Holding the Mirror up to the Text

By casting the examination of textual process as the rewrite of a prior text, Spenser extends the Book IV exploration of retrospection to recursion, the application of the text's own procedures to itself in order to produce more information. Fundamentally, the process of recursion derives epistemic effects from a structural procedure. Nevertheless, it is significantly different from the strategy of retrospection, which seeks to achieve fixity by imposing closure. While an important project of Book IV is to reveal the pitfalls of depending on structurally built-in guarantees of epistemological certainty, the recursive features of Book IV are designed to produce, not absolute certainty, but a greater degree of knowledge. This recursion is a forward-looking procedure that results in a growth of knowledge.^[3] As Daniel Dennet points out, "One 'goes meta-' when one represents one's representations, reflects on one's reflections, reacts to one's reactions. The power to iterate one's powers in this way, to apply whatever tricks one has to one's existing tricks, is a well-recognized breakthrough in many domains: a cascade of processes leading from stupid to sophisticated activity" (29).

This recursion, in which the text's own procedures are taken apart and presented as part of the story, appears as source following as it calls attention to the process, normally taken for granted, of ascribing and imposing structure. Spenser's pose of nostalgia for the irrecoverable masterworks of bygone literature is shown to be the imitation of a thoroughly conventional topos. Spenser's lament,

But wicked Time that all good thoughts doth waste,
    And workes of noblest wits to nought out weare,
    That famous moniment hath quite defaste,
    And robd the world of threasure endlesse deare,
    The which mote haue enriched all vs heare.
    O cursed Eld the cankerworme of writs,
    How may these rimes, so rude as doth appeare,
    Hope to endure, sith workes of heauenly wits
Are quite deuourd, and brought to nought by little bits?
                                                                                     (4.2.33)

echoes Chaucer's complaint in Anelida and Arcite (10–21). Spenser alludes to Chaucer, who cites Statius and a mysterious Corinne. While this seems like an infinite regress, the ineluctable drift of language

from an unknowable source, it really is no such thing.^[4] What purports to be irreparable epistemic loss is a convention eminently transferable from one text to another and Spenser's pose of following Chaucerian "auctoritee" gives way to a freewheeling narrative invention that calls attention to itself by its copia .^[5]

In addition, Spenser's pose as Chaucer's redactor appears to conflate the positions of writer and reader into one textual configuration:

Then pardon, O most sacred happie spirit,
    That I thy labours lost may thus reuiue,
    And steale from thee the meede of thy due merit,
    That none durst euer whilest thou wast aliue,
    And being dead in vaine yet many striue:
    Ne dare I like, but through infusion sweete
    Of thine owne spirit, which doth in me surviue,
    I follow here the footing of thy feete,
That with thy meaning so I may the rather meete.
                                                                         (4.2.34)

The pun about following "the footing of thy feete" and the mysterious claim to meet with Chaucer's meaning casts interpretation and signification—reading and writing—in spatial terms in order to give the epistemic aspect of signification, the movement over time from one consciousness to another, the appearance of fixity. Spenser signals this process of spatial translation as the Squire of Dames intervenes in the ongoing and seemingly interminable quarrel between Blandamour and Paridell and, as Jonathan Goldberg insightfully observes, turns Spenser's text into another Squire's Tale (44–46). Spenser remarks of the intervention:

There they I weene would fight vntill this day,
    Had not a Squire, euen he the Squire of Dames,
    By great aduenture trauelled that way;
                                                                   (4.2.20.1–3)

The locatives "there," and "this" trace a complex web of transactions between writer and reader. "This day" points to the time of writing and each time of reading. "There" points to a fictional place temporally destabilized by the tense of "would fight." "Would have fought until this day" would fix the fight, so to speak, with respect to "this day," but the imperfect tense of "would fight" inhabits the fictional time and space of "There" and not the times of writing and reading

referred to by "this day." The complexities evoked of writing and reading over time, where words on a page take on existence through time through successive voicings, give way to the temporally fixed structure of the flashback. As introduction to the story of Cambel and Canacee, the textualized voice of Spenser's narrator quotes Chaucer's Knight, "Whylome as antique stories tellen vs" (4.2.32.1), and concludes "that since their days such louers were not found elsewhere" (4.3.52.9). Although the story of Cambel and Triamond seems to have an almost lapidary stability as an encapsulated text transfused directly from Chaucer to Spenser, that solidity tends to melt on closer inspection. The concluding line, "That since their days such louers were not found elsewhere," can indicate not only that the lovers are exemplary but that their existence is confined to the page of Spenser's text.^[6] On closer examination, the monumental solidity of the episode appears to be the product of discursive games.