SOURCE: Panja, Shormishtha. “A Self-Reflexive Parable of Narration: The Faerie Queene VI.” Journal of Narrative Technique 15, no. 3 (fall 1985): 277-88.

[In the following essay, Panja applies structuralist and poststructuralist critical theories to an analysis of Spenser's narrative in Book VI of The Faerie Queene, emphasizing how the text of the poem comments on itself and on the nature of storytelling.]

The charm of applying structuralist and post-structuralist narratology to a “classic” text like Spenser's The Faerie Queene lies not only in the confidence of sounding modish and polemical; today scholars and critics have the freedom to analyze certain “occurences” in the text and admit that they do not have to be wound into a watertight, perfectly closed argument. Critics can present it “like it is” and admit that they are occasionally baffled. Not only that, they can thereby avoid the pitfall of an easy and fallacious attribution of excessive unity to a text that has little intention of having it. This does not mean that twentieth-century narratology is a boon to the lazy critic. On the contrary. As soon as critical closure ceases to be of prime importance, he may discover worlds upon worlds of knowledge opening before his eyes; no longer does his study have to remain exclusively historical or textual or generic.

In this paper I shall be deliberately pluralistic in my approach to both Spenser's The Faerie Queene VI and the critical theories that I shall call upon, namely those expressed in Roland Barthes's S/Z, Umberto Eco's The Role of the Reader, Gerard Genette's Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, Tzvetan Todorov's The Poetics of Prose, M. M. Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination and Frank Kermode's The Genesis of Secrecy. I choose these particular texts not merely because time and usage have proved their validity. These critics provide valuable new terms and subdivisions in formerly broad categories of narrative technique, thereby making possible a rather minute analysis of a poem as large and amorphous as The Faerie Queene.¹ I shall be examining the various problems or discontents of the narrative of Book VI and testing the validity of the critical theories I draw upon in the application to a specific text. I wish to prove that Spenser employed different narrative voices and techniques like lack of closure, deferral, repetition, multiple focalization, paralepsis and paralipsis to create in The Faerie Queene VI a complex “open” text, incorporating within itself both “writerly” and “readerly” elements; a text which is, unlike the preceding five books, mainly about the act of narration. In the Letter to Raleigh, Spenser said his intention in The Faerie Queene was to “fashion a gentleman.” This gentleman is not only the Elizabethan reader, and the “fashioning” is not just a lesson in deportment or morality. The epic is a lesson on insightful reading.² As this paper will demonstrate, the reader undergoes a process of education in Book VI, a process whose degree of success can only be gauged with regard to his penetration of the text's secrets.

WHAT SORT OF A TEXT IS THIS?

Eco invents the terms “open” and “closed” texts in The Role of the Reader while Barthes in S/Z uses the similar terms scriptible and lisible (translated by Richard Miller as “writerly” and “readerly” respectively). According to Eco, the text that is “inordinately open to any kind of interpretation” (he uses detective fiction as an example) is a “closed” text, while a text that invites the reader's active and disciplined collaboration is an “open” text. The “open” text does not extend a universal invitation to anarchic participation: “You cannot use the text as you want but only as the text wants you to use it,” says Eco.³ The first thing that strikes one here is that Eco's example of detective fiction does not work. One cannot, for example, read Agatha Christie's The Body in the Library as a subverted Marxist interpretation of the fall of the Roman empire. Thus “closed” texts are what their name suggests: texts that have “closed” or finite interpretations. Eco's definition of “closed,” though clever, is not convincing, yet his term “open” text is useful and applicable to The Faerie Queene. The description of the poem as “a continued allegory or darke conceit” by Spenser in his letter to Raleigh immediately makes the poem open to at least four different levels of interpretation, levels which often work simultaneously. If we read the proems we also find that there is an explicit invitation extended to the reader to figure the narrative out for himself. As early as the proem to Book II we are told:

Of Faerie lond yet if he more inquire,
By certaine signes here set in sundry place
He may it find: ne let him them admire,
But yield his sence to be too blunt and bace,
That no'te without an hound fine footing trace.

(II Pro 4)

The text is presented as a semiotic maze here, puzzling and frustrating on the first reading, which the reader must gradually unravel. The secret “certaine signes” are set almost erratically: “in sundry place.” The reader must have the assiduity of a hound to follow the scent, and be wary of being misled, for the traces are “fine.”⁴

Barthes's terms, “writerly” and “readerly” are probably more helpful in the context of The Faerie Queene than Eco's. The closest parallels I can find to Barthes's terms are Plato's concepts of the idea and imitation. The “writerly” text, in its purest form, exists only in the mind of God or the writer. It is the idea of the thing, not the thing itself, which is merely an imitation. A text is “writerly” only at the time of writing, as long as that act is not completed. Only “readerly” texts may be bought at a bookstore. “Writerly” texts, which make “producers” rather than “consumers” out of their readers, are not sold in the marketplace.⁵ So far so good. However, Barthes does not make two important qualifications. He does not admit that a text may have both “writerly” and “readerly” elements, and perhaps only a text that has more of the former may be termed a “classic.” He merely equates the classic and the “readerly,” without making a hierarchical distinction: “We call any readerly text a classic text.”⁶The Faerie Queene has certainly established itself as a classic in the old-fashioned use of the term. It also incorporates within itself both “writerly” and “readerly” elements, as we shall discover, thereby earning the title of a classic in the new sense. In fact, perhaps one may say that all classics earn that appellation only through the incorporation of both “readerly” and “writerly” elements, the more “writerly,” the more “open,” the more classic.

WHAT IS THE NATURE OF THE NARRATIVE?

One of the aspects of Book VI that puts the burden of interpretation on the reader's shoulders and thereby “opens” the text is the unreliability of the supposed guides, be they the narrator or the protagonist. The naive reader is sure to be misled if he expects to find a reliable guide in the forest. But before we go into that we must determine the identity of the narrator. This is a puzzle that forms part of what Barthes terms the “hermeneutic code” or the code of enigmas in a narrative.⁷ Twentieth century narratology has demonstrated the importance of distinguishing between the narrator and the author, but it has not made the task of identifying the narrator any easier. Is Book VI an Example of “homodiegetic narrative,” i.e. a narrative like Wuthering Heights where a character or characters other than the protagonist tells the story? Or is it an example of “autodiegetic narrative,” a narrative where the hero is the narrator, as in David Copperfield? Or is it a “heterodiegetic,” i.e. an omniscient narrative?⁸

To the naive reader, the book seems to be a confusing mixture of all three. The narrative seems to be “homodiegetic” because the narrator appears to be a character in the poem, threading the paths of Faerielond and suggesting that the land is created by someone other than himself. The narrator also seems to grow and develop in the course of the epic. While he begins the epic on a note of adventurous excitement, as expressed in the use of the ship simile (I xii 1), by the time Book VI is reached, probably after a gap of twelve odd years (1582-1596),⁹ the same simile is used in a tone of defensive weariness:¹⁰

Like as a ship that through the Ocean wyde
Directs her course unto one certaine cost,
Is met of many a counter wind and tyde,
With which her winged speed is let and crost,
And she her selfe in stormie surges tost …
Right so it fares with me in this long way,
Whose course is often stayd, yet neuer is astray.

(VI xii 1)¹¹

Subject to external decrees of the Queen, the Muse or the poet, the narrator appears at times to be a mere scribe of the higher powers. However, he probably bears some relation to Colin Clout, a persona that the contemporary reader associated with Spenser¹² after the publication of The Shepheardes Calender in 1579 and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe in 1591. Since Colin is so crucial to the vision on Mt. Acidale, which is the core of Book VI, he seems to be, at least temporarily, the true hero of the book, making it an “autodiegetic narrative.”

What about the book as an example of “heterodiegetic” narrative? There are problems here too for, in incidents like the Mirabella episode (VI vi-viii), we can see, using Genette's subdivisions, that the “mood” (who sees) and the “voice” (who speaks) of this narrative are not identical.¹³ Let us look at the episode a little more closely. We first learn of Mirabella's “stubborn stiffness” and her “hard hart” from the narrator. We are told of her lovers' accusations and the punishment decreed by an enraged Cupid (VI vi-vii). Finally, we hear the story from Mirabella's own lips, and hurriedly qualify our former opinion of her as a reprobate (VI viii). She admits with disarming frankness that she had learned to love herself in school and compassionately begs Disdaine, her constant companion, to free Timias, suggesting that the view of her former implacability has been somewhat exaggerated. It is certainly not criminal to refuse lovers. As a result of these confusions and anomalies, it is perhaps best to term the narrative not “autodiegetic,” “homodiegetic” or “heterodiegetic” but “pseudodiegetic,” for it is a mixture of different voices rather than any one, consistent, unwavering point of view.¹⁴ It appears that not only the reader, but the narrator too, is fashioned by what the narrative discovers.

THE SELF-CONSCIOUS NARRATOR

Whatever be the identity of the narrator, he is certainly divided, self-conscious and unreliable. As we have just observed in the Mirabella episode, not all of what he says may be taken at face value. There is a division not only between the different narrative voices but also within the single voice of the narrator. If we examine the proems to the various books, we see enough evidence of this inner division. There is a peculiar mixture of insolence and abjectness in his attitude to his readers and even, occasionally, to the Queen. Book II begins with a humble apology to the “most mighty Soveraine” for writing what can only be termed “th'aboundance of an idle braine … and painted forgery”; but two stanzas later the narrator's tone changes to one of contemptuous chastisement of the “witlesse man (who) so much misweene(s)” to think “that nothing is, but that which he hath seene” (II Pro 1-4). In the proem to Book VI the narrator tells us that Faerielond both wearies and delights him. Perhaps he refers here to the delight of creation, the pleasure of the “writerly,” and to the “tedious travell” of communication, of fixing the “writerly” in the mold of the merely “readerly.”

The narrator also shows a division in his attitude towards the alleged protagonist, Calidore. First of all, Calidore hardly appears to be what the narrator says he is, the most “courteous Knight,” “beloued ouer all” (VI i 2). Calidore commits a number of faux-pas, lies to Priscilla's father (VI iii 18), offers money to Melibee and is roundly chastised for his “ill display” (VI ix 33). His condescension to his rival in love, Coridon, seems almost insulting (VI ix 41-44). He apologizes with hilarious inappropriateness to Calepine and Serena for breaking in on their lovemaking and then proceeds to talk in a leisurely way about his various adventures (VI iii 21-23). His blithe apology to Colin Clout after dispersing the vision of the Graces on Mt. Acidale is equally jarring:

Haile iolly shepheard, which thy ioyous dayes
Here leadest in this goodly merry make,
Frequented of these gentle Nymphes alwayes,
Which to thee flocke, to heare thy louely layes;
Tell me, what mote these dainty Damzels be …

(VI x 19)

Someone who has just broken his pipe in exasperation as Colin Clout has done can hardly be addressed as a “iolly shepheard.” Neither is “dainty Damzels” an appropriate description of the Graces. What is more disturbing is that even after Colin Clout has gruffly corrected Calidore's perspective (“Not I so happy … As thou unhappy”) and pointed out the extent of the damage, the knight is still not ruffled in the least by his misdemeanor, but cooly proceeds to accuse his favorite scapegoat, Fortune, for a boorish act that has been entirely of his own volition: “right sory I … That my ill fortune did them hence displace” (VI x 20). If this is the epitome of courtesy, can we really trust anything the narrator tells us? The unreliability of the narrator puts the reader on his guard. It creates both the “wary” reader and gives evidence of the text's “openness.” A “naive” reader would be as unconscious as Calidore of the irony of the knight's apology.¹⁵

THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF THE CODES

One betrayal of the unreliability of the narrator is that he is definitely acting with self-conscious deliberation in these cases. Barthes speaks of the “hermeneutic code” or the code of puzzles and enigmas, the “proairetic code” or the code of actions and the “connotative code” or the issues of a narrative (which, when they gather around a proper name, become a character).¹⁶ If we examine these codes in Book VI we shall find that the text becomes a classic precisely through the ease with which it breaks these codes rather than the rigidity with which it adheres to them.

With regard to the connotative code or the code of issues (in this case, courtesy), it is when Calidore breaks out of the model of the perfect gentleman of courtesy and becomes a comically flawed and realistically imperfect human being that Spenser's characterization appears to succeed.

With regard to the “hermeneutic code,” Spenser's narrative does not always answer the reader's questions, particularly the naive reader's questions, about the fabula.¹⁷ Occasionally, the narrative will give us partial or disguised answers, and the naive reader is educated to ask the right questions and to comprehend partial answers. For example, if one asked whether Pastorella and Calidore were finally united, the narrator would probably answer, “Remember Britomart's adventures in the Castle of Isis?” If the reader recognizes this as an answer and a gentle rebuke for his naivete in believing that such a union, even when accomplished, is eternal or an end in itself, then he is well on his way to becoming a wary, even a “model” reader. Thus it is not so much the answers to the hermeneutic code that are important as the reader's education. The “naive” reader is, of course, naive only in certain respects, for example, in his expectations of closure and satiety, in his fumbling concern for the fabula over the suzjet. The reader has to have a certain amount of orientation to be able to qualify even as a “naive” reader. “Naive” thus definitely does not mean invincibly ignorant. In fact, “naive” readers already display a potential for wariness in their particular type of naivete.

DISCOURSE AS ACTION

As regards the proairetic code, the syntagmatic code of actions in a narrative that come into being as we name them (as in a mental synopsis of the plot) we see that there are hardly any actions at all in Book VI. Discourse is the main activity of Book VI. This is why the ruling virtue of the book, courtesy, dealing as it does with verbal interaction, is so appropriate. Apart from the killing of Maleffort, the punishment of Crudor and Briana, and the rescue of Pastorella from the brigands, Calidore spends all his time pretending to follow the Blatant Beast but in actuality either talking or listening, hanging on the “melting mouths” of either Tristram, Melibee or Colin Clout with “greedy eare” as the narrator describes it (VI ix 26). The book is full of a series of “narrative-men,” to use Todorov's description of the characters in The Arabian Nights who live to tell the story of their lives. The lack of action contrasts with most romances and the earlier books of The Faerie Queene. For example, the death of the “headless knight” is accomplished within two lines: “But ere he (Calidore) came in place, that youth had kild / That armed knight” (VI ii 4). This is all we see directly of the event. However, the report of the knight's misdemeanors continues intermittently from VI ii 7 to VI ii 19, a unique case of prolonged “multiple focalization”¹⁸ in The Faerie Queene. Thus the reader's expectations regarding the fabula are destroyed quite rapidly. In fact, we grow so accustomed to a lack of events that when anything does happen it appears infinitely disappointing. We feel no excitement when Calidore finally captures the Blatant Beast (VI xii 36), but when the Beast frees himself within a few lines, our interest is rekindled (VI xii 38).

A NARRATION OF NARRATION

In Book VI we can see a number of important techniques used by the narrator or the pseudo-narrator (Spenser, his persona, the other “narrative-men”) which focus our attention on the act of narration. Deferral, repetition, “multiple focalization” (one incident seen from varying points of view), lack of closure, “paralipsis” (inadequate information) and “paralepsis” (excessive information) are the most notable ones and almost all of them help exasperate the naive reader. Let us examine a few examples of these techniques and then try to account for their employment.¹⁹

Deferral is quite a common technique for romance. Like Ariosto, the narrator of The Faerie Queene occasionally ends a particular incident by saying “the end whereof I'll keepe untill another cast.” In some cases, the “end” never does in fact appear (VI viii 51). A lack of closure can be seen in individual incidents, as in the story of Calepine and Serena (which ends with the fateful words just quoted) or the story of Calidore and Pastorella, and in the fact that the whole poem remains incomplete. Multiple focalization can be seen in the Mirabella episode, which we have already discussed, and in the headless knight episode which we shall now examine. Besides relating to the theme of discourse, this episode is also an interesting use of the technique of repetition.

We hear the story of the headless knight's savagery no less than four times, first from Tristram (VI ii), then from the headless knight's lady (VI ii), then from Priscilla (VI ii) and, finally, from Aladine (VI iii). Significantly, the knight remains nameless. He is speechless, since Tristram kills him almost as soon as we glimpse him (VI ii 4); and he is headless, since Calidore decapitates him as “the signe of shame” (VI iii 17). The knight seems to be a “certaine signe” of the end of discourse, which is equivalent to death in a narrative, as Todorov²⁰ perceptively points out in his examination of The Arabian Nights. It is almost as if the characters know that as soon as they stop talking they will have ceased to exist, and that is why they are so loquacious. Repetition is thus used to defer closure or death, as Peter Brooks points out (in another context) in his essay “Freud's Masterplot.”²¹ If, as Todorov says, loquacity equals life,²² then the unfinished state of the entire Faerie Queene may be one of the ways in which Spenser denies the poem closure or death. The text, like the Blatant Beast, seems to be both rumor and mythical beast, eluding capture as closure. All attempts to grasp the text, like Calidore's capture of the beast, remain evanescent. We have seen the rhythm of temporary capture or closure followed by unbonding earlier in the altered ending of Book III. Originally, in the 1593 version, Spenser ended the story of Scudamour and Amoret with the lovers clasped in a close embrace like “that faire Hermaphrodite.” This closure was loosened in the 1596 edition, with Amoret disappearing, in order to make a better transition to the later books. Just so the Beast is captured and set free, loosening forever the ending of Book VI and the entire poem.

We have seen how the techniques we have examined so far in Book VI serve higher purposes than that of merely thwarting the naive reader. They show the reader the pitfalls of a blind subservience to the narrator's or the characters' discourse; they are instrumental in recalling the potentially wary reader, schooling him to ask the correct questions and to understand the partial or disguised answers; they deny closure and thereby defer the death of the poem; they leave certain questions perpetually unanswered and force the reader to make what Eco terms “inferential walks” and compose “ghost cantos” (I adapt Eco's term “ghost chapters”) in order to create a closure that fulfills all his desires; they focus our attention on the act of narration itself, rather than what is being narrated.²³ In short, these techniques are instrumental in “opening” the text, in giving us evidence, albeit covert and disguised, of the text's “writerly” elements. They help make Book VI a classic.

ACIDALE: THE HEARTH OF DENOTATION

The incident that provides the most conclusive proof for the above arguments is the interrupted vision on Mt. Acidale (VI x). Barthes speaks in S/Z of the “hearth of denotation” around which all the meanings of a text gather.²⁴ Mt. Acidale forms just such a round hearth as well as being the traditional locus amoenus of pastoral. The circle was the popular Renaissance and Neo-Platonic image for order, hierarchy, ascent and perfection. It is not surprising that we are faced with a number of concentric circles as we approach Acidale. The mount is surrounded by a plain which “round about was bordered with a wood” (VI x 6). On the mountain we encounter further concentric circles—the dancing “troupe of ladies” surrounding the smaller circle of the three Graces surrounding the lass of “diuine resemblaunce” and Colin Clout. These circles are a mimesis of a number of things. First of all, they give us the impression of moving closer and closer to the very heart of creation, which lies not in “outward showes” but “deepe within the minde” as the narrator tells us in the proem to Book VI. The appearance of Acidale and then the sudden way in which the vision disappears both suggest a magical place, a place outside space and time as we know them.²⁵

The circles can also represent what Todorov terms “embedded narrative,”²⁶ the inclusion of one story in another, something we encounter time and again in Book VI. Perhaps the circles might also be termed a mimesis of “embedded interpretation,” for the vision is protected by layers and layers of cotton wool voices. Here we have an example of what Bakhtin terms “heteroglossia,” the interaction between different narrative voices.²⁷ Is it the narrator who speaks, is it Colin Clout, or is it Spenser? Or do the different voices finally coalesce? Do we see through the eyes of Calidore or through our own imaginative insight? If through the latter, then we have probably reached that point in the narrative where the naive reader comes of age, much as Calidore does.²⁸ Is this the point at which the text, which might have appeared “closed” on a first reading, finally becomes “open,” only to shut the door on our faces, saying “This is all ye need to know?”²⁹ Just as Kermode finds “something irreducible, therefore perpetually to be interpreted; not secrets to be found out one by one, but Secrecy” in the Gospels,³⁰ so in this vision we find some of our questions answered, but not all. There is a redundant incompleteness in Colin Clout's exposition of the vision. It is both paraleptic and paraliptic. We do not need to be told that the women are the Graces, for the narrator has already hinted at the possibility of their appearance:

They say that Venus, when she did dispose
Her selfe to pleasaunce, vsed to resort
Vnto this place …
Or with the Graces there to play and sport;

(VI x 9)

However, we do want to know who the lass in the center of the circle is, and why, if she is a mere human, she should disappear along with the Graces. We also desire a more detailed description of the vision, but we are merely told that the “sundry parts were here too long to tell” (VI x 14). This seems to be one way of making the vision inviolate and of suggesting that the reader, like Calidore, has been an interloper too long.

A PARABLE OF INTERPRETATION

We can read a parable in this ultimate recalcitrance of the narrative. We have noted the sense of disappointment that follows the fulfillment of expectations derived from the fabula (as in the capture of the Blatant Beast); thus, in their silence, Colin Clout and the narrator may be granting us both “desire and its object.”³¹ If all our questions were answered, there would be little left to spark our desires or to kindle our imagination. The fact that Colin's words are paradoxically excessive and inadequate is an example of the pitfall every interpretation must face and few avoid. Colin and the reader are separated by a barrier which is akin to the “Shadow” that T.S. Eliot speaks of in “The Hollow Men” that falls “Between the idea / And the reality … Between the conception / And the creation,” between vision and utterance, between what Barthes would term the “writerly” and the “readerly.” Acidale is a vision of the creator's innermost source of inspiration. It is the source of the poem, the “idea” or the “writerly” text of which the poem is an “imitation.” Ironically, it is not the description by the interpretation of Colin Clout and the narrator's interjection (VI x 14) that sets up a barrier between the reader and the text. This creation of barriers is what Todorov terms one of the “risks of narration.”³² At the very moment when one is most pressed to communicate, these barriers arise. The threat of ultimate inchoateness is another danger. While initially separating the reader and the narrative, these perils, which exist for readers and writers alike, ultimately unite them.

Book VI of The Faerie Queene is an intriguing combination of loquaciousness and terseness. An “open” text, containing both “writerly” and “readerly” elements, it demands the reader's wary attention and disciplined collaboration. It talks about itself, and about the reader's relation to the text; but, like a good conversationalist, it knows when to hold its peace.

Notes

1. Jonathan Goldberg, in his illuminating study of Book IV, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse has proved how the poststructuralist and the deconstructionist narratologists help one renounce the formalist dependence on closure and transcendence in literary texts.

2. See Walter Davis's article “Arthur, Partial Exegesis and the Reader” TSLL xviii (1977), pp. 556-558, to see how the reader is educated in the art of allegorical reading in Book I of The Faerie Queene.

3. Role, p. 9.

4. All quotations are from Spenser: Poetical Works, ed. Smith & Selincourt (London: Oxford University Press, 1912, rpt. 1975).

5. S/Z, pp. 3-7.

6. Ibid., p. 4.

7. Ibid., pp. 18-21.

8. The three terms are Genette's. “Diegesis” is Genette's term for a condition opposite to “mimesis” where we have a maximum of what he terms the “informer” and a minimum of information. Narrative Discourse, pp. 162-70, 245. The examples are my own.

9. In 1582 Spenser wrote that he was “well entered upon” the epic (Selincourt, p. xlii) and in 1596 the last three complete books were published.

10. See Jerome S. Dees, “The Use of the Ship Conceit in The Faerie Queene,” SP lxxii (1975), pp. 208-225.

11. The very fact that the narrator can say something like “Yet neuer is astray” should immediately make us question the validity of the narrative voice. Is this a blatant lie, given all the digressions in the poem, or is the narrator justified in believing that even when he seems to stray, he is still being true to a deeper motive, the motive of educating the reader? I examine this problem in greater detail later in the paper.

12. Certain commendatory verses written after the publication of The Faerie Queene “To the learned Shepheard” by an unknown admirer who calls himself “Hobynoll” describe Spenser as a “iolly Shepheard,” a title Calidore later uses to address Colin Clout (VI x 19).

13. Narrative Discourse, pp. 30-32.

14. Ibid., pp. 236-237. Genette speaks of an “oust(ing)” of narrators and different narrative levels in his definition of “pseudodiegetic.”

15. Eco invents the terms “naive” and “model” reader (Role, pp. 7-11). Though I prefer the adjectives “innocent” and “wary” the metaphor is probably the same: the pleasures and frustrations of unravelling the text, are akin to those of an emotional involvement: one makes up (in more senses than one) and breaks up with The Faerie Queene as with people.

16. For example, an issue in Book VI is courtesy and Calidore is the character around whom this issue revolves.

17. Here, I use the Russian formalist distinction between fabula (sequence of events in a story as they would happen in life) and suzjet or plot (the author's ordering of these events) as put forward by Vladimir Propp in Morphology of the Folktale.

18. Genette's term for one story seen from varying points of view as in Browning's The Ring and the Book.

19. The terms in quotation marks are Genette's. Narrative Discourse, pp. 189-94, 205.

20. “Narrative equals life, the absence of narrative, death.” Poetics of Prose, p. 74.

21. Yale French Studies, 55-56 (1977), pp. 280-300.

22. Poetics of Prose, p. 75.

23. Role, pp. 32, 214.

24. S/Z, p. 7. Barthes equates the hearth with the “centre, guardian, refuge, light of truth.”

25. See Harry Berger, “A Secret Discipline: The Faerie Queene VI” in English Institute Essays 1961, pp. 35-75. Berger, in what is probably the finest piece of criticism on Book VI, sees the book as an example of the Hellenistic rhetorical term Poeta because the problems which the poet faces in organizing his material form part of his theme. Berger notes the sameness of the characters, their homonymous names (Calidore-Calepine-Coridon), the repetition of set romance motifs (“the aristocratic and foundling motifs; the nursery, withdrawal and retirement motifs; the motifs of love, of holiday and diversion, of being caught off guard, turning inward”) and calls them “dim prefigurations of Acidale” in that they symbolize the confict between the “idea or foreconceit” (I borrow Sidney's terms) within the mind of the poet and his actual creation. It is the tension between the two that dissolves the vision on Mt. Acidale and leaves the poem, in a way, incomplete (Berger, p. 72).

26. Poetics of Prose, p. 71.

27. “Epic and Novel,” p. 11. “Heteroglossia” and “polyglossia” are two complex terms used interchangeably by Bakhtin without any proper definition. They appear to mean an “interanimation of languages” in the discourse of the novel. This may range from a mixture of dialects or styles varying from the language of folklore to the elevation of classical invocation, or it may mean a shift of tone or emphasis within a relatively uniform style. The latter meaning is suggested by Bakhtin's examples from Pushkin's Onegin (p. 47). The intention of this play is to prevent the style from congealing and to preserve the open-ended, realistic character of novelistic discourse. As we see, this can be present in romantic epics like The Faerie Queene as well. For example, when the narrator begins VI ix with an affected self-address to the “iolly swaine,” this signals a change from the heroic tone of the preceding cantos to the pastoral tone of the following cantos. Bakhtin does, in fact, overstate the simplicity of the epic in order to prove his arguments about the novel, but that is too broad a topic to discuss here.

28. The knight shows a commendable strength of purpose in the succeeding cantos.

29. I use Kermode's adaptation of the situation in Kafka's The Trial. The Genesis of Secrecy, p. 145ff.

30. The Genesis of Secrecy, p. 145.

31. As Todorov puts it in The Poetics of Prose, p. 105.

32. Ibid., pp. 56-57.

Works Cited

Primary Sources

Spenser: Poetical Works. Ed. Smith & Selincourt, London: Oxford University Press, 1912; rpt. 1975.

Secondary Sources

Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Emerson and Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.

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