Bizarre Numerousness: A Response to “Companions and Doubles”

Embedded in Eric Langley and Luke Prendergast’s essay on Spenser and Derrida is a defense of the humble literary and critical practice of juxtaposition. “Placing disparate things side by side,” they write, “inevitably reveals surprising resemblances between them”—a reliable principle, then, of literary criticism that can be used to disrupt what we think we know about a text and its habitual companions. But is a resemblance still surprising if its discovery is inevitable? Joe Moshenska has written of the “delirious paranoia that The Faerie Queene is capable of inducing,” the sense that its allegory’s atmosphere of global meaningfulness, at theminute level and themacrocosmic, pervades not just the text but everything and anything else you might be reading or thinking of at the same time. Moshenska’s contingent reading was Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit—a match for Spenser at least in terms of scale and ambition, as well as in the allegorical habits of synthesis and sublation. But the principle holds everywhere. In his great final essay “Of Experience,”Montaigne—after giving full voice to the anxiety of variety, the fear that difference is so universal a quality that no abstracted knowledge can be possible—acknowledges that, though “no event and no shape is entirely like another, so none is entirely different from another. . . . All things hold together by some similarity; . . . we fasten together our comparisons by some corner.” There is always some awkward joint of “as” or “like” or simile, by which we can make different things belong together. This is a principle at once inevitable and unpredictable,