Reading against Time

Abstract

This chapter addresses the concept of “reading against time”: reading that invokes a pressing sense of necessity in order to license a departure from established readerly norms and values. Book 5 of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene has long frustrated those who look to Spenser's poetry for wit, subtlety, and profound spiritual insight, and who expect to work hard and slowly for such rewards. Inspired in part by sympathy for the character of Cymoent, who reminds one that taking one's time with a text is not only a readerly achievement but a readerly luxury, the chapter makes a case for the unpoetic reader, for whom the demands and the insights of the moment supersede the values of patience and diligence on which poetic reading depends. The degree to which such readers have succeeded in extracting value from a part of Spenser's poem that has left more conscientious readers cold suggests that there is something to be said for urgency, haste, brute force, crude approximation, and willful anachronism: for all of the straitening and reductive tendencies of reading in a state of emergency. To put it another way, it is worth considering the etymological link between criticism and crisis.