Resisting Allegory by Berger Harry;Miller David Lee;

Author:Berger, Harry;Miller, David Lee;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

CHAPTER 3

Wring Out the Old: Squeezing the Text, 1951–2001

FOR JUDITH ANDERSON AND ANGUS FLETCHER

We have nothing to fear but fear itself.

—FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT

Jeepers [!], Creepers!

—HARRY WARREN AND JOHNNY MERCER

I began writing this essay at the turn of the century, just a half century after I had begun reading Spenser.1 By the early 1950s World War II had turned cold while the intellectual climate of the universities was warming up in the glow of the magisterial studies that lit a fire under all of us in my generation, studies that drove us beyond war-torn Europe, beyond the balkanized precincts of academic disciplines, toward relatively more integrated and global approaches to culture that presaged the future of humanistic curricula. There were the translations of Auerbach, Curtius, and Beauvoir that appeared in 1953, the books by Kantorowicz and Wind that came out a few years later along with translations of Lévi-Strauss, followed in the early 1960s by belated translations of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Although these authors were changing my view of Spenser, literature, and the world, I remained mired in the practice of close interpretation then being promoted by the New Critics who were my teachers at Yale. At the time, these same New Critics were pushing Metaphysical poetry and not having any truck with The Faerie Queene. Consequently, I decided that trying to close-read The Faerie Queene would be a way to get in their face, and that is what I proceeded to do, and what I’m still doing, though the critical map has changed in so many ways.

In retrospect, two features of the Spenser sector of the postwar map stand out. First, it was still dominated by the prewar culture of the Variorum edition, a culture steeped (if not drowned) in a more or less pious and genteel ideology produced by an uncritical commitment to the interpretive procedures of the history of ideas.2 Second, the criticism of my generation, including my own, was sexist and gender-blind. I was aware of the first but had no awareness whatsoever of the second. I made the Variorum culture my target, which made me feel hip, and I thought nothing of referring to Frances Yates as Miss Yates, which made me feel courtly. Today I think the classical-to-Christian scenario that informs my account of Book 2 in The Allegorical Temper3 is about as Variorum as you can get, and never more so than when I blame everything on the witch I refer to as a demonic allegorist. Now, as I revisit the scene of my crime, I know that what I should have written was not “demonic,” but “demonized.”

Between then and now, three convergent public conversations about the politics of reading have profoundly affected Spenser criticism. One concerns orality and literacy, the second concerns feminism, gender, and the role of the reader, and the third concerns the possibility of internal distance and oppositional reading. For me personally, what made the difference was, first, finding my way into a method of reading that emphasized the internal

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