a. The obvious (and obviously correct) analogy is Tasso's prose
allegory of Jerusalem Delivered.

1. Last week I watched the first "Star Wars" again. That movie came
out when I was about seven years old, and I think it still holds up.
So well, in fact, that I asked myself all day, "What happened to
George Lucas?" The year after the movie came out, my brother and I got
the script of "Star Wars" for Christmas. We really pored over that
one! I don't know where it is now, but there was a reprint when the
new versions came out, and I started thumbing through it. The first
page of the script says that the story comes from something called
"The Journal of the Whills." Wait, so what's the larger story that
"Star Wars" the movie is a fragment of? Now when I was seven, there
was no such thing as Google, and I didn't have money to join the Star
Wars fan club and read its newsletter, "Bantha Tracks." I knew that
there was a Journal of the Whills, but I had no way of finding out
what was in it. Three decades pass, the internet goes mainstream, I
get tenure. -- You can see where this is going. An hour later, most of
the questions that my seven-year-old self worried about are answered:
most urgently, what was Luke Skywalker going to do in episodes 7
through 9, after the Empire was defeated? It turns out that Lucas
didn't really know either, which is why he scaled back the series from
nine episodes (twelve in some interviews!) to six; and then decided,
retrospectively, that the six episodes he did film were really "The
Tragedy of Darth Vader." If you're curious, read Michael Kaminski's
book, "The Secret History of Star Wars" (2007). Or just read the
articles on his website, http://secrethistoryofstarwars.com.

I know, "Secret History." What does this have to do with Spenser?

Only that mythology-writers sometimes do announce big plans and then
scale them back. Maybe I'm running through open doors -- again. But is
this what happened to Spenser? Unlike Lucas, he doesn't seem to be
running out of ideas. In the first "Star Wars," the big threat is a
planet-sized battlestation named the "Death Star." In the third "Star
Wars," the big threat is...a planet-sized battlestation named the
"Death Star," only it's bigger than the first one and not finished
yet. To be fair, some of the repetition in Lucas's films is intended
to be typological: Anakin does, in Episode I, the same kinds of things
that his son, Luke, will do in Episode 4; but at some point there have
to be some new ideas, and I don't find any good ones in the later
films. I do find new ideas -- and good ones -- in the later books of
The Faerie Queene. Also, Spenser is just as good at describing
happiness as sorrow. (Dostoevsky can do this too, but it's a rare
gift.) So there's no reason he couldn't keep going. More on this
below.


2. Another possible analogy, also inspired by recent movie-watching:
Tolkien's Silmarillion. It's not long, counting by words, but it
covers a long period of time. We know what the sources are, but unlike
(say) the Lancelot-Grail cycle, it's the work of one person, same as
"Star Wars." Unlike Lucas, though, Tolkien has no problem filling out
his outline. His main anxiety, as expressed in the short story "Leaf
by Niggle," is that he won't live to give all the episodes their due.
And, in fact, he doesn't; even though he lives to be 81, most of the
stories aren't ready to be published. But he knows where the story is
going, and what its broad turning points will be. What Tolkien can't
imagine -- and this brings him back into Lucas's orbit -- is the
adventure of realized civilization (as Chesterton might have called
it). He didn't know how to write the history of Middle Earth after
Aragorn's coronation, any more than Lucas could figure out what to do
with Luke Skywalker after he saved his father and destroyed the Death
Star (again). Lucas, I've suggested, ran out of ideas. Tolkien, I
don't think, had that problem; his mythology is typological, like
Lucas's (Silmarils --> rings of power; Beren --> Frodo; Luthien -->
Arwen) but the types evolve; the second jewel quest is more profound,
morally, than the first. Tolkien's problem, if you want to call it
that, is his view of history: namely, as what Elrond calls "the long
defeat." We live on a blighted star, on which there are flashes of
goodness but no real dawns. Good people can delay the deluge, but not
reverse it. Like Lucas, Tolkien can describe the struggle to restore
the king (or in Lucas's case, the Republic), but he can't imagine what
will happen afterward. When he tries, he gives up after a few pages,
because it's so dreary: after Aragorn, people get bored with goodness
and begin to experiment with perversions. See Letters, pp. 344, 419.

Relevance to Spenser? Tolkien yearns for the sabbath, but he can't
picture it. He shows, though, that a long mythology (such as Spenser
announces in the Letter to Raleigh) is not automatically a figment of
the halflings' pipeweed. Probably, that mythology will be structured
typologically, as Tolkien's and Lucas's are; see Kaske, Spenser's
Biblical Poetics.

Where there is disagreement, I suspect, it will be about the sabbath.
I think that a poem like "Epithalamion" shows Spenser _could_ picture
it. To this, I can imagine two counterarguments. One, that even "Ep"
is shot through, riddled with, or weighed down by, foreboding; I would
reply that the poem feels happy anyway. Two, that Spenser wrote about
getting married, not being married. He could picture his wedding
night, and making babies; but he couldn't -- or at least didn't --
picture them growing up, going to school, &c. I don't have a reply for
that one.

-- 
Dr. David Wilson-Okamura    http://virgil.org          [log in to unmask]
English Department              Virgil reception, discussion, documents, &c
East Carolina University        Sparsa et neglecta coegi. -- Claude Fauchet