Abstract
This chapter examines the queer conformity of Edmund Spenser’s knight of love, Sir Scudamore, alongside the similarly queer conformity of the GIF. Short for Graphics Interchange Format, GIFs are essentially compressed image files, often used to punctuate communications on message boards and other social media platforms. This chapter suggests that the visual and poetic structures of the GIF and the Spenserian epic are similar in that both exhibit lack of forward momentum as a path to other, less predictable narratives. Scudamore’s story of “long toil” is the most GIF-like of all the cantos in The Faerie Queene. Like a GIF, it is a story set up to go nowhere. What is surprising, unsettling and at once oddly gratifying, is learning that nowhere is a place we might go.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Marshall Grossman suggests that the poet’s self-conscious “redefinition of contingent ends as intended” places Marvell’s poem in the midst of a “literary history event” that makes possible “the momentary escape of history from its narrative containment” (31, 23–24). Scudamore’s own self-consciousness leads him to his own opportunities for escape, as I discuss below.
- 2.
The underbrag is social media’s recent, cheeky response to the slightly less recent humblebrag, a term coined by comedian Harris Wittels and defined as “a specific type of brag that masks the boasting part of a statement in a faux-humble guise” (Wittels xi). Worse than outright bragging—or brag bragging—because it “wants to [be] met with awe and sympathy” (Alford), humblebragging gave way to what blogger Jen Doll of The Atlantic Wire calls the “third wave” of bragging: the underbrag, “the brag that shouldn’t BE a brag. It’s a terrible brag, the un-brag, not really a brag at all—except for the fact that the underbragger is bragging about it and therefore changing the rules of bragging as we know them.”
- 3.
QR code: GamingRoach. “Yep! I meant to do that.” Imgur, 13 December 2014. imgur.com/gallery/UjMTjKL. Accessed 6 November 2016.
- 4.
Two of Ngai’s primary literary models of the stuplime are Samuel Beckett and Gertrude Stein, whose texts induce “a series of fatigues or minor exhaustions, rather than a single, major blow to the imagination”—as is the case with the sublime (Ngai 272). The stuplimity of Waiting for Godot, for example, “paradoxically forces the reader to go on in spite of its equal enticement to readers to give up” (Ngai 272).
- 5.
Source for split .GIF images and QR code: “April 16, 1889: Charlie Chaplin is born.” Unhistorical: a history(ish) blog, 16 April 2013. unhistorical.tumblr.com/post/48121296974/april-16-1889-charlie-chaplin-is-born-a. Accessed 3 November 2016.
- 6.
Source of split GIF images and QR code: Taludex. “Perfect.” Imgur, 3 April 2015. imgur.com/gallery/ZlhsUtu. Accessed 6 November 2016.
- 7.
Scudamore might serve as a fictional example of the “insistent concatenation of pleasure with measure” that Laurie Shannon notes in her examination of the household inventories of Cardinal Wolsey (1473–1530); sufficiency in this period “means plenitude of provisions, not their mere adequacy. ‘Surplus’ simply names the requisite amount” (Shannon “The Touch of Office” 140). Amoret fails to measure up.
- 8.
Lauren Silberman explores at length the peculiar dynamics of losing and winning that take over canto 10, replacing an earlier dynamic of losing and finding:
Scudamore’s description of winning Amoret occurs at the point at which, by narrative logic, Amoret and Scudamore should find each other. The nature of the opposition of loss to winning differs from that of loss to finding. Winning and losing are a binary pair as reversible as mirror images in a perpetual zero-sum game of specular exchange. In short, everybody wins some and loses some. Finding pairs in a different way with loss. It does not depend on a binary opposition to losing. No one has to have lost Artegall for Britomart to find him. And while it might be theoretically possible to find again what one has lost, in Book IV what has been lost cannot be found because the theoretical orientation has shifted from an economy of finding and losing to an economy of winning and losing, and this way of looking at things presents itself as all there is.” (76–77)
QR code source: Morrissey, Tracie Egan. “A Comprehensive Glossary of Gifs.” Jezebel. 15 October 2010. jezebel.com/5664134/the-comprehensive-gif-glossary. Accessed 6 November 2016.
- 9.
QR code source: verguy. “GIF : George C. Scott, Dr Strangelove.” Imgur, 15 September 2014. imgur.com/gallery/Kz5RxzK. Accessed 6 November 2016.
- 10.
Spenser’s romance shares qualities with Sidneian romance, which, Robert Stillman notes, “can do its work because its epistemological foundations have a natural concord with the very nature of the mind … Poetics, in Sidney’s case, derives from arguments … pursued urbanely but urgently” (Stillman 31–32). Pursued stuplimely, one might say.
- 11.
QR code source: “gym swim unit.” Giphy, no date. giphy.com/gifs/gym-swim-unit-Ar6Y54wirIpLG.
- 12.
Definition 10.a of “fee, n.2.” OED Online. Oxford UP, September 2016. Accessed 31 October 2016.
- 13.
The Online Etymology Dictionary gloss of fee includes the following content:
The Old English word is feoh “livestock, cattle; movable property; possessions in livestock, goods, or money; riches, treasure, wealth; money as a medium of exchange or payment,” from Proto-Germanic *fehu- (source also of Old Saxon fehu, Old High German fihu, German Vieh “cattle,” Gothic faihu “money, fortune”). This is from PIE *peku- “cattle” (source also of Sanskrit pasu, Lithuanian pekus “cattle;” Latin pecu “cattle,” pecunia “money, property”).
The other word is Anglo-French fee, from Old French fieu, a variant of fief “possession, holding, domain; feudal duties, payment” (see fief), which apparently is a Germanic compound in which the first element is cognate with Old English feoh.
- 14.
Hamilton notes that Spenser’s Amoretti delivers the opposing view, that the reward of gaining love does outweigh the pain of seeking it (note 9 of 10.3).
- 15.
QR code source: effulgentlight. Photobucket, no date. Accessed 6 November 2016.
- 16.
Beyond the listicle-based websites that traffic in GIFs such as Gawker (now shut down) or Cracked, Rob Tornoe notes several examples in “To GIF or Not to GIF?”, including what he calls the “dubious example” of BuzzFeed’s “The Story of Egypt’s Revolution in Jurassic Park Gifs” (8 July 2013); and the GIF of Marco Rubio hitting a child in the face with a football that appeared in pieces from Bloomberg Politics, CNN and Time, among others. See Tornoe, Rob. “To GIF Or Not to GIF?” Editor & Publisher, vol. 148, no. 10, 2015, pp. 26, 27, 49. ProQuest. Accessed 19 May 2016.
- 17.
Source for split GIF images and QR code: Mayuri. “Scarlett Johansson Falling Down.” obscenemay.blogspot.com. 8 October 2013. obscenemay.blogspot.com/2013/10/scarlett-johansson-falling-down.html. Accessed 3 November 2016.
- 18.
Source for split GIF images and QR code: Untitled. Giphy, media.giphy.com/media/tO4kJue0WO7m0/giphy.gif. Accessed 3 November 2016.
- 19.
See also Judith Anderson’s Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton. Anderson describes the poet of The Faerie Queene as “a personal, not an impersonal, pronoun, and he is also a figure whose essential humanity may lie—may even lie punningly—precisely in his decenteredness” (41).
- 20.
Goldberg would no doubt disagree. In The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations, he undercuts the ideological force of Spenser’s statement in the letter to Raleigh by noting “the puzzle offered” by its two “organizing phrases”—gentleman or noble person and vertuous and gentle, words that may “simply double each other,” or may “demand to be distinguished” (64). “It could be,” Goldberg goes on to explain, “that the telos of the book is not its literal ending and not confined within a textual space at all” (64).
- 21.
It is in fact an underbrag, at least the way Ronell interprets this choice of Kant’s to give up on style: “Kant has relinquished talent; he can’t write beautifully. He complains, he denounces himself, he confesses as if it were a matter of revealing … a sexual perversion” (283). But as quickly as any social media over-sharer turns what shouldn’t be a brag into a brag, Kant turns his perversion into a sacrifice: “Kant will appropriate the failure to write well, displace its value, insert a will—it’s now fixed as an act of renunciation; he has to do it for the sake of philosophy—and explains the renunciation of elegance, locating the critical position it forces him to occupy” (284).
- 22.
Source for split GIF images and QR code: “April 16, 1889: Charlie Chaplin is born.” Unhistorical: a history(ish) blog, 16 April 2013. unhistorical.tumblr.com/post/48121296974/april-16-1889-charlie-chaplin-is-born-a. Accessed 3 November 2016.
- 23.
This is not unrelated to Anderson’s argument in Reading the Allegorical Intertext that Scudamore’s tale “is in some sense a continuation” of Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas (143). Canto 10 both is and is not Scudamore’s story. The entire Temple episode, Anderson says, “is an experience seen from inside and outside, from Scudamour’s engaged, admiring point of view, and from a more detached, allusive, and ironic one. While neither view cancels the other, their accord is at best uneasy” (149).
- 24.
Source for QR code: “getting punched the simpsons gif.” Wifflegif, no date. http://wifflegif.com/gifs/47336-getting-punched-the-simpsons-gif. Accessed 3 November 2016.
- 25.
Lorna Hutson traces among humanist readers a shared estimation for the superiority of “discourses in which the plot solution emerged from the order of telling” rather than “discourses such as chivalric romance in which solutions were reached through the lapse, rather than the ordering, of narrative time” (85–86). As I hope will become more and more evident, the GIF -like design of canto 10 attempts to discourse both ways, spotlighting both order and lapse—order overlapping with lapse—as the grounds for Scudamore’s progress.
- 26.
Source for split image GIFs and QR code: “Control vs Aggro.” island-delver-go.tumblr.com, 24 December 2014. island-delver-go.tumblr.com/post/135863438340/island-delver-go-control-vs-aggro. Accessed 3 November 2016.
- 27.
That Scudamore’s name means “shield of love” actually draws attention to the queer relationship constituted between Scudamore and his shield. As Maureen Quilligan has suggested, “all allegorical narrative unfolds as action designed to comment on the verbal implications of the words used to describe the imaginary action” (53), and Spenser “will generate a whole narrative episode to reveal the particular truths contained in one pun” (40).
- 28.
Source for QR code: Easily Amused Museum Geek. melbourneonmymind.tumblr.com, 25 June 2012. 66.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lma9dddlD51qj3p4eo1_500.gif. Accessed 6 November 2016.
- 29.
Jenny Mann argues that this “conundrum of the supplement” conveys “the essential paradox of sixteenth-century attempts to forge a vernacular eloquence: in order to achieve an artful vernacular, English writers must supplement their vocabulary with foreign terms, and yet this importation of ‘stranger’ words mangles English speech, rendering it, once again, barbarous” (101, 180). Spenser engages with this “poetic dilemma” (96) throughout The Faerie Queene . I would say that in Canto 10 of Book IV, any eloquence Scudamore produces is supplemented by contact with the strange, queer, even barbarous turns that consistently disrupt his narrative.
- 30.
Source for QR code: Callegari, Caitlyn. “21 ‘Hamilton’ Lyrics that Make Perfect Life Advice.” Bustle, 13 April 2016. Accessed 6 November 2016.
- 31.
Others have written about the significance of armor and armored figures in The Faerie Queene . See Anderson’s “Britomart’s armor in Spenser’s Faerie Queene: Reopening Cultural Matters of Gender and Figuration” for an examination of the ways in which Britomart’s armor “signals her agency and specifically her will to resist and act freely” (82). For thoughts on what Arthur’s shield signals, see Efterpi Mitsi’s “Veiling Medusa: Arthur’s Shield in The Faerie Queene,” in The Anatomy of Tudor Literature, edited by Mike Pincombe, Ashgate, 2001, pp. 130–141. In The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity, Joseph Campana writes at length about the significance of disarmed or disarming gods in the poem, as well as the implications of “begin[ning] a martial poem with a gesture of disarming” (4). For more on this theme, see William Junker’s “Spenser’s Unarmed Cupid and the Experience of the 1590 Faerie Queene,” ELH, no. 79.1, 2012, pp. 59–83. Jessica Wolfe dedicates an entire chapter of Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature to the “inhumanism” of the iron man of book 5, Talus, investigating “whether the precondition of humanity is essential or detrimental,” in The Faerie Queene , “to the consummation of heroic virtue” (203).
- 32.
Image source: TrueGif.com/38. Accessed 1 December 2016.
- 33.
Compare Patricia Vicari’s discussion of “writing emblematically (emblematice scribere) when there is no question of incorporating actual pictures into the text. The images that are formed in the mind when we read words that describe something or cause us to imagine something visual … are emblematic, not because they are the same as those that can be found in some emblem book, or because their subject matter is of a traditional sort that has come to be associated with emblems, but because they call into play a certain activity of the mind. Any image at all can be made emblematic if we concentrate this activity of the mind on it” (165). Likewise, I believe that any image in canto 10 of The Faerie Queen can be GIFed.
- 34.
Here I echo Goldberg in pointing to the significance of the moment near the end of Book 3 when Amoret is made “perfect hole” after Britomart rescues her from Busirane (7.38.9). Goldberg suggests that the revised ending to Book 3 draws attention to “the ambivalence of ‘hole’” and asks the reader to “take as the pleasure of the text this moment of doubled loss, fulfillment through want, ‘perfect hole’… [F]ailed pleasures are the pleasures of this text” (Endlesse Worke 3).
- 35.
Source for split GIF images and QR code: Jaycasey. “Perry’s Portable Hole (Animated).” Deviant Art, 18 February 2013. http://fav.me/d5vdoqz. Accessed 3 November 2016.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hoffmann, C. (2017). The Faerie Queene, the Gif and the Rhetorical Stuplime. In: Stupid Humanism. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63751-8_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63751-8_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-63750-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-63751-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)