Posted By BillHeise on June 15, 2009

This is an article associated with the article “15 Memorable Books.” See the article for an explanation of this article.
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The culmination of my graduate school career turned out to be my reading of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. This was something I had always intended to address out of graduate school, but I was forced into writing on the poem after I fell out with my medieval professor who I came to school to study with.

What happened was this. I turned in a paper on a medieval French poem and had gotten a horrendous grade from my medieval professor. Now he’d never been very comfortable with me, largely because he knew I was interested in a poem that he thought was worthless (La Roman de la Rose). He didn’t want to carry me if I was such a bad writer and was interested in something so worthless as the Roman de la Rose. I have no excuse. The paper was bad. But I was in the process of working out my new configuration of literature, and I thought I deserved a little credit for trying something new.

At the time I was teaching a poetry class, and Joan Klein was leading the poetry teacher’s discussion class. She was a Spenser scholar. So one day after I had received my bad grade from my medieval professor I was sitting in her office and I told her that after I got graduate school I was planning on writing a book on allegory that started in the 12th century and culminated with my reading of Edmund Spenser. I explained to her, however, that I was not very confident of ever getting out of grad school on account of my interests and, I admit, on account of my poor writing style.

I had already decided, however, that I was not getting any interest in my work at home, so I had decided to take my work on the road. I felt hurt that no one would acknowledge my contributions to literature. It seemed that it was only my faults and flaws that attracted attention. That, of course, is completely fair. But it does not tell the whole story, either.

At the time that I met Joan, I had just given a paper on the subject of Shakespeare’s Richard II at a conference. She asked me in what class I had read Richard II, and I admitted that I had read it on my own. I had found the problem of the failure reason to close with the individual in Richard II, just like I had found it in the Roman de la Rose. What I was trying to do, this point in my academic career, was to find a new theory of literature, a theory that could comprehend all of the things that current theories could not. I explained why I had started to submit proposals for conference papers, that the faculty and my fellow graduate students were not responsive.

She asked me if I wouldn’t be more comfortable writing my book while I was still in graduate school and offered herself as my dissertation advisor. She would guide me through the Spenser section. We could keep Charlie Wright as the medievalist (if he would agree; he did), and I could fill up my committee with Janet Smarr, a comparative lit scholar from the Italian department. I agreed.

I had to add on another year to my graduate career so that I could study, not only the medieval works that come to school to study, but also the entire corpus of Renaissance literature. I aagreed to this, as well.

What I found in Spenser was another instance of what I found in the romance of the Roman de la Rose. The ascent to reason had failed, and Spenser reconfigured his allegory from an allegory of vertical ascent to an allegory of horizontal breadth, just like what I had found in Chariton.

Spencer was unique in my academic experience in that I actually learned from the experience of reading The Faerie Queene. This had been my goal when I first got into school, but I had long ago given up learning from the great works (reading for knowledge) to correlating the great works with the larger culture (reading from a superior position). But I learned things from reading Spenser’s work that were invaluable to me and which I could never have come up with on my own.

This is an important point to me. I was stuck in a Modern/postmodern academic community that was looking for answers to questions. And they dis not have all the answers. In fact, the Moderns thought that they were on the way to finding answers that had eluded scholars since the beginning of criticism, while the postmodern thinker denied the access to those answers through a rigorous rational skepticism. However, in both cases, scholars valued the knowledge of the modern world more than they valued the world of ancient, medieval, or early modern knowledge. Spencer, being older than the modern man, could not, in the opinion of the modern man, have access to any more knowledge than a modern man. This just seemed to me like one of those undeconstructed values chains that was dying to be deconstructed. So I set out to deconstruct it.

The alignment of the Modern and postmodern movements was brought home to me by Maureen Quilligan’s postmodern work on allegory in which she decides two things:

This was derived, I think, from the skeptical attack on reason that had been launched by Jacques Derrida. Spencer was not engaging the world; he was a creature involved in his own mind was having problems reaching the outside world through his reason.

She believes that Spenser, being early must not have known that allegory was “hung up with words, words” and must’ve believed that words reflected outside realities. More fool Spenser then.

But, as with Jean de Meun, I questioned whether Spenser was simply a deluded idiot, a new Ion to Quilligan’s Modern Socrates. Perhaps Spenser had answers to questions that the Moderns and postmoderns had not thought of yet.

If this were the case then I thought that Spenser might have answers to the future of the Modern/postmodern experience. For Spenser had, in my opinion, fought through the world of reason in a satisfactory way that neither Chaucer and Jean de Meun had. As a result of reading Spenser I’ve come to feel that the interpretation of literature has more to do with science and reason than with metaphysics and God. This insight has become the basis of my new literary career.

I had huge fights with Joan Klein when I was writing my dissertation. But these fights were always civil; and she allowed me to argue many positions that she did not agree with, including my view that Redcrosse was a pathetic figure, one who carried the word of God on his chest but who did not have a mind to match. She and the rest of my dissertation committee recognized that I was onto something, even if I had not yet finished my work.

They gave me a passing grade on my dissertation the fence, as well as a “passed with distinction” mark. I didn’t know that was possible, and clearly, given my poor writing style, and my weak grasp of the facts, I never expected to have it bestowed upon me. But things had changed since I switched advisers. For one, I have given over the course of two years 10 conference papers on subjects as wide ranging as Boethius, Roman de la Rose, Petrarch, Gower, Chaucer, Pierce Plowman, Shakespeare, and Spenser. I was told later that I was the star of the department.

But I had away from Champaign to finish my dissertation away from the political environment of academia in Dayton, Ohio. They gave me a series of scholarships at UIUC, which, once again, I had no reason to expect given my poor reception in academia. I pursued my dissertation until the end, but I had given up two years before. It would have to be enough for me to finish my dissertation and then move on to something less stressful and more fulfilling.

I still kept giving conference papers, because I was vain and I believed (foolishly perhaps) that my work could still serve others. But I was prepared to give that up, too after my last conference in May 2004. I had given a paper at the Spenser session at Kalamazoo, Michigan . My session was led by a famous Spenser scholar whose name I have forgotten. I gave my paper on the Garden of Adonis in which I proposed a radical solution to a problem that had eluded scholars for generations. When I was done, the only thing the famous Spenser scholar whose name I have forgotten could think to say was that I had not followed proper procedure in submitting my paper in advance. This calmed the audience’s desire to ask me questions about my radical solution.

This was, I thought, a piece of bureaucratic idiocy. I was angry and I gave up. I thought I had in my dissertation a solution for a young student who was working on the Book of Holiness and was having problems reconciling what he thought he knew to what he saw on the page. He was at an impasse, and I was never going to publish my dissertation, so I offered it to him. Perhaps because he learned to respect his elders more than knowledge, he never took me up on my offer. [Of course he could have agreed with the famous Spenser scholar whose name I have forgotten, and then who could blame him. But in my opinion if that was the case, he was an idiot.]

This is one of the reasons that I am not an academic. Academia too often substitutes bureaucratic forms over original thought. It does not mean to do this, and it has attempted with all its might to escape this bureaucratic idiocy. But without the value proposition at its base, the arts can never value anything correctly. Instead of deciding that Shakespeare is more valuable than, say, an advertisement for hair gel, they value them equally.

Or perhaps that is unfair. Without the value propostion at its base, they cannot tell why they value Shakespeare more than hair gel and they fall prey to arguments from hair gel enthusiasts which follow the question “Why is Shakespeare so important?” They want things both ways. They want the revolutionary behavior of being able to expand the “canon”–a noble goal in my opinion–but they also want to keep themselves in control of literature and literary expertise. They do this by holding on to the metaphysical perspective and dismissing all efforts at putting value on things.

This reduction of the value proposition for a metaphysical perspective in which all things are equal, reduces Shakespeare too much and elevates advertisements for hair gel beyond their normal levels. I actually believe that Shakespeare has value. I also believe that advertisements for hair gel have value. But, as regards to who is more important thinker or our lives as whole human beings, I would say that there is no doubt that Shakespeare has more value than an advertisement for hair gel.

But without this value proposition in place, conservatives were able to make the case that in the departments were operating on premises that are detached from the “real world.” And I actually agree with that, despite the fact that I don’t tend to agree with those same conservative thinkers on the remedy for the problem.

My solution to the academic problem is the same solution I proposed in my dissertation to the problem of Spenser and allegory. Spenser had started out with a pure vertical allegory, but he had “tipped it over” to a more broader and extensive value proposition.In Spenser’s work, we never get a firm belief that “words” are coextensive with the things they denote, as Quilligan says. There is always something more to explore in the extension of words through time. Spenser fives us a model to expand our mind through the devices of allegory. I believe in academia would do well to follow Spenser’s example.

But I had long given up my quest to remake the academic world from within. I laid my academic work aside for good, I thought. But when my stroke robbed me of my ability to do anything but write, I decided to revisit my dissertation once again. I have managed to flesh out what was wrong with the Spenser portion of my dissertation and I’m planning on publishing it in a series of books, the first of which is about ready to go off to a publisher and the last of which will deal with the allegories of Edmund Spenser.

Categories: Books, Personal, Philosophy
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