#phding

Feminist Modernist Studies

Rather, I am suggesting something far more basic: namely, that our inability to ‘define’ the love between Achilles and Patroclus, whether or not Homer himself was indifferent to the task of doing so, is part of what makes that love believable as love. For if one were to draw only a single lesson from the long history of love, especially the literary history of love, including but not limited to same-sex love, it would surely be about love’s Houdini-like ability to escape ‘labels,’ to say nothing of ‘strait-jackets.’ Were Achilles and Patroclus friends, or battlefield comrades, or lovers? When it comes to true love, the best answer is always ‘yes.’ Forget the ‘intention’ that Fantuzzi remarkably claims to know not only for Homer but for the authors of Gilgamesh and the Book of Samuel. Or rather, suppose that he is right, since, heaven (alone) knows, he may well be. In that case, time has given us the true-love stories that a single age perhaps could not: that is to say, stories of that kind of love that leaves questions about labels to those lovers of words who are really only lovers of dictionaries.

Had a meeting

between now and monday, I have to