Early in 2021, the officers of the International Spenser Society (ISS) announced the launch of a new initiative called ‘Spenser at Random’.  People would be invited to meet over Zoom, at which point a stanza from The Faerie Queene would be chosen using a random number generator, and the gathered company would then be split off into breakout rooms to discuss the stanza in question for a set period of time.  The principal stimulus for this initiative was a successful online event that we ran in December 2020 as part of the ISS’s Inclusive Pedagogy Initiative.  Under the rubric of ‘Getting Started with Spenser’, invited speakers spoke about specific pedagogical strategies through which they encouraged students to begin thinking with Spenser about questions pertaining to gender, race, class, and the current ecological crisis.[1]  The event, which was lively and well-attended, confirmed two things: first, that there was a large and engaged community of students and scholars who were keen to take advantage of our compulsory familiarity with online discussion to find new ways of engaging, together, with Spenser’s work; and, secondly, that remaining closely connected with small portions of Spenser’s poetry is a good way to give a manageable scale and a practical focus to the largest and most complicated questions about how and why we read.  It was from our desire to maintain and broaden this community, and to continue encountering these questions, that Spenser at Random emerged.  Since then we have had a number of meetings, introduced by me or by Chris Barrett, which have been, from our perspective, successful and enjoyable, and I have heard anecdotally that Spenser at Random has become an established part of people’s sense of the Spenser-world, referred to offhandedly in conference Q&As and elsewhere.  This therefore seems an opportune moment to offer some brief reflections on the aims and future of the sessions.

I had experimented before with using a random number generator to select pieces of literature to read: in my teaching; at a Sixteenth Century Society roundtable in Milwaukee, co-run with Jeff Dolven, at which we chose a stanza to read together using a set of dice with different numbers of sides; and then in a Shakespeare Association of America seminar that I co-organised with Leah Whittington, where we finally went digital and used the online tool to select and read together one of Shakespeare’s sonnets and one of the Amoretti.  The basic reason for thinking that it might work well for reading Spenser together online was that it had, on these occasions, been enjoyable for all of those involved, simply by virtue of injecting an element of sheer unpredictability into the occasion.  Typically when we get together with other readers – whether teaching, at conferences, or elsewhere – we tend to have dutifully done our reading ahead of time, and to know roughly what to expect.  Randomised reading mixes the familiar – we are still reading Spenser, still doing so with colleagues, students, and friends – with the uncertain, the contingent, the basic fact that none of us know until that moment exactly what we are going to do.  The fact that I was able to find an online random number generator complete with a brightly coloured, spinning wheel and silly sound effects only added to the fun.

As we planned the sessions and as they have unfolded, however, it has become clearer that the randomised selection of a stanza, while enjoyable, also raises consequential questions about what it means to read, and to read The Faerie Queene in particular.  One of my interests in finding random ways into this poem was to ask us all to reflect on what it means to know, what it means to be an expert on a text so vast in scale and so intricate in its details; so demanding both of the endurance required to plough on, and the care needed when zooming in.  Even those of us who have reflected upon this question in our writing will necessarily tend, when it comes to choosing examples through which to explore the issue, towards those parts of the poem that we know well and that speak to The Faerie Queene’s seemingly endless self-consciousness about its own knowability.  How could one write precisely about the unknowable aspects of a text, those qualities that slip beneath our readerly radars or from our porous memories?  How could we think about the bits of the poem that we don’t typically think about?  To read a randomly chosen stanza is to be taken collectively out of our comfort zones, to be forced to slow down where we might otherwise have skipped blithely on.  Randomised reading is, on the one hand, a way of experiencing the seemingly infinite richness of Spenser’s poem – the way in which, no matter how well we think we might know it, there will always be more to ponder and to unearth.  But on the other hand there is, as I have tended to stress in my opening remarks to these sessions, another side to this experience, which is the more unsettling realisation that The Faerie Queene is never knowable, always elusive, and that to read it in different ways over time is therefore to veer, like many of the figures within the narrative, between delight and panic.

Another important and connected implication of reading in this way is that it is something of a leveller: we are supposed to stick to the stanza that is chosen, and although there is inevitably some reference to other moments in the poem (and, at least in the breakout rooms in which I’ve been, some seriocomic angst about ‘breaking the rules’ by looking elsewhere on the page, or even, for the truly transgressive, flicking forward or backward a page) this focus does have the effect of making the kinds of knowledge which we often wield as the enchanted spears and shields of scholarly discussion rather less useful, or necessary.  The meetings have attracted attendees of widely varying age, experience, and career stage, and the sense that anyone present can home in on a specific word or sound, regardless of his or her level of comfort with or within the poem as a whole, has had a democratising effect.  I have been struck in the breakout rooms in which I’ve participated by a tone of conversation not quite like any other academic occasion, produced by the fact that we have been thrown together for fifteen minutes with no time for small talk, no reason to identify or to place the other participants (and no way of doing so) before we dive into discussion.  In fact, I would say that the greatest surprise for me has been the way in which the random component of the sessions, which we originally thought about primarily in terms of the selection of the stanza, has been at least as interestingly informed by the wondrous technology of the Zoom breakout room, and the way that it can create ad hoc and fleeting interpretive communities, unplanned and mathematically unlikely to be repeated.

If this sounds rather utopian, then that’s fine by me: we could certainly all do with some brief moments like this when life as it has unfolded around us over the past eighteen months has been so relentlessly dystopic.  But I’d like to end these brief reflections by discussing another and perhaps more complicated set of ways in which, for me, Spenser at Random is not only accidentally about The Faerie Queene, but seems intrinsically to reflect that poem’s ways of working.  Spenser’s poem, in my view and in the view of many of its readers, is both enriched and, at times, tormented by an endless capacity for self-reflexiveness, no experience with or within the poem exempt from questions as to its nature and worth as an experience, no way of thinking allowed to remain oblivious to its own risks and costs.  The utopian spaces that the poem contains are, at best, transient, fragile, inaccessible, riven with contradiction, but this doesn’t necessarily devalue them or the kinds of thinking that they provoke.  From their inception, the Spenser at Random sessions were intended to reflect this quintessentially Spenserian doubleness, which is part of what makes him so good to think with, and to think against. 

As my above account of the genesis of these sessions makes clear, Spenser at Random emerged directly from our collective attempt to find new ways of engaging simultaneously with Spenser and with a cluster of political and ethical questions that reverberate between the sixteenth century and our own.  Since I accepted the invitation to write these brief reflections for The Spenser Review, the stakes of doing so were changed somewhat when our announcement of an upcoming session in which we plan to tweak the format in order to return explicitly to the concerns of the ‘Getting Started with Spenser’ session – gender, race, class, eco-crisis – triggered a strong set of responses on the Sidney-Spenser listserv.[2]  Without going into the details of a discussion on what is not an open forum (though one that can be freely joined), the responses were roughly split between those who welcomed the initiative, and those who, while generally making clear that they recognised the importance of discussing these topics, did not seem to think that they cohered with the deliberately undirected quality of Spenser at Random.

I have reflected a great deal on this discussion and some of the specific contributions that it prompted.  The provisional conclusion to which I have come is that I, at least, want to continue to use Spenser to have it both ways, in the way that he so often seems to want for himself.  I’m uncomfortably aware that the utopian picture I’ve painted above could be a highly partial one.  The sessions have seemed largely convivial and relatively non-hierarchical to me, but I attend them as one of the convenors and one of the ISS officers, sure that my own voice will be heard.  I hope that others feel this way, but it’s entirely possible that the format is much more nerve-wracking for others who face greater barriers to speech.  For me, finding new ways of enjoying Spenser and new groups with which to pursue this enjoyment is inseparable from an ongoing questioning of these ways and of these groups, a searching predicated upon the assumption that there will be blind spots not only in my reading of Spenser, but in my reading of the situation in which I read him.  And this doubleness means that these various activities – the enjoyment of interpretation, and the relentless questioning of what it means to interpret, and of the situations within which we are embedded when we interpret – don’t seem opposed or mutually exclusive.  This was, for me, the takeaway of the ‘Getting Started with Spenser’ session – that it is when we are closely focused as readers of poetry and reflecting on our habits and propensities as readers that we can most productively engage with pressing political and cultural questions of Spenser’s age, and of our own. And this conviction was the original spur for the formation of Spenser at Random.  My hope is that we will continue to gather randomly around Spenser, taking advantage of the fact that the sessions are open-ended, not progressing towards a fixed goal.  We can afford to experiment with our priorities in order to discover what they are, to read in different ways and with different groups on different occasions.  The results will sometimes be thrilling, sometimes chastening: but that’s The Faerie Queene for you. 

Joe Moshenska

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