> Dare I ask what Spenser would have thought about George the
> Lion-Hearted's crusade against this latter-day
> Souldan-Gerioneo-Grantorto?
1. In a non-trivial sense, I think it is possible to argue that Spenser
*did* think about it; that seems to be the point of exemplary historical
allegory. Some of what follows below attempts an illustration of this
claim. The rest is just barking. I apologize for the hasty and underlashed
constructions in both cases.
2. It seems likely to me that, were he asked specifically about this
situation, Spenser would not have given one answer or enactment, but
several.
3. The question as framed above is already ideologically pitched (of
course) in a way that I think Spenser might have resisted. Figures of
tyranny in the poem go well past the Souldan, Gerioneo, and Grantorto.
Jove is a conquering tyrant who has in the gigantomachy suppressed the
chthonic elements (plebs, 'georgos', etc.) that we might most readily
associate, allegorically speaking, with a populus. In this sense, Nature's
verdict is perhaps a mirroring or re-enactment of Artegall's suppression
of the giant with the scales in V.ii, another instance of fairly
uncompromising tyrannical behavior in the face of what looks suspiciously
like democratic thinking, in the classical sense anyway. Guyon's conduct
in the bower has a strongly tyrannical flavor. (Aristotle, Nicomachean
Ethics, Book II, c. vi, §§16-17: And it is a mean state between two vices,
one of excess and one of defect. Furthermore, it is a mean state in that
whereas the vices either fall short of or exceed what is right in feelings
and in actions, virtue ascertains and adopts the mean. Hence while in
respect of its substance and the definition that states what it really is
in essence virtue is the observance of the mean, in point of excellence
and rightness it is an extreme.)
4. Which may raise the question of whether a 'democratically elected'
leader can act tyrannously. This too is a question in which The Faerie
Queene is interested, if in different terms (an anachronism otherwise, but
then, what isn't), and even if it shares this interest with much of the
rest of the humanist English literature of the sixteenth century and
beyond. 'Not in my name', reads the badge we have worn at protest after
protest lately; as a gifted allegorist/ironist, Spenser handled the gap
between name (extension) and intention with innate and superflexible
dexterity, and it seems to me that he would recognize and be able to
characterize the current political crisis--domestically in the US,
internationally in the UN, and even more broadly in the experience of
democracy generally--pretty acutely with these tools. The pressures
exerted on the persistent metaphysical/political gap between extensive
agent (/leader) and intensive subject (/citizen) by dissimulation are
enormous, fundamental, possibly catastrophic. Trust and forthrightness
(oneness, unity, univocality, Una) in our agents/leaders/signs is
indispensable, insofar as they do not collapse the binary structure of
meaning entirely. Plausible belief in the correspondence between the two
elements must obtain and persist; pressure to widen or close this gap will
destroy the system of meaning or agency.
5. Not that leaders have not always practiced dissimulation, and well and
possibly rightly. But they have done so effectively by disowning that
dissimulation. Spenser explores the moment and act of concealment in
Mercilla's judgment of Duessa in V.ix. See in particular the disturbing
final stanza of the canto:
But she, whose Princely breast was touched nere
With piteous ruth of her so wretched plight,
Though plaine she saw by all, that she did heare,
That she of death was guiltie found by right,
Yet would not leet iust vengeance on her light;
But rather let in stead thereof to fall
Few perling drops from her faire lampes of light;
The which she couering with her purple pall
Would haue the passion hid, and vp arose withall.
The act of covering or concealing her gaze with her purple pall allows
Mercilla to cloak her private judgment, and dissociate it from her public
responsibility. 'Would haue the passion hid': does she *desire* to hide
it, or was she merely, and sincerely, ineffective at hiding it? In other
words, the authenticity of Mercilla's response is in question, and in fact
her judgment is of course delayed until the opening of the ensuing canto,
when she is 'constrained' to let justice fall on Duessa. But Spenser's
image is more specific even than this obvious rehearsal of the queen's two
bodies; in covering her eyes, Mercilla not only hides the evidence of her
passion, but blinds herself and obscures her own face. The withdrawal of
the face of judgment is as literal as it is political (the verdict is
stayed; the historical queen was not at Fotheringay), and again prepares
us for and intensifies the eventual submission of Mercilla's passion to
the 'constraint' that would compel her to act. The effect of blinding
herself (to pity, to ruth) is much the same, but it shares ground with
Cupid and, more importantly, with Dame Nature. I would argue that Nature's
judgment of Mutabilitie represents another place in the poem where Spenser
is very interested in the concealment of duplicity in practical judgment,
and further that his eventual conclusion of the judgment is much more
pessimistic. Of course the suppression of Mutabilitie is necessary once
she has pitched all on her claim, because the universe would decay beneath
her rule. And yet something else is lost in that suppression that Nature
does not admit in her judgment, but which she enacts in its consummation:
So was the Titaness put downe and whist,
And Ioue confirm'd in his imperiall see.
Then was that whole assembly quite dismist,
And Natur's selfe did vanish, whither no man wist. (VII.vii.59)
'And Natur's selfe did vanish...' The sterility and stasis of the closing
lines of The Faerie Queene--'all things firmely stayd/ Vpon the pillours
of Eternity'--is crushing for a reader who has pulsed in the Garden of
Adonis, danced on Acidale, worn the crown which Ariadne wore. This is a
fulfillment of the gage laid down in the first few translation of A
Theatre for Worldlings, of course--iconography and iconoclasm were ever
paired for Spenser--but the thunderbolt that breaks the temple there, or
the storm that fells the obelisk, when it falls upon us is devastating.
Nature's concealment of that loss in her judgment, followed by the
enactment of that loss, seems to me to represent a much more pessimistic
approach to the duplicity of agents; the world depends on such mutability,
such uncollapsed distances between intention and extension; should we put
them to the stake, expose them, upturn and examine them, eradicate them,
catastrophe will result.
6. 'Not in my name' thinking works equally well for the other side of the
political (soon, military) crisis we are all now facing: a tyrant in
Baghdad--and in this case a particularly inhuman, vicious, and ruthless
tyrant, however rational and successful--invites war to effect regime
change. The people whom he governs, after eleven years of the most
sustained and meticulous economic sanctions ever adopted against a modern
state, sanctions that have methodically destroyed their entire civil
infrastructure including health, energy, transportation, agriculture and
food distribution, etc, still seem to be resisting the idea that a foreign
invasion will solve their problems. Why could this be? The fact is that
the Iraqi people have long themselves been expert at dissociating their
plight and condition from the fortunes or practices of their government.
This is why the imposition of an economic sanctions regime, effectively by
the US but handled through the UNSC, is so ironic: sanctions are designed
to put pressure on a government by targeting the welfare of its people. If
the link of responsibility between a government and its people is tenuous,
or in this case entirely disposable, sanctions are not only ineffectual,
they are criminal; the west has effectively been conspiring with Saddam
Hussein (a brutal man, please do not mistake me) in the systematic polling
and pilling of the poor of Iraq for the last decade and more, and the
results, by independent NGO estimates as well as by the WHO and UNICEF,
have been and are likely to be even more appalling. When I put my
daughters to bed at night, I often think of the 500,000 excess deaths of
children under 5 that UNICEF estimates occurred in Iraq between 1991 and
1998. ('They Came crepeinge forthe vppon their handes, for theare legges
coulde not beare them they looked like anotymies of deathe they speake
like ghostes cryinge out of their graves.' In Spenser we find this
horrible; in Iraq we have found it, in Madeleine Albright's famous words,
'worth the price.') The most terrible side of the tragedy that seems about
to occur is that it will continue, and intensify, this suffering of the
Iraqi people as the price of regime change. Internal contingency planning
documents leaked by the UN over the past few months, and published by the
Campaign Against Sanctions on Iraq in Cambridge, suggest that, in the
likely event of a medium-term conflict, the vulnerability of pregnant and
lactating mothers, and of dependent infants and children under 5, could be
in the substantial millions--to malnourishment/starvation, to disease
(dysentery, but also respiratory infection, etc.).
7. Irenius comments of Lord Grey in A view that he was 'most gentle
affable lovinge and temperate but that the necessitie of that present
state of thinges enforced him to that violence & allmost changed his verie
naturall disposition'. As Aristotle insists throughout the Nicomachean
Ethics, ethics is the practice of goodness. NE, Book II, c. iv, §6: 'But
the mass of mankind, instead of doing virtuous acts, have recourse to
discussing virtue, and fancy that they are pursuing philosophy and that
this will make them good men. In so doing they act like invalids who
listen carefully to what the doctor says, but entirely neglect to carry
out his prescriptions. That sort of philosophy will no more lead to a
healthy state of soul than will the mode of treatment produce health of
body.' The pursuit of virtue is perilous, as Grey's examples shows (in
Irenius's formulation, but there are parallels in FQ), because the
confrontation of vice can contaminate the virtuous subject. In voicing
this pathetic cry of crisis, 'Not in my name', we seem to be renouncing
the viability of the democratic idea (at least provisionally, at least
locally) because we have become disenfranchised by the autonomy of our
elected agents. Will this engagement being prosecuted by Bush's
administration, and still supported by Tony Blair--an engagement that I
don't hesitate to call wrong, given the current state of published
information on the supposed 'threat' or 'justification' that occasions
it--taint the self? I imagine that Spenser would have seen this situation
with the same kind of habitual ethical ambivalence with which he seems to
have approached the subjugation of Ireland; within a given set of
parameters, it is the right course of action. Whether those parameters
themselves are ethical may be another matter, and is the motive for the
enquiry into the ironic state that we and our history have fashioned for
us.
8. Unlike many, I think I see in A view a sustained effort to moderate and
limit the human suffering of a people by falsifying and then eroding their
national, social, and ideological affiliations. The horror that Spenser
witnessed in Munster, the ruthless efficiency at Smerwick, and the
pathetic humanity at Limerick lie like mines waiting to explode in A view
every time I read it. It is often claimed that Spenser proposes using
famine as a political instrument in Ireland. He does not. In fact he
refers to his experience of the Munster famine as a reason why the Irish,
who have seen such horrors before, will not hesitate to trade loyalty,
identity even for security. The human *cost* of lives, even Irish lives,
is not worth the ideological integrity it might purchase. Unlike Madeleine
Albright, Spenser does not argue, even through Irenius, that it is 'worth
the price'. I do not mean to suggest by this that Spenser questioned the
Elizabethan project in Ireland, nor do I mean to apologize for him, much;
but I do register in A view the same fundamental dissociation of name and
substance that defines much of the theory of allegory permeating The
Faerie Queene.
9. Like Milton, Spenser was throughout his adulthood a 'committed' artist,
in Adorno's sense of the word. He seems to have risked his advancement
repeatedly on political interventions, to have amassed credibility only to
spend it lavishly when the occasion served, as in the publication of
Complaints in 1591, or in the composition of Daphnaida. I suspect that it
was his experience of such negotiations between withholding and
intervening that gave him the opportunity and motivation to reflect on the
philosophy of this predicament of commitment, and to become wise in it.
Certainly, too, the humanist, courteous, increasingly Stoically-influenced
metaphysics of Elizabeth court culture contributed. All this is to say
that I don't think he would have hesitated to recognize his persistent
problems in our current crisis. And I think he shows us some of the cost
of 'achievement': absolutism, stasis and petrification, moral
contamination, and unrecorded suffering.
10. I have gone on too long. The approaching invasion terrifies me in the
scale of suffering the precedes it, and the scale of the suffering that
will follow it. It is a detonation in history that explodes before and
after, and the poison of its depleted uranium, like the poison of its
noxious ideologies, will go on killing us by decades. What would Spenser
have thought? I hope we all take this question into our classrooms, as
into our beds at night. I cannot shake the vision of that collapse in
Mutabilitie, the failure of irony and the end of compassion, the
devastation of Arlo-Hill and the silencing of the great noise. This is not
Armageddon for me, for us, but it is Armageddon for maybe thousands, maybe
hundreds of thousands, of others. They will be consoled in eternity,
perhaps, by the millions who have gone before.
andrew
|
