Page 174 - Costellazioni 5

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

Influenced perhaps by both Harington’s Ariosto and Spenser, Fairfax
preserves from the Italian the cue of Clorinda’s “golden locks” (le
chiome dorate) and adds that her helmet also is “guilden,” for good
measure. Until enflamed with love some stanzas later, Tancred, like
Spenser’s Arthegall, is left gazing in a stupor, as signaled by the nar-
rator’s rhetorical questions: “Tancred, whereon think’st thou? What
dost thou gaze? / Has thou forgot her in so short a while?” (3. 22. 3-
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4). In a familiar way, Clorinda first responds aggressively to her op-
ponent, even when revealed (“she threats to kill him twice,” 3. 23. 8),
but then, following a narrative path unlike Britomart’s, she flees to an
adjacent forest, the love-beso ed knight following after. Although the
textual experiences operate differently within the narratives, repetition
of significant cues and the emotional complex of surprise-wonder-fear
suggests that arousal of affect and engagement stimulated an inter-
textual memory, whatever the direction of influence.
Whether Spenser and the translators Harington and Fairfax are
responding to one another or to others writing in the long tradition of
chivalric romance, repeated associations of disguised young women
whose identities are revealed in combat reproduce an intertextual mem-
ory that, more than merely alluding one to another, mingles emotions
of wonder, awe, anger, and fear that are cued by references to helmets,
hair, and the reactions within the text of stunned viewers. Such experi-
ential memories are “enactive” in the sense that Giovanna Colombe i
proffers when she writes that enactivism refers to sensorimotor and bio-
chemical embodiment, to lived experience, and to the “deep continuity
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of life and mind.” The experience of reading invites an embodiment
that is simulated through an extended memory tool — the text, with its
capacity for recursiveness, familiarity through memory or page-turning,
and arousal of emotions — and is enactive in its stimulation within the
body of simulative processes that are noetic, affective, and kinetic. Such
experiences are capable of registering emotions with positive or nega-

42 Gerusalemme liberata, ed. Care i, 3. 22. 3-4: “Tancredi, a che pur pensi? a
che pur guardi? / non riconosci tu l’altero viso?”
43 Colombe i, The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind, xiv-
xvii.

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