Delie as Other: Toward a Poetics of Desire in Sceve's "Delie."

For those readers of Sceve's Delie inclined toward a modern negative hermeneutic approach to this love masterpiece (and the number appears to be growing: Pascal Quignard, Michael Giordano, Gregory de Rocher, and now Frelick, among others), there is no finer study to date than Delie as Other and its Lacanian, indeed "(post-)structuralist," focus on Sceve's poetics of desire. What sets Frelick apart is how she expertly combines modern critical thinking and Renaissance critical thinking (Petrarch, Erasmus, Rabelais) through the primary Lacanian lens. For her, Sceve, like the other Renaissance authors, wrote "fragmentary, polyphonic, or plurivocal texts [which] emphasize the indeterminacy of truth and meaning, and question the referentiality of language, as well as the significance and signification of sign systems" (9). Thus, the Delie is not "a linear, completed discourse that is entirely in agreement with itself" and whose "meaning" can ever be "master[ed]" (11). To the contrary, its "fragments or elusive gaps are the locus of meaning" (i.e., its Lacanian-Platonic emphasis on myth, enigma, aporia, ellipsis, tautology, paradox, oxymoron, etc.). These gaps constitute its poetics of unfulfilled desire (13).

Frelick thus reads Sceve's love poems and the poetic project itself as moments of rupture and fragmentation: as "the opposition of the I and the other" which highlights the absence/presence and death/life antithesis of D144, a model poem of desire and lack for Frelick wherein the negative element forever subverts the positive element (28 ff). Sceve's poetics of desire as rupture and fragmentation are especially reinforced by Delie's Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Ovidian mythic subtexts (4197), which also serve to "evoke the problems of expression involved in [failed] attempts to capture the ineffable through images, speech, and writing" (91). Frelick's last two chapters argue that "neither through Delie as other nor through writing Delie can the Poet-Lover ever become unified or rid himself of the feeling of lack" (125), and that in the overall "text(ure)" of Delie, "desire does not lead to the Whole but back to the Hole, the gap, to lack. Instead of providing integration, the Poet's verses, written in the language of the unconscious, stand as the traces of his fragmentation" (156).

Now, in regard to more "traditional-positive" readers of the Delie, as Frelick calls them, who have and who continue to view Sceve's accomplishment as something more than, if not the exact opposite of, the picture of eternal amorous anguish and the resulting fragmentation of poetic perspective (and whose numbers are equally impressive, from V.-L. Saulnier through I.D. McFarlane and Enzo Giudici to Cynthia Skenazi today, among others), Frelick's study is obviously problematic. This is inevitable, of course, and quite positive for Sceve studies. For both sides of the critical spectrum on Sceve, meaning, like beauty, is ultimately in the eye of the beholder-reader. At the very least, divergent critical readings of Delie's desires (in the plural) testify to Sceve's widespread literary relevancy today. It will be the pleasurable task of each individual reader of Delie to determine for himself or herself which desire and which Sceve is the more meaningful. Frelick argues forcefully her own view and position on Sceve who, "like Plato and Lacan, teaches us about desire obliquely, through myth and through a poetics of fragmentation and indeterminacy that creates gaps" (161). Not everyone will agree, but most will appreciate her deeply held and carefully argued critical conviction.

JERRY C. NASH University of New Orleans