Phantastes’s Flies: The Trauma of Amnesic Enjoyment in Spenser’s Memory Palace

Abstract

The problem of Guyon’s inauthentic subjectivity may be approached effectively by understanding his quest within the context of the discourses and practices of remembering rather than by detecting traces of a repressed libido. In Book II, the House of Alma constitutes a fantasy that takes the symbolic form of the memory palace, a phenomenological space regularly advocated by the art of memory. This memory palace, along with forays into zones of forgetting, impresses upon Guyon the injunction to know thyself common to the depiction of interiority in natural history discourse. The fantasy of remembering and forgetting ultimately shapes Guyon’s desire to remember, constructing as the object of that desire the mnemonic image. However, when extracted from the fantasy field of Alma’s house, mnemonic images are seen to be what they actually are: Phantastes’s flies, buzzing and swarming with a life of their own. Surpassing the imaginary limits of identity formation in early modern mnemonic activity, Book II exposes the underside of amnesic jouissance to be found in the corporeal memory palace.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.