Classical Memories/Modern Identities Paul Allen Miller and Richard H. Armstrong, Series Editors Humanism and Classical Crisis Anxiety, Intertexts, and the Miltonic Memory U Jacob Blevins THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS • COLUMBUS Copyright © 2014 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Blevins, Jacob, 1970– Humanism and classical crisis : anxiety, intertexts, and the Miltonic memory / Jacob Blevins. p. cm. — (Classical memories/modern identities) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-1241-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8142-1241-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8142-9344-7 (cd-rom) ISBN-10: 0-8142-9344-1 (cd-rom) 1. Literature, Modern—17th century—History and criticism. 2. Literature, Modern—15th and 16th centuries—History and criticism. 3. Classical literature—Influence. 4. Humanism. 5. Milton, John, 1608–1674—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. II. 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ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For Catherine my most beautiful memory Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1 • The Convergence of Voice, The Artifacts of Memory: Theoretical Orientations 14 Anxiety and the Lack of Lack 14 Anxious Influence and a Lacanian Reconceptualization of Bloom 20 Humanism and Ideologies of the Self 25 Chapter 2 • The Renaissance, Rome, and Humanism’s Classical Crisis 30 Rome’s Ruins and the Resurrection of the Secular Self 32 Rome on the English Stage 45 Chapter 3 • Anxiety and Constructions of the Text: Dialogues with a Classical Past 54 Lyricism and the Processes of Identity in the French Pléiade 55 Marvell’s Two Gardens: Rewriting the Roman Hortus 65 Catullus and the Sons of Ben 73 Chapter 4 • Miltonic Elegy and the Rebirth of a Roman (Split) Subject 85 Latin Elegy and the (New) Roman Subject 91 “Christ’s Nativity” and Exorcising the Pagan Past 104 Lycidas and Allusive Self-Consciousness 111 viii Contents Chapter 5 • Milton’s Heroic Action and Formal Falls 125 The Hero Is in the Form 128 Epic Action and Tragic Falls 133 Epilogue 146 Selected Bibliography 155 Index 167 Acknowledgments would like to express my sincere gratitude to the U.S. and U.K. Fulbright Commissions for their early support of this project. I also owe thanks to those at Cardiff University, who allowed me access to their wonderful university back in 2006. I would particularly like to thank Mar- Itin Kayman for a lunch conversation with me about his concerns over the notion of “influence.” His thoughts on the subject have remained with me throughout my writing of this book. I would like to thank Catherine Belsey for her initial support of my project; her endorsement, I am sure, carried substantial weight with the Fulbright selection committee. David H. J. Larmour and Diana Spencer published an altered version of Chapter 2 in their The Sites of Rome: Time, Space, Memory (Oxford: Ox- ford University Press, 2006). Their early comments and suggestions helped shape the direction of the book as a whole. Thanks to Intertexts and the Andrew Marvell Newsletter for publishing other sections of this study. Eugene O’Connor, Paul Allen Miller, Richard Armstrong, and the anony- mous readers of my manuscript at The Ohio State University Press, I cannot thank you enough for your careful attention and ultimate support of this book. I could not be more pleased to have it published by The Ohio State University Press. I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues at McNeese State, especially Keagan LeJeune, Ray Miles, Amy Fleury, Rita Costello, Wendy Whelan-Stewart, Dafydd Wood, Scott Goins, and Bob Cooper; your influ- ix x Acknowledgments ence manifests itself in all areas of my personal and professional life. I also owe a tremendous debt to John Wood, who taught me to see the beauty and wonder of art. John may reject many of the theoretical principles of this book, but his influence is present in all that I do. I am very grateful to John Metoyer for his permission to use his photograph for the cover. Finally, I would like to thank Alison, my wife, and my two children, who have given me more than I could ever imagine. Introduction U his book’s argument rests on two primary assertions. The first is that the act of literary appropriation of classical texts and culture during the early modern period, in its various manifestations, is primarily the result of a psychical process of identity construction and only second- Tarily a matter of historical literary development.1 The historical and cultural forces that influence literary appropriation are intricately connected to the methods and practices of imitatio. However, the phenomena of “influence” and “imitation” in literature are historical only insofar as history shapes and influences the psychical processes of subjectivity. There is no histori- cal marker, whether it is a law, a political movement, or a previous work of art, that is not first processed through the sieve of the psyche before it can be recast in the form of a new literary expression. We cannot even begin to understand the ideological pressures that might direct literary filiation without first understanding the way those ideologies and literary memories are processed by the psyche. The traditional approach to the study of liter- 1. Throughout this book, I use the term “psychical” as opposed to “psychological,” primarily because the term “psychological” is so closely linked to psychology as a discipline or clinical practice. Lacan viewed the field of psychology as extremely problematic: “Psychology properly so-called is effectively a science of perfectly well-defined objects” (Seminar 3, 243); “To look for the real that psychoanalysis deals with in the psychological is the principle of a radical deviation. Every reduc- tion, every attempt to return, as they say, or of the exhaustion of psychoanalysis in some pscyholo- gism . is the negation of psychoanalysis” (Seminar 12, 16.06.65, p. 2). 1 2 Introduction ary imitation and influence has tended to begin with the historical, with the modes and operations of practice, with available texts, with the reading habits of authors, and with the previous models of genres and themes—all of which do find a place in the current study. But to locate the signifi- cance of such textual negotiation, to identify how texts and the act of writ- ing itself actually function for writers, one must approach intertextuality as fundamentally a part of a psychical process, and any given text as a kind of amalgamation of psychical influence.I n a general sense, this has been a core idea in psychoanalytic criticism since Freud, but such an approach has not been adequately considered in the area of literary appropriation. That is the starting point of this study. Some clarification of the terms “influence” and “imitation” as they are understood and utilized in this book is necessary, particularly as they relate to a psychoanalytic approach to literary appropriation. The notion of influ- ence is troublesome in many ways, especially as it has been used by previous critics, Harold Bloom most notably. There is a certain nebulous quality to the concept of influence; it is both difficult to define and even more dif- ficult to analyze systematically. Bloom tried, and other critics have followed with varying success. Still, influence itself, whether one is considering liter- ary influence or the influences of history and ideology, represents an infi- nite source of psychical stimuli impacting the manifestation of subjectivity, and that manifestation seems virtually unmappable. Imitation on the other hand is something quite different. It is an active process, an actual literary act by which an author appropriates a text or group of texts and assimilates them into a new creative act, a new literary self-projection. Imitation is not only identifiable but is measurable within given criteria. Critics have tended either to paint a canvas of influence in very broad strokes that yields little useful analysis or to focus so much on the technical intricacies of liter- ary imitation that the underlying ideological, literary, and psychical forces that drive the creation of a literary consciousness get lost. From a psychi- cal standpoint, literary influence is akin to the vast influence of individual experience that shapes a particular subject’s self-fashioning; imitation rep- resents the acts and behaviors that can give us insight into the origins of influence that construct the subject and that subject’s sense of self. The second underlying assertion of this study is that literary appropria- tion is not a stable act. Generally speaking, writing essentially functions as a mode of either self-expression or self-representation, and psychically such representation of the self or of the self’s perception of the world is sel- dom, if ever, “stable.” Even narrative discourse, from a Bakhtinian perspec- tive, is dialogic in nature and is the result of multiple narrative discourses Introduction 3 converging on the narrative text.2 The concept of convergence is key to this approach. Voices are not separated out into well-packaged categories but rather engage one another, begging for response, reinterpretation, reevalu- ation, and finally reexpression. Even within a narrative text, intertextual- ity shapes any voice heard, and that is the principle of literary imitation outside an individual text as well. This sounds simple enough; however, once voices and ideologies converge, textual tension must result as writers attempt to integrate one “voice” into another, one ideological position into another.