thank you, Professor Bishop; all linear, prosaic points taken;
I apologize, and castigate myself, for being a touch too prosaic in that
formulation. A parapraxis on my part in an attempt to respond to the demand
to be clear to Renaissance scholars. I should not have proceeded linearly
and prosaically in my own speech, for that would never get any analyst
anywhere beyond the veil, beyond the "now" you aptly pointed out. But
unlike me, Spenser never for a moment lets go of verse and in-verse, and in
"dead as living ever" as in the opening line of the FQ, is careful to never
allow the "now" to become a possibility. That would prosaicize all verse,
lead us to misrecognize ardor as adumbrating a possibility of being.
Prose proceeds directly, as you do in your reading. Verse, etymologically,
re-turns.
This is what Giorgio Agamben says about the two categories in *Language and
Death*:
"verse ... signals to the reader that these words have alwasy already come
to be, that they will return again, and that te instance of the word that
takes place in a poem is, for this reason, ungraspable. Through the musical
elemeenet, poetic language commemorates its own inaccessible originary
place and it says the unspeakability of the event of language...Muse is the
name the Greeks gave to this experience of the ungraspability of the
originary place of the poetic word" (p. 78).
Please listen to the first line of FQ musically, in verse, Professor
Bishop, before your pursue it prosaically. Is it not significant that "I"
and "maske" (and "Muse") synchronize in a "whilome" which can never be a
present moment?
I wanted to thank you for a psychoanalytical ear on two other counts. My
use of the word "declare" was not incidental, for this word itself is an
involucrum par excellence, a topic on whose use in medieval verse such as
the verse to which Spenser looks in FQ I have been working for some time
with Dr. Gila Aloni of Hunter College. "Declare" semantically bespeaks a
telling, as you say. But at the same time it signifies a de-clarification,
veiling, hiding. Please listen, musically, to the interplay between
"declare" and "hyd" in the prologue to Chaucer's *Legend of Good Women.*.
I do not mind name-calling, as to my mind it unveils the caller, not the
called, who, qua origin, remains constitutively unattainable. In this
instance, I would only say I appreciate Barthes's attention to grammar and
rhetoric, but on the whole believe he is one of the far too over-rated
thinkers of this century. One of the reasons I think this is the book to
which you alluded, and to which an accident of prosaic history, not poetry,
relates my initials. What Barthes fails to hear there is precisely what
Spenser, and the Renaissance rhetoricians, and the initiates of the ancient
mysteries, understood long before. It is only in prosaic thinking that
mysteries or enigmas can ever come to what he calls "the end of
expectation" or closure (p. 76). As a psychoanalyst of vesre and/as music,
I believe veracity is in-verse, and hence never read the way he, and you, do.
I take "correspondent," however, as a compliment in a pastoral, Pythagorean
spirit. And you did unconsciously hear my post had everything to do with
the psychoanalytical category of the name, and with my own (originary) name.
thanks again,
Dr. Shirley Sharon-Zisser
At 15:48 17/11/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Our Barthesian correspondent, S. S-Z, writes:
>
>>But who is the *Faerie Queene's* "I"? The speaker declares himself to be
>>veiled -- "masked" -- as soon as he utters his "I" in line 1
>
>But, of course, Spenser declares nothing of the kind. He says that
>his "muse whylome did maske", not he himself, and not, perhaps, "now"
>but only "whylome". Though he may indeed be masked, he is not so
>unknowing as to declare so. That would be telling.
>
>
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