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Article Excerpt
We are surrounded by noise. And this noise is inextinguishable. It is outside--it is the world itself--and it is inside, produced by our living body.... In the beginning is the noise, the noise never stops. It is our apperception of chaos, our apprehension of disorder, our only link to the scattered distribution of things. Hearing is our heroic opening to trouble and diffusion. Michel Serres, The Parasite 126
1. Introduction
The genre of Roman verse satire, inaugurated by the outspoken Republican poet Lucilius, then developed by Horace into a more mellow and cautious form in the era of Augustus, and given a densely allusive character by the Stoic Persius under the rule of Nero, reaches its culmination--at least in terms of picturesque rhetorical power--in the poems of Juvenal. Although they were composed during the relatively benign reigns of Trajan and Hadrian, many of Juvenal's Satires, especially those which constitute the first book (1-5), look back to the far more dangerous times of the emperor Domitian. Given the parrhesiastic character of satire in general, and the foundation of Roman satire in Lucilius's much-vaunted libertas (roughly, "free speech" or "free outspokenness"), it is not surprising that a primary tension in Juvenal's poetry is the relationship between speech and silence, especially with regard to the speaker or the persona who addresses the reader. Roman satire--the only Latin literary form without an obvious Greek model (1)--is a genre whose main preoccupation is subjectivity, and especially how the Roman male citizen subject speaks and what restrictions are placed upon his speaking. Paul Allen Miller has recently encapsulated the significance of libertas for Roman satire as follows:
Satire, then, is the most Roman of genres because it is the form whose subject is libertas.... The subject of satire is both the form's subject matter and the speaking subject who is empowered to forge this hash of humorous observations, personal reproof, and grotesque degradation. As the history of aristocratic self-formation becomes more problematic in relation to changing political and historical circumstances, satire becomes a more inward and ironic genre. Satura is wholly Roman, then, because its evolution is inseparable from the intertwined political, aesthetic, and legal issues that define what it means to be civis Romanus [a Roman citizen]. (Introduction, section 33)
Again, it is Juvenal, writing furthest into the imperial era, who gives the tension between speaking and not speaking its most extended treatment. My purpose here is to examine how this issue is presented in the programmatic Satire 1, with particular reference to the opening (1-21) and closing (147-71) lines of the poem. Together, these two sections of the poem constitute a diptych loaded with directions for interpreting and understanding the fifteen diverse and unpredictable satires which follow in the rest of the corpus.
The opening of any poetic collection demands special attention, and this is especially true for a genre in which how the satirist positions himself, in relation to both his predecessors and his contemporaries in the literary landscape, is always a prominent issue. (2) In addition, it is precisely in those lines standing outside the "rhetoric of exemplarity" which dominates Juvenal's Satires that we should look for points of entry into a text pock-marked with challenges to conventional modes of interpretation. Insofar as we can speak of a standard pattern for the Juvenalian satire, it consists of an introduction followed by a series of exempla, which illustrate or, rather, ram home the point the satirist wishes to make, not only through their linguistic artistry and observational acuity, but also by sheer weight of numbers. In Satire 1, for example, as soon as the introduction ends, the speaker launches into a catalogue of types and individuals he finds offensive (22-35): the eunuch who takes a wife, Mevia who goes hunting like an Amazon, the barber who has become a millionaire, the dissolute Egyptian Crispinus who was one of Domitian's henchmen, Matho the shyster lawyer (causidicus), informers (delatores) like Massa and Carus, and so on. While these exempla tell us much about the targets and techniques of this kind of satire, it is also helpful to scrutinize those parts of a poem which preface, link, or in some other way stand apart from the lists of examples--such as extended narrative or descriptions, direct speech or dialogue, references to the author or the reader, webs of allusion that stretch across poems or books, the introductions, and the "sudden" endings that bring to a halt (even if they do not necessarily "close") most of the Satires. To speak of a "standard pattern" in connection with a genre as free-wheeling and fluid as satire, let alone a collection as variegated as Juvenal's, may seem riskily reductive, but the term is here simply a device to characterize a recurring discursive strategy in the satires, without attempting to erase the fact that Satires 4, 12, and 15 are obvious exceptions to the standard pattern, with 9 and 13 also showing significant divergences. In such cases the rhetoric of exemplarity is held somewhat in check and subsumed into the narrative or dialogue form upon which the particular satire is structured. In Satire 4, for instance, the main part of the poem is the mock-epic tale of how the giant turbot makes its way from the Adriatic to Domitian's inner circle (34-154), and exemplarity is confined, for the most part, to brief but insightful sketches of the emperor's closest "friends" (75-152) that are embedded within the unfolding of the narrative.
2. The Noise of Satire
That satire is noisy and noisome is apparent to any reader of Rochester's lyrics, Swift's Tale of a Tub, or Waugh's Black Mischief, as well as their Roman predecessors. The Juvenalian corpus bursts forth with a memorable contrast between poets loudly reciting and their auditores sitting in impotent, irritated, silence (1.1-6):
Semper ego auditor tantum? numquamne reponam vexatus totiens rauci Theseide Cordi? inpune ergo mihi recitaverit ille togatas, hic elegos? inpune diem consumpserit ingens Telephus aut summi plena iam margine libri scriptus et in tergo necdum finitus Orestes? [Must I always be only a listener? Am I never to pay back for being harassed so many times by the Theseid of yelling Cordus? With impunity then shall that one have declaimed his plays at me, this one his elegies? With impunity shall that huge Telephus have taken up the whole day, or an Orestes that fills even the margins of a big book and still isn't finished even when it is written on the back cover?] (3)
This opening series of questions reminds us that satire as a genre lays great stress on, and is indeed defined by, the questions of who speaks, who has the right to speak, and whose speech silences others as they attempt to speak. Juvenalian satire thus provokes all sorts of questions and anxieties in the reader from the very beginning: who is this shouting at us, and what does he want? It is a discourse that places more emphasis on posing questions than on supplying answers. The way the four questions follow upon each other in six lines, gradually getting longer and more involved, presages how the discourse of this particular poet seeks to close off the possibility of response, to silence the listener, in exactly the same way as the speaker complains of being silenced by Cordus and the other declaimers of epics and tragedies. So, from the start, the satirist is marked by many of the features he imputes to those he is attacking. The opening questions also remind us that the speaking takes place against a background of noise--the verbal, literary, and ideological noise of Rome--to which it contributes while struggling to be heard in contradistinction to it. Our postmodern condition, because we are so conscious of the noise that surrounds us, makes us acutely aware of the noise of competing discourses and of language itself, even as we encounter texts like Juvenal's that are, in one sense, enveloped by a silence more profound than most, because of their temporal and cultural distance from us.
It is worth pausing here to consider more closely what noise is. In addition to its primary meaning of a loud or confused outcry, "noise" carries notions of unwanted interference, of irrelevant or meaningless accompaniments to desired information, of common talk (especially slander and rumor), and of attracting attention in the world. The English word "noise" is thought to derive from Old French noise, with connotations of "strife" or "quarrel", and may ultimately have its origins in the Latin nausea (sea-sickness or nausea). (4) The noise of Juvenalian satire aggressively seeks attention, provokes strife, and makes its readers "feel sick" not only because of its unremittingly high-decibel performance, but also because it "interferes with" the system of categories and points de capiton (quilting-points) upon which the Roman male subject depends for his very being. (5) By submerging the great signifiers of Romanitas (what it means to be a Roman)--masculinity, virtus, the class system, citizenship, amicitia, marriage, etc.--under a torrent of noise, this variety of satire pulls up the anchors which "fix" the subject's identity, leaving him "all at sea." Nautical imagery is common in Roman satire, and in Roman moral discourse in general, especially the notion of the wicked man drowning in a sea of vices; so in Horace, Satires 2.7.6-8, for example, Davus the slave's opening words to the poet run as follows:
pars hominum vitiis gaudet constanter et...
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