Gordon Teskey. Spenserian Moments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. xiii +  529 pp.

Teskey’s Spenserian Moments is not the sort of book usually found these days in the academic publishing of literary criticism. It is long—about 450 pages of text—and its print is relatively  large, more like that of a trade book. A substantial portion of the book is basic and introductory, although the book’s range, depth and sophistication greatly exceed that of a preface to The Faerie Queene. From the first twenty pages or so, it is clear that Teskey aims for a general audience of the sort that earlier prefaces to Spenser or Milton sought. His manner is often poetic, sometimes personal. Occasionally, he makes one-off assertions that an interlocutor might try in conversation or teaching—confident, speculative, whimsical, provocative. When he tells quite basic stories about Spenser and his epic romance, and he does so often, his remarks have a sprinkling of new information or new takes on familiar material, and it is clear that much learning underlies the familiar. His stories are pleasant to read. As the book unfolds, it becomes more theoretical and, at moments, visionary. The more I reflected on Spenserian Moments as a whole, and, frankly, on the virtual impossibility of reviewing it comprehensively, the more I saw in it the desire to mirror, somehow to encompass and convey, Spenser’s achievement, even while embracing the awareness that ‘There is far too much complexity in the poem for any one mind to grasp, including the mind of the poet’ (380).

Spenserian Moments is a ‘collection’ (book jacket) of overlapping sections and chapters, plus a unifying introduction and an afterword, which features ‘The Colossi of Memnon’, Derrida’s Glas, and more. Its eighteen chapters are divided into sections on ‘Spenser’, ‘Allegory’, ‘Thinking’ and ‘Change’. Thirteen of the chapters were published between 1990 and 2018, and about a third of these have been revised. The introduction specifies the founding concerns of the book, at once a study of poetry ‘as improvisation, in particular, improvised thinking’ and of Spenser’s generation in his poetry ‘of moments for thinking’ (1, 3). Here thinking is a poetic act rather than a philosophical one, a view that philosophy itself supports. Allegory, a continuing concern in the book, involves ‘poetry that points beyond itself’ in an open-ended sense and as ‘a dynamic process’ with the result that ‘The poem is the totality of the system created by … reader and text’ (1, 252). A reading moves along two axes, ‘One follows the narrative’, which sometimes resembles a Möbius strip, twisting so that inside and outside, meaning and surface, blend or seem to as ‘our progress keeps interacting with our imaginations’ (261). ‘The other axis is orthogonal to the readerly and narrative one. …continually stretching off to the side’—for example, to classical and biblical allusions, general moral engagements, historical contexts, anthropology, psychology and so on. As in a gravitational field, these divergent contexts become ‘diminishingly compelling so far as making sense of the poem is concerned, but they augment our sense of its richness. They are not less true; they are just less strong’ (261-62). While not a revelation, the clarity and wisdom of this statement are compelling and, to my mind, most welcome.

The Moments in Teskey’s title are perhaps best illustrated by the image of a moving stream that recurs with recognisable variants throughout his book. It starts with a memory from his college years in Canada when, for a moment, just as he had finished reading the Mutabilitie Cantos, he saw from the library a moving river with trees reflected, and everything he saw, the river and his open book, ‘seemed … gathered together and held, as if nothing had ended but had simply moved past into something other, as with allegory. So it is with the moments … in The Faerie Queene’ (4-5). Within pages, this memory returns to summarise a paragraph on moments, as distinct from structures, in Spenser’s poetry: ‘The Spenserian moments are like whirling eddies at a bend in a river, turning at once into themselves and releasing their energy downstream’ (17, cf. 50, 277, for example). Florimell’s celebrated first appearance becomes both the prime instance of such a Spenserian moment for thinking (265-69) and for still movement or moving stillness, like the river’s whirling eddies. ‘[T]he poem is the radiant, central axis of an environment of mind’, that is, the poet’s mind, its extension in the poem, and readers’ minds ‘interacting with the poem and recycling mental energy back into the poem’ (44).

Part I of Spenserian Moments, ‘On Spenser’, has four chapters. Dominant threads in two of them, ‘Other Poets’ and ‘Toward Fairy Land’, treat romance sources (Ariosto, Tasso, etc.) and The Shepheardes Calender as a kind of prolegomenon to The Faerie Queene. A third chapter is titled ‘In Ireland’, a location Teskey finds nearly coincident with Faerie in Spenser’s imagination. Book Five, which ends explicitly in Ireland, he considers ‘the brutal, beating heart of the poem Spenser wanted to write’ (108). The telos of The Faerie Queene is surprisingly secular, even in Book I (156-57): ‘Saint George has gone to Fairy Land with Una, Truth, as the English have gone to Ireland with Truth and an army and later with colonists’ (127). The conquest of the dragon by Redcrosse is further analogous to the conquests of the English army. The fourth chapter of Part I is a survey, or summary, of what Teskey seems to mean elsewhere when he refers to the poem’s ‘bare narrative’ (297). I honestly wondered why this simplistic fourth chapter is in the book.

Another notable and revealing thread starting in Part I and recurring throughout Spenserian Moments involves comparisons—or rather, contrasts—between Spenser and Milton. The index lists about ten contrasts, although I have noted others. These are useful, incisive clarifications, although I doubt that many Miltonists will warm to them since Spenser always seems to have the preferred position. My impression more generally is that Teskey greatly favours distinctions and differences over similarities and connections in other respects as well. For example, he wants to distance metaphor, which includes analogy and extends to personification, from allegorical theorising, which necessarily involves abstraction, and he does not exhibit the fondness for verbal ambiguity, equivocation, polysemy and the like conspicuous in many another Spenserian commentator and in Spenser himself and his contemporaries.

Sound bites, as it were, from Part I seem to me a way of suggesting more of its richness and range. For example, Britomart, Spenser’s ‘most splendid knight’ becomes ‘a threat’ to ‘the masculine bias’ of Spenser’s design and Spenser has to suppress her (5-6, 66). But Spenser ‘believed in the equality of women’, and in The Letter to Raleigh, he pointedly ‘specifies members of both sexes as readers’ of his poem, not just the Queen (75, cf. 153). Belphoebe’s beauty is ‘political beauty, the radiance of power’, and The Faerie Queene has an ‘incipiently totalitarian design’, with which, however, it is itself at war, insofar as Spenser, unlike Milton, is ‘ideologically incoherent and subversive’ (10, 12). The Letter, which Teskey ranks second only to Sidney’s Defence for theoretical import, plays a recurrent, substantive role in his arguments, one that is notable for its meticulous but imaginative attention to Spenser’s epistolary words, albeit arguably engaged in special pleading later with respect to the poet’s ‘darke conceit’, to which I’ll return. 

But I stray from Part I and soundbites from it, more of which follow. Saracens in The Faerie Queene ‘are only symbols of the passions dressed in the accoutrement of Roman Catholic Spain’ and are ‘systemically dehumanized’, in contrast to their treatment in Italian romance (28). In fact, ‘All cultural others’, including the Irish, ‘tend to be assimilated to the Saracen’ by Spenser (35). Much later, the House of Pride, with its covering of gold foil alluding to the riches of the New World, leads us ‘to think of the arrogant House of Castile’ (think Castle) in whose precinct the Saracen Knight Sans Joy represents Spanish pride (336). (Nothing here of the ‘mayden Queene’ Lucifera’s glance toward Elizabeth I; in fact, Spenser’s criticisms of Elizabeth do not figure in Moments).  Whereas Belphoebe’s beauty radiates power, elsewhere ‘beauty is virtue’, or rather ‘virtue’s fully embodied expression, its parousia [presence, arrival] and revelation’, with Florimell only its fleeting vision and the Fairy Queen never seen at all (62). Plausibly related is the view that ‘The poet of The Faerie Queene distrusts and fears the frank and emotional expression of love’: witness Britomart and Artegall (64). Spenser also appears to think ‘Strong women make men effeminate’, and he seems not to ‘believe in true friendship between men’, or else ‘he had no earthly conception of it’ (66, 95). Resonating with Jameson’s landmark study, Italian critical theory of the sixteenth century constitutes ‘unconscious discussions of politics and exercises in political theory’ (100).

Part II, ‘On Allegory’ offers six chapters, more than any other section. These are ‘Allegory in The Faerie Queene’, a ‘General Theory of Allegory’, ‘Death in an Allegory’, ‘Positioning Spenser’s Letter to Raleigh’, ‘Allegory and Renaissance Critical Theory’, and ‘A Field Theory of Allegory’. The two central chapters, outliers to the rest, cover, respectively, what happens and what it means when an allegorical figure dies, and the Letter’s undecidable positionality with respect to editions of The Faerie Queene after 1590 (at its beginning, middle, or end?). This undecidability, Teskey concludes, forces us to abandon the idea that the poem elicits ‘what is inside it, instead of an energy proceeding from us’, the latter an idea that Teskey urges again and again (227). The first two of the chapters on allegory offer a short, quite introductory commentary on how allegory works in Spenser’s 1590 instalment and an interpretative history of allegory, which is a revised version of Teskey’s 2012 encyclopaedia article on ‘Allegory’. Emphases in this history include daemons and personifications, in whose Spenserian figuration he finds the line between ‘the ontic and the signifying functions’ elusive (171). Eventually, he replaces this line by ‘a sliding scale between nonexistent extremes’, or by what I think of as a continuum, more of a connection than a precisely measurable demarcation (189). He rightly holds that ‘all allegory is figural and real at the same time’ and that ‘The dynamic of transcendence and embodiment, each one adding power to the other, even as it contradicts the other, is at the very center of our experience of the allegorical personification and indeed of allegory’ (184, 198). As earlier in Moments, however, Teskey’s interest lies in figures (personages and images) but not narrative, to whose movement, I would suppose, the river’s run corresponds.

In the last two chapters on allegory, the title of the first, ‘Allegory and Renaissance Critical Theory’ is self-explanatory, and again the material familiar. Teskey’s framing of it is admirable, however, beginning with the first sentence, ‘Spenser lived in the first age of literary theory’ (228). Poetic theory becomes at this time an object of speculation, different from rhetoric (228-29). This much is true, although again Teskey’s desire to confine, narrow and limit the imaginative resources of metaphor, which should be understood to encompass the other rhetorical tropes, as well as to be itself a specific trope, is not historical, and it uncharacteristically slights the imaginative resources of the poets, as distinct from the writers of pedagogical tools and rhetorical handbooks for the uninstructed or less instructed. Moreover, if Sidney, after the Italians, envisions poetry’s higher end, even handbooks like Puttenham’s exhibit a pronounced interest in poetry. The distinction between poetry and rhetoric is simply not the hard one in the Renaissance that Teskey favours.

The final chapter in this section, Teskey’s ‘Field Theory of Allegory’, is the most suggestive and original one, although I wonder about the extent or, indeed, the specificity, of its explanatory power, which seems to amount to saying, ‘That’s just the way it is’. By a field, Teskey means a field of energy or force in connection with which he evokes magnetism (discovered by William Gilbert, De Magnete, 1600), together with Einstein’s field theory and quantum mechanics. He explicitly disclaims any value beyond a heuristic one for his connection of field theory with allegory, however. His first explanatory example of this theory in Spenser is encapsulated thus: ‘Fame is activated not by going to any particular place but instead by random movements in a field, the field of honor, of fame, of glory. What is honor for the characters within The Faerie Queene is, for readers of The Faerie Queene, meaning. This is the field theory of allegory’ (242). A clearer example for me comes in his explanation of Ollyphant’s terrified flight from Britomart, namely, that the perverse Giant ‘knows who Britomart is because they are energized in the same field’ (258). Still another comes in response to the question of how, in III.xi, Scudamour knows in some detail what Busirane is doing to Amoret; Teskey explains that ‘this is a case in which, though the two are physically separated, his field and hers [Amoret’s and Scudamour’s] interact’ (259). I have no better answer to Teskey’s question, although, I admit, it has never bothered me or my students, avid readers of Victorian novels, Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. Once it is posed—Teskey suggests that it should or would not be except by a hypothetical reader of (realistic?) novels—magic, intuition, romantic or fairy-tale convention, poetic license and even the amorous sympathy suggested by Scudamour’s and Amoret’s names all come to mind. As for Ollyphant’s flight, all we need to know is that Britomart is the patron of chastity and the incestuous pedophile Ollyphant nominally represents ‘destructive phantasy’.

In Teskey’s theory, Faerie itself is ‘a vaguely defined region of propagated energy, a field’(243). This field of energy ‘is propagated to readers of The Faerie Queene in every subsequent age in which the poem is read. Allegory occurs in the interactions … between the dynamical signifying structures of the poem and the innumerable engagements with them at distances’ in time and place (243). This perceptive view of literary history recalls those of the Modernists, such as T. S. Eliot. Teskey adds that these interpretative engagements ‘need not be accurate or true, in a philological and historical sense’ (243). Lest we suppose that anything goes, he adds later that ‘It’s not quite that all readings are equally legitimate, relevant, and expert’. Some are strong, some weak, ‘not as a value judgment’ but in terms of their distance from the center of the poem’s field (262).  Field in this last instance, as in the instances of Ollyphant and Amoret, appears to be both a variable and dominantly a subjective one. Accordingly, on the same page, as emphasised so often, the poem is ‘the field created by the interaction of the reader with its text’. Teskey’s investment in this interaction is reasonable enough, but I still wonder whether he underestimates the capacity of the text for provocation and, equally important, for resistance. It goes without saying—or does it?—that Teskey’s interactions—strong, weak, accurate, even untrue—do not sanction sheer ignorance, historical or lexical, and the simple mnemonic or contextual mistakes encountered with some frequency in the interpretation of the roughly 35,000 lines of Spenser’s epic romance.

Part III, ‘Thinking’, has four chapters and not surprisingly, before it is finished Hegel, Heidegger, Adorno, Benjamin and other thinkers make relevant appearances. Teskey endorses Heidegger’s view that we go to the poets ‘to find out about thinking’ because, like courtesy, as Teskey adds, poetry ‘is open to the otherness of the unknown’ (314). He turns to Hegel both for the conception of moments as elements in a process and the idea that the word moment contains two meanings, kinesis and stasis, both opposites evident in the arrival of Florimell (275-76). Therefore, ‘From Moment to Moment’, the first chapter in this section, focuses on stillness in motion, the whirling eddies in the flowing river, Florimell’s initial, momentous appearance. This paradoxical combination of stillness with movement largely belongs to ‘the subjective experience of reading, although the text has created the conditions’ for it (270). Here the text has a creative role, at least conditionally.

It is in this chapter on thinking, together with that on field theory, that Teskey attends closely to Spenser’s ‘darke conceit’, half of a phrase in the Letter to Raleigh describing his epic romance as ‘a continued Allegory, or darke conceit’. He proposes that by the two terms Spenser really meant ‘different ways of saying the same thing or different things whose natures overlap’ (is there a difference here?), yet Teskey’s interest lies in the ‘darke conceit’, which, he suggests, translates Greek hyponoia, ‘undermeaning’  (254). He tells the story of how hyponoia was in time absorbed by allegory, making allegory ‘no longer merely a rhetorical device but rather the instrument … for transmitting mystery’ (255). If so, why didn’t Spenser use and gloss hyponoia if that is what he meant rather than using ‘conceit’, a word associated with Italian concetto and important in Sidney’s Defence?^[i]  (Even as hypo- signals a lack, it may be worth noting, concetto suggests a bringing together, con/com).  I find Teskey’s assertion ‘no longer merely a rhetorical device’ a needless exclusion as well. Surely, allegory continued to be also a rhetorical device, in addition to being newly a means of conveying mystery; moreover, in the form of analogy, continued metaphor—allegory—connects the known to the unknown. At the end of Teskey’s next chapter, his special investment in the ‘darke conceit’ comes to light. Here, he writes of ‘a sacrality’, a ‘numinous power’ that is aesthetic, not religious, and of a transcending not quite transcendent, ‘having analogical spin but spinning in place’ (284). Considered aesthetically, all allegorical signs have this spin inside them and reaching beyond them: ‘The spinning signs tend towards one another, as if … longing to join together first in one transcendental sign’ with a black and illegible face. ‘This is the higher meaning that embraces them all—from below—and it is what Spenser means by ‘“darke conceit”’ (284). Though puzzled by the emphatic ‘first,’ I notice that with analogy—‘analogical spin’—metaphor, earlier ejected from allegorical theory, is back in this powerful, affective claim.

The second chapter in this section treats ‘Thinking Moments’, because Spenser thinks rather than resolves in his poetry, not making ‘the questions disappear into answers’ (299). Teskey also characterises Spenser, who investigates and haunts the ruins of earlier cultures, as ‘an archeological thinker’ because these mainly textual ruins offer the poet both ‘an index of the passage of time’ and the presence of ‘poetical spirit’ (302). Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos get attention at the end of this chapter, as does Nature’s thinking moment, her final verdict: ‘We are supposed to listen to the whirl of the words’ she speaks, not ‘to grasp the meaning concealed behind or among the words’ (308). To support this statement, Teskey invites us to listen to how her chiming rhymes imitate ‘the effect of a sestina’ (308). Here thinking is listening, attending—maybe dreaming?  In a subsequent chapter, he attends to what her words mean.

The last two chapters in Part IV, ‘Courtesy and Thinking’ and ‘Thinking of History in Spenserian Romance’, might look at first glance like a balance of opposites. Indeed, near the end of the second, which returns to the subject of ruins, Teskey strikingly concludes that ‘ethical reflection and political commitment are not harmonious with each other’, as Spenser likely discovered in the course of writing/thinking his romance (342). In the first of these chapters, ‘the metaphorical model for thought is no longer the grasping of a thing [as in an abstractive concept] but the exercising of courtesy’; this model is ‘something—someone—that is not seized but approached’ (311). It is in this chapter that Teskey rather oddly distinguishes the poem’s ‘bare narrative’ from ‘relations of thought’, and he explains that ‘Spenser is not primarily a narrative poet [like those Italian romancers]’ but instead a thinking, allegorical one (297, 314). Teskey seems to struggle to fill out such assertions, first holding that the opening episodes of each book of Spenser’s poem in no way imply or contain ‘in nuce the developments to come’ (316). This is a half-truth at best, soon modified to hold more convincingly that these openings are ‘more naïve stages in the thought’ but then spoiled by the added phrase ‘unrelated to the thought at the end’ (317). Much broader, more comprehensive, more complex, more provisional, even different, I would agree, but not ‘unrelated’. Then, two sentences later, the value of narrative seems to shift: ‘As Spenser works to fill out a thought by means of narrative …’ and then, early in the next chapter, we further read about the ‘“introspective turn”’ of medieval romance, which combines with interlace narrative to make narrative itself ‘“a way of thinking”’ (330). Of course medieval dream vision, notably Piers Plowman—an introspective narrative if ever there was one—also enters into this development and flows into The Faerie Queene. Narrative, like metaphor, continues to be an issue in Teskey’s wonderful book, as does consistency, ever a challenge for collected articles to overcome. If ethics and politics can be inharmonious in The Faerie Queene, moreover, theory and pragmatics can be so in its criticism as well. The elevation of moments, such as Florimell’s parousia or the Acidalian vision, has a price in the ongoing narrative, such as the assault by the lecherous, old fisherman and the attack by the brigands.

Part IV of Spenserian Moments, ‘On Change’, has four chapters, of which the first, an extensive testimony to Teskey’s abiding interest in relevant modern art (also poetry and music), treats ‘Colonial Allegories in Paris’, likely recalling for some Barthes’s Mythologies or Teskey’s own Allegory and Violence. Benjamin makes an appearance, as does the notion of capture.^[ii] Briefly, Spenser also appears. The next chapter, ‘Courtesy and the Graces’, focuses on Book VI, seen as ‘an essay in Spenserian social theory’ in which ‘people as people [come] first’ (370, 382). Strangely, Teskey never makes the religious connections of courtesy familiar in the criticism of Book VI. But he is recurrently concerned with death, perhaps an inevitable association in connection with change, with ‘the self-destructive but necessary acknowledgment within poetry of the dismay that haunts all our experience of beauty’, including the Graces and erotic love (376). The Acidalian dancers merge with the quills of pens thrown by poets into Spenser’s grave, another affective image that recurs in Moments, now associated with death, now with poetic flight (377). The reunion of Scudamour and Amoret at the end of the 1590 Faerie Queene, first treated in Part I (60-62), also returns for discussion: whereas before, the image of the hermaphrodite having been dismissed, Teskey celebrated the ‘erotic and emotional happiness’ of the lovers’ embrace, now he remarks that their merging, ‘“growne together quite”’, all the veils having fallen , all secrecy gone, ‘entirely sufficient to each other’, is ‘a little depressing’ (61, 383). But then, citing Harry Berger’s gloss on ‘sweet countervayle’ in the lovers’ reunion as ‘a reciprocal veiling’, he corrects that depressing thought, adding, ‘as if their passionless, hermaphroditic conjuncture were lost and real love had returned’ with the restoration of the veils (383). This is a fascinating observation, although it turns Berger’s gloss, which is ambivalent and likely suspicious, into a positive interpretation— in Berger’s lexicon, effectually kidnapping it. Mention of the 1590 hermaphrodite leads next by association to the Venerian hermaphrodite in the Temple of Venus and the imaginative recognition that death, not just generation, is behind her pubic veil (384).

The highlight of this chapter is Teskey’s superbly imagined discussion of the momentous Acidalian experience. Here again are ‘difference, separation, and secrecy’, together with ‘the transcendental power of desire and the transcendental vision of courtesy’ (386). Teskey tells us that Acidale exists ‘in several registers of the sublime’, as does his reading of it, which I’m not about to violate by summary. Less forward than Calidore, I’ll content myself with two comments from Teskey’s framing: ‘At this moment, on this scene [the setting, or approach], when the allegory of courtesy is seeking its ground in the natural world, Spenser’s vision comes close to what we mean by ecology: a system of living exchange’ (391). The second comment follows discussion of the stream at the foot of the Acidalian Mount, recognised as ‘the source of poetry, a Celtic Hippocrene’ (392). Here, ‘poetry is beginning to tell us what it is: a gathering together of the world and also a pointing beyond’ (392).  This chapter is a must for readers.

The last two chapters of Part IV focus on Mutability, or on thinking and mutability, on identity (sameness) and nonidentity (difference), or the Heraclitean stream—stillness and movement again. There is plenty of insight in these chapters, but much of what I would single out for thematic emphasis would further repeat what has already appeared in this review. Yet one other feature again stands out, namely Teskey’s desire to keep religion out of consideration, perhaps as a balance to his insistence on transcendence. Is religion too scripted, too close to theology, too burdened by historical baggage,  too unpoetic or unimaginative? Who knows?  But Teskey’s making the debate between Jove and Mutability ‘not religious but metaphysical’ seems too neat a distinction for Spenser or his culture (400). Similarly, to consider the figure Nature purely Neoplatonic or purely natural overlooks her as the agent of Spenser’s ambiguously phrased ‘God of Nature’, as well as her insistent association with the Bible, indeed with the transfigured Christ, in her initial description, and her further association with Alanus’s De planctu Naturae, in which Nature is ‘the essential link between God and man’.^[iii]   For Teskey, ‘Nature does not know what she is talking about’ in her verdict ‘when she speaks of things returning to their first estates’ because her words resound with Christian resurrection (406). Nonetheless, he takes ‘fate’ in Nature’s verdict to mean a purely natural law, whereas for Spenser’s culture, fate was an instrument of divinity. Following Nature’s verdict, Teskey reads the poet’s leave taking in VII.viii as the ‘loathing of life’, overlooking the multiple verbal ambiguities that qualify this reading, and, contrary to most other modern readings, he takes the final phrase of the Cantos, ‘Sabaoths sight’, to refer to the God of rest, not the God of (active) hosts. Rest is certainly an acceptable option, but I wonder whether his preference for it in the final phrase, the end of the ending, is really for stillness, entropy, death.

Taken whole, Spenserian Moments is a massive achievement, beautifully written, sensitive and imaginative, learned and above all, in a word most apt, thoughtful. Its size, like that of The Faerie Queene itself, enables Teskey to balance the Romantic and visionary against a clear-eyed appraisal of Spenser’s politics. He richly deserves the readership toward which his book reaches a welcoming hand.

Judith H. Anderson

Comments

• Auburn Concrete Company 5 months ago

  Thirteen of the chapters were published between 1990 and 2018, and about a third of these have been revised.

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