Poetic Narrative and Human Time: Spenser with Paul Ricoeur

Abstract

If allegory inheres in narrative, narrative is fundamental to The Faerie Queene, and if allegory does not, Spenser’s major poem uncontestably remains a narrative form. My essay treats the working of narrative in the poem, taking as its lodestar Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, whose thesis asserts the intimacy of narrative with human time. Ricoeur’s theory develops and extends the thinking of Augustine on temporality and Aristotle on narrative form, the former offering a subjective grounding, the latter an objective one. Both Augustine’s awareness of time and Aristotle’s emplotment are needed, but only a poetics of narrative, such as Ricoeur’s, can mediate between them. Through metaphorical reference, narrative, according to Ricoeur, transfigures the world. Informed by Ricoeur’s theory, my essay treats the opening of Book I, the binding of Occasion in Book II, the chronicles of Books II and III, the early cantos of Book IV, and more.