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"The Faerie Queene": The Incomplete Poem and the Whole Meaning

The unfinished state of The Faerie Queene has posed the sort of critical problem that typifies the inadequacy of some of our aesthetic concepts. It is true that Spenser composed only six of the twelve books he planned to write (and a fragment of a seventh). Similarly, Chaucer finished only about twenty of the 120 tales he proposed for The Canterbury Tales. Perhaps critics have worried a little less about Chaucer's incompleteness than about Spenser's because Chaucer's work depends less upon rational design-is, if you like, less schematic, more loose and "additive" in principle. Instead of constructing an allegory of the virtues, with a clearly didactic purpose, he has put together a collection of stories within a narrative frame. Spenser, it would seem, must suffer far more by not having fulfilled his plan of presenting the twelve private moral virtues. Not only do we remain in some doubt about the particular virtues he would have chosen for the next six books but also about the order of these virtues and the light that this selection and order would have thrown upon the plan of the whole, including the precise significance of his ordering of the first six books. But besides the incompleteness of the allegorical scheme, the action itself is incomplete, since Spenser has chosen to plunge in medias res, leaving both the initial action and the concluding action to the unwritten twelfth book. Thus, even with the help of Spenser's prefatory letter the six completed books seem to give no more than a glimpse of a pattern which only the twelve would fully reveal. Although critics have argued for the unity of the poem on the basis of philosophical or poetic coherence, nevertheless the assumption remains that as an incomplete work it cannot communicate its whole meaning. The crux is in this notion of "whole meaning." Are we to agree that "without the unwritten books our appreciation of those we have must be incomplete"?' "Our loss," this critic explains, "in the six unwritten books, is great, and all the greater because of the cumulative method by which the poem's meaning is revealed." The reference to "a final unity," and the concern expressed for the greatness of our loss in that this was never attained, suggests a question: In what sense is The Faerie Queene to be considered an incomplete work? Is it incomplete as The Canterbury Tales are? Or as "Kubla Khan"? The "Finnsburg Fragment"? It would be as well for us to face this question of just what part, if any, of Spenser's meaning is incomplete. Surely it is not his purpose. That is stated clearly-all too clearly for some people-in Spenser's prefatory letter: "The generall end therefore of all the booke is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline." If it is the plot structure which is obscured by the "beginning in the middle," again the prefatory letter is sufficiently explanatory. Nor can I agree with W. L. Renwick that the "incompleteness of The Faerie Queene obscures the construction more than incompleteness need, because the over-ingenious scheme did not grow out of the main action, or out of any action, but was devised from purely mechanical data of