4 - An Early Modern Address to the Author: Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft, ‘My love, my love, my love’ (1610)

Summary

The goal is to be on both sides of the poem / Shuttling between the you and I

Ben Lerner

It is a famous case in Dutch literary studies. Of the many sonnets Hooft wrote, this sonnet in which the blissful intimacy between the speaker and his beloved sadly turns out to be a dream, seems to be the one that is most often discussed. The sonnet has been interpreted in different ways and it even led to a polemic about the right way to read seventeenth-century poems. Despite their differences, all these interpretations make use of the author as a unifying principle. The poem is understood as something that sheds light on the author – either on his life (Hooft wrote this sonnet four months before he married Christina van Erp, to whom he [pseudonymously] addressed his manuscript version of the poem), or on his authorship. In the latter case, the sonnet is regarded as a proof of Hooft's inventiveness and originality. The time has come, I believe, to see the sonnet in a different light – not from the perspective of the author Hooft, but rather the other way around. In this contribution, I want to suggest that the poem demonstrates how the author as a unifying and meaning-giving principle came into being.

But in what way is this sonnet about a thwarted lover's dream, actually a sonnet in which an author constitutes himself as the one who has created the truth of the sonnet? In order to answer that question, I will first look at Foucault's notion of the author function, and then turn to Jonathan Culler's apostrophe and Joel Fineman's conception of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sonnet (see Foucault, 1969; Culler, 1981; and Fineman, 1986). Foucault, first of all, because he pleaded several times – both implicitly and explicitly – to adopt the perspective on the author I am suggesting here. In ‘Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?’ (1969), for example, he explicitly proposed to see the author not as a phenomenon ‘outside and anteceding’ the text; rather, he encouraged others and himself to ask why, since the beginnings of modernity, we tend to see the author in that way (Foucault, 1984, p. 101).