Miller Paul Allen - Subjecting Verses

Subjecting Verses

Subjecting Verses

LATIN LOVE ELEGY AND

THE EMERGENCE OF THE REAL

Paul Allen Miller

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2004 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, NewJersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place,
Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY
All Rights Reserved
eISBN: 978-1-40082-593-6

U.S. Library of Congress and British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Sabon
Printed on acid-free paper.
www.pupress.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To Annie, Omnia vincit amor

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK has been eight years in the making. I fear that I shall almost certainly forget to thank one of the countless people who have read drafts of various chapters. Special debts of thanks are owed Micaela Janan and Sharon Diane Nell, who read the whole manuscript from cover to cover and provided numerous comments, suggestions, and much needed criticisms. Judith Hallett as one of my readers for Princeton did me invaluable service, and the entire book has been much strengthened by her exacting and detailed criticisms. At various points during the books composition, chapters have been read and responded to by a wide a variety of friends and colleagues: Chuck Platter, David Larmour, Ralph Johnson, Marilyn Skinner, Sharon James, Ellen Greene, TimMoore, Douglass Parker, David Wray, AndrewCousins, David Oberhelman, and Wayne Rebhorn. To each of you, I owe a special debt of thanks. I also most gratefully acknowledge the classics departments at the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Georgia, Boston University, the University of Chicago, Duke University, and Notre Dame University for allowing me to present the results of my ongoing research to them. Lastly, this book could not have been written without the assistance of a sabbatical leave in the spring of 1997 from Texas Tech University that allowed me to start writing in a serious fashion and a College of Liberal Arts Scholarship Support grant from the University of South Carolina in the summer of 2001 that allowed me to complete my first draft.

I owe special thanks to my teachers, Barbara Gold, Carl Rubino, and Kevin Herbert, who taught me to love this poetry and the adventure of intellectual inquiry. A debt of gratitude is also owed to my parents, Joe and Mary Miller, who have offered me unwavering support in all my endeavors, to Ann who puts up with me no matter what, and to Sam who is five-years-old today. Happy birthday, buddy!

A portion of an early draft of chapter 1 appeared in Towards a PostFoucauldian History of Discursive Practices, Configurations 7 (1999): 21155 The Johns Hopkins University Press and is reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. Portions of chapter 4 were published in The Tibullan Dream Text, Transactions of the AmericanPhilological Association 129 (1999), 181224 ohns Hopkins University Press and are here reprinted with the permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. The first three sections of chapter 5 appeared in Why Propertius Is a Woman: French Feminism and Augustan Elegy, ClassicalPhilology 96 (2001): 12746. Copyright () 2001 by University of Chicago Press. They are reprinted here with the permission of the University of Chicago Press.

November 4, 2002

Columbia, S.C.

Subjecting Verses

Chapter One

TOWARD A NEW HISTORY OF GENRE:

ELEGY AND THE REAL

It seems to me rather that we have to look at failures of

form,the impossibility of certain kinds of representation

in a certain context,the flaws,limits,obstacles,which

become the clue to the social truth or social meaning.

Jameson 1998: 361

It can often be the emphasis on the impossibility of

representation that gives the clue and organizes things.

Jameson 1998: 369

THE PURPOSE of this book is to provide a history or genealogy of the Latin love elegy. That history is problematic and demands a more comprehensive explanation in part because it is so short. Many books have already treated the form,and in recent years several have offered exciting and sophisticated readings of its rhetoric and modes of characterization (Greene 1998; Kennedy 1993; Veyne 1988),but none has offered a convincing exegesis of this subgenres sudden flaring into existence and its just as sudden extinction. Indeed,most treatments have largely eschewed historical modes of reading,except for now outdated forays into the uncertain terrain of biographical criticism.

Latin love elegy first comes to light in the last years of Catulluss life, around 56 B.C.E. It effectively disappears with Ovids death in exile in 17 C.E. the last collection of love elegy to have any observable influence on subsequent literary history,then the entire genre,as an effective and authentic form of literary expression, can be said to have bloomed and died in a mere fifty years (Lee-Stecum 1998: 1618; Albrecht 1997: 744; Elia 1981: 7475; Boucher 1980: 34).

Of course,thi s does not mean that elegies ceased to be written. We continue to have references to occasional practitioners of elegiac verse later in the imperial period,b ut none of them merits appearance in Quintilians canonical list of the Roman elegists (10.1) or Diomedes the Grammarians fifth-century compilation (1.484) or had any recognizable influence on the literature of his day (Ross 1975: 101; Boucher 1980: 164). Thus,P liny the younger mentions a nephew of Propertius (Epistles 6.15.1, 9.22.12), but neither of them left either any substantial record of his work. The genres moment,it seems,had passed. The extreme tensions, which I argue constitute the elegiac subject position,no longer assumed the same forms. Erotic elegys extraordinary public dramatization of a private sphere that both engages socially constituted norms of individual conduct and insistently calls them into questionthe vital contradictions at the heart of its beingwere no longer able to find a place fromwhich they could be directly spoken. Those tensions were not so much resolved as displaced. The Ovid of the Tristia, as we shall see in chapter 8,cou ld only continue the discourse of elegy by speaking from the realm of the dead. What we see in him and those who come after is the specter of elegy rather than elegy proper. No longer possible is the overtly contradictory position of a Tibullus,w ho accepts a life of traditional martial virtue for his patron Messalla but rejects it for himself (1.1; see chapter 4); of a Propertius,who casts his love for Cynthia in terms recalling Antonys for Cleopatra while praising Caesars victory at Actium (2.15, 2.16; see chapter 5),or of an Ovid,w ho simultaneously invokes the power of ius while proposing stratagems of adultery (Amores 1.4; see chapter 6). The ideological space required for this type of openly split subject is no longer available (Boucher 1980: 3435).

Instead,we see a new model emerge in which the subject is always already absent from view,speaking from nowhere,from a place beyond the contingencies of the here and now (Newman 1989: 1501). Persius under Nero digs a grave (scrobis) in which to tell the truth and bury it (1.11920). Juvenal under Trajan dares only speak of (and thus effectively from) the dead (1.17071). The position of the speaking subject has changed in a fundamental way (Auerbach 1965: 24748; Foucault 1984: 105; Henderson 1993: 130; Edwards 1993: 32). As Shadi Bartsch demonstrates in her reading of Tacituss Dialogus de Oratoribus,the place that was once the republican orators,addressing the people in pro