THE TEXTUALITY OF CATULLAN MANHOOD

If Poems 5 through 7 respond to a reading that takes them as a triplet, with the Catullan speaking subject moving from the stance of a fearfully defiant lover (in Poem 5) to that of an aggressive moralizer (in Poem 6) and back again (in Poem 7), what poetic meaning, and indeed what social and ethical meaning, are we to attach to this flashing oscillation? Despite the last chapter's argument against reading a Catullus critically detached from his own poetically performed aggression, surely there is some kind of role playing (prosopopoeia) in this three-act mime, and hence surely it is possible, here and elsewhere in Catullus' poetry, to draw some kind of distinction between role and actor, between mask and man. Some kind of distinction there is, but I think it need not take the form of the neat demarcation, derived from modernist “persona criticism,” between Catullus the poet and “Catullus” the persona, a binary division that a generation of Catullan criticism taught its students to make and maintain carefully, on pain of falling back into what it saw as the hopeless naïveteá of Romantic “biographical criticism.”1 It is a question, again, of who is speaking, and of the nature of the speaker's engagement with the words being spoken, especially where those words are ethically unpalatable to the reader by the aggression they perform. Here again a postmodern critical stance may offer a richer and deeper reading of ancient Catullus than was provided by modernism's saving of the appearances through positing a “literary persona.”.