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DANIEL T. LOCHMAN, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

serves that Spenser breaks up causal sequencing with techniques of
“digression and deferral, repetition and recursivity.” She adds that
these allowed Spenser to introduce big ideas about the individual soul,
national identity, private and political ethics, and relationships be-
tween lived and transcendent worlds, but they did so at the cost of a
9
readily accessible narrative sequence. Gregerson observes kinds of
narrative control that Spenser recuperates despite the disruptions: he
is able to “alter the pacing of the narrative, to waylay action for the
duration of a stanza or a canto, to interpolate a parallel vista or point
of view, [and through prosodic techniques] to puncture time or slow
10
it down.” Gregerson’s analysis of the literary effects of such narrative
recuperations, from a formalist’s perspective, parallel what I will en-
gage from a cognitive consideration of textual memory — namely, the
collective coherence-generating elements within a literary artifact that,
despite frequent disruptions within the surface narrative, allow read-
ers to a ribute meaning by carrying in mind, consciously or subcon-
sciously, what has preceded a present literary action or description
and by extending it forward as affordances for future actions.
In an ongoing way, a reader fills gaps in a narrative and recon-
stitutes it in a cognitive, autobiographical experience. The text is an
artifact that prompts cognition, the mental and bodily operations that,
as philosopher Michael Wheeler has observed in reference to cognition
generally, is able to be distributed — to “spread out over the brain,
11
the non-neural body, and [their] environments.” Distributed to the
brain, body, and world, a narrative generates experience that is pecu-
liarly recursive, available for the ongoing change, revision, and refine-
ment that results from a reader’s memorial reexaminations or recon-
sideration of similar episodes and the anticipation of future events.

9 Linda Gregerson, “The Faerie Queene (1590),” The Oxford Handbook of Edmund
Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Oxford University Press, 2010), 198-217.
10 Ibid., 213.
11 Michael Wheeler, “Distributed Cognition in the Analytic and Continental
Traditions,” A History of Distributed Cognition, University of Edinburgh (2014):
h p://www.hdc.ed.ac.uk/seminars/distributed-cognition-analytic-and-conti-
nental-traditions.

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