The Erotics of Doubt

“The Erotics of Doubt” contends that the carpe diem trope whose classical form was an expression of pragmatic Epicureanism became, during the religious upheaval of the Reformation, an unlikely but effective vehicle for articulating religious doubt. For a diverse group of early modern poets, an encounter with ancient theories of essence and substance enabled the articulation of a skeptical hypothesis almost impossible to imagine in any other cultural venue. The unassuming carpe diem trope, that is, parlays classical physics’ materialist paradigm into a robust discourse founded entirely upon the presumption of mortality. The chapter shows that the erotic invitation’s discursive environment—its pitting of assaultive rhetorician against naïve virgin—is inherently confrontational. It reveals, through readings of Herrick, Marlowe, Ralegh, and others, that the dynamic structure that propels a lusty speaker towards consummation is latent with rhetorical and dramatic potentiality. To explore these issues, the chapter turns to Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, whose central crisis is generated by a series of unwelcome invitations made to the play’s singular virgin, pressed to surrender her chastity in order to spare her condemned brother from execution. The cloud of unredeemed death that hangs over the play forces a “measurement” of that chastity as weighed against the evocative materialist nightmare it fails to redeem.

Poetry and Matter in the English Renaissance

Chapter 1, “Poetry and Matter in the English Renaissance” traces the crucial relationship between poetics and philosophical materialism in the early modern period, explaining why erotic verse so readily lent itself to confronting questions about the nature of being and of knowledge. This chapter shows that for Renaissance poets—informed by Lucretius’ great analogy between atoms and alphabetic letters—there is poetic form in elemental matter. The writing of poetry was therefore often understood as a physical practice, while poetry itself was understood as ontologically complex and efficacious. As terms such as “figuration” reveal, poetic making has both metaphorical and literal elements, which come especially to the fore in the ubiquitous blazons depicting the face of the beloved. Within the syntax of materialist poetics, foretelling the decay of the love object is therefore tantamount to a kind of deconstruction or unmaking—making poetry actually “do” the work of time. Multiple traditions, from Aristotelian hylomorphism to idealizing Petrarchism, had prepared the way for the female body to function as a proxy for embodied matter which poets could “figure,” “make,” or “undo.” This chapter presents the object of erotic poetry becoming just that: a fictional construct subjected to the recombinatory shaping of the godlike poet. As later chapters will develop, the paradoxical loneliness of the carpe diem invitation emerges from this troubling strategy, for it is an invitational form addressed to an entity it has forever exiled as metaphysically other. This chapter thus provides both a theoretical framework and historical background for the project’s larger claims.

Saying No and Saying Yes

“Saying No and Saying Yes” turns at last from the speaker of the erotic invitation to its imagined auditor: the figure being invited to “seize the day.” Persuasion poets, of course, never expect acquiescence—the motif would hardly exist if ladies were easily seduced. However, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Milton’s A Maske are among those longer works that make room for very demonstrable acts of refusal, and both do so within an explicitly moral, Protestant context: Spenser via his knight Guyon (hearing Acrasia’s song in the Bower of Bliss), and Milton through his virginal and unnamed Lady responding to the libertine Comus. Despite some obvious similarities between these encounters, the two poets imagine remarkably different responses to the voluptuous invitations they feature. Spenser’s Guyon responds not with his putative virtue, Temperance, but vehement rage to Acrasia’s invitation in the Bower—becoming an agent of the very materialist forces he repudiates. Milton, on the other hand, imagines a place for chastity that is not built upon a sequestration of the self, but a willingness to seek, and find, trial. He thereby provides a model for perhaps the most “impossible” thought experiment of all, one in which a woman participates as an intellectual and rhetorical equal, and in whom eloquence, chastity, and desire can coexist. Milton thereby utilizes the trope to turn it on its head, constructing within it a forum for a proto-feminist articulation of agency and voice.

Introduction

The Introduction, “The Limits of the Possible,” presents the problems with the conventional reading of carpe diem invitation poetry as a low-stakes, playful mode. These poems’ pretext of erotic enticement is often stunningly belied: by a morbid preoccupation with time and death (with ekphrases of decaying bodies used to incite love-making), by an abstruse fixation on the meaning of virginity (regularly interrogated on physiological, semiotic, and ontological terms), and by an anti-theist denial of Christian Providentialism (if there is no God to judge our actions, why not have sex now?). A brief look at the locus classicus of the motif in authors like Horace and Catullus reveals the philosophical stakes of the Renaissance revival, in which the secular hypothesis puts nothing less than an entire belief system on trial. This introduction shows both the world-making aspirations, but also the terrible constraints on a mode whose primary subject is, ultimately, the limits of human knowledge and existence. The introduction outlines my methodology, both archival and theoretical, for this full-scale re-evaluation of carpe diem as not merely a vaguely erotic commonplace, but also a medium and a mode of cognition.

Telling Time on the Body

“Telling Time on the Body” examines carpe diem in conversation with Renaissance visual arts of death. Lyrics that once seemed merely imitative of classical tropes take on paradoxical new life when we recognize that their depictions of time, aging, and death incorporate distinctly visual strategies for representing desiccation and emptiness. These artists ekphrastically reveal the effect of Time upon matter, turning the abstraction of temporality into something rendered hauntingly in green and ochre. Early modern poets, likewise, present pictorialized “Time” as the figure that divulges hidden truths about decaying bodies. They thereby claim their own consanguinity to Time, as fellow actants upon bodily material, while also presenting decay as an event that happens predominantly to women. Yet it is not misogyny alone that motivates these sometimes-grisly figurations of the aging or postmortem female body. Rather, in decomposing the idealized beloved—rosy cheeks, pearly teeth, and all—the poet also “unmakes” the Petrarchan poetry that first invented her, demonstrating his temporal triumph over tired poetic conventions. By vividly rendering the postmortem decay of the woman’s body, that is, the poet brings “death” not just to his supposed beloved, but also to Petrarchist clichés about the red and gold and white. Carpe diem’s unforgivingly visual program of poetic representation confronts outmoded mystifications with brute empiricism, and demands that erotic verse leave behind courtly conventions and claim a new place in literary history.

Afterword

The afterword, “Learning to Imagine What We Know” attempts to articulate a material poetics, rather than a metaphysics, of the mind in extremis, at the places where life, time, representation, and knowledge can go no further. Deleuze, in “The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy,” contends that “the atom is that which must be thought, and that which can only be thought.” Angus Fletcher, in the chapter “Marlowe Invents the Deadline,” makes a stunningly similar claim: “Time, finally, can only be thought.”Impossible Desire recognizes the elusive hymen, too, as a conceptual morsel that fuses sexual and epistemological conquest. It demarcates, and arouses a desire to transcend, the limit point of human knowledge. But this erotically charged search for knowledge occurs, for the carpe diem poet, in the absence of teleology. He recognizes no promise of full revelation, and only a perpetually receding horizon of further things unknown. Despite this, he uses poetry to create unlikely but capacious domains for the unthinkable, an aspiration identified as an act of world-making. As George Steiner puts it, “deep inside every ‘art-act’ lies the dream of an absolute leap out of nothingness, of the invention of an enunciatory shape so new, so singular to its begetter, that it would, literally, leave the previous world behind.” The conclusion of Impossible Desire locates this ontological leap in carpe diem poetry’s attempt to expand the increments of existence within the interstices of poetry, ultimately the only mortal place wherein one can make “this one short Point of Time/… fill up half the Orb of Round Eternity.”

Seizing the “Point Imaginary”

“Seizing the ‘Point Imaginary’ ” follows erotic poets as they grapple with the elusive concept of nothingness. The pervasive quips about a woman’s “nothing” within Renaissance literature belie the fact that virginity is in several respects a genuine paradox. Although countless attempts upon the “point imaginary” were merely sexual in nature, others make of the hymen the ultimate sign of mystery and impossibility: a tympan between materiality and immateriality, the cusp between the known and unknown. The hymen, like the Lucretian atom or the draftsman’s mathematical horizon of sight, sometimes functions as the poet’s conceptual limit point. Worth pursuing for its own sake, this vanishing point of the female body further beckons the poet with the tantalizing threshold of knowledge that it emblematizes. A seemingly trivial seduction narrative such as Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander thereby re-emerges as a site for wrestling with the epistemological and ontological problems that this paradoxical bit of material represents. This chapter traces these operations in the works of several authors, including Shakespeare, Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley, Ben Jonson, John Davies, and Thomas Wyatt. “Nothing,” for these poets, may initially refer to the woman and her questionable virginity, but also becomes attached to more portentous unknowables and supersigns. Such “impossible” thoughts were not wholly containable within the airy realm of paradox. They had implications for how early moderns understood the limits of knowledge in relation to both bodily and poetic form.