A Touch More Rare: Harry Berger, Jr., and the Arts of Interpretation

8. Taking Another Peek

c h a p t e r 8 Taking Another Peek Lauren Silberman In responding to Harry Berger’s reading of the Bower of Bliss, I’d like to combine homage to Harry with Harry-inspired insubordination as I shift my primary attention away from the Bower of Bliss and question Harry’s identification of the gynephobia showcased by the episode as the fundamental drive animating the discourse of Book Two of The Faerie Queene.1 In his recent work on Book Two, Berger focuses on the way Spenser’s text represents its own processes; the text skillfully deploys the full resources of rhetoric while simultaneously inviting readers to register and scrutinize the rhetorical manipulations directed at them. Given that account of Spenserian dynamics, Berger demonstrates himself close to the ideal reader of Book Two in the way he both explores gender ideology in the text and, in the words of Gregory Bateson, ‘‘goes ‘meta’’’ to register the instrumental value of his choice to approach the text in that way. In his talk at the International Spenser Conference in Cambridge in 2001, later published in Spenser Studies, Harry observed that he consciously cultivated the critique of conventional gender ideology because it afforded him a ‘‘viewpoint from which to stand outside and revaluate . . . traditional account[s] of Spenser.’’2 I remember thinking while reading this: How like Harry to be so lucid and so fundamentally positive about his own critical practice—no wringing the hands about how, alas, all we 104 105 Lauren Silberman have is interpretation. And how ironic that I was finding that setting aside a focus on gender ideology and the essentially feminist perspective from which I had been reading Book Two opened up new vistas for me. This was all the more ironic because the idea that Book Two subjects its own discourse to critique was one I presented in an article published by Modern Language Studies in 1987, an article of which Harry was a spectacularly sympathetic and constructive reader.3 The shift I propose is from the sexual politics of Book Two to the religious elements. To a certain extent, this is a methodological move, designed to supply a ‘‘viewpoint from which to stand outside and revaluate’’ if not, strictly speaking, ‘‘traditional account[s] of Spenser,’’ then some of the more recent ones. To be sure, attention to the religious dimension has never been absent from Spenser criticism. Nonetheless, formalist/humanist criticism of Spenser of the sixties and feminist scholarship of the seventies represent to a significant extent a shift away from explicitly religious concerns. Given the capacity of Spenser’s complex poem to overwhelm the powers of synthesis possessed by any individual critic, any shift in perspective allows new elements to come into focus. In addition to simply providing a fresh point of view, however, shifting focus from the erotic to the religious draws particular attention to the interplay of cultural and psychosexual elements in Book Two of The Faerie Queene. Berger directs his attention to gynephobia and the discourses of gender in order to contextualize and examine the actual discursive operations of Spenser’s text. Instead of accepting what gender discourse says as a given, Berger directs attention to how gender discourse functions as a deliberate textual process. Just as Berger focuses on what he terms ‘‘gynephobia ’’ to put in question how the discourse of antifeminism functions, so I should like to direct attention away from the Bower of Bliss and from the discourses of gender and sexuality in Book Two in order to put the fundamentally psychological focus of gender criticism, as well as fundamentally psychological readings of the Bower of Bliss, into a wider context . In general terms, regarding inner states as primarily spiritual rather than as psychological recasts those states and the transactions of inner and outer in ways useful for critical understanding. Similarly, the dimension of history seems less of a given and more of an object of inquiry when considered in the context of Christian understandings and constructions of temporality. Prominent among these constructions is typology. Biblical typology represents a particularly rich and complex paradigm for understanding temporality in that the typological relationship of Old Testament and New 106 Taking Another Peek Testament seeks in some respects to preserve history while denying history . That is to say, biblical typology insists on the historical validity of events in Hebrew Scripture while disclaiming the historical belatedness...