Key words: excruciation, overextension, iconoclasm\/Catholicism<\/p>\n
TL\/DR<\/strong>: Spenser constantly allows the form, paths, and emotions of his poem and its characters to wander, before frantically pulling back, far more anxiously than Ariosto. Why? Perhaps he remains constantly transfixed\u2014and troubled\u2014by his own inability\u2014and that of humanity generally (?)\u2014to learn from previous mistakes. So the pat moralism of the opening stanza in this canto is variously complicated in the course of what follows, only for its sententiousness to be reaffirmed\u2014and so on. Another perplexing crux: the efficacy of the ostensibly mystical, overwrought\u2014to call a spade a spade, \u201cCatholic\u201d\u2014imagery of the transfixed heart-jewel Timias dispatches, via mourning dove, to Belphoebe. It works. But isn\u2019t it also a betrayal of Protestant austerity? Then there\u2019s the pesky problem of the couple\u2019s reunion resulting in Arthur wandering all about. We\u2019ll find out what he gets up to later tonight! [142 words]<\/p>\n Our passage focused on Timias, who settled into a serious funk after Belphoebe caught him kissing Amoret\u2019s tears. Naughty boy! Solomon\u2019s line that \u201cthe displeasure of the mighty is \/ Then death it selfe more dread and desperate\u201d suggests that the relationship of squire to beautiful Diana has a more topical political resonance too, perhaps recalling that of Sir Walter Raleigh to Elizabeth.<\/p>\n In any event, our concerns were more formal and thematic, stemming from a key question: why is it that Spenser so often dramatizes the experience of deep, physically felt emotion\u2014\u201cexcruciations,\u201d Jeff called them\u2014only to insist upon their resolution, often quickly and sententiously to boot? In this case, the speaker recommends enduring the woeful melancholy of \u201cdispleasure\u201d with \u201csufferaunce soft\u201d and \u201crigor\u201d till time allays the \u201csterne remembrance.\u201d (In a conditional Emily helped us parse\u2014\u201cIf heaven, then none may it redresse or blame, \/ Sith to his power we all are subiect borne: \/ If wrathfull wight, then fowle rebuke and shame \/ Be theirs, that have so cruell thee forlorne; \/ But if through inward griefe or wilfull scorne \/ Of life it be, then better doe advise\u201d\u2014Britomart tacks in a similarly grin-and-bear-it direction. But perhaps we shouldn\u2019t be surprised that in a poem of such endlessly maddening contradictions\u2014or carefully structured dialectic\u2014Timias ignores her advice and the couple reunites.)<\/p>\n I suggested that we might look to Ariosto (a bit of whose Orlando furioso<\/em> is included below) and Tasso, Spenser\u2019s two most important forbears for help making sense of The Faerie Queene<\/em>\u2019s intense anxiety around the topic of emotional and formal entrelacement<\/em>. While never completely dropping the thread of moral seriousness, the former gleefully entangles his plotlines and emotionally overwrought characters for as long as he can, though eventually Orlando must indeed be cured, and the Saracens, at last defeated. By contrast, Tasso\u2014whose fraught, Bloomian relationship to Ariosto has animated entire monographs\u2014always keeps the telos of retaking Jerusalem in sight; as such, his celebrated digressions do not veer from this narrative trajectory so much as they dilate points along its curve. When even this strategy was found morally suspect\u2014a response that accelerated the poet\u2019s psychic breakdown\u2014Tasso expurgated and then rewrote the epic completely, extirpating its more romantic episodes.<\/p>\n Spenser, Jeff pointed out, takes a different approach altogether. He seems more to operate by way of a logic of \u201coverextension\u201d: his epic speaker indulges the Ariostan passions only to realize how far he\u2019s gone and then to retreat, frantically<\/em>. Never, however, does the narrator or his characters seem to learn their lesson. Perhaps the atrocities Spenser helped to perpetrate in Ireland partly explain this: Spenser was never confident that\u2014if confronted with similar circumstances again\u2014he wouldn\u2019t act in exactly the same way. Spenser\u2019s \u201cmoments of greatest clarity,\u201d Jeff suggested \u201care also his hardest moments.\u201d And they manifest by way of panicked narrative devices in the FQ<\/em> itself. (Then again, there\u2019s always the possibility\u2014as Berger reports\u2014that Spenser is also performing these lapses into error self-consciously, with the poise of an experienced teacher, so that we can learn from them\u2014and not fall down these same byways ourselves.)<\/p>\n One of our other major themes\u2014thanks to Sally\u2019s keen focus on the jewel the \u201cturtle Dove\u201d bears to Belphoebe\u2014was Spenser\u2019s competing affinities for intensely embodied imagery and antipapal iconoclasm. Though he\u2019s no friend of the pope, he\u2019s also no Zwinglian image-breaker: he\u2019s too wondrous a creator of captivating pictures himself. (Linda Gregerson\u2019s book, The<\/em> Reformation of the Subject<\/em>, is a helpful read on this subject, but perhaps she stabilizes the ambivalences and tensions in The Faerie Queene<\/em>\u2014and, for that matter, in Paradise Lost<\/em>\u2014too neatly. By contrast, Joseph Campana\u2019s The Pain of Reformation <\/em>amplifies them, showing that Spenser\u2019s corporeal rhetoric and attention to the community-making nature of pain and feeling in the FQ<\/em> works to correct for Protestantism\u2019s disinterest in affect\u2014though in his case, he might give short shrift to the new religion.) For Belphoebe and Timias, anyway, the iconography works: they find each other once again. But of course, their reunion also means that the squire becomes \u201cmindlesse of his owne deare Lord.\u201d That\u2019s a problem. But sometimes, too, refusing care to others\u2014being mindless<\/em> of them\u2014is a good thing. How do we know the difference? What a pickle!<\/p>\n Favorite couplet: \u201cAnd have the sterne remembrance wypt away \/ Of bitter thoughts, which deepe therein infixed lay.\u201d [This, for the \u201cwypt away \/ infixed lay\u201d contrast John pointed out\u2014and because I\u2019m fascinated by the sonic effect of \u201ctherein in<\/em>fixed.\u201d]<\/p>\n Parting thought: I\u2019m endlessly smitten with the sheer capaciousness of Spenserian corporeality: on the one hand, it surreally extends to include the compound unit of knight + armor + steed (as I\u2019ve argued to you all before). On the other hand, it stretches inward to the \u201cmotions\u201d that Elizabethans understood to be fully interconnected to the physical form. Where does embodiment begin in the FQ<\/em>, then, and where does it end? Can there ever be an answer? And does it matter in the end?<\/p>\n Additional reading<\/p>\n (1) Jeff Dolven, \u201cPanic\u2019s Castle,\u201d Representations <\/em>1 (Fall 2012): 1-16, 1-2.<\/p>\n \u201c\u2018Forgetful of his owne, that minds anothers cares\u201d (FQ <\/em>1.5.18). \u2026 Confronting the book\u2019s epistemological agonies, the narrator, our sole guide and storyteller, makes a sudden, drastic overcorrection, declaring that the only remedy for the hero\u2019s vulnerability to deception is indifference. A problem of knowledge is solved by ethical withdrawal. It is a moment of moral panic expressed as a moral lesson. \u2026 Its radical case is not an idea, nor even an affect, but an experience of peril that overwhelms reason and instinct alike. Panic is both halt and spasm, an organismal failure, a sudden devolution that strips us not only of our civility but also of our sentience. \u2026 This essay will pursue the hypothesis that panic, and the fear of panic, are the generative principles of The Faerie Queene<\/em>, and that the narrator\u2019s impetuous disavowal of an ethic of care is part of a pattern of overreaction that determines the poem at every level. \u2026 [P]anic can be a kind of structure too, or it can make or at least provoke one. This last idea will need to be approached by stages, stages that will take us from the local trails of the characters up to the invention of the poet himself. Panic first as flight, then as action, then as interpretation, and, finally panic as a structuring principle and the poem as panic\u2019s castle.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n