Latin Verse Satire

by Miller, Paul Allen

  Our last pair of examples is the least grotesque, Horatian decorum knowing greater restraint than is found in either Juvenal or Persius. In the first passage, Horace, on his way to Brundisium with Maecenas, who is to attend an important meeting of the representatives of Augustus and Mark Antony, has stopped at a villa.49 The evening’s entertainment features two lower-class yokels whose comic buffoonery is laughed more at than with. The next day Horace and company continue their journey to Apulia where they take shelter from the burning Scirocco at a tavern whose promise of hospitality proves illusory. Not only does the kitchen smoke and the chimney catch fire, but that evening the poet is stood up by a girl who had promised to come to his bed. As a consequence of his frustration, he has a wet dream and soils himself. The passage stands out as the sole description of a nocturnal emission in ancient literature, outside of a technical philosophical or medical context.50 The scene features the open, liquid body, but directs the force of that image back on the satirist himself:

  hic ego mendacem stultissimus usque puellam

  ad mediam noctem exspecto: somnus tamen aufert

  intentum Veneri; tum immundo somnia visu

  nocturnam vestem maculant ventremque supinum

  Here in bed I wait like an idiot till midnight for that tease of a girl:

  sleep however carries me off, still intent on sex; then dreams stain my

  nightshirt and my up-turned belly with obscene fantasies.

  (1.5.82–85)

  This passage can be seen as an example of that gentle, if somewhat grotesque, self-mockery that is the trademark of Horatian satire. Yet, though Horace’s self-parody makes his work more ironic and consequently less one-sided and less negative than that of his successors, his use of the grotesque is very similar. In Bakhtinian terms, one might say that while Horatian satire is more dialogic than that of Juvenal and Persius,51 since it more explicitly dramatizes the undermining of the speaker’s authority, it is no more carnivalesque. For not only is the conjunction of food and sexuality, implied by the metonymic link between the one night’s feasting and the next night’s wet dream and bespattered belly, every bit as sterile as that seen in Juvenal and Persius, it is also less subversive than that of his successors. Horace’s little comedy is always kept at a safe distance from the authoritative discourse represented by Maecenas and Augustus.52 Indeed, Horace’s journey ends at Brundisium but the actual treaty was reached at Tarentum, outside his presence. Horace thus keeps a strict cordon sanitaire between the eruptions of his body and of the satiric grotesque and the centers of power and patronage to which he was then trying to gain access.53 Such a strategy of containment necessarily limits the power of the grotesque in Horatian satire. For Bakhtin, however, carnivalesque renewal requires the subversion of the existing hierarchies of power. The double movement of uncrowning and recrowning must both be given their full scope for the laughter of the carnival to be truly present. By marginalizing his own mis-adventures, while subtly juxtaposing the small joys of private life with the unnamed anxieties of the public man, Horace carefully leaves the structures of power and their ruling ideology firmly in place.54 The liquidity and crossing of borders that the grotesque implies is not only fruitless in this case but also strictly contained.

  Our final passage comes appropriately enough from a failed feast, the Cena Nasidieni of Satires 2.8. As the concluding satire of the second volume it offers a final commentary on the theme of the proper feast that runs throughout the book. The central problem of the text as a whole is how to avoid excess and, hence, that crossing of boundaries that constitutes the grotesque.55 Thus in 2.2, a peasant that Horace recalls from his boyhood, Ofellus, extols the virtues of a simple diet. In 2.4, Catius, with a fervor normally reserved for the arcane secrets of the mysteries or the hidden truths of philosophy, recalls the extravagant recipes of an unnamed gourmet, whom Deena Berg has identified as Nasidienus.56 The implicit contrast between the gourmets, Catius/ Nasidienus, and the simple farmer, Ofellus, is then rendered explicit by 2.6’s fable of the City Mouse and the Country Mouse, a tale told in the context of Horace’s own modest contentment as he spends a night of quiet conviviality with friends at his Sabine farm.57 This monologic installation of his own practice as the model to be imitated is, however, overturned in 2.7 when the slave Davus notes Horace’s inability to follow his own counsels of moderation whenever a dinner invitation from Maecenas arrives. This uncrowning of Horace leads us to 2.8 in which the satirist asks the comic poet Fundanius to recount the tale of a dinner party the latter attended with Maecenas. Poem 2.8, thus, offers a set of final reflections on the theme of proper conviviality without imposing a sense of monological closure, since Horace himself remains tangential to the narrative framed by Fundanius’ comedy.58

  In that comedy, Nasidienus is seen as a pretentious host who aspires to being part of Maecenas’ circle but whose very eagerness condemns him as irredeemably vulgar. Yet whereas the braggart host’s exclusion is definitively signaled when his guests abruptly depart, leaving the meat course untasted, Horace in a typically dialogic and distancing gesture does not directly participate in that condemnation.59 The climax of this comic meal that leads to the guests’ departure is a dish of pregnant lamprey, surrounded by shrimp “swimming” in a peppery sauce, all presented in the trompe l’oeil fashion dear to Roman gourmets (2.8.42–44):60

  adfertur squillas inter murena natantis

  in patina porrecta. sub hoc erus: “haec gravida” inquit

  “capta est, deterior post partum carne futura.”

  Then a lamprey is brought in, stretched out on a platter between swimming shrimp. At this the master of revels said, “this fish was caught pregnant; the flesh would be of poorer quality after having given birth.”

  The feast, of course, is the site of the carnivalesque par excellence. Gargamelle gives birth during the celebration of Mardi Gras. But the Cena Nasidieni is a feast gone awry. Whatever mirth arises in it is directed against the host rather than toward a celebration of conviviality, the open body, and excess that leads to carnival’s cycle of degradation and renewal. The grotesque at this feast is not in the service of renewed vitality, but rather reminds the reader that transgression leads to failure and humiliation. Where Bakhtin notes that the pregnant body is one of the privileged sites of grotesque realism, representing as it does the erasure of the boundaries between bodies and the consequent potential generation of new life,61 the pregnant lamprey is sterile and perverse.62 It will never give birth but has been frozen in this state for the purposes of consumption. The grotesquerie is then compounded by it being presented as if it were alive with shrimp swimming about. As Arrowsmith famously remarked of Petronius’ Trimalchio, Nasidienus “does not know what might be called the mortal modalities … By eating he proposes to forget death, to ‘seize the day’ and to live; he passionately desires life, but with every mouthful he takes, he tastesdeath.”63 The conjunction of the feast and sexuality in this scene gives rise not to regeneration but to a kind of death-in-life, symbolically evoked by the trompe l’oeil presentation of the pregnant lamprey.

  The grotesque degradation implicit in this scene, however, goes well beyond the perverse image of pregnancy aborted by a feast. Indeed the question arises, with what is the lamprey pregnant? The answer to Horace’s audience might well be less obvious than it seems to us. For, as a number of Horace’s Renaissance commentators note, as well as more recently Lejay, lampreys were widely believed in the ancient world to mate with vipers. Thus Nasidienus’ pièce de résistance was not simply grotesque but, to a Roman audience, potentially dangerous.64 Moreover, as Prudentius notes (Hamartigenia 581–607), the female viper was thought to conceive through a bizarre form of oral intercourse during which the head of the male was bitten off. Her offspring, in turn, were born by gnawing their way through the mother’s entrails, thus killing her. The lamprey, therefore, whose womb is filled with baby vipers, not only fuses the images of fertility and sterility, but its consumption demands that fusion f
or it can only be eaten while still pregnant, since, were it to carry its venomous brood to term, it would be consumed by its offspring and its flesh would be inedible. This fusion of birth and death in the image of the pregnant lamprey, which serves as the emblem of the overzealous gourmet’s violation of boundaries, marks the turning point in the satire’s narrative and signals the beginning of the denouement that will leave its host abandoned and the final course untasted. Immediately after the lamprey is brought in, the master of ceremonies engages in a long and pompous disquisition on the sauce in which it is swimming. At this moment, the tapestry overhanging the diners collapses, covering the tables and guests with “as much dust as the north wind blows from the Campanian fields” (2.8.56). Thus, as Kirk Freudenburg notes, “In the annihilation of the fish course, death injects itself into Nasidienus’s dinner party in its most unthreatening, comic form.”65 But, as we have seen, death in a less comic form was implicit in the image of the pregnant lamprey all along, and in point of fact, the party never recovers from this disaster. For Nasidienus and his aspirations of admission to Maecenas’ charmed circle, it is the beginning of the end.

  As in our first example from Juvenal, this last passage from Horace has all the same elements as those found in the birth of Gargantua, only, as was the case with Juvenal, the accent is different. Pregnancy, feasting, agriculture, and death all appear. Yet the pregnancy does not produce joyful, new life, but is abortive and signifies a perverse commingling of species that conjures death. The feast in the Cena Nasidieni is not the site of communal celebration and new life, but is left uneaten, with its host ridiculed and abandoned. The fields are not fertile. They merely blow dust. Death is not celebrated as part of the cycle of existence but functions merely as a sterile end. What separates this passage from those of Juvenal and Persius is the satirist’s bemused distance from the invective moment. For, as we have noted, in poem 2.7, the poet has conceded the compromised nature of his own position in the book’s ongoing debate on the nature of the proper feast. Thus in 2.8, while the grotesque degradation that appears in Fundanius’ account of the Cena Nasidieni may be absolute, the poet’s relation to that degradation is left ambiguous. In Horace’s last satires, it seems, the grotesque is deployed within a more thoroughly dialogized frame than is found in either of the other satirists or in his own earlier work, but the signification of the grotesque within that framework is unchanged.

  In sum, these six passages (and more could be added) indicate that Roman satire, through its deployment of the grotesque, privileges by negation the closed, the solid, and the finished over the open, the fluid, and the boundless. As such, it is located firmly within the mainstream of traditional Roman morality which, as defined by Catharine Edwards, privileges the dry, the hard, and the masculine over the fluid, the soft, and the feminine.66 This understanding of satire allows one final point to be made. If the preceding analysis is correct, Roman satire can be described in psychoanalytic terms as a discourse of the phallus that defines itself in opposition to those very features of the grotesque that make its humor work, features that it ultimately labels as, if not feminine, then at least effeminized. It rejects that model of unbounded desire, of wetness, transgression, and leakage, that Anne Carson has demonstrated was attributed to women in the ancient world.67 This is substantially the same model that Irigaray has embraced under the rubric of “fluid mechanics” as an antidote to the oppressive certainties of a masculinist logic that privileges the bounded entity over the open and grotesque, as Micaela Janan has recently made clear.68 Satire in this view is a vehicle for that same phallic and aggressive ideology first described by Amy Richlin in The Garden of Priapus.69 Its humor does not seek to open up the world to change and the other, as does the Rabelaisian grotesque, but to affirm the rigidities of present and past by always picturing the violation of boundaries as leading to death and sterility—and that’s no carnival.

  Yet satire is also obsessed with the very images of food, sexuality, and the grotesque that are associated with that same potential for regeneration that the satirical vision appears to lack. How are we to understand this continued presence of the rejected other? On the one hand, the satirist’s pose as the scold of decadence and the maintainer of boundaries requires that such a partition between same and other, masculine and feminine, and good and evil be strictly enforced. This is the essence of the ideology of the bounded form. On the other, the binary logic of the partition itself creates a kind of structural desire for the excluded, without which the boundary, and hence the satirist, could not exist. The logic of exclusion is thus always, ultimately, self-undermining, and it is through the unsustainability of the satirical stance, through the very vitality of the vile bodies it denigrates, that carnival’s hope (however muted) of resurrection reasserts itself as the unacknowledged, and indeed forbidden, ground of the satirical grotesque.

  Notes

  1 My thanks to Susanna Braund, Martha Malamud, and Arethusa’s anonymous referees for their many helpful suggestions. A special debt of gratitude is owed to Barbara Gold who first saw these ideas many years ago in the ill-formed and overfed work of an equally grotesque M.A. student. All remaining deformities are, of course, stubbornly my own.

  2 Bakhtin 1986.135. I want to thank Susan I. Stein for bringing this passage to my attention.

  3 For a survey of recent work on the grotesque, see Robertson 1996.1–14 and 119–24.

  4 On this phenomenon and its pernicious effects, see Emerson 1993.128–32; Rubino 1993.141–43; Eagleton 1989; Stallybrass and White 1986.13–15, 30–35, 72–75; and Jacobs 1991.74, 80. On the attempt to identify carnival and the grotesque, and then generalize from Bakhtin’s conclusions to genres and periods beyond those which he specifies, see Platter 1993 and forthcoming. For an example of this simple identification of the grotesque with the carnivalesque, see Andreas 1984. 62–66.

  5 Carnival has become the focus of controversy within Bakhtin scholarship. The debate, more often than not, has political overtones. In general, those scholars who place the most emphasis on carnival represent leftist or neo-Marxist readings of Bakhtin, while those involved in the current drive to devalue carnival’s place within the Bakhtin canon are avowedly conservative critics. Only by treating the concept with historical and generic precision will it be possible to move the debate beyond a rather sterile ideological interchange. See Morson and Emerson 1990. 3–4, 11, 67, 77, 92–96, 102, 104, 106–19, 124–25, 161–62, 433–52, 479 nn. 6–7; Emerson 1994; Shepherd 1993.xvi–xxi; Gardiner 1992.2–6, 9–22, 107, 138, 197 nn. 3–4 and 8, 215–16 n. 11; Holquist 1990.8, 34–35, 157–58; Frow 1986.64–68, 97–99, 133–39, 158–59; Todorov 1984.11. Stallybrass and White record Tony Bennet’s claim that “Bakhtin’s study of Rabelais should hold an exemplary place in materialist cultural criticism” (1986.7). See also the exchange of letters between Hirschkop and Shepherd on the one hand and Morson on the other in PMLA 1994.116–18. For a general discussion of the multiple readings of Bakhtin currently in circulation, see Miller and Platter 1993a.117–20.

  6 See Gowers 1993.30–31 on Bakhtin’s view of the grotesque as being “too rosy” to account fully for its use in Roman satire; a similar critique is found in Richlin 1983.70–72. For an analagous view from the perspective of Greek literature, see Rössler 1986.

  7 Bakhtin 1968.28–29, 37–39, 81, 114, 211; Gardiner 1992.47; 207 n. 20. This is a distinction that eludes Byrd in his otherwise excellent article on Freudian influences on Bakhtin’s theory of laughter (1987).

  8 Bakhtin 1984.126.

  9 It recalls the naive, mimetic vision of the genre found in the work of critics like Highet 1962.3; Duff 1936.6; Gérard 1976.iv–ix, 35–38. In Bakhtin’s case, however, he is talking more about a rhetorical and generic stance rather than the actual representation of reality. Journalism, in its pretense to present “just the facts,” is necessarily a monologic genre.

  10 Bakhtin 1968.23–34; Rebhorn 1993; Gowers 1993.128.

  11 This is not to say that Naevol
us is a common prostitute. As Braund 1988.130–77 points out, he is a cliens with equestrian pretensions, who “chooses to make his living sexually” (p. 155).

  12 Admittedly these six cases do not prove that the grotesque in Roman satire always and everywhere functions in exactly this fashion. To make that case would require a much longer article that would soon grow tedious from the necessary repetition an exhaustive study implies. It is sufficient to note that many more examples could be added to the list proffered here and that evidence for the satirical grotesque as a celebration of the powers of regeneration is far harder to come by. For a similar reading to the one offered here of more passages from Juvenal, see Miller forthcoming. On Persius, see note 47.

  13 The translation of Rabelais is from Cohen 1981.48; the passage itself can be found at Rabelais 1962.38. The spelling and accentuation reflect sixteenth-century practice.

  14 Cohen 1981.52; Rabelais 1962.48–49.

  15 Bakhtin 1968.163. For a fuller treatment of this passage and a defense of Bakhtin’s reading of Rabelais, see Miller forthcoming.

  16 The texts of Juvenal and Persius are both taken from Clausen’s OCT (1959).

  17 Translation by Rudd 1992.