7. Cynthia Returns from Lanuvium (4.8)
Maud Gonne at Howth station waiting a train,
Pallas Athene in that straight back and arrogant head.YEATS, “BEAUTIFUL LOFTY THINGS”
William Butler Yeats, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York, 1951), 300. Reprinted by the kind permission of Anne Yeats.
DISORDER
Elegy 4.8 is often called Propertius' one attempt at pure comedy—by general consensus, a successful effort.[1] The elegy tells, in humorously self-deprecatory fashion, how Propertius came to grief trying to revenge himself on Cynthia. She had gone on an excursion outside Rome with a foppish wastrel; stung by her desertion, he invites two somewhat disreputable women, Phyllis and Teia, over for an evening's revel. The party falls flat: the women cannot divert his mind from thoughts of his lover. Cynthia's unexpected arrival on his doorstep in the midst of the festivities brings the evening to a chaotic end, as she drives out her rivals and punishes her lover severely. A wary reconciliation closes the poem.
The elegy has been the subject of unobtrusive but steady attention over the last several decades, culminating in the generous scope of Marion Komp's 1988 monograph that grants half its pages to the poem's careful analysis.[2] Komp's book, like the majority of scholarship, treats 4.7 and 4.8 as a meaningful diptych, with good reason: only these elegies in Book IV unequivocally revisit the love affair that occupied Propertius' first three books, since only they refer to Cynthia by name.[3] The poems' position, side by side in the collection as we now have it, reinforces their singular déjà vu.[4] These facts alone invite readings that deliberately pair the two, and scholarship has diligently elucidated numerous less obvious correspondences of vocabulary and theme that unite them.[5] Yet the poems' conspicuous interrelation underlines, rather than softens, the embarrassment of their order: why portray Cynthia's death in such gruesome detail in one and in the next spring her vigorously alive upon the poet's shocked audience?[6] The jarring effect has been
Of the two, 4.8's structural logic is the most obscure, and for that reason, will occupy our attention in this chapter, as the more vivid example of how disjunct form shades interpretation of content. For example, after the first distich tantalizingly hints of scandal in Rome (“disce, quid Esquilias hac nocte fugarit aquosas, / cum vicina novis turba cucurrit agris”—“learn what panicked the watery Esquiline last night, when the neighborhood crowd ran through the new fields”), Propertius abruptly jumps twenty miles southeast to Lanuvium and begins a long excursus on that city's snake-cult associated with the worship of Juno Sospita. Each year, selected young women from Lanuvium descend a long dark cave, carrying food for Juno's sacred serpent; it rejects the offering if any girl is not virgin, and such iniquity calls down punishment (capital punishment, Propertius implies) on the offending young woman. However, if all goes well, the maidens return to their parents and the farmers shout, “it will be a fertile year!”[9] Propertius leaves us to conjecture how the provincial ritual constitutes an appropriate proem to the Esquiline riot, and in fact, the problem is never adequately solved. Eventually he tells us that Cynthia and her companion went to Lanuvium ostensibly to witness the ritual (15–16), but also denies that the journey had any real connection to Juno's cult: “causa fuit Iuno, sed mage causa Venus” (“the pretext was Juno, but the real cause was Venus!” 16).[10] Nonetheless, Propertius expends elaborate strokes describing the mere pretext of his lover's visit, then unceremoniously precipitates his reader into the scandalous details of her journey to Lanuvium (15–26), only to switch venues and apparent rationale once more by plunging back into the equally disreputable facts of his debauch in her absence (29–48). His aetiological gesture of describing the Lanuvium snake-cult trails away into nothing: the poet ultimately offers no explanation of the cult's origins or significant nomenclature, still less of its significance to his story.[11] Rothstein attempts to explain the divagation as inspired by the fourth Book's avowed aetiological program, a program waylaid in this poem by Propertius' greater interest in Cynthia's hoydenish behavior en route, while Pasoli detects in the detour a more mischievous “autoparodia” of the book's avowed intentions.[12] Camps and Richardson abandon the struggle and classify the poem unequivocally as a love-poem, not an exercise in aetiology;[13] most other commentators delicately skirt the question of how exactly the excursus on the Lanuvium cult fulfills any larger structural scheme.[14]
Yet two recent studies—by José Turpin and J. D. Noonan—surmise that the relevance of Lanuvium's celebration of maidenhood lies, paradoxically, with sex. Both scholars argue that the ritual functions as an oblique sexual allegory, a fitting background to the poem's more explicit sexual content.[15] They unfold a plausible allegory: the cave at Lanuvium (like the city's gates, the object of Propertius' yearning reverie at 48) suggests the female genitalia, while the snake represents the male. The rite at Lanuvium explicitly sacralizes virginity in the service of (agricultural) fertility, but Propertius' concern with his mistress' “unchastity” when she deserts him for an elegant flâneur implicitly colors his description of the town and its ritual site. The excursus thus spoofs his own anxiety.
Turpin's and Noonan's explanations draw Lanuvium into plausible relation with the rest of the poem, yet their insight—that the sexual relation usefully glosses the poem's specific content—can be expanded to encompass more than just the poet's disquiet over Cynthia. The idea of sexuality-as-ordeal summarized by the Lanuvium snake-rite fits the dismally failed eroticism most everyone in the poem suffers. Erotic relations appear in this poem as a series of impasses: Propertius' embarrassing impotence in the midst of his infidelity (47–48), Phyllis' and Teia's tainted and undependable sexual charms (29–32), Cynthia's curiously truncated tryst with the “plucked ne'er-do-well” (“vulsus nepos”) that brings her back to Rome too soon (implying that her dalliance was unsatisfactory) (15–26), the lovers' uneasy reconciliation whose ambiguous quasi-military jargon hints of continued hostility (88). In ironic contrast to these antipathetic venues, sexual innuendo shades a remarkable percentage of the poem (quite apart from the Lanuvium cult's description). Propertius uses the word concubitus, for example—which usually means “sexual intercourse”—to describe his merely reclining with his guests Phyllis and Teia, anticipating what he hopes from them. Scholars have seen only slightly subtler references in Cynthia's deliberately driving through the “foul spots” (“impuros locos,” 22) on her way to Lanuvium—supposed to glance obliquely at her lack of (sexual) discrimination[16] —and in Propertius unsuccessfully “seeking Venus” (“Venerem quaerente”) as he dices, blind to his guests' charms (45–46). The elegy even closes with double entendre: the final distich, “atque ita mutato per singula pallia lecto / respondi, et toto solvimus arma toro,” reads as “and so, once the bed's sheets had been changed one by one / I rose to the occasion and we unsheathed our weapons,” (87–88).[17] Why is sex everywhere in this poem (even spread allegorically over a ritual celebrating chastity) and successful nowhere?
THE SEXUAL NON-RELATION
Lacan—or more precisely, the elaboration of his thought in the work of his followers—can help us here. For example, applying Slavoj Žižek's work on sexuality to Propertius 4.8 reveals that the wide reach of sexual implications in the poem proceeds from (rather than contradicts) its pandemic sexual failure. In analyzing
This universal surplus—this capacity of sexuality to overflow the entire field of human experience so that everything, from eating to excretion, from beating up our fellowman (or getting beaten up by him) to the exercise of power, can acquire a sexual connotation—is not the sign of its preponderance. Rather, it is the sign of a certain structural faultiness: sexuality strives outwards and overflows the adjoining domains precisely because it cannot find satisfaction in itself, because it never attains its goal.[18]
Failing of the goal in one sense or another can be amply documented from Propertius' whole chronicle of his affair with Cynthia, not just this poem; his verses schematically mirror a via dolorosa of sexual antagonism that anticipates the elegant sorrows of courtly love. However, 4.8 intensifies the sense of impasse by reducing him to impotence and his mistress to violence, degradations that the fragile congeniality of the poem's conclusion does more to underline than to erase (as we shall see). The elegy may be read—in this as in other respects—as a conspectus on their entire relationship, especially since it is his collection's very last word on the subject. Beneath the joyful comedy of this elegy lurks an unresolved tension, rendered all the more insistent by the uneasy proximity of Cynthia's ghost in 4.7 and her embittered retrospect on their romance. Why should Propertius' final word on the affair be so fraught with doubt and subterranean despair?
The poem, read as a conspectus, subtly shifts our perspective in a way that is simultaneously an exoneration and the counsel of despair. That nothing, not even a determined attempt at lightheartedness and comedy, can quite banish the sense of failure from Propertius' and Cynthia's liaison indicates a flaw inherent rather than contingent, endemic to sexuality per se rather than to the lovers' peculiar shortcomings. Certainly the dismal history of antagonistic relations between the sexes (quite apart from Cynthia's and Propertius' part in it) argues that sexuality cannot realize a relationship of true complementarity between Man and Woman; Lacan begins his explanation of this defeat (in Encore, his twentieth seminar) with the pitiless pronouncement that “there is no sexual relation.” Joan Copjec's illuminating reading of Encore aligns Lacan's failure of sex with a failure of language, or better, of signification (thus showing Žižek's observation—that sexual language stems from the failure of sex—to be the converse of Encore 's central point).[19] Copjec renders the seminar's chief innovations clear by beginning with the same basic question Lacan inherited from Freud in contemplating sexuality: What is sex? Psychoanalysis, she observes, elucidates human sexuality as a product of signification—more precisely, as the effect of signification's deadlock. Sexual difference is not unambiguously marked anatomically, chromosomally, or hormonally, yet neither can convention alone account for it; sex is neither simply a natural fact, nor reducible to any discursive construction. Sex cannot, finally, be reduced to sense; to the contrary (as Copjec sums up the problem), “sex is the stumbling block of sense.”[20]
In chapter 3, I mentioned Lacan's conceiving sexual difference in terms of a logical relation in his twentieth seminar. Encore opposes masculine to feminine as two different ways of apprehending phenomena: the masculine, from a position of (false) confidence, sees the world in terms of universality; the feminine, from a position of skepticism, sees it as ungraspable heterogeneity. But Seminar XX also rethinks sexual difference from a different (though complementary) angle as two different modes of logical impasse—a perspective more relevant to our purposes in grappling with the apparent illogic of 4.8. Encore assigns two formulae of sexuation to Woman: “there is not one x that is not submitted to the phallic function/not all x is submitted to the phallic function.”
A word is in order here on Lacan's terminology, especially the phrase “phallic function,” which has not appeared previously in our discussion of Propertius. Lacan's formulae express ideas of gender and subjectivity already set out in this book; they appear here translated into a strict formal logic. We have, in fact, unfolded the phallic function's work before, albeit not under that name. The phallus, in Lacan's system of thought, is the universal signifier of desire, in both subjective and objective senses: it abstractly designates desiring (the fundamental status of the divided subject), and the object desired. Yet as a signifier, it is devoid of substance and corresponds to no actual subject or object whatsoever. Rather, the phallus stands behind all other signifiers of desire, such as the culturally freighted icons discussed in chapter 2 (“good citizen,” “good lover,” “good man,” etc.) that promised to heal the subject of his division and lack; it grants these signifiers value, as if it were the (radically empty) Platonic Ideal in which they all participated, though reducible to none of them. When, therefore, the divided subject submits himself to limits placed upon his desire—when he submits to the social constraints imposed by these cultural signifiers, for example, in the hope of assuaging his perceived internal lack[21] —he ultimately submits to the phallic function as, essentially, the principle of setting limits to desire.
The broad pattern of the phallic function setting limits in order to assuage desire and to achieve (an illusory) “wholeness” can be assimilated to the masculine perspective discussed in chapter 3. The subject who assumes the masculine position believes that he can intellectually grasp disparate phenomena; motivated by the desire for meaning, he strives to master their heterogeny and mold it into a conceptual Whole. This exercise necessarily entails delimitation, since in order to wrest a comprehensible pattern (however specious) from his observations, he must exclude something against which his data may be defined. Only thus do his data become an exclusive set whose members' inclusion is ordered by a principle, rather than an indiscriminate congeries ordered by none. Fundamentally, of course, he must, by presuming his own objectivity, exclude from his calculations himself as observing subject, and his desire (the very factors that preclude objectivity).
The phallic function's role in delimiting in order to achieve meaning—or rather, the failure of that role—impinges upon Seminar XX's “feminine” formulae of sexuation insofar as they proceed from a contradiction internal to a fundamental rule
This sheds a different light on the heterogeny of predicates Propertius' corpus assigns to Cynthia; Lawrence Richardson remarks on her bewilderingly kaleidoscopic guises in the Monobiblos:
The picture of Cynthia that must be put together is of a woman who is shown us by turns as a casta puella who spurns the poet's desperate love and devotion (1.1), a frivolous and vain creature of fashion entirely preoccupied with her own appearance (1.2), a devoted mate who can berate the poet for his desertion of her for an evening while he has gone off carousing (1.3), a doxy willing to threaten to follow a rich suitor to wintry Illyria (1.8), yet tearfully insistent that P. give up thought of a career and the chances of lining his pockets in Asia to dance constant attendance on her in Rome (1.6), a vindictive little trollop ensconced in the society of the demimonde of Rome (1.5), and a courtesan accustomed to spend her holidays grandly among the pleasures and temptations of Baiae (1.11)—to name only some of the guises in which we meet her in the first half of the first book.[23]
Elegies 4.7 and 4.8 together simply telescope the inconsistency that organizes the figure of Cynthia into the span of some two hundred lines. As Richardson observes:
The extremes of Cynthia could hardly be more sharply drawn, the vindictive, brooding woman of the ghost poem who can demand that the poet destroy his poems and yet claim that she had always loved him and the fine, spirited girl of the present poem [4.8] who will engage happily in a wild donnybrook with her rivals, exact outrageous terms of peace from her unfaithful lover, and then go to bed with him contented and serene, and without ever explaining her own behavior.[24]
Other poems of the corpus often point irritably to Cynthia's quixotism as contributing to the affair's failure, but 4.8 frames her tergiversations as symptom rather than cause: her contradictions point to a logical impasse at the heart of the sexual relation in which both partners participate, but that burdens them differently (as we shall see).[25]
Propertius also participates in contradiction (both in this poem and throughout the corpus), but a contradiction oppositely structured. Lacan says of Man that “there is at least one x that is not submitted to the phallic function/all x 's are submitted to the phallic function.” As Copjec remarks, these formulae do draw a limit to the unfolding of signifiers—the “at least one” exception—but an internally contradictory limit: what does “all” mean when “one” is excepted? Much of Propertius' corpus dramatizes this paradoxical limit in the form of his envious construction of his rivals. He regularly depicts himself as a lover woefully handicapped by poverty in his pursuit of his mistress (subject, that is, to the “lack” that informs the phallic function) while the wealthy, fortunate rival is the necessary, but impossible, exception to this rule. The rival “always gets the girl”—but his final appearances in the corpus reduce him to an effect of perspective. In elegy 4.5, for example (as we have already seen in chapter 5) the mistress' cunning attempts to foster jealousy conjure up a competitor who circumvents the phallic function, but more as phantom than substantial fact. Here, in elegy 4.8, the figure of the wealthy rival arises again, this time as the vulsus nepos who accompanies Cynthia to Lanuvium; this prodigal comes garishly fraught with contradiction between his status as fortune's favorite in the Propertius-Cynthia affair, and his objective properties. Dee points out that when Propertius describes his enemy as “depilated” (“vulsi,” 23), he sketches a pathic whose wealth derives from rich male lovers; the spendthrift blanches at a beard (“barba pudenda,” 26) because it interferes with his role as epicene love object.[26] Moreover, the wastrel's need artificially to make himself smooth implies that he is rapidly losing the youth that makes him desirable to men.[27] Propertius' jibe that his rival must soon sell himself as a gladiator speaks to the other man's spendthrift habits, but also to the imminent disappearance of his wealth's source. Propertius depicts his rival less as Cynthia's complement than her mirror: the nepos, too, depends precariously upon his sexuality for his daily bread. Cynthia's sudden return from her tryst with him hints that this rather pathetic figure, youth and finances dwindling, cannot in truth bear the weight of Propertius' grand jealousy: Propertius is surprised in fla grante delicto because he expected the nepos to keep her happily occupied rather longer than the poor man could manage.
Seen in the whole context of the sexual relation's failure, though, the nepos ' shabby manhood is simply inevitable: masculinity and femininity are both logically impossible, as Lacan's formulae on the sexual (non)relation make clear, deriving as they do from a conceptually crucial limit either forsworn (by the feminine side) or speciously imposed (by the masculine side). Accordingly, no man or woman may say that he or she embodies this thing, “masculinity” or “femininity.” Sexuality is thus rendered imposture and masquerade—more to the point, a radically asymmetrical charade that can discover no fitting union between its two masks. Sex becomes a signifier empty of content, without a signified, making its rude takeover of “innocent” language logically apt: it achieves a universal dimension precisely because a specific sense has been evacuated from it. Sex is always a potential co-sense (anything can be seen as “alluding to that ”) because it always fails to find its “proper”
THE BREAK IN THE CAUSAL CHAIN
A failure of logic akin to the sexual relation's central stumbling block transforms Propertius' one comedy into unabashed slapstick: elegy 4.8 reflects and amplifies a certain illogic that has always plagued Propertius' recorded relations with Cynthia, but never quite so riotously.[29] We have already seen that Propertius not only grossly overestimates the vulsus nepos ' fascination, he also ignores his own knowledge of Cynthia when he invites Phyllis and Teia for the evening. His description of Cynthia's journey to Lanuvium implies intimate knowledge of her jehu's driving habits; knowing also that she travels fast and light in a two-wheeled carpentum (23), why does he court destruction by arranging this ill-timed fête intime?[30] Similarly, when Cynthia returns and discovers his unfaithfulness, she rather overreacts, given that she herself went to Lanuvium precisely to betray him (51–52, 55–57, 61–67, 73–86). The lovers apparently cannot put together cause and effect properly.
Of course the ancients did not (any more than the moderns) consider lovers the most reasonable of creatures, and Propertius often openly, though defiantly, declares his own folly.[31] Yet in this poem, Propertius simultaneously amplifies the effect and shifts the heavier burden of illogic to Cynthia when he spirits away even the flimsiest pretext for her anger at his slave. She outdoes her own unreason in judging her lover's offense when she turns from strictures on Propertius to peevish vengeance on the innocent Lygdamus: “Lygdamus in primis, omnis mihi causa querelae, / veneat et pedibus vincula bina trahat”—“Lygdamus especially—the whole cause of my complaint!—let him be sold and drag double chains upon his feet” (79–80). More than one commentator has puzzled over how Lygdamus can be blamed for an adventure that stemmed entirely from Propertius' own initiative; only the dead Cynthia demanding her “poisoner's” torture (but not being able to decide, or care, who among Propertius' slaves this should be) can match this outburst for illogic (4.7.35–38).[32]
This is not the first time that Propertius has grappled with the fact that his mistress does not act with strict predictability. The obscure relation between cause and effect in Cynthia's heart baffles Propertius repeatedly in the first three books: scorn does and does not make her heart grow fonder,[33] a rich rival's money does and does not tempt her,[34] poetry makes her now kind, now cruel to the poet.[35] Yet previously Cynthia's quixotism only puzzled and frustrated Propertius; even here, Cynthia's peremptory judgments of servant and master seem at first glance to fit the stereotype of women as always exasperatingly “blowing things out of proportion, overreacting.” That notwithstanding, Propertius admires her arbitrary imperiousness (“furibunda decens”—“insane rage becomes her,” 52) and describes it in heroic terms (55–56, 63, 82).[36]
Jon Elster's meditations on human whim are of use to us here, as an entry (though no more than that) into the problem of Cynthia's mercurial behavior; he has attempted to reduce such phenomena to order with the concept of the mecha nism. “A mechanism is a specific causal pattern that can be recognized after the event but rarely foreseen. … it is less than a theory, but a great deal more than a description.” For example, if denied what they want, humans will sometimes be satisfied with what they have (the “sour grapes syndrome”)—or may crave the prohibited more precisely because they cannot have it (as “forbidden fruit”). If people pursue a certain habit in one sphere, they may sometimes also pursue it in another (the “spillover” effect); they may also act oppositely (the “compensation” effect).[37]
Yet Žižek, commenting on Elster, points out that mechanisms cannot be conceived as simply occupying a middle position on a common scale whose extremes are universal theory (with predictive power) and mere description. Rather, mechanisms constitute a separate domain of causality whose efficiency obeys radically different laws: the specificity of mechanisms turns on the way in which the same cause can trigger opposite effects. Different subjects, in a self-reflective way, determine which causes will determine themselves.[38] The mechanism—that quixotic gesture of freedom—defines the subject.
Inspired by Propertius' ill-fated dalliance with Phyllis and Teia, Cynthia beats and humiliates him one moment, then happily makes love to him the next (64–67, 73–88); her unpredictability models the gap between cause and effect that is subjectivity. The subject emerges precisely insofar as the relationship between cause and effect becomes “unaccountable”: we can never ascertain in advance the way the causes that determine us will exert their power over us. Cynthia's “fickleness” becomes an index of, not a degeneration from, humanity; from indeterminacy, she culls the shadow of freedom, if not the pure substance.[39]
Of particular interest to us is the fact that, here as elsewhere, scholars often read her radically different reactions to the same cause as specifically feminine.[40] They do not exactly err in so doing, but “female fickleness” bears deeper scrutiny in the light of Elster's and Žižek's elucidation of unpredictable subjective determination: Cynthia's “feminine” suspension of the causal chain points to Woman, not Man, as the subject par excellence. Cynthia fascinates Propertius as a spectre of freedom; her feminine “unreason” constitutes a gesture of refusal, a refusal to be inserted in the “proper” nexus of causes and effects.[41]
COURTLY LOVE
Yet even a fascination for defiance does not fully explain Propertius' almost embarrassing enthusiasm for his mistress' display of high temper and for his own humiliation. Cynthia's sudden intrusion upon Propertius' private debauch comes as an unexpected (and strangely welcome) surprise: impotent and unhappy despite Phyllis' and Teia's best efforts, he had imagined himself before the gates of Lanuvium, the city of the divine ritual that (he thought) held Cynthia (47–48). She bursts in the
His joy subtly draws attention to who really benefits from amorous “slavery”: the Lady's demands, however inscrutable, capricious, even cruel, effectively dissimulate the sexual relation's failure. By elevating Woman to the place of the Lady, courtly love posits her as locating desire's fulfillment and ratifying the lover's supposed knowledge of his own identity as Man. Yet at the same time, her demands insure that he can only approach such fulfillment via the elaborate detours she specifies. These detours infinitely defer the encounter with her, and thereby put off the moment when the lover would be forced to acknowledge that attaining such a heaven of bliss is not prohibited, but rather impossible, because “there is no sexual relation”: no symmetry exists between the positions Man and Woman, lover and beloved, that confirms the identity of either, or makes up one harmonious Whole. Cynthia magnificently relieves Propertius of the embarrassment of re-experiencing sexuality's failure (of which his impotence has already given him a taste) by driving out Phyllis and Teia and prescribing a monk's life for him in future (75–78). As belle dame sans merci, Cynthia is (to borrow Lacan's words) “a highly refined way of making up for the absence of sexual relationship, by feigning that we are the ones who erect an obstacle thereto.”[42]
OBJET A: IN YOU MORE THAN YOU
One could be forgiven for wondering, though, whether Cynthia's physical violence to her lover does not strain even the wide tolerance of courtly love, and push us closer to something like sadism. When Cynthia returns to Propertius' house after routing her rivals, she assumes the hauteur appropriate to a triumphant general and dictates terms of “surrender” to her lover (“accipe, quae nostrae formula legis erit”—“hear what my terms are,” 74)—but she also bites him until she draws blood, scratches his eyes, and beats him cruelly (65–67). The corpus as a whole has not prepared us for this—though elegy 3.8 had elaborated, at a purely theoretical level, the idea that violent behavior signals true love. In that elegy, Propertius had invited Cynthia to “prove” the depth of her affection by wounding his face, threatening his eyes, marking his neck (3.8.6–7, 21–22). Yet his invitation can only be sarcastic hyperbole in Book III: Cynthia may have raged at him verbally, but her worst physical gesture in the whole of the corpus thus far has been to push (dramatically, but
Everything: Cynthia bites and wounds the surface of her lover's body as yet another effect of the necessary asymmetry that founds the sexual (non)relation. Lacan's formulae of sexuation, with their emphasis on non-complementarity, essentially say that no relationship exists between what the loved one possesses and the lover lacks. Yet love and desire flourish somehow: what fills in the gap between what the lover wants from the beloved and what the latter has to give? Lacan answers “objet a ”—the mysterious object that is “in the beloved more than the beloved.” The lover loves something in the beloved of which the latter is unaware and cannot name (I can never articulate the exact cause of someone else's love for me).
Žižek draws our attention to the lover's experience of the beloved's body in order to dramatize the disjunction between the two positions. I can regard my lover's body as an object of aesthetic pleasure, or of sexual desire, or of biological study (the effect of flesh, blood, glands, and the like); yet I cannot translate one domain into the other (cannot, for example, see sexual attraction as entirely a matter of blood or muscles or pheromones, of biological determinism) because they belong to heterogeneous orders. Even if biochemistry successfully isolated the hormones that governed the rise, intensity, and duration of love, the actual experience of love qua event would still maintain its autonomy, its radical heterogeneity to its bodily cause. The body's depth can be read as extra-symbolic “cause” of the surface “effect”—but an effect already incommensurate with its cause, because surface and depth belong to heterogeneous orders.[45] In this context, it makes sense to call Cynthia's laceration a “lovebite” (nota), even though the term is usually reserved for mere bruises. Her gesture sketches a desire to break the barrier between symbolized surface and depth; she breaks into her lover's body as if to draw out from it the fantasized objet a, the presumed object-cause of desire.[46] She acts out Lacan's cryptic summary of love: “I love you, but because inexplicably I love in you something more than you—the objet petit a —I mutilate you.”[47]
RELIGION
Objet a 's particular usefulness lies in denying a break in the causal chain, proffering itself as putative cause (of sexual desire, for example). This conversion of contingency into causality conceptually grounds in yet another way the apparent whimsy of including religious cult in an erotic poem. We have spoken of the Lanuvium snake-cult as allegorically reflecting Propertius' desire for Cynthia, but the cult also mirrors the structure of Cynthia's desire for Propertius. Like Cynthia's vicious probing
But what of Cynthia's desire for a “fling” that propels her to Lanuvium? Does that not put her at variance with the ritual? After all, the cult's implicit claims to coordinate the human community with the divine rest on assaying female virtue: chastity (among the young girls it sends down to feed the snake) assures agricultural fertility. Currie may be ungallant to remark that “there would have been no point in sending Cynthia down with the basket to the serpent,” but he expresses plainly an uneasiness other commentators only insinuate.[49] Propertius ostensibly makes her presence anomalous to the ritual when he insists that she went to pursue chastity's opposite (16)—and yet his elaborate description of her pilgrimage becomes an awkwardly disproportionate effort if read as nothing more than a mean-spirited joke at Cynthia's expense.
Those who argue for a purely sarcastic interpretation of her pilgrimage seem not to have noticed that her subordination of the ritual's universal, communal claims (community survival as a function of Woman's chastity) to particular human desires (the pursuit of a love affair) perfectly reflects a stratum of motivation implicit in the ritual itself. Propertius himself represents the rite as a tourist attraction rather than an august solemnity (“hic ubi tam rarae non perit hora morae”—“here, if anywhere, the hour spent for so unusual a stop is not wasted,” 4),[50] and archaeological evidence indicates that his interpretation was not entirely strange—perhaps not even unwelcome—to the Lanuvians.[51] The ample temple grounds of Juno
“Woman,” says Hegel, “is the eternal irony of the community”—a phrase that captures Cynthia's performance perfectly, as well as foreshadowing Lacan's meditations on sexuality's internal contradictions. Žižek points out that, while Hegel may seem to ascribe to Woman the narrowness of a private perspective, it would be odd if one who so eloquently championed Antigone thought of such resistance as a mere gender-specific failing. Rather, Woman is the cynic capable of discerning behind the portentous forms that allegedly govern public welfare the private motives of those who propagate these forms; Cynthia exposes the inherent limitation of the social totality's standpoint.[55]
A fundamental contradiction analogous to that which Cynthia elucidates at Lanuvium emerges willy-nilly in the poem's final scene, though it closes on the lovers' “reconciliation.” Propertius and Cynthia compose their differences at last through the elaborate divagations of a ritual focused on purity (83–87) that nonetheless concludes in an equivocal light. The description of their detente— “toto solvimus arma toro” (88)—glances toward reconciliation and continued discord simultaneously; by analogy, the phrase Propertius has coined could mean “we downed arms” or “we unsheathed our weapons.” Given that he locates the force of his phrase “toto … toro,” he inevitably evokes loveplay, but loveplay troubled