The Vocative and the Vocational

If, as Derrida claims, every written text has its origin in the vocative, in the writer's desire to achieve the perfect union of Speaking and Being, then the process of continued writing is testimony to the writer's failure to close off the equivocality of language. If the vocative could be achieved, then writing itself would cease to be. In Glas Derrida argues that text only exists, resists, consists, represses, itself be or written if it is elaborated by the unreadability of a proper name.' Thus the written text exists as a record not of the success of the vocative impulse, but of the loss of the Name, its dissemination in linguistic dispersal. The writer must write because the Name cannot be named. Spenser's The Faerie Queene lets itself be read because its ultimate quest is the poet's unsuccessful effort to nominate Elizabeth. If we may argue that The Faerie Queene has its origin in the vocative, then it is time to consider the crucial interrelationship between Spenser's vocational goal in The Faerie Queene, the fulfillment of his epic role as England's Virgil, and his vocative goal, his desire quite simply to name his queen, to call forth her image from behind her couert vele (2 proem 5.2) as the ultimate sanctioner of his epic task.2 The Faerie Queene's origins in the vocative are noted by Raleigh, himself a seeker of the hidden image behind Elizabeth's couert vele, whose commendatory sonnet to the epic urges Spenser to Behold her Princely mind aright, and write thy Queene anew. In his punning association of aright and write, Raleigh has wittily and succinctly identified the difficulty of Spenser's nominative task: his poetry must work to achieve the

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• The Faerie Queene and renaissance poetics

  Maria R Rohr Philmus•English Studies•1995

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