[Image Description: Four human figures and two horses have encountered one another; on the left, a knight and his squire look upon Una and her dwarf– racialized as a person of color– on the right. The dwarf is pointing in the direction he believes they should be heading. The group is in a shady grove against the broader expanse of a forest.]

If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence.

(Justice Louis Brandeis, concurrence in Whitney v. California, 1917)¹

Given that President Trump once claimed to have “brought back free speech,” the constitutional right seems oddly attenuated in the present United States.² Dissidents are being absconded, news outlets sued, legal advocates barred from courts, and universities pummeled by the withdrawal of federal funds.³ One needn’t be a devotee of these people or institutions to be troubled by how Donald Trump is bringing them to heel, as the concerns of certain conservative pundits suggest.⁴ Progressives, for their part, have condemned the president’s actions more vehemently still, with “unprecedented,” a favorite cri de coeur.⁵ In the face of such urgency, then, what good is the falling behind of my title, much less the literary past it evokes?

A great deal, this article suggests. Insofar as the Trump Administration is indeed posing an unprecedented threat to free speech—for the most consistently protected of Americans, at least—we must look to the longer history of speaking truth to power for meeting the exigencies of the moment.⁶ We must look, in other words, to the tradition of liberal, pre-Enlightenment thought that informed the First Amendment to begin with. This includes John Milton’s iconic critique of prepublication censorship, Areopagitica (1644), in a brief opening section and then, for the rest of this essay, a romance epic that modeled, for Milton, how to navigate the muddy marketplace of ideas: Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590, 1596).⁷

The relationship of these two texts—and authors—has consistently occupied scholars, but revisiting their nexus is needed all the same: to clarify the embodied dynamics of free speech, or more generally, of living in a world where the circulation of competing, potentially affronting ideas is both unavoidable and necessary.⁸ These corporeal dynamics tend to get elided in contemporary assessments of “this transcendent value”—as Justice William Brennan once put it—and have not been glossed by scholars of Spenser and Milton themselves.⁹ But their texts—when read by those aware of disability’s potential as an epistemological, ethical, or aesthetic resource¹⁰—suggest that speaking truth to power is not a rarefied, incorporeal endeavor. Rather, it's one that benefits from learning and thinking from the subject position of a particular kind of physique. Crucially, this body is not always the integral, properly sober one we tend to associate with these Protestant writers.¹¹ Frequently, I argue, it’s a dysfunctional or disabled figure whose paces and pauses offer key resources for parsing truth from falsehood and sharing one’s sense of both with the world.¹²

Wayfaring

To start, then, the framework of speaking truth to power that Areopagitica affords. Though it famously declares, “as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book,” Milton concedes that certain texts may well be dangerous.¹³ He therefore explains how we might confront, respond to, and—if still certain of our convictions—resist the potential threat of their contrary ideas: why doing so can be singularly, stalwartly heroic. This heroism benefits from a body that doesn’t sprint ahead. (Doing so is, after all, is nearly impossible in a hazardous postlapsarian world.) Rather, it staggers and stops to reassemble the dismembered body of truth—which can never again be fully pieced together—accepting the inevitability of physical limitation en route. This work of pursuing, and voicing, one’s belief in the face of opposing perspectives requires “endless, successive virtuous choices” (Smith 72), in what Patricia Parker has called the “[i]nterval of decision”: a “dynamic suspension” of “not-yet-completed movement.”¹⁴ This movement cannot, perhaps, be completed at all, or only with struggle, “not without dust and heat,” as Milton proclaims. It’s the struggle that attunes one’s attention to those choices that must be relentlessly reasserted in the wandering meantime at the heart of romance itself.

Consider, for instance, Milton’s famous celebration of sallying forth to meet the opposition: “He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian.”¹⁵ The recurring pivots of the doubled, polysyndetic adversatives enact the temporal distension required for virtuously sifting through myriad ideas. These pivots are retrospectively physicalized, as well, by that final verb, “wayfaring,” which signifies uneasy walking on one’s feet, in a way that’s not necessarily disabled but generally crip: erratic, labored, irregular, pained.¹⁶ This is to say that even as precarious corporeality reminds us of our sinful natures it can provide a check on them, though few Miltonists have observed how.¹⁷

That’s because the pace of “wayfaring” anticipates what recent scholars have called crip spacetime.¹⁸ The term describes how disability snakes the body in ways and directions that defy relentless “chrononormativity,” according to which early modern society increasingly ran.¹⁹ Crip spacetime has no singular pace—there’s no one template of the disabled bodymind to begin with—but I’ll concentrate on the halting pulses, the “uneasie steps” of compromised, postlapsarian bodies.²⁰ This uneasiness undermines the steady progression and standardized verse schemes of conventional epic, while reshaping and redirecting our attention, too. As a brace-wearing cane-user myself, I know the thinking that’s possible in such an interval—after the tricky torque of a knee or catch of a toe—and the possibility this distention has for putting thought into speech.²¹ Disability is not, of course, required for speaking truth to power, but the timeline it activates might well align with—and even enable—a tempo apt for resisting authoritarian pride and productively conversing with those who find such demagoguery attractive.

Lagging

What does this heroism—of halting past many viewpoints to decide on, and aver, one’s own—look like in action? Milton, I’ve said, directs us to The Faerie Queene—to Guyon’s marathon tour of abstinence through the luxuriously venal cave of Mammon. Guyon’s signature temperance suggests that confronting and resisting vice indeed depends on solvent corporeality. But then something strange happens: he falls, incapacitated, upon reentering the open air (II.viii.65).²² There’s a hint, then, that disabling weakness might be part of his heroism, too. Could it ever be the driving force?

Elsewhere—against all odds—The Faerie Queene implies yes, almost immediately in Book I via an obvious non-hero: the dwarf. He doesn’t “wayfare,” exactly, but the verb illuminates the dwarf’s own ambulatory falters—his “lag”—which seem problematic until they allow him to warn the legend’s central knight of holiness, Redcrosse, of mortal danger—more than once.

For his part, Redcrosse heroically springs into view: he’s “pricking on the plaine,” in regular, lockstep progression. This is agility keyed to a central Christian virtue, marshaled against all manner of ill, prepared “[a]s one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt” (I.i.1.1, 9). Of course that “as” complicates things—a point to which I’ll briefly return—but his apparent fitness is what renders Redcrosse legible as an epic hero to begin with, of a piece with Achilles, Odysseus, and Aeneas.²³ The dwarf, by contrast, is something of an afterthought, relegated to a half-stanza that otherwise describes Redcrosse’s lady Una:

   

Behind her farre away a Dwarfe did lag,

That lasie seemd in being ever last,

Or wearied with bearing of her bag

Of needments at his backe.

(I.i.6.1–4)

 

Since The Faerie Queene often figures “[d]elay and deferral as moral categories” that are rarely good (Parker 62), we have to ask: why does he “lag” in the first place? Maybe his lazy character’s to blame, but “seemd” casts doubt. Maybe he’s overloaded, though the “or” likewise poses problems and, in any case, those “needments” remain obscure.²⁴ Physically, they’re the stuff of travel and, allegorically, common sense—perhaps even reason—but regardless, qualities less important than the spiritual armor of Redcrosse or the innocence of Una. Considering the question a moment longer—carrying the burden, in our case, of the enjambed period, along with the Dwarf himself—suggests that there’s no one answer. The problem is that he’s misfit with chivalric heroism itself. He’s disabled, in some way, relative to the two figures before him, not punitively but pathetically, conscripted into a context that poses challenges no one seems willing to ease.²⁵ All of this suggests, as well, that the best reason for his lagging must be that he’s shaped differently, shorter, and thus is slower in turn, reflecting a kind of unexpected, yet characteristically Spenserian, realism. Indeed, walking tends to be harder for little people. (As well as for those of us with mobility impairments. We too are left behind on strolls with clueless friends.)

More important, I’ve suggested, is that the lagging dwarf doesn’t just escape culpability; he also trundles into heroism. Evidence could come from several places, but the best test case is from canto 5, when Redcrosse has, himself, been lagging with a femme fatale named Duessa. As bad dates often do, she’s taken him to a shady locale. It’s an authoritarian realm called the House of Pride, under the murderous thumb of Lucifera. For a long time, Redcrosse doesn’t know Lucifera’s been disappearing people in dungeons and that his own somatopsychic integrity is at risk. It’s the dwarf who figures out their bind. “For on a day his wary”—inextricably weary, lagging—“Dwarfe had spide, / Where in a dungeon deepe huge numbers lay” (I.v.45.7–8). Ironically, the unheroic body preserves that of the Legend’s exemplar; meanwhile, it achieves a kind of greatness all its own.

The dwarf pulls this off by wayfaring à la Areopagitica. As Redcrosse has not, he’s carefully surveyed and scanned his environs, which leads to him engaging those captive, contrary voices “that wayled”—or is it way-led?—“night and day” (45.9): potentially evil strains of those who have “mortgag[ed] their lives to Covetise, / Through wastfull Pride, and wanton Riotise” (46.4–5), and thus, the “law of that proud Tyrannesse” (6). But rather than hector them, the dwarf takes time to “learn[] … in secret wise / The hidden cause of their captivitie” (2–3), including the stories of the corpses of famously impious figures: Nebuchadnezzar, say, who “would compel all nations to adore, / And him as onely God to call upon” (47.2–3). The dwarf then shares their predicament with Redcrosse in the form of an epic catalogue that formalizes the weltering, wobbling suspension that Milton suggests, in Areopagitica, allows one to “scout into the regions of sin and falsity,” “scanning of error to the confirmation of truth.” Meticulously, in fact, the dwarf relates the “case” of these prisoners, to the end of moral conviction, “And made ensample of their mournefull sight / Unto his master” (52.1–3). He had every reason to ignore their cases altogether, to shun their presence as dangerously perverse. But rather than be corrupted by the stories he’s heard, the dwarf models how to “apprehend and consider vice, … and yet prefer that which is truly better”—in fact, to counsel what’s better to Redcrosse himself.

Here’s the vitally crip bit: given the dwarf’s signature trait of “lagging,” we’re invited to imagine it’s his physical limitations that allow this figure, rather than the obviously heroic ones, to apprehend the looming peril. Always, his wobbly, warily weary teeterings have been sharpening his attention to the things Redcrosse disastrously misses—too preoccupied, perhaps, with affecting the chivalric fitness into which he’s as yet incompletely matured. What the dwarf discerns as a result are the “secret” and “hidden” details known only to those who can’t skip by. There may be cripistemology of a different sort at work, as well, since his lived experiences of lagging could alert him to the stories of those abandoned fully by an autocrat who’s used and then left them for dead.

Regardless, the narrative effect of the dwarf’s revelation is that they “early rose, and ere that dawning light / Discovered had the world to heaven wyde, / He by a privie Posterne took his flight” (52.5–7), to safety. But there are larger effects, as well—two of them, in fact. Formally, I’ve hinted that the dwarf’s revelation of the dungeon forces the poem itself to do what he does—that is, lag—but in a way that’s productive, working toward a fundamental Spenserian technology of edification: example.²⁶ More impressive still, the dwarf is an imaginer of something essential to the genre of epic itself, the convention of the catalogue, installing himself at the very heart of this tradition as an ad hoc bard.²⁷ He’s no mere imitative one, either. He reorients the set-piece around decaying bodies instead of, say, fit ones setting sail (as in the Iliad’s catalogue of ships).²⁸ The resulting innovation serves The Faerie Queene well and looks ahead from it, too, toward Milton’s virtuosic Lazar-House in Paradise Lost (11.479–99).

Admittedly, at this same moment, the dwarf recedes from view: “He by a privie Posterne” left refers singularly to Redcrosse. It’s a subtle instance of Spenserian “panic,” as Jeff Dolven has called The Faerie Queene’s tendency to overcorrect for departures from its ideological commitments.²⁹ In this case, that commitment is to valorizing the right sort of body. Yet the volte face comes too late, only underscoring the deficits of perfection itself. The virtues of pricking have been questioned and those of lagging extolled.

Wandering, Hand-in-Hand

More should be said about lagging in The Faerie Queene and its Miltonic, increasingly crip reimagination in the final lines of Paradise Lost (12.646–49).³⁰ But I want to end as I began, with our current crisis of mounting authoritarianism.

For anyone alarmed by what the arguably cruel, undemocratic, anti-intellectual policies of Trump 2.0, enduring these next few years—and regaining certain voters who made them possible—will require the work of Redcrosse’s “carefull” savior. Cautious and caring, the dwarf listens to and learns from those he feels have erred without denouncing them by default. He needn’t agree with them, much less approve of their actions. (He doesn’t do anything like hang out in Lucifera’s dungeons.) But he can’t ignore or silence them altogether. Rather, he “lags” among these folks; this makes all the difference.

It must sound naïve to suggest that cultivating such an “ethics of pace,” to borrow Moya Bailey’s term—regardless of whether one’s disabled or not—can make any difference, but it’s telling that Trump’s worst affronts to the First Amendment are committed with fleet-footed haste.³¹ Certainly, we should rush to assuage their most deplorable effects, for which other crip temporalities might help.³² Yet rushing, in like manner, to excoriate those who support the president’s agenda—our friends, family, and community members, at least—is probably less helpful, as instantly gratifying as doing so surely is. (I speak from experience, from having my own attempts at reprimand erupt in my face.) On the contrary, we might try using the resources of disability knowledge. We might wayfare instead of run, resisting the lock-step march of the autocrat’s parade. And we might make the not-yet-completed movements of persuasion rather than condemnation, opting for somatopsychic suspension over the facile agility of consensus.

Make no mistake: I write these words as a reminder to myself more than to any other.

I write them with hope, after trying to engage with political difference in my own life, even when difference can legitimize views that delegitimize myself and others, many of whom are less aptly positioned to have these conversations in a similar way. I’d rather ignore such discussions altogether. (Why court discomfort and dis-ease?) But the alternative—of siloing further and further apart, without doing anything to slow the widening sprawl—scares me even more. Every week, then, I speak—actually converse—with my personal trainer, who finds himself siding with neither American political party, who talks of politics rebounding from one extreme to another, who stresses that everything will be alright in the end. Meanwhile, I’m forced to listen, by trying to stay upright in the workouts he guides me through. That’s a good thing, since listening is the vexing responsibility that attends all of us with the freedom to speak, as Darren Walker has observed.³³ But then it’s my turn. I open up. I feel comfortable doing so thanks to vulnerability—the kind that comes from someone watching me waver and trusting that he’ll ensure I won’t fall.

He listens, as well, in the intervals of rest and hydration we take together. I share that Donald Trump is creating such uncertainty for, and changing so much about, my personal and professional lives. The lives of so many people I work with and care about. Actually threatening or ruining them, in ways that only a crip might fully comprehend. (Medicaid’s come up; Social Security, too.) He says, “that sucks” and gives me a hug; I think he understands, though one can never be sure. Still, I’ve tried to persuade in my implicit way. Maybe I haven’t done enough. But just maybe he’ll recall my words come 2026.

This isn’t to claim that meeting speech with more speech is always the answer, especially in a contemporary digital age. But as Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote in the epigraph to this essay, it might be the best way forward, to avoid the shaming of others, the calcifying of distrust and resentment, the anger that far-right populism harnesses and stokes in turn.³⁴ Notice Brandeis’s conditional, however: “If there be time,” that precious commodity. Normative timeframes can allow only for flexibility up to a point; it’s the temporalities of crip living that might enable the dilations we actually need—to engage with, talk to, learn from, and perhaps at last to refute enough people to resist this authoritarian pull.

But doing so takes participation from both sides. Which means I also write these words with realism, knowing that there is sometimes no choice but to heed another of the dwarf’s admonishments: “Fly fly” from the dreadful den of Error (FQ I.i.8.7).