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Creative Criticism
by Joe Moshenska, Leah Whittington, Simon Palfrey, Ewan Fernie

Jump to: Joe Moshenska and Leah Whittington, Simon PalfreyEwan Fernie

Joe Moshenska and Leah Whittington

Reflections on “Pleasure and Interpretation in Shakespeare and Spenser,” at the Shakespeare Association of America Conference, Washington D.C., 17-20 April 2019

  

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Introduction

 

Few literary critics these days would wish to hide the pleasure they take in reading. As scholars have reflected on how the language of criticism disposes us towards our objects of study, it has become self-evident that enjoyment, playfulness, love, and pleasure are as much a part of the affective world of the critic as aversion, wariness, and resistance. And yet, if discussions about critical and postcritical approaches to texts suggest that critics need not be tied to one affect, disposition, or style of thought, pleasure is still often placed in opposition to modes of reading that emphasize uncovering meaning or revealing hidden contexts. What then, we might wonder – as critics and as Spenserians – does pleasure have to do with interpretation?  

This was the topic that we (Joe Moshenska and Leah Whittington) hoped to address when we convened a seminar on ‘Pleasure and Interpretation in Shakespeare and Spenser’ at the Shakespeare Association of America conference in April 2019. Spenserians have always had to grapple with the affects of interpretation, given their investment in a poem which, by presenting itself as allegory, seems to ask readers to engage in the arduous work of unveiling meanings. This may be one reason that reading Spenser for love or pleasure can still seem a tall order, in contrast to the wide range of work on positive affect in Shakespeare. On the hunch that pairing Shakespeare and Spenser together would help us explore the interpretation of pleasure and the pleasure of interpretation, we asked members of the seminar to contribute papers focused on interpretive strategies that highlight the role of affect, emotion, pleasure, and sensation. The seminar members were pressed especially to move beyond a simple recuperation or embrace of ‘pleasure’ and the ‘pleasurable’, and probe what it might mean to do so. Do dichotomies of surface and depth, disclosed and hidden, reading with or against the grain sufficiently capture the remit of ‘interpretation’ for early modernists? When and how do pleasure and interpretation relate to each other, both in the early modern texts we read and in the professional contexts where we work?

SAA seminars, like incoming Spenserian knights, look rather differently after they pass than when they first approach. When the project of the seminar first began to coalesce in our minds, the word ‘creativity’ – the theme of the present issue of The Spenser Review – was not at the centre of our thinking. But it gradually became clear as we went along that an integral part of what we were doing in asking about the relation between pleasure and interpretation was to inquire where the line between the ‘critical’ and the ‘creative’ lay, and indeed whether it made sense to think of it as a line at all. We wanted to think about what a ‘creative response’ to our pair of writers might look like – not just in relation to the particular activities that we asked our participants to undertake (about which more below), but in terms of the seminar format as a whole, which we began at an early stage to envision as a space within which various forms of practice and discussion might coalesce. 

Critics are used to discussing the formal decisions that poets make in terms of generative constraint or self-imposed tyranny in the service of beauty – akin to what Marcel’s mother says in Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann: ‘she derived from this very constraint one more delicate thought, like good poets forced by the tyranny of rhyme to find their most beautiful lines.’ But we less often construe the norms of academic practice in this way.  Much of what modern literary scholars do involves trying to think, speak and write well under conditions of institutional and organisational constraint which range from the benign to the obviously pernicious. Turning those constraints into creative occasions for rethinking and remaking our critical writing turned out to be a crucial part of the work that “Pleasure and Interpretation in Shakespeare and Spenser” ended up doing.

This essay casts a retrospective eye on the seminar as a ‘creative’ enterprise – a project of experimentation with forms and norms. For the many perspectives brought to bear on the topic and for the lively discussions that attended the seminar, we are grateful to all the seminar participants, whose, paper titles and abstracts can be found here.

 

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Part 1: The Project

 

In order to infuse a spirit of creativity and play into an academic meeting we decided to introduce unexpected constraints of structure and form. This strategy was in no small way a part of our response to the particular pairing of Shakespeare and Spenser. The imperative to divide and organise the papers within the fixed timespan of the seminar meeting would itself be an opportunity to reflect upon some of the most interesting contrasts between Shakespeare and Spenser in terms of the ways in which their texts are internally divided or strung together: the obsessive splitting of The Faerie Queene into books, cantos, and stanzas versus Shakespeare’s dramatic divisions into act and scene; the differing generic strategies of the two authors’ shorter poems, most obviously their shared interest in the protracted rhythm of divided-but-connected works that make up their respective sonnet sequences. How might a seminar echo, or at least engage with, these mixtures of repetition and internal variation, of sameness and difference?

            Shakespeare and Spenser provided the motivation for another of our experiments with the seminar format. Both authors, in related but very different ways, obsessively depict the nature of response itself.  It is notoriously difficult, for example, when Spenser gives us Guyon moralising over the spectacle of Amavia’s dead body or the Red Cross Knight so captivated by Contemplation’s panorama that he would prefer to stay atop his mountain forever, to know how our own reactions to the poem should relate to those that it stages: surely the horizon of possible response is far broader than those that it depicts, but how broad should we allow ourselves to go? In a very different way, Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream interposes a group of braying courtiers between us in the audience and the mechanicals’ play. Are we invited to join their mockery, or does its presence occupy a complacent space that now, happily, is no longer available to us, forcing us to ask harder questions about the mixture of ludicrousness and pathos that the play of Pyramus and Thisbe contains? These are well-established critical questions: but we wanted to ask, can a conference seminar itself be a space for testing out the range of responses that we allow ourselves to have in relation to these works, in a manner that these and many other moments seem to invite? 

These questions of form and of staged response were in our minds as we planned the scaffold of activities participants would undertake prior to the meeting. We asked participants for a total of four contributions, staggered over six or so months. While they were beginning to plan their papers, participants submitted around two pages of text in the form of extracts from critical or primary texts that they thought might be relevant to the paper they planned to write: we named this exercise ‘snippetotomy,’ in tribute to Harry Berger Jr.[1]  This was one part of the process that we were quite sure worked well, and produced a mixture of expected names (Barthes, Foucault, Rita Felski, Wai Chee Dimock) and surprises (Joan Didion and Picasso).

The second task was the most straightforward, and the one about which we will say the least here: asking people to write the papers that they had originally proposed for the seminar. Once we received the papers, we began to complicate things, for ourselves and for our patient and committed seminar members. Each member of the group was asked to complete two final tasks: to write a short critical response to one of the other papers in their group; and to write a short creative response to one of the other papers in their group. 

 In assigning the creative response, we wanted to raise questions about the strange relationship that we as scholars often have to our own critical practice, which is constantly situated in close relation to creativity but rarely proclaims itself to be creative. But we were well aware that to do so may seem to risk the appearance of hubris or lack of rigor.  If we are not trained to see criticism as a creative activity, then a sudden invitation to respond creatively might feel like an unfair imposition.  We were interested in affects of discomfort and uncertainty (as well as revelry and delight), and what they might tell us about the kinds of interpretation that we feel more and less comfortable pursuing. 

 

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Part 2: The Fruits

 

            As it turned out, the creative responses were in almost every case as helpful as the critical ones. By remaking the papers according to different discursive norms, the creative responses discovered meanings in the critical pieces that had been nascent all along, and often brought to the fore often hidden but crucial points and assumptions. Among the formal strategies used by creative response writers were: dialogue, Q & A, commonplacing (including an imagined page from Cleopatra’s commonplace book), cartoons, lemmatic commentary, aphorism, catechesis, redaction and interpolation, haiku, job application letter, stanzaic poems, sonnets, pastoral poems, fan fiction, and essay. These responses had two salient qualities in common. First, we noticed that creative response writers felt freer to make associations between early modern literature and current art forms, unhampered by the implicit compulsions of strict historicism. These associations had evident interpretive value, linking early modern poetic contexts to analogues in the present from science fiction to Broadway musicals. Second, the creative responses helped to highlight the affective registers of the language we usually reserve for criticism. In contrast to the standard academic vocabulary of arguing, contending, insisting, claiming, pressing, interrogating, revising, and qualifying – rhetoric that tends to produce affects of self-protectiveness, diffidence, condescension, or hostility – the creative responses adopted rhetorics of curiosity, receptivity, amusement, and playfulness. Several were downright funny. Many gave pleasure to their readers.

            Below are three samples selected for their variety, ingenuity and interpretive interest. We include a complete list of papers and the creative responses composed for them here.

 

I.  Convolution (Hannah Crawforth)

Responding to Amy Cooper’s paper ‘Textual Pleasure in As You Like It and The Faerie Queene’, Crawforth wrote a ‘convolution’ – an essay about a short lyric composed solely from the words of that lyric, with the same final word count as the original poem.[2]  Crawforth selected three stanzas from The Faerie Queene (II.xi.85-87) – Guyon’s conversation with the Palmer about Grille’s transformation from hog to human – which, in Cooper’s reading, convey allegory’s resistance to easy interpretation, its resolute otherness, and its refusal to be tamed by readers.

Crawforth writes: ‘The apparent arbitrariness of the convolution form emphasized the brutality of Spenser’s imagery afresh – the insatiable, indiscriminate hunger of bare human life. It also highlighted the work of the poet in capturing such “figures hideous” in the “comely form and streight staff” of the highly regular Spenserian stanza. Spenser’s Christian universe has a darkly existential underbelly, my convolution suggested; in the bleakness of our modern moment the words of the poem reform themselves into a Darwinist, even atheistical vision of the chaos out of which human life shaped itself, and into which – despite the efforts of poets and critics – it ever threatens to return.’

 

The Faerie Queene, Book II, canto XII, 85-87                                              [203 words]

 

Said he, These seeming beasts are men indeed,
  Whom this Enchauntresse hath transformed thus,
  Whylome her louers, which her lusts did feed,
  Now turned into figures hideous,
  According to their mindes like monstruous.
  Sad end (quoth he) of life intemperate,
  And mournefull meed of ioyes delicious:
  But Palmer, if it mote thee so aggrate,
Let them returned be vnto their former state.

 

Streight way he with his vertuous staffe them strooke,
  And streight of beasts they comely men became;
  Yet being men they did vnmanly looke,
  And stared ghastly, some for inward shame,
  And some for wrath, to see their captiue Dame:
  But one aboue the rest in speciall,
  That had an hog beene late, hight Grille by name,
  Repined greatly, and did him miscall,
 That had from hoggish forme him brought to naturall.

 

Said Guyon, See the mind of beastly man,
  That hath so soone forgot the excellence
  Of his creation, when he life began,
  That now he chooseth, with vile difference,
  To be a beast, and lacke intelligence.
  To whom the Palmer thus, The donghill kind
  Delights in filth and foule incontinence:
  Let Grill be Grill, and haue his hoggish mind,
But let vs hence depart, whilest wether serues and wind.

 

CONVOLUTION

 

Said she: this Enchanter hath transformed thus his louers’ lusts into figures hideous (according to their minds, monstrous). Sad end (quoth she) of ioyes delicious: now seeming turned unto intemperate beasts which feed. (Whylome his meed mote of thee palm – if thee but let him.) These are indeed mournefull states: if men whom in their former life did like it so, return and be not aggrate.

 

For shame – some did repine greatly – vnmanly men did late miscall men beasts, in comely forme and streight staffe brought captive. From vertuous Dame, a ghastly hog; a girl, strooke hoggish.

 

They that had seen his unaturall ways stared streight with inward wrath.

 

Yet he but looked from them.

 

She – that had by one name beene hight – became to him aboue the rest speciall, and her being, some.

 

Now he chooseth to serve her (them).
In filth and foule incontinence life began. Of wind and weather, beasts and hogs had mind to be.
See us thus.
With that, let Guyon, Palmer and Grill (Grill!) depart hence.
That be so, said she.                                                                                        [203 words]

 

 

II.  Madrigal Sestina (Clare Kinney)

Responding to Matthew Zarnowiecki’s paper ‘Social Song: an un-Spenserian Pleasure?’ Kinney wrote a madrigal in sestina stanzas. Zarnowiecki’s paper discussed Orlando Gibbons’ madrigal setting of a few lines from Book III of The Faerie Queene, arguing that the musical setting ‘transforms Spenser’s text into a different aesthetic object, far removed in tone and mood from the original’.

Kinney writes: ‘I found myself wondering whether The Shepheardes Calendar – the first instance in print in England of a particularly intricate poetic form – might actually speak interestingly both to the dynamics of madrigal and to Zarnowiecki’s claims. I worked from the model of the ‘August’ eclogue, interspersing my own words with quotations, near quotations, or partial quotations of phrases from the paper itself and from its citation of a passage from Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015).’ 

 

                                   Madrigal Sestina

 

One song, but woven with six sliding voices,
Attaching and collating and assembling,
Forging new links in dancing repetition—
Polyphony of sweet recursive rhyming
Whose harmonies unfold, through sundry stanzas,
A madrigal, recast as a sestina.

 

Let social singing sound in a sestina!
Its turns add to a madrigal’s five voices 
Another note; its labyrinthine stanzas
Repeat, replay, forever reassembling
Obsessively, in contrapuntal rhyming,
A music shaped by slanting repetition.

 

In “August,” Cuddie hosts such repetition,
Singing to other lads a sad sestina
Framed by a friend. Their cheerful rival rhyming,
Their roundelay of bouncing, tripping voices,
Gives way to Colin’s plangent reassembling
Of mournful echoes, shaped in stately stanzas.

 

Though Colin was not there to sing his stanzas,
Receptive hearers praised their repetition:
The boys of summer (Virgil’s swains resembling)
Ended a singing match with a sestina
Evoking absent presence; Cuddie’s voice has
Lovingly reprised that lovelorn rhyming.

 

Nothing illicit mars this social rhyming,
No unchaste Bow’r resounds with wanton stanzas,
No siren Witch commands licentious voices,
No melting lust, half cloyed with repetition,
Cries carpe diem in a soiled sestina:
No subtle shows deceive through art’s dissembling.

 

Through Perigot and Willye’s reassembling
With Cuddie (to beguile the time in rhyming)
The somber plaints of Colin’s sad sestina
Convert to pleasure; those recited stanzas
Transform sharp woes in sweetest repetition—
Transfigured thus by sympathetic voices.

 

Oh kindly voices!—dulcetly assembling
Through patterned repetition, social rhyming,
The stanzas of a madrigal sestina.
 

III. Interrogative Dialogue (Alice Leonard)

            Alice Leonard’s interrogative dialogue written in response to Brian Chalk’s paper on sleep and dreams reminded us of the ‘Ithaca’ chapter in Joyce’s Ulysses, where an impersonal disembodied voice asks questions that are answered by a similarly impersonal respondent, using declarative affectless language to establish basic facts in meticulous detail. Joyce called this form a ‘mathematical catechism’. Leonard’s version of the interrogative dialogue was thankfully less ‘mathematical’ but it brilliantly assumes the directness of a catechetical style, stripping language down to its most basic form and offering a catalogue of apparently indisputable facts. Leonard’s decision to format the ‘answer’ sections of the dialogue flush to the right margin added a visual register to the asking and answering voices, making them appear to be functions of the page rather than the utterances of individual or identifiable human beings.

 

A Dialogue in Response to Brian Chalk, ‘“Sleepy Business”: Gendered Dreams in Spenser and Shakespeare’

 

How does this paper approach pleasure and interpretation?

It doesn’t discuss pleasure, but rather the interpretation of dreams (although not The Interpretation of Dreams).

What’s the argument?

It examines how Spenser and Shakespeare determine women characters in response to the dreams of men. Two incidents of dreaming are explored: in The Faerie Queene, Book One, where, as Redcrosse sleeps, Archimago makes a false Una which tries to seduce Redcrosse (1.1.47). The real Una is asleep while Redcrosse abandons her. ‘Una awakes to find herself inhabiting Redcross’s dreams and competing with duplicate versions of herself’ (Chalk, p. 8). In Cymbeline, Chalk is interested in ‘the dream state that Imogen occupies after Giacomo convinces Posthumous that she is unfaithful’ (p. 9). Like Redcrosse, Posthumous also betrays and abandons Imogen because he believes she has been unfaithful.

 

So these aren’t strictly or literally dreams?

No, there are two kinds of dream at issue: the dream made of desire that another can inhabit, beyond sleeping, and a dream made of sleep which is a private imagining. Chalk is interested in the former, the metaphorical nightmares that Redcrosse and Posthumus produce, which women have to inhabit. Posthumus ‘brings her [Imogen] into the dream world that his actions create’ (p. 10). These are the fantastical parts of romance in which women are nightmarishly both blamed and deceived. Recent #metoo attention to Measure for Measure might also help us feel uncomfortable about Imogen’s position in which her husband colludes with a friend to test her fidelity, she believes her husband to have been decapitated, and is hit by him when they reunite at the end of the play.

 

If women appear as the victims of men’s dreams, what happens when women dream?

We don’t hear about them – Una sleeps through all the action and it is only in Book One Canto Two that we are told she awakes: ‘The royall virgin shooke off drowsy-hed, | And rising forth out of her baser bower’ (7). Similarly Imogen declares that ‘Sleep hath seiz’d me wholly’ and she falls asleep (2.2.7), yet attention to her dreams are replaced with Jachimo’s secret actions as he creeps around her room, surveying her half-naked body (2.2.11-51). In Belarius’s cave when Imogen sleeps for a second time, she awakes with a start, continuing a conversation she was dreaming of having: ‘(Awakes) Yes, sir, to Milford-Haven, which is the way?’ (4.2.291). While Posthumus’s dream-desires create a ‘nightmare landscape’ for Imogen to travel through, Imogen only dreams of making that journey in order to get back to him (p. 3). From Chalk’s perspective, the desires of the male dreamer are all important in creating a space of no agency for women. Whereas Redcrosse awakes to find a sexually receptive Una, who has had her chastity ‘subdewd’ and learned ‘Dame pleasures toy’ (1.1.47), Imogen awakes to find the ‘headless man’ of her husband (4.2.308). Neither her dreams nor her desires determine any part of Posthumus’s reality; her dreams do not come true.

 

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Part 3: A Game and A Conclusion

 

            After writing the creative responses, participants probably thought they had seen the last of our convenorly antics, but it was not so. What would happen if we added one last layer of structure to vary the discursive rhythms of the seminar?  In between discussions of papers, we interposed a collective reading of a passage of text, intended as a way of testing and developing the insights that we had advanced, of making them concrete.  For one interlude we chose the section from Book IV, Canto 5 of The Faerie Queene, in which the golden girdle falls from the waist of the False Florimell,; for the second we read and discussed the opening of Act 4 of As You Like It, a frequent point of reference for the papers, in which Rosalind-as-Ganymede announces that (s)he is ‘in a holiday humour.’ 

            If these choices were guided by the written papers, however, in other interludes we decided to abrogate choice altogether, and allow the Google random number generator to choose us a sonnet to discuss.  While there was a degree of unabashed deliberate fun motivating this plan, it also allowed us, in the seminar itself, to integrate an element of sheer chance into what had of necessity become, due to the sheer number of moving parts, a carefully orchestrated occasion. 

To return to where we began, if we tried to organise this seminar so as to experiment with the paradoxically liberating power of formal constraints that Proust describes, then aspiring to a version of the interplay between organisation and contingency that characterizes the texts of Spenser and Shakespeare felt apt in its own way. The result was highly enjoyable, and confirmed for us that, whatever else comes out of this seminar, we would like in the future to try creating further occasions on which we read and discuss texts with other scholars, something for which the standard conference format leaves little time.  As so often happens, the sonnets chosen by the random number generator seemed marvellously apt, as if its technological magic were a tool of revelation, like an enchanted spear or, perhaps better, a restraint that also reveals, like Florimell’s golden girdle.  It gave us Shakespeare’s sonnet 113, ‘Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind’: the poem’s meditation on the shaping, even deforming power of perception seemed absolutely germane to our discussions of whether to take pleasure in an interpretation risks clouding, rather than responding to, its object.  There is also, however, a cautionary tale here.  So in the moment were we that, as far as we have been able to tell, nobody wrote down which sonnet from the Amoretti we discussed, nor can we recall with certainty which it was, though we discussed it in depth at the time.  As any reader of The Faerie Queene knows only too well, an openness to contingency has its risks and its losses as well as its pleasures.

 



[1] Although, perhaps appropriately, this a tribute by way of radical adaptation: Berger uses the term not in his voluminous writings on either Shakespeare or Spenser but pejoratively, in his rich essay on Pepys, to criticise those who take extracts from The Diary out of context (‘The Pepys Show: Ghost-Writing and Documentary Desire in The Diary,’ ELH 65.3 [1998], 557-91; 563, 567).

[2] Jeff Dolven, ‘Convolution,’ in The Pocket Instructor: Literature: 101 exercises for the college classroom, eds. Diana Fuss & William A. Gleason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 278-79.


Simon Palfrey

Demons Land: a poem come true

Demons Land is a multimedia project that imagines an island remade in the image of The Faerie Queene. It is an experiment in interdisciplinary collaboration and translation, exploring how film, paintings, sculptures, soundscapes, live performance, intermedial technology and text can combine in a multi-dimensional critique and embodiment of the poem.

History as a poem

We begin with a simple question: what might it mean, what might it be, for a poem to come true? We are familiar with the idea that a poem might reflect or record history. But what if poetic form anticipates and models political change? What if history itself is structured like a poem?

FQ is a poem of fervent ambition, humanist, militarist, imperialist. It is equally a poem of disappointment. Spenser’s mission in Ireland failed; his poem at once reflects, predicts, and tries to redeem this failure, offering a model of the necessary future as much as a diagnosis of present conflicts. The poem is famously, perhaps necessarily unfinished.

 

Here is where we take our cue. Demons Land continues the story by means of a simple premise: that FQ is the seminal text of global modernity, coming imperfectly, differentially true throughout the dominions conquered or settled by the English.

 

This posits a model of poetic action that is recursive, repetitive, and fractal. History becomes a sequence of superimpositions, expressed at one place or time and then another, as the poem gets replayed over and over in the dreams and crimes of empire.

 

Life as a poem

 

We ask the same questions of a life. What if individual life is not a self-sufficient experience, but a shadow or allegory of something other, forever awaiting supplements or analogues? What if each person is a metaphor, no more than what they resemble? What if metaphors are the real, and life is a quantum formalism, measured in rhymes, stanzas, endlessly repeating rhythms? What might it mean to be subject to a poem? What are the ethical or political implications of a truly sympathetic reading?

 

Questions such as these exceed the bounds of conventional, evidence-based literary scholarship. They ask for creative experimentation - testing both the responsibility to imagine, and the responsibilities of imagination.

 

The poem frustrates conventional pictorial, narrative, and cinematic techniques: peopled less by familiar humans than by unfinished exemplars; preferring allegorical tableaux to suspenseful story; structured by replication, return, and systematic incompletion. Spenser’s fairyland has nonhuman speakers, living simulacra, mutations and metamorphoses; its characters quest to become perfect allegories rather than fully realised humans. Virtuality is forever challenging and reshaping reality. And yet this denatured creation evokes history in process, lives on the cusp, unrepealable suffering.

 

Methods and materials

 

Our task was to discover materials true to this synthetic, inorganic, gridded, strangely second-hand morphology, in which image and idea are the real – and yet which continues humanly to matter.

 

We are not describing or reporting a pre-made world: at every level our activities are making or re-making this world. The material trace had to be visible. We needed to get away from human actors as the necessary agents of history and drama.

 

We chose as our basic materials duvets, tights, and paint, which we could manipulate into all kinds of shapes, human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate. The physical materials shift between actor and prop, place and person, micro and macro, travel inside a body and survey a vast sweep of land. The same material can express terrestrial bodies, cosmic geographies, sub-particle motion, imaginative speculation.

 

We filmed inside a permeable modular box in the form of a ruined squash court. Each shot was set-up like a painting. We link paint and film by photographically magnifying details, and by filming paint in process, as it flows into or out of form. The sculptures likewise exist both in the film and in the installation.

 

The paintings help literally to create the film-world. A painting is not just a completed surface to be interpreted. It grows out of a script, and also sources that script, as though the world before it. It is filmed and photographed during the process of its composition, allowing the stages of the painting to illustrate stages of history, and (like FQ itself) be an archive of its own becoming. The paintings are subject to flowing water and weather. Print-outs of paintings are cut to produce other figures. In this way the film-world, its geography and its characters, emerges out of the painted world – and vice-versa (most of the painting in fact post-date the filming). In turn, the paintings compose their own revolving grid.

 

Film

 

The film tells the story of the Collector, who enters an island beneath the known world. He thinks the island savage and formless, and determines to remake it in the image of this poem - a world in staves and stanzas, rhythms and rhymes, choosing what shall have life and what shall not. However, both the poem and island have a life of their own. Like Spenser’s mission in Ireland, the Collector’s dream fails: not because the island failed to be like the poem; but because both poem and land are other, are more, than imperative, abstracting thinking allows. They have indigenous energies, lives, untapped implications that demand recognition.

 

In our film, a woman re-enacts this history, is forced to suffer the poem-world, test the mission’s assumptions and responsibilities, bring poem and history to life.  She becomes writer, designer, camera operator, prop-maker, editor, and sole live actor.

 

Project history

 

The inaugural Demons Land installation was at Stowe National Trust in 2017.

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/stowe/whats-on/demons-land-a-poem-come-true

The film featured in the Ecstasy exhibition at UQ Art Museum, Brisbane

https://art-museum.uq.edu.au/whats/past-exhibitions/2017/critic-artist-simon-palfrey

Demons Land has also been screened or exhibited at King’s Place London; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; Queens Film Theatre, Belfast; RSC Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon; Old Fire Station, Oxford, Hobart Dechinaeux Arts Centre, Hobart; University of Western Australia; University of Sydney; College Art Association of America, New York City.

 

Current project

 

The latest iteration of the Demons Land project is an unprecedented collaboration with Australian Indigenous artist and communities. In this major event/installation we want to enter the experience of all participants in this difficult history: the invading whites; the original owners; and perhaps above all the land itself, understood as sentient and responsive, a repository of stories old and new.

 

We will be developing our use of intermedial technology, mixing live and recorded environments as a means of moving between different scales and environments; exploring synergies between indigenous, poetic, and digital techniques of distributing agency and conceptualising space; extending custody of the story.

 

We will listen to the poem as a Dreaming, like Australian country a living source of interconnecting stories. We want Demons Land – the work we collaboratively do, the work we make - to be a shared experimental space, a conceptual land, an imaginative country, where we can engage with the past (or pasts) and imagine the future (or futures). The land is an unfinished poem, and the poem is an unfinished land.

 

Makers

Simon Palfrey: writer, director, producer

Andrea Bubenik: curator

Tom de Freston: artist

Mark Jones: editor/cinematographer

Liz Swift: intermedial performance

 

Links

 

Website: https://www.demonsland.com

Film trailer: https://vimeo.com/222839791

Selection of paintings and film stills:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/d3hdg78hfcigovn/AACBfRO2FY_ilonIUoH4xa4fa?dl=0

For inquiries about viewing the complete Demons Land film: simon.palfrey@bnc.ox.ac.uk

 

Ewan Fernie

The Redcrosse Project

 

Redcrosse: A New Celebration of England and St George premiered in St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, in March 2011; it happened in Manchester Cathedral in May of the same year.  It was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council / Economic and Social Research Council ‘Religion and Society’ programme.  The following year it was adopted by the Royal Shakespeare Company for Coventry Cathedral’s fiftieth jubilee celebrations. The project received national and international media attention, including this profile in The Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/24/poets-enlist-st-george-liturgy

An academic book - Redcrosse: Remaking Religious Poetry for Today’s World - was published by Bloomsbury in 2013.

The giant, Catalan-style St George used in Redcrosse at Manchester Cathedral, 2011. By Tony Hardy.

I directed the project and wrote the new creative text with the theologian Andrew Shanks and three major contemporary English poets – Andrew Motion, Michael Symmons Roberts and Jo Shapcott. We tried to create a new liturgy for contemporary England and its people of all faiths and none.  Spenser positively stimulated our work for the following reasons:


1) His terrific self-, society- and faith- shaping ambition for poetry
which could bring new inspiration, energy and confidence to poets and writers in the present, at the same time as bringing creativity more powerfully to bear within value-establishing social, educational and religious contexts

(2) His guilt as a brutal colonist in Ireland
which – precisely because it’s so painfully regrettable – might force we, the English, to confront and ‘own’ the violent history of our society and its political, ideological and religious traditions

(3) A surprising correspondence, in England, between his original ‘Anglican moment’ and our own culturally pluralist moment
where in both cases the spiritual identity of the nation is undetermined and in flux, to the effect that Spenser’s creative response could – mutatis mutandis – help us respond more positively to our own predicament


(4) The provocation of his militant poetics in the context of current terrorism and counter-terrorism
which could help us formulate and answer questions about what – if anything – is worth fighting for and the nature, scope, value and limitations of spiritual struggle.

We remained troubled by the potentially excluding masculinity of Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight but tried to reflect this in the text we eventually came up with.  The Star ran a story under the headline ‘St Georgina’s Day’ (https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/st-georgina-s-day-18318274).

 

Redcrosse at St George’s Chapel, Windsor.  Copyright Doug Harding.

We worked with two generous groups of consultants in Windsor and Manchester, bringing together scholars, artists and theologians from different faith traditions, including Islam.  We commissioned new music from the jazz / classical composer Tim Garland for the Acoustic Triangle trio and Royal Holloway College Choir. Catalan giants (made by the Booth Centre for the Homeless under the artistic direction of Paul Devereaux) were a special feature of the Manchester event, and included a black George in an England football shirt. This, in particular, stimulated the ire of the British National Party. There were protests on Nick Griffin’s website; a National Front website called for a counter-demonstration; we received a torrent of perhaps more than a hundred pieces of hatemail, as well as abusive phone-calls.

Speaking as an academic, it was interesting, exciting and (given the aggression we roused) alarming to move from more familiar scholarly procedures of detached cultural critique to what felt like real cultural participation. Redcrosse sought to demonstrate that the position of the scholar in regard to the foundational stories we inherit need not be either wistfully nostalgic or critically superior but can be one of renovating involvement. Literary scholarship can be creative, storytelling infused with critical energy. The project allowed us to address head-on some of the fundamental questions relating to the study of English literature and culture in our time, including:

 

  1. What are we to do about the intrinsic ENGLISHNESS of Eng Lit and religious culture in a much-changed England, not to say a bewilderingly plural, global culture?

 

And:

 

  1. What are we to make of the intense RELIGIOSITY of so much great English literature, in our own more diverse and secular society?

 

Two important creative questions grew out of these critical questions:

 

  1. What scope is left for social and spiritual SOLIDARITY in an England that has, in many ways, outgrown the old hegemony of the Church of England establishment?

 

And, perhaps most excitingly:

 

  1. Could a questing and imaginative, POETIC engagement with the ultimate questions of religion create new and viable forms of cultural practice in our time?

 

Whatever its strengths and weaknesses, Redcrosse certainly caused a more intense and widespread reaction than any of my more conventional critical work.  There wasn’t much of a scholarly context for it at the time but, as this issue of The Spenser Review demonstrates, things might be changing.

  The RSC Redcrosse at Coventry Cathedral.  Copyright University of Birmingham.

 

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49.3.4

Cite as:

Joe Moshenska, Leah Whittington, Simon Palfrey, Ewan Fernie, "Creative Criticism," Spenser Review 49.3.4 (Fall 2019). Accessed March 29th, 2024.
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