Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Professor John Rogers: Traditionally in
Renaissance literature, the muses -- and this will be
familiar to many of you -- the muses are thought to be the
daughters of Memory, and the nine muses up on Mount
Helicon -- that's where the muses are believed to have lived
-- are the offspring of the goddess of memory,
whose name in the Greek is Mnemosyne.
Mnemosyne, whose name is spelled with some difficulty,
is spelled on the lower part of your handout.
Now, there's an important reason for this genealogy,
the idea that the muses are the daughter of Mnemosyne,
the goddess of memory. In the Renaissance,
the most potent source of poetic inspiration was often
believed to be the poet's own memory,
the degree to which the poet could call up,
just out of sheer recall, literary topoi or
commonplaces stored in his or her memory from a lifetime of
reading. Milton himself,
and this seems to be true, is said to have had one of the
most capacious, one of the largest memories in
English letters. This is the effect that we get,
I think, from reading Milton -- is this notion that he seems to
have had one of the largest memories imaginable and that
he's remembered just about everything he's ever
read.Now we know that Milton was blind probably well before
the time he began writing Paradise Lost,
and therefore, of course, he was then unable
to read. Even though there were people,
mostly young men, willing and able to read to
him, it's clear that the vast
quantity of learning that gets poured -- all of that erudition
that gets poured into the pages of Paradise Lost -- it's
clear that this is not a product of Milton's last-minute review
of the classics. This learning springs from the
recesses of Milton's memory. I take this to be an undeniable
fact, but this is easy for us to say -- it's easy for us to say
that it's Milton's memory which is the fount of so much of the
poem's erudition. It's easy for us to say that it
was Milton's memory that facilitated his grasp of the
Christian and the classical traditions.But I think
Milton would probably feel a little uncomfortable with our
easy attribution of so much of the poem's learning to his
memory. That's because to suggest --
just think of it -- to suggest that Milton is relying on his
memory as he composes so allusively and so dependently,
in a lot of ways, so much of Paradise Lost --
to say that is simply to say that the poem has been generated
by Milton and not by God. Milton has expended,
we know, a considerable amount of energy in establishing what
he wants us, I am assuming,
to believe is the divine authority behind the poem.
This poem, Milton tells us again and again,
has been authorized by that same Holy Spirit who had
inspired Moses to write the Book of Genesis.
And so in order to make an extraordinary claim for divine
authorization, Milton has to defend against
this notion that I just began this lecture with:
the idea that memory is on some level really at the source of
Milton's poetic inspiration because to rely on memory is
simply in some sense is to admit that this is just one more epic.
It's to admit that this is in fact a late epic and that it
derives from a close, studious, student-like
imitation of the great epics of Homer and Virgil.Now you'll
remember from our discussion of the opening invocation to
Paradise Lost, that insistent bid that
Milton was making: the bid to be first.
His adventurous song is one that "with no middle flight
intends to soar / above th' Aonian Mount,
while it pursues things unattempted yet in Prose or
Rhyme." And so it was with such pride
that he declared that this poem was going to soar above all of
its classical predecessors, but the category [laughs]
"Prose or Rhyme" is a large one.
It covers just about everything, I would have to say,
and the literary spectrum from prose to rhyme,
of course, would have to include the Bible as well.
There's even the suggestion here that Milton will be
pursuing things unattempted yet even in holy scripture.
That is an extraordinary claim for the poem's
originality.But it's a difficult claim because even as
Milton makes this claim, he manages to undermine its
force. Merritt Hughes usefully notes
this in one of the notes at the bottom of the page,
that Milton in that line, "things unattempted yet in
Prose or Rhyme," Milton's actually alluding to the opening
of another romance epic. This is the Orlando Furioso
by the great sixteenth-century Italian poet
Ariosto. What is happening?
[laughs] Milton had borrowed this claim
for an absolute originality. He's taken it from somebody
else, and in doing so I think he's doing this deliberately;
he's exposing some of the darker ironies behind his own
literary ambition. It's a good sort of question
that gets raised in such a problematic allusion:
how do you set out to write an original poem within such a
conventional genre like the epic?
What does it mean to be inspired to write by the
Christian Holy Spirit when your epic,
in fact, just imitates a whole array of classical pagan
conventions? How can you write an original
poem when your literary consciousness is essentially
made up of the memory of all the things that you've read
before?This is what I'll be proposing over the course of
this lecture: that memory is a problem that
Paradise Lost is continually confronting.
So much of the pathos of Satan's fallen condition
involves his painful memory of that blissful state in heaven
from which he had fallen. The problem of memory is just
as important to the psychological dynamics of the
fall of Adam and Eve, but as we will see when we look
at Book Four, surely it's the problem of the
poet's memory that's the most troubling in Paradise Lost.
Milton's own faculty of memory -- this is the idea that
I'm going to be floating here -- seems to provide something like,
or pose a stumbling block or an obstacle for,
his attempt to write an original,
divinely inspired poem. I want to suggest in this
lecture something that will initially sound,
I assume, like a peculiar formulation:
there's a strange way in which Milton has to imagine himself
losing his memory if he's actually going to open himself
up to the muses' inspiration and the inspiration of the
Christian, the heavenly, muse.
There's a sense in which Milton will have to forget everything
he's learned up to this point. There are some important signs,
I think, especially in the first two books of Paradise
Lost of what we can think of as Milton's -- it's a literary
fantasy, a literary fantasy of
forgetfulness.As you may well have gleaned from your
reading, the first books of the poem are
particularly absorbed with the idea of forgetting,
because more than any other part of Paradise Lost
they display so ostentatiously the remarkable
scope of Milton's own memory. These books are without
question more heavily allusive than any other books in the
epic. They are steeped in the entire
literary tradition of the underworld journey that
stretches from The Odyssey of Homer up through Virgil's
Aeneid, and of course up
through all of the Renaissance romance epics.
And it's important to remember that Milton will -- this is
probably an invariable truth, but I'll qualify it nonetheless
-- that Milton will typically imitate his predecessors only
with a difference. He usually takes pains (for
example, in his great depiction of hell in Books One and Two) to
avoid the standard epic scenes of the torture of the damned,
for example, with which we're familiar if
we've read Homer or Virgil or, of course,
Dante much later.There are nonetheless a few details from
the classical underworld that he seems to have lifted more or
less wholesale and one of them -- I'm going to ask you to look
at page 246 in the Hughes. This is line 582 of Book
Two. One of these little details
that Milton has lifted rather directly is that of the river
Lethe, the river of oblivion that was
believed to flow in the underworld.
It's a river that, I think, all classical writers,
and a lot of Renaissance writers, are very comfortable
placing in the underworld. So this is Book Two,
line 582, Milton: Far off from these a slow
and silent stream, Lethe the River of
Oblivion rolls Her wat'ry Labyrinth, whereof who
drinks,Forthwith his former state and being forgets,
Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain.
So in this context, the river of oblivion serves an
obvious purpose in the context we have here in Book Two.
To drink from this river would allow the fallen angels to
forget their fallen state, to forget the fact of their
fallen-ness from their more blissful former condition.
On some level, forgetfulness would just ease
the grievousness of this miserable new psychological
dynamic with which they are tormented.But there's also,
I think, a deeper sense in which Milton himself might want
to drink from this slow and silent stream.
If Milton could silence -- see what you think of this -- all of
his literary memories, perhaps he could better
guarantee his fresh intake of inspiration from the Christian
heavenly muse. It's a fantasy,
of course, because no such brainwashing is going to be
possible, just as the fallen angels -- if
you look at line 607 -- will be barred from drinking their fill
of the river Lethe, forgetfulness is impossible.
The fallen angels, they: …
wish and struggle, as they pass,
to reachThe tempting stream, with one small drop to
loseIn sweet forgetfulness all pain and woe,
All in one moment, and so near the brink;But
Fate withstands, and to oppose th'
attemptMedusa with Gorgonian terror guardsThe Ford,
and of it self the water fliesAll taste of living
wight, as once it fledThe lip of Tantalus.
It's an amazing passage because in a lot of ways,
I think, Milton is actually directly enacting for us,
the reader, the impossibility of such sweet forgetfulness.
As soon as he describes the impossibility of forgetting,
a flood of classical figures pours into his own narration.
They pour with such a force, I think, that Milton permits --
I think this is a significant rift that fissures or fractures
the otherwise seamless text that we have in Book Two.
I'm convinced that there's something very strange going
on.Standing in the Lethe of Milton's hell is none other than
the classical figure, the figure from classical
mythology, Medusa. You know Medusa.
She has the power with her snaky locks to turn men into
stone, and so this seems to be unique -- I don't know of any
predecessor that Milton had for this: Medusa,
having been placed by Milton in the river Lethe,
in the Christian underworld, can prevent,
of course, the fallen angels from drinking the waters of
oblivion. Such is her power.
But we have every right to ask what Medusa -- this is a figure
from Greek mythology -- what Medusa is doing in a Christian
hell. There are, of course,
dozens of figures taken from the texts of classical mythology
who are alluded to throughout the first two books,
but invariably they appear, just as Tantalus does in this
very passage, within the context of a simile.
They're not actually present in the real world of Milton's hell,
or if it's a pagan god who's mentioned,
Milton will tell us that the pagan god was just an early
manifestation of one of the fallen angels.But at least
within the context of the present narration,
the figures mentioned in Milton's hell are all former
inhabitants of the Christian heaven.
And the fallen angels themselves -- Satan,
Moloch, Belial, Mammon, and Beelzebub -- these
are all demons who were drawn from the Judeo-Christian
tradition of demonology. They've been clearly been
hurled into hell by a Judeo-Christian deity.
So this little moment, this Medusa moment,
we can call it, is really quite strange.
In the midst of all of the Judeo-Christian realism,
we have standing here a decidedly pagan -- and I think
this is not uninteresting -- a decidedly female presence.
You'll correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I'm right to insist
that this is a unique phenomenon in these books.I think
there's actually a reason for this aberration.
Medusa can turn men into stone. She subjects them to that
posture of absolute paralysis that we've seen represented in a
number of the early poems. The Lady, the Lady in Milton's
mask, was stuck to her seat in the presence of the
Shakespearian magician Comus, and Milton himself had claimed
in the poem "On Shakespeare" that Shakespeare "dost make us
Marble with too much conceiving."
Shakespeare can turn us to marble because he can fill our
imaginations and leave us incapable of thinking for
ourselves, incapable of maneuvering
around, or moving around, on our own.
I think it's possible to see Medusa here as an emblem or some
sort of figure for a similarly paralyzing power.
You could think of Medusa as Milton's counter-muse.
If Milton's true muse, or so he hopes or so he wants
us to believe, has a Christian origin,
then this counter-muse is unquestionably classical.
She's a daughter of Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory,
and she represents that force that prevents Milton from
forgetting all of the pagan and all of the classical literature
that, of course, he had spent so much
of his life reading.Now I asked you to read for today,
and I'm hoping you remember some of the reading,
the canto from Spenser's Faerie Queene that
features the cave of Mammon. The cave of Mammon is the home
of Mammon, the money god, who stores in his cave all of
the wealth and all of the honor that human beings spend so much
energy striving for. Now Spenser's hero in Book Two
of the Faerie Queene is Sir Guyon, and Sir Guyon
descends into Mammon's Cave -- it's a Spenserian underworld --
and it's in Mammon's Cave that he is tempted by the money god
himself. This little bit of the
Faerie Queene is important for Milton in all
sorts of ways. It's first of all a depiction
of an underworld, and so it provides Milton with
an important Christian representation of a hell.
In that respect, it has a kind of priority over
the hells or the underworlds of Homer and Virgil.
It also provides Milton with the figure of Mammon who will,
as you will see over the course of this semester become -- well,
here in Paradise Lost he's one of the key fallen
angels in Milton's hell. Mammon actually seems to
represent the Miltonic position, or that position in the debate
in hell that seems to resemble most closely Milton's own moral
temperament, we could say;
and you'll see at the end of this semester that Spenser's
cave of Mammon canto is even more central to Milton's sequel
to Paradise Lost, which is Paradise
Regained, which in many ways is a more or less close
rewriting of Spenser's story with Satan playing the role of
Mammon and Christ in the role of Sir Guyon,
the hero.Now you also may remember that we have already
run into Spenser's Mammon before this point,
before Paradise Lost. Mammon had surfaced -- I'm
testing your memories here -- in the text of Areopagitica.
Because this is one of the most famous passages in the treatise,
and it's not one that we actually looked at for Mammon
himself, I'm going to ask you to turn to
Areopagitica. This is page 728 in the
Hughes, the right-hand column.
This is where Milton began to consider the problem of
temptation that, of course, will become so
important to Paradise Lost. Here though,
Milton is talking about the temptation of reading classical
literature. This is an argument that we've
examined before. Read everything you can,
Milton insists, because only then can you
overcome what he thinks of and characterizes as the temptation
of reading. So in the right-hand column of
728: I cannot praise a
fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed,
that never sallies out and sees her adversary,
but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is
to be run for, not without dust and heat.
[I'm going to skip a couple lines here.]
… [W]hich was the reason why our
sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a
better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas [Scotus and Aquinas are
medieval philosophers] describing true temperance
under the person of Guion, brings him in with his palmer
through the cave of Mammon, and the bower of earthly bliss,
that he might see and know, and yet abstain.
Spenser's cave of Mammon is central to Milton's
understanding of the Christian's resistance of temptation,
the temptation posed in Areopagitica by
scandalous and seemingly non-virtuous books.
Spenser, Milton argues here, knows the importance of reading
everything, the Miltonic position.
However evil those books are in and of themselves,
we have to read them so that we might see and know and yet
abstain.Now this passage is famous for a lot of reasons,
not least of which is that it's wonderful.
It's juicy evidence that provides for Milton's intense
fondness for -- we might even think of it as a passion for --
this earlier English poet. The passage is also famous
because in it Milton does something that he almost never
does. Milton has made a mistake.
John Milton has made a mistake. He's made a literary mistake
and, as I think all editors know, Spenser does not.
Edmund Spenser in the Faerie Queene does not bring Sir
Guyon with his palmer through the cave of Mammon.
Guyon descends in to the cave of Mammon by himself.
The palmer has been Guyon's guide up to this point,
his teacher. The palmer accompanies him on
all of his adventures but this one, and Spenser in stanza two
of this canto makes a big deal of the fact that Guyon is
descending in to the Cave of Mammon by himself.
He's been separated from his guide, his teacher,
the palmer.Milton seems actually to have forgotten
something is. His memory has failed him and,
given the general importance that I'm attributing to problems
of remembering and forgetting, I think it's safe to assume
that something important is going on here.
The temptations that Mammon offers Guyon are literally
within the story itself temptations of wealth,
but they're also temptations to the wealth of classical
learning, the wealth of the entire classical heritage.
You'll remember that Mammon has a special place within his cave
that's called the garden of Proserpine,
and the Garden of Proserpine has within it all of the central
symbols of pagan wisdom and of beautiful epic literature.
Perhaps you'll remember, too, that Tantalus is present
in the cave of Mammon, literary temptation being as
important as all other temptations in this canto of
Spenser's. The temptations of classical
literature are so genuinely tempting to Milton that he finds
it impossible to imagine that Guyon could have seen and known
and yet abstained from them without the aid of his teacher,
the palmer.You'll note in this passage from
Areopagitica that Milton himself calls Spenser a teacher.
He's a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas,
and the text seems almost to suggest that Milton can't do
without his own teacher, Edmund Spenser.
Milton needs Spenser -- this is an argument that's been
amplified at some length and really quite brilliantly by John
Guillory in the book Poetic Authority -- Milton needs
Spenser to serve as the Christian poet who can help
Milton fight off the temptations of pagan poets like Homer and
Virgil; or perhaps Spenser is a poet
who can help Milton fight off the temptations of even a
secular contemporary like William Shakespeare.
It's almost as if the story of Mammon's temptations of Guyon
has hit a raw nerve in Milton. Milton's lifelong
susceptibility to this story, and that will without question
prove to be the case, speaks to a truly profound
ambivalence about the pleasure to be derived from a reading of
secular literature. Milton seems genuinely
ambivalent about all of the time and all of the study that he has
invested in his own education to become an epic poet.
I think that the metaphors of investment here and of profit
are especially applicable since it's the figure of Mammon who
provides Milton with a literary version of his economic account
of poetic investment and poetic profit.Let's look at the
first appearance of Mammon in Paradise Lost.
This is page 228 of the Hughes, Book One,
line 678. Milton's describing the
landscape of hell, and hell here,
it turns out, seems to resemble Milton's
heaven in that it contains deep within it -- and we would never
have expected this -- it contains deep within it a soil
that is hiding precious metals. This is an underworld,
of course, but there seems to be another underworld resting
just beneath it. It's an underworld filled with
gold that a brigade of fallen angels begins to extract with
spades and pick axes. So this is what Milton tells us
at line 678: Mammon led them on [this
angelic brigade]Mammon, the least erected Spirit that
fellFrom heav'n…
And even in heaven, we're told Mammon was always
looking down [laughs] -- it's kind of a cute scene --
Mammon was always looking down at heaven's golden pavement
rather than contemplating the more elevated figure,
presumably, of the heavenly father.
And in line 684 we are told this of Mammon:
… [B]y him firstMen also,
and by his suggestion taught,Ransack'd the Center,
and with impious handsRifl'd the bowels of
thir mother EarthFor Treasures better hid.
Soon had his crewOp'nd into the Hill a spacious woundAnd
digg'd out ribs of Gold. When we consider the degree of
Milton's anxieties about his own attachment to classical
learning, I think we can see the
significance of Mammon's actions here.
The image of men, and it's a grotesque image,
of men rifling the bowels of their mother earth for treasures
better hid -- this is a disgusting and terrifying image
of a lot of things. One of the things,
I think, that it's an image of is the practice of literary
excavation. To ransack the intellectual
treasures hidden away in the landscape of literary history is
an act, on some level, of a kind of a violent
desecration. Milton, I think,
would need to defend himself from the implications of this
act of violence.And so Milton calls on none other than
his teacher, Spenser.
Milton seems to have dug around rather carefully in his copy of
the Faerie Queene, and he's come up with this
illusion. You actually see this near the
top of your handout, the allusion from the Faerie
Queene. It's the passage from
Spenser's cave of Mammon canto that describes this
same scene of violation, the violation of mother earth.
The first discovery of gold for Spenser took place when "a
cursed hand, the quiet womb / of his great-grandmother with steel
to wound…" Spenser, just like Milton after
him, seems to be associating the digging of gold with the pursuit
of a very literary past. They're on the same wave length
here.Now it's not entirely clear that Milton has been
successful in sufficiently vilifying Mammon's project of
the excavation of riches. I think in a lot of ways -- and
this could probably be said of Spenser as well -- Milton is
attracted to the excavation project.
Look again at the sentence that I just read, the last lines:
Soon had his crewOp'nd into the Hill a
spacious woundAnd dig'd out ribs of Gold."
The fallen angels may be -- okay, they may be violating
mother earth, not so great,
but look what this violation produces.
Out of the wound are dug "ribs of gold."
The image that seems initially negative begins to resemble
something, I think, quite important and quite
beautiful. I'm thinking here of the
creation of Eve. Adam will tell us later -- this
is in Book Eight when Adam recounts for us the creation of
Eve -- that God: …
op'n'd up my left side, and tookFrom thence a
Rib…[W]ide was the wound…[but t]he Rib
He form'd and fashion'd with his hands.
And when we remember that God will dig a rib out of Adam's
wound in order to create the beautiful,
the golden Eve, we realize how complicated,
how complex and how ambivalent, Milton's little image is here
at the beginning of the poem. Milton is loading every rift of
this passage with ore, and there seems to be something
at least provisionally -- at least for a moment,
there seems to be something potentially redemptive and
potentially generative about the activity of excavation that
Milton is describing otherwise so negatively here,
that he's condemning here. Mammon uses this extracted gold
to create that magnificent structure Pandemonium,
and the function of this structure is implicit in its
name. Pandemonium comes from pan
daimonium: pan-demon.
It's the place where all of the demons, all of the fallen
angels, will congregate. This is their political capital.
This is where they will debate their future and establish a new
political institution. This structure -- and this is
something that's important for Milton to convey to us -- is
genuinely beautiful. It's not entirely clear that
Milton wants us to think of Pandemonium as unambiguously
evil. Clearly, it's evil in all sorts
of ways. This is the fallen institution
established by the fallen angels -- but it's more complicated
than that. Look at Milton's description of
the architect of Pandemonium. This is the man who appears as
the fallen angels enter the building at line 732.
The architect of Pandemonium is Mulciber and:
[H]is hand was knownIn Heav'n by many a
Tow'red structure high,Where Scepter'd Angels held thir
residenceAnd sat as Princes...
Mulciber was famous in heaven for building beautiful palaces
there, and Milton lets us know that there isn't actually that
much of a difference, at least in terms of
architectural or aesthetic quality, between the palaces of
heaven and the palaces of hell. For a moment at least,
it's almost as if there were a strange moral equivalence
between the palaces up there and the palaces down here.
A lot of the rigid moral distinctions that the poem has
actually been working rather hard to establish are beginning
to blur. The line between good and evil
is beginning to blur. Look at Milton's account of
what happened to Mulciber later on earth.
This is line 739: Nor was his name unheard
or unador'dIn ancient Greece;
and in Ausonian landMen call'd him Mulciber;
and how he fellFrom Heav'n, they fabl'd,
thrown by angry JoveSheer o'er the Crystal Battlements:
from MornTo Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve,A
Summers day; and with the setting
SunDropt from the Zenith like a falling Star,On
Lemnos th' Ægean Isle…
Milton tell us that the story of Mulciber in ancient Greece --
in Homer's account of The Iliad, he tells us
this story. It's actually the Homeric
version of the story of Mulciber that you have reproduced for you
on the handout. Milton is reminding us with
this illusion of the punishment of Mulciber and the punishment
by implication of all of the fallen angels by an angry God;
but at the very moment that he's telling us of Mulciber's
punishment, he's allowing himself to dilate,
to augment or to expand, this beautiful little nugget
that's been excavated from the pages of Homer,
and he allows himself to linger over its beauty.
Just look at those lines again: [F]rom MornTo Noon he
fell, from Noon to dewy Eve,A Summer's day.
I propose that for a moment, we almost forget what's
actually being described in the passage.
It's as if the story of Mulciber's punishment has come
to a standstill. Of course, it's with no small
help from Milton's incredibly elastic blank verse here that
the headlong rush of Mulciber's fall has been drawn to a
provisional stop. It's been drawn out and
spatial-ized. It's as if it's been
spatial-ized into a scene of a beautiful summer's day,
and we're left contemplating not the punishment of evil but
-- I don't know, one of the things we're left
contemplating is the sheer beauty of Homeric poetry.
Milton has dug up a gem from the pages of The
Iliad, and this gem has something like a Medusa
effect on the poem or perhaps on us as readers.
Time almost seems to stop when we begin appreciating this image
solely on aesthetic grounds.But Milton,
of course, is a Christian poet, and he will not allow time to
stop forever; for as soon as he explains that
Mulciber fell like a star on Lemnos, the Ægean Isle,
he adds this: [T]hus they
relate,Erring; for he with this rebellious
routFell long before…
This is so mean.
Just as we were beginning to appreciate the loveliness of the
classical tradition, Milton reminds us -- once again
he reestablishes the moral poles of good and evil:
"hus they relate, / erring."
Who cares? Who cares what Homer says?
What did Homer or any of Homer's contemporaries know
about Mulciber? Mulciber fell long before Homer
because Mulciber fell long before the creation of the earth
-- and it's Milton, and it's no other poet before
Milton, who's finally able to set the record straight.
Milton's insisting here that all of the pagan deities had
originally been fallen angels. He's providing us with
something of a prehistory of classical mythology,
a prehistory of classical mythology that had,
of course, been completely unknown to Homer and Virgil,
naturally, because they didn't have the benefit of the
Christian story of the fall of the rebel angels.Now without
doubt this is a dubious theory of classical anthropology.
Milton probably knows that; but it's a theory that serves
an obviously useful function for Milton.
It allows the poet to appropriate all of the classical
literature that he wants to because in the end he'll be able
to correct that literature. He can compare the myths of
Homer -- the earliest myths we have -- he can compare them
directly to the time scheme of Christian history and prove
beyond a shadow of a doubt that his own version,
that Milton's own version, of the story comes first.
Milton may be writing after Homer, but the story he's
telling comes first. This is one of the primary
strategies that Milton develops, especially in the first two
books of Paradise Lost, as a kind of defense
against his dependence on classical literature.Now
Milton may not be able to forget Homer,
but he is able to correct Homer or to preempt Homer.
Let's look at a later manifestation of Mammon.
This is in Book Two, line 249. This is page 238 of the
Hughes, Book Two, line 249.
This is Mammon's speech during the great consult in hell.
The subject of the debate has been the nature of the fallen
angels' political future: essentially,
the question is where do we go from here?
Moloch, you'll remember, is the military general who
will risk absolutely anything for revenge.
Belial is the lovely intellectual,
the intellectual seeking peace and who prizes above all things
his intellectual freedom: our thoughts,
as Belial puts it, our "thoughts that wander
through eternity." Mammon is the profiteer.
Mammon is the goldsmith's son who wants to invest his talents
with labor and with hard work in order to show a profit.
Mammon's advice is thus not to seek revenge on heaven or to
give up, as Belial is counseling,
in despair but to cultivate all of the rich resources that we
have down here in hell. So line 249 of Book Two:
Let us [this is Mammon] not then pursueBy force
impossible, by leave obtain'dUn&a
grave;cceptable, though in Heav'n,
our stateOf splendid vassalage, but rather
seekOur own good from ourselves…[T]hough in
this vast recess, Free, and to none
accountable, preferringHard liberty before the easy
yokeOf servile Pomp. And a few lines down Mammon
tells us that we will "work ease out of pain / through labour and
endurance." He's offering us essentially an
economic model that, I think, we as readers of
Milton recognize. This is the model of investment
and profit that had characterized Jesus' parable of
the talents. It's the model of investment
and profit that characterized so many of Milton's own early
writings, including that promise,
you'll remember, to his fellow Englishmen that
he would one day produce a work of literature that his
countrymen would not willingly let die.Now for my money,
it's Belial who gives us the most beautiful and the most
seductive contribution to the debate in hell,
but it has got to be Mammon who most resembles Milton himself.
It's Mammon that comes closest to Milton's own -- this puritan
ethos of disciplined liberty, hard work, and this kind of
absolute self-sufficiency. In so many ways it seems that
Mammon is actually echoing a lot of the political prose that
Milton had written a decade before.
It's almost as if in the character of Mammon,
we have Milton's parody of himself.
That cry, "Let us seek our own good from ourselves" -- it's a
perfect Miltonic tag for the first two books of Paradise
Lost. Milton is always seeking a
good from himself that is morally superior to the good of
his classical predecessors. Milton refuses the state of
splendid vassalage to a kingly poet like Homer.
He's continually seeking a good from within his own religious
and from within his own literary sensibility.Now in these two
books we've seen Milton dig up and discard just about the
entire [laughs] tradition of epic poetry.
It's at the end of Book two that Milton seems to complete
this process, this process of a trashing of
his literary predecessors. It's here at the end of the
second book that Milton is finally ready to embrace the
poetics of his better teacher, Edmund Spenser,
and out of nowhere -- and I know that all first-time readers
of Paradise Lost are surprised by this -- we have
Milton engaging the fine art of Spenserian allegory.
So let me remind you of what's happening.
Satan flies out of hell. He journeys heroically through
chaos in order to find that new planet that he had heard about
in heaven, and he's stopped by a figure
who holds the keys to hell's gate and who can determine who
is able to leave and who is able to enter.Now it goes without
saying that Milton has not been up to this point writing an
allegorical poem. The creatures moving and
speaking have been actual creations of the deity,
with the strange exception of Medusa.
They have a substantial reality within the fictional context,
the mimetic context, of this epic.
These are angels. They are individual creatures
who seem really to be in hell just as they seem really to have
been in heaven; but the figures of Sin and
Death, they are entirely different animals.
They are mere personifications of abstract ideas,
and it's not at all clear that Sin and her son,
Death, exist as individual entities in the same way,
or on the same plane, that Satan does,
for example, or Beelzebub. It's reasonable,
I think, to invoke Dr. Johnson here,
Samuel Johnson, who writes in his Life of
Milton that Milton's (I love this) unskillful allegory
appears to be one of the greatest faults of the poem.
Whenever Johnson is being arrogant and mean about
Paradise Lost, invariably he's on to
something, and here he's telling us that
Milton's gone too far. He's taken his allegory too far.
He permits a real character like Satan to interact with a
merely allegorical or symbolic character like Sin.
The effect for Johnson -- and who can say that this is -- that
Johnson is wrong? -- involves an awkward
collision of different artistic modes and entirely distinct
planes of reality.I don't know.
If you've ever seen a movie -- well, there are lots of movies
that do this; one of the first movies that
did this was "Who Killed Roger Rabbit?"
-- if that's something you're familiar with -- in which the
interaction of real people with what are called "Toons" in that
film is part of the film's pleasure.
The boundary between different levels of reality is crossed.
Milton's performing a similar boundary-crossing aesthetic
gesture here. Now it might be morally useful
to talk about the forces of Sin and Death as if they were actual
moral agents, but it makes no sense within
the mimetic narrative that Milton has created for us here
in this realistic poem. I think that Milton is acutely
self-conscious of the uncertain status that these allegorical
characters that he has invented have.
And so I'm going to propose this: the idea that Milton's own
allegory, while it is a serious allegory and it's performing all
sorts of work that I don't have time to talk about,
is at the same time a critique of allegory.Look at the
description of Sin. This is line 648 on page 247 of
the Hughes: Before the Gates there
satOn either side a formidable shape;The one
seem'd Woman to the waist, and fair,But ended foul in
many a scaly foldVoluminous and vast, a Serpent
arm'dWith mortal sting.
Now those of you who have taken English 125 or any course that
has asked you to read Spenser will recognize almost instantly
I think, I hope, Milton's literary depth.
At the very moment that Milton is beginning his own attempt at
allegory, he alludes to the most famous allegorical character by
England's most famous allegorical poet.
This is Errour, the filthy dragoness who charms
us, or doesn't charm us, in the first canto of the first
book of the Faerie Queene. Like Milton's Sin,
Spenser's Errour is half woman, half serpent,
and in a lot of ways she embodies the very problem of
religious error. Dr.
Johnson is right to suggest that Milton's use of Spenserian
allegory only invites a confusion of what are
essentially disparate and irreconcilable categories;
but what Johnson doesn't seem to understand is that the
confusion is precisely Milton's point.
It doesn't make sense to speak of sin and death as if they were
living entities capable of action and actual influence,
as if they were living entities moving about as agents in the
world.And why is that? Within the perspective of
Milton's free-will theology, sin can't exist as an external
reality. It can't exist as a force that
conceives a human individual from the outside without that
individual's consent because we all freely sin.
No one can be compelled to do anything within the Miltonic
theology of free will. Sin can only exist as the
product of individual choices that freely willing people,
like Adam and Eve or like Satan before his fall,
make and for Milton to parse the world into rigidly
determined categories like good and evil,
or sin and virtue, is simply to be guilty of
intellectual error. This isn't how the world works
in -- this isn't the Miltonic universe.
Milton is alluding so unashamedly here to Spenser's
Errour because, I think,
on some level he wants to brand Spenserian allegory as an
erroneous literary practice.Now we've seen
Milton do this before. He uses -- and I'm thinking of
"uses" in a pejorative way -- a poet like Homer to extract what
beauty he can from deep within the Homeric minds,
and then he does that only to turn on Homer with that
devastating dismissal: "hus they relate,
/ erring." He doesn't even give Homer the
credit of [laughs] being singular in having
composed The Iliad. "They" -- who's "they"?
He can't even bring himself to say, "Thus he relates,
erring," so powerful is this defense against Homer.
Homer was in error, Milton told us,
and Milton called on the moral voice of Spenser to help him
make that moral judgment against Homer.
But one of Milton's projects in Paradise Lost is to
effect his forgetting of all of his literary precursors.
That means that he has to expel from his system not just Homer,
not just Virgil and Dante, but also his better teacher,
Edmund Spenser. It's almost as if we can hear
Milton say, after he's given his own really quite elaborate
display of allegorical poetry, "Thus Spenser relates,
erring."Now in 1644 when he wrote the Areopagitica,
Milton may have forgotten that Spenser's Guyon did in fact
descend in to hell without the help of his teacher,
the palmer. For Milton then,
at least at that point in his career, his literary career,
such a trip without a guide may well have seemed unthinkable.
The temptations of the wealth of classical literature
represented by Mammon perhaps were too powerful to resist
alone; but now in the 1660s I think
it's possible to see a way in which Milton finally gets the
story right. He realizes now that it is
possible, perhaps it is possible, for the Christian poet
to descend into the literary underworld alone,
just as it was possible for Sir Guyon in the actual Faerie
Queene to descend in to the cave of Mammon alone.
Milton surveys the wealth of literary tradition before him,
and he resists its allure without the help of any human
guide. He can reject the beauty of
Homer, he can reject the beauty of Virgil, but he can also
reject -- and this has got to be an even greater challenge,
perhaps -- he can also reject the help of his Christian
teacher, Edmund Spenser.And so I'm going to leave you here
at the end of this lecture less with a conclusion than with a
paradox. I think that Milton in
Paradise Lost finally remembers what actually happened
in Spenser's cave of Mammon, how the hero triumphed alone,
but Milton remembers this particular Spenserian story only
once he has successfully forgotten Spenser -- only once
he has set aside fully his teacher's style of
poetry.Okay. That's it for today.
Next time reread for the third time -- you will be repaid by
your dedication -- Books One and Two, this time focusing on the
similes. Also, as I mentioned at the
beginning of class, read the essays by Stanley Fish
and Geoffrey Hartman.