Teasing: The Aesthetic Relation

The first poem in Catullus' book is not simply an act of dedication, for what Catullus does in this poem is to put the book into

circulation, to give it to its readership, and the nature of the object is to some extent constituted by the form of this gesture.^[13] The dedicatee, Cornelius Nepos, stands at a nodal point between the production of Catullus' nugae and their reception by posterity: because he approved them, or saw something in them, they have now been published and committed to the care of time.^[14] Once his trifles have been given value by a reader, they cease to belong to the poet, but publication also removes them from any other individual's appropriation:

Cui dono lepidum novum libellum
arida modo pumice expolitum?
Corneli, tibi; namque tu solebas
meas esse aliquid putare nugas
iam tum, cum ausus es unus Italorum
omne aevum tribus explicare cartis
doctis, Iuppiter, et laboriosis.
quare habe tibi quidquid hoc libelli
qualecumque; quod, <o> patrona virgo,
plus uno maneat perenne saeclo. (c.1)

To whom do I give this chic new little book
freshly smoothed by the dry pumice?
Cornelius, to you; for it was you
who used to think my trifles  were  something
when you yourself had dared, alone
of the Italians, to expound all history
in three most learned and laborious volumes.
So have this little book for what
it's worth, and, O my virgin patron,
may it remain fresh for more than one generation.

The modest detachment of "have this little book for what it's worth" acknowledges that Nepos, by seeing something in Catullus' bits and pieces, is responsible for their publication; but it also recognizes the fact that what this book is depends on how its future readership receives it. So the object that Catullus is giving to Nepos is both a delightful physical object and a polished work of art that is not confined to any one of its instantiations, and this duality is what complicates the gesture of giving, because the book as work of art cannot actually be given. Paradoxically, then, the approval of Nepos, which earned him this book, is what removes the "trifles" to another time.

Catullus is publishing his trifles; every reader of Catullus knows that "now you have it, now you don't" feeling produced by a combination

of casual spontaneity and high finish;^[15] at the end of poem 1, the book is given to Nepos with a gesture that dramatizes this relation between poet and reader. The phrase "habe tibi" (have it, 8) is, as Fordyce (1961 ad loc) points out, "a regular phrase of Roman law in reference to the disposal of property." Both in the legal and colloquial senses (the latter implies, as Fordyce puts it, "a certain indifference"), there is often a contrast between what is given and what is retained. But in this case it is the same thing that is both given and retained ("have this little book . . . may it remain"; habe tibi . . . quod maneat, 8–10), and there is a real connection between the lightness of Catullus' relation to his nugae and their continued freshness as aesthetic objects.^[16] The poet himself keeps nothing, for the book goes on the one hand to anyone who now finds something in these trifles, and on the other to a posterity that continues to find them fresh. Nepos, though he gets this attractive little book because he made something of Catullus' nugae , can't really have it because the virgin sees to it that the book will remain fresh for future generations.

This virgin is the poet's Muse, addressed here as patron (patrona virgo, 9) instead of Nepos. As a virgin the Muse plays her part in the erotic figuration introduced when the newly completed book appears "freshly smoothed by the dry pumice" (2). Pumice has two uses in the literary sphere: to smooth the ends of the scroll in the final stages of the book's preparation, and to erase and correct the work prior to publication. The first use draws attention to the book's attractions and availability, as Horace shows us when he berates his book of epistles for its eagerness to prostitute itself to the public:^[17]

Vertumnum Ianumque, liber, spectare videris,
scilicet ut prostes Sosiorum pumice mundus
odisti clavis et grata sigilla pudico. ( Ep. 1.20.1–3)

You seem, book, to look towards Janus and Vertumnus
[booksellers' area],
Wanting to offer yourself smooth from the pumice of the Sosii
[booksellers],
You shun keys and seals, which are welcome to the chaste.

Horace's "smooth from the pumice" plays on the fact that pumice was used as a depilatory, and Catullus' phrase also associates the book's appealing exterior with sexual attractiveness and availability. But this aspect of the book, its immediate appeal and consumability, so to speak, is conveyed by the same words that also express the labor of composition

and literary perfectionism implied by liberal use of the eraser, features of the book that ensure its continued life beyond this generation.

For the most part, modern commentators have concentrated on showing how the poem functions as an Alexandrian or neoteric literary manifesto: the lightness and modesty with which Catullus offers his book is all part of a display of allegiance to Alexandrian principles.^[18] This approach usually generates a contrast between surface and depth that says as much about modern scholarship as it does about the poem: this apparently light and unprepossessing poem conceals references to Alexandrian watchwords and aesthetic attitudes, and once these have been identified by the scholar, the poem reveals itself as a serious work of high art.^[19] The work of the scholar, then, protects us from the poem's trivial surface. Although the interpretation of this poem as a coded and concealed masterpiece posing a riddle for the learned reader is compatible with much of what we know of the Alexandrians, the poem has another dimension that is more distinctively Roman, and that is its social gesture. The associations of words like pumex and expolitum (smoothed, polished) in Latin are not only Alexandrian: smoothness and polish in a literary context tend to be given dubious sexual connotations by Roman writers who play on the coincidence of the language of the toilette with that of literary polish; so Catullus' book has a teasing sexuality that is provocatively effeminate.^[20]

What I am arguing here is that Catullus is playing with the particularly complex relation between poet and reader when he both gives and withholds the book in a kind of teasing.^[21] The poetics implied by this poem is neither one of surface and depth (Catullus professes an urbane indifference to the trivialities he offers Nepos, but finally reveals his sense of their true worth) nor paradox (it takes the harsh application of dry pumice to make something that never dries up: perenne, 1O). In fact, it is Nepos' own work that exemplifies the deceptive or paradoxical results of "artistry": he has managed to unfold (explicare, 6) the whole of time in a mere three volumes.^[22] By contrast, Catullus focuses the temporal paradox concerning his own book on the act of giving: Nepos is welcome to the book (this attractive, smooth little volume), which becomes his as Catullus utters the formula "habe tibi"; but, as the poet prays for the same book that the Muse may preserve it fresh throughout posterity, he withdraws it from its dedicatee (maneat).^[23] The same pumice that gives the book its sexy air of availability also gives its content the kind of polished definitiveness that takes it out of the field of consumption and consigns it to the care of posterity and the virgin Muse. Standing in for

any reader who sees something in these trifles, Nepos is the figure through whom we experience the studied carelessness of these poems as a relation both to the poet and to posterity. Catullus' contradictory act of giving offers us the bifurcated sensation of participating in two different time-scales: we acquiesce in our frustrated possession of these trifles in order to participate in the eternal freshness of the work. What exactly it is that gives these trifles substance (esse aliquid, 3) we forbear to explore in order to leave them fresh for posterity. Here an aesthetic drama of loss and compensation takes on an imperial character, for this delicate moment now spreads its influence into the future with an imperialism more sure than Nepos' unfolding of the whole of time in three volumes. Any reader who is able to see something in these poems can have them, for their survival depends on this, but, in the interest of participating in the power and scope of their fascination, each reader must forbear to possess them. It is this position that the reader enjoys.

Catullus teases Nepos with his book, and in the next poem he teases his readers with intimations of sex, only to turn the tables on them in the final lines, where once again virginity intervenes:^[24]

Passer, deliciae meae puellae,
quicum ludere, quem in sinu tenere,
cui primum digitum dare appetenti
et acris solet incitare morsus,
cum desiderio meo nitenti
carum nescioquid lubet iocari,
et solaciolum sui doloris,
credo, ut tum gravis acquiescat ardor:
tecum ludere sicut ipsa possem
et tristis animi levare curas,
tam gratum est mihi quam ferunt puellae
pernici aureolum fuisse malum,
quod zonam soluit diu ligatam.

Sparrow, plaything of my mistress,
who plays with you, and holds you in her lap,
who offers you her fingertip to peck at
and then provokes sharp bites from you,
when the shining object of my desire
is pleased to play some charming game,
a solace for her suffering, I think,
to moderate the flames of passion:
If I could play with you as she does
and lighten the gloomy troubles of my mind—

that is as pleasing to me as they say
was the golden apple to the swift-footed girl
which loosened her girdle, so long tied.

At the end of this poem, we are told that Lesbia's game with the sparrow is itself the consummation to be desired: it would be as pleasing to Catullus as the apple that brought the end of virginity to Atalanta, and in being as pleasing it denies us the untying of the knot, for the game that suggested sex now becomes its alternative or substitute. Like that "something" which Nepos saw in Catullus' "trifles," but which immediately fades into the suave surface of the urbane tone, the sexuality of those who play with the sparrow never comes into focus.^[25] The suggestive ambiguity of Catullus' interest in playing with the sparrow is compared to the ambiguous interest of the virgin Atalanta in the apple: was it a girlish delight in bright things; a desire that fully comprehended the erotic symbolism of the apple; a confused, virginal combination of both?^[26] Sexual innuendo is now transferred to Atalanta, whose virginal mind is no doubt incapable of understanding what we know about her reaction to the apple; so the impenetrable and teasing sophistication of Catullus offers us its own compensatory supplement, the penetrable, half-innocent mind of Atalanta, whose confusion we are in a position to observe knowingly.

Like the contradictory gesture with which Nepos is offered the book, the final simile of poem 2 both offers and withholds. These contradictions have to do with the relation between poem and audience, for both the fact that Nepos cannot really have the book that is his and the fact that Catullus does not express a desire to have Lesbia dramatize the continuing availability of the aesthetic object to its audience, present and future. Neither Catullus himself nor any particular reader has privileged or preemptive access to the poetry, and this is constitutive of its aesthetic character as well as a guarantee of its persistent freshness. In poem 2, the desire of Catullus is a performing desire which, rather than interposing itself between the audience and its object, suffuses that object with a suggestive sexuality that does not exclude its audience; and yet, at the same time, it provokes and teases us with its elusiveness, its nugatoriness, and, if there is anything of Furius and Aurelius in us, its effeminacy. As in poem 1, the aesthetic object is here constituted as aesthetic by virtue of the peculiar drama of desire and possession between the agents that it assembles.

But the poem I have been describing is to be found in none of the modern texts of Catullus, for editors have detached what they regard as

the puzzlingly "inappropriate" simile with which the poem ends in the manuscripts (lines 11–13, now called 2b) to produce a poem that falls into line with one of the most common ways of thinking about Catullus: the superficial Lesbia plays with her sparrow and so assuages her desire for Catullus, who wishes he could do the same himself, but being a man and a great poet he feels too deeply to be so easily satisfied.^[27] The truncating of the poem by the editors provides a clear layering of surface and depth, so that the different relations of the characters to the game with the sparrow gives us a reassuring sense of what it is that allows us to say that the trivial is trivial. This truncated version of the poem provides a neat parallel to the usual interpretation of the dedication poem: just as Catullus writes what his culture defines as "trifles," but by virtue of the care he lavishes on them proves himself a dedicated and serious Alexandrian poet, so the intensity of his love for Lesbia transcends its rather trivial object. I doubt that editors would have been so impressed with the problems of the manuscript text at the end of poem 2 were they not so satisfied by the kind of reading made possible by detaching the last three lines.^[28] This editorial tradition clarifies one of the roles of Catullus the canonical author, namely, to confirm the distinction between surface and depth, triviality and art, that he seems to put at question. The canonical Catullus is a poet who confronts the prejudices of his own age and culture, unable to appreciate the intrinsic value of art, and affirms or proves what we now know to be its true value. The Catullus that I am describing works with the troubled and suspicious fascination of his culture with what, for want of a better word, we can call deliciae to produce a positional drama that has much to tell us about the constitution of what we now call the aesthetic.