Response: Wonder, Stone, and the Outside: Edmund Spenser’s Infra-human Aesthetic

Abstract

Edmund Spenser was not, I think, particularly interested something called the human. I do not mean be difficult or cast aspersions on the highly productive rubric for this special issue, but if, by human, we are understand some order of noncontradictory, ontological category which only the animals we name homo sapiens belong, then, against that definition, I tender Edmund Spenser's works and the lively and thought-provoking essays by Rachel Eisendrath, Michael West, and Tiffany Jo Werth this issue of Spenser Studies as evidence the contrary.My objection stems not from sense of anachronism or pedantic desire for semantic correctness. It comes instead from core dissatisfaction with the term, the way the human (whatever that is) designates something that never quite manages generate itself without some set of excluded beings or traits, parceled out on other, differently animated forms of life. Spenser was, of course, interested great many things, some of which serve as precursors or compeers something that we might name human. He was, for example, interested what it means be thing of clay, Christian, reformed Christian at that; what it means be English and Irish; what it means labor, exist as discharger of energy or ensouled kitchen that eats and defecates, rests and sleeps, emotes, and finds itself played by all sorts of variously encoded information (physiological, aesthetic, social); the differences, such as they are, that obtain between men and women and beasts; or men and women and plants; or men and women and stones. Crucially, he might be said be interested also the effects (for good and ill) that words and images and sounds have on these men and women and so what it means make sounds and images that affect others. In that now famous letter Spenser writes Sir Walter Raleigh regarding the aim of The Faerie Queene (1590/1596), he offers the poem as an attempt to fashion gentleman or noble person vertuous and gentle discipline-that fashioning unfolding its own peculiar meditation on mimetic faculty or ability, the inclination become otherwise that he names a continued Allegory, or darke conceit, always on the move, never quite generating or generating too much come close.1This sense of the poem as process that I find the essays which I am responding accords with Michel Foucault's conception of technics or technology of self, set of somatic and psychological routines, for optimizing virtuous persons or gentle men, but it remains unclear as whether The Faerie Queene quite succeeds this endeavor, or whether it dallies, chooses dally, leads readers astray if not stray as it both prescribes and dilates its process.2 The poem designates nonlinear chain of making, then, collective labor of writing and reading, that might, if performed well, which is not say correctly, produce this entity or category of a gentle man or noble person. For, as Eisandrath, West, and Werth's readings offer, the poem seems go out of its way estrange any sense that there might be some noncontradictory core or essence this virtuous or gentle man, be that core innate, cognitive or perceptual abilities, languagebearing sense, rationality, or sensitivity. What emerges instead from the poem, on their readings, is an ongoing probing of limits, as the poem offers multiple scenes of making or testing, limit cases, which personhood is produced or deemed be at risk. Instead, everything seems come down good timing, kairos that it is hard craft, but which might, the end, come down little more than practice.Tiffany Jo Werth says it best, perhaps, when she notes the poem's emphasis on 'performance' as opposed 'sence,' may be the paramount factor determining personhood. In the poem, identity emerges, she continues, in what one does, or performs, what and how one speaks, but perhaps above all, how one moves others. …