Plato Baptized: Towards the Interpretation of Spenser’s Mimetic Fictions by Elizabeth Bieman, and: Spenser’s Moral Allegory by Sean Kane (review)

118 LETTERS IN CANADA 1988 Elizabeth Bieman. Plato Baptized: Towards the Interpretation of Spenser's Mimetic Fictions University of Toronto Press. 325. $40.00 Sean Kane. Spenser's Moral Allegory University of Toronto Press. xiii, 237. $40.00 Gathering evidence for the diachronic presentation of typical moments in the development of [the Platonic tradition] had effects far other than those anticipated. Spenser's language became richer, much richer, as my understanding ofhis word-hoard grew - butit did notbecome unequivocally clearer. Thus Bieman, in a brief afterword, more benediction than apologia, counters the deconstructive oxymoron'all interpretation is misinterpretation ' by stating the equally chastening but less dogmatic paradox she demonstrates with intelligence, craft, and prodigious learning free of unexamined cant throughout this magnificent study: Spenser's art may be understood as well as misunderstood, but never comprehended. Spenser's meaning lies outside or beyond the metonymic power of language to 'comprehend' by division, analysis, definition; he 'wield[s] language metaphorically' and we can court apprehension of his vision only by fusion out of confusion, meditating on those 'nodes' where metonymic distinctions become indistinct and language leads us into perplexity, into the state of 'aporia' that stimulates Socrates' dialectic. Such nodes where 'the analytic seeker of certainties is constantly being thwarted,' are pandemic in Spenser's poetry, and Bieman engages some major examples, cumulatively and comparatively, drawn from a representative range of works that attests to their wide distribution: Fowre Hymnes, Amoretti, 'Epithalamion,' 'Ruines of Time,' 'Muiopotmos,' and The Faerie Queene, particularly book III and the cantos of Mutabilitie. Their potential to yield 'knowing' depends, for Bieman, on context supplied by the 'Platonic tradition' that she contends shaped Spenser's vision, and demands that we assimilate not simply the static structure of fact comprising that tradition but also the dynamic mythos that allowed its categorically diverse elements, classical and Christian, through interpretation and reinterpretation over time, to find synchronic accommodation in a metaphorically coherent world-view. A perspective on the tradition circumscribed by strictly analytical understanding limits itself to distinctions among 'the Many' without recognizing 'the One' immanent in 'the Many,' and thus generates misinterpretations of the kind occasioned by the categorical distinction between 'Neoplatonic' and 'Christian' developed in Ellrodt's influential Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Edmund Spenser, which classes Fowre Hymnes as Spenser's only Neoplatonic work, all the rest being Christian. In an astonishing tour de force, Bieman devotes the first half of her work to providing the metaphoric complement to Ellrodt's metonymy, mimetically recreating the evolution HUMANITIES 119 of a cultural synthesis from Plato through Aristotle, the Stoics, Epicureans , and Sceptics, Philo, Paul, and the Gnostics to the emergence of the Plotinian paradigm in the Enneads and its development in Porphyry, Iambichus, Proclus, and the early Christian Platonists, Augustine, Synesius, and Pseudo-Dionysius. Her eye for 'typical moments' from this vast dynamic is precise and authoritative, not only in the selection of significant texts and passages but also in the task so demanding of critical insight and balance, their summary epitomization without distortion. Evidence of such scope and complexity obviously defeats the efforts of a reviewer to do it justice, but Bieman's argument for the importance of these older, pre-Fincian Platonic texts to an understanding of Spenser's humanist context is persuasive, in part because the tradition is so precisely and coherently adduced and in part because Bieman applies the Platonic principles of the tradition with such cogency to Spenser's more puzzling sources of aporia. She avoids, like Socrates, trying to resolve a dilemma by impaling herself on one of its horns, seeking rather to transcend dichotomies by shifting the critical discourse outside the categorizing impulse that engendered them, and stimulating a sense of new resonance and unclosed possibilities in passages whose potential for such revelation, or 'metaphoric baptism,' is constrained by the elusiveness of mystery to a net of words cast by metonymic analysis. Where Bieman labours to clarify our understanding of what Christian humanism meant to Spenser, Kane argues that our identification of Spenser as simply a spokesman for humanist ideology, however well our scholarship defines his perception of its tenets, disguises fundamental tensions between the poet's personal concerns and those...