over to the reader the task of connecting ‘‘this pleasant new little book... whatever it is’’ with the poems that follow. What this means is that the very task that programmatic poetry is being asked to do cannot be done. Catullus will not tell you how to read his poetry and he will not rigorously define his values. And, even if he did, you might still be just another Nepos or you might take him too literally, like Furius and Aurelius. This is, perhaps, why the modern languages are so little interested in ‘‘programmatic poetry’’: What the poet says he is doing or thinks he is doing is not
Relevant because it never determines anything, and the meaning of the poem, in which the poet tells us these things, is always ‘‘misread’’ anyway. Classical scholars, who turn to this designation in an effort to fix and determine the meaning and affiliations of a poetic corpus, ignore the fact that such readings always require an allegorical supplement which can only be confirmed by reference to the interpretation of other poems (also supplemented).
The programmatic poem, then, is not a thing that we discover in the corpus, a thing that tells us how to interpret a poet or other poems, but the product of an argument based on interpretation. It is a heuristic device that helps us think in new and interesting ways about poetics. It entails an assignation of self-consciousness and authority, but it does not thereby halt interpretation. Its validity or force always depends on argument and interpretation. But this is not bad news. We should read more poems programmatically, use this figure of speech to help us to figure out our poet. And if what we find is incoherent, then perhaps we are on the track of what eludes the poet’s control or his self-awareness or the flexibility and capaciousness of his discourse - or, perhaps, the lack is in ourselves.
In fact, this is what scholarship does. One critic notices that poems 2, 2a, and 3 suggest a narrative of desire, marriage, and separation: the opening ‘‘triad’’ then becomes programmatic for the implied Lesbia narrative (M. Johnson 2003). In poem 85 the poet claims that he loves and he hates, but that he does not know why: the question and answer present a poet who will attempt to explain to his readers who he is and how he feels (Adler 1981: 3-8). Catullus is concerned with desire, and desire is a lack: let’s read the gaps that the reader must fill programmatically as allegories of desire (see Janan 1994). In poem 12, Catullus demands that Marrucinus return a stolen napkin, a reminder of close friends: but the poem itself memorializes both the friendship and the napkin and so is programmatic for a poetry that replaces a literal ‘‘keepsake’’ with permanent poetic commemoration.
When used as a heuristic device, reading a poem programmatically can open new understandings of the figure of the poet, and the characteristics of his corpus. The only thing that is really at stake is the coherence of the narrative we develop, the persuasiveness of arguments we offer for the figures we see at work in the verse, and the pleasure we find in understanding (or in the illusion of understanding). So, go ahead! Accept the challenge! Read a different poem as programmatic; explore a strange figure of speech or an odd metaphor! Ask it to help you imagine relationships within the corpus that will help you understand the corpus or even yourself more convincingly. And do this with good hope. After all, if there is a poetic program, then every poem should be in some sense an instantiation of that program: if you find the way in which the poem does that, you’ve found a programmatic reading of the poem.
World History
