Catullus, Pliny, and Love-Letters

Abstract

I would like to examine literature and love.' In particular, I shall focus on the relationship between epistles and desire: hence the title Love-Letters. We shall begin with the problem of love and the epistle, but I would like to move from there to a more general examination of the ways in which desire is interconnected with literary culture. There is on the one side the love-letter that the lover sends as a missive to the beloved, and on the other literature in general and its relation to desire. In order to bridge the gap between these two versions of love-letters, we will examine the literary practice of the poet Catullus and the man of affairs and sometime letter-writer Pliny. One might suppose at first glance that these two authors would have diametrically opposed relations to love and literature, where Catullus is the lover in verse and Pliny is the rather dry man of letters in prose. Similarly, one might suspect that an author writing in the 50s B.C.E. might diverge radically in the spirit of his literary ethos from one who flourished in the 100s C.E. But I would like to show how the epistles that both authors send come to represent the whole project of literary production and consumption. And these letters, we shall see, do not just express desire; they also inculcate and manage a whole social economy of pleasures. This economy of the letter does not just cover exchanges in the socio-political dimension, but also encompasses a psychic economy regulating intersubjective relations as well as one's relationship to the self. These two dimensions, though, are not segregated; and one finds in these letters the ledgers and accounts that would verify the solvency of Roman masculine identity. In this fashion one writes of love, because, in a sense, it cannot be helped: all literary culture falls under the sign of desire and this desire is a force ordering the social and psychic accounts of the world.

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