Reconstructing Rome: Vespasian in the Capitolium | The Peripatetic View of the Passions | Blood, Guts, and Laughter: Dark Humour in Statius' Thebaid V | Lucretius and the Conquest of Emotion | Transforming Relationships through Emotional Expression in Sophocles' Electra | Brutalized Bodies and Broken Categories in Catullus 8 and 40

Brutalized Bodies and Broken Categories in Catullus 8 and 40

    The brutalized body figures prominently in Catullus' poetry, whether the body is subjected to physical punishment or suffers the physiological symptoms of love. The status of the brutalized body relative to the tormentor is generally dictated by generic conventions: the lover is tortured by the object of his poetry, and the iambic poet abuses objects of his invective. By manipulating generic and social codes and conventions, Catullus addresses questions of literary genre, the social position of the poet at Rome, and the competitive nature of political relationships in Roman society. After a brief analysis of Catullan corporeal poetics, this paper analyzes the bodies in pain in poems 8 and 40 using Elaine Scarry's view of brutality and torture as devices used to manipulate the realities of the tortured and to empower the agents of torture (The Body in Pain, 1985). Catullus' poetry exhibits all three elements of torture that Scarry describes: the infliction of increasing pain, the objectification of this pain, and the redescription of one person's pain as another's power.
    Catullan corporeal poetics are based in the interplay of active and passive roles (in both a literary and social sense) and in the status and virility these confer in relation to the brutalized body. Catullus represents his libellus as a refined corpusculum in his programmatic first poem, where it is identified charming, new, and polished: attributes consistent with the refined body of the puer delicatus (charming, fresh, and hairless). The poet embodies the genre-based discourse of love in the brutalized erotic body: his erotic bodies suffer pain, generally because they desire (e.g. poems 51 and 76), while in the invective poems (e.g. 15 and 16) he places himself in the explicit role of aggressor and agent of the pain relative to the victim of his invective. Catullus implicates the violated body within this dialogue about genre almost as if the images of pain and suffering are components of literary genre leaving their marks on the mutilated body.
    Poem 8 illustrates both the performative aspect of Catullan poetics and the aesthetic investment in the brutality and painful suffering that characterizes his work. The poem takes the form of invective directed both against the unhappy lover and the object of his desire, the stock character of amatory lyric. Poem 40 also blends invective and love lyric, casting the recipient Ravidus simultaneously in the roles of amatory opponent (voluisti amare, 8) and political adversary (non bene advocatus, 3). In these poems (as elsewhere) Catullus subverts the role of agent/subject and recipient/object conventional to love poetry and iambics respectively by contaminating each genre with the other. As the center of the power relationships within each poem, the brutalized body becomes a metaphor and a site for the interplay of genres and the analysis of social position through the redefinition of these roles.