ASKING FOR JUSTICE IN HELL: JOUISSANCE AND THE LAW
A clue to this reading may be found in the puzzling horror of the setting for Cornelia's “trial.” Most ancient portrayals of the Underworld are admittedly drear, but a strange sentience distinguishes Cornelia's vision. She addresses Hell as if it were alive and of evil intent:
| “damnatae noctes et vos, vada lenta, paludes | |
| et quaecumque meos implicat unda pedes, | |
| immatura licet, tamen huc non noxia veni …” | |
| (4.11.15–17) |
“Doomed darkness and you swamps, sluggish shallows, and whatever wave winds about my feet, you know I have come here untimely, but innocent …”
Gordon Williams and Leo Curran note that Propertius has modeled this passage on similar passages from Vergil's descriptions of the Underworld in Aeneid 6 and Georgics 4:[8]
| quos circum limus niger et deformis harundo | |
| Cocyti tardaque palus inamabilis unda | |
| alligat et novies Styx interfusa coercet. | |
| (G. 4.478–80) |
[Those who died untimely deaths] the black slime and the misshapen reeds of Cocytus and the unlovely swamp, with its sluggish water, holds fast and Styx, nine times interposed, constrains.
| fas obstat, tristisque palus inamabilis undae | |
| alligat et novies Styx interfusa coercet. | |
| (Aen. 6.438–39) |
It is forbidden, and the unlovely swamp of bitter water holds [the suicides] fast, and nine times Styx interposed constrains [them].
But Propertius has strengthened the implication of sentience in Vergil's alligat (“holds fast”) by having Cornelia appeal to the dank waters and darkness directly as “you.” Her address lends implicat (“winds about”) a sense of purposiveness: the water entwines itself around her feet as if alive and vengeful, and she, terrified, protests her innocence.
The poem's lurid depiction of the place of the Law illustrates to perfection the Lacanian concept that Law is implicated with “enjoyment,” where enjoyment bears the technical meaning of “the limit of interpretation; nonmeaning as such.”[9] Lacan's startling marriage of conceptions suits a poem in which the significance of Cornelia's obedience to her caste protocols can be read so differently, as either sublime self-sacrifice or meaningless waste. In the debate over 4.11, his analysis of Law can help us shift attention from What does it mean for Cornelia to obey the Law? to How does that Law mean? What, ultimately, is the conceptual ground of the Law, and does anything found the Law, so as to give it coherence and “solidity”?[10] The answer, of course, is “no”; the Law, like any other system of signification, rests self-enclosed on difference. Each of its elements depends ultimately for its meaning upon that element's relation to all others in the system; no anchor or guarantee of the system's truth exists that transcends the differential system itself.