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Foreword
The publication of this volume of the essays of Alastair Fowler offers a remarkable opportunity both to explore the intellectual development of one of the finest scholars of the last half-century and more and also to encounter afresh some of the master-works of Renaissance literature in the company of a uniquely gifted guide.
There was, at the end of the last century, a brief craze for computer-generated visual puzzles that at first glance appeared to be sheets of merely abstract grey tessellation. If you knew how to look at them, however, and if you stared at them for long enough from just the right angle, gradually three-dimensional shapes seemingly hidden behind the opaque surfaces began to appear: balls, cubes, cylinders, and in the more advanced versions, animals, human faces, or birds in flight. The reward for the patient observer was thus the discovery of unexpected beauty and complexity behind a familiar façade, a discovery to which you alone seemed privy. Revisiting the classics of Renaissance literature alongside Alastair Fowler provides the same sense of uncovering hidden treasures in works whose riches had hitherto seemed long-exhausted. His impeccable reading of the emblems deployed in Book II of The Faerie Queene is a case in point, revealing unexpected patterns of fountains, lakes, and rivers, symbols of baptism, repentance, and regeneration, of cups and vessels, and finally of water poured into wine, all emblems related to the book’s principal virtue, Temperance, and all evidencing a text startlingly rich in its conception and execution. Similarly, his virtuoso exposition of the symbolism of ‘To Penshurst’, drawing on points as diverse as the early-ripening of apricots and the numerologically significant placing of the word ‘crown’ and the first mention of King James in the poem, inspires a new appreciation of the geometric intricacies of Jonson’s creative imagination.
Fowler is probably best known as the author of classic book-length studies such as Kinds of Literature, Triumphal Forms, and Renaissance Realism, and magisterial critical editions of Milton and Spenser, but in these essays he shows himself equally adept at delivering great reckonings in far smaller rooms. The collection offers a series of intellectually intense and deeply engaging lectures from a master of his craft who takes his readers deep into each carefully chosen text, pointing out a submerged classical allusion here, an echo of contemporary Neoplatonist thought there. Blink and you will miss an intellectual firework or a wry aside. A brilliant and paradigm-shifting reading of Shylock’s devotion to his bond is offered almost in passing in a discussion of the multiplicity of
Shakespeare’s plot-lines. A more sustained reading of Hamlet is exemplary both in its broadminded acknowledgement of the play’s diversity (and why it matters) and in its command of fine, often seemingly arcane contextual detail. ‘Hans Knieper’s tapestry workshop at Elsinsore was famous,’ he throws in, suggesting why Polonius was made to die behind an arras rather than under the rushes like his forebear in Saxo Grammaticus’ narrative version, only then to show that this apparently incidental detail of local Danish colour is itself carefully woven into the play’s wider fascination with ‘words, words, words’ (Francis Bacon among others having suggested a clear affinity between cloths of arras and spoken words ‘opened and put abroad’). Discussing Shakespeare’s comedies, Fowler is able to cast new light on the depth and prevalence of images of time passing and time measured and divided in As You Like It and on the deep layering of allusions to Epiphany in Twelfth Night. Turning to the literature of his native Scotland, he offers a sensitive reappraisal of the work of Gavin Douglas, making a compelling case for his election to the first rank of Renaissance linguists and translators.
Throughout his career Fowler has been in many respects the lone scholar par excellence, often ploughing a lonely furrow in pursuit of an idea thought unworthy of consideration or just too difficult a challenge by modish scholarship. And few modern critics are as well read or as erudite as he is. It might thus be wise to have a good dictionary to hand when reading further, unless ‘immiscible’, ‘amphibolous’, ‘catoptric’, or ‘theriomorphic’ are features of your familiar conversation. And perhaps just nod in agreement and hope for no further questions when he says of Malvolio that ‘his comprehensively Saturnalian disposition will be obvious to anyone who recalls the Tetrabiblios and Ptolemy’s description of Saturn’s children .’ But if Fowler’s reputation for the rigour of his own mind and scholarship is fully exemplified here, that for the sharpness of his criticism of others less rigorous is effectively challenged. He is certainly more than willing to hand out low marks where he thinks them merited: witness the taking to task of Jacques Derrida for his ‘poor grasp of Saussure’ or of Stephen Greenblatt for the ‘gross factual errors’ in his Will in The World. And there is a particularly neat taking down of both W. H. Auden and A. D. Nutall with a single stone for each getting Shylock ‘exactly wrong’. But the essays gathered here also allow us to appreciate Fowler’s lifelong enjoyment of the pleasures of academic conviviality and companionable argument with other scholars from C. S. Lewis (‘the first great critic I knew personally’) through Barbara Lewalski and Christopher Ricks to ‘Fred’ Jamieson. Each of these essays was written in real or vicarious dialogue with other scholars, testing their hypotheses against the evidence of text and context, offering counter-proposals and alternative readings, and acting as enthusiastic advocate for Renaissance modes of thinking and writing that currently fashionable scholarship neglects. There is thus more than a grain of truth in his own self-deprecating suggestion, voiced in the Introduction, that ‘I begin to see that my raison d’être lay in reminding critics about parts of
literature they had forgotten’. The essays themselves, though, are anything but forgettable. By turns dazzling and inspirational, they are supreme examples of great scholarship motivated by the love of the works that form their subject and of the writers who produced them.
Greg Walker, Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature, University of Edinburgh
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for permission to re-use the following articles:
Fowler, A., 1988. The Paradoxical Machinery of The Rape of the Lock. In: C. Nicholson and A. Pope, ed., Alexander Pope: Essays For The Tercentenary. Elsevier. Reproduced with permission of Elsevier B.V. through PLSclear.
Fowler, A., 2008. Ut Architectura Poesis. In: C. Guest, ed., Rhetoric, Theatre and the Arts of Design: Essays Presented to Roy Eriksen. Novus Press.
Fowler, A., 1974. The Life and Death of Literary Forms. In: R. Cohen, ed., Routledge Revivals: New Directions In Literary History. Informa UK Limited. Reproduced with permission of Informa UK Limited through PLSclear.
Fowler, A., 2003. The Formation of Genres in the Renaissance and After. New Literary History, 34(2), 185–200. Reproduced with permission of the Johns Hopkins University Press via Copyright Clearance Center.
Fowler, A., 2010. Perspective and Realism in the Renaissance. In: K. Cartwright, ed., A Companion To Tudor Literature. Wiley-Blackwell. Reproduced with permission of John Wiley and Sons.
Fowler, A., 1984. Paradise Regained: Some Problems of Style. In: P. Boitani and A. Torti, ed., Medieval And Pseudo-Medieval Literature: The J. A. W. Bennett Memorial Lectures, Perugia 1982–1983. Boydell & Brewer.
Fowler, A., 2005. Gavin Douglas: Romantic Humanist. In: A. MacDonald, and K. Dekker, ed., Rhetoric, Royalty, And Reality. Peeters. Reproduced with permission of Peeters.
Fowler, A., 2008. Cut Without Hands: Herbert’s Christian's Altar. In: Erskine-Hill, H., McCabe, R. and Jack, I., ed., Presenting Poetry: Composition, Publication, Reception. Cambridge University Press. Reproduced with permission of Cambridge University Press through PLSclear.
Fowler, A., 2007. Anagrams. The Yale Review, 95: 33–43. doi:10.1111/ j.1467-9736.2007.00307.x. Reproduced with permission of John Wiley and Sons through PLSclear.
Fowler, A., 1992. Georgic and Pastoral: Laws of Genre in the 17th Century. In: M. Leslie, and T. Raylor, ed., Culture And Cultivation In Early Modern England. Continuum International Publishing. Used by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Fowler, A., 1995. Twelfth Night and Epiphany. In: S. Chaudhuri, and K. Datta, ed., Renaissance Essays For Kitty Scoular Datta. Calcutta: Oxford University Press. Reproduced with permission from Oxford University Press India.
Fowler, A., 1997. Relevance. The English Review 7.3. Reproduced by permission of Hodder Education.
Fowler, A., 1999. The Emblem as a Literary Genre. In: M. Bath and D. Russell, ed., Deviceful Settings: The English Renaissance Emblem and its Contexts. Selected Papers from the Third International Emblem Conference. New York: AMS.
Fowler, A., 2001. Lord’s Space in 17th-Century Britain. In: R. Eriksen and M. Malmanger, eds, Renaissance Representations of the Prince. Edizioni Kappa Roma.
Introduction
From the beginning of my working life I had a sense that literature enjoys an unsearchable complexity. Working on Milton and Spenser did nothing to dispel this belief. Literature’s complexity sometimes involves hidden anagrams or numerical patterns; but an education in mathematics, science, and medicine ensured that I had no fear of numbers. More than once, indeed, I made forays into numerology.
Being selected from the work of six or seven decades, these essays differ in the aims and assumptions they share with other criticism of their periods. At first, the New Criticism of I. A. Richards and William Empson, R. P. Blackmur and W. K. Wimsatt dominated. Largely displacing the biographical preoccupations of Lord David Cecil and others, this New Criticism counted as ‘formalist’ in the sense of focusing on formal relations between the parts of literary works— repetitions, for example, and such devices as irony. It necessarily cultivated ‘close reading’. And it treated literary works as self-contained: independent of biographical context—independent, even, of other works. New Critics ignored the interrelations of literary history. In fact, T. S. Eliot was almost the only critic of his generation to write about tradition.
The early essays here share the assumptions of New Criticism. I was impatient with talk about the lives of writers, and wrote simply to bring out the coherence of literary works: to clarify their qualities. I aimed to explain, to remove difficulties— often by recovering half-forgotten conventions. Through the emblems in Essay 13, for example, Spenser displays the virtue of Temperance in The Faerie Queene Book II. I took for granted that criticism is subservient to literature, and that literature deserves favourable attention, even when it serves the values of a former age.
If the earliest essays suggest any influence, it is that of C. S. Lewis, the first great critic I knew personally. But soon the essays engaged with the ideas of later mentors: Don Hirsch, Ralph Cohen, and Frank Kermode. An intellectual watershed was the 1972 Bellagio conference organized by Cohen to assemble theorists from both sides of the iron curtain, who were to address the large question: Was it still realistic to attempt literary history? Between the participants—Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, Jean Starobinski, and the Marxist Fred Jameson—sharp differences emerged. The present essays suggest aversion from the Bellagio tribalisms, and a preference for exploring common ground where possible.
The next school, structuralism, had more repercussions on linguistics and anthropology than on literature. But the contexts of literature, slighted by the New Criticism, returned in New Historicism. This owed much to Fernand Braudel, the great historian of everyday life. Yet it found room too for the highly selective, ideologically slanted histories of such as Michel Foucault and Steven Greenblatt. The only completely negative review I had previously published was ‘Enter Speed: A Feverish Life of Shakespeare, Like History on Amphetamines,’ which identified many gross factual errors in Greenblatt’s Will in the World. This review attracted a good deal of attention.1 Nothing could show more clearly the prevailing disregard of historical contexts than the fact that Greenblatt’s book continued to be cited favourably. ‘Enter Speed: a Feverish Life of Shakespeare’ was put down to personal animosity, despite my very different reviews of Greenblatt’s other works.
Although not by any means a New Historicist, James Shapiro convincingly explored historical contexts in A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599, as did Stuart Gillespie in Shakespeare’s Books (2001). Valuable studies of theatrical contexts include Bart van Es’s Shakespeare in Company (2013) and Tom Rutter’s Shakespeare and the Admiral’s Men (2017).
Almost as influential in the seventies and eighties, deconstruction changed for many the procedures of criticism. This school of criticism, associated with Jacques Derrida in France and J. Hillis Miller in the USA, oddly claims allegiance to the great linguist Ferdinand Saussure. According to Derrida, all writing is ambiguous and crammed with irreconcilable contradictions. But in this he shows a poor grasp of Saussure. Any well-written text contains its own disambiguation.2 Much of my criticism in those decades worked against the uncritical adulation of Derrida.
The successive schools—New Criticism, structuralism, deconstruction— should not be dismissed as mere fashions. They exposed serious concerns, emphasizing neglected aspects of literature. Deconstruction, for example, reacted against structuralism’s fixed coding. But a sense of literature’s unsearchable complexity made me averse from each school in turn. Each falsified literature by denying its true complexity. Biographical contexts, authorial intentions, readers’ responses: each in turn was slighted. I begin to see that my raison d’être lay in reminding critics about parts of literature they had forgotten. But I must confess that something was also due to the aggressiveness I used to indulge.
The three divisions of this selection correspond to prevailing focuses in my work: genre, realism, and relations with visual art. The earlier essays on genre follow Hirsch; but the later take a less abstract approach, and depend more on
1 See, e.g., John Sutherland, ‘Where there’s a Will there’s a payday’, The Guardian, 16 Feb. 2005.
2 As Deirdre Wilson shows in Meaning and Relevance (Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblance. (Instances of a genre being here the family.) Concepts of genre figure in any sound literary theory.
Essays on realism—or realisms in the plural—form a second grouping. For I see medieval and Renaissance realisms as distinct, just as both are distinct from the realism of pre-modern novels. The development of representation, far from being one of steadily improving verisimilitude, has gone through several distinct sorts of realism. Essays 10 and 12, for example, distinguish the participatory realism of the Renaissance from the spectator realism of nineteenth-century novels.
The old canon has rightly been replaced by one with a much larger proportion of women authors than before, including some previously passed over altogether. On this I count myself a feminist. I share, for example, Wallace Robson’s view that Virginia Woolf was the best critic of her time. This must have widespread repercussions on the whole canon. It need not mean demoting every male author; but it surely involves giving less attention to the likes of Shakerly Marmion.
In a third grouping of the essays attention turns to the kinship of literature and art. Christopher Ricks has often told me I waste my time writing about the visual arts. But he has never convinced me. Conventions of visual art offer essential parallels with those of literature. The ‘sister arts’ display many family resemblances—obviously so in imagery, less obviously in their strategies of realism. Essay 14 explores imagery in a poem by Alexander Pope (himself an artist); Essay 15 studies an emblematic poem by George Herbert, in which he turns conventional features into expressions of personal devotion. Essay 16 considers emblems as themselves a genre. It was written for an emblem conference at Pittsburgh in 1993.3
Some of the essays have appeared in English or American journals such as New Literary History and Review of English Studies. Others are less accessible to American and British readers. Essay 3 was given as a lecture and printed only in a very small edition; Essay 15 was consigned to the comparative obscurity of a Festschrift; and Essay 8 receives here its first printing. Essays 6, 7, 9, and 11 were published in Italy or France. With the one exception, all are printed here as they first appeared, except for trivial changes in spelling and punctuation.
3 The participants included Daniel Russell, Karl Joseph Höltgen, Peter Daly, Michel Bath, John Manning, and Alan R. Young, to whom I owe many additions and corrections.
Emblems of Temperance in The Faerie Queene, Book
ii
It was Spenser’s invariable practice to build into the imagery of The Faerie Queene, at strategic points, the traditional emblems of the virtue whose legend he was writing. These emblems must once have helped to make at least the main drift of his allegory widely intelligible; but unfortunately it no longer works like that. In Book ii , where emblems are heavily relied on for structure as well as for imagery, either their existence is now not even noticed, or else they are treated as mere surface decoration. Yet they are essential to Spenser’s method, which is oblique, working indirectly through details. The golden set-square, the ‘norm of temperance’,1 for instance, is only once mentioned explicitly, when Guyon says that ‘with golden squire’ the virtue ‘can measure out a meane’ between the fleshly death of Mordant and the self-accusing death of Amavia (ii . i. 58). Because it is used in the geometrical construction of the mean proportional, the square is a symbol for the virtue by which Guyon will continually make the moral construction of the golden mean. The castles of Medina and Alma, however, are both founded on the same mathematical principle, and the set-square is a mason’s instrument; so that from one point of view all the closely related architectural and geometrical images in the Book can be regarded as extensions of the emblem.2 The bridle, a commoner emblem of temperance, is equally unobtrusive. Guyon has a horse with ‘gorgeous barbes’ (ii . ii. ii ) called Brigador (v. iii. 34)—a name which means Golden Bridle (briglia d’oro). 3 And this emblem, too, is functional; for it is Braggadocchio’s theft of Brigador which precipitates Guyon into the pedestrian adventures which follow: that is to say, it is originally through pride (Braggadocchio) that the Platonic horse of man’s desires ceases to be bridled by
1 Achille Bocchi, Symbolicarum quaestionum libri quinque (Bologna, 1574), Embl. cxliv, p. 145. in which the norma temperantiae is handed to a prince, is particularly apt as illustration. The square was as often an emblem of justice as of temperance; Spenser may have regarded the one virtue as essential to the other.
2 Mean proportionals were actually used in Renaissance architecture: see R. W. Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London, 1949), Pt. iv, ‘The Problem of Harmonic Proportion in Architecture’.
3 Yet Warton thought it merely a pompous name ‘on the affectation so common in books of chivalry’. For the bridle emblem see Ripa, Iconologia (Padua, 1611), pp. 508 f.; and E. Male, L’Art religieux de la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1925), pp. 313 ff. and figs. 168, 173, 175.
temperance.4 I shall be solely concerned here, however, with a third emblem of temperance, which is perhaps the commonest of all—the pouring of water into wine.5 This emblem makes the least obvious appearance, but only because it is developed on a scale we do not expect; it is hidden, only because most deeply structural.
The very first extended image in the Book is one of water: the nymph’s fountain. This fountain of tears from the eyes of a petrified nymph not only occasions Mordant’s death, but proves mysteriously immiscible with the blood of Amavia on Ruddymane’s hands. The obscurity here, as so often in Spenser, is the result of compression: he has fused two emblematic fountains which apart would have been less difficult, if less original. We find them partly disengaged, as it happens, in a well-known emblem by Herman Hugo. Hugo portrays repentance as a seated female figure—Anima, the human soul—with a stream of tears issuing from her eyes and hair, as she faces a fountain in the form of a petrified nymph, from whose head and outstretched hands water flows into a large pool.6 This is a visual rendering of Jer. ix. i : ‘Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears.’ For epigram, Hugo gives Anima’s prayer to be metamorphosed into a fountain, like Acis, Biblis, and Achelous; all of them mythological figures who, like Spenser’s nymph, became rivers. (This allusion is reflected in the engraving by Boetius a Bolswert: the iconography of his petrified nymph, not to speak of the river-god in the background, is obviously influenced by illustrations of the Metamorphoses.) The streams of water from the nymph’s outstretched hands, however, are neither from Jeremiah nor, solely, from the tradition of Ovidian illustration. They belong to another symbolic fountain, the Fountain of Life, as a glance at a later emblem of Hugo’s will show (iii . xli). In it, Christ-Eros is a fountain, with spouts issuing from his outstretched hands, side, and feet, and falling into a pool, the bath of salvation. The Fountain of Life—originally an expression of the cult of the Precious Blood—was a very popular motif in late medieval art; in the Reformation it persisted, though associated then with baptism rather than with the mass.7 However disguised mythologically (as in the later
4 At ii . iv. 2 the ‘rightfull owner’ is described as able to ‘menage his pride’; at xii. 53 we find him ‘Bridling his will’. Cf Rinaldo’s stolen horse, which Harington interprets as ‘fervent appetite’ (notes to Orlando Furioso, Bks. i and ii ). On the horse as symbol for the wilful passions, see Valeriano, Hieroglyphica (Lyons, 1611), iv. xx–xxiii; as a special attribute of superbia in medieval graphic art, A. Katzenellenbogen, Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art (London, 1939), pp. 10, 79, and fig. 8a.
5 For numerous examples of this emblem, see Mâle, pp. 321–3; Katzenellenbogen, pp. 55 f. et passim; and R. van Merle, Iconographie de l’art profane (La Haye, 1932), figs. 16, 22, &c.
6 Pia desideria (Antwerp, 1624), i . viii, pp. 59–64; illustrated in M. Praz, Studies in SeventeenthCentury Imagery, i (London, 1939), p. 133 (fig. 56).
7 See Mâle, pp. 110–18, and, for the earlier history of the motif, P. A. Underwood, ‘The Fountain of Life in Manuscripts of the Gospels’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, v (1950), 43–138. The motif seems to have been introduced into emblem literature by Georgette de Montenay, in her Emblemes ou devises chrestiennes (Lyons, 1571), Embl. iii , illus. Praz (fig. 9) from a later edition.
period it often was), it would be readily recognized, in the briefest allusion, by a contemporary reader. Thus Spenser’s fountain, to which Mordant came when Amavia reclaimed him, is an extraordinarily complex symbol of the believer’s identity with Christ; serving both as fountain of repentance and laver of regeneration, as fons lachrymarum and balnea salutis.
Closer examination would show that the early cantos form an allegory of baptismal regeneration. The rock of the fountain is Christ, the ‘spiritual rock’, from whom flows the water of baptism (i Cor. x. 2–4). Mordant (the ‘outer man’) and Amavia (the ‘inner man’) of the old Adam die and are buried by the fountain, because baptism involves a sacramental death and burial with Christ (Rom. vi. 3–4).
The Edward VI Form for Private Baptism contained a prayer ‘that the old Adam in them that shall be baptized in this fountain, may be so buried, that the new man may be raised up again’. As for Guyon’s new man, he is present too, in the shape of the laughing baby, Ruddymane. His ‘guilty hands’ are baptized simultaneously with Guyon’s own; but even the water of life will not wash out the bloody stains, which derive ultimately (ii. 4) from the poison of Acrasia (concupiscence). As the Ninth of the XXXIX Articles warned, concupiscence, the cause of the death of the old Adam, is not effaced by baptism. Only the long process of mortification of the flesh—with which Book ii deals—can do anything to arrest it. Some theologians, indeed, among them Calvin, held out little hope of concupiscence ever being eradicated in this life. ‘This corruption’, he says, ‘never ceases in us, but constantly produces new fruits just as a fountain is ever pouring out water’ (Inst., iv. xv. ii , tr. Beveridge).
And this is how Spenser renders it, substantializing the traditional metaphor in the ‘Infinit streames’ of the fountain of Acrasia. With its erotic sculpture—profane Eroses bathing in the ‘liquid ioyes’ of love or playing ‘wanton toyes’ (xii, 60)—this fountain is so disturbingly matched against the earlier one that recollection is enforced. Guyon has bathed in tears under the streaming body of Christ; will he, then, bathe in the ‘ample lauer’ of Acrasia’s fountain, under the ivy of Bacchus, whose ‘lasciuious armes’, creeping into the water, seem ‘for wantones to weepe’, in blasphemous parody alike of crucifixion and piety?8 In grasping this opposition, Spenser’s first readers would be assisted by their familiarity with the work he was emulating, Trissino’s L’Italia Liberata da Gotti. 9 In Trissino the two fountains are more closely juxtaposed (iv. 873 and v. 152), their symbolism less complex. But in Spenser’s Book ii the whole action flows between the fountain of life and the fountain of death, which set, as it were, its alternative extremes. The contrast involves a paradox: those who drink Acrasia’s fountain seem alive, but are virtually
8 xii. 61; the parody is compressed into a pun: ‘drops of Christ all seemed for wantons to weep’.
9 Spenser’s use of Trissino has been noticed by C. W. Lemmi, ‘The Influence of Trissino on the Faerie Queene’, P.Q., vii (1928), 220–3.
dead—reduced, like Cymochles (v. 35), to a shade; while those who drink the nymph’s fountain die, but only to rise to a new life.
This almost symmetrical opposition is far from being the only one of its kind; contrasted images of water are, indeed, the Book’s leitmotif. Thus the dead lake of idleness is set against the lake of grace which swallows up the deathly Maleger in its life. Pyrocles is hotter than ‘damned ghoste’ in Phlegethon (vi. 50), a burning river answered by the nymph’s cold fountain (ii. 9). Equally opposed, this time to its purity (ii. 9), is the black river Cocytus, those ‘sad waues, which direfull deadly stanke’ under the Cave of Mammon.10 (The burning and the filthy rivers correspond to the two modes of corruption—ireful and appetitive, strong and weak—a dichotomy which runs throughout the Book.) Such contrasts, between good and bad fountains, rivers, lakes, not to speak of wands, nets, boats, pilots, &c., are no doubt in part a device of formal arrangement, in part expressions of the ambivalence of a natural order calling for constant discrimination. They may, however, carry the further implication that two entire ways of life, two complete mental landscapes, are being presented to our choice.
The Book has also its images of wine. Repeatedly the temptation of the Bower of Bliss is presented as a wine-cup, or is associated with symbols of Bacchus. This is a deliberate emphasis, and one which is not found in Spenser’s models, Tasso’s Bower of Armida or Trissino’s Garden of Acratia.11 First there is the ‘mighty Mazer bowle of wine’ of evil Genius; then the golden cup of Excess, with juice pressed from intoxicating grapes; and lastly the cup of Acrasia, the ample laver of her fountain, beneath the ivy of Bacchus. Acrasia’s cup makes her lovers animals in the end; but for a time they become embodiments of the god Bacchus himself. Thus Mordant is actually called Bacchus in Acrasia’s curse (i. 55); while Verdant, as his name suggests, enjoys that green age of youth which was the perpetual condition of the god.12
Into contact with these Bacchic images comes, at the moment of the mission’s fulfilment, the principal water-image, Guyon, for the name Guyon derives from one of the four rivers of Paradise (Gen. ii. 10–14). These rivers were from patristic times identified with the four cardinal virtues, Pison usually being prudence, Tigris fortitude, Euphrates justice, and Gihon (Geon, Gaeon, Gyon, &c.) temperance. The Neoplatonist Philo probably invented the allegory; but it was Ambrose who developed it christologically. In Ambrose’s interpretation, the single river from which the four river-virtues spring is Christ, the fountain of
10 vii. 57. Such pairs of contrasted rivers were traditional: Bersuire contrasts the hot Egyptian fountain of avarice and worldly pleasure (‘non est refrigeretiua, sed potius inflammatiua’) with the waters of compassion and piety (Dict., Pt. I, under aqua). Landino, the Neoplatonist, interprets the four rivers of Hell as the course of sin, flowing from man’s concupiscence—‘a concupiscentia nostra veluti a fonte manat aqua’ (Alleg. in Aen., Virgil, Opera (Basel, 1596), pp. 3038, 3044).
11 Trissino has vines, but no cups of wine.
12 For Bacchus as semper iuvenis and puer aeternus, see Conti, Mytholog., v. xiii, and Alciati, Emblemata cum comm. ampliss. (Padua, 1621), p. 140a, on Embl, xxv, ‘In statuam Bacchi’.
eternal life.13 The symbol was a familiar one in the Renaissance. To cite well-used reference works: Bersuire (Comm. in Gen., ii, in Reductorium morale) traces the rivers back to the fountain of repentance which irrigates a righteous man’s conscience; while Valeriano (Hieroglyph., xxi . xiv) follows Ambrose and Philo, explaining that the Gaeon (Nile) signifies temperance because it washes Egypt (i.e. enticing pleasure) and Ethiopia, a land stained, like the human body, with a dark infection: ‘it purges the vile body, and quenches the ardour of lust’.
The purpose of the four rivers allegory was to symbolize in a vivid way the absolute dependence of the virtues upon their source, the water of life. The same idea was expressed by a motif in late medieval graphic art, which associated human personifications of the virtues with the Fountain of Life. A Bellegambe painting at Lille, for example, depicts the faithful, assisted by female figures (the virtues), climbing into a large laver beneath the crucified Christ: signifying that men can only achieve virtues after bathing in the blood of salvation, each effusion of which washes out one deadly sin.14 In a similar manner, and with similar meaning, Guyon the virtue of temperance helps Ruddymane to wash in the Fountain of Life.
Since Guyon’s entry into the Bower of Bliss brings images of water and wine together, the missing emblem of temperance has been found. It remains to discover what symbolic force it exerts. Traditionally, temperance’s pouring of water into wine had meant dilution: moderation in the indulgence of a burning desire. Such is the interpretation in Claude Mignault’s Commentary on Alciati; somewhat disappointingly, he explains that when the Greek Anthology says that Bacchus delights to link with three nymphs, it only means that wine should be mixed with three parts water: unmixed, it causes fury and insanity. He quotes Plato’s advice that ‘the drunken god should be tempered with sober nymphs’ (Alciati, 143b, 144b, and 146a). Sometimes, however, the two vessels of temperance carried another significance. Ripa tells us that temperance is portrayed with two vessels, one tilted into the other, ‘because of the similarity between a mixture of two liquids, and that of two contrary extremes’ (Iconologia, p. 508). The conception of temperance as the mixture or integration of extremes, as distinct from their avoidance, is clearly expressed in the triads of the Castle of Medina. But the mixture emblem is also worked up into a characteristic piece of poetic theology, more deeply hidden, which underlies the Bower of Bliss temptations, as well as Acrasia’s curse upon Mordant.
Spenser seems to have taken a hint from Bersuire’s allegorization of an account in Solinus of the marvellous river Diana, near Camerina. According to Solinus, if
13 De parad., iii. For further details about the history of this allegorization, see Underwood, pp. 47–9.
14 See Mâle, p. 115 and fig. 62; it should be noted that the bath in this painting is an erotic bath, shared with the object of desire.
anyone of unchaste habits draws water from the Diana, it will not mix with the wine in his body (Polyhistor, xi). Bersuire takes this to mean that the unchastity of the drinker will be revealed. By water, he says, can be understood doctrine— especially by the water of the Diana, a name which means ‘manifest’ [clara]. But by wine can be understood the human will; for water (doctrine) cools, but the human will burns with desire. Therefore the water of good doctrine is applied to the wine of ardent will, so that the appetite may be tempered (Reductorium morale, viii . Iii. 33).
By a common and obvious symbolism, intoxication and the consequent heating of the blood has throughout Christian literature been an image of sin. Thus, in Burnet’s Exposition of the Thirty-Nine Articles, an extended speculation about how original sin altered the human constitution imagines the pathological effect as an inflammation of the blood (on Art. IX). More metaphysically, Neoplatonic writers used the intoxicating draught of Bacchus as a myth to describe the immersion of the mind in matter at birth, when ‘the new drink of matter’s impetuous flood’ intoxicated the soul and brought oblivion. Augustinian theology, which took over the myth, also regarded the soul as overcome at birth; not, however, by matter, but by its failure to dominate the body’s original sin, concupiscence.15 Thus it is concupiscence (Acrasia) whose Bacchic draught brings Mordant such oblivion that he forgets Amavia. And having drunk the wine of wilfulness, he is confronted with his unfaithfulness by waters of doctrine from a fountain of Diana (revelation), so that he knows himself mortally guilty. Since passions have the darkness of a Bacchic intoxication, the accomplishment of temperance must consist in remaining lucid amidst them, until their sources are understood. This is expressed allegorically by Guyon’s refusal to bathe at the Bower of Bliss. Carrying with him on his course water from Diana’s fountain, he enters the sphere of the natural, and resists immersion in it. For the temptation of the Bower would be underestimated if, with Bowra, we regarded it as ‘sexual irregularity’.16 It is nothing less than the primary temptation to relinquish the mind’s dominion and succumb in animal wilfulness to the intoxication of the natural and the material: to succumb, that is, to concupiscence, ‘the mind of the flesh’, by wallowing in the desires of the heart. Nevertheless, the Bower is not simply to be avoided; to the passionate heart—the fountain of the will—Guyon must bring the water of doctrine and grace.17 This allegory of a human conduit between fountains
15 See Aquinas, Disp iv De malo, i , on the soul’s contraction of original sin at its infusion. The Platonic myth can be traced from the Phaedo through Plotinus (Enn., iv. iii. 2), Porphyry (De antr. nymph., i. 88), and Macrobius (In somn. Scip., i . xii) to Renaissance mythographers like Valeriano (Collectanea, ii . ix).
16 Lemmi, who notices much of the Bacchic imagery (M.L.N., 1 (1935), 163–4, and P.Q., viii (1929), 276–7), sees some of the symbolism, but makes it too narrowly sexual, treating Bacchus as the ‘masculine principle’ and Mordant as ‘oversexed’.
17 For the heart as the fons voluntatis, see Valeriano, xviii . xiii, ‘Concupiscentia’. N. S. Brooke, ‘C. S. Lewis and Spenser’, Cambridge Journal, ii (1949), 430, noticed that the fountain of Acrasia is the heart, but failed to make the connexion with the will.
was not entirely novel. In Trissino’s L’Italia Liberata, water is carried in vessels from a fountain made by God from Virtue’s tears, and is poured in literal fact into Acratia’s fountain of concupiscence.18 The difference, however, between this allegory and Spenser’s is significant. Whereas Trissino automatically overcomes each obstacle by the same device, sprinkling with holy water, Spenser attempts to render the process of regeneration in greater detail, by the introduction of images with assignable psychological meaning, such as the Palmer’s staff of concord and net of formal analysis. Characteristically, Trissino calls the water acqua del sanajo; while Spenser allows the theological meaning to remain implicit.
The symmetry of Book II now emerges, as we see Guyon on a massive scale bringing together, as temperance should, two vessels. He lives in no exclusively moral, natural world, as some critics have maintained; but in the full tension between spirit and rebellious flesh, between Fidelia’s cup and Acrasia’s.
18 vi and v. Cf. also Goltzius’s engraving ‘Satisfactio Christi’, where the Fountain of Life pours directly into a human heart opened like a box to receive it.
The Life and Death of Literary Forms
Forms and the Literary Model
The subject proposed is the ‘life’ and ‘death’ of literary forms, not of literary works (a different subject). We say that the mock epic form has died out but The Rape of the Lock in some sense lives on, that the sonnet continues viable though Constable’s Sonnets are moribund, that pastoral persists in fresh guise, even if Googe’s Eclogues do not. The historical duration of works need not coincide with the duration of the forms they use.
However, I must not take this as axiomatic, since for certain meanings of form it would be untrue. If forms meant personal configurations—as in Buffon’s le style est l’homme même—they might be coterminous with individual literary works. And a Crocean idealist who thought of form as ‘expression-intuition’ would not even want to distinguish it from the internal event of the work;1 for him, each work is formally unique, the diachronic propositions of literary history meaningless. Best begin, then, by specifying a literary model.
The theoretical model currently useful is likely to be based on recent ideas of the substrate, and consequently to draw on post-Saussurean linguistics and on information theory. Thus we may define a literary work as the record of a specialized speech act. An author makes and communicates it, much as speakers express themselves, through a system of shared grammatical rules—Saussure’s langue—supplemented by other more specialized systems of conventions.2 His individual speech act, however, is parole, a unique contingent communication, which, though it depends on previously shared conventions, may also modify them to initiate new conventions. These in turn become langue for subsequent paroles. As for the difference between everyday and literary communication, it seems to lie in the latter’s more elaborate langue, which may include not only rules of spoken or written grammar but also many sorts of conventional types, such as modes, genres, motifs, topics, narrative devices, symmetries of structure, rhetoric, and meter. Literary forms, in short, are precisely what distinguish literature from ordinary communication.
1 See René Wellek, Concepts of Criticism, ed. S. G. Nichols (New Haven and London, 1963), p. 56.
2 Here I follow F. W. Bateson’s extension of the concept langue in ‘Modern Bibliography and the Literary Artifact,’ English Studies Today (Bern, 196I); see esp. pp. 74–6. Cf. E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven and London, 1967), p. 134.
Reflection finds a difficulty here, in that some literary forms occur in paroles outside decent literature, even outside writing altogether. Figures of speech may figure in speech, and verse was sometimes used for technical treatises during the Middle Ages. To account for this, one supplements the linguistic with the information theory model. In information theory, oral and written conventions work as signal systems, by which communications are constructed from series of signals. The signal system may work together to optimize construction of the correct message, through an arrangement of noise-combating codes called redundancy: ‘‘redundancy’ may be said to be due to an additional set of rules, whereby it becomes increasingly difficult to make an undetectable mistake.’3 Now literary works, since they often deal with elusive or hard ideas, and since they communicate themselves across ‘noncooperative links’ (reception can’t usually be checked by questioning an author) need a high degree of redundancy. Perhaps, then, what distinguishes literary communication is not any particular form or signal system, but rather the redundancy available. In short, the unity of mutually confirming structures. Thus, if ordinary speech achieves a high degree of redundant integration it may become memorable, pass into the literature, and be reckoned a ‘saying.’
Redundancy of literary forms tends to prolong the possibility of constructing the work (or something like it) even after some of its many signal systems have fallen into oblivion. That is how literary works sometimes survive even their own genres. In a similar way redundancy makes it possible to construct very novel communications, such as avant-garde experiments. And it is the same allimportant conception of information theory that guarantees validity of interpretation and determinacy of meaning.
Validity of interpretation in E. D. Hirsch’s sense4 can only be defended against subjectivism on the ground that a work remains inaccessible to interpretation, free or otherwise, until it is constructed. Since construction depends on identification of signals in terms of systems shared with the author, no reader can claim the freedom to interpret as he pleases. For signals themselves are meaningless. And if a reader identifies them according to inappropriate signal systems, or in disregard of redundancies, the communication he constructs is not the one to be interpreted.
As for determinacy of meaning, Hirsch’s genre logic guarantees it in potentia. In practice, however, the generic rules which sharing of types depends on may remain inaccessible. Only by recourse to the conception of redundancy, can we understand how meaning continues determinate in practice in certain instances, even after some of the generic forms involved have long been smoked over by time’s tenebrosity.
Still, ‘genre ideas have a necessary heuristic function.’5 Hirsch refers to his broad category of ‘intrinsic genre,’ but the same is true of genre in a more
3 Colin Cherry, On Human Communication (New York, 1958), p. 185; see also Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics (New York, 1958), pp. 215–17.
4 Validity in Interpretation, pp. 3–6, 10. 5 Ibid., p. 78.
conventional sense. Traditional genres and modes, far from being mere classificatory devices, serve primarily to enable the reader to share types of meaning economically. Moreover, his subsequent understanding is also genre-bound: he can only think sensibly of Oedipus Tyrannus as a tragedy, related to other tragedies. If he ignores or despises genre, or gets it wrong, misreading results. Johnson’s blunder over Lycidas and the more recent and even more spectacular critical error of taking Paradise Lost as classical epic with Satan the hero are dreadful examples. Clearly, generic forms must rank among the most important of the signal systems that communicate a literary work.
By forms, then, I mean all the conventional elements of literature, from modes to metrical patterns. Archetypes, however, though closely associated with conventions by Northrop Frye,6 and indirectly involved as we shall see in every full description of a genre, I exclude. For they appear just as much in other fields of discourse, so that they must be reckoned psychological rather than literary types. I also differ from Frye about the relative importance of forms. To ‘commentary,’ or structural analysis of an individual work, he prefers ‘identification,’ a superior kind of criticism that follows ‘an inductive movement towards the archetype,’ away from verbal texture, through imagery and larger conventions, to mythic archetypes shared with other works.7 I think that the Hamlet criticism of superior interest to all except theoreticians and anthropologists is likely to consist of statements about what is peculiar to Shakespeare’s play, not what it shares with Samson Agonistes or ancient Greek myths. About intrinsic genres and individual paroles; 8 not archetypes, or even genres. Since, however, literary works can only be communicated through generic forms, these may be of great, though subsidiary, critical interest, according to the individual case. Historically, too, the interest of any form is liable to fluctuate over any considerable period. It may even lose significance altogether. Then either it will become a mere habit without value qua signal (as with some Romantic poets’ use of stanza forms long after interest in their proportion had declined); or it will cease to be used altogether (pastoral eclogue, poulter’s measure, epic). Of all literary forms the class whose continuance probably matters most is genre.
Interpretation and Genre
By genre I mean a better defined and more external type than mode. Genres each have their own formal structures, whereas modes depend less explicitly on stance,
6 See, e.g., Fables of Identity (New York, 1963), p. 123, and cf. W. K. Wimsatt, ‘Criticism as Myth,’ Northrop Frye in Modern Criticism, ed. Murray Krieger (New York and London, 1966), p. 87 n.
7 Fables, p. 13; Wimsatt, p. 87.
8 Hirsch (pp. 103, 111) defines intrinsic genre as between parole and langue
