Male Victimology in Juvenal 6

Abstract

I use the words you taught me. If they don't mean anything anymore, teach me others, or let me be silent. Beckett, Endgame terra malos homines nunc educat atque pusillos. Today the earth breeds a race of degenerate weaklings. Juvenal 15.70 nee galeam quassas, nee terram cuspide pulsas. You do not shake your helmet, nor beat the ground with your spear. Juvenal 2.130 My intention here is to describe what seems to me an aspect of this superb and notorious poem that has been insufficiently examined, a major disruption in the sign-systems it makes use of and is used by. In order to do that I will be, as best I can, setting aside questions about the poem as a product (its meaning, how its form and content fuse to effect that meaning) and about the intentions its producer (the poet or his persona) had when he went about producing that product; whether the meaning and the intention are recoverable or not, whether they are decidable or not, is a moot question, and to try to answer it here would obscure my project (and doubtless waste our time). ‘To interpret a text,’ says Barthes, ‘is not to give it a (more or less justified, more or less free) meaning, but on the contrary to appreciate what plural constitutes it.’ To have some access to the portion of that plural that concerns me, I have to be arbitrary (and fictive) with the question of the poet's meaning/intention and to set aside as well questions of his poem's aesthetic charms.

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