Lisa Cordes (Humboldt-University, Berlin)
Blending personae – Hybrid Speakers and the Performance of Authorship in Cicero’s Dialogues
The paper analyses instances of dynamic and ambiguous speaker-modelling in Cicero’s Dialogues. Focusing i.a. on the Academici libri, De divinatione, De senectute, and De amicitia, it asks what notions of persona and authorship can be derived from this modelling and what purpose it might have in the context of the late Republic.
While scholarship has often considered the interlocutors in Cicero’s Dialogues from a historical perspective, discussing their authenticity and their use as ‘mouthpieces’ for the author, the literary and political implications of the textualization of Roman nobiles have been less studied. Discussions about the ancient notion of the literary persona, on the other hand, revolved mostly around poetry and fictional narrative (e.g. Mayer, 2003). Yet, the Dialogues are an important object of study in this context, because the understanding of the innertextual personae and their relation to the extratextual world is of immediate socio-political relevance in this case.
The paper starts from the observation that the interlocutors in Cicero’s Dialogues are often modelled and described as ‘hybrids’: as artificial personae, created by the blending of two or more extratextual individuals. The ‘blend’ may include the author, the dedicatee, other contemporaries, and historical and literary figures. This depiction creates ambiguities concerning the speakers’ identities that go beyond the dichotomy of the ‘mask’ and the author ‘behind the mask’. Moreover, the speakers’ identities are unstable. We observe moments of dynamic fusion and separation of individuals, and instances of ‘cross-fading’. The interlocutors thus appear as dynamically extendable, composite personae whose identification with biological individuals is explicitly denied.
Despite this explicit textuality of the personae, the Dialogues urge the reader to think about their relation to extratextual individuals, to the author, and to others who were incorporated into them. It is thus imperative to ask what notions of personhood and authorship underlie this design of speakers. The paper argues that the ambiguous modelling of the personae serves to depict authorship itself ambiguously. Oscillating between a display of ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ authorship, the Dialogues allow Cicero to represent himself simultaneously as a ‘solitary genius’, a collaborative agent (Gurd, 2012), and a mere scribe. In the socio-political context of the Late Republic this is an effective way of ‘performing authorship’ (Berensmeyer, 2012). Combining aspects that are deemed contradictory in modern authorship theories, Cicero is able to gain social capital both, by emphasising his literary abilities, and by inserting contemporaries into the texts, without specifying who is ultimately to take responsibility and credit for what is said. Thus, as with regard to the literary personae, modern categories must be adapted and extended when we analyse Ciceronian authorship.