Seizing the “Point Imaginary”

Abstract

“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.