Andrew,

I've let this sit a few days, mulling it over, and still am not certain
but what my response is off the mark.  I keep thinking, though, that
Arthur and Redcrosse do not, in fact, expend the passionate force of
their dreams by turning them into narrative.  Redcrosse doesn't because
he does not, in fact, turn the dream into narrative at all; Spenser's
narration of it may instrumentalize the dream-text within the work of
his allegory, but the force of the passion that dream announces
continues to move Redcrosse violently, however serene it leaves us.
Arthur doesn't expend the passionate force of his dream in narrative--I
would say--because I believe him when he says he carries the bleeding
wound of that dream in his breast.   I.ix.8:

Deare Dame (quoth he) you sleeping sparkes awake,
Which troubled once, into huge flames will grow,
Ne ever will their fervent fury slake,
Till living moysture into smoke to flow,
And wasted life doe lye in ashes low.
Yet sithens silence lesseneth not my fire,
But told it flames, and hidden it does glow,
I will revele, what ye so much desire:
Ah Love, lay down thy bow, the whiles I may respyre.

Spenser does often, as here, represent the moment and the motives of a
character's entry into narrative, whether the tale is a personal
history, a hidden sorrow, or a dream (or all three, as with Arthur).
Arthur initially seems to hesitate, fearing that the act of telling will
not expend the passion but fan its flames.  Then he shrugs (so to speak)
and plunges ahead, figuring that his fire/wound is going to be just as
painful whether he talks about it or not.

Of course Arthur's entire career as a hero is a way of
"instrumentalizing" his dream, but it's always seemed to me that this
instrumentalization doesn't do a lot for Arthur himself, who persists as
an almost sacrificial figure.  Nor does this
instrumentalization-through-action depend on Arthur's becoming a
narrator of his dream:  it is, again, an instrumentalization performed
by the Spenserian narrator, more or less at Arthur's expense, and done
in a way, the text implies, that will sustain and augment rather than
lessening the passion of his dream.

DM


David Lee Miller
Department of English
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC  29208

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>>> [log in to unmask] 1/27/2005 1:09:53 PM >>>

> 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
>