Paradise lost, the miltonic "or," and the poetics of incertitude

SEL - Studies in English Literature

Volumn 43, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 181-211

  Herman, Peter C ^a  

^a SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 60950694241     PISSN: 00393657     EISSN: 15229270     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/sel.2003.0005     Document Type: Article

References (77)

1. Joseph Wittreich, Feminist Milton (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1987), p. 85.
2. See also Michael Lieb's excellent essay, "Two of Far Nobler Shape': Reading the Paradisal Text," in Literary Milton: Text, Pretext, Context (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 114-32
3. and Wittreich's equally powerful contribution to the same collection, "'Inspir'd with Contradiction': Mapping Gender Discourses in Paradise Lost," pp. 133-60. Both Wittreich and Lieb, however, restrict their analyses to Milton and gender.
4. Wittreich notes that "Milton criticism, especially of late, has been paralyzed, indeed impoverished, by the suppression of such conflicts or just plain avoidance of them" ("'He Ever Was a Dissenter': Milton's Transgressive Maneuvers in Paradise Lost," in Arenas of Conflict: Milton and the Unfettered Mind, ed. Kristin Pruitt McColgan and Charles W. Durham [Selinsgrove PA: Susquehanna Univ. Press, 1997], pp. 21-40, 36)
5. and Elizabeth Sauer also notes the same resistance: "To problematize Samson Agonistes is to oppose the strong tendency in Milton studies to resist textual indeterminacy and difference" ("The Politics of Performance in the Inner Theater: Samson Agonistes as Closet Drama," in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1998), pp. 199-215, 204.
6. A. J. A. Waldock ascribes the various contradictions to Milton's being "not quite as conscious of what is happening to his poem as a steersman would be of what was happening to his ship" ("Paradise Lost" and Its Critics [Gloucester MA: Peter Smith, 1959], p. 49).
7. John Peter, in A Critique of "Paradise Lost" (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1960), also takes Milton to task for supposed aesthetic failures - "It can be seen that many of Milton's difficulties with God arise from his imperfectly anthropomorphic presentation" (p. 18)
8. Catherine Gimelli Martin, The Ruins of Allegory: "Paradise Lost" and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention (Durham NC: Duke Univ. Press, 1998), p. 328
9. and Steven Jablonski, "'Freely We Serve': Paradise Lost and the Paradoxes of Political Liberty," in Arenas of Conflict, pp. 107-19, 107.
10. See also Stephen Greenblatt's description of the essays in New World Encounters as concerned with "the half-hidden stress points in the official structures, the tensions, ideological negotiations, and rifts that are often plastered over in later accounts, all but disappearing from view" ("Introduction: New World Encounters," in New World Encounters, ed. Stephen Greenblatt [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993], pp. vii-xviii, xvi).
11. One of the few exceptions to this rule is John Rogers, who finds in the contradiction between the chaoses represented in the theological treatise and in the epic . . . the symptom of the inescapable pressure of political philosophy on Milton's theological science. The discrepancy between a vital chaos and a chaos that harbors a corner of inertness measures the distance between the faith Milton held in popular sovereignty in the period between 1649 and 1651 and his soberer resignation, articulated most fully at the end of the republican decade, to a perpetual parliament of like-minded oligarchs empowered to exercise force over a multitude that showed no signs of capacity for the popular sovereignty Milton had so eagerly anticipated. (The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton [Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996], p. 141)
12. William Kolbrener, Milton's Warring Angels: A Study of Critical Engagements (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), p. 5.
13. David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 478, 473, 479 (my emphasis).
14. Wittreich, "'He Ever Was a Dissenter,'" pp. 21-40, 36
15. quoting A. Bartlett Giamatti, A Free and Ordered Space: The Real World of the University (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 29-30.
16. Charles Eric Reeves provides a textbook example of how this masterplot operates. Faced with the problem of what to do with Raphael's warning to Adam (since Raphael had to have witnessed the colloquy between the Son and the Father in book 3, he knows that any warning will be futile except to deflect blame from God), Reeves posits two Raphaels, one present for book 3, the other without foreknowledge of the fall ("'Lest Wilfully Transgressing': Raphael's Narration and Knowledge in Paradise Lost," MiltonS 34 [1996]: 83-98, 91-2).
17. One can find instances of how this masterplot governs Milton criticism in general in Mark Womack, "On the Value of Lycidas," SEL 37, 1 (Winter 1997): 119-36, which argues that "Lycidas does not cohere in any single system of organization but in a multitude of overlapping patterning systems" (p. 120) and that "[t]aken together, the various patterns manage to contain the incoherent elements present in individual patterns" (p. 121).
18. One can also find such instances in William Kerrigan, "The Irrational Coherence of Samson Agonistes," MiltonS 22 (1986): 217-32.
19. Fish, "Preface to the Second Edition," in Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost, 2d edn. (Cambridge MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997), pp. ix-lxxiii, xxi.
20. Rumrich, Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), p. 37.
21. Rumrich, Milton Unbound, p. 22.
22. As such, my argument takes its cue from William Empson's brilliantly iconoclastic treatment of God in Milton's God (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961), to whom he attributes "infinite malice" (p. 38) and who he compares to "Uncle Joe Stalin; the same patience under an appearance of roughness, the same flashes of joviality, the same thorough unscrupulousness, the same real bad temper" (p. 146). While I am deeply indebted to Empson, both for specific details and for being among the first to ask hard questions of Paradise Lost without assuming that the answer must conform to orthodoxy, he and I differ on the matter of certainty. Simply put, I see Milton as productively confused; Empson, like most other critics before and after him, retains a sense of Milton's certainty.
23. See Peter C. Herman, "'Warring Chains of Signifiers': Metaphoric Ambivalence and the Politics of Paradise Lost," TSLL 40, 3 (Fall 1998): 268-92.
24. Albert C. Labriola, "'All in All' and 'All in One': Obedience and Disobedience in Paradise Lost," in "All in All": Unity, Diversity, and the Miltonic Perspective, ed. Durham and Kristin A. Pruitt (Selinsgrove PA: Susquehanna Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 39-47, 39, 44-5.
25. Gladys W. Hudson, Paradise Lost: A Concordance (Detroit: Gale, 1970), p. 343.
26. Milton, Paradise Lost, in The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 1.6-7. All subsequent references to Milton's prose and poetry are to this edition and are cited parenthetically by book and line number in the text.
27. Both examples are cited in Christopher Ricks, Milton's Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), pp. 84, 85.
28. Ricks notes the "fluidity" in Milton's use of "or," the way "or" increases meaning and thus proves the virtues of Milton's style (pp. 84-5), but he does not pursue the matter to its conclusion.
29. Alastair Fowler, ed., John Milton: Paradise Lost (London: Longman, 1971), p. 141;
30. Merritt Y. Hughes, ed., John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), p. 199.
31. as well as his essay, "Milton's Arianism: Why It Matters," in Milton and Heresy, pp. 75-92;
32. See Herman, "'Warring Chains of Signifiers': Metaphoric Ambivalence and the Politics of Paradise Lost," 271-2.
33. Vergil, The Aeneid of Virgil, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1971), 10.778-84.
34. Theogony and Works and Days, trans. M. L. West (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 21-5, lines 617-736
35. and "The Iliad" of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press), pp. 69-70, lines 396-406.
36. Those describing Briareos as a rebel include Charles Stephanus (see DeWitt T Starnes and Ernest William Talbert, Classical Myth and Legend in Renaissance Dictionaries [Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1955], pp. 242-3)
37. Pierre Gautruche, The Poetical Histories (1671)
38. and Alexander Ross, Mystagogus Poeticus or the Muses Interpreter (London, 1648; rprt. New York: Garland, 1976), pp. 11-5, sigs. B6r-B7r.
39. Those upholding the opposing view include Natalis Comes, Mythologiae, who writes, "Dicunter suisse inter caeteros Titanines Prometheus, Crius, Pallas, Anytus, & Centimanus Aegaeon, qui Briareus etiam vocabitur; & Gyges, qui fuit Ponti ac terrae filius creditus, quem tamen non adversus Jovem bellum suscipisse scriptsit Ion in Dithyrambis, sed ad custodiam Jovis suisse è mari à Thetide evocatum" (my emphasis. I have silently corrected f to s, as to ae, and u to v). Mythologiae (Venice, 1567; rprt. New York: Garland, 1976)
40. the French translation is as follows: "Entre les autres Titans il y avoit Promethee, Crie, Pallas, Amyt, Aegae Centimain (autrement dit Briaree) & Gyges, qui toutefois, selon le tesmoignage d'Ion en ses Dithyrambes, ne fit point la guerre à Jupiter, ains fut par Thetis appelle hors de la mer, & commis pour archer de la garde du corps du Jupiter" (here also I have silently corrected f to s, æ to ae, and u to v). Mythologiae, trans. Jean Baudoin (Paris, 1627; rprt. New York: Garland, 1976)
41. William King, who comes after Milton, more or less conflates Homer and Hesiod: "and therefore Juno, Neptune and Pallas conspir'd against [Jupiter], and threw him into Bonds, from which he was delivered by Cottus, Gyges, and Briareus the Gyants, who then were esteemed as the faithful Guards of Jupiter's Person, and were call'd by Thetis to his timely Assistance" (An Historical Account of the Heathen Gods and Heroes [Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1965], p. 58).
42. Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Proust (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1979), p. 72.
43. Christopher Grose, for example, writes that "Milton omits the conclusion - at least it is not rehearsed - but the ending, like the meaning of the simile, is hardly in doubt" (Milton's Epic Process: "Paradise Lost" and Its Miltonic Background [New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973], p. 152)
44. and Linda Gregerson agrees: the morning "will presumably disclose to the pilot his doom" ("The Limbs of Truth: Milton's Use of Simile in Paradise Lost," MiltonS 14 [1980]: 135-52, 142)
45. as does Roland Mushat Frye: "Just as Leviathan lured seamen to anchor on the seeming security of his great bulk, only then to plunge to the bottom of the sea and destroy them, so Satan had already lured his angelic followers to Hell and would so lure many deceived men and women in future ages" (Milton's Imagery and the Visual Arts: Iconographic Tradition in the Epic Poems [Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978], p. 93)
46. "What are Sheaves bound up in a Barn to the Phalanx, that hem'd Satan? where's the least Similitude?" (Milton's "Paradise Lost": A New Edition, ed. Richard Bentley [London, 1732], sig. T3r, note to V.983 [p. 143], I have silently corrected f to s).
47. I am indebted to Elizabeth Sauer's important book, Barbarous Dissonance and Images of Voice in Milton's Epics (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1996)
48. for her resonant parsing of the multiple voices in Paradise Lost. Sauer, however, comes to a different conclusion than I do: "In each chapter I also identify strategies adopted by the poet to order the confusion and to create a community of voices that remains for Milton a conceptual rather than a real possibility" (Barbarous Dissonance, p. 10).
49. Surprisingly, while critics note that Adam and Eve have their own versions of their first meeting, the relationship between these two versions has not received extensive treatment, the dominant assumption being that Adam's narrative dominates Eve's in an exact parallel to how men are supposed to dominate women within patriarchy. See Christine Froula, "When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy," CritI 10, 2 (December 1983): 321-47, 328-9;
50. Diane Kelsey McColley, Milton's Eve (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1983), pp. 80-5;
51. Martin, The Ruins of Allegory, pp. 267-8;
52. Elizabeth Mazzola, "Milton's Eve as Closed Corpus, Open Book, and Apocryphal Text," in "All in All": Unity, Diversity, and the Miltonic Perspective, pp. 83-99, 84-5;
53. Sauer analyzes Adam's and Eve's narratives separately, but only once considers the relationship between the two: "Adam's autobiographical narrative responds not only to Raphael's history but also to Eve's, which it, however, overshadows" (Barbarous Dissonances, pp. 105-6).
54. Fallon in Divided Empire: Milton's Political Imagery [University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1995], pp. 47-51).
55. Stephen M. Buhler, on the other hand, says that it happens in book 3 ("Kingly States: The Politics in Paradise Lost," MiltonS 28 [1992]: 49-58, 52-3).
56. Blair Worden conflates the two narratives ("Milton's Republicanism and the Tyranny of Heaven," in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990], pp. 225-45, 238-9)
57. as does Mary Anne Radzinowicz ("The Politics of Paradise Lost," in The Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Kevin Sharpe and Steven N. Zwicker [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1987], pp. 204-29, 209-10).
58. Loewenstein, Milton: Paradise Lost [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993], p. xv).
59. This expedient bears a close resemblance to Anne Barton's positing that in Henry V, Shakespeare provides the audience with two visits to his troops, one described by the Chorus, the other put on stage by Shakespeare's players, in order to resolve the flagrant contradictions between the Chorus's view of the play and the play itself ("The King Disguised: Shakespeare's Henry V and the Comical History," in The Triple Bond: Plays, Mainly Shakespearean, in Performance, ed. Joseph G. Price [University Park: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 1975], pp. 92-117). Rumrich, in private correspondence, suggests that books 3 and 5 "participate in the eternal moment as it is dilated in time."
60. Donald F. Bouchard, Milton: A Structural Reading (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1974), p. 130;
61. Mark A. Wollaeger, "Apocryphal Narration: Milton, Raphael, and the Book of Tobit," MiltonS 21 (1985): 137-56, esp. 144;
62. See Leslie Brisman, Milton's Poetry of Choice and Its Romantic Heirs (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1973)
63. and Peter C. Herman, Squitter-wits and Muse-haters: Sidney, Spenser, Milton, and Renaissance Antipoetic Sentiment (Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 183-93.
64. Fish, "Problem Solving in Comus," in Illustrious Evidence: Approaches to English Literature of the Early Seventeenth Century, ed. Earl Miner (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975), p. 128.
65. Fish, "Reason in The Reason of Church Government," in Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1972), pp. 265-302;
66. Fish, "Driving from the Letter: Truth and Indeterminacy in Milton's Areopagitica," in Re-Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 234-54;
67. Fish, "Wanting a Supplement: The Question of Interpretation in Milton's Early Prose," in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton's Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 41-68.
68. William B. Hunter has disputed Milton's authorship of the De Doctrina Christiana ("The Provenance of the Christian Doctrine," SEL 32, 1 [Winter 1992]: 129-42
69. now expanded into a book, Visitation Unimplor'd: Milton and the Authorship of De Doctrina Christiana [Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univ. Press, 1998])
70. as well as his article in the same volume, "Milton's Arianism: Why It Matters," pp. 75-92, 75-7.
71. E.g., from Milton, De Doctrina: "The second kind of external efficiency is commonly called CREATION. Anyone who asks what God did before the creation of the world is a fool; and anyone who answers him is not much wiser" (chap. 7, "Of the Creation" [pp. 1174-8, 1174];
72. that Milton devotes a significant amount of Paradise Lost to answering this supposedly foolish question should not go unnoted); "The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was not a sacrament, as is commonly thought, for sacraments are meant to be used, not abstained from; but it was a kind of pledge or memorial of obedience" (chap. 10, "Of the Special Government of Man before the Fall," pp. 1180-9, 1180);
73. On Milton's appropriation of biblical authority for his own, see Regina M. Schwartz, "Citation, Authority, and De Doctrina Christiana," in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton's Prose, ed. Loewenstein and Turner, pp. 227-40.
74. Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy, ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 247-72, 248.
75. Schwartz, "Citation, Authority, and De Doctrina Christiana," in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton's Prose, ed. Loewenstein and Turner, pp. 227-40, 228.
76. As such, I have in mind a much more quotidian definition of anxiety than that employed by John S. Tanner in Anxiety in Eden: A Kierkegaardian Reading of "Paradise Lost" (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992). Interesting and provocative as I find this text, my sense of Milton's anxiety is grounded upon historicizing Paradise Lost, which is resolutely not within the purview of Tanner's project.
77. See also Carl Freedman's very informative analysis of Empson, T. S. Eliot, and F. R. Leavis in "How To Do Things with Milton: A Study in the Politics of Literary Criticism," in Critical Essays on John Milton, ed. Christopher Kendrick (New York: G. K. Hall, 1995), pp. 19-44.