Spenser's Allegory: The Anatomy of Imagination
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Spenser's Allegory: The Anatomy of Imagination
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Overview
Viewing the poem as a model of Spenser's universe, the author investigates the poet's theory of knowledge and the role of imagination in the construction of cosmic models. She begins with a survey of theories of the imagination and the creation of fictions, establishing a context in which allegorical images may be understood throughout the European allegorical tradition to which The Faerie Queene belongs. Isabel MacCaffrey's new readings show that insofar as Spenser's poem concerns modes of knowledge, it offers the reader an anatomy of its own composition, an analysis of imagination in its varied relations to the world.
Originally published in 1976.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691617138 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/08/2015 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #1363 |
| Pages: | 460 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 3.60(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Spenser's Allegory
The Anatomy of Imagination
By Isabel G. MacCaffrey
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1976 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-10043-2
CHAPTER 1
The Universe of Allegory
The power of imagination is described by Michael Drayton at the climax of Endimion and Phoebe, that curious amalgam of Ovid and Plato.
And now to shew her powerfull deitie,
Her sweet Endimion more to beautifie,
Into his soule the Goddesse doth infuse,
The fiery nature of a heavenly Muse,
Which in the spyrit labouring by the mind
Pertaketh of celestiall things by kind:
For why the soule being divine alone,
Exempt from vile and grosse corruption,
Of heavenly secrets comprehensible,
Of which the dull flesh is not sensible,
And by one onely powerfull faculty,
Yet governeth a multiplicity,
Being essentiall, uniforme in all;
Not to be sever'd nor dividuall,
But in her function holdeth her estate,
By powers divine in her ingenerate,
And so by inspiration conceaveth
What heaven to her by divination breatheth.
Drayton's last couplet neatly acknowledges the subjective origin of conceptualizing, while allowing, in the etymological progress from inspiration to breatheth, for the dependence of imagining upon divine origins. The historical process that led up to this and similar eulogies of the heavenly Muse in the Renaissance is a lengthy and tangled skein. I propose to unravel only its main thread, as a preface to the argument that the allegorical method and the theory of imagination are inseparably related during the centuries which sustained belief in both the objective reality of an invisible realm, and a required relation between that realm and the realities perceived by sense.
"The history of imagination is the account of the process by which rightful recognition was given to that function of the mind in virtue of which we have pictures." The slowness of the process and the tardiness of recognition can be traced to the lowly origin of phantasia in the material body of man; it belonged to the sensible soul, the soul which man shares with the brutes. In a dualistic metaphysic like Plato's — a dualism never completely solved by Aristotle, and endemic in western philosophy — imagination inevitably bore an hereditary stigma. A philosopher dedicated to escape from the bonds of materiality must cast a cold eye on phantasia, irrevocably shackled to the objects of sense from which its second-class images are derived. In the faculty-psychology of classical philosophy which survived in various versions through the lifetime of Spenser, imagination was a humble mediating power. The younger Pico could declare, as a "proposition which in the eyes of philosophers and theologians is a clear and admitted fact," that
There exists a power of the soul which conceives and fashions likenesses of things, and serves, and ministers to, both the discursive reason and the contemplative intellect; and to this power has been given the name phantasy or imagination.
Spenser depicts this power as the melancholic man Phantastes, "that mad or foolish seemd," in the third chamber of Alma's turret (II.ix.52). Toiling at its menial, though necessary, tasks, phantasia looks uninteresting and harmless enough. But it has some interesting features, as Aristotle noted. "For imagining lies within our own power whenever we wish (e.g. we can call up a picture, as in the practice of mnemonics by the use of mental images)."4 Though dependent, ultimately, on sense experience, imagination can function in the absence of sensation; Aristotle cites the example of dreams. In this partial independence of the image-making power lie the seeds of many future developments.
But this is not the whole story about imagination for classical philosophy. Both Plato and Aristotle recognized that the imagining power plays an essential role in even the loftiest ranges of human thought, the realm of "the contemplative intellect"; and both, in different ways, made room for it in their epistemologies. In certain of Plato's late dialogues, there is discussion of images as reflections, divinely implanted in the soul, of the ideal realm. And Aristotle acknowledged that even the rational soul cannot function, in man, without imagination. "To the thinking soul images serve as if they were contents of perception. ... That is why the soul never thinks without an image." The notion that imagination, though in origin a "lower" faculty, is an ingredient in man's knowledge even of divine truth, appears in many medieval descriptions of the rational soul; the account by Hugh of St. Victor is especially pertinent.
The third power of the soul appropriates the prior nutritional and sense-perceiving powers, using them, so to speak, as its domestics and servants. It is rooted entirely in the reason, and it exercises itself either in the most unfaltering grasp of things present, or in the understanding of things absent, or in the investigation of things unknown. This power belongs to human-kind alone. ... This divine nature is not content with the knowledge of those things alone which it perceives spread before its senses, but, in addition, it is able to provide even for things removed from it names which imagination has conceived from the sensible world, and it makes known, by arrangements of words, what it has grasped by reason of its understanding.
Hugh's classification of invisible realities accessible to the soul follows a tripartite scheme which corresponds to man's life in time and space. In the moment, we grasp "things present"; to the past or regions remote in space belong "things absent"; to the future, "things unknown." Spenser provides an expansive version of the last notion in his stanza on the voyages in the Proem to Book II of The Faerie Queene.
But let that man with better sence advize,
That of the world least part to us is red:
And dayly how through hardy enterprize,
Many great Regions are discovered,
Which to late age were never mentioned.
(II.Pro.2)
The great regions include the new-found lands of the Americas, but the poet goes on to speculate audaciously of the "other worlds" in the stars or beyond, which may also be discovered by imagination.
The relationship, in imagining, between sense experience and the knowledge of invisible reality is paradoxical and crucial. It appears to be based upon an analogy between the soul's humblest function — recording and reproducing sensory images — and its most exalted — intuiting ultimate essences in those realms of deep truth that are imageless though not inapprehensible. The analogy derives from an introspectively derived truth: that knowledge of transcendent reality is "like" knowledge of images in being immediate and non-discursive. Accommodation of epistemology to this fact can be found in Plato's extrapolation of fantasy as "the very faculty which, rightly informed by light from above, results in vision higher than reason can attain," and in the medieval notion of an intellectus superior to ratio or discursive reason. To the threefold hierarchy of faculties is added a fourth which transcends them all.
Sense, imagination, reason and understanding [intelligentia] do diversely behold a man. For sense looketh upon his form as it is placed in matter or subject, the imagination discerneth it alone without matter, reason passeth beyond this also and considereth universally the species or kind which is in particulars. The eye of the understanding is higher yet. For surpassing the compass of the whole world it beholdeth with the clear eye of the mind that simple form in itself.
Boethius' intelligentiae oculus "sees" simple forms; it therefore seems somehow akin to the sub-rational power, imagination, which also "discerns" forms sine materia. Poetry, Milton said, is simple, sensuous, and passionate. In that simplicity lies its claim to kinship with the high visionary powers of the transcendent intellect. References to an eye in the mind underline this relationship. "The mind has, as it were, eyes of its own, analogous to the souls' senses. ... I, Reason, am in minds as the power of looking is in the eyes." From here it seems but a short step, logically if not chronologically, to the notion of "Wit the pupil of the Soul's clear eye," the erected wit of the Apologie for Poetry.
In fact, of course, the concept of imagination as the arts ist's special gift was very slow to emerge. The nature of poetic fictions was a subject of debate in the twelfth century, but it was treated in the course of more general discussions concerning the nature of the symbolic method and the interpretation of Scripture. Wit (ingenium) or imagination was a way of knowing before it was a power of making.
Ingenium ... is a vital link in human consciousness, uniting the highest and the basest capacities of will and curiosity. It is closely related to imagination, the power of mind by which things absent are perceived, and thus to "fantasies" of all sorts, from the wildest dream to the highest state of vision.
Nevertheless, although members of the so-called School of Chartres both analyzed and produced poetic fictions which embodied visionary truth, imagination as an aesthetic principle was regarded even by them as of minor importance, and as potentially dangerous. Hugh of St. Victor included among the functions of the soul not only the power to understand, but the power to record the fruits of understanding by providing names "which imagination has conceived," but this activity is quite narrowly defined. Later in the Didascalicon there is a disparaging chapter on "the songs of the poets" as "mere appendages of the arts," unworthy of being counted among the true artes.
A strong renewal of interest in imagination, as both a noetic and a creative faculty, accompanied the recovery of neo-Platonic and "occult" symbolisms in the Renaissance. These reinforced
a profound conviction that man, the image of the greater world, can grasp, hold, and understand the greater world through the power of his imagination. We come back here to that basic difference between Middle Ages and Renaissance, the change in the attitude to the imagination. From a lower power which may be used in memory as a concession to weak man who may use corporeal similitudes because only so he can retain his spiritual intentions towards the intelligible world, it has become man's highest power, by means of which he can grasp the intelligible world beyond appearances through laying hold of significant images.
The use of imagination to "grasp the intelligible world" is one side of the picture. The other is confidently asserted by Tasso, who cites "the Areopagite" to support the highest possible claim for the poet as a maker of images.
That part of occult theology that is contained in the signs, and has the power of making one perfect, is fitting to the indivisible part of our soul, which is the intellect at its purest. The other, eager for wisdom, which brings proofs, he attributes to the divisible part of the soul, much less noble than the indivisible. Thence it leads to the contemplation of divine things; and to move readers in this way with images, as do the mystic theologian and the poet, is a much more noble work than to teach by means of demonstrations, which is the function of the scholastic theologians.
This is a lofty flight indeed; and interest in the creative faculty was not confined to "mystical theology." Imagination improves our prospects in this life as well as the next.
Sure He that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unus'd.
(Hamlet, IV.iv.36-39)
These words of Hamlet draw what to us seems a necessary conclusion from the presence in man of discursive reason, his peculiar intellectual faculty: we know in order to use our knowledge. An aspect of "discourse," the ability to look "before and after," alludes to those mnemonic and prophetic powers that also dwell with imagination. The godlike capability of man manifests itself in the making and carrying-out of plans, like Hamlet's plot to kill the king, or the state as a work of art; and also in monuments of unaging intellect which outlast many individual life-spans and enable us to triumph over mortality. Among these monuments are the alternative worlds of art, societies of spaces that remain unrealized until the maker's fiat causes them to become tangible in paint or stone or words.
Sidney's Apologie for Poetry is both the culmination of the movements of thought I have been tracing, and a portent of things to come. Sidney speaks of alternative worlds and the power of the poet to create ex nihilo in terms that may strike us as very modern. And, in fact, the audacity of such a position was acknowledged and deplored by writers in the following century, who saw that the poetic imagination was to be feared not simply because it dealt with licentious subjects and sensuous images, but because it presumptuously, even blasphemously, preferred its own creations to the divine handiwork. Sidney's saucy comparison could lead to fearfully dangerous consequences. The poet,
lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect into another nature, in making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in Nature. ... Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.
"Freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit," he can escape the limits that constrain ordinary mortals and enjoy the powers of a god in the little world he has made. Nevertheless, if we read on, we must agree that Sidney does not press the implications of this paragraph. The passage that begins by setting the poet beside God ends with a reminder of the Fall.
Neither let it be deemed too saucy a comparison to balance the highest point of man's wit with the efficacy of Nature; but rather give right honour to the heavenly Maker of that maker, who having made man to His own likeness, set him beyond and over all the works of that second nature: which in nothing he showeth so much as in Poetry, when with the force of a divine breath he bringeth things forth far surpassing her doings, with no small argument to the incredulous of that first accursed fall of Adam: since our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will keepeth us from reaching unto it.
Although Sidney celebrates the poet's power to invent, he makes a crucial connection between invention and the intuition of uninvented reality: "our erected wit maketh us know what perfection is." A perfected but invisible reality exists; the poet adumbrates it in the "new" forms of his golden worlds. But these new forms are really reminders of old forms, since we once lived in an actual golden world. As Sidney's editors have noted, sixteenth-century poets, like their medieval counterparts, were reluctant to detach the poet's golden worlds from the actuality of the divine Creation or to claim absoluteness for poetic creativity. The notion of making, making-up, or feigning opens a Pandora's box of fraudulent visions — fictions that mislead deliberately or inadvertently, prove deceptive or self-deceiving. To ground poetic fiction in an ideal realm — ordinarily obscured by the waywardness of the infected will and the opaqueness and hostility of the fallen environment — is to insure its validity. In a sense, therefore, all valid art is imitative or visionary, though, as Sidney suggests, the objects of imitation are inaccessible to any but an erected wit. Verisimilitude gives way to the stratagems of a higher mimesis, and to Touchstone's paradox that the truest poetry is the most feigning.
The complexities of relationship between invention and imitation can be endlessly debated. Many readers in the sixteenth century were no doubt satisfied by the cheerful compromise of Puttenham, who concluded that the poet "is both a maker and a counterfaiter: and Poesie an art not only of making, but also of imitation." More interesting questions arise when we consider the kind of commerce that can exist between visible and transcendent reality, and between the material resources available to the artist and the impalpable truth apprehended by imagination. The answers lie in the theory of metaphor. For if it is the case, as I have been arguing, that imagination's task has traditionally been to render visible the realms of being apprehended by the "secret ynwarde syghte," then it is no wonder that allegory, the most important of the metaphorical modes, dominated fiction-making for many centuries.
Poets themselves, of course, have always been interested in these problems and in the kind of claims that can be made for their fictions. The loftiest role in which they have cast themselves has been that of the seer or visionary; for Christian authors, the model is the author of the Apocalypse.
The Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave unto him, to shew unto his servants things which must shortly come to pass; and he sent and signified it by his angel unto his servant John:
Who bare record of the word of God, and of the testimony of Jesus Christ, and of all things that he saw. (Rev. 1:1-3)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Spenser's Allegory by Isabel G. MacCaffrey. Copyright © 1976 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- Frontmatter, pg. i
- Preface, pg. v
- Contents, pg. ix
- Abbreviations, pg. xi
- Introduction, pg. 1
- I. Allegory and Imagination, pg. 11
- II. Re-Mythologizing: Book I as Context, pg. 131
- III. “Lovers Deare Debates”: The Middle Books, pg. 229
- IV. Book VI: The Paradise Within, pg. 341
- Conclusion: The Promised End in Mutabilitie, pg. 423
- Index, pg. 435