Whoa!

How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Early Modern Scholarship (with A Love Letter to James Nohrnberg’s The Analogy of The Faerie Queene)

‘Some of these early reviewers seem to have wanted Nohrnberg to be differently ambitious: they want his extended commentary to pin The Faerie Queene down, to articulate its meaning, “to say finally,” to borrow a phrase from Michel Foucault, “that which was silently articulated deep down.” Nohrnberg has no desire for the final word; all his efforts work toward opening the poem up, acknowledging the poem’s capacity to contain worlds. In his preface, Nohrnberg writes of The Faerie Queene’s “generativity,” its “copiousness,” the “manifold character of the poem,” “the conspicuous heterogeneity of its matter,” and its “resourcefulness.” Nohrnberg captures these aspects of The Faerie Queene as well as anyone ever has and, in part, he does so by replicating them. Nohrnberg’s Analogy is in many ways analogous to The Faerie Queene; it is its doppelganger, a work of scholarship that mirrors the poem’s wonderful weirdness and strange ambitions. No insomnia could ever make one the ideal reader of Nohrnberg’s seemingly bottomless book, but forty years from its publication, it still inspires some of us to try.’