Dear Professor Willett, 

Thank you for your responses. I think part of the current dispute
concerning many issues has to do with a philosophical distinction between
the categories of certainty and truth. Of course facts do exist and can be
validated with certainty. I never disputed that, nor any of the facts
mention. I did raise the question of whether literary analysis, and
thinking in general, should remain on the level of establishing
certainties. I know your position is that it should. I am sure that, as you
say, this is the position of many if not most other members of this list:
it has been the orthodoxy of Renaissance studies for at least the past two
decades. 

I believe that when Professor Grossman was talking about truth in fiction,
he was not talking about certainty, or what others call "hard evidence."
When I spoke about truth in poetry, I was not talking about certainty, but
about truth. Truth can never be known in its entirety nor with the same
kind of certainty of hard facts. It has everything to do with what cannot
be fully said or known, everything to do with the impossible. But it can be
accessed in fragments. Poetry seduces us to listen for those fragments.
Much of philosophy does too. That is where it converges with poetry. I
believe there is evidence Heidegger thought the same. To me, the
*Symposium*, like *The Shepheards Calender*, is such a seductive text that
when listened to, and Lacan did listen to it in its original language,
might yield such fragments. Diotima is a figure in this text. This is why
it is immaterial to me whether or not she existed as a historical figure.
                    

I certainly agree with you that Renaissance thinkers were creative in their
relation to the ancients, though I am not sure this relation was alwasy
Christian, as I think you too imply below when you talk about their use of
the pastoral tradition. But this makes their relation to the ancients part
of their poetic product. 

Part of this relation, as you also imply, had to do with the ancients'
toleration for the full spectrum of sexuality and its free public
expression, which we have not, unfortnately, recovered much of. Yet in
every generation there were those who tried, despite the frightening (and
certainbly verifiable) laws many scholars of homosexuality in the
Renaissance are so fond of quoting over and above the poetry which speaks
the truth of the psychic structures of homosexual passion. Oscar Wilde is
too obvious a verifiable example. For some reason, in the late sixteenth
century there were many such poets who spoke those truths without fear. To
me, this indicates a measure of tolerance we have not recovered. That
critics have ignored the poetizations and thinkings of homosexual passion
in Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare (and I am thinking not of
those examples even the proponents of new historicist certainty and surface
semantic articulation could not ignore but many others which have hardly
begun to be written about), not to mention Barnfield, Dyer, Dickenson,
Campion. That some of this poetization is not part of the semantic surface
of the poem but of what Profesor Miller termed its flourishing secrecy has,
to my mind, less to do with the with the sexual orientation in question
(since the same kind of poetics appear with regard to all forms of passion)
but with the privileging of the oral and musical over the visual and
semantic in Renaissance poetics in general. That most Renaisance scholars
ignore this verifiable certainty about Renaissance poetics does not speak
very well of their commintment to the certainities beyond which they refuse
to go.       

 I love language far too much, Professor Willett, to use words of whose
meanings I am not aware. But froma Socratic perspective, you are not,
unfortunately perhaps for you, my teacher and hence in a position to quiz
me. I admire your erudition, as I've said, and when I do need enlightenment
on Greek words, I will seek your advice. 

I understand your antipathy to postmodernist thinking, but believe that
someone as erdite and insistent as precision as you does hinmself injustice
when dismissing wholesale a text he has not read (Lacan's Seminar VIII --
your psychoanalytic ear missed the slip I made there in my previous post).
I am also uncomfortable with the branding of Lacan as "postmodernist," and
*most* uncomfortable with his lumping together with Derrida. I think
Derrida, together with the late Foucualt, has something with the license
that has beengiven and eagerly adopted by Renissance scholars to say
nothing of substance (because we cannot know anything about the past,
because all texts invite but textual play). But Lacan, like me, always says
(not all) the truth. In the full speech that lsitens beyond the empty
speech of semantic surfaces. 

best as always, 

Dr. Shirley Sharon-Zisser     




  



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