The poet becomes poem: The missing object and Petrarch's ends in the Canzoniere

ABSTRACT

This article considers the role of the object of desire in Petrarch's Canzoniere. Deconstructive and post-deconstructive readings tend to emphasize the fragmentation and instability of the subject position—specifically, the figure of the poet who is metamorphosing or falling apart. Other readings of the Canzoniere, especially by feminist and psychoanalytic critics, have reappraised the place and function of the beloved. One implication of these conflicting readings is to repolarize the object/subject distinction. Developing a line of inquiry that acknowledges both threads, this article looks at the several endings—the last poem in the cycle, the “Poem to the Virgin,” Petrarch's ending as a subject, and the form of the envoi—to explore a new view of the object's function within the process of subject formation.

KEYWORDS:

• Endings
• object theory
• Petrarca
• Petrarch
• post-deconstruction
• psychoanalysis

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Lynn Enterline, Bob Edwards, Sherry Roush, and Maria Truglio for their insight and guidance.

Notes

1. “One could argue that the fundamental subject of the Canzoniere is not so much or not only the psychology of the speaker as the ontology of his selfhood, the struggle to discern a self or compose a self which could stand as a fixed and knowable substance” (Greene 124).

2. Robert M. Durling translation of the Rime sparse, unless noted.

3. Scarry notes that the human mind is unprepared to express the effects of pain and torture, both on ourselves and witnessing them on others: “The instability of our descriptive powers results from the absence of appropriate interpretive categories that might act as ‘perceptual stays’ in moments of emergency; we enter into such events incompanioned by any pre-existing habits of mind that would make it possible to go on ‘seeing’ what is taking place before our eyes” (279).

4. “When Jesus saw his mother there, and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to her, ‘Woman, here is your son,’ and to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ From that time on, this disciple took her into his home” (John 19:26–27).

5. In a recent book, Sherry Roush studies a Medieval and Early Modern variant of prosopoeia, eidolopoeia, where the dead speak back but always in a ventriloquizing way, where the voice is thrown, projected onto the non-speaking subject.

6. Another interesting counterpoint drawn from the Hispanic thread of the Petrarchan lyric (the cancioneril tradition) are the poets Juan Boscán (1492–1521) and his friend Garcilaso de la Vega (1498–1536), who introduced the Italian forms to Spain. Garcilaso wrote a fairly faithful cancionero, where his beloved Isabel Freyre, like Laura, dies in the middle of the story arc and becomes, typically, an impossible object in its second half. Garcilaso himself died soon after completing his cycle, despondent, and perhaps recklessly, in battle. Boscán, on the other hand, after his initial, pained, and distant observation of his beloved, eventually married her. Thus the second half of Boscán's cancionero is devoted to other topics such as local politics, friendship, and the bad luck of his dead friend Garcilaso.