I hope I speak for a lot of people when I say I am deeply grateful for 
Prof. Berger's thoughtful response, which I will print out and think hard 
about rather than respond to quickly.

Peter C. Herman

At 01:19 PM 2/12/02 -0800, you wrote:
>I take it that the protocol of the SpenserList calls for quick responses, 
>and that's too bad, because David W-O asks a deep question, and I don't 
>think it's one that can be handled within the conventions of 
>quick-response discourse. The responses tend to have less to do with what 
>might be going on in the poem than with what might have been going on 
>around it in the poet's various neighborhoods. I've been thinking about bk 
>2 since the 1950s and for the life of me (unfortunately it's more life 
>than I want to have had) I've never been able to get a purchase on the 
>question, Why, specifically, a Palmer? I suspect that's partly because I 
>kept wondering about the pilgrim/palmer allusion to a returnee from the 
>Holy Land, and that headed me toward the Religious Question, and I could 
>never make that work for me. It wasn't until about an hour ago that I came 
>upon the best answer I've ever seen, at least the answer that best fits 
>with my sense of what goes on in book 2. The answer comes not surprisingly 
>from Charlie Ross. It's Charlie's simple and brilliant suggestion that 
>palmers were "spoil-sports, particularly in matters of love," with the 
>attendant implication that Spenser's Palmer may be read citationally as a 
>critical embodiment, a parodic quotation, of canonical attitudes. But 
>attitudes toward what? Toward temperance. At the risk of violating 
>short-discourse protocol I want to suggest how this works. You have to 
>remember that I'm probably the oldest new critic on the face of the earth 
>and so it will undoubtedly take me longer to play this gig than most of 
>you would like.
>
>         1) When Guyon first appears he's described as a domesticated but 
> skittish terminator, "all armd in harnesse meete, / That from his head no 
> place appeared to his feet," and he's led by the aged and feeble but 
> sage- and sober-looking Palmer whose "slow pace" makes the knight temper 
> "his trampling steed" (2.1.6-7), which means in effect that he keeps 
> Guyon from pricking on the plain. The Palmer "with a staffe his feeble 
> steps did stire, / Least his long way his aged limbes should tire" 
> (1.7).  It is the staff I want to look at. A kind of prosthetic 
> supplement, it moderates the difference between the young rider's vigor 
> and his old guide's laborious ambulation.  Here it "stires"-steers, but 
> also stirs-the Palmer's feeble steps, quickening his pace so that he can 
> lead the knight who is careful not to spur or stir up his steed. It's the 
> symbol and instrument of temperance both as the mean between extremes and 
> as the generational transmission of prudence and self-restraint; the 
> symbol  simultaneously of the Palmer's weakness, his cybernetic 
> (governing) power, and his knowledge, all of which converge in the 
> following passage:  the Palmer guided Guyon
>                                 over dale and hill.
>         And with his steedie staffe did point his way:
>         His race with reason, and with words his will,
>         From foul intemperance he oft did stay,
>             And suffred not in wrath his hastie steps to stray.   (1.34)
>
>The colon ending the second line has the force of an id est leading to an 
>allegorical interpretation of the visualized act. In its Faerie form, 
>temperance is allegorical magic: rational and verbal restraint are no more 
>difficult or problematic than the staff-pointing to which they are 
>pastorally reduced. The last two lines, especially "foul" and "oft" and 
>"suffred," suggest that the allegory of the staff is a whitewash. 
>"Steedie"--a 1590 reading inadvisedly emended to "steadie" in 1609--picks 
>out the locomotive function of the staff that "stires" the Palmer's feeble 
>steps and is thus both the equivalent and the moderator of the hero's 
>trampling steed.
>The "steedie staffe" is a symbol of a different order from Guyon's 
>"trampling steed."  The steed belongs to an organic and psychomachian 
>model that derives ultimately from the embodied tripartite soul of 
>Platonic tradition: whether the horse signifies irascibility or 
>concupiscence, it connotes aspects of male virility associated with sexual 
>difference and its bodily inscription. The staff, on the other hand, is 
>dissociated from the sexual body. It is a crafted object cunningly framed 
>of "vertuous" wood and invested with an extra-organic genealogy. The 
>analogies of Moses and Mercury affiliate it with the herald's staff, the 
>divine magician's wand, the god's scepter. They give it an aura of 
>antiquity that fixes attention on the continuity, the transmission, of 
>apotropaic power.  It is a symbol, also, of the generational transmission 
>and preservation of antique authority from the feeble old Palmer to his 
>young pupil.
>
>2) A Lacanian digression, inspired by David Miller's work.       The power 
>of transmission that makes the staff the guarantor of the symbolic order 
>of temperance and the law of the father is contingent on the dissociation 
>of the phallus from the penis.  In Lacan's story-and here I'm quoting 
>Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen-the father does not possess "the phallus by nature, 
>by virtue of a potent, fertile penis.  On the contrary, he 'has' it only 
>to the extent that he has given it up beforehand by incurring symbolic 
>castration:  the phallus is a title, which he has received so that he can 
>bestow it in accord with symbolic pact and law." What Lacan is talking 
>about in his "article on the signification of the phallus" is not the 
>"penis but . . ..  its symbol:  the erected, painted, or sculpted 
>Phallos." For although it "may very well express masculine power," the 
>phallus "does so only symbolically (that is, . . . not sexually).  The 
>phallus is the penis annulled-castrated-raised to the function of 
>'scepter', of inherited signifier, which is passed on according to the law 
>of exchange and kinship."
>
>         3) The twelfth canto and the second book conclude with a victory 
> for Acrasia:  the Palmer's temperance fails to undo her witchcraft; he 
> can change her victims' bodies but not their minds and wills.  Such a 
> conclusion justifies and underscores the sense of futility conveyed by 
> the "rigour pittilesse" with which Guyon destroys the bower. And it 
> explains an odd feature in the caduceus stanza, which marks the threshold 
> between the Odyssean sea voyage and the journey through the bower. "Like 
> the staff of Mercury to which it is kin," Pat Parker writes, the Palmer's 
> staff  "is able both to recall souls from the symbolic Hades of 
> subjection to female power and also to 'rule the Furyes, when they most 
> do rage.'" The narrator, it is true, states that when Mercury "wonts the 
> Stygian realmes invade," he uses his rod to rule the Furies, tame Orcus, 
> and "asswage" the infernal fiends (12.41). But he says nothing about 
> recalling souls; the psycho-pomp function is a familiar enough aspect of 
> this motif that many Spenserians mention it, therefore a closer look 
> makes its exclusion here noteworthy. The staff of Temperance is impotent 
> to recall souls from Acrasia's power. "Wonts . . . invade" indicates a 
> practice that is habitual or recurrent, presumably because the temperance 
> imposed by the rod is at best temporary; a practice that is both 
> aggressive and relatively ineffective.
>This restrictive characterization of Mercury's power rubs off on the 
>Palmer and Guyon.  Their invasive, aggressive, and ineffective "conquest" 
>of Acrasia is cunningly framed and interpreted by the rewriting of its two 
>most prominent pre-texts: to be reminded of Homer's Circe and Tasso's 
>Armida is to realize that the Acrasian variant conspicuously deletes the 
>motif of sympathetic recuperation that brings Acrasia's precursors back 
>into the fold of homosocial society. She is the more seductive, lethal, 
>and vampiric objectification of a narrative fantasy that shows itself at 
>times dangerously seduced and vulnerable, that doesn't trust her to 
>relent, or trust itself to be anything but relentless in the violence with 
>which it punishes her for its lapses.  So, for example, it perversely 
>fixes and feeds its "hungry eies" on hers (12.78) even after it describes 
>"her false eyes fast fixed in his sight" and "greedily depasturing 
>delight" (12.73). Acrasia, in short, is the objectification of male 
>hysteria. From this standpoint, you could say that her femaleness is like 
>that of a male in drag. She's male in the double sense that she's placed 
>in the position of dominance and that she's a specter created and 
>empowered by male fantasy. Remember that in canto 12 this fantasy 
>expressly includes the positioning of Guyon and the Palmer in the role of 
>the cuckolded husband, Vulcan. Bert Hamilton's gloss on the name makes all 
>the connections: "Akrasia"  conflates two Greek words, one denoting 
>humoral imbalance and the other impotence, and the second is reinforced by 
>its links to Acrates and to Maleger's hags, Impatience and Impotence. It's 
>been suggested that the hags are "vicious counterparts" of Prays-desire 
>and Shamefastnesse (Nohrnberg), and that Prays-desire and Shamefastnesse 
>may be parodically recalled by the two bathers in the Bower (Krier, 
>Miller). I add that the bathers, who are also wrestlers, are linked by 
>several details to Maleger's hags.
>At 12.86, when the "vertuous staffe" restores Acrasia's raging beasts to 
>human form, it does the work performed in the Odyssey by Circe with her 
>wand and medicine. The revisionary contrast to that subtext, in which a 
>domesticated Circe figure helps the hero, further demonizes Acrasia, while 
>the imperfect restoration of Acrasia's victims-"they did unmanly looke" 
>and resisted or resented their liberation-signifies a last-minute breach 
>of the powers previously integrated by the ambiguous epithet 
>"vertuous":  the staff retains its magical potency but it's been stripped 
>of its more important allegorical potency as an ethical symbol in which 
>pointing the way is conflated with the restraining influence of words and 
>reason.
>
>4) While I agree in general with Michael Schoenfeldt's insistent emphasis 
>on the Spenserian portrayal of temperance as an anxiety-driven structure, 
>I would modify his description of it. "Spenser," he writes, "imagines the 
>self" as "a fragile and unstable edifice Š assailed on all sides 
>(including the inside) by insurgent passions." Therefore temperance, as a 
>discipline of self-fashioning, is a "heroic" and "dynamic even frantic 
>maintenance of order in the face of perpetual insurrection." In my 
>version, this unhappy, defensive, anxiety-driven self isn't "Spenser's" 
>fantasy, and it certainly isn't "his" ideal. I find thoroughly persuasive 
>Mimi Sprengnether's and Lauren Silberman's demonstrations to the effect 
>that  Spenser's poem targets precisely the hyperactive conception of 
>Temperance Schoenfeldt describes. Silberman argues, for example, that 
>Maleger's assault is an effect rather than the cause of the  strategies of 
>defense embodied in and as the castle of temperance-that a paranoid ideal 
>of security produces a nightmare of perpetual siege-and that in the Bower 
>of Bliss, "Spenser strips the veil from the sexual fear that motivates the 
>elaborate sensual defenses of Book 2." (Frankly, I remain puzzled why such 
>fine pieces of interpretation seem to get ignored or forgotten; I would 
>have expected Schoenfeldt to want to deal with their arguments in order to 
>make his case.)
>         Although Schoenfeldt's account of the beleaguered temperate self 
> applies as much to Alma and Medina as to Guyon, it's obvious that the 
> generic self he's concerned with, the subject and agent of temperance, is 
> restrictively a male self, not the human self, not an androgyne self. He 
> doesn't always make that clear, but he does register the complexity of 
> the situation while describing the argument of canto 9: the castle's 
> owner and tour guide is a woman who "leads the knights Š through a body 
> that is probably masculineŠ. The sexual ideology at work here is 
> certainly masculinist, but in a conjunction of traits confusedly endowed 
> with masculine and feminine meaning." This conjunction is itself a 
> problem for the subject of temperance, since-as Bert Hamilton acutely 
> points out in his gloss-Spenser's spelling of foeminine "suggests that 
> the feminine is foe to man."
>
>         5) 6) Jane relevantly mentions Aristotelian phronesis as a thesis 
> term for book 2. I'd be inclined to replace the term with so-phrosyne-. A 
> loose translation is "temperance." A more literal translation is 
> "safe-mindedness." That's the sense the Platonic Socrates puts into play 
> to describe pretty much the response to anxiety Schoenfeldt characterizes 
> in the preceding section
>
>6) Dysfunctional families abound in Book 2, ripped apart by structural as 
>well as affective conflicts: between domestic and chivalric priorities, 
>between family and career, between love and lust. The Amavia family, 
>Medina and her two sisters, Furor and his mother Occasion, the brothers 
>Pyrochles and Cymochles;  several mixed-up families in Arthur's chronicle; 
>last but not least, we pass by Jason and Medea depicted on Acrasia's gate 
>and finally come upon a glimpse of the Venus/Vulcan/Mars imbroglio when 
>our heroes catch Acrasia and her lover in the Palmer's net. But what does 
>it mean to place the Palmer and Guyon in the role of the cuckolded 
>husband? For now it's enough to say is that if you want to find a social 
>and political as well as moral justification for the discourse of 
>temperance the Palmer represents, you can find it here, in the way 
>affective relations and divided loyalties complicate and are complicated 
>by the demands of family solidarity, generational continuity, alliance, 
>and inheritance. But why, then, specifically, a Palmer? This where 
>Charlie's spoil-sport hypothesis comes in.
>         I think the traces of the dysfunctional-family problematic are 
> conspicuous enough for us to notice that it's being shouldered aside, and 
> that what the Palmer, Guyon, and the narrative prefer to concentrate on 
> are simplistic evasions of the real issues. Simplistic, but not 
> uncomplicated. For example, when Guyon beholds Mordant's lovable corpse 
> and miserable family, he turns stony cold with fear, as if he sees an 
> image of the occupational hazard knights like himself are exposed to. The 
> message relayed by the Palmer's discourse of temperance is 
> uncompromisingly gynephobic: stay away from girls, and not only those of 
> the Acrasian persuasion; avoid all female entanglements. A glimpse of his 
> ideal of womanhood appears incidentally during his account of the stream 
> that won't wash off the bloody-handed babe. The stream's behavior, he 
> says, reflects the aversion of its nymph. When Faunus pursued her, she, 
> "dismayd / With stony feare," begged Diana to save her from rape. The 
> goddess obligingly turned her to a stone "from whose two heads / As from 
> two weeping eyes, fresh streames do flow, / Yet cold through feare, and 
> old conceived dreads." Her stony fear matches Guyon's, and like Mordant's 
> smile, it lives after her in her waters, where it seems identical with 
> the "vertues" that make the water "chast and pure, as purest snow, / Nor 
> lets the waves with any filth be dyde, / But ever like her selfe 
> unstained hath been tryde" (2.2.8-9). The Palmer concludes that since 
> this water won't cleanse the bloody hands, they might as well remain 
> bloody so they can serve as a symbol "to minde revengement, / And be for 
> all chast Dames an endlesse moniment" (2.10). What could that mean? 
> "Endlesse moniment" has the same resonance here that it has in 
> Epithalamion (memorial, admonition, payment [payback?]). The Palmer's 
> sympathy is with Amavia, whose innocence he upholds, but the phrase 
> suggests that the bloody hands will be as much a warning to chaste dames 
> as a memorial. They need to avoid Amavia's predicament, and the best way 
> to do that is to follow the nymph's example and try to "dye a mayd" 
> (2.8). Carol Kaske has a great essay on this passage.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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