Dr Gail Trimble: List of publications

This chapter is a piece of teaching-led research (a Heyworth phrase): it stems from my experience of teaching Ovid, and specifically Fasti 6, after having been taught Horace. As I worked with students who had written essays on closure in the Fasti, I found myself repeatedly articulating the kind of understanding of Horace’s final ode that I shall outline below, and encouraging them to see that much more might be implied by Ovid’s allusion to it in the last line of Fasti 6 than simply the sense of an ending. I am grateful to the editors of this volume for the opportunity to explore in writing the ideas I had been trying out in tutorials, and to connect them with a ‘Horatian’ interpretation of aspects of Ovid’s exile poetry which I had also been keeping in mind, and discussing with colleagues and students, for some years; I would like to thank the editors, too, for their advice on this chapter. But above all I am grateful to Steve for teaching me so much both formally and informally, and I ask for his forbearance if I include in what follows more about ‘late Horace’ in full Augustan flow than he would normally have the taste for.

This chapter revisits the challenges of thinking about narrative metalepsis in lyric contexts by considering the diverse corpus of Catullus. Catullus’ most obviously narrative poem—poem 64—offers rich possibilities for metaleptic readings, and the chapter particularly investigates the ways in which the boundary between the poem’s outer narrative and its inset, ostensibly ecphras- tic story is navigated by two powerfully subjective presences, the narrator and Ariadne, by such means as apostrophe and mise en abyme. Yet Catullus is typically classified as a lyric poet, and the chapter also examines poems that fuse the narrative and lyric modes, looking at potentially hymnic addresses to divinities across the corpus, and the tension in poem 68 between, on the one hand, the tendency to establish a whole series of nested narrative levels through ring composition and simile, and, on the other, the pull of the lyric mode towards a unified poetic ‘present’. There is a particular emphasis on the interaction among speech acts in the first, second and third person. Catullus himself appears in all three ‘persons’ as a character in the corpus, but is also a Roman author in whose real existence we believe, and the chapter concludes by returning against this background to Genette’s concern that metalepsis prompts us to ask whether we may belong to some narrative—as Catullus indeed does.