Poetry #
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book I #
While reading The Faerie Queene, I started thinking about Hartman and his argument in The Unmediated Vision. “Poetry, especially in the modern period from Wordsworth to Valéry, pitted the other senses, primarily the ear, against the eye by a compensatory dialectic,” writes Hartman.1 And the same theme can be found in Book I Canto X of The Faerie Queene in the House of Holiness. From the start, the veracity of the eyes is called into question. Stanza fifteen oddly repeats the word “beseeming”—the central theme in Book I—despite the actual holiness of the women in the House of Holiness. Later, in stanza eighteen, Fidelia “open[s Redcrosse’s] dull eyes, that light mote in them shine” in order to (or potentially by) teaching him from her “sacred Booke” with “goodly speach.” The dialectic, then, is completed—troubled and doubtful sight is remedied not by perfect sight but metaphorical sight. Hearing replaces the seeing.
Herein lies the transition. For the first time, Redcrosse’s world is revealed in its fully false aspect—what Erich Auerbach calls “creatural.”
Earlier… the idea that life on earth has value and purpose was still very much alive. Human society had specific tasks to accomplish; it had to realize a specific ideal form on earth in order to prepare men for the Kingdom of God… [However,] by the last centuries of the Middle Ages there are to be observed symptoms of fatigue and barrenness in constructive-theoretical thinking, especially insofar as it is concerned with the practical organization of life on earth, with the result that the “creatural” aspect of Christian anthropology—life’s subjection to suffering and transitoriness—comes out in crass and unmitigated relief.2
Though Spenser still speaks of “light” and “sight,” reality is no longer measured with such visual certainty. Instead, “She vnto him disclosed euery whitt” with “her wordes,” suggesting that hearing alone “disclose[s] euery whitt,” a pun on wit as knowledge and wit as sense (I.x.19.3). In fact, words and speech turn out to be almost unlimited in their power:
She vnto him disclosed euery whitt,
And heauenly documents thereout did preach,
That weaker witt of man could neuer reach,
Of God, of grace, of iustice, of free will,
That wonder was to heare her goodly speach:
For she was hable, with her wordes to kill,
And rayse again to life the hart, that she did thrill.
And when she list poure out her larger spright,
She would commaund the hasty Sunne to stay,
Or backward turne his course from heuens hight,
Sometimes great hostes of men she would dismay,
Dry-shod to passe, she parts the flouds in tway;
And eke huge mountains from their natiue seat
She would commaund, themselues to beare away,
And throw in raging sea with roaring threat.
Almightie God her gaue such powre, and puissaunce great. (I.x.19-20)
We know from Marvell that “we cannot make our sun / Stand still” (45-6). Instead, the harming / healing power of words lies in their ability to “kill… and rayse again… the hart” and the heart alone, because “the ear, as a psychic organ, is at least as vulnerable as the eye.”3 Yet what Fidelia teaches is that, behind every thing, there is in fact only the operation of the “word.” The nature of the word, moreover, is not that of some law, which merely describes the natural processes on earth. Nor is it some perfection, as in Aristotle’s view, according to which the natural world tends in emulation or desire of that perfection. Instead, the “word” is the hidden power behind all the world; all natural perfection arise from the word; even if the world were to become inverted (as in the sun), it would still be according to the same word. The word, therefore, cannot be seen but only heard, literally in Scripture, and figuratively in the way we question or doubt “that weaker witt of man.” This, then, generates a kind of double vision—one in which what one knows and what one sees is incongruous.
In fact, the Confucians, were like the Romantics. Yet they never rejected the eye in favor of the ear. “The hearts of the people are the will of Heaven”; answering the call of God did not require one to negate the phenomenal world. It was precisely this insight that was rejected by the May Fourth movement. Comparing the two, the proponents of the New Literature saw what they deemed to be a timidness or fearfulness in Confucius. If the “ear is attuned” presumably to the will of Heaven, why shouldn’t we reject sight as the Romantics did?
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Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Life and Learning,” in The Geoffrey Hartman Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 13. ↩︎
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Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton University Press, 1953), 249. ↩︎
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Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Words and Wounds,” in Saving the Text: Literature, Derrida, Philosophy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 123. ↩︎