Echoes and Reflections in Catullus’ Long Poems

What kind of connection between different parts of a text might we be trying to capture with the word ‘intratextuality’? One plausible answer might be that intratextuality should be thought of as something comparable to intertextuality. Specifically, the cognitive process for the reader might involve memory over some appreciable distance: something in the text reminds me of something I previously encountered in the same text, long enough ago that I want to say that I am ‘remembering’ that other moment rather than that it is still in my immediate experience because my eyes encountered it a line or two further up on the same page, or, as I read aloud, I have not yet taken a breath since I uttered it. If this is along the right lines, then it makes sense to talk about Catullus’ longer poems under the heading of intratextuality. By ‘long poems’, specifically, I mean those grouped in the corpus as we have it under the numbers 61 to 68. Their actual length varies from the 24 elegiac lines of poem 65 to the 408 or so hexameters of poem 64, but it is generally true for them as it is not for Catullus’ other poetry that each of them is long enough in principle to produce intratextual effects in the way just outlined. Their relative length, however, is not the only prompt for an intratextual investigation of these poems. In a rich chapter in Sharrock/Morales 2000, Theodorakopoulos discusses intratextuality in Catullus 64, reading that longest and densest of the long poems as a labyrinth, a lake of ink, a textile woven of crisscrossing threads: hers is one of many attempts, to which I am adding in my forthcoming commentary on the poem, to respond to its complex structure and texture – one story inside another, dense tangles of chronological confusion – and its perplexing tone – is it a sensuous celebration of the heroic past and/or a lament for historical decline? My approach here, however, draws more closely on work on Catullus 64 that has looked, without the label of intratextuality, at some of the specific means by which the poem creates these complexities: namely, its networks of repetition. This is a frequent theme in criticism of the poem, and I