> Not sure about "They fle from me," Andrew. Isn't it a tart
> representation of the Whiner's (victim's) discourse?
Hi Harry,
Sure, but it's in the interest of the tart whiner ('Wyatt') to circulate
and attest (publicly) his betrayal; and in that political move the
retrospective affirmation-by-narration, in words, of his dreamlike
encounter both supplies it as evidence, and memorializes it by
instrumentalizing it. In disclosing a dream, as in divulging an affair,
mourning is a process of alienation, in which the secret of a subjective
experience becomes shared, emptied, and made progressively less painful
through its commodification. A story that I tell about a dream, once I put
it into words that can be communicated, becomes something quite different
from the dream itself; in retelling it, and using it to forge connections
with friends, or to increase my prestige, or for any other social purpose,
I attach and superimpose new meanings upon the story of the dream as an
instrument.
The Faerie Queene has always seemed to me, by virtue of its intricate and
hypostasized allegory, to exist in a very ambiguous relation to me as an
affectively-involved reader. On the one hand, Spenser (like Sidney) would
seem to want to use poetry to 'move' me to take that work in hand, which
in other circumstances I would fly from 'as a stranger'; on the other
hand, I am made to feel like a bit of a stranger to myself, in the reading
of it: my virtues and vices are anatomized before me, my selves are
multiply proliferated throughout the text, etc. What I wonder, in relation
to this discussion about dreams, is whether these moments of passion
(Redcrosse's rage, Arthur's desire), which Spenser figures as consequent
upon dreams, expend their passionate force in narrativization: is the
instrumentalization of passion in the service of reason a
debasing/emptying of its intrinsic and authentic power? Is the process of
remembering a dream a process, actually, of forgetting its first force in
the accretion of retellings/instrumentalizings of it, the overlayering of
it with a verbal account? Redcrosse knows what his dream means he must do;
Arthur knows what his dream means he must do; and Spenser seems
interested, to my mind, in the way they remember the dream as the origin
of a quest from/towards something. They control a passionate encounter by
narrativizing it. I don't know about you, but I'm afraid that this is the
way I 'explain myself to myself.' And it seems to me why The Faerie Queene
(at least through Book 4) tends to provoke serenity.
andrew
Well, scratch
> "tart" (just woke up to its meaning). Asserting and acknowledging
> then disclaiming the privilege of daunger? And at the same time,
> using dreamlike passivity to get off the hook. And vengefully
> reasserting daunger at the end. Tottel's version of the last line,
> "What think you by this that she hath deserved?," conveys a more
> pungent sense of his "gentilnes," his cortezza, than the more
> anthologized alternative because the second-person interrogatory
> turns gentle prey into publisher and plaintiff into prosecutor. It
> brings Reader into court as judge and jury
>
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