Medieval narrative is liquidated by two paradoxically antithetical writers: Cervantes and Spenser. The first does so by taking that narrative literally; the second by denarrativizing it by means of an allegorical complexity that reduces it to the temporality of the individual stanza. The two great traditions of medieval literature had both emerged in the twelfth century; on the one hand, in a mystico-erotic lyric that culminates in Dante’s unique epic; the second, in the more properly narrative “romans” of the epoch’s greatest “novelist,” Chrétien de Troyes. Intricate legends are spun from this last, which are dutifully developed for centuries (and find true literary achievements in Italian “epic”) until they sink under their own weight in Spenser’s megallegory, thereafter only fitfully remembered by the Romantics in Novalis (Heinrich von Ofterdingen) and Wagner’s Parsifal (to which I suppose we need to add Tolkien and the effervescence of contemporary commercial fantasy literature).
Spenser was notable for being one of those rare combinations of culture and politics—an elite poet of great distinction (today one might describe him as an avant-garde writer) and a repressive colonist and military governor who left a history of what we might today call human rights abuses behind him in a newly conquered Ireland. In short, only D’Annunzio springs to mind as a weird modern analogy for this career, until we remember that the poetry was also political, The Faerie Queene itself constituting one long tribute of flattery to a sovereign who showed no interest in it whatsoever (although she was herself an Italianist and an intellectual à sa manière).
At any rate, few works of the tradition combine such extraordinary literary gifts with an architectonic ambition that makes of this monumental unfinished epic one of the strangest and most impressive ruins upon which one may stumble in the jungle of the written archive. The apotheosis of allegory, it virtually destroys the whole allegorical arsenal in one great natural disaster, visible from miles in all directions; it thereby merits our attention, particularly for what it has to tell us about the framing of the allegorical process as well as the destiny of one of its most basic instruments, namely personification.
To understand the operation of the allegorical frames, we need to draw back a little from our central exhibit and examine a modern text which shows off the play of such interacting references in a simpler and more accessible form. Ursula Le Guin’s great political novel The Dispossessed presupposes twin planets, one of which, Uras, is civilized, being geologically and metereologically well favored, while the other, Anarres, far more barren, has been uncolonized until its settlement as the result of a peaceful revolution in which the anarchist opposition, under their woman leader Odo, is allowed to secede with a fleet of aged spacecrafts and to build their Utopia on the unpromising twin planet. The resultant revolutionary society is an impoverished and regimented one; everyone must work (their tasks assigned by computers); bureaucratic conformism has set in, which is oppressive for misfits and oddballs, the characterological heretics and dissidents of this particular social order; finally, communications with Uras are reduced to a strict minimum, no capitalist propaganda, few exchanges, and a single spaceship landing once a month in a carefully patrolled and sealed off checkpoint. Leaving aside Le Guin’s Jeffersonian rhetoric, it is surely very difficult not to read this 1974 novel as a thinly disguised fable about the opposition between the United States (or the capitalist West) and the Soviet Union (the protagonist Shevek being an ambivalent kind of defector or dissident who moves between the two).
So far so good; there would be nothing very surprising in such a fictional transposition (of which many others exist). But when we get to Uras, a peculiar discovery awaits us: the richest part of Uras, where Shevek first lands, is to be sure a capitalist analogue of the United States. But alongside it, on the same planet, there exist other countries and continents: and they turn out to “represent” Maoist China, the Third World, and finally even the Soviet Union itself. So now suddenly we have a bewildering multiplicity of referents: it is not that Anarres includes several things at once (different social systems, different regimes, different places). It is rather that other “pIaces” within this novel also simultaneously mean “the same thing” on different levels. The situation is then compounded and heightened into a genuine representational and interpretive dilemma when we learn that beyond Uras and Anarres, somewhere else in the galactic system at large, there also (or perhaps one should say, there still) exists a real Earth, that real planet on which the real United States and Soviet Union once stood, and which has now been reduced to poverty and bare subsistence by nuclear war and ecological disaster.
I believe that this peculiar and seemingly aberrant structure of multiple frames and references puts us on the track of a significant and essential feature of allegory itself. For one thing, this is precisely the kind of nonspace we have been looking for: surprisingly, however, it is not to be found in the representation itself, where each space remains “realistic” and homogeneous—there are the two planets, with real countries on one, and somewhere beyond them, but in the very same real world and “real” galactic space, even though incalculably far away, there is the real Earth. (Were we here pursuing the originality of the work of Le Guin itself, this would be the moment to bring up the central datum on which her plot turns, namely the “ansible,” the hypothesis of a nonspatial simultaneous communication across just such enormous distances.)
What is discontinuous after the fashion of Western medieval paintings is not the represented space itself here, but rather the discontinuity of its allegorical references. What does the allegorical referent “Soviet Union,” designated by Anarres, have to do with the allegorical referent “Soviet Union” designated by the country on Uras, let alone with that subsisting or destroyed on Earth itself? There is here an undecidability of narrative frames, the historical Cold War projecting various fictional versions of itself onto several science-fictional scales (that of Uras/Anarres, that of the cosmic planetary system of the Ecumen). But the difference between these frames is not confusing, inasmuch as their active presence is only detected by way of the allegorical references they suggest. They are, in other words, simply distinct “frames of reference” that remain largely homogeneous within a single historical situation, that of the Cold War itself. (I resist distinguishing between fictive or imaginary frames and real historical ones, insofar as all are narrative, and in any case the notion of a “Cold War” is itself an abstract, or “transcendental,” totalizing concept whose function is to organize a series of disparate “historical” facts into a narrative unity that is no more binding than any other such narrative version.)
We may for the moment leave aside the semiotic debates about levels of reading or isotopies—linguistic or textual units supposed to ensure the homogeneity of a certain reading, a certain way of “following the story”—and observe that classical allegory, from the Roman de la rose (1230) to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), secures the unification of its reading by way of the framework of the dream, which serves to rationalize the variety of its episodes and to deproblematize the allegorical transversalities and inconsistencies of interest to us here. Meanwhile, upon the device of the dream a second form will customarily be superimposed, namely that of the spatial journey, which has the advantage of specifying a goal or terminus, in the Roman the rose itself:
In spite of Wealth, that villainous creature who showed no pity but refused me entry to the path she guarded (she paid no heed to the path by which I came here in secret haste); in spite of my mortal enemies who caused me so many setbacks; in spite particularly of Jealousy, weighed down by her garland of marigolds, who protects the roses from lovers (much good her guard is doing now!), before I left that place in which, had I had my way, I would have remained to this day, I plucked with joy the flower from the fair and leafy rose-bush. And so I won my bright red rose. Then it was day I and I awoke.1
Compared to Bunyan’s vision of the Gate of Gold and in the second part, of the Celestial City, the plucking of the rose is no doubt as peremptory and inexpressible as orgasm itself, while the final entry into the City in Pilgrim’s Progress remains in the future of living readers and believers. But the journey itself organizes space (and vice versa) and can surely be said to constitute some final form of that Babylonian star journey Bloomfield saw as the origin of the system of the seven deadly sins.2 The journey motivates (in the sense of the Russian Formalists) the discontinuous “device” of the episodes, the stops on the way, the variety of encounters, in other words, the synchronic dimension of the allegorical apparatus; while the journey itself does not so much produce space as it generates narrative temporality and sequence from out of it.
But in both these initial examples, this structure would seem to offer little more than a map on the one hand and the allegorical label on the other, a two-level process appropriately ridiculed in conceits like the seventeenth-century “carte du tendre” of salon and court society. That the thirteenth-century Rose emerges from debates on sublimation no less philosophical than those in the as yet unrediscovered Symposium or later on in psychoanalysis restores a certain significance to this simple-minded allegory; while as far as Bunyan is concerned, no one can fail to appreciate the unique agony of guilt recorded in its opening pages, a momentous psychic experience of which Luther’s own is henceforth for us the historical marker. But both these subjective experiences are uncharted, and find no place in the various historical systems of emotions or passions we have examined in an earlier chapter. I am tempted to say that both are in that sense allegorical passions, partly experiential or phenomenological and partly textual (in the special sense that word has come to have in poststructuralism). Both are in other words phenomena which are distinct from either lived experience or literary and linguistic expression, while sharing features of both; and it is as an approximation to just such unique structures that I stage the following readings of Spenser, Dante, and Goethe.
But Pilgrim’s Progress possesses an additional interest for us, insofar as it would seem in certain respects to resemble what have been latterly characterized as a genre, the “postmodern novel.” It will be important to avoid this anachronism, which has some justification, by showing that it is the restriction of Bunyan to a two-level scheme that encourages it. The so-called postmodern novel can in this spirit be characterized by the inclusion of textuality within the text itself, so that the narrative itself becomes “textualized” (as in Robbe-Grillet’s descriptions), or else the “text” itself appears within the novel as a mysterious and missing document (as in House of Leaves, or in Dick’s Man in the High Castle), or by the assimilation of life to writing, or the characters to authors, or events to media processes or mechanisms (as in Infinite Jest or Cloud Atlas), and so forth. But we must remember, when dealing with Bunyan (and especially with Protestant allegory) that the text of the Bible is a central object in such allegories: so that the visit of Christian to the Interpreter and the crucial place of the library or textual “room” is scarcely a postmodern thematics but rather a central issue in the political struggles of the period (and in its personal experiences of conversion). The contamination of the two levels of text and narrative activity therefore—however much it may recall such interferences for postmodern readers—is a fairly limited structure that will become far more complex in the three major allegorical texts to be examined here.
But there is another distinction to be noted, and one which goes some distance toward explaining not only how Bunyan can have been thus novelized but how his relatively simple dream tale might come to remind us of the Moebius strip of recent literatures. This is its prose redaction (and we may also recall here how many of the earlier medieval verse narratives such as the Roman de la rose were also “translated” into prose in the later Middle Ages).
It would seem unnecessary to review the unique versification of our three principal exhibits, yet in our “world of prose” (Hegel) verse narrative, and even Goethe’s versified “reading play,” constitutes an increasingly rare and rarified experience. Versification is in fact the control of the reader’s lived time; it imposes a unique formal sequentiality on our own loose informal personal temporalities (not for nothing did Augustine choose a hymn to illustrate his own discussion of Time in Chapter 11 of the Confessions), in that bearing some resemblance to music or to film as temporal media which demand a certain kind of uninterrupted attention. It would be premature to speak of the construction of subjectivity in the context of such temporal discipline: its forms are already there, in the structure of the sentence, for example, or in that of the hours of the day, or of emergence and disappearance in the realm of emotions.
Yet verse sharpens a regulated sequence of instants, and it also submits us to temporary and ephemeral experiences of closure. Thus, Dante’s extraordinary terza rima both completes its sequences and (by way of the overlap of its rhyme schemes) ensures their interlocking continuation as well; it enforces an interplay of “difference and repetition,” which strikes a compromise between the synchronic and the diachronic and keeps us going at the same time that it arrests us, in this very much like Virgil’s twin contradictory insistences on looking and on moving on. We will have occasion to examine the episodic in Dante later on, but even at this stage it is clear that terza rima must pay for it by inventing the concision of the one-liner, the epigrammatic characterization, that ephemeral yet definitive formula that T. S. Eliot compared to some of Dickens’s great characterological effects (“I’ll never leave Mr. Micawber!” “Barkus is willing!”).3
Closure is then far stronger in the unique Spenserian stanza, which seems to complete itself at every move, its definitive last long line shutting down the verse paragraph and forcing the narrative to begin again as a new and yet renewed totality. Here the role of the episode is taken over by the verse form itself, which makes the episode itself over into a series of smaller episodes. This is an enforced temporality very different from that of Dante, one which changes the nature of the journey just as surely as it does that of its reading. What remains to be determined is its relationship to the allegorical structure as such.
Finally we must come to terms with that extraordinary variety of verse forms in Goethe’s Faust II. In a historicist age, these cannot but stand as reminiscences of the past and of the verse forms of a nascent world culture (or “world literature,” as he called it): a true anthology in the classical sense, a memorialization of all the prosodic forms invented in that Alexandrian world that stretched from Rome to Persia, from the Germanic forests to Alexandria and the world ocean. Here the knittelvers of German folksong meets the most august epic temporality of the hexameter. Even in English, in Whitman’s underground rhythms, hexameter exerts its authority and breathes an epic monumentality on everything it touches: hexameter thereby constitutes a kind of allegorical amplification in its own right and contributes to the bewildering heterogeneity of Goethe’s drama in a way that seems to open it up, rather than, as in Spenser and Dante, to close it down.
Yet prosody and meter, beat, even pulse and accent, all seem to play their role in the release of allegorical impulses, just as their absence condemns Bunyan’s text to a half-life in the antechambers of the novel. Is it possible that the enforced temporality of verse serves to compensate the dispersal of allegorical structure as such? What might dissolve into a rhizome or hypertext of cross-references—as indeed it does in the attempt to theorize these texts—is here transferred to a sonorous and linguistic level where it must submit to a different kind of order—a horizontal continuity masking the vertical chaos of the levels and the break-up of the isotopie.
This is, however, the moment to return to the question of frames in the Faerie Queen, a work that does not rely on the framework of the dream, but rather with the classic invocation to the Muses sets forth resolutely after the fashion of the epic narrative as such:
This is an epic framework, but a deceptive one, insofar as we do not enter a unified Event such as a war in medias res but confront instead what one is tempted to call the homogenous landscape of medieval romance. What is then doubly deceptive in this narrative strategy is the discontinuity of those landscapes themselves.
In the Faerie Queene, the action (if one can even call it that) takes place in two overall localities: England (to be sure, present only in flashbacks or interpolated chronicles) and Faeryland, in which the present of the poem finds both readers and characters, and whose problems we must not too hastily dismiss with Coleridge’s notion of “mental space” (as though all artistic representations did not in one way or another take place in mental space). From one point of view, Faeryland is considered to be a kingdom somewhere east of the then Ottoman Empire; the various knights travel there to fulfill their vows and complete their quests. In that case, the whole varied topography of the poem is “set” in this kingdom, one that has a monarch (Gloriana) and a location on the existing globe (albeit a fictional one). But leaving aside the quality of the spaces and narrative settings within Faeryland for the moment, this setting itself poses further problems. What of the presence within Faeryland of properly British rivers (the Thames and the Medway, for instance, and their “marriage”)? Perhaps one could maintain that it is only the physical rivers that exist in Britain, while their allegorical spirits and personifications are housed in this other place. Are we then to suppose that, far from being another locality altogether, Faeryland is superimposed on the real Britain much as More’s Utopia is superimposed (with all manner of inversions and structural recombinations) on the real England of his time?5 In that case, is such superimposition still to be considered allegorical? And what do we do with the second super-imposition of some supplementary theological space, as when Redcross’s journey takes him to what are called “Eden lands”? Meanwhile, it is necessary to insist on the relevance of our previous account for the inner space within the poem, or, better still, for the nonexistence of any continuous space between those local places of the various episodes. Perhaps it would be better to say that the poem is constructed in such a way that between its episodes the reader is never inclined to ask embarrassing questions about their interconnections: their “space” and their travel times. (Nor are those pictorial in any modern sense of asking us to visualize a perspectival scene and to fill in its components.)
But l don’t mean by all of this to reach the conclusions either that Spenser was sloppy or self-contradictory in this regard, or that all this spatial slippage is of no interest and significance at all (so that asking questions about it is rather like the naive reader’s referential ones: who Lady Macbeth’s father was, in a famous Thurber story or how many children she had, in another equally famous critical essay).
Better to turn now for a moment to the beings or characters who populate these spaces and in particular to the official inhabitants of Faeryland: the Elves. Were these last mere Tolkien-style figures of various secondary kinds, among whom properly human (or British) heroes move, no great problems would arise: but it so happens that one of the protagonists also happens to be an Elf. (Leave aside the fact that several of the other human figures have been snatched away and raised in Faeryland.) This is Guyon, the hero of Book Two, and the allegorical personification, according to its title, of the virtue of Temperance. How are we to read this distinction? It surely cannot mean that Elves are by nature more temperate than humans (or Englishmen); yet the destiny of this particular Elf ought to help us distinguish the properties of his race from those of the race of Arthur himself (a central figure in this book).
I follow Harry Berger Jr.’s classic account at this point6: the Elfin race is like the human, but without original sin and the Fall. That ought to make them superior to human beings; but to think so is to forget the theological doctrine of the happy fall or in other words the way in which grace lifts the human being above any conceivable prelapsarian innocence, whether the innocence before the fall or that of the noble pagan. This is indeed Berger’s argument, that the first part of the Book, in which Guyon is on his own, reflects a classical ideal (in style as well as in ethos). But Guyon’s fainting spell at the very moment in which he has surmounted his greatest temptation so far—the offerings of Mammon’s cave—is the allegorical signal that he can get no further with a purely Elfin (prelapsarian) nature and requires the theological supplement supplied by Arthur’s arrival and assistance. At this point the Book becomes a Christian poem, and the reason for Arthur’s centrality—even though he is the central protagonist of none of the books we have—becomes clear. But I also want to add that this is a purely local message: Guyon does not reappear in the existing poem we have (except as a misprint in the next book), but one can conjecture that he will not always have this specific allegorical value and that even the system of levels of perfection thus briefly epitomized in him will not be a permanent feature of the completed poem:
The Soul and its Salvation
______
The Individual Possessing Classical Virtues
______
The Fashioning of the Courtier
In other words, his destiny is to rise from the lowest level, the worldly one to the highest, in this superposition of the gentleman, the hero, and the saint.
In that case, if one follows the commentators, perhaps we should posit the linguistic texture—puns, figures, the words that come to fill up each stanza as a self-contained unit—as something like a literal level on which the other levels episodically build. The medieval or knightly material is little more than a pretext for these figures, and they remain local. Thus, unlike Dante’s cosmos or the general medieval system, Spenser must rearrange his components for every episode, every throw of the dice, and so the “meaning” of Faeryland is no more stable than the logic of its space.
But now we need to look at the most strategic example of this spatial slippage, which can be observed around the person of the monarch herself. But which one? For the “real” monarch is fully as present in the poem, by way of the various addresses and appeals as to her, as her poetic alter ego, Gloriana, the queen of Faeryland (“as fully”: that is to say, no less but also no more—both are in fact charged absences). But there are subtle discrepancies, and nagging difficulties, about identifying these two figures in any stable way. Various episodes for example allude to events of Elizabeth’s reign or at her court (proposed marriages, for example), which have no analogy in the Gloriana scheme. But in this last we find the service of Arthur, who not only has no stable equivalent in Elizabeth’s life history (an identification with Leicester impossible, given the outcome, and that with Essex unlikely, although the latter has been associated with Calidore and Arthegall),7 but whose possible courtship of an ultimate marriage with the eponymous figure is both suggested by the logic of the epic and refuted by the legendary history of the “real” King Arthur himself.
It is true that in that unfulfilled project he outlines in The Letter to Raleigh, Spenser ingeniously invents a well-nigh postmodern solution to his formal problems: he there imagines the final unwritten book as a virtual coronation festival for Gloriana in which selected “wights” present themselves to act out the various virtues at work in the legendary figure and career of King Arthur. Each book is then a reading of those exploits, like the bard’s recitation of the story of Odysseus before the unrevealed hero himself, unless they are the narratives of more authentically medieval trials and missions, where the attendant knights are sent forth to prove themselves. The ultimate frame that would reconcile all this is then either a properly Arthurian cycle or rhizome of round-table adventures, or a play that reenacts those before the sovereign; but obviously enough, the text we have never reaches that moment of the fulfillment, the Viconian ricorso.
Then there are the various mythological references: is the sovereign not from time to time Venus, or perhaps on the other hand Diana? These would be dangerous associations if allowed to persist for long; rather, there is a constant movement of coupling and uncoupling as the royal reference comes and goes. Much more explicit—the Proem to Book III declares it outright—is the association of Elizabeth with Belphoebe, a prototype of cold or cruel chastity who is more uniformly allegorical of the identification than Britomart herself, sometimes also suggested as another Elizabeth figure. But it is the flat characters that can carry off such properties better than the round ones; we need to think of such momentary references as aspects of a being-for-others: now it is power and sovereignty, now chastity, now heroism and the like; and everyone can be shattered into such aspects that fail to add up organically, nor are they futures of subjective identity, either. And this is why that splendid expression, subject positions, although having some analogies, is not altogether right either, since these are somehow more objective. They exist as aspects for other people, they are somehow institutional virtues within monarchy; and perhaps this is the clue to the function of the allegorical operation itself, which seeks gropingly to correlate these “objective” entities (called virtues or vices or psychological phenomena that have been reified into names) with some inner placement, some blind correlation with what is not yet completely an existential and phenomenological inner space.
Belphoebe’s twin Amoret seems a less likely equivalent for royal identification (given the otherwise scandalous account of a successful courtship), but the structural effect of the “reference by multiplication” aims not to promise certainty about any of the allegorical identifications, but rather constantly to allow the possibilities to rise and fall, as so many moments for the “endlesse worke,” so many readerIy hesitations, self-doubts, and conjectures by the Grübler, who turns the pages of such emblems. The confusions are then mimicked and textuality acted out in the well-known referential confusion of Spenser’s pronouns—the unidentified “him” and “her” that can only be sorted out in the further course of reading and whose appositions are never clarified by syntax. The reader first assumes this to be his own weakness or failure; then Spenser’s sloppiness as a writer; and finally concludes, à la Spitzer, that the linguistic peculiarity is a meaningful symptom in its own right and corresponds to deeper structural originalities in the work itself. The pronouns thus lie open to reference, they lie in wait like so many snares prepared for the “capture” of allegorizable elements (to use Teskey’s admirable phrase).8
In the normal scheme of things in the allegorical world, that capture would take place in the form of personification (which will be examined later). But what is more significant for the development of allegory—not a chronological matter, as the placement of our chapter on Dante later on suggests—is the emergence of revealing slippages in such allegorical fabrics, of what, following Stephen Knapp, we will call spatial anomalies.9 These are moments in which personification interrupts the allegorical narrative rather than ensuring its development and precipitates a kind of crisis in the form.
Knapp is dealing with the textbook crux or scandal of Milton’s twin personifications of Sin and Death in Paradise Lost: two names or actors who seem very much out of place in their style and structure to the general “realism” of Milton’s epic narrative, and which indeed seem to have become virtually unavoidable in any discussion of allegory and its discontents: are they not flaws or lapses in Milton’s great poem? But the three wild animals that threaten Dante in the First Canto of Inferno might equally have served the purpose, as we shall see shortly.
At any rate, Knapp usefully leads us through a variety of peculiar yet constitutive features of such “characters”: the interchangeability in them of passive and active, for example (83–84), or the way in which ultimately “personifications ‘know’ only the abstractions they designate” (102). But his major exhibit, Wordsworth’s “allegorical figures,” calls forth a host of spatial puzzles, in its diagnosis of what he oddly calls the “naturalization of the allegorical personifications” (106) (as though this movement from abstraction to naturalization did not centrally define personification in the first place):
How and where, for instance, is the Old Man located in the landscape with which the descriptive similes might seem to identify him? The protagonist sees a Man before him, but at what distance and at what angle? If the Old Man resembles a huge stone on the top of an eminence, then presumably the speaker is looking uphill at a distant object. But a sea-beast can only crawl forth at sea level, which suggests that the Old Man is at, or more likely below, the speaker’s own elevation. The sea-beast, moreover, has an obvious origin—namely, the sea—and an obvious means of arrival—namely, crawling forth. But the stone amazes all its viewers, who wonder “By what means it could thither come, and whence.” This ambiguity about the Old Man’s mode of arrival applies as well to the speaker’s mode of discovery: should we assume that the speaker’s perception took the form of sudden or of gradual recognition? “I saw a Man before me unawares”—is “unawares” an adverb modifying the speaker’s action (“I saw him unexpectedly”) or an adjective indicating the Old Man’s obliviousness of—or indifference to—the speaker? (106)
At any rate this description confirms our feeling (already encouraged by the Le Guin example) that the peculiarities in question are to be defined first and foremost by spatial incommensurabilities, a kind of radical disjunction or disconnection between the familiar Gestalt terms of figure and background.
There are to be sure other descriptive alternatives, which contribute their own value to the problem. Paxson’s classic Poetics of Personification cites Gérard Genette’s rhetorical classification of the phenomenon as metalepsis to characterize his own interesting version of Knapp’s “naturalization” process, namely the incompatibility between a personification figure and a “human” character (as the former grows in centrality, the latter “diminishes,” at length even losing its “human” voice).10 But the latter, after all, continues to be essentially constituted by the incompatibility of the two contexts; the insertion, for example, of Job, a biblical–historical figure, into Prudentius’s battle of the conventional personified Virtues and Vices, nonetheless itself constitutes a superposition of two distinct levels or isotopies. Paxson prolongs his theorization into the late deManian preoccupation with prosopeia and facing or defacing, but this seems to me to return us unproductively to the narrower and more specialized domain of the dynamics of personification as such, rather than widening the inquiry into the larger field of allegory.
For the “spatial anomalies” at question here constitute invaluable clues as to the structural effects of allegory in general, as it lives on after the putative extinction of the personification device in modern times. The latter was already visible in Knapp’s allusion to Wordsworth’s “naturalization” of his figures (which assumes, incorrectly I think, that they began as abstractions) but is also implicit in the very ambivalent nature of the actant or character in the first place.
Such figures are at one and the same time potentially static essences and mobile players in a narrative: it is the very duality of the category of the “character” that is at stake here; and the movement of an abstract idea toward personification—already inherent in the very naming of an emotion—is at one with its transformation into a character. The reference back and forth between these two “contexts”—the system of abstract ideas such as emotions or cosmological elements; on the other hand a narrative movement on its way to the closure of a full-fledged story—is a subset of that allegorical heterogeneity, that confusion of reference we have in mind here. The more all-encompassing presentation of this “form problem” will then prove to be better served by returning to the fourfold system we have been exploring and by substituting the conceptuality of the level for that of a context (which has itself no context) or a ground, both of which presuppose a naturalistic psychology. The phenomenon we seek will therefore be best defined in terms of an interference, if not a perpetual cross-referencing or even transversality, between the four levels.
Thus, to return to the rather blatant example we have cited in Dante, the three ravenous beasts that frighten the poet at the base of the mountain on whose summit is situated the earthly paradise (or in other words, the former Garden of Eden), remain unnamed but have traditionally been identified in allegorical terms as cupidity, pride, and greed, respectively, on the basis of literary allusion and traditional bestiaries. They are here, in fact, only a leopard, a lion, and a she-wolf, each described with extraordinarily sculptural economy: the “lonza leggiera et presta molto” (32)11 with a spotted hide (movement); the lion “con la test alta e con rabbiosa fame” (47) (bearing), and the she-wolf “che di tutte brame / sembiava carva ne la sua magrezza” (49–50) (skin and bones). It is significant that in his copious notes, Singleton does not deign to mention even the traditional allegorical identifications of these creatures, which, long before Luther was even thought of, forbid Dante’s personal achievement of salvation (still conceived idyllically, as pastoral happiness; “il dilettoso monte”; 77), thereby confirming the later Lutheran critique of salvation by works.
Yet the meaning of the beasts is so far somehow inherent in their movements, which takes us a step beyond the physical attributes (the deceptive loveliness of the leopard’s coat, the port of the lion’s head, the skeletal emaciation of the wolf): for the leopard is not given any visible movement other than its lithe suppleness, the lion is meanwhile bearing down on Dante alarmingly, while the she-wolf ominously shadows Dante, moving back and forth alongside. Meanwhile, each one vanishes from the text after the appearance of the next, and by the time Dante pleads for help from Virgil there seems to be left only the last (“vedi la bestia per cu’io mi volsi”; 88). Does this not suggest first, that they are all forms of the same drive, even though each can be individualized in the form of specific temptations: that of beautiful false appearance (the pelt), that of aggression, and that of a generalized hunger in which the physical and the moral or spiritual are indistinguishable? Those temptations might then themselves be further allegorized as that of art, politics or warfare, and commerce or moneymaking. The allegorical impulse is then a kind of contagion that restlessly infects a wider and wider interpretive circle.
The most convincing allegorical interpretations of the beasts are those, appropriately enough, drawn from the scheme of sins embodied in Inferno (malice, force, incontinence).12 However, this very reading illustrates the spatial incoherencies we have identified with allegory here, for not only do the sins and these initial perils occupy two distinct places in Dante’s narrative (Inferno and Purgatorio), they embody two distinct aesthetics, that of the allegorical beast and that of the realistic or “naturalized” sinners. This very identification of the one set of phenomena with the other (a more recent effort)13 shows something of the appearance of a quasi-mathematical reconciliation, in which the embarrassing inconsistencies of the two sets of data are minimized in ways that bring them into a harmony that can surely satisfy no one. The incompatibilities we are here dealing with need on the contrary to be brought out as sharply as possible in order to emphasize the peculiarity of the structure in which they are all housed.
The provisional impression one takes away from these problems is a useful rebuke to the traditional association of allegory with didacticism or the pedagogy of abstraction: for one sees here some first demonstration that an allegorical structure might well be grasped as the response to some doctrinal contradiction rather than as straightforward teaching and indoctrination. Yet it is only by way of underlining the problem of the representability of the doctrines in question that one can avoid the properly Crocean objection that we are here dangerously close to abandoning the poetic and the figural or the purely conceptual.
But there is another path to the domestication of allegory that is even more dangerous, inasmuch as it is far more accessible for modern readers: what one may call the novelization of the allegorical work, or in other words its rewriting in purely subjective (and in most cases, autobiographical) terms. Here the beasts are rewritten as dangers or temptations which concern some biographical Dante himself, an “implied narrator” or point of view, whose salvation, the poem allegedly shows us, is here at stake. From this perspective, then, one might hazard the guess that the mesmerizing visuality of the leopard’s coat obscurely reflects the perils of art itself, and the temptation to transform the “dolce stil nuovo” into an end in itself, into a pure aestheticism; the lion’s fury might then be the fear of losing oneself altogether, not only in politics, but in political anger, and being wholly absorbed by righteous indignation and obsession; while the she-wolf, in its sinuous movements, might well illustrate the distractions of exile and the desires that result from its hither-and-thithering, if not, perhaps, those of transient attractions and erotic hungers. The assignment of these biographical interpretations to the third, or moral, level then demands a certain restraint or discipline on the part of subjectivized and biographically habituated modern reader.
That such a novelization is always a temptation latent in allegorical structure, that such subjective and narrative translation is always a temptation for its readers, can also be demonstrated by the two great narratives I have already touched on, namely the Roman de la rose (1230) and Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). The dates alone make an important point, namely that the history of this form, or formal structure, is not a continuous one; and that allegory seems to arise in unique and unrelated national situations, out of the failure of more traditional genres to express a given historical and psychic content. Meanwhile, the immense discrepancy in that content between these two works—the one secular and emerging from the theoretical and experiential situation of courtly love, the other religious and expressing the deepest anguish of the Protestant revolt—shows that religion is not a very adequate characterization of that content either, whose subjectivities take another form than those which will later on produce the unique new modern form of the novel and people its narratives.
This is the point at which to conclude that the spatial anomaly is not an aberration in the practice of allegory but rather constitutes the moment in which the heterogeneity of the allegorical levels breaks through and makes its presence felt. The levels are not a collection of complete narratives superimposed upon one another. Rather they come at reality in an utterly different way, by a jarring and sometimes dissonant differentiation of their various dimensions. And this heterogeneity holds, not only for the narrative unities we inevitably seek to form out of the elements and raw materials of the allegory, but also for the most tempting form of reunification for modern readers, which is that of the psychic level, the unity of the moral or psychological message or development, which I here propose to replace with the concept of a construction of subjectivity (subjectivity not constituting a unity at all, neither a homogeneity nor an identity or personal self). Yet in these intricacies one must not lose sight of the other levels of the allegory: if the allegorical or mystical key is to be found in the identification with Elizabeth, and the moral level in the constructions of subjectivity I have just outlined, we must not neglect the anagogical level, or vision of history which the identification of the previous two levels (court intrigue, the system of the virtues) produces. It will therefore not be inappropriate to cite the following delightful reenactment of the Faerie Queene as a vision of History:
Why not allow Book I to be an allegory of modern Russian Communism? The Red Cross Knight stands for the working class armed with the Marxist faith: naturally his colour is red, and his cross refers to the crossed hammer and sickle. Una is clearly the spirit of Communism. The opening battle against Error refers to the Revolution. That monster’s books and papers which she spews at the knight refer to the flood of Trotskyite writings, and her death marks the first triumph of the oppressed peasant class (the knight is Georgos, one brought up in ploughman’s state). The scattered brood who feed upon Error’s body represents the landed kulaks who used the time of distress to get rich; and the account of their swollen bellies “with fulnesse burst,/ And bowels gushing forth” shows what rightly happened to them. But the knight is then separated from Una by the wiles of Archimago who stands for the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie. Though he able to defeat Sansfoy, who is lack of faith in Marxism, he becomes the willing tool of Duessa, the Church of Rome, which is in league with the Western imperialists—her father is an emperor who “the wide West vnder his rule has, / And high hath set his throne, where Tiberis doth pas.” She leads the knight to the house of Pride which is the modern capitalist world—hence the old on the roof, the weak foundations, the general corruption, and the masses chained in the dungeon. Here the knight is attacked by Sansjoy, obviously referring to the misery of the working class under capitalism, and betrayed into the hands of Orgoglio who is the U.S.A. After he is rescued by Arthur, the agent of the Comintern, he enters the house of Penance, where he repents his deviationism, is trained in the Marxist dialectic, and sees a vision of the future classless society—note the mingling of angels (probably a pun on Engels) and men. Finally he overthrows the dragon of Capitalism in order to free mankind from its chains.14
Everything the Anglo-Saxon reader may find comical in this (not unrealistic) political narrative holds, not only for most other kinds of political stories one might want to imagine but also for the ethical or moral ones, as the author himself indeed goes on to show. But in those, as the chapter on emotions has already suggested, one necessarily deals, not with history as some ideally unified teleology, but rather with individual emotions, virtues or vices, properties, individual strengths and weaknesses, which it is the drawback of personification to isolate from their specific historical systems; the strength of the technique lying rather in its capacity to furnish characters suitable for an edifying tale. The isolated representation then reconfirms the reification of the feeling in question and makes its relationship to the original system of emotions more difficult to discern. Indeed, Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh (which, like the Letter to Can Grande or some of Goethe’s comments to Eckermann, can then function as an often misleading gloss on the enigmas of the work in question) suggests that each of the twelve projected books of the poem are meant to illustrate “the twelve private moral virtues, as Aristotle hath devised” (in the Nichomachean Ethics), a plan which, even unfulfilled, will make for difficulties, as we will see shortly.
At any rate, the books clearly dramatize a personification of Arthur’s multiple virtues. It is worth dwelling on the technique, inasmuch as it was personification, more than any other feature, that gave allegory a bad name in the Romantic period; it was with personification that allegory has most often been identified, while its defenders have equally often sought to distance themselves from this awkward and old-fashioned medieval form, which even in Bunyan’s time, encourages a one-to-one reading of the older Alexandrian variety. This is why Tuve argued vigorously against Christological interpretation (in Spenser and elsewhere),15 and why Milton’s Sin and Death in Paradise Lost have seemed to be blots on an otherwise still complex yet coherent narrative surface (or isotopie).
But personification will not go away as easily as that, and therefore we need to learn how to use or to interpret its manifold presences. Angus Fletcher gives a clear directive when he evokes the concentration of the daimon and the demonic, the way in which the various personifications of feeling or emotion seem to be obsessive intensifications or crystallizations of normal emotive activity.16 This puts us on the track of reification, at the same time that it suggests a new way to consider personification not as a thing or entity, but rather as an event. But these two consequences are one and the same. Personification clearly does give itself out as a thing or an entity: that event turns out to be the very process of reification itself, when something that was not thinglike suddenly became crystallized into the appearance of thingness, if not an outright thing itself. Once again, this means that the personifications will be ephemeral and context specific; they will come and go like reference itself, never forming any stable system (although Spenser includes systematicity as we shall see later on), but forming and dissolving according to a logic that is neither narrative nor thematic.
In fact, Spenser has inserted an account of this very process into his text, which as far as personification is concerned here becomes sharply self-referential. This is the famous episode of Malbecco, at which all the commentators l have consulted pause briefly or at length, so striking is it (the most comprehensive reading being that of Alpers).17 The whole comic cuckolding episode—Malbecco is the unhappy husband and victim of a Paris–Helen rerun—develops into a nightmarish sequence in the course of which, in a genuinely Ovidian metamorphosis, this still human character and figure of fun turns into a strangely disembodied monster, who lives in a cave,
where he through priuy griefe, and horrour vaine,
Is woxen so deform‘d, that he has quight
Forgot he was a man, and Gealosie is hight.
(III/x/60/535)
No better exemplification of Fletcher’s notion of demonic possession could be imagined: the concentration of the mind on a single emotion has wasted the rest of the human substance. The intent to kill himself (leaping from a cliff) is taken metaphorically and realized in that spirit, for he has already done so, and there is nothing left to die or to be killed:
But through long anguish, and selfe-murdering thought
He was so wasted and forpined quight,
That all his substance was consum’d to nought,
And nothing left, but like an aery Spright,
That on the rockes he fell so flit and light,
That he thereby receiv’d no hurt at all,
But chaunced on a craggy cliff to light;
Whence he with crooked clawes so long did crall,
That at the last he found a cave with entrance small.
(III/x/57/534)
This is no doubt reification with a vengeance; and it should be noted that its final form—the state of thingness or false objecthood in this poetic surface—is the act of naming itself: “Gealosie is hight.” It has in any case often been remarked how Spenser withholds the name, whether of narrative characters such as Redcrosse, or Arthur, or, as here, of personifications. One can say this differently by observing (as Alpers does) that Spenser always does eventually give us the name, thus avoiding the hermeticism of standard Renaissance allegory: but the structure whereby the name comes as the climax of the process of reification is not merely to be understood as a form of identification for the general public. It is first and foremost an activity of construction; it is in fact the very construction of subjectivity itself.
One must be careful to avoid the language of psychology, which assumes that the conventional individual, who comes complete with a constructed subjectivity in the first place, already exists in advance of whatever he/she is or does. What is called self-fashioning is only the external form of the possibility of reconstructing this subjectivity, that is to say, as the Renaissance conceived it, of constructing something like a genuine subjectivity for the first time.
(Antiquity went about the process in a different way, with the help of its pantheon. Thus, in a similar situation, that of Erysichthon, Ovid does not need to call on personifications: the god Hunger is there at hand to meld with the victim:
Her skeletal embrace goes around him.
Her shrunk mouth clamps over his mouth
And she breathes
Into every channel of his body
A hurricane of starvation.18
The sufferer then disposes of the remnants of this reification by devouring himself. Flaubert, in his account of the triumph of Christianity over paganism in La Tentation de Saint Antoine, gives us, contemporaneously with Marx, a virtual catalogue of such divine or diabolical commodifications.)
And this does not so much amount to inventing new emotions for the new individuals of this new age, but rather groping about in either nameless or conventional already existing inward realities and attempting to reorder them in ways that can only be thought of in terms of the act of naming. Lacan already taught us that the name is some first primal alienation, a violence done to the infant subject of desire by the familial and parental Others: indeed, language in general shares in this violence, which is that of a repression that is at one and the same time an ordering. The name of these inner processes is the reifying nail that holds each one in place (or, coming loose or wobbling, lets the alleged subjectivity drift out into psychosis).
What must be named, therefore, are the negative things, the sins, the taboos and stigmatized impulses: they come first, because they must be mastered, and the positive ones follow (or so the organizers and the moralizers hope). Harry Berger has brilliantly offered the fable for this process as a whole. In a commentary on Fidelia’s
cup of gold,
With wine and water fild up to the hight,
In which a Serpent did himselfe enfold,
That horrour made to all, that did behold. (I/x/13/163)
he reminds us of the allusion to Apocalypse:
On Ephesus the poison given to John by the Emperor Domitian miraculously condensed into a serpent and left the cup. The serpent in Fidelia’s cup suggests the need for faith by showing forth the enemy found in the very cup of faith; it also suggests how faith can reveal the poison in its true and primal nature. In the gradual development of a single soul through and toward faith, the scattered evil is gathered together until it is trapped and displayed.19
The word condensation (Berger also uses it for phenomena such as Malbecco)20 is significant and retains its Freudian connotations. Subject formation as we are describing it here reifies its inner raw material precisely by way of such condensation, which it seals with a name or noun or a system of nouns and substantives. As Berger suggests, it must first do this with the negative energies and feelings, those to be cast out and expelled, or at least to be quarantined and placed under surveillance. “Psychology” will eventually become precisely this surveillance system, in which nameless inner movements, stirrings, barely perceptible reactions and tropisms, are matched up against an accredited and evaluative nomenclature.
But all such attempts—which are much more closely related to toilet training (Freud), penmanship (Foucault), and table manners (Elias) than they are to Renaissance manuals of courtly behavior, let alone handbooks of virtue Aristotelian as well as theological—are also fraught with permanent contradictions, which do not result from the “sinful nature of man,” but rather from the coexistence of the various feelings and names simultaneously: in other words from a multiplicity and difference within the alleged psyche itself which can never fully be overcome or unified. Let Malbecco also stand as the fable for this reality: when we first meet him, as a stock comic character, he is identified not only as the jealous husband, who locks his wife up and is very reluctant to allow her to meet guests, but also as a miser. But these are two distinct personifiable “vices,” which can only be unified by some strong interpretive and metaphorical act—in other words, jealousy as the miserliness of the husband possessing a wife or miserliness as the jealous husbandry of the treasure considered as a kind of spouse. That these metaphorical efforts, while implied, are ultimately not fully successful, is illustrated by the narrative itself: Hellenore escapes by setting the treasure on fire, Malbecco is thus torn between his miserliness and his jealousy. Later on the theft of his treasure comes as a supplement to the definitive loss of the wife (who now prefers to live among the satyrs): yet being the last straw, it cannot quite be “the same thing.” Ultimately, of course, personification and the reification of the ruling passion come about when Malbecco has neither object, so that the passions must somehow feed on themselves: no longer concentrated on a specific object, they somehow “produce” a Self in order to take that as an object—“And he himselfe himselfe loath’d so forlorne” (533)—a verse preceded by the even stranger “And ran away, ran with himselfe away.” Berger’s snake then reappears:
So shamefully forlorne of womankind;
That as a Snake, still lurked in his wounded mind.
And in this state of “narcissistic melancholy,” without an object of desire in the outside world, turning into a figure, Malbecco astonishingly becomes immortal:
Yet can he never die, but dying lives,
And doth himself with sorrow new sustaine,
That death and life attonce unto him gives.
And painefulle pleasure turnes to pleasing paine. (III/x/60/535)
Paul de Man would have read such a passage as irrefutable proof of the triumph of the tropes over anthropomorphism. At any rate, Malbecco is truly one who has followed to the letter Žižek’s admonition, “Enjoy your symptom!” Or in other words, as the existentialists used to put it, he has chosen his fundamental passion, and his immortality—which is to say his inhumanity—lies in this freedom.
But even here the emotion is not unmixed. For in a curious final description Spenser shows us the batlike, clawed, hermit cowering forever in his cave, the perpetual prey of a rather different emotion, namely fear:
continual feare
Of that rockes fall, which ever and anon
Threates with huge ruine him to fall upon. (III/x/58/534)
No doubt, as Alpers suggests, jealousy is also a kind of fear; but these distinct reified psychic objects are not really to be dissolved again and reunited in a new one. There remains something ungovernably heterogeneous about Malbecco’s passions, even in this supreme moment in which we are given to witness their ultimate textual and tropological, linguistic triumph.
It is a triumph dearly paid for in style: Ben Jonson famously remarked that Spenser “writ no language,” a judgment echoed down through Dr. Johnson to the New Critics and Eliot. Despite the unique music and the form of the stanzas, this is not good writing, fine style, poeticity heightened, and concentrated language. How could it be?
At length they came into a forrest wyde,
Whose hideous horror and sad trembling sound
Full griesly seemed … (III/i/14/388)
so choosing solitarie to abide
Far from all neighbours,
that her develish deeds
and hellish arts from people she might hide. (III/vii/6/477)
Spenser needs these “horrendous” adjectives, the very instruments of penny dreadfuls and the Gothic, of H. P. Lovecraft and melodrama in general: and this, not particularly because he is a full participant in the melodramatic imagination—the villainies are too obvious, the move to armed conflict too swift, the intrigue doesn’t really interest him, all the monsters look alike. No, it is his allegory that needs them, and not his sensibility: for the reading of this allegory—of all allegory perhaps?—is absolutely dependent on the ethical binary, the distinction between good and evil. It lies so profoundly at the heart of allegorical reading and decipherment that it scarcely seems to have anything to do with lofty abstract philosophical ethics any longer, seeming closer to the friend–foe, inside–outside, self–other distinguishing mechanisms of the organism in evolutionary biology: the ethical “judgments” if we can dignify them as that, being inseparable from movements of sheerly physical disgust and loathing. And no doubt all this is deeply inscribed in the Protestant rhetoric of the period, such visceral disgust richly mobilized by the wars of religion and informing the hatred of idolatry, priests, Rome, the Whore of Babylon, and everything physically (I’m tempted to say racially) related to them. But this is merely the primal and primordial form of the dialectic of Otherness itself: ethics is at one with it and constitutes the Manichaean identification of the Other as evil. Perhaps Sartre was right after all, and Nazism and anti-Semitism can never produce great literature but only just such caricatures and just such stereotypical expressions of visceral loathing and hatred. And yet the literary and cultural fortunes of the ethical binary have been great indeed and very durable. I think it becomes productive only when it is tapped for something else, harnessed for a different kind of task than that of sheer expression: melodrama at its greatest, for example, has a secret epistemological function—it lifts the corner of the curtain on such passions, and gives a brief glimpse into the most ignominious fears at the heart of being itself, in the light of which one suddenly understands that good is as evil as evil itself and that ultimately the opposing terms of all binaries turn into one another.
In Spenser all these trappings, which made him as unserviceable a poetic model for the modernists as Milton was (for other reasons), serve a very different function. They are the maps and the geography of that construction of subjectivity we have evoked above. The latter was characterized as a blind groping about the informe, the inchoate, the primal and unorganized, with a view toward separating its masses of heterogeneous materials, collecting them, designating them with a name and an identification. The ethical binary is primordial and biological because it is the original instrument of separation; only by identifying the bad and evil—through concentration and reification as we have seen—can the psychic movements be sorted out and something permissible, exemplary, good, be identified by contrast and assigned its place. This is the new fruit of Protestant introspection: you have to do it by yourself and inside yourself; the older classification schemes are still there (as we shall see shortly), but the external and objective signposts by which they organized behavior are unreliable and suspect; only language and names remain and they come after the fact. They are the result of discovery and decision. Self-examination thus becomes a confusion and a pathless agony; nothing answers from inside as it is supposed to. The adjectives of good and evil are thus the only signs and clues, and they can sometimes be adroitly wielded:
She seemd a woman of great bountihed,
And of rare beautie, saving that askaunce
Her wanton eyes, ill signes of womanhed,
Did roll too lightly, and too often glaunce. (III/i/41/395)
Perhaps “wanton” jumps the gun a bit, as though Spenser were apprehensive that we might not get the point soon enough: the overzealous placement stands out in a poetic narrative that most often—and deliber–ately—exaggerates in quite the other direction and makes us wait unconscionably for the crucial denominations. But those are generally the names for “good,” for the virtues; the signals for evil precede them. In the emergence of the Christian system, as we have seen, the sins come first, the taboos, after which the virtues are fashioned as so many symmetrical afterthoughts and complements: a transcendental system cannot allow itself any very convincing belief in this-worldly perfection (nor do the pagan ones succeed in fashioning anything much more satisfactory than this “handbook for courtiers,” of which Spenser’s poem is also the most grandiose version).
But the structural problem does not lie in the possibilities of the afterlife or in the commitment to a belief in some ineradicable human corruption. It is rather to be found in the coordination and superposition of these “virtues” with one another, and for that matter, in that of the sins as well. In Spenser (but in medieval allegory as well) this is supremely evident in the discrepancies between the various lists and tables of the virtues: are they to be classical, pre-Christian ones, mostly derived from Aristotle, but as selectively as you like? Are we then to add the theological virtues to them? But are there not theological powers and categories that cannot fit into the older systems? Do they not also demand new systems of their own? Indeed, the same problem arises for the virtues as for the vices: if it is a problem how jealousy and miserliness (not to speak, later on, of sheer fear and timorousness) somehow “combine” in Malbecco, it is equally a problem to know how the virtues themselves combine. What are we to take of that initial, quickly annulled, conflict between Guyon (Temperance) and Britomart (Chastity)? Can there really be a conflict between virtues? At the very least the operation would seem to demand rank and hierarchy: one virtue agreeing to be somehow inferior in rank and power and thereby subordinate to this other one. When in doubt, the theological can be called upon to out-trump the secular and classical virtues: whence the raison d’être of Arthur himself, as both Christian knight and king-to-be. We have already seen how his unique powers—grace itself—are needful if the more secular and classical virtues of Guyon are to win through. But anyone searching for some definitive classification scheme will be sorely disappointed, while anyone attempting on account of this confusion to do without all classification schemes will be stalemated from the outset.
Here, as in our discussion of the stylistic reflexes of good and bad, we have to observe that the evil comes first and that the system of the virtues cannot come into being without some preexisting system of vices or sins on which to organize itself. Rosemond Tuve has shown how the principal medieval organization of the theological virtues, in the “gifts of the holy spirit,” is called into being by way of the seven deadly sins they must combat.21 In Dante, the circles of Paradise are organized around the virtues in name only; in fact each circle necessarily turns on the sin it cancels, so that the latter still stands as the deeper organizing principle. In Purgatory it is granted that several sins can coexist (the soul lightening successively as it is freed from each one in turn and flying up to another level); in Inferno the sins provide ruling passions; in Paradise, however, it is difficult to see how this or that virtue takes priority over the others.
Indeed, what argues against any such synthesis is the movement of the text itself, the temporal structure of its allegorical operations, which remain bound to a specific thematization of the reading process. Take for example Britomart’s wound in Book III. At its very opening, and the beginning of her quest, a semi-comic episode is inserted in which her embodiment of Chastity proves to be a relatively undeserving virtue indeed, since it is a woman (Malecasta) who attempts to seduce her. The episode commences with her overcoming of the chatelaine’s six knight-servants (with the help of Redcrosse), each of whom bears an allegorical name, presumably designating the six stages of seduction: Looking, Speaking, Joking, Kissing, Revelry, Late Nights. Later on, when Malecasta fails in her attempt and sounds the alarm, the six knights again attack Britomart, one of them grazing her slightly:
yet was the wound not deepe,
But lightly rased her soft silken skin,
That drops of purple bloud thereout did weepe,
Which did her lily smock with staines of vermeil steepe.
(III/i/65/401)
This lone successful attacker is the first of the former list, Gardante (Looking). We should add that later on, when Britomart rescues the imprisoned Amoret from the sadistic Busyrane’s castle, the latter also manages to wound her slightly:
From her [Britomart], to whom his fury first he ment,
The sicked weapon rashly did he wrest,
And turning to her selfe his fell intent,
Unawares it strooke into her snowie chest,
That little drops empurpled her faire brest.
(III/xii/33/558)
Such events, the very possibility of wounding so otherwise scarcely assailable an allegorical figure as Britomart, necessarily carry a charge of meaning: the wounds designate the figure in question, along with her virtue, as somehow vulnerable, at least in the one specific particular. In the case of Gardante, the implication is clear: Britomart is at least minimally assailable by way of the sense of sight itself (see also scoptophilia in general, in Castle Joyous (III/i)).22 Chastity can be tempted by the act of looking, even if no further. And this is exactly what will be dramatized for us in this Canto, when, in the present of our reading, we witness the fatal coup de foudre in Britomart’s past that decides her destiny.
Nothing is stranger than this episode: nothing so closely approaches science fiction in Spenser (save for the robot Talus in Book V) than the magic globe in which Britomart catches first sight (“one day it fortuned”) of her future groom. It is a well-nigh televisual experience, one that presents all the trappings of the postcontemporary simulacrum (the very central mechanism of our “society of the spectacle”). It will be agreed that this is a very special “penetration” by the eyes in which the traditional image of Cupid’s arrow is maintained:
the false Archer, which that arrow shot
So slyly, that she did not feele the wound.
(III/ii/26/408)
but with the interesting effect of a time lapse, so that Britomart, imagining simply that she has done no more than “view his personage and liked well,” wakes up suddenly in the throes of nascent passions:
Tho gan she to renew her former smart,
And thinke of that faire visage, written in her hart.
(III/ii/29/409)
When readers come to know Arthegall himself, they may have some additional questions to raise about this sudden infatuation: for the moment, however, it is the predominance of sight that concerns us. I will argue that the temporal loop (first, Malecasta, then the flashback to the magic glass) is necessary in order to establish the priority of sight for Britomart and thereby to justify (retroactively) her deeper but more metaphorical wound by the image of Arthegall. But how are we to position this in the construction of subjectivity: are we to understand that sight is the one sense channel that is permissible for the chaste subject? Or on the contrary, that sight is the most fundamental danger that menaces such a subject? But we do not have to choose, nor to decide this question: subjectivity is in this sense not formed by imposing a system on these components, let alone a normative or evaluative system. (In this I disagree with Roche’s moralizing.23 ) It is formed on the contrary by sensitization and identification: sight must be separated off as a sense with a very special kind of power, and it is thus isolated by the giving of a name. After that, it does not matter much whether the subject resists or falls, sins or remains virtuous: the constituents will have been established and can participate in either of these events and outcomes. Nonetheless, as has been suggested above, the sin comes first in the process of separation and crystallization. Sight is first a wound and then a power or a property. And this yields a second crucial observation: for “first” here designates the text and not the chronological events: this is very precisely the argument for a textual–contextual specificity of the allegorical operation. The episode does not argue for some eternal status of sight in love (although it is a status conventional in a Petrarchan tradition that survives all the way up to Stendhal and Proust). Rather it yields a punctual event and a purely local allegorical meaning: the proof lies in the next episode of wounding, which comes at the very end of the Book and means something quite different.
In his excellent discussion of Busyrane, Roche does not venture to interpret this second wound; yet his own reading gives us the means to do so, suggesting that reading the mask and the sadistic spectacle concealed behind it (Busyrane has extracted Amoret’s heart) project a fear of the violence of male sexuality and marriage onto the female figure.24 She is in fact a prisoner of her own terror; it lends her an enforced and fearful chastity, which like that of the fleeing Florimel is inconsistent with Britomart’s own meaning, and rather analogous (in the male) to Marinell’s peculiar self-defenses. But if this is so, then the wound means that Britomart is also mildly accessible or vulnerable to this view of sexuality as well, although she combats and defeats it. Note that this episode immediately precedes the meeting with Arthegall (Book IV) in which her love is acted out in violent combat. In a sense, then, the new wound may be said to modify the meaning of the old one: sight remains as a constant (she finally meets the object of her gaze, after all) but is now completely intermingled with the threat of the violence of male sexuality, along with the threat of the fantasy of it, yielding a completely different “combination” of these elements.
But all of this is cast in a very different light by a curious episode from Book IV, Canto VIII, in which Arthur, having rescued two damsels, Aemyilia and once again Amoret (and perhaps this second and more definitive rescue by a male reinforces the interpretation given above), is obliged to take shelter with them in the hovel of a Hag identified as Sclaunder (Slander). That she should malign them and shout lies after them as they leave the unpleasant shelter is normal enough: a male knight travelling unaccompanied with two gentlewomen who are not “his” (in the sense of service or engagement or other such official relationships)—what could more easily give rise to the worst suspicions and the most impure thoughts? What is astonishing, however, is that these thoughts are at once attributed by Spenser to the reader himself:
Here well l weene, when as these rimes be red
With misregard, that some rash witted wight,
Whose looser thought will lightly be misled,
These gentle Ladies will misdeeme too light,
For thus conversing with this noble Knight
(IV/viii/29/663)
Now it is the reader who is in danger of being overpowered by Slander: she is not operating directly on us since she remains inside the text where she can vilify only her guests. But it is as though her powers—we know from the ultimate picture of the Blatant Beaste, as well as from his biography, how supremely sensitive Spenser was himself to this “vice” and its effects—seeped out of the text and into its reading, giving us the same bad thoughts she allegorically encourages in her fellow characters. Now the reader becomes the allegorical level and is woven into a new and unique episode whose function is to show and prove the dangers of malicious gossip. To be sure, the reader necessarily assumes the burden and the responsibility of interpretation far more self-consciously in allegory than in other, more homogeneous kinds of texts. But he or she cannot break out of the reifications of personification and is driven fatefully in the direction of the ethical binary and its subforms (as in the gender-oriented reading I have proposed above).
That Spenser’s text—if not Spenser himself—is ultimately aware of this structural restriction is perhaps best demonstrated by its final form. For the poet, facing an early death at the age of forty-nine, unrewarded for his services either poetic or political, and confronting the immense and unfinished plan he has unwisely set himself, at that point leaps into a new space in the two final “Mutabilitie” cantos, in order, as it were, to place himself at once on the missing anagogical level and to reach the dimension of History itself, where, in that age-old pessimism that runs from Heraclitus to the Benjaminian baroque, he identifies the movement of human events with the meaningless cycles of natural history, as personified by the demi-goddess or Titanesse whose name he has inscribed above this final allegory.
There thus reappears here a familiar dialectic of the maximal and the minimal: the infinite time of history revealing itself as somehow inseparable from the perpetual present, the miniature and obsessive gaze, of the closed Spenserian stanza, which faithfully immobilizes movement forward in time, in history, in narrative, into a harmonious and decorative stasis.