Dear Andy,
Many, many thanks for listening, in the real humanist spirit, for the
poetic sensibility; and for the hope.
We do concur on all major points, I think. I certainly think we will not be
able to understand our object if we do not bring Renaissance thinking on
music, poetry, rhetoric, philosophy, and love. And yes, we concur on the
irrelevance to our object of the author's sexual orientation (I too found
the subject of that question about Marlowe both offensive and
pseudo-historicist). The phonic/rhetorical poetization of desire and
sexuality matter a great deal. Should we, like you, be willing to listen
beyond the semantic surface to which new historicists insist on clinging in
the name of the imaginary, those poetizations could teach us many many
words/sounds with which to enrich our understanding of literary object and
its culture: honey, flowers, reedes, bees, orpharions, wills, fells,
melody, shells, corals ... not to mention rhetorical and musical forms such
as simile, the mean, apsotrophe, anapodoton, diapason, figure. Of course,
these last, being structures, would at the same time ramify and enrich our
psychoanalytic thinking of the poetics of the psyche.
This is why, Andy, in terms of Pythagorean (and Deleuzian) thinking,
Spenser's not having read Lacan is immaterial. Lacan's theory too is a
repetition with a difference of the same object whose truth, I think, is
articulated through phonemes and structure, not semantics. Orpheus,
Pythagoras, Campion, Peacham, Sherry, Puttenham, Spenser, Marlowe,
Barnfield, can help us enrich and ramify Lacanian theory perhps much more
than Lacan can help us undersatnd them. It was his imperative, after all,
that psychoanalysis should*never* be "applied" to literature, but that
psychoanalysis should, rather, turn to literature, and even more so to
rhetoric, in order to learn more about its concerns. I think we should
listen to him too.
I *do* apologize to you (but only to you, at the moment) for the
complexity of my language. But I began trying the language, and the
concepts, once again on undergraduates yesterday, with Campion's Ayres
quitely playing in the background. And as for the apst six years, they were
enthusiastic.
very best,
Shirley
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