Murrin, Lewis, Greenblatt, and the Aristotelian Self-Swerve

"Know that I am Massinassa, king of the Maesuli, and since I believe that this land will fall to my lot, I should be loth to sack and burn it. So, as God is my witness, any harm which befalls you now will be through no fault but your own."--Gian Giorgio Trissino, Sophonisba (1) "Fay had tried to get back to the Ranch--and it was just not there anymore--it had burned to the ground, nothing remained, just a charred heap of rubbish. It was so strange, so strange..... "You may jeer at me, and threaten to clear the court, but until I am gagged and half-throttled, I will shout my poor truth. I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another's child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine; changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque part oil nous ne serons jamais separes; Ohio?"--Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (2) The success and influence of Stephen Greenblatt's work-from Renaissance Self-Fashioning, which inaugurated the New Historicism, to his ode to the Epicurean Lucretius in the recent best-seller The Swerve-may be attributed to any number of things: the intelligence and writing talent of the author; a Yale education that gave the author a solid grounding in Renaissance texts; the application of insights from other fields, particularly anthropology, psychology, and sociology; a Marxist perspective sharpened by studying with Raymond Williams; the helpless experience of living through the Viet Nam era as a graduate student; chatty sessions at Berkeley with Foucault and De Certeau; and possibly an inordinate hatred of Harold Bloom's understanding of literature as a phenomenon isolated not only from cultural issues, but the self. For if Bloom's agon turns literature into some sort of analgesic that makes the pain of the world and the self disappear for some precious moments, Greenblatt's ego works as a sort of Salvation Army outreach program that regards literature as an education in the ills of society without quite admitting its own regimentation. One may wonder just whose libido was more repressed in 1980, that of the fictional Guyon, whose violent destruction of the Bower of Bliss (Greenblatt argues) reflected the colonial violence and dangerous desires of the English in Ireland, or the author of Renaissance Self-Fashioning, whose enormous range of interests included a stint, while he was at Cambridge, with the English, all-male boarding school cut-ups who became Monty Python's Flying Circus. In this paper I will argue that however brilliant Greenblatt's work-and I think I am second to none in the fan club-he overlooks or simply has no sympathy for Platonism. I don't think he could have written Hamlet in Purgatory otherwise, but for the most part I will confine myself first to his chapter on Spenser in Renaissance Self-Fashioning and then more briefly to The Swerve. I will first argue that Christian Platonism created the allegorical mode in which Spenser wrote, allowing a different perspective of the self than the one Greenblatt describes. I will then suggest that those Christian thinkers who rejected Lucretius and Epicureanism did so for philosophical reasons deeply grounded in Plato's thought. There are, as Whitehead said, two sets of footnotes in the history of philosophy, but both are productive and unable to cancel the other. In what I will openly admit is a paean to my great teacher at the University of Chicago who is retiring this year, I would like to argue that of three books published in 1980--Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashion, Fredrick Jameson's Political Unconscious, and Michael Murrin's The Allegorical Epic--that it is the third, far less well-known book--and its theoretical prelude, The Veil of Allegory--that can best help us understand what Guyon was doing when he burned the banquet houses of the Bower of Bliss. For Greenblatt seems not to recognize the extent to which Spenser is separated from Guyon, because he does not take into account the dichotomy between events as they transpire "on the ground," as today's political writers like to say, and events that are mere, imperfect, fleeting glimpses of an unknowable ideal. …