Paradise Lost

Szegedi Tudományegyetem Bölcsészettudományi Kar PhD értekezés PROTEAN VICISSITUDE AND MILTON’S PARADISE LOST Zámbóné Kocic Larisa Témavezetők: Szőnyi György Endre, egyetemi tanár Rozsnyai Bálint, egyetemi docens Szeged, 2011 Acknowledgements The writing of this dissertation bore a remarkable resemblance to a wrestling with the old man of the sea. From its initial outset, the topic itself has turned more shapes than Proteus himself, necessitating bidding and tying often beyond my strength. Were it not for the help of my supervisors and colleagues, this bold undertaking would have never come to a fruitful end. I thank my supervisors, Professor Szőnyi György Endre, who showed me where to hold faster onto my topic lest it should break loose; and Professor Rozsnyai Bálint who not only shared his fascination with Fish, but also made me listen to Handel’s adaptations of Milton’s verse for the first time. I am grateful for associations with colleagues and friends who have informed my thinking, offered stimulus, and sustained a faith in the possibility of completing this feat: Ágnes Matuska, Anikó Oroszlán, Anna Kérchy, Erzsébet Barát, Korinna Csetényi, Tibor Fabiny, Attila Kiss, Miklós Péti and Robert Péter. I also wish to thank Milton scholars, Beverley Sherry, Stephen Fallon, and Neil Forsyth for encouraging my first “wandering steps and slow” through Milton studies. Finally, my deepest thank goes to my family for enduring my single minded obsession during the last few months of writing this dissertation. I owe them the most. Contents Acknowledgements .................................................................................. 1 Contents .................................................................................................... 2 Preface ...................................................................................................... 4 1 Not so much a Theory as a Historiography of Milton Controversies .. .......................................................................................................... 10 1.1 “Fishie fumes” and Milton Controversies ...................................... 10 1.2 “Nor… do I repent or change”: Fish on Milton ............................ 13 1.3 “Inspir’d with contradiction”: Herman and the paradigm of Milton studies ........................................................................................ 18 1.4 “With double sense deluding”: The issue of Kuhn’s paradigm. 25 1.5 “Jarr not… but well consist”: The primary value of consistency . ................................................................................................................. 31 1.6 “Grateful vicissitude”: Finding a place for the “forces of difference” .............................................................................................. 38 2 Proteus, a proverb of versatile mutability ........................................ 45 2.1 The emblem of depravity................................................................... 45 2.2 “One first matter all” .......................................................................... 58 2.3 The dignity of man .............................................................................. 61 2.4 “Proteus is no Proteus compared with you” .................................. 66 2.5 More shapes than one ......................................................................... 71 3 The copious use of words ................................................................. 76 3.1 The struggle with protean vernaculars ............................................ 77 3.2 Imitatio as a metamorphic conception of a work of art............... 87 3.3 A Good Digest of Common Places ................................................. 93 2 3.4 Works in progress ............................................................................... 98 3.5 Turning ideas into more shapes than Proteus ............................. 102 4 Howering between images ............................................................. 110 4.1 More or less than meets the eye .................................................... 110 4.2 Are Milton’s angles naked? ........................................................... 117 4.3 A sensuous effect on the ear .......................................................... 123 4.4 Dissociation or unification of sensibility? ............................. 130 5 Conclusion: “Some further change awaits us nigh” ...................... 139 Works Cited ................................................................................................ 144 3 Preface In Francis QUARLES’ book of emblems, under a motto from Deut 32:29, there is an isncription in a form of a dialogue between two allegorical sisters, Flesh and Spirit. On the emblem accompanying the inscription, we see them seated in an avenue of trees, each equipped with an optic glass, Flesh being naked and facing the reader, while Spirit is clothed and facing the horizon. The prospect of the latter’s optic glass (seen also by the viewer/reader) is the skeletal figure of Grim Death with a palm branch in his left and a two-edged sword in his right hand, and a typological scene of the last judgement with Christ seated in the middle of a rainbow, a trumpeting angel on both his sides. The inscription provides additional details of Spirit’s view: I see a Brimstone Seat of boyling Fire, And Fiends, with knotted whips of flaming Wyre, Tort’ring poore foules, that gnash their teeth, in vaine, And gnaw their flame-tormented tongues, for paine; Looke sister, how the queazie-stomack’d Graves Vomit their ded, and how the purple waves Scal’d their consumelesse bodies, strongly cursing All wombs for bearing, and all paps for nursing (1635, 178) The other sister, abashed at such “showes t’ affright” offers her own “glasse-Triangular” for the prospect there “will ravish eyes” of 4 World in colours; colours that distaine The cheeks of Proteus, or the silken Traine Of Floras Nymphs; such various sorts of hiew, As Sun-confronting Iris never knew… But Flesh is admonished by her sister Spirit for doting “on goods that perish with thy Glasse! /Nay, vanish with the turning of a hand!.” Moreover, Flesh’s prospect is insubstantial, it is of “things that have no being”, hence Spirit’s final advice (summing up the moral of the emblem): “Foresight of future torments is the way / To baulk those ills which present ioyes bewray; / As thou hast fool’d thy selfe, so now come hither, / Break that fond glasse, and let’s be wise together” (1635, 178). I have given a detailed description of this emblem because it seems to me a fitting illustration of present day Milton scholarship. On the one hand, one could cast in the role of Flesh critics like Lucy Newlyn, John Rumrich and Peter Herman (to mention just a few) who emphasize the conflicting, inconclusive, polysemous and paradoxical, indetermined nature of Milton’s works, while, on the other hand, one could see Stanley FISH cast in the role of Spirit denying substantiality to these qualities, for he sees Milton’s poem being “engaged in an act of containment”, that is, “in a forcible undoing and dispelling of energies (of thought, action, language) that are protean in their resourcefulness” (2001, 11). Also, while critics cast in the role of Flesh see ambivalence, open-endedness, the very variability of Milton’s works as their chief engaging features, Fish, perfectly epitomizing the allegorical sister Spirit, dismisses them, because “conflict, ambivalence, and openendedness […] are not constitutive features of [Milton’s] poetry but products of a systematic misreading of it” (2001, 14) or, to recourse to the emblem above, of using the wrong optic glass. Consequently, just as Flesh finds her sister’s prospect bleak in Quarles’ emblem, many critics find Fish’s reading to be of equally pallid effect (notwithstanding its popularity), indeed to the point of suspecting Fish’s 5 reader (and by extension Fish himself) of masochistic tendencies, hence, echoing Flesh’s question: “Can thy distemper’d fancie take delight / In view of Tortures?” (QUARLES 1635, 178; FORSYTH 2003, 72; KERRIGAN & RUMRICH & FALLON 2007, 278). FISH in the preface to the second edition of his seminal work on Milton, Surprised by Sin (1997, first published in 1967), while addressing the charges against his bleak prospect, admits to selling short the “forces of difference” (1997, lxvi) for which he tries to find a more substantial place in his second monograph on Milton, How Milton works (2001). However, it is here that he alots them a role of mere temptations, of values that need to be dispelled because they can seen as values only by a “systematic misreading” of the poem (2001, 14), hence, Fish’s argument proves to be just as “suffocating” as the structure of his argument in Surprised by Sin. Therefore, in my dissertation, I hope to find a place for “the forces of difference” in Milton’s works, and particularly in Paradise Lost, that would prove more liberating than Fish’s constraining notion which allows these differences mere cameo roles that are bound to consume themselves in Milton’s poetry and prose. In doing so, I also strive to decline the notions of incertitude and indeterminacy pervasive in Milton studies today (especially in the strand opposing Fish) and, instead, will interpret the multiple levels of meaning present in Milton as functions of fecundity rather than tokens of incertitude. On the one hand, variety forms the basis of reasoning — “Reason also is choice” and choice being possible only where there is a variety

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