De Gustibus

Corey McEleney's Futile Pleasures seeks to demonstrate that Renaissance writers who worried about the frivolity of literature—theater, poetry, and romance—were right. Despite their appeals to educational or moral profit to justify literary pleasure, these Renaissance literary texts fail to deliver on their utilitarian promises. Linking contemporary historicist criticism to Renaissance authors' similar wish to redeem literature as useful, McEleney seeks instead to revive a deconstructive textuality that emphasizes "play, digression, deferral, contradiction, surprise, coincidence, and a general resistance to ends" (8). He ties the eclipse of this high deconstructive mode to its association with "non-heterosexual eroticism and style" (40), as reflected in charges of "impotency and passivity … obliquely figured by the narcissism of women and queers, gay men in particular" (41). Critics who insist instead on the "importance of effecting historical or political understanding, difference, or change" (41) replicate Renaissance scapegoating of queer or other marginalized figures who represent un(re)productive literary and sexual pleasures (8, 44).

Playing on the utility of Horace's dulce et utile, McEleney calls his approach "futilitarian." Granting, however, that it is difficult to eschew all forms of usefulness, and perhaps undesirable to do so (6–7), McEleney hopes the pleasurable critical journey of Futile Pleasures will excuse its inevitable capitulation to the ends of critical argument (14). This journey involves—with intentional digression to other texts and authors, early modern and otherwise—close readings of five major Renaissance texts: Richard II, The Schoolmaster, The Unfortunate Traveler, Book 6 of The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost. Surprisingly absent from the book is Marlowe, who merits only three brief mentions. For sheer Renaissance literary fun, is there anything that beats "Hero and Leander"?

The chapter on Richard II establishes the connection between futilitarian literary pleasures and a scapegoated queer character whom McEleney—borrowing from Lee Edelman riffing on Lacan—refers to as the sinthomosexual (47–48). Here the sinthomosexual is Richard II, a non-reproductive king who engages in wasteful and "narcissistic" (48) pleasures (from the view of the normative political world) along with his "sodomitical flatterers" Bushy, Bagot, and Green (58–59). These pleasures are also literary, a connection made through the aesthetic dimension of the myth of Narcissus and through the epithet "caterpillars of the commonwealth," used both to describe Richard's followers and, in Stephen Gosson's The Schoole of Abuse, poets and players, among others (pipers, as usual in these discussions, get short shrift). McEleney argues that Richard becomes the scapegoat for the pleasures of the text: "the play projects vanity onto its eponymous character so as to avoid the futilitarian void in which he falls" (51). By finally providing a counter figure of redemption in Hal, Shakespeare further submits the narrative arc of the second tetralogy to "the ideology of socially useful ends" (63).

The following chapter shifts from theater to another suspect Renaissance literary form, the romance. A nice deconstructive reading of Roger Ascham's The Schoolmaster traces how his condemnation of the idle and indecent pleasures of Arthurian tales replicates, in its search for the enemies of morality, a romance quest, with the "protean foe always just beyond his grasp" (79). McEleney in this chapter joins Ascham with Nashe, an unlikely pair except that Nashe too, however ironically, at times rails against pleasures of romance or Italianate literature and culture. There is a sharp reading here of the phrase "babble bookemungers" in the Anatomie of Absurditie (82–85). McEleney's attempt to discover Nashe's inability in The Unfortunate Traveler to reconcile pleasure and profit ("a radically incompatible doubling between the pleasurable means and apparently virtuous ends of the text" [97]) seems to me to take Nashe's occasional expressions of seriousness too seriously in the first place.

In the second half of the book, McEleney turns to two writers, Spenser and Milton, who did take seriously the idea that literary pleasure could provide a useful moral education. In the chapter on Book 6 of the Faerie Queene, McEleney...