having read "the faerie queene"

a shallow response

from walter crane’s illustrations for the faerie queene

i am not going to be able to say anything about the meaning & historical lineage of this book better than what cs lewis said in the allegory of love, which is well worth reading even if you don’t intend to read spenser, so go read that instead of this. but this substack post will be much shorter than lewis’ whole book, so you’ll probably read this instead or at least first, & so i think it’s worth talking about the experience of reading this very strange poem on a surface level. spenser himself loved surfaces

i have to thank my book club, without whom i could not have gotten this dense, archaic, ponderous text. thanks especially to scott, neill, frog, wifegeist, smeerp, & everyone who listened to us on twitter spaces. sorry for being disorganized at times (maybe that’s kind of forgiveable considering the just sheer length of what i was trying to do) & thank you for picking up the slack for me often. and thank you for making it so fun!

which brings us to the first aspect of the surface. this book is hard to read. it uses a lot of old words, and often simply uses words weirdly, the sentences are convoluted (sometimes just for effect but sometimes to work within the spenserian stanza structure), the pacing is….kind of naive, like a child’s too-long joke. i found that reading it out loud, & hearing it read out loud, made it a lot more comprehensible, kept me from getting lost, and highlighted the delightful sounds while smoothing over difficulties. (so thank you very much bookclub for reading aloud with me!) i also noticed how quickly my co-readers & i went from stumbling over stanzas to fluency & even a little bit of dramatizing. so like. i cannot really recommend that you fully read the faerie queene out loud. but maybe start by reading it out loud, or reading along with a recording?

the second aspect of the surface—almost not worth saying, bc so well known—this book is at times ravishingly beautiful. the garden of adonis, britomart looking in the glass, sir guyon’s odyssey-like voyage to the bower of bliss, the bower of bliss itself….and countless little perfect lines along the way. this is why the romantics loved faerie queene, this is why keats loved it

so both of those things are probably more or less obvious from the name of the book, a book called faerie queene spelled like that & everything is obviously going to be dense archaic & at least aspire to beauty. it’s time to talk about the surprising parts:

one surprise was the weird modern-ness of the story. when britomart (the lady knight who rides about in armor pretending to be a man but is the fairest woman in the world¹ when she takes off her helmet, and can only be beaten by one man) shows up, spenser introduces her with not only a surprisingly feminist account of men suppressing women warriors bc the women were so good at fighting that it shamed them, but also an image of britomart as a young girl hating needlework, like sansa stark. she’s tsundere, she’s independent, she’s the tomboy bf. it was honestly almost vertiginous to see all of this stuff, which people still use today to feel like they’re subverting fantasy tropes, in a 1590 poem

also…i can’t remember who said first in the book club that

this poem feels like a video game

i don’t actually know that much about video games i’ve just watched people play them. fair warning.

there’s little details that contribute to this, the way that the protagonists ask every stranger they meet for news & rumors which feels so rpg, the fact that the fantasy setting in general has largely been purged from self-consciously self-serious literature & relegated to the land of mass entertainment

& many of the books have what i can only describe as a boss-battle structure where it all builds up to one big bad. this is obviously not something that video games came up with (although it seems to work even better intrinsically for video games than for less-interactive-by-nature media like poems and stories); again, like the fantasy setting, it feels like a structure that has been relatively recently excluded from literature rather than something that springs up from fundamentally unliterary pop culture

the same is true of the use of allegory. you don’t really see allegory in self-consciously self-serious literature right now, but you do kinda see it in video games (dragon’s dogma imo) & especially in anime (neon genesis evangelion & revolutionary girl utena are standout examples)

in general my theory about all this weirdly video-game feeling stuff is that fantasy settings, boss battles, and allegory are just things that people naturally really like, and that the fashion in self-consciously self-serious literature rn (for various structural reasons, which i would like to write about, and which i am trying unsuccessfully to write about) is specifically to make things that people kind of dont naturally like…….on which…..more later….hopefully……

i said i wouldn’t talk too much about the themes/meaning. but…

spenser obviously loves the world. i’m trying to justify or cite evidence for this statement but i really can’t. this kind of love is all too rare in poetry & he has it

spenser has the fractal quality, like dostoevsky or shakespeare, of being interpretable through basically any framework for understanding humans/meaning that a person could reasonably hold in good faith. i found myself thinking of lacan, buddhism, objectivism, paglia while reading the faerie queene. when stuff feels that variously interpretable, the impression i get is that (as weird and unreal as the writing itself may be) the author somehow started writing from things-as-they-are rather than writing from an ideological framework. i don’t know if i’ve expressed that in a way that makes sense. i am extremely jealous of this aptitude

spenser loves change. (probably related to loving the world). it’s like the opposite of ode on a grecian urn, possibly spenser’s biggest difference from his biggest fan. i don’t want to blame keats at all for wanting a little impossible grasp on time, i want it too, and i have less of an excuse, i’m not dying of consumption over here. i wish i could love change like spenser does, i try to write about it and deal with it in many of my poems² but he’s so sparklingly beautiful and roundly, wheel-like-ly symmetrical about it….

in conclusion

i really liked the faerie queene. i can feel that this is a book i’ll dip into again and again for the rest of my life, getting more & more out of it each time, that this puzzling & strange experience of reading it thru for the first time is not a full experience in itself but a foundation for a lifetime of increasingly strange and familiar experiences with this poem, which i greatly look forward to

1. spenser has a lot of fairest women in the world

2. which i feel pretty weird even mentioning in the same sentence as spenser’s poems