Amy A Koenig (Hamilton College)
The tenth poem of Prudentius’ Peristephanon, the account of a martyr who miraculously continues to speak after the removal of his tongue, is a tour de force celebration of the corporeal rhetoric of violence. In addition to rich engagement with his literary predecessors (e.g. Malamud 1989, Levine 1991, Fux 2013), the works in this collection equate the bodies of the martyrs they commemorate with texts and with the poems themselves, creating a complex relationship between written, oral, and corporeal communication (see e.g. Ross 1995, Ballengee 2009, Fielding 2014). In Peristephanon 10, owing to its subject matter, this theme is explored in a particularly emphatic fashion.
This paper illuminates ways in which Peristephanon 10 engages with a particular set of ideas surrounding loss of voice that manifest in earlier literature: specifically, that enforced muteness might represent not simply a deprivation of agency, but a paradoxical, unintentional liberation from the constraints of the voice that can grant compensatory power (compare, for instance, the versions of the myth of Philomela in which a silenced woman becomes the archetypal bird of poetic lament). Conversely, accounts of the miraculous regaining of speech often cast doubt on the agency behind the voice thus recovered, toying with the idea that the words may not be the person’s own (e.g. descriptions of divine poetic inspiration or prophetic utterances).
The passion of Romanus, true to these traditions, emphasizes the state of liberation created by the silencing at the poem’s center, embodied by a free-flowing gush of blood produced by the severing of the martyr’s tongue (903-10) and the multiplication of his “mouths” by the opening of wounds (561ff.). While Romanus’ long speeches seem to dominate the poem, and scholars (e.g. Ross 1995) have characterized it as privileging verbal and corporeal “rhetoric” equally, I argue that it privileges the silent “voice” of bleeding wounds over verbal testimony: the martyr’s wounds are not simply equivalent to his words, but more crucial aspects of his passion, as encapsulated by the “recording angel” near the poem’s end who requires drawings alongside text in his task of commemoration (1121-1130). At the same time, Prudentius—beginning with a powerful image of Christ becoming the poet’s tongue (mea lingua Christus, 22)—calls into question the agency behind both the poetic voice and the miraculously restored voice of the martyr, which continues to speak despite being brutally disconnected from his body’s vocal apparatus. Both are ultimately characterized as proceeding from the will of Christ, which supersedes the will of the martyr or poet himself.
I close with the suggestion that Peristephanon 10, while participating in a literary tradition of exploring the potential of muteness, is distinctive in its attitude toward it. Where stories such as the myth of Philomela often feature an underlying unease regarding the brutality of the silencing, or the subsumption of one voice into another, Prudentius’ text full-throatedly celebrates both the liberation afforded by the martyr’s torture and the surrender of his divinely inspired “new” voice to the will of God.