csuf e211 british literature to 1760 spring 05

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Week 15 Samuel Johnson

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Tue, 24 May 2005 03:40:00 +0000

Samuel Johnson's "On Fiction" (Rambler #4)

Johnson is responding to the rise of the middle-class public; he wants to articulate its demands and needs. In spite of his Platonic fear of art's power to contaminate young minds, Johnson believes that art, because it now deals with realistic characters with whom the middle-class audience can identify, affects the reader powerfully and teaches him how to behave in the various situations that modern Britain throws at its citizenry. Ultimately, though, it is important to state that for Johnson the neoclassicist, "the universe is a moral order structured by rational principles, and the aim of art is to reproduce and reaffirm that order" (Adams, Critical Theory since Plato). The critic may only judge how well nature—human nature—has been methodized. Middle-class complexity and urbanity should not be allowed to obscure this. We can find in the "Preface to Shakespeare" certain romanticist-tending ideas. Johnson pays a lot of attention to the poet in this preface, and he speaks well of the particularity and variety that romantics will valorize. All in all, there are a few too many "streaks" in Johnson's criticism for him to fit perfectly in the neoclassical camp.
Johnson believes poets should understand the middle-class society they depict. They must know its habits and mores. He assumes that city life and commerce have created a more or less common set of demands on artistic work, or at least that such a standard is crystallizing as he writes. The rise of the "public" subjects the realist poet, novelist, or dramatist to stringent requirements in copying and selecting from human manners, but this change in expectations alone is no guaranty that art will serve the moral purpose Johnson and many other critics want it to serve. We see Johnson trying to harness the identificatory, affective power of realistic fiction. (In the nineteenth century, by the way, critics like Thomas Carlyle, J.S. Mill and Matthew Arnold will lament advancing middle-class conformism in the arts and general culture.) In sum, aesthetic demands are shifting in Johnson's time, and his goal as a critic is to respond to and, perhaps, to shape those demands toward suitably moral ends. Let novelists take care: the very fact that their young middle-class readers can identify with the main character could be disastrous. Realistic art has great affective power, so writers must select their objects carefully.

Johnson holds a traditionally Christian view of humanity's fallen tendencies. He insists that men are often "discolored by passion, or deformed by wickedness." Behind the figures of deformation lies the idea that human life is always in flux, especially in the city. The old Christian idea about the variability of human passions is evident here, but added onto it is a wariness about the variableness of situations in eighteenth-century urban life. The old and allegedly stable aristocratic order is giving way to bourgeois anxiety. The point of art, for Johnson, is to teach people (especially young people) about all the snares that lie in wait "out there" in the real world and to show them how they might avoid those snares.

Samuel Johnson's Rasselas

According to Imlac, the poet must be skillful in bringing to the average reader's mind an idea of the tulip (or anything else) that will not conflict with the idea of a tulip in other readers' minds. The point is to achieve identity of ideas. What the poet gives us is not the particular tulip with its particular number of streaks; he gives us instead a general tulip with just enough streaks to remind us that tulips generally have them. John Locke says that while "mere words" may have caused the medieval scholastic philosophers infinitely many headaches, the most troubling cause of confusion is dissimilar ideas. Johnson follows this basic Lockean epistemological scheme. (Epistemology is the term for "theory of knowledge"—an epistemologist inquires into the grounds of acquiring knowledge.) Getting men to recall identical ideas would be important to Johnson's moral scheme. How, in other words, can the artist or critic reinforce a universal, rational, moral order if our ideas about virtue descend into mere temporality, diversity, and particularity? We should then be always quibbling over the number of streaks on our moral tulip, and obviously this quibbling can lead to no universal assent about morality. And there is, for Johnson, a stable moral order to reinforce in the midst of middle-class, urban English life. The average person must not let life's modern complexities lead him or her astray from this eternal order.

Imlac says that the poet must observe all aspects of the human condition and passions, all "changes of the human mind as they are modified by various institutions and accidental influences of climate or custom." This is to some extent a very modern claim in favor of diversity, but it's well to keep in mind that Johnson's neoclassical poet is expected to find a rational order underlying surface diversity.

Samuel Johnson's "Preface to Shakespeare"

Johnson's point is rather similar to that of David Hume in "Of the Standard of Taste." I don't mean to make any close philosophical connection; it's just that Johnson, like nearly all his contemporaries, must have been influenced both by the empirical tradition of England dating from Bacon and Locke to his own contemporaries Edmund Burke and David Hume. Hume makes much the same point in "Of the Standard of Taste" that Johnson makes: "But though all the general rules of art are founded only on experience and on the observation of the common sentiments of human nature, we must not imagine, that, on every occasion, the feelings of men will be conformable to these rules . . . . A perfect serenity of mind, a recollection of thought, a due attention to the object; if any of these circumstances be wanting, our experiment will be fallacious, and we shall be unable to judge of the catholic and universal beauty. The relation, which nature has placed between the form and the sentiment, will at least be more obscure; and it will require greater accuracy to trace and discern it. We shall be able to ascertain its influence not so much from the operation of each particular beauty, as from the durable admiration, which attends those works, that have survived all the caprices of mode and fashion, all the mistakes of ignorance and envy. The same Homer, who pleased at Athens and Rome two thousand years ago, is still admired at Paris and at London. All the changes of climate, government, religion, and language, have not been able to obscure his glory."

Hume's individual critic needs to practice his craft, temper his state of mind, before he can make true judgments about what pleases or ought to please in art. The same goes for Hume's society (Scotland and England) as well—time alone will tell if a work is truly great. Similarly, while Johnson has recourse to the idea that there is truly some "universal human nature" behind all the variables in life, he pays due attention to the supposed distorting effect of these variables upon artistic judgment. Art, says Johnson, is inherently subject to the variables that cause the mind to be pleased or displeased with what it beholds. Poetry and drama are simply not "raised upon principles demonstrative and scientific"; we are not dealing with the Pythagorean theorem here but with a product whose purpose is to "teach by delighting." Inconstant creatures that fallen humans are, what ought to give them pleasure may not do so when it is first presented to them, and what at first pleases them may, in a hundred years' time, have passed out of fashion. In sum, says Johnson, "works tentative and experimental must be estimated by their proportion to the general and collective ability of man, as it is discovered in a long succession of endeavors." The empirical bent of that statement needs no explaining. Neither does the remark that, "what has been longest known has been most considered, and what is most considered is best understood."

But back to Shakespeare specifically. Since "human judgment, though it be gradually gaining upon certainty, never becomes infallible; and approbation, though long continued, may yet be only the approbation of prejudice or fashion," says Johnson, we must ask why Shakespeare still delights his audiences. For Johnson, there is a bedrock "human nature" that transcends time and place; the universal order is essentially a moral order, one which art can reinforce and the good critic discern. Evidently, there is a "standard of taste" in Johnson's view, and Shakespeare satisfies its demands. Shakespeare captures the variety, the mixed modes, of life. He knows that there are more passions than love; he is able to approximate the remote and familiarize the wonderful. His comedies and tragedies capture human experience in all its confusion, and yet we derive intelligible meanings from our reading experience. In scenes such as the "drunken porter" episode in Macbeth or the twinning of the Fool with King Lear, we are forced to see events from more than one perspective. We never get to exclaim arrogantly, "what a piece of work is man!" but instead must confront our own intellectual and moral complexities.

Finally, I believe that behind Johnson's maxim lies basic Lockean psychology and epistemology. In spite of all the vicissitudes in judging art that both Johnson and David Hume emphasize, there is still some kind of common experience to be arrived at, even if it takes a hundred years. Let's examine Hazard Adams' concise account of Lockean epistemology on page 252:

For Locke, words are signs of ideas, always based on experience, that precede them. Their relation to these ideas is purely arbitrary, though after repeated use they seem natural. Except for proper names, words are general and do not refer to specific objects. Rather, they signify abstract ideas built up from combinations of simple ones. These ideas are the "nominal" essences of genera and species, there being no "real" essences hidden and unknown to us.

Adams goes on to say that Locke prioritizes Ideas over words, leading him to condemn rhetoric as a means to use words to deceive and mislead men about their ideas. Adams also points out that "Locke locates truth in the empirically derived ideas." We may not know the "real essence" of particular things, but it is good enough, thinks Locke, that the ideas arising from sensory perceptions can be combined to form abstract "genera and species" that allow us to make our experience intelligible and classifiable. Here is an important passage from Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding:

6. It is true I have often mentioned a real essence, distinct in substances from those abstract ideas of them, which I call their "nominal essence." By this "real essence," I mean that real constitution of any thing which is the foundation of all those properties that are combined in, and are constantly found to coexist with, the nominal essence; that particular constitution which every thing has within itself, without any relation to any thing without it. But essence, even in this sense, relates to a sort, and supposes a species: for, being that real constitution on which the properties depend, it necessarily supposes a sort of things, properties belonging only to species, and not to individuals; v.g., supposing the nominal essence of gold to be body of such a peculiar colour and weight, with malleability and fusibility, the real essence is that constitution of the parts of matter on which these qualities and their union depend; and is also the foundation of its solubility in aqua regia, and other properties accompanying that complex idea. Here are essences and properties, but all upon supposition of a sort, or general abstract idea, which is considered as immutable; but there is no individual parcel of matter to which any of these qualities are so annexed as to be essential to it or inseparable from it. That which is essential belongs to it as a condition, whereby it is of this or that sort: but take away the consideration of its being ranked under the name of some abstract idea, and then there is nothing necessary to it, nothing inseparable from it. Indeed, as to the real essences of substances, we only suppose their being, without precisely knowing what they are: but that which annexes them still to the species is the nominal essence, of which they are the supposed foundation and cause.

7. The nominal essence bounds the species.—The next thing to be considered is, by which of those essences it is that substances are determined into sorts or species; and that, it is evident, is by the nominal essence. For it is that alone that the name, which is the mark of the sort, signifies. It is impossible therefore that any thing should determine the sorts of things which we rank under general names, but that idea which that name is designed as a mark for; which is that, as has been shown, which we call the "nominal essence." Why do we say, "This is a horse, and that a mule; this is an animal, that an herb?" How comes any particular thing to be of this or that sort, but because it has that nominal essence, or, which is all one, agrees to that abstract idea that name is annexed to? . . .

9. Not the real essence, which we know not.—Nor, indeed, can we rank and sort things, and consequently (which is the end of sorting) denominate them, by their real essences, because we know them not. Our faculties carry us no farther towards the knowledge and distinction of substances than a collection of those sensible ideas which we observe in them. . . . The workmanship of that all-wise and powerful God, in the great fabric of the universe and every part thereof, farther exceeds the capacity and comprehension of the most inquisitive and intelligent man, than the best contrivance of the most ingenious man doth the conceptions of the most ignorant of rational creatures. Therefore we in vain pretend to range things into sorts, and dispose them into certain classes, under names, by their real essences, that are so far from our discovery or comprehension. (Amherst: Prometheus, 1995. pp. 359-360)

Though the analogy is rough, we might say that "morality" somewhat resembles a Lockean "simple idea" for Johnson—though it may be covered up by the arbitrary, decaying language of fashion and politics, etc., time will wipe away these obstructions and allow us to understand one another's "ideas"—or universal morality, or aesthetic taste, in this case. We all have a common sensibility and a common capacity to discern these things. They are founded upon something valid.

Johnson slides smoothly into his rather strong condemnation of certain faults in Shakespeare. It is clear that Johnson's priority is moral improvement, though it is true enough that pleasure is the necessary means to moral ends. Other, lesser faults than the main one Johnson cites are that Shakespeare's plots are loose, his plays rife with anachronisms, and his attention always prone to be led astray by a quibble.

As for his criticism of strict neoclassicism, Johnson links Corneille and Dryden to the same naive mimetic view of art that Plato's Socrates held. As Professor Michael Clark of UC Irvine has said in a lecture, the empiricist tradition in England posits that "language parallels, and even replicates, natural processes and that we may, therefore, arrive at an exact correspondence between one word and one thing. If language can replicate natural processes, art can replicate nature. . . . If one word can mean (i.e. "represent") one thing, the interpreter can analyze language and thereby learn about the relationship between things themselves . . . . 'It is unnatural not to obey the unity of time,' says Dryden. Unity of place must also be observed, and the stage is only one place. In this instance, Dryden implies that there is a direct correspondence between nature and that which imitates it. While the Augustinian sign refers to something beyond itself, the neoclassical sign corresponds strictly to its referent." Furthermore, Clark says that "for the French rationalists, the locus of Being is rational thought processes, which themselves underlie natural processes . . . . For Pope and Johnson, to study nature is to study human nature, so two separate theories have been fused—that of inductive study of nature and that of rationalist psychology."

I would add to Clark's exposition that as far as I can see, for the British, rationalism and empiricism are not entirely separate doctrines. Continental rationalists imply that the universe operates along the lines of reason and mathematics. Writing just before Locke, the British scientist Isaac Newton makes it tenable to marry mathematics and empirical study of the universe. After all, the universe operates along the principles of something quite mathematical—gravity; we can see these laws at work in physical nature. We can go to nature itself and validate our theory that the universe operates along rational principles.

Language theory aside, Johnson says that there is nothing sacred about the unities of time and place. Thanks to plain common sense, he will not hear of the idea that the spectators are fooled into believing what they see on the stage. As Prof. Clark says, Johnson is a lot less interested in any theory of strict mimesis than he is in the psychology of artistic representation. For Johnson, art does not represent nature directly; it only moves us to think of reality. Notice that Johnson turns Corneille's and Dryden's alleged audience of true believers into a pack of deluded fools; "mass delusion" would be our term for it today. Their naiveté creates a scene no less than "fantastic." As Johnson says, "Delusion, if delusion be admitted, has no certain limitation." If we listen to Dryden, we shall slide right off the verge of the inane and absurd; we shall be unable to tell the difference between illusion and reality. But if I read Johnson correctly, he implies that sanity and moral soundness depend upon just this sense of balance. It is vital to retain the ability to see a fiction for what it is while comparing it to "real life" and drawing a moral lesson therefrom.

With regard to mimetic theory, Johnson values not so much "imitation of nature" as the effecting of an identification between the middle-class spectator and the "unheroic" character. This is an emotional identification. Fictions bring realities to life. We credit or rather value (note my shift in terms) fictions because they bring realities, possibilities, "moral landscapes" to mind.

A Further Note on Johnson and Pope

Just a quick note to make sure I am not misleading anyone when I refer some of Pope and Johnson's ideas to British empiricism. I think such statements are correct in general, but I also think it important to say that "British empiricism" is not exactly as static a movement as my commentaries may suggest. The differences between the early empiricism of Sir Francis Bacon and the Royal Society and the philosophy of the Scot David Hume show a steady tendency toward skepticism and even, in the case of Bishop Berkeley, toward an extreme idealism which posits that "all qualities of matter . . . [are] simply ideas in the mind" (From Classic to Romantic. Walter Jackson Bate. New York: Harper, 1946. 56). It is as if once Locke argued that our knowledge arises mainly from sense (and in some cases from introspection), the question as to whether in fact the "ideas" we get from sense data really correspond to the "outside world" was bound to emerge and become a central problem for empirical thinkers. Hume's answer was, as Bate says, that "the mind can know only its own isolated ideas, with no absolute confidence in the existence and nature either of the external world or of the rational validity of the mind's working" (56). That sounds like far too extreme a formulation for more neoclassical critics like Pope and Johnson.

Finally, while in Pope and Johnson imagination is not to be condemned, it should not run wild; there is nothing wrong with observing particularities, but ultimately the foundations of our knowledge are rational, not directly based upon sensory perception, as imagination too directly is. While both Pope and Johnson acknowledge that we discover truths or standards through experience, that probably doesn't mean to them that the very source and derivation of those truths is empirical nature.

PS: Bate's book, though written a half century ago, still retains all its capacity to introduce you to the major tenets of neoclassicism and romanticism. The same might be said for Meyer H. Abrams' book, The Mirror and the Lamp.

Albert Wlecke, Johnson's "On Fiction," Rasselas, and "Preface to Shakespeare"

Johnson lived from 1709-1784. When he died, Wordsworth and Beethoven were 14 years old. Johnson wrote the first major dictionary of English—the compilation was mostly his own work! Boswell and Walter Jackson Bate are both good sources on Johnson. He edited may periodicals, and wrote some fine poetry, most especially "The Vanity of Human Wishes."

Johnson's task in "On Fiction" is to sustain the basic Renaissance humanist rationale for literature, but he must face the advent of the novel and the change in readership this new genre signals. The middle class is interested in periodical literature and novels. By Johnson's time, authors begin to feel the need to translate their Latin and Greek epigrams since they are no longer sure of the public's ability to read ancient languages.

By Johnson's time, literature is changing, so theory has to change to accommodate it. We are no longer dealing with medieval romances, even though such ancient stuff is still published in his day. Johnson says that the task of our present writers is to observe carefully the middle-class world around them. They must know the "general converse" and engage in an acute observation of "the living world." This is still a version of the norm of verisimilitude, but with a middle-class twist. The rise of the common reader and the spread of literacy make this new norm possible.

Johnson says that the question of moral education cannot be separated from intellectual education. Literature, he thinks, is bound up with the education of the young, just as it does in Plato. It is not so much that the artist imitates life, or human manners; rather, he selects carefully what he will imitate, what he will feed the young. He should keep from them incongruous combinations of images—the kind that we see, for example, in poem's like Donne's "The Flea." He must also protect his audience from unjust premises and perverse opinions. Youth is impressionable, and literary works have the power to inculcate opinions for better or worse. (The same basic position might well be ascribed to today's "cultural studies" theorists.)

Sidney says that the poet teaches men "as if they had taken a medicine of cherries." Art can shape the will without our being aware of its doing so, or indeed almost without the intervention of the will. Johnson acknowledges art's power, and that is why the writer must be careful to portray what is "most proper fro imitation." He argues that the artist must represent the most perfect idea of virtue (an argument in accordance with that of Sidney).

In Rasselas, Johnson says that the natures of things and the passions of humankind are "always the same" at base. Shakespeare provides us with representations of universal nature. Aristotle, too, argues that literature presents universal truths about humanity. The argument Johnson makes would be too humanistic for many modern-day "anti-foundational" theorists—he would oppose the idea that notions about "human nature" are the product of ideology, oppression, and particular historical and social contexts. For Johnson, human nature is universal and timeless.

Week 13 Alexander Pope and Addison/Steele

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 19:19:00 +0000

Notes on Alexander Pope

Neoclassical Premises (ca. 1650-1789)

(a) Social commitment and desire for continuity in response to Civil War’s deep divisions (1642-1649).

(b) an inclination to categorize experience, nature, and literature into “kinds.”

(c) appreciation of satire; satire is a robust art form during the eighteenth century.

(d) importance of probability; thus the use of analogy as a literary figure: the two terms of the comparison both illuminate each other but remain distinct.

(e) the prevalence of moral categories—neoclassical art is often didactic.

(f) fondness for classical precedent.

(g) obedience to ordinary English grammar .

(h) categorizing the appropriate types of speech for appropriate subjects: epic for high subjects, lyric for love poetry, etc.

(i) importance of mirroring nature in art (mimesis): art should follow nature, not proclaim itself independent.

(j) skepticism about language—another reason for analogy: metaphor tends to collapse the two terms of comparison: man = pig, etc. The worry is that language can hide truth and nature just as easily as it reveals or honors them.

(k) stress on art’s utility and capacity to give pleasure (the Horatian imperative that art should be utile et dulce, useful and pleasant). Literature must both please and teach, with emphasis on the latter function.

Pope’s Era: The Neoclassical Age of Queen Anne and the Hanoverian Georges

Pope’s ideas about the value of art derive from Horace, a silver-age poet and urbane critic. Horace’s era (he lived from 65-8 BCE, covering the reign of Augustus 27BC-14 CE following the Civil War and assassination of Julius Caesar) accords well with the reign of Queen Anne in Great Britain (1702-14) and then the Hanoverian Kings George I-III (1714-27, 1727-60, 1760-1820). Alexander Pope lived from 1688-1744. The perceived need was for continuity and calm after the turmoil of the English Civil War in the 1640’s and the Puritan Rule of Cromwell in the 1650’s. Throughout the eighteenth century, that’s what many British citizens looked for in their rulers and in their literature.

This is an age in which the predominant theory of art is mimetic, meaning that readers and critics expect literature to offer them a judicious and ethically sound representation of life. And the point of such mimetic art is to influence morals for the better: as Horace had said, good art is both utile and dulce, useful and delightful. The point is that people respond emotionally to eloquence and beauty, and emotion can temper the severity and callousness of reason. It would be a mistake to think of the eighteenth century as purely an “Age of Reason”—that’s taking a motivated exaggeration at face value. After all, the eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume said that “Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Sentiment, properly directed and educated, was just as important as reason in this age, whatever contemporary critics claim the romantics said about their predecessors’ “overemphasis on reason” at the expense of the universal passions that bring humans together.

Eighteenth-century language theory tends towards classification—rather a scientific model of language, one distrustful of metaphor and flights of fancy. Horace made fun of the furor poeticus, and the eighteenth century is similarly distrustful of placing too much value on poetic genius and originality for the sake of originality. Imagination and language are wonderful things, but they need restraint and education to temper them into fine instruments that produce excellent works of art. The Baconian distrust of “idols” (errors due to the peculiarities of the individual and to the needs of the collective, as well as the tendency of perception to slide from raw accuracy into the dull comfort of abstractions) reigns in eighteenth-century notions of language.

Still, we need not think of this horizon of expectations as implying an insatiable appetite for pompous “poesy,” though second-rate poets may lapse into that kind of adherence to mere formal elegance. Pope himself makes fun of anyone who lards on the elegance too thick. In an era of refined art, taste and restraint are everything—one must know what to omit as well as what to include, and when an acceptable tendency becomes a travesty. Calling fish “the finny tribe” is a ludicrous abuse of the tendency to categorize individual things, sacrificing whatever is “fickle, freckled, who knows how” (Hopkins) for the sake of dull comprehensibility. The same goes for the “breeze” that “whistles through the trees” like clockwork. What an abomination against nature and poetry! In his “Essay on Criticism, Pope mocks both tendencies—abstractionism and hollow rhyming that imposes a false order on the beautiful variety of nature.

Epic Conventions and Mock Epic

When Samuel Johnson says, “nothing can please long except just representations of general nature” (nature here meaning both the environment and human nature), he speaks for a whole century’s worth of critics, readers, and audiences. Well, we might think that in such a Silver Age where decorum, observation of refined rules, maintenance of tact and restraint, are nearly everything, something as rough and rude as, say, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or satire in general would be out of place, but that isn’t the case. Satire was a favorite kind of literature during the eighteenth century, and that is where Pope’s mock epic The Rape of the Lock comes into view.

A mock epic, of course, mocks the conventions and aims of epic by adhering to them, with a significant change in subject matter. In order to understand mock epic better, we should consider what an epic is. The genre is easy to define formally: “the epic is a long narrative poem involving heroic figures in the performance of heroic deeds, usually extended over a wide geographical area; it is written in a heroic or grandiose manner” (Norton and Rushton). Here are its major conventions:

1. Hero: a mythical or historical figure, usually national.
2. Subject matter: heroic deeds, battles, long journeys.
3. Verse: elevated, lofty, “heroic”; the best known device is epic simile—see PL I.331-343, 351-355, 761-798.
4. Action: intermixture of supernatural elements/ figures with human characters.
5. Place: world-wide, even cosmic, scale.
6. “Comic,” not “tragic”: the hero is successful in his exploits.
7. “Objective” poet: but consider the “Miltonic aside.”

Some of the minor conventions are as follows:

1. Invocation to the muse: PL I.1-26 and elsewhere. “Hail, Muse!” &tc.
2. Starting in medias res, as when the Odyssey begins with Odysseus having almost finished his wandering.
3. Narratives of events that transpired before the poem: “flashbacks.”
4. Formal or “set” speeches like Satan’s to his fallen legions in Paradise Lost, Books 1-2.
5. Processions of characters, as in Paradise Lost 1.376-505; catalogs of events or things. (Milton dwells on geography, etymology, and the origin of various human practices, including artistic genres.

In addition to all of the above, epic has a serious ethical purpose—it labors within the culture from which it comes, trying to affect that culture for the better: it has a cultural task. Homer wrote about the exploits of Odysseus and the wrath of Achilles, probably hoping to infuse into his own difficult times the ancient heroic virtues and the resilience of an earlier age. Virgil wrote about the sad but fortunate fall of Troy —the Trojan Aeneas had to see his city destroyed so he could sail to Italy and found a city, Lavinium, setting in motion the events that would lead to the establishment of the Roman Republic and then the Empire. And Milton wrote Paradise Lost to “justify the ways of God to men,” but perhaps most immediately to reassure dejected fellow Puritans that God had not abandoned them.

Mock epic is similar to satire, and it, too, might be said to have a task. One reason to satirize and mock is that the satirizer may be speaking for and to people who feel that they have little power, at least for the time being, to change things for the better. (I suppose that’s the charge running through Jon Stewart’s mock-newscasts on Comedy Central, or Stephen Colbert’s deadpan imitation of a bloviating conservative pundit. Such mockery may not exactly send people into the streets with French-Revolutionary fervor, but it’s powerful in its way because it encourages an alternative sensibility and way of understanding events alongside the official channels in the news and political realms, meaning not only politicians but those who cover them in the various “serious” media outlets. (The fact that I’ve put quotation marks around the word “serious,” thereby calling it into question, is an effect of the kind of satire I am discussing: i.e., how seriously should we take supposedly serious or official accounts of why certain domestic and foreign policies are being pursued?) But in Pope’s case, perhaps the poet is just responding to a need for his culture to examine its tendencies lest they become empty exaggerations. Mock-epic may serve as a warding-off gesture, a warning that today’s happy conformity—a society with lots of “shiny happy people holding hands” and mostly accepting the same fundamental assumptions about themselves, their government, and the world at large—might well be tomorrow’s stale, real-life parody. Perhaps conformity itself soon becomes morbid me-too-ism (a lame excuse for healthy existence), or generates excesses in the other direction (rebelliousness, that is), so it needs to be questioned frequently and searchingly.

That’s a serious social task to ascribe to mockery and satire. I think it’s the one most appropriate to Pope: he speaks as a man of letters to those whose assumptions he mostly shares. His Catholicism in a deeply Protestant country makes him something other than a simple adherent to neoclassical taste and political values. His traditionalism is somewhat self-conscious, I should think—he’s not the kind of aristocratic brute who absorbs his values from the nice thick beefsteak he gnaws every evening and the good wine with which he washes it down. As the Norton introduction says, Pope is the first man of letters to make a comfortable living by writing—his father was a prosperous merchant, and Pope lifted himself into even more polite society by means of literary skill. Moreover, he belongs early in the tradition we may trace down to Wilde and then the Modernists—artists of great culture and learning who fear the effects of mass culture both upon society at large and, more narrowly, upon the arts. But on the whole, Pope fits into the Horatian tradition that says art’s mission is to render in a decorous manner what the public already believes, and to influence and gently uplift the reading public’s manners and morals.

Notes on The Rape of the Lock

What Pope does in The Rape of the Lock is reflect humorously on the elaborate quality of gender relations in his day. He makes fun of the era’s assumptions about female virtue—in the poem, the language of commodification and ethics seem to go together, and the male superiority posited by the honor code is made to appear ridiculous. A woman’s position in Pope’s time was complex—women were hemmed in by all sorts of constraints, yet they were very important in symbolic terms. The image of the female was central to notions of domesticity and morals, her beauty bodying forth the goodness of the social order itself, rather like the courtier’s grace signifying the sovereign’s legitimacy and rightness in earlier times, in the Renaissance Courts of Europe and England.

Dedication to Mrs. Arabella Fermor

2514. Pope makes fun of modern triviality, but as a critic he maintains a balance of view regarding the quarrel of the ancients and moderns. Ancient epic, after all, sometimes makes trivial things seem important, deflating human pretensions. Homer certainly does that. As for the addition of Rosicrucian supernatural machinery, Pope’s use of such trappings is hardly dismissive; rather, I suppose he is emulating Milton’s angelic hosts and “devils to adore for deities” of Paradise Lost.

Canto 1

1-12: Prelude
13-26: Morning; Belinda asleep; Ariel; Belinda dreams of a young beau; Ariel speaks
27-114: Ariel’s address; the sylphs take charge of Belinda; picture of the beau monde; the game of sex
115-20: Belinda wakes
121-48: The toilet

2515-16. From line 67 and following, honor is a wispy thing, a tactical affair rather than a sacred virtue. We can’t escape the “war between the sexes,” the poem seems to be telling us, and women, it’s suggested, tend to be flighty and vain when it comes to love matters.

2517. Belinda is warned of a “dread event” (109) by Ariel, her guardian Sylph. But her thoughts flow to material things lying around her, a glittering and reflective environment. At lines 125-26, there’s a hint of Eve’s innocent narcissism in Paradise Lost: “A heavenly image in the glass appears; / To that she bends, to that her eyes she rears.”

Canto 2

001-018: Belinda rises from her toilet: her beauty
019-028: Belinda’s locks
029-046: The Baron desires Belinda’s beauty
047-052: Belinda secure
053-072: Ariel gloomy and anxious, summons his battalions
073-136: Ariel’s speech
137-142: The sylphs await events

2520. The Rosicrucian spirits take their stations. At lines 90-92, Pope echoes Milton’s invocation in Book 9 of Paradise Lost, redefining the proper subject of epic, suiting the subject to the form. At lines 106-09, the narrator equates honor with a china jar, and these lines offer a series of disjunctive references. It’s hard to take honor too seriously when we see it placed adjacent to such trivial objects, and the verse form reinforces the conflation-effect: “Forget her prayers, or miss a masquerade, / Or lose her heart, or necklace, at a ball” The stopping-points in these lines, the caesuras, drive home the point.

Canto 3

001-018: The setting of Hampton Court
019-104: The “Battle” of Ombre
105-124: Taking coffee: the Baron gets an idea
125-154: THE RAPE OF THE LOCK
155-160: Belinda’s horror
161-178: The Baron’s triumph; the glories of steel

2521-23. To Hampton Court we go, as if the place were heaven or Olympus. At lines 19-22, Pope’s epigrammatic style sums up the truth of a fifty-page sociology paper on the justice system: “wretches hang that jurymen may dine.” At lines 25 and following, the epic battle for Belinda’s heart: a game of Ombre (http://webpages.shepherd.edu/maustin/ombre/ombre.htm). Such games are, like chess, bound up with strategy, and are a surrogate form of chivalric containment of violence. Perhaps there’s an implicit criticism of modern love here, but it could also be that Pope aims at something more uplifting. It is human to “methodize” nature, to set up rules and conventions, and so long as they remain rooted in human nature, all is well. We live in societies so that we may be “to advantage dressed.” These are phrases from Pope’s “Essay on Criticism.” Love is civil, elaborate, and involves strategy and deferral of desire. So in this sense, a game like Ombre, with its complex rules and competitive spirit, is a good figure for erotic pursuits.

2523-24. Belinda’s scissors give the Baron his chance. The chivalric references in the passage introduce ambivalence about the event that will soon transpire. Ariel’s power dissipates because he knows Belinda isn’t, perhaps, so dead-set against the Baron as she professes herself. So the trappings of deferral and civility must give way. For the moment, however, they give way to high wrath, almost Achilles-like wrath. But that too, it’s fair to suggest, is just another kind of delay.

Canto 4

001-010: Belinda’s sorrow
011-088: Umbriel visits the Cave of Spleen; obtains the bag and vial from the Goddess
089-094: Belinda in the arms of Thalestris
095-120: Thalestris’ speech
121-130: Sir Plume: demands the Baron return the lock
131-140: The Baron refuses
141-146: Belinda renews her grief
147-176: Belinda’s speech

2525. The lock has now been seized, and Umbriel goes to the underworld, or here the Cave of Spleen. Just as Odysseus and Aeneas had to communicate with the underworld to complete their journeys, so Belinda’s love can only be accomplished or won with a journey to the bottom of it all: melancholy, stormy passion. Umbriel makes sure that she will be afflicted with Ill Humour.

2528. Sir Plume the beau plays the role of Collatinus, the injured husband of Lucretia. But his stake in the action is rather general, a matter of principle, as signified by a rap on the snuffbox.

Canto 5

001-008: Belinda’s speech has no effect; Clarissa prepares to speak
009-034: Clarissa’s speech
035-074: The beaux and the ladies fight
075-102: Belinda and the Baron fight: Belinda’s victory
103-112: Belinda demands the lock, but it is missing
113-150: The apotheosis of the lock

2529-30. Clarissa’s grave lesson is “she who scorns a man must die a maid.” But fierce Thalestris wins out against this privileging of merit over looks and manners. Clarissa speaks around line 30 to the “hemmed in” status of eighteenth-century women, their power came from manipulating men within a complex set of fules. Women were expected to give in and yet maintain the important ideal of chastity.

2531-32. No way will Belinda recover her lost lock of hair, which symbolizes female honor. But neither will the Baron keep it as a trophy to gloat over. So there has to be an apotheosis, where the material lock becomes a poetic symbol of feminine honor. Art here helps to maintain civility in the necessary “war” between desire’s deferral and its satisfaction.

Notes on Eloisa to Abelard

The poem is genuinely medieval in sentiment—strong passions are constrained by convent walls and barbarous guards of honor. Eloisa and Abelard have become disembodied voices, confined to what they can write at long distance. They have no direct contact. Eloisa remains defiant, refusing fully to sublimate her erotic passion for Abelard into spiritual adoration of Christ. Her defiance is risky since she won’t give up an inappropriate love interest, one that the situation would seem to demand she put behind her. And she is quite self-conscious on this dilemma. What’s striking about the poem is how it manages, thanks to Pope’s virtuosity, to be both elegant and genuinely emotional: it isn’t easy to write love poetry in heroic couplets, but Pope has done it.

General Notes on Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Criticism”

Nature: nature is structured like the human mind, and it operates in a rational and stable way. The ancients based their works upon nature, so studying Homer is like going back to nature, both in the sense of “human nature” and the physical environment. Literary and social rules are not merely prescriptive; they are instead based on the close observation of nature—that’s why we should follow them, and why we should value the ancients. Not to hold them in high regard merely shows that we have gone astray from what Dr. Johnson will later call “just representations of general nature.”

Imitation: Notice the predominance in the eighteenth century of certain mimetic figures: mirror, speech as dress, ornament. What is to be dressed and finely decked out with words is “nature,” human nature, or the social and political hierarchy. These are already solid and “there.” The point is to make them memorable and attractive. In this way, poetry is a species of elegant rhetoric, whose point is to reaffirm the belief that our ways and understandings are right. “Whatever is, is right,” as Pope says. Neoclassical critics generally support the principle of hierarchy underlying the social order, so they can conceive of a genial, erudite critic who does justice to the work itself and helps a broader public (gentlefolk, not Dickensian kitchen scullions and street-sweepers) understand the work’s complexities to as great an extent as possible. Such a critic serves the text and the public. Some modern cultural theories, by contrast, betray an anxiety that culture is either a top-down ideological control mechanism or an exercise in commercial vulgarianism: bread and circuses, “infotainment,” etc.

Analyzing the relationship between author/work/public and criticism demands consideration of art’s cultural value: does literature reflect an already held value system and merely dress or adorn it? Or is it a shaping force, a creator of culture, rather than a passive storehouse of normative ideas and aesthetic images? We can see art as establishing and maintaining consensus, or as tearing it down in favor of something new. It seems reasonable to say that it has done all these things and that critics, depending on their political and social leanings, have responded in very diverse ways. Some critics see themselves as guardians of culture—highbrow watchdogs, one might say—while others see themselves as unmasking texts’ claims to normative status with regard to social and political ideals, and still others claim they’re more or less operating in a politics-free zone where they should strive to “see the object as in itself it really is” (to borrow Matthew Arnold’s phrase) or work with a literary text entirely on its own terms (the New Critics of the 1930s-50’s in America). But even staking out a claim for the legitimacy of “apolitical” or “formalist” analysis is itself a political gesture since it means the critic is consciously refraining from or arguing against certain kinds of interpretation of a more political bent—today’s “cultural studies,” for example, would hardly be sympathetic to the notion that works of art exist in an autonomous realm independent of life’s other dimensions.

From the eighteenth century onwards, the notion of a “public” and even of several levels of public readership, from the low to the high, becomes an issue. We see the rise and fall of the man of letters and the advent of what George Gissing describes in New Grub Street as hack journalists and critics churning out pablum for a quarter-educated public. Pope isn’t facing this crass commercialization of art to the lowest common denominator. But you can see in his admonitions that critics should know their limits a flicker of anxiety that criticism may be starting to pander to a paying public that has its own not-so-well-considered ideas about what is worth reading. (Samuel Johnson, too, will later betrays much the same anxiety: who is going to be reading all those newly published novels? Mostly young and impressionable ordinary people, he fears.) Modern artists have sometimes tried to turn this relationship to a powerful public into a positive thing, but to varying degrees the attempt can require ceding ground on old claims surrounding art’s power to change individuals and even entire societies. Some further questions and observations:

1. Are literary authors superior to critics, and if so, on what grounds should we say that they are?

2. Is critics’ task to explain the text, or might they be best advised to add to, supplement, or go beyond it, perhaps using it as a springboard for their own observations? Or are all of those things good in their own way? Moreover, many contemporary theorists assert an independent right to do what they do, and don’t see themselves as simply serving as assistants to artists or explicating “primary texts.” What does that assertion imply about criticism’s role, and about the traditional notions that art exists innocently as an autonomous realm or that it merely adorns a culture’s values?

3. To what extent should literary authors and artists be familiar with criticism about their own work, or, more broadly, with the critical tradition as a whole? Is an artist likely to be better for being a critic, or would that just get in the way of artistic creation? What examples can you think of to illustrate both tendencies? Name a few literary or other kind of artists who seem not to have been interested in criticism, and a few who have doubled as critics in their own right.

4. Rejecting the responsibility of the explicator-critic to make texts accessible to a broad public narrows the critical function more or less to academic circles. Is that an entirely bad thing? Why or why not? Might it not be said that there is much of value that the public can’t appreciate that nonetheless shouldn’t be hounded out of existence, or that sometimes authors or entire schools of art become popular only long after their own time, and go nearly unregarded while they are still “in the making”? But what about the counter-charge that the arts (and criticism) shouldn’t be so distant from the needs and sensibilities of “ordinary people” that they lose all social impact? What happens to art if it becomes thought of as the product of marginalized, specialized labor rather than as something vital in which everyone has an interest? Is that where we are now in terms of how we think about art, or is the situation less bleak than that?

Page-by-Page Notes on “An Essay on Criticism,” Part 1

2497/441. “Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss” (6) and “In poets as true genius is but rare, / True taste as seldom is the critic’s share” (11-12). Pope values criticism for the same reason Horace does—the tasteful critic takes note of the best work (work possessed of genius) and makes it available for public appreciation and emulation by contemporary authors. But criticism quickly becomes a self-referential, self-perpetuating industry, one almost detached from its object. Bad critics pander to a vulgar public—Pope himself make his living as a writer, so he must have understood why other critics might be tempted to do that.

2498/442. “Be sure yourself and your own reach to know, / How far your genius, taste, and learning go” (48-49). As Pope writes at the beginning of the second epistle of his “Essay on Man,” “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan, / The proper study of mankind is Man.” Here at lines 46-49 is the lesson adapted for critics, who can’t just spin literary rules from their own heads, or presume to be experts in what they really don’t understand. The great author of classical times isn’t to be condemned because he does something the critic can’t process. Homer and Virgil constitute an external, transhistorical, universal set of standards to which critics must conform their sensibilities: taste is intricately tied to education. Even the erudite person has limits, a “point where sense and dullness meet,” and must begin with frank acknowledgment of those limits, lest the public be misled by vain obscurantists about the true value of a given work. This line of thinking seems reminiscent of Socrates’ distrust of squirrelly rhapsodes like Ion who suppose they are the masters of every craft because they can talk about them fluently. But unlike Plato, Pope seems to think the practice of criticism can rise to the live of a genuine craft; it need not be considered mere dilettantish twaddle about “copies of copies of copies.”

2298/442-43. “Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, / One clear, unchanged, and universal light…” (70-71). Nature is “the source, and end, and test in art” (73). Mind and nature work analogously; the world follows Reason, and is an intelligential order, so that to study the world around us is to study something that operates in accordance with principles we should be able to grasp. The artist and critic help us appreciate the intelligibility of the natural order, the compatibility between mind and nature.

2499/443. “Those rules of old, discovered, not devised, / Are Nature still, but Nature methodized…” (88-89). Neoclassical authors such as Pope are careful to insist on selection from nature: Nature must be “methodized” in the sense that we must intelligently derive appropriate rules for human conduct from it. Pope does not suggest that authors should “copy” nature in the lowest sense. This carefulness is partly due to the moral (pragmatic) demand of neoclassical criticism: art should teach by delighting. But it is also an Aristotelian requirement to derive the universal significance from the particular instance. The rules are themselves rooted in nature, so conventions are natural to humanity, not mere extrinsic ornaments or ungrounded artifice. (Another way to gloss the term “artifice” is to say that it’s fine so long as it is rooted in nature, not totally independent of it.) Pope points to ancient Greece as a time when critics, artists, and the people had forged the right relationship

2500/445. “When first young Maro in his boundless mind / A work to outlast immortal Rome designed, / Perhaps he seemed above the critic’s law, / And but from Nature’s fountains scorned to draw; / But when to examine every part he came, / Nature and Homer were, he found, the same . . .” (130-35). Homer was a great observer of human nature and of the natural environment and its processes, so to derive the rules for epic from him is to derive them from nature itself. Virgil, in essence, went to Homer as a critic and was inspired by that artist’s universal, transhistorical excellence to write his own excellent epic, one appropriate to his own time and place, which was Augustan Rome.

2500-01/445. “Great wits sometimes may gloriously offend, / And rise to faults that critics dare not mend. . .” (152). Such a great wit or artist, says Pope, may “snatch a grace beyond the reach of art, / Which, without passing through the judgment, gains / The heart . . .” (155-57). He’s probably alluding to Shakespeare above all: when Shakespeare seems to violate the rules of good drama, we should most often credit him with the genius it takes to make new rules based on seeing something in human or physical nature that nobody has ever seen before. A person with such a gift must be granted wide latitude, and “rules” must never be applied so prescriptively that they keep us from appreciating a work of genius. Moreover, sometimes what may appear to be a flaw shows its true virtue when viewed from a distance, from a different perspective; this is something we must watch out for in reading Homer, who, Pope famously says, is never mistaken: “Nor is it Homer nods, but we that dream” (180).

Page-by-Page Notes on “An Essay on Criticism,” Part 2

2501-02/446. “A little learning is a dangerous thing” (215). Pope is against mediocrity for the same reason as Horace: art should reflect our society and values to us elegantly; that is the meaning of decorum. Otherwise, we end up with Plato’s demagogues and critics and artists pandering to the lowest common denominator. In that case, art would not exert any shaping power, and we would be on a degenerative arc with respect to the ancients. At the bottom of 2502, Pope insists we must know the whole work, not just the parts; we should note “the joint force and full result of all” (246).

2505/447. “True wit is nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed; / Something whose truth convinced at sight we find, / That gives us back the image of our mind” (297-300). True wit does not get itself a raised podium or become its own order of things; the intellect’s glory doesn’t consist in departing radically from what common humanity thinks but rather in expressing something common in a fine, appropriate manner. Some eighteenth-century authors distrust words and wittiness because they tend to get in the way of truth and “things as they are,” but judiciously crafted language dresses or adorns nature to advantage. Just as fashion succeeds only when it knows the body well, so art must accord with human nature and with the order of things. Moreover, the notion that words clothe thought implies that thought itself refers to a stable order of things prior to language. The emphasis is on coherence, on building and maintaining consensus. True wit is like nature in that both give us back a proper image of our minds. The term “wit” is an important one in eighteenth-century literature; in faculty psychology, the “inner wits” are imagination, fantasy, and memory, which process and recall sensory data, and judgment and common sense or sensus communis. But more broadly, as the OED explains, the term means “The seat of consciousness or thought, the mind,” and in the plural, “intellectual powers.” The last-mentioned is the meaning that best fits Pope’s usage in line 297: true intelligence or right-thinking.

2504/448. “But true expression, like the unchanging sun, / Clears and improves whate’er it shines upon; / It gilds all objects, but it alters none. / Expression is the dress of thought…” (315-18). Language should clarify things and “gild them,” but it should not change the object or lead us away from just appreciation of it. Felicity lies in apprehending the order of things, and in expressing that order attractively. The Victorian critic Matthew Arnold would later call for critics to “see the object as in itself it really is”—a statement that seems neoclassical in its reassertion of human values as solid, factual, and real.

2504-05/450. “But most by numbers judge a poet’s song, / And smooth or rough with them is right or wrong” (337-38). Pope, though a great employer of the heroic couplet and the elegant phrase, doesn’t reduce poetry to rhyme or smooth meter; as he says, “The sound must seem an echo to the sense” (365). Milton, too, in his preface to Paradise Lost, had rejected the notion that rhyme and such devices were essential to poetry; rhyme, he said, was “no necessary Adjunct to true Ornament” in a poem—especially a long one with a complex subject to develop. Pope also writes that “Some foreign writers, some our own despise; / the ancients only, or the moderns prize…” (394-95) and that a fine critic will “At every trifle scorn to take offense” (386). Pope does not simply say the ancient authors are better: the category true-false does not reduce to old-new in this regard, and neither is carping and nitpicking an appropriate way to proceed. Such behavior merely shows the critic to be petty and inhumane. Conversely, what’s needed is not blind partisan advocacy of an author’s merits but instead judicious, constructive remarks: “For fools admire, but men of sense approve” (391).

2508/454. “Nor in the critic let the man be lost! / Good nature and good sense must ever join; / To err is human, to forgive divine” (523-25). The goal for criticism generally is to improve public taste and promote an intelligent consensus in social and moral affairs, in so far as art touches upon them. The phrase “the public” implies a degree of democracy—it’s starting to matter in Pope’s day what an increasingly broad public thinks about various issues, even if democratic reforms will have to wait until the nineteenth century. Since the function of the critic is to inform the public’s taste and morals, the critic must behave in a civil manner. Later, in Part 3 (lines 631-32), Pope says that pride is the main fault of intellectuals, thus continuing a thought that he had voiced earlier: “But where’s the man, who counsel can bestow, / Still pleased to teach, and yet not proud to know?” Sir Philip Sidney had described the way to move people towards virtuous action along similar lines: they must have enough humility to see that it’s their job to please the public and move its members towards virtuous action. Art shouldn’t be about self-aggrandizement, and neither should criticism. That is a typical 18th-century notion, too—literature is said to better than philosophy because it has broader appeal. If critics are authorities, they are benevolent ones, not tyrants because genuine consensus cannot be achieved by tyrannical or destructive means.

I will add material on Addison and Steele if time permits....

Week 12 Samuel Pepys and Jonathan Swift

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 01:05:00 +0000

Samuel Pepys, Diary

Pepys’ entries convey nicely the basic personal and historical truth that we don’t process real-time events immediately. An “event” is to the impersonal, collective realm what an “experience” is to the personal realm—something that has to be processed before we can really say, “such and such happened.” In other words, we attach meanings to occurrences only in this way. Consider, for instance, how people responded to the attacks on September 11th—the events themselves took a little while to process. When we first saw them on the television screen, they looked like Hollywood contrivances—they probably seemed that way to people who saw them with their own eyes, too. Consider, also, what we mean by the term “experience”—you can experience a breakup or an accident, but not your own death. Why? Because you aren’t there to interpret it to yourself or relate it to anyone else.

Life-writing like that of Pepys is one of the most important ways to learn about the past—you get a sense of how things were that goes beyond simple narration, even though in this case Pepys is generally providing us with a reportorial account, mixed in with some personal reactions. I don’t suppose he’s trying to let us in on his “inner self” but rather to retain his impressions—it doesn’t seem that he intended them for publication at all; they were private accounts for his own benefit. But maybe that’s what makes them so interesting—they’re the private musings of a very important individual.

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

On making comparisons, utopian-style. To compare one thing with another, there must be some similarities and some dissimilarities. Otherwise there would be nothing in common between the two things, and therefore nothing to say. Lemuel Gulliver’s travels always result in appropriate comparisons between English/European ways and the customs and mores of other societies.

Perspective is central to the results Swift obtains: either he’s standing close-up to giants and feeling tiny (as if viewing himself from a great distance), or seeing himself from the perspective of tiny Lilliputians so that he appear gigantic. We notice that somehow the result is always to our discredit. Viewed as puny or gigantic, we come out looking dreadful—our vices and roughness magnified or our virtues and beauty trivialized.

What is the difference between Swift’s comparison technique and that of, say, Thomas More in Utopia and Francis Bacon in The New Atlantis? One major difference is that More and Bacon compare European institutions and morals with those of people rather similar to ourselves, only less corrupted. The Utopians and Atlantians are “just people” who arrange their affairs better than we have managed to do. But Swift is closer to science fiction than to traditional utopian literature, from Plato onwards: he compares Europeans to giants and little people, to outrageous parodies of certain mental tendencies as with the Laputans, and finally and most bizarrely, to horses endowed with a reasoning capacity far more genuine than we can honestly claim to possess.

So what’s the upshot of all this comparison-making? It’s probably similar to that of other utopian fiction—namely, first to understand human nature and practices, and secondly, to offer suggestions on ameliorating the human condition, whether one believes that can be done just now or not. Generally, utopian fiction is what Francis Bacon calls an experiment of light rather than an experiment of fruit or immediate use. (Similarly, dystopian fiction like Orwell’s 1984 might be called an experiment of darkness, a prophecy of the worst that could happen based on what we seem capable of doing to one another.) The genius of Swift is that it’s difficult to classify his work as either dystopian or utopian—the utopia he projects is too “horsy” for us to achieve since we can’t turn ourselves into horses. The Yahoos may seem pretty dystopian, but they aren’t the only human-like creatures Lemuel Gulliver meets—there are the Lilliputians who behave more or less like miniature “Euro-trash” (excuse the term), and the huge denizens of Brobdingnag, who are somewhat like humans, with their good and bad traits. In sum, Swift keeps his utopia very distant from us, and his dystopian vision isn’t the only option, though it must be admitted that neither the Lilliputs nor the Brobdingnagians are anywhere near satisfactory destinations for us.

What’s unsettling here is that we aren’t far from Yahoos, and poor Lemuel finds it very hard to come back home to his own kind; he’s alienated from humanity for good. The reacclimation process proves painful, more painful perhaps than the one that Plato’s philosopher who has seen the truth and then has to go back down into the Cave to tell benighted fools something they don’t want to hear. They would prefer the unexamined life, however worthless Plato says it is, to painful self-examination and permanent alienation from their assumptions about human nature and beliefs. To me, it seems that Swift has offered us not “food for thought” but rather a cup of hemlock, an intensely bitter dose of humility. What keeps us going is simply Rabelaisian laughter—Swift’s ability to expose and send up the utter ridiculousness of human pretensions to dignity and security, an ability that links him to authors like Aristophanes, Apuleius, Rabelais, Erasmus, and others. But in Swift, the laughter is somewhat less than permanent. A reference to Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove is also appropriate: we laugh at that film, but the laughter is tinged with anxiety because the world it conjures up and then annihilates just isn’t worth preserving. And it seems too much like the real one we live in.

Addendum--Presentation byAdriana Perez, on Samuel Pepys

3. Optional: for further information about the Great Fire of September 1666, visit The Pepys Home Page or some other site on the web and set down what you find most interesting about this historical event.

Answer: Well, by reviewing Pepys home page I found out some very interesting things that happened after the tragedy. Before the fire in 1666 there were very flammable materials all over the city (hay, wood ). There were some complains about this but nobody listen to them. After the tragedy, the houses were rebuilt under more strict regulations to prevent another tragedy. I also found that thanks to the fire the Black Plague declined. The Black Plague which had been going around in Europe since 1664 was transferred through blood. Fleas infested and flea infested rats carried the plague from place to place. During the Great Fire many infested rats were killed because they failed to escape the flames. This helped reduced the plague.

Week 11 Milton's Paradise Lost

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 17:23:00 +0000

Notes on John Milton’s Paradise Lost

Introduction to Milton

An industrious youth, studious and earnestly Protestant, Milton wanted to write a great national epic, with Spencer as his predecessor. From the late 1620s through the 1630’s, he wrote pastoral and other poetry, such as Arcades and Comus (1634). Milton was a bourgeois, and his father was a successful scrivener. Milton went to Cambridge , made a grand tour of Europe in 1638-39, and three years later the Civil War broke out, an event that changed Milton ’s life profoundly. Archbishop William Laud had driven him away from the Church of England, and now Milton wrote in favor of the Puritan cause, against Bishops, in favor of divorce, and for a free press (1644, Areopagitica.)

His personal life was a sad one; his young wife Mary Powell left him soon after the marriage, only to return and die in childbirth 1652. That is the same year in which Milton went blind. He married Catherine Woodcock in 1656, but she died in 1658. he married the third time to Elizabeth Minshull in 1663, and Elizabeth outlived Milton . After the Restoration in 1660, Milton experienced some financial hardship, but by 1667, he nonetheless published Paradise Lost in 10 books (the 12-book version came out in 1674). In 1671, he published Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes.Paradise Lost is a work written in sadness and disillusionment. The author’s millenarian hopes had been crushed—there was to be no immediate Rule of the Saints, and his own time no longer seemed to be ushering in Christ’s return at the Last Judgment. Ordinary people preferred theaters, bowling and the semi-Catholic and elegantly dissolute Charles the second, along with his “Protestant whores.” This would be egg on any Puritan’s face, but Milton had kept a high profile. So how was he to deal with the fall of the Puritan cause and the return of the Stuart Kings? It became necessary to tie historical developments into the persistent consequences of the Fall. England had, after all, fallen away from what had seemed to be history-making progress in religion, politics, and civil society.

The Structure of Paradise Lost

1-2 :: 11-12. Permanent Fall of Satan versus the Fortunate Fall of Adam and Eve. 1-2 are a parody of classical epic’s militarism—set speeches, hosts, power-grabbing leaders. Satan is cast as Agamemnon and as an Asiatic despot. In 11, Michael will give Adam a panoramic view of the future, so that in his exile he will retain hope for his offspring. Satan doesn’t understand “the vision thing,” and he has a vested interest in not understanding God’s linear time.

3-4 :: 9-10. Adam and Eve converse, and we find out about the relationship between heaven and earth, which by 9-10 will have to be renewed. Satan makes his adventurous trip to earth through Chaos, and tempts Eve. God sets forth prophecies.

5-6 :: 7-8. Narration of events in Heaven, explanation of Adam and Eve’s place in the created order. WAR IN HEAVEN and its consequences = 5-8 as a block. Christ is a Warrior, God’s terrible aspect, in 5-6, and he is the Creative Word in 7-8. God is inscrutable, but Christ the intercessor makes him manifest, expressing the inexpressible.

Introduction to Books 1-2

Problem: we have two sets of givens—our experience of an evil world, and the idea that at the creation everything was perfect. How did the change occur? Milton will draw on a grand multi-part myth cycle to explain things:

1. Creation and 2. The Fall. Milton will link these first two logically; Genesis provides a brief text without full justification, or at least without much explanation.

3. Redemption. Christ offers to atone for humankind’s original sin, re-forging a connection or path between the human and the divine. Milton ’s poetical problem is how to deal with the extremely long Old Testament history that must go by—why does it take so long for Christ to return? Michael’s Book 11 panorama justifies this length in terms of poetic structure.

4. Anno Domini. This is the time from the Annunciation to the Apocalypse. But when will the latter occur? Milton compresses the waiting time.

Things to Watch For

Eyes, Ears, Understandings

God
Christ
Good Angels such as Raphael, Abdiel, and Michael
Adam and Eve Unfallen
Adam and Eve Fallen
The Narrator, aided by Urania/Holy Spirit
Fallen Us, Fit Audience Though Few

Significant Texts and Structures

The Bible, Old Testament and New Testament
Classical Epic and All Other Genres
Christian Epic and Literature (Tasso, Ariosto, Dante, Spenser, Shakespeare)
The Great Chain of Being (Raphael’s “Bright Consummate Flow’r”)
Theology and Philosophy
Science—Bacon, Galileo, etc.
Current Events and Opinions—English Civil War, Rule of Saints, Stuart Restoration
Narrator’s personal situation (closely parallels that of isolated, endangered Milton )

Risks to Keep in Mind

Narrator : may aspire without proper inspiration and authority: Satanic self-sufficiency, desire to rewrite and even replace Biblical narrative as well as all other literature (Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, etc.). Is the narrator’s heart continually “upright and pure”?

Us : siding with Satan the Rebel with a False Cause; mere literary appreciation of text’s complexity and beauties as “dead letter”—i.e. failing to interpret PL spiritually; not fitting ourselves into the story or applying stern lessons to ourselves. We may fail to be, in Stanley Fish’s phrase, “surprised [continually] by sin”—an effect that many of Milton ’s dramatic descriptions and narrations are clearly meant to create. In this regard, the work as a whole resembles a strong, varied sermon—it must be appliedto members of the congregation.

Some Modes of Showing and Telling

Example: Christ, Abdiel, Raphael and Muse as poets describing heavenly things, etc.

Demonstration: The War in Heaven—demonstrates to rebel angels God’s omnipotence and serves as vehicle for Christ’s dramatic elevation.

Celebration: Prayer and Song, as in Eden Adam and Eve chant orisons unpremeditated.

Concrete Description (allegory included): Narrator and Raphael able to do this, bearing in mind the limits of speech as a conveyance for heavenly things.

Vagueness: Strategic vagueness to remind us how to interpret the poem’s concrete descriptions.
Oratory: Public set-piece speeches by God, Christ, Satan, Adam, others. Satan is the first “politician” (in the bad sense, not the good Aristotelian one wherein politics helps us pursue the good life).

Narration: recountings “situate” prior and higher things and events temporally and spatially, in terms that the fallen eye and understanding can encompass. This is due not to God’s need, but ours, and even to that of unfallen Adam and Eve. Main justifications for history as unfolding occur in Books 7 and 11: the Annunciation of Christ, Adam’s Panoramic Vision of Human History as Granted by Michael--the Fortunate Rise of Christ and Fortunate Fall of humankind. Exclusion and differentiation lead to still greater unity and coherence.

Places to arrange: Heaven, Hell, Chaos, Unfallen Earth, Fallen Earth, Narrator’s Study.

Book-by-Book Notes on Milton’s Paradise Lost, Books 1-4

General Comment: Regarding the claims of Milton’s epic to retell parts of the Bible, we might refer to “the doctrine of things indifferent,” which suggests that if something isn’t discussed in the Bible, people are free to invent, opinionize, and so forth. Milton would probably agree that the basic articles of belief and conduct necessary to make it to heaven aren’t particularly difficult to comprehend, so authors are free to extrapolate from or elaborate on the Scriptures. The text’s truth-status is certainly something Milton must defend in Paradise Lost since he can’t rely sincerely on an argument like that of Sir Philip Sidney, who wrote in his “Defense of Poesy” that a poet shouldn’t be accused of falsehood since “ he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth: for . . . to lie, is to affirm that to be true, which is false.” Milton is, after all, extrapolating from the Scriptures, and it’s obvious that he considers his text “inspired” by a Christian Muse. But there is a long tradition of defending the use of metaphor and figurative language in the Bible (carried on by no less than Augustine, Aquinas, among others) as a necessary form of accommodation, and Milton would probably say that his own stories based on Biblical events are just such a form of accommodation to help fallen human beings understand their predicament.

Book 1

1-26. In his initial invocation, the narrator will take his readers all the way back to the beginning of things, back to “man’s first disobedience.” Milton’s text shows a strong interest in getting back to the origin or source of things, events, tendencies, words, stories, and just about everything else he can find time and scope to investigate. The narrator calls his muse Urania, but indirectly invokes the Christian God, or “the Holy Spirit” as a creative, illuminating power. At 15-16, the narrator claims that there will be “no middle flight” in this book—nearly every major human thought-system and historical cycle is to be subsumed into Paradise Lost, there to be given its place within the Christian order and narrative. Homer, Virgil, and all other great literary artists of pagan times may be considered honorable predecessors whose work to some extent prefigures Milton’s, but it’s clear that we are to understand them as having written about what Milton, in a famous line from Book 1, calls “devils to adore for deities.” The narrator prays at line 18 for the “upright heart and pure” that should prove a fit vessel for the task to be accomplished. Blindness—and of course Milton had gone blind by the time he began to compose Paradise Lost—is an early theme in the epic, one that will recur more than once in the books ahead. The compensation for physical blindness, the narrator implies, is inward illumination about spiritual matters.

36. The first sin, according to the narrator, was pride. This sin involved Satan’s desire to upset the fixed, just hierarchy of God, an ethereal and yet real order that Satan (ever the bad interpreter) mistakes again and again for something merely material.

54-75. At this point, we are treated to the first “elegiac moment”; Satan suffers from “the thought / Both of lost happiness and lasting pain.” There will be many more such moment, some perhaps less illegitimate than others, but none fully deserving of pity. Milton seems to have learned much from Shakespeare’s handling of his tragic heroes, and while Satan may not have a “Fool” of the same kind that King Lear has by his side throughout most of his sufferings, he carries his own “inner Fool” with him at all times.

The line “no light but rather darkness visible” (60) is deliciously absurd, but that’s because the narrator needs to render something of the strangeness and absurdity of Hell itself. This is perhaps our first look at Milton’s important strategy of accommodating heavenly things to more understandable earthly ones. Hell, as Milton’s narrator describes it, is a crazy composite “place”; it burns with a bizarrely negative light, and although it is a prison (a place of stagnation), there’s literally “no rest for the wicked.”

80-94. The elegiac quality of Satan’s opening words here is hard to miss; in essence, he tells the first rhetorical lie to Beëlzebub, whose aid he courts with chivalric sentiment.

95-124. Satan’s rhetoric is absurd here, as it will prove to be throughout Paradise Lost. Milton’s Devil is always equating himself with God and making bogus political claims. While he obviously covets the role of absolute dictator over the fallen legions, he sets himself forth as an angel whose peers “democratically” chose him as their leader. Christ’s declared advancement is seen as mere favoritism on the Father’s part, and as one of my UC Irvine professors used to say, Satan suffers from a serious case of “injured merit.” In a word, he feels slighted and can’t see why the Son has any more right than he, Satan, has to sit at the right hand of God the Father. The battle is described as having taken place on a literal plane, a “field,” and the outcome is characterized as dubious. It makes no sense to ask defiantly, “What though the field be lost?” (105) when one’s defeat is total and extends infinitely beyond any physical, containable dimensions. God’s power, in Milton’s order of things, is absolute and infinite; it cannot be countered with anything but laughable results. And there is a great deal of this sort of humor in Paradise Lost. Well, Satan needs to enlist sham reasoning in the service of his perpetual illusions and confusions. He seems eternally astonished at the plain truth of God’s justice and order, and he chooses instead to ally himself with chaos and cover-up. Following Satan’s speech, Beëlzebub evidently doubts the force of what Satan has said—what if, he asks, the “field” is more than just one battle, and what if things really can keep getting worse and worse?

156-91. In reply to Beëlzebub, Satan is ready with some more speedy words; he sets the devils’ tasks as those of un-creation, negation, inversion, chaos-making, and in general the frustration of Providence (God’s plan).

195-210. Here is the first of Milton’s excellent “observer” similes: this one describes the bulk of Satan as similar to that of the Biblical Leviathan or a great whale that a Norwegian captain might stumble upon in the dark of night, and mistake for an island. The purpose of similes in Milton is generally fourfold: it may refer us back to a former state of things; offer an historical parallel (Red Sea, Egyptian chivalry, Biblical times, etc.); bring other epics into the mix (Homer refers to leaves and bees metaphorically; and so does Milton); or refer to Eden and the wilderness thereof. In the present simile, we see the strangeness of what the narrator is trying to describe to us—its proportions and dimensions are too huge for our senses to take in, which may produce a disorienting effect. The simile itself doesn’t try to reduce Satan to a level easily taken in; rather, it reproduces the “original” sense of disorientation implied.

242-70. Satan offers another elegiac perspective on his situation, taking his farewell in thought of the “happy fields” he had formerly known. Some of his most memorable lines occur in this little speech: “The mind is its own place,” he insists at line 254, and then goes on to sum up his position on the angelic fall: “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n” (263). This is why British romantics such as Byron and Shelley praise Milton’s Devil—they see him as the ultimate rebel with a cause: opposing God’s allegedly tyrannical rule over adoring slaves. Shelley’s “Essay on the Devil and Devils” takes this view about as far as it can go since he proclaims that Satan is “morally superior” to the God against whom he rebelled. This is what he writes in the essay: “Nothing can exceed the grandeur and the energy of the Devil as expressed in Paradise Lost. . . . Milton’s Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent, in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy—not from any mistaken notion of bringing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity but with the open and alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments.” ( Shelley’s Prose. Ed. David Lee Clark. New York: New Amsterdam Books, 1988. 267.)
But the same romantics probably also understood that Milton would scarcely ratify their interpretation: Satan’s claims are about as dubious as claims can be: the mind is not independent in the way Satan claims, as Milton would surely say, and neither is reigning over a territory of utter desolation better than praising the Almighty in Paradise.

283-94. Although Milton uses the ancient Ptolemaic system of astronomy, he is aware of the discoveries of Galileo (1564-1642), whose name is associated with his predecessor Copernicus (1473-1543), whose “heliocentric” theory helped initiate the modern Scientific Revolution. The narrator likens Satan’s shield to the moon as viewed through Galileo’s telescope.

315-30. Milton borrows here and elsewhere from classical epic’s standard portrayal of the haranguing captain inciting his men to courageous exploits with a mixture of insults and inspirational language: “Awake, arise, or be for ever fall’n” (330).

365-521. At the command of their leader, the rebel angels rise from the burning lake and begin to wander about the realm of Hell, giving the narrator an opportunity to trace the lineage of the world’s “devils to adore for deities” (373). The goal in cataloguing these pagan gods is partly to get to the source of mythological and historical confusion. Hell accounts for a great deal of the wrong kind of human diversity in that its bad angels spread out over the Middle East, Egypt, Greece, Britain, and nearly everywhere else on the globe. (By “bad diversity,” I mean the kind that stems from fiendishly clever variations on wicked and selfish acts, not the kind that stems from God’s generous decree in Genesis that humans and all creatures should “be fruitful and multiply.”) Moreover, the catalogs so full of names and places underscore the deceptiveness of fallen language, which multiplies confusion along with its many terms for things.

587-621. Satan surveys his great host in a moment of epic grandeur. Again we see his divided psyche, in which what may be genuine pity for the fallen coexists with cruel determination to forge a rival empire dedicated to the frustration of God’s cosmic order. Satan towers above the other rebel angels, and we are told that some of his old beauty still survives, in an “excess / Of glory obscured” (593-94). Milton must, of course, play up the epic dimensions and persona of Satan, lest his epic become much less interesting—Satan must, after all, be greater than an earthly Achilles or Aeneas, mustn’t he? But at the same time, the narrator will keep twinning his sublime descriptions of Satan with passages casting the hellish hero as a posturer and deployer of devious rhetoric and “smoke-and-mirrors” visual spectacles.

622-62. Satan takes stock of the situation for his host, blaming God for the catastrophe they’ve suffered because he advanced Christ as the Crown Prince and then put down the envious rebels with strength they never knew he had. The charge, then, is that God deviously “concealed” the true dimensions of his power, and in effect tempted the angels to defy him—in Satan’s view (if, of course, we are to suppose that he really believes what he says), God set them up for a fall. Satan is issuing what we might call a terrorist’s manifesto; he waffles somewhat on the question of confronting God again directly on the so-called “field of battle,” and insists that in any case the bad angels can wage asymmetrical warfare against this sublimely powerful foe. However, as always in Milton’s scheme of things, Satan doesn’t see that God’s power is not merely physical; it is moral and spiritual, and therefore cannot truly be opposed.

670-751. In this segment, the narrator belittled human pretensions to grandiosity and opulence: the devils set to work on their infernal palace, mining the necessary metals and other materials as they go, with a speed that would astonish the most proficient human engineers and architects. This whole passage is a reminder that much human industry amounts not so much to intelligence as to fiendish cleverness stemming from a desire to rival God or simply achieve an illegitimate independence from him. What the devils do in Hell, we might say, is the archetype of the building of the Tower of Babel in Genesis.

775-98. In the concluding segment of Book One, the narrator’s multiple similes describe the devils as they prepare for their “great consult[ation].” The narrator allows a pretense of grandeur, orderliness, and democratic assent into his description, only to take it all back in a spirit of mockery at their shape-shifting grotesqueness and, ultimately, inessentiality. We are told that the devils shrunk themselves down to “smallest forms” (789), but we hear subsequently that “far within / And in their own dimensions like themselves” (792-93) some of the highest angels (if I read Milton correctly here) take their seats and begin the meeting. But what exactly are these true dimensions? The point we are to derive, it seems, is the Augustinian one that says evil, correctly understood, simply does not exist; it lacks ontological stability because authentic beings are grounded (and freely recognize that they are grounded) in God.

Book 2

30-42. Satan puts forth a false principle of egalitarianism, claiming that no one in Hell will claim “precédence.” But he is exactly the sort of despot Milton himself had long been on record as despising.

43-105. Moloch is the Devils’ Achilles-like fighter; he declares for open warfare, not guile. As far as he is concerned, nothing could be worse than the present situation. At line 65, he sounds like the first spokesman for the “military-industrial complex.” Milton chastises ancient epic’s glorification of war for war’s sake and uncontrolled wrath, the “oulomenos mēnin” of Achilles. This kind of anger differs from God’s righteous wrath in the Hebrew Scriptures.

106-228. Next Belial offers his opinion. Possessed of more savvy than Moloch, he realizes that things actually could get worse and that God’s powers are not of the almost purely material kind that some of the angels attribute to Him. If God is omniscient as well as omnipotent, it also makes no sense to suppose, says Belial, that the bad angels will be able to trick him or hide anything from him. Belial therefore counsels that the fallen host play a waiting game; perhaps God will remit some of their punishment if they stay out of his sight for a long time. Still, this advice is no better than a variation on Satan’s mistake: how can one be “out of sight, out of mind” when the perceiver is God?

229-83. Mammon then takes his turn, and he offers a Nimrod-like pan: the devils should stay in Hell and concentrate on building up their empire. He believes that they can achieve a level of splendor rivaling God’s Heaven and even that in due time, they will become accommodated to the fiery element of their new abode.

299-416. Beëlzebub now steps in and plays “spin doctor,” extrapolating from Satan’s earlier thought that it might serve best to seek out earth and ruin whatever “next big thing” God has planned for the cosmos. The whole speech is carefully staged, and leads to a portentous request for a volunteer: who will be so bold and skilful as to make his way out of Hell and fulfill the task specified?

430-85. Satan sets himself forward as the princely devil for the job. His bold exploit will lead the bad angels on to their new dream of building and maintaining a rival empire against God, by any means necessary. Satan’s speedy response has effectively “prevented all reply” (467), and so with Beëlzebub’s help he is able to cement his position as Hell’s great dictator and heroic champion, receiving the clamorous acclaim he seeks upon the conclusion of his speech.

506-628. The “Stygian council” breaks up now that the necessary decision has been made, and the rebel angels split up into separate groups according to their various inclinations. They participate in games and practice arts—Olympian-style contests at 530, recitation of heroic epic at 546ff, and philosophical and theological debate at 557-65. Hell has its explorers, too, as we find at 570, and they begin to trace the stunning geography of the “dismal world” into which their sin has thrown them. Lines 614-28 offer a remarkable description of this place, with its “Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death, / A universe of Death,” all seen, we must presume, in the eerie “darkness visible” mentioned back in Book 1.

629-889. This segment presents the famous meeting between Satan and his “daughter” Sin, along with their offspring, Death. Sin is described with Spenserian visual dimensions at line 645 and following, and at first Satan fails to recognize either his old lover or his son Death, when the latter appears and threatens to sting his father. As usual, Satan is blind to the consequences of his actions, calling Death “execrable shape” at line 681. At 727, Sin shows a strange affection for Satan, and dissuades him from harming Death, as he seems set on doing, and she similarly warns her son not to harm his father. This is truly the first “dysfunctional family,” fraught with violent regard and incestuous relations. When Satan still cannot recognize Sin, she recounts for him the story of her birth, which Milton has evidently borrowed from the Greek myth of Athena springing fully grown from the head of Zeus. Sin sprang from Satan’s head just at the point when he was about to declare his bold plan in council to rebel against God’s tyrannical rule. The lady now reveals a Satan-like sense of “injured merit,” believing that she is now deprived of that favor which her father and lover had formerly granted her. At 774, in what seems to be a parody of Saint Peter’s reception at the hands of Christ of the Key to Heaven, Sin says that after the rebel host fell, she was given the key to Hell’s portal, “with charge to keep / These gates for ever shut” (775-76). At 792, Sin recounts how she was raped by her son Death, and the union produced myriads of “yelling monsters” that surround her always and return at will to the womb, there to gnaw her innards. This is Milton’s grotesquely Spenserian figure for the incestuous relationship between sin and death. By line 815, Satan has come to realize that this hideous pair are his natural allies, fitting instruments of the revenge he seeks against God. He will set them free as if they were two attack dogs, and Sin obligingly obeys her father. Her recognition of him and her support for his plan are ironic, considering the disloyalty Satan has shown for God.

918-67. The Gates of Hell now opened (not to be shut again until the Last Judgment), Satan beholds the great space he must cross for a time, and then embarks on his Odyssean voyage through Chaos. The narrator describes this passage in somewhat comic terms: we see Satan falling, tumbling, and stumbling through the empty space, only advancing, the narrator reminds us, at the sufferance of God. He is ill at ease and off balance throughout his “heroic” voyage, dependent on the will of the very Power he means to oppose.

968-1010. Satan manages to convince Chaos and Night, and the dread Powers surrounding their throne, that he means them only good. Theirs, he promises, will be the “advantage,” while he seeks only “revenge” (987). They agree without much ado, and Satan is able to make his way forwards.

1024-55. Sin and Death follow their father, building after his tracks the great bridge that will speed the passage of the bad angels back and forth from hell to earth, there to tempt mankind. Book 2’s final passage offers a panoramic vision of the “empyreal Heav’n” and the beautiful new “pendent world” (1052) next to its moon. Satan’s mind, however, is dark with revenge—he has not come merely to behold this magnificent sight; he has come, so he thinks, to destroy it utterly if he can, or at the very least to spoil it for the better part of its inhabitants.

Book 3

1-55. The invocation at the beginning of the third book, with its Petrarchan extremes and genuine pathos, is perhaps the most intimate and moving of any in Paradise Lost. The narrator will soon describe the consequences of the fall, but at this point the issue for him is the consequences of that fall for him personally. He is blind, and what compensation can there be for so terrible a deprivation? He feels a duty to cultivate the spiritual insight that can alone make up for such loss, and asks for help from “holy Light, offspring of Heav’n first-born.” God obliges him, and the narrative moves on. The narrator links himself with ancient seers who have shaped history, and brings the story down to the level of a brief, individual human situation (his own) in the present time. Milton had implored God at the beginning of the first book, “what is dark in me illumine,” and here in the third book we are reminded of the difficulty in accommodating heavenly things to earthly understandings and reassured of the narrator’s confidence in his ability to do so: “So much the rather thou celestial Light / Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers / Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from thence / Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight” (51-55). We are moving from darkness and chaos to the realms of light, and the narrator prays to be freed for a time from Satan’s and his own painful way of knowing things as a fallen man. Milton would have been quite aware of his predecessor Dante’s wonderful achievement in characterizing heaven as a place of pure energy and light in the Paradiso, and Paradise Lost must venture into the same region.

79-134. God begins to speak to his Son. Some have said that he sounds almost petulant at times, but the logic is Milton’s own: “reason is but choosing,” as the author had written in “Areopagitica.” God says of mankind, “whose fault? / Whose but his own? Ingrate, he had of me / All he could have; I made him just and right, / Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall” (96-99). As for the old argument about God’s omniscience and omnipotence making him responsible for the evil others do, God says, “if I foreknew, / Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, / Which had no influence on their fault” (117-18). The idea is that God did not compel either the rebel angels to disobey or Eve and Adam to sin; he simply knew that they were going to make the choices they in fact subsequently made. Not everyone finds this argument convincing, but it’s the one Milton himself evidently means to make. At line 129, we see that God is by no means a full-on predestinarian: to humankind he offers grace, while Satan he views as a lost cause: “The first sort by their own suggestion fell, / Self-tempted, self-depraved: man falls deceived / By the other first: man therefore shall find grace . . .” (129-31).

144-66. The Son replies to the Father, showing concern for the latter’s reputation: wouldn’t allowing mankind to be utterly lost amount to a victory for the rebel angels? Wouldn’t it be a profoundly decreative act, whereas God is all about creative generosity? The Son’s reverential tone marks a change from the tone of the heroic epic we heard in the first two books to a more reverential tone; as the editors point out, what the Son says sounds a lot like Abraham’s pleadings with God not to destroy the people of Sodom.

167-216. God explains to the Son and the angels that redemption is indeed possible and part of the plan. At line 180, we are told that man will be “By me upheld, that he may know how frail / His fall’n condition is, and to me owe / All his deliv’rance, and to none but me” (180-82). This line may seem to have a bit of the Hebrew Scriptures’ “jealous god” in it—it’s the kind of statement against which Shelley takes radical aim in his prose.

217-73. God explains that for the redemptive potential to come into its own, a sacrifice will be necessary: “death for death” (212). Even the good angels want no part of this demand, and the Son alone shows the “active virtue” Milton had praised highly in “Areopagitica”: “Behold me then, me for him, life for life / I offer, on me let thine anger fall; / Account me man . . .” (236-38). We may remember the infernal parallel to this scene, where Satan alone rises to the challenge of finding a way out of hell. Well, does the Son seem to be less than equal with God the Father here? Or is Milton just accommodating the dialog to our limited understanding? He has an obvious dramatic problem here: how do you represent a dialog between perfect beings, two members of the Trinity? Well, you have to make them sound like entirely separate beings.

317-43. God prophecies (infallibly, of course) about End Things or eschatological matters: Christ will return a second time and judge the living and the dead, while the world “shall burn, and from her ashes spring / New Heav’n and earth, wherein the just shall dwell . . .” (334-35). In the end, “God shall be all in all” (341) and the Son will be able to put away his scepter. The assembled hosts are told that they must “Adore the Son, and honor him as me” (343). Well, we might ask, why doesn’t this all happen sooner? Why must there be such a long detour? In terms of Paradise Lost as a narrative, the eschatological scheme implies a linear progression towards the last things, but that isn’t a scheme the epic itself can follow. The difference or detour on the way “there” from “here” Milton treats as the effect of sin and as part of God’s providential design.

344-417. The hosts comply, and sing hymns first to the Father and then to the Son, his “Divine Similitude” (384). Radiant imagery prevails, with the Father called a “Fountain of light, thyself invisible / Amidst the glorious brightness where thou sitt’st / Throned inaccessible . . .” (375-77). The narrator announces a shift in his subject matter at the end of this segment: “Hail Son of God, Saviour of men, thy name / Shall be the copious matter of my song / Henceforth . . .” (412-14).

418-587. The narrator performs a rather cinematic “cut” to Satan with the word “Meanwhile.” The Arch-Fiend surveys the region later to become known as the Paradise of Fools. But the narrator undermines Satan’s grand perspective of “Jacob’s ladder” to the heavens (510) by reminding us of various ridiculous delusions, sins, and pridefulness. We hear of the friars with their false doctrines about how to get to heaven, false rituals, and so forth: “Then might ye see / Cowls, hoods and habits with their wearers tossed / And fluttered into rags; then relics, beads, / Indulgences, dispenses, pardons, bulls, / The sport of winds . . .” (489-93). Satan himself is on a quest to hold divided empire: in essence, he is a Manichean who believes in his own substantiveness in opposition to God. But in due time “The stairs were then let down” (523) and a way into Paradise is thereby opened for Satan, whereupon we shift with a perhaps conquistador-themed observer simile to the magnificent sight that unfolds before the Fiend, sparking his “wonder” and “envy” alike—at least for a moment, whereupon he makes his landing on the sun. And who should he espy there but a radiant angel that turns out to be Uriel.

588-742. When he sees Uriel, Satan knows he must begin his career as an Ovidian shape-shifter, so he presents himself as an innocent cherub on vacation from heaven, just a fine young angel who burns with the desire to see and know more about the universe God has made. And the deception works: Satan turns Uriel’s kindness into weakness for, as Milton says, “neither man nor angel can discern / Hypocrisy” (682-83). Satan is at least free to make his way down to earth, and lands on Mount Niphates in Assyria.

Book 4

1-113. Milton does a fine job at the beginning of this book with regard to preventing our perspective from unifying with Satan’s or our sympathies from his way. That’s the risk an author always runs when dealing with a powerful villain whose understanding of and control over the situation seems to be greater than those of anyone else around. Readers find it hard to side with dupes, to put the matter bluntly. But the narrator makes sure to characterize Satan as a stage villain—one who is lucid enough to understand the nature of his error and so stubborn that he would rather persist in his villainy than repent. Why did Satan rebel? His own explanation is, “Ah wherefore! he deserved no such return / From me, whom he created what I was / In that bright eminence” (42-44). Satan knows this intellectually, but evidently he cannot accept it spiritually or emotionally: “Be then his love accursed, since love or hate, / To me alike, it deals eternal woe” (69-70). His situation is hopeless by his own admission: “Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell” (75). Even if restored to his former place, he would rebel again, and humanity’s creation only rubs salt into his wounds. This being so, he decides upon a strategy of depraved inversion: “Evil be thou my good; by thee at least / Divided empire with Heav’n’s King I hold / By thee . . .” (110-12).

131-287. Taking the form of a ravenous cormorant, Satan alights on the Tree of Life (194-96) next to the Tree of Knowledge, and surveys “A happy rural seat of various view” (247).

288-355. “Two of far noble shape erect and tall . . . .” In this portrait of the first couple, that they are differently ranked is not in question: the narrator says that they are “Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed” (296). They are different, but there’s reciprocity between them: mutuality and “meet conversation” reign. Adam is somewhat like Puritan husband—he is minister, teacher, and guardian to his mate. The Garden of Eden isn’t a regimented place, and neither is the relationship rigid. Instead, there’s a gentle symmetry or complementarity between Adam and Eve.

356-410. Satan views this “gentle pair” (366), and is at first stunned by their innocence and beauty. As always, Satan is deeply divided and in an unhappy dialog with himself. We see that his private compassion is divided from his sense of duty as leader of the bad angels: “public reason just, / Honor and empire with revenge enlarged / By conquering this new world, compels me now / To do what else though damned I should abhor” (389-92). The narrator’s denunciation of this ploy is right on the mark—he calls this alleged “necessity” nothing but “the tyrant’s plea” (394). Satan has an empire to administer, and constituents to satisfy and keep in line, and as far as he is concerned, nothing must be allowed to stand in his way.

411-39. Adam’s conversation with Eve shows that for him, material objects hint at the creation’s source; his “necessity” is only this generous supposition: “needs must the Power / that made us, and for us this ample world / Be infinitely good . . .” (412-14). Adam and Eve are not yet subject to the same sad way of learning that Satan is—he learns only by making mistakes and paying the price for them, and is then continually surprised at what should be obvious to him about his situation and state of error. The upshot of Adam’s lecture to Eve is something like the first pastoral: “let us ever praise him, and extol / His bounty, following our delightful task / To prune these growing plants, and tend these flow’rs, / Which were it toilsome, yet with thee were sweet” (436-39). Adam shows us his unfallen Puritan work ethic: he and Eve are to complete God’s labor of creation.

440-91. When in Book 9 Adam recounts to Raphael his own memories of his first moments, we find that the first thing he did was look up instinctively to seek his maker. Eve provides an innocent contrast to this later story when (at 449-91) she recalls her own first moments. She has Adam’s inductive and inferential capacities, but seems to need some help in realizing them. If Eve is a bit narcissistic, her narcissism is of the healthy sort. She is drawn by her “reflection” in the pool to find out who she is and where she belongs. Ovid’s Narcissus was a selfish lad who refused his gifts of love to a young maiden, and he pined away with “vain desire” (Eve’s phrase) after the maiden cursed him. Eve is moved by an innocent excess of desire to seek Adam; she is charitable, not guilty of cupidity. At 480, Adam and Eve engage in an innocent version of the Ovidian erotic chase; Eve is nothing like one of Wyatt’s courtly ladies, “wild for to hold.” As so often, Milton strips away the fallenness of a literary motif or genre, taking us back to its source in charitable feeling, an outpouring of positive emotions to achieve a worthy goal. We can see Eve’s potential for spiritual and linguistic development. Adam will teach her to pray and look up rather than down. He needs her. As in Renaissance literary theory, “Reason” needs the complementarity of the imagination, which is responsible for dealing with images. Eve hardly seems rebellious at this point since she professes satisfaction with her choice to yield to Adam, as the Creator (Christ in that capacity, as the Father’s “effectual might”) suggested she should: “follow me, / And I will bring thee where no shadow stays / Thy coming . . .” (469-71), and evidently agrees with the doctrine of male superiority. Adam is the possessor of “manly grace / And wisdom” (490-91), and in Milton’s order, these things make him Eve’s mentor.

505-35. Satan has been taking all this in, and he finds much to be optimistic about: the Tree of Knowledge seems to him a “Suspicious, reasonless” (516) hindrance, or at least he will be able to sell it to them that way, stirring within them “more desire to know” (523) about the universe. What has God been keeping back from them, indeed? He sees a chance to provoke envy in Adam and Eve, and to convince them to aspire beyond their current place in the created order: the same temptation to which he himself succumbed.

539-609. Gabriel warns Uriel that the bad angel is up to no good, and promises to find him no matter what shape he may have assumed.

610-775. Eve flatters Adam with the first dawn song or aubade, beginning “Sweet is the breath of morn, her rising sweet, / With charm of earliest birds . . .” (641-42). I think we are to take this fine poem as spontaneous prayer, a source of poetry. There’s no hint of John Donne’s complaint against the “Busy old fool, unruly sun” in Eve’s song. She asks Adam a question about astronomy: “But wherefore all night long shine these, for whom / This glorious sight, when sleep hath shut all eyes?” (657-58) And of course Adam responds with a perfectly proper pre-Copernican explanation: the stars “have their course to finish, round the earth” (661). It would not be good, he suggests, if night reigned perpetually, and the starshine has its own beneficence quite aside from their service to humankind. The narrator steps in with a classical allusion likening innocent Eve to Pandora, and warns that Eve’s gifts will turn out “O too like / In sad event” (715-16). Then comes Milton’s usual “sex-positive” outlook as the first couple retire for the evening: “who bids abstain / But our destroyer, for to God and man?” (748-49)

776-1015. Gabriel’s lieutenants discover Satan “Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve; / Assaying by his devilish art to reach / The organs of her fancy, and with them forge / Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams . . .” (800-03). This act—which the narrator describes in almost erotic tones—is Satan’s way of setting the stage for the temptation to come in Book 9. Eve’s strange, ominous dream will be revealed in Book 5, and in it Satan (in his own shape rather than as a serpent) will promise her that the forbidden fruit’s virtue will make her a goddess. Eve will find the dream disturbing, but all the same her appetite has been whetted, both materially and in the sense of unlawful aspiration beyond her place and limitations. From 823 onwards, Satan brazenly defies his Gabriel and the other discoverers, of whom he seems to have no fear at all, believing himself once more than their match, at least if God hadn’t tipped the scales against him. But God again “tips the scales,” and we are told that Satan “fled / Murmuring” from the scene. But his work for the present is done. In Books 5-6, Raphael recounts for Adam and us how God had Satan in derision during the War in Heaven, and he warns Adam and Eve not to transgress, effectively preventing us from letting them off too lightly. Books 7-8 will demonstrate God’s creative power. We move from fear in Books 5-6 to a sense of wonder and reverence for the creation in Books 7-8. Structurally, this unit of Books 5-8 helps to “justify” God’s ways, partly because we are drawn to appreciate both God’s tremendous power and righteousness and the generosity of his creation of the world. Books 9-12, as a unit, will have to do with loss and compensation for what has been lost: history records the consequences of Adam and Eve’s mistake and losses in the Garden of Eden, while Adam will be granted a vision of that history that yet offers redemption, turning the fall, ultimately, into a fortunate one.

Week 08 Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 23:51:00 +0000

The main point of Christian theology upon which the play turns is the opposition between the letter of God’s Law and the spirit of that Law. This opposition implies that the New Testament (the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which tell the story of Jesus, along with other texts such as the Acts of the Apostles, Revelation, and the Letters of Saint Paul), with its emphasis on forgiveness and love, is the Christian fulfilment of the Hebraic Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, the Pslams and Prophetic books, etc.), which emphasizes strict obedience to Yahweh’s commandments. In Saint Paul’s words, “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Corinthians 3:06). And he says to the Romans, “…a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law” (Romans 3:28) One final passage will turn out to be important in capturing the nuances of Shakespeare’s treatment of the Christian characters in The Merchant of Venice: In his Letter to the Galatians, Paul writes,

3:23 But before faith came, we were kept under the law, shut up unto the faith which should afterwards be revealed.
3:24 Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.
3:25 But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.
3:26 For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.
3:27 For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.
3:28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

It is perfectly obvious from such passages that for Saint Paul, acceptance of Jesus’ divine mission and continuing faith in him is the one thing necessary—not strict observance of the formal codes of conduct set forth in Old Testament books like Numbers and Deuteronomy. Jews come in for stricture most notably because they do not agree with the characterization of Jesus of Nazareth as the long-promised Messiah and God’s Son, which rules out their accepting the allied notion that Jesus’ crucifixion made redemption from sins available to all who believe in him. Based on statements such as those in The Gospel According to John (“…the Jews sought to kill him” 7.01, etc. In the original, περιεπάτει ὁ Ἰησοῦς ἐν τῇ Γαλιλαίᾳ, οὐ γὰρ ἤθελεν ἐν τῇ Ἰουδαίᾳ περιπατεῖν, ὅτι ἐζήτουν αὐτὸν οἰ Ἰουδαῖοι ἀποκτεῖναι), a tradition of vilifying Jews as the “murderers of Christ,” etc. took hold in Europe and, to some extent, it persists to this day, as current hate crimes against Jews there show. John Chrysostom in particular, a fourth-century (347-407 CE) Church Father, has become the focus of much debate about how much antisemitic commentary is in patristic theology. (A web instance: http://www.chrysostom.org/jews.html.)

Simply put, many Christians have long criticized Jews for not being Christians, and of course Jewish people have also had to contend with a broad, culturally reinforced antisemitism that takes on a life of its own and goes far beyond any disuptes about theological truth—as when Hitler and his Nazi Party claimed that “international Jewry,” in league with western capitalist powers such as Great Britain and France, was responsible for all of Germany’s social and economic woes after WWI. In order to understand Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, we must factor in the already ancient tradition of European antisemitism. Although I don’t for one minute believe Shakespeare himself was a vicious antisemite who advocated violence against Jews, it’s clear that the history between Christians and Jews is the backdrop of his dark comedy and that it is by no means a peripheral issue in the play’s overall meaning.

We know that things do not end well for Shylock, a successful Jewish financier at the Rialto in Venice. He loses his daughter, most of his wealth, and is forced to abandon his Judaism and swear to become a Christian, while the Christians in the play end happily married—excepting Antonio, of course, though he fares much better than we had thought he would. Since the play’s conclusion leaves Shylock out in the cold and offers no overt condemnation of what has happened to him—indeed the play’s title refers to Antonio the merchant, not to Shylock—what are we to make of such treatment? I suspect that Shakespeare’s audience would, for the most part, have considered Shylock’s punishment entirely just and even risible; they may well have reveled in the forced conversion and the taking-away of most of his wealth at the behest of Christians. We can’t know exactly what Shakespeare himself thought of Shylock, for the simple reason that all we have are the words of the play, which are all spoken by characters. All attempts to know the author’s intention about any work of art (dramatic or not) are doomed to failure for much the same reason, so the best we can do is probably to say, “well, Shakespeare is a Christian author, so it’s likely that his basic sentiment would have favored the Christian characters, at least to some extent.” Certainly the play is a Christian comedy, however dark—not a Jewish tragedy.

In my view, Shylock is anything but a “stock Jew” or a stage villain like Barabas in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. (http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/Texts/Marlowe.html). This doesn’t mean he is portrayed in a positive light. My sense is that there’s something deeply ambivalent about Shakespeare’s representation of Shylock—for almost every instance or utterance that makes him out to be a sympathetic figure and a wronged man, there’s another that shows him to be anything but sympathetic. It all comes down to where you think the emphasis lies—are we to weight the sympathetic moments more, or the unflattering ones? Consider just the ending of Act 3, Scene 1:

SHYLOCK. Why there, there, there, there! A diamond gone, cost me two thousand ducats in Frankfort! The curse never fell upon our nation till now; I never felt it till now. Two thousand ducats in that, and other precious, precious jewels. I would my daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in her ear; would she were hears'd at my foot, and the ducats in her coffin! No news of them? Why, so- and I know not what's spent in the search. Why, thou- loss upon loss! The thief gone with so much, and so much to find the thief; and no satisfaction, no revenge; nor no ill luck stirring but what lights o' my shoulders; no sighs but o' my breathing; no tears but o' my shedding!
TUBAL. Yes, other men have ill luck too: Antonio, as I heard in Genoa-
SHYLOCK. What, what, what? Ill luck, ill luck?
TUBAL. Hath an argosy cast away coming from Tripolis.
SHYLOCK. I thank God, I thank God. Is it true, is it true?
TUBAL. I spoke with some of the sailors that escaped the wreck.
SHYLOCK. I thank thee, good Tubal. Good news, good news- ha, ha!- heard in Genoa.
TUBAL. Your daughter spent in Genoa, as I heard, one night, fourscore ducats.
SHYLOCK. Thou stick'st a dagger in me- I shall never see my gold again. Fourscore ducats at a sitting! Fourscore ducats!
TUBAL. There came divers of Antonio's creditors in my company to Venice that swear he cannot choose but break.
SHYLOCK. I am very glad of it; I'll plague him, I'll torture him; I am glad of it.
TUBAL. One of them showed me a ring that he had of your daughter for a monkey.
SHYLOCK. Out upon her! Thou torturest me, Tubal. It was my turquoise; I had it of Leah when I was a bachelor; I would not have given it for a wilderness of monkeys.
TUBAL. But Antonio is certainly undone.
SHYLOCK. Nay, that's true; that's very true.

This passage contains a great deal—Shylock is by turns genuinely sorrowful and frantically vengeful against both his daughter and Antonio. He seems confused here and elsewhere in the play about the relative value of his money and his family, as when we hear from Christian report that he has conflated his “daughter” with his “ducats.” There is pathos in his statement that he wouldn’t have traded his departed wife’s ring “for a wilderness of monkeys,” and yet there’s something ridiculous about such a comparison-phrase, too, so we are tempted to laugh. And just as the Christians tend to be dealt with as individuals and to talk about themselves as individuals, we find Shylock often referring to himself in terms of his “tribe” and his “nation,” as if being an Israelite made him not an individual but a representative member of this collective identity: “The curse never fell upon our / nation till now; I never felt it till now.” Shakespeare isn’t working from a romantic concept of the self as unique—the Renaissance tends to treat the individual as an aggregation of virtues, vices and “faculties” or capacities—but it’s also the case that Shakespeare’s individuals are often strongly marked in a way that lends them nobility if not correctness. Shylock, to be fair, gives us an intimate sense of his inner thoughts and feelings, but a good deal of it makes him seem muddled and confused about important matters. And the references to his “tribe” tend to reduce him to the level of a stereotype, even if he is too complex a character to remain at that level.

It’s common for Shakespeare’s plays to offer parallels between one character or set of characters and another – for example, consider that many pairings in King Lear: the three daughters and their husbands, Gloucester and the King, and, above all, the Fool and the King. This is perhaps Shakespeare’s best way of enabling us to make sophisticated judgments about his characters and about the ethical and political questions the plays explore. It is seldom easy to say that a character in Shakespeare is “all good” or “all bad.” Lear, at his moments of greatest pathos, is dragged down from sublimity by the near-constant presence of the twaddling, bawdy-minded Fool, who in many productions actually resembles him in appearance. Presumably, that is because we are not to take Lear’s pronouncements about human nature or kingship at face value—he is a character offering us his perspective at points of extreme distress, isolation, and even madness. But it’s worth considering if Shylock in The Merchant of Venice might have a twin of sorts – his “tribe,” the Jews as the popular imagination would have them. Even as he speaks some of his most sympathetic lines, this shadow of the comic “stock Jew” hangs over him, and prevents him from rising to a level of tragic dignity. To the Christian characters in the play, Shylock is either a devil or a figure of fun—there seems to be nothing in between for him, and he finds it almost impossible to get himself considered as a human being with a genuine grievance.

But what about the Christians in this play? Beyond Shylock, there are other parallels between characters and character sets in The Merchant of Venice. These parallels seem to me to cut both ways with regard to the behavior of the main Christians. Consider, for example, the love match between Lorenzo and Jessica as a lower-ranking parallel to the love match between Bassanio and Portia. On the surface, the pursuit of Jessica by Lorenzo might seem to be completely unrelated to Bassanio’s pursuit of Portia. But what about the possibility that Lorenzo’s obvious erotic interest in his lover and his willingness to abscond with her father’s ducats and jewels (conveniently in a chest not unlike Portia’s “caskets,” by the way) is meant as a way to bring the idealistic Bassanio down to earth? His Portia, after all, is “a lady richly left”—aren’t we being invited to ask ourselves just how much difference there is between his desire for Portia and Lorenzo’s less exalted desires for Jessica?

Then, too, while Shylock’s frenetic concern for his ducats often makes him look foolish and confused, what about the way in which the Christians Antonio and Bassanio continually make money out to be a thing of no importance—that is, in comparison with their high ideals and spiritualized notions about love and friendship? But isn’t Bassanio a prodigal who has squandered his own wealth on high living and appearances, and now has to put his friend’s life at risk so he can go in search of the perfect woman? Neither is Shylock solely concerned with money—certainly by the time of the trial scene in Act 4, he is no longer interested in recovering his 3,000 ducats; the pound of Antonio’s fair flesh will make good his “oath to heaven.” On the whole, Antonio and Bassanio themselves seem too fond of excessive oaths, repeatedly falling into the same error of making ridiculous attestations to facilitate whatever course of action seems convenient. That is one of the things Portia (now undisguised and free to be her female self) chides them for in the final act: their willingness to break an oath to their intended wives to satisfy some other (male-centered) pressing demand, like giving a gift to the “men” who helped Antonio win his case. They trivialize the things of the spirit by calling them to witness in the service of worldly oaths and purposes, and then they break the oaths at will. This hardly leaves their pretentions to Christian otherworldliness and earthly charity untouched.

Finally, Portia's interpretation of Shylock’s bond in Act 4 is that it doesn't contain all the necessary qualifications—flesh may be taken, yes, but blood mustn't be spilt. The Christian point is that fallen humanity can never sufficiently justify itself in God ’s sight. By implication, human beings cannot sufficiently qualify strict contracts and oaths and be truly just in their demands, so there is no point in making such hard bargains in the first place. Mercy is not something that can be divided up or quantified, and mercy is the only proper framework for human conduct. Jesus weighs in on this issue in The Gospel According to Saint Matthew 6.14-15: “For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” Shylock is aware of what others think of him and his religion (his voicings of this awareness often strike hard at Christian pretense to kindness and fair dealing), and he self-consciously tries to pay them back by conforming to their estimation of his “hard-heartedness,” insisting that every last stipulation of his bond be adhered to.

The ultimate point for Shakespeare’s audience, I believe, would be that Shylock is unmerciful when he has the chance to show mercy, and therefore he not only deserves to lose his case against Antonio, but he even deserves the punishments he receives at Christian hands. But for modern audiences—Christian or otherwise—Shylock’s punishment may well appear every bit as unjust as his own attempt on Antonio’s life: the political, economic, and religious establishments of Venice gang up on him and take away all he has, even his very faith. For what it is worth, I incline towards the view that Shakespeare is conscious of an irony in the fourth and fifth acts that was available to him at the time: it is fallen human beings who are meting out the punishments, not God, and the “quality” of their mercy is at least an open question. The Merchant of Venice may not be a tragedy, but its status as a comedy is not entirely stable, either, and I don’t believe that the “darkness” of this comedy is entirely the product of apologetic modern interepretation.

Week 06 Shakespeare's Henry V

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 03:55:00 +0000

Shakespeare’s Henry V, Realism, and the Monarchy. Shakespeare is not is a "realist" in the nineteenth-century novelist's sense. Although he sometimes includes ordinary people and knaves of various kinds (like Falstaff and his tavern-going friends), he is mainly interested in the dynamics of social and political power. Analyzing the causes of disequilibrium in these areas of life is a mainstay in his plays. If you want to find out much about, say, everyday life in London, you must go to the historians or to a playwright such as Ben Jonson (Bartholomew Fair, for instance). Shakespeare lived and wrote his plays during the reigns of two powerful sovereigns, Elizabeth (last of the Tudor line) and James I (the first Stuart king). While Elizabeth was a master politician and contemporizer, James tended to lean on the developing doctrine that a monarch rules by “divine right,” and therefore ought to wield almost absolute power. When his son Charles I got hold of such ideas, he drove the country’s landed gentry and some of the nobility—along with lots of regular folks who didn’t like Charles’ semi-Catholic High Anglican policies—into open rebellion during the 1640’s. The result was Cromwell’s Interregnum rule in the 1650’s and then a return to a chastened Stuart Charles II and, at last, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 wherein William and Mary came in from the Low Countries, acknowledged the limitations of their sovereignty, and satisfied the nation’s firmly Protestant sensibilities. From that point onwards, there was no talk of royal absolutism, and even the larger-than-life Queen Victoria reigned rather than ruled through much of the nineteenth century.

Shakespeare’s ideal sovereign seems to have been Queen Elizabeth (reigned 1558-1603), who had a strong sense of prerogative but also evidently felt deep responsibility for the well-being of her subjects. Elizabeth knew how to play politics like a true Machiavellian operator. Her reign was marked by what today we would call a shrewd concern for “public relations”—that is, for managing the Queen’s image and keeping the various subsections of the populace as favorable as possible towards her policies. The “Cult of the Virgin Queen” gradually encouraged by Elizabeth’s officials and courtiers proved a successful means of maintaining order. (She never married, partly because that would have meant diminished power for herself and an increase in dominion for her Continental Catholic suitors.)

Henry V and Tudor Pride. But what about Henry V? Henry must have been high on the playwright’s list of proper kings, judging from the accolades he receives in the history play that bears his name. Henry Bolingbroke, who became Henry IV after taking the crown from Richard II in 1399, was the son of the Duke of Lancaster, and so his son, upon ascending the throne in 1413 at the age of 26 as Henry V, continued the Lancastrian line. The fact that Henry V was a Lancastrian matters because the first Tudor King, Henry VII (who vanquished the Yorkist Richard III at Bosworth Field in 1485), was himself head of that great house by his mother Margaret Beaufort. The Tudors, therefore, favor the Lancastrian side of English history, not the Yorkist side. It would be natural for Shakespeare (who in his history plays partly follows Raphael Holinshed’s Tudor-friendly Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland) to offer a flattering reconstruction of the Lancastrian Henry V, and I think that is pretty much what we get in the historical play Henry V.

Modern cultural materialist critics have offered a counter-reading that sees irony everywhere one looks in plays such as Henry V, but I am wary of such interpretations. Critics in any era recast their favorite author to suit their own ideological convictions—after all, every generation must reexamine the past to find out what is still valuable. It’s interesting to read The Tempest, for example, in part for what it has to say about how colonizing Europeans treat “others” like Caliban, and it’s worthwhile to read Othello for its engagement with early-modern European ideas about racial difference. I can sympathize with the excellent Regency period republican William Hazlitt when he criticizes Henry V for its willingness to applaud a king Hazlitt considers no better than a brute bent on imperial conquest. In a lecture, Hazlitt writes, “Henry, because he did not know how to govern his own kingdom, determined to make war upon his neighbours. Because his own title to the crown was doubtful, he laid claim to that of France.” That is a frank and authentic response to an attitude Hazlitt finds offensive in his countrymen. Still—and without meaning to sound like a naïve realist who thinks we can establish the one “true interpretation” about great events or literary texts—I believe critics ought to impose some limits on themselves when they work with centuries-old material. Claiming that Macbeth is practically a nihilist manifesto or that in Henry V Shakespeare is laughing up his ruffled sleeve at the principle of monarchy is unconvincing. Almost every line in the play tends in the opposite direction. It is hard to see how a man who headed up The King’s Players theater company for James I could possibly be anti-royalist in sentiment. No, I think Shakespeare is a believer in the Renaissance’s prime image of earthly order: the Great Chain of Being, wherein everything has its place and God sanctions the order of things. He is neither an anarchist nor a murmerer against the political order of Elizabeth Tudor or James Stuart. The human order draws its order from the providential order of God.

This is not to say that Shakespeare is a shameless mouthpiece for the powers that be. We can see from Henry V and other plays that he doesn’t support monarchy blindly—the strengths and weaknesses of his characters amount to something like a Mirror for Magistrates. He never tears the institution of kingship down, but in the end the advice Henry V himself gives in our play holds good: “the King is but a man.” And a “man,” in the view of Renaissance authors, is for the most part a collection of virtues and vices just like every other individual, high-born or not. There are plenty of vice-riddled or otherwise wrongheaded rulers in Shakespeare’s canon, and they never fare well. But this leads us to a consideration of Henry V as a character—romantic poets such as Coleridge, in his Lectures on Shakespeare, have written with much acumen about the way in which many of this playwright’s characters manage to be both strong individuals and yet representatives of a whole class of people. Coleridge says famously of the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet, “The character of the Nurse is the nearest of any thing in Shakespeare to a direct borrowing from mere observation; and the reason is, that as in infancy and childhood the individual in nature is a representative of a class, just as in describing one larch tree, you generalize a grove of them,--so it is nearly as much so in old age.”

This is an insightful statement—Coleridge seems to be suggesting that there is something generic about the Nurse’s eccentric behavior as an individual—she is an uneducated but good-hearted old woman, and all such people show similar tendencies in their speech and conduct. Coleridge has much to say in romantic fashion about how the “genius” of Shakespeare cannot be bound by external conventions about dramatic structure or the representation of character, but rather drives him to let his plays unfold and his characters develop according to the supposed inner laws of their nature—just as an acorn, to use the organic metaphor, must grow into an oak and nothing else. I have always like that romantic way of describing Shakespeare’s process, but my point here is that Henry V is the very type of a good king. He achieves this paradigmatic status not because Shakespeare is following some wooden rulebook on “how to be a great king” but rather because, over the course of no fewer than three plays (I and II Henry IV plus Henry V), he allows Prince Hal to transform himself from a rascal into a sovereign of iron will and implacable virtue, the burden of which is at times lightened by the sense of humor that comes from being kicked around by life enough to acknowledge one’s own limitations—amongst them spiritual error and mortality.

All the World’s a Stage. What is Hal’s method for learning as much as he does? It is that of an actor—Prince Henry play-acts and workshops his way to glory, interacting with all manner of citizens from the common tavern to battlefields full of fiery nobility. His is not so much a romantic, unique, nameless, intimate self but is rather the product of trying out many different stations and styles on his way to appreciating his one true “office”—that medieval, relational term for defining a person by his or her role in life, entailing as it does certain responsibilities within the political and social order. If you’re going to be a king, you have to understand, in Shakespeare’s terms, that it is to play a role on the “stage” of life. That such a role means taking on grave burdens and enduring potentially harsh consequences in no way makes it less a role than if the person were simply strutting across the theatrical boards.

In I Henry IV, Hal’s father Henry IV at times shows disgust for his son’s prodigal ways. Hanging out with hard-drinking highwaymen like Sir John Falstaff and his friends, thinks the King, can lead to no good and violates the “public relations” principle that a great prince is more prized by making himself scarce than by mingling with low company. What the father doesn’t quite understand is that this “mingling” is Hal’s way of getting to know his subjects, the better to govern them. So in I Henry IV, Prince Hal tries out various roles, learning how the various subjects in his future kingdom think and live. In Act 1.2, Hal himself describes his antics in providential terms: “My reformation, glitt'ring o'er my fault, / Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes / Than that which hath no foil to set it off. / I'll so offend to make offence a skill, Redeeming time when men think least I will.” In other words, kingly virtue was always Hal’s redemptive final goal, whatever capers he may commit on his way to the throne. That may or may not have been true of the real Henry, but it seems true of Shakespeare’s character, who goes from “Hal” to the ultimate warrior-king Henry V, October 1415’s victor at Agincourt against an imposing French army.

Even when he becomes king and is about to undertake the greatest battle of his life at Agincourt, Henry V remains an actor and a learner. His groundedness and view of the big picture in morals and politics shows in the following prose exchange in Act 4, Scene 1 between the disguised King and one of his humbler subjects, Williams:

Williams. But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make when all those legs and arms and heads, chopp'd off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place'- some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left.

Henry. [T]he King is not bound to answer the particular endings of his soldiers, the father of his son, nor the master of his servant; for they purpose not their death when they purpose their services…. Every subject's duty is the King's; but every subject's soul is his own.

To a thorough philosophical materialist, this exchange would be pointless because both parties speak of “end things”; they speak of death and eternal judgment following the Resurrection of the Dead. But since they both accept this religious view of life, it’s easy to see whose argument is the better in such a context: the soul is more than the body, so the King can send his subjects off to fight in a foreign war without being held responsible for their physical demise, even if the cause should turn out to be unworthy. He neither wants them to be killed nor can answer for the state of their souls at the point of death—that is something only they can answer for. The point is that Henry can relate to his subjects at their own level, yet he retains the superior perspective of a man operating on a higher plane of experience and understanding. As Henry comes into his own, it becomes clear that his playful past has imbued him with the medieval and Renaissance truth that the king has not one body, but two—a natural body that desires, breathes, and dies, and a body political whose boundaries go well beyond the personal and the physical. The King is in part a walking “office” or set of duties, and this transpersonal aspect of him is what promises political continuity as well as (to borrow Thomas More’s term in Utopia) the “majesty” that comes with respect for whatever is larger than material affairs and ordinary humanity. (On the development of this theory, see Ernest Kantorowicz’s classic 1959 book, The King’s Two Bodies: a Study in Medieval Political Theology.)

Words, Words, Words. I like Russ McDonald’s Bedford Companion to Shakespeare, and his introduction to Elizabethan/Jacobean rhetoric in particular. McDonald’s main advice is that in order to enjoy Shakespeare, we need to be patient with what seems to our modern, journalistic sensibilities overly verbose passages and drawn-out figures of speech. We apply the idea that “brevity’s the soul of wit” to just about every kind of writing and speaking, so it can be disconcerting when Romeo’s friend Benvolio describes the predawn period as “an hour before the worshipp'd sun / Peer'd forth the golden window of the East.” The French historian Guizot said that Shakespeare tried every style except simplicity, but it’s fair to add that the most verbose statements in Shakespeare’s plays usually go to the silliest characters. Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing and Polonius in Hamlet are fine examples.

On a more serious level, the key question to ask about seemingly “verbose” figures and long sentences in Shakespeare is, “are the words oriented towards action, or towards further rhetoric?” Henry V, for instance, gets many full speeches both in soliloquy and in dialogue with others, some of them rather exuberant. But because his words always appear to be spoken to some useful and necessary end—like plucking up his men’s courage just before a battle, or inwardly hashing out a difficult matter in monarch-theory or a point of conscience (4.1 “think not upon the fault / My father made in compassing the crown! / I Richard's body have interred new…”), they pass the “blowhard” test. An example would be Act 3, scene 3’s longish harangue of the citizens of Harfleur—Henry seems to be revel at length in the horrors his men will inflict on the defenseless town, but his purpose is blunt and (arguably) even humane, as the concluding rhymed couplet of his speech makes clear: “What say you? Will you yield, and this avoid? / Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy'd?” Henry is a talker, but he’s much more than that—he is a doer whose words suit his purposes and his actions. Similarly, Captain Fluellen is loquacious, has a comic Welsh accent, and even ends up talking sometimes while others are fighting. Even so, his vehemence (“look you, now”—“in your conscience”!) is as honorable as Henry’s occasional exuberance—Fluellen speaks as he does from an excess of uprightness and national pride, not from any unworthy motives, and his overfondness for “discoursing of the wars” stems from admirable erudition in military history.

Contrast Henry’s performance as a speaker with the Dauphin (the Crown Prince of France)—he is eager to defend his country, we quickly intuit, but his bravado and metaphorical flights are not grounded in prior experience. When he compares his horse to Pegasus—“ha! he bounds from the earth as if his entrails were hairs; le cheval volant, the Pegasus, chez les narines de feu! When I bestride him I soar, I am a hawk. He trots the air; the earth sings when he touches it; the basest horn of his hoof is more musical than the pipe of Hermes”—the Constable quick tries to bring him back to earth: “Indeed, my lord, it is a most absolute and excellent horse.” A horse, that is, and nothing more. As the conversation proceeds, it becomes clear that the Dauphin’s older advisors have heard this nonsense before, and hold it in contempt. The man is a fine talker, but his career as a doer, while honorable, will be cut tragically short by Henry’s “band of brothers.”

Finally on the subject of linguistic styles, the matter is far more complex than I can do justice to here. We aren’t always dealing with straightforward contrasts indicating either perfect virtue or absolute vice. Even Plump Jack Falstaff, in the Henry IV plays, with his windy rhetoric and bad morals, has something of value about him—he’s a slippery, virtuoso rogue even if not a virtuous man, and he teaches the Prince a thing or two about what makes men such as himself tick. There are almost as many unflattering affinities as stark differences between the rascals and the royalty in the Henry IV-V trilogy. This is part of what Samuel Johnson, in his Preface to Shakespeare, warily acknowledges as the playwright’s genius—he is true to the complexities of character and life’s events, sometimes to the point of surrendering the uplifting moral for love of the tale that rings true to human nature. In 5.1 the lowly Pistol laments, “Old I do wax; and from my weary limbs / Honour is cudgell'd. Well, bawd I'll turn, / And something lean to cutpurse of quick hand. / To England will I steal, and there I'll steal….” The statement has a certain eloquence to it, and the pun on “steal” reinforces the pathos of this unheroic character’s probable future: King Henry said everyone who came back from the war in France would be remembered eternally, but that’s clearly not true for a man like Pistol—with no honorable role to play back home, he’s sure to meet some ignominious fate.

Week 04 Thomas More and Thomas Wyatt

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Sun, 20 Feb 2005 04:23:00 +0000

Notes on Sir Thomas More’s Utopia

Historical Background. Thomas More lived from 1478-1535, the early decades of the Tudor dynasty that stretches from 1485-1603 (Henry VII to Elizabeth I), and served as Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor. When he defended the Church and refused to go along with Henry's desire to divorce Queen Katharine and marry Anne Boleyn, the King had him executed for treason. It was a difficult balancing act to maintain one's loyalty to religious principle and yet serve such a headstrong monarch, and ultimately it proved impossible. It's common today to spin turbulent affairs in political life with the Chinese proverb, "may you live in interesting times"—Thomas More's early Renaissance English milieu certainly qualifies as "interesting times."

The Tudors and their Successors. In political terms, the Tudor period saw increasing centralization of the monarchy at the expense of England's feudal barons. By the time of Henry VIII (who reigned from 1509-47), the country had been bled by the Wars of the Roses between the houses of York and Lancaster from 1455-87 (that is, from the time of the Lancastrian Henry VI through the Yorkists Edward IV and Richard III, and finally the Lancastrian Henry Tudor, who became Henry VII). But many other things were happening—on the Continent, the Reformation (Martin Luther's spearheading of a break from the Catholic Church and the foundation of "Protestantism") had a profound effect on religious, political, and social life for many Europeans. In England it was a time of growth in commerce and the rise of what today we would call "the middle class," at least in a pre-industrial sense: England came to have a fairly large and influential number of people who were no longer agricultural laborers but who made their living from commerce and professional practice of one sort or another.

The Tudor line was impressive in many ways, but its efforts really did not settle the country's affairs in matters of religion--, Elizabeth I's supposed settlement in favor of protestantism gave way to James Stuart's (James I's) doctrinaire absolutism and then his son Charles I's high-handed intensification of that doctrine until the Protestant landowning class under the banner of Oliver Cromwell engaged them successfully in a civil war lasting from 1642-51 , which itself gave way to the Stuart Restoration of Charles II in 1660, and finally, in 1688, to the "Glorious Revolution" that brought in William of Orange as William III and his Queen Mary and finally guaranteed England's throne as solidly Protestant. The Bill of Rights limited the king's claims to the exercise of authority and guaranteed that Parliament, not the monarchy, would for the most part be in charge of government.

Renaissance Humanism. More wrote his Utopia in Latin for learned humanists all over Europe. It was the universal language of intellectuals—Michel de Montaigne, for instance, was raised with Latin as his native language, and claimed he later forgot how to speak it. The French word "Renaissance" refers, of course, to the rebirth of classical learning that began in Italy and spread from around the fourteenth century onwards, at least through the sixteenth century. The Church had long known parts of the classics, but such knowledge was not widely disseminated outside the church—at least not in Europe. During the Renaissance, however, scholars not so closely tied to the Church's imperatives began to make much of classical literature, and the intellectual flowering that occurred in these times remains a striking achievement. It's fair to say that the great Renaissance humanists looked "backwards" to antiquity for their models in philosophy and social theory, but they did not do this out of a servile desire to imitate their superiors. Rather, the point was to adapt ancient ideas to contemporary life. Although it would be a mistake to see the Renaissance as anti-Christian, it makes sense to say that Renaissance authors like Giovanni Pico della Mirandola promoted human autonomy and even a degree of individualism—it being understood that a humanist defines the "individual" not as we would but rather in terms of certain classical virtues and capacities. (Consider, for example, the persistence of the ancient Roman idela of strength and honor in the Italian term virtù.) Still, much in Renaissance philosophy and the literary arts would have sounded to medieval ears like prideful straying from the straight and narrow path of salvation. (Even more modern critics have sometimes construed the Renaissance as a period of spiritual decadence—see, for example, John Ruskin's eloquent multivolume work The Stones of Venice.) The Church did not more kindly to Pico’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (See also The Pico Project.) any more than it did to certain nefarious claims the the earth revolved around the sun—not the other way around. On the whole, we can find Neoplatonic otherworldliness, Aristotelian civic engagement, and the new discourses of scientific exploration in the intellectual history of the European Renaissance—no single explanation comes close to encompassing this historical and cultural period.

The Genre of Utopian Fiction. In any era, utopian fiction, like pastoral, provides an alternative vision, a make-believe refuge that offers us some perspective on our own time and institutions. Advocacy of radical change depends on the individual author. If you cannot generate utopias, this genre assumes, you will soon lose the capacity for self-criticism and will be able to do no more than accept the status quo, no matter how untenable it may be. Ideologues are the greatest enemies of any system since no human system is perfect. As Wilde says, “utopia is the one shore upon which humanity is always landing.” What one thinks of utopian fiction will probably stem in part from what one thinks of human nature: either we are hard-wired or we are the very soul of change; either we are primarily irrational and aggressive and will always be that way, or we can deal with those tendencies and make progress towards the good life for everyone; either we need to solve the ancient problem of achieving fair and rational distribution of wealth, or much inequality and even injustice in life are necessary to the pursuit of societal prosperity, innovation, and so forth. Utopian fiction's impact will vary according to our vision of humanity’s purpose on earth. Even modern "dystopian" fiction—more of a warning than a promise of a shining and happy future—evokes many of the abovementioned issues. Think of Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, or Woody Allen's Sleeper, for example.

Utopia's Social Philosophy and Economic System. More's Raphael Hythloday advocates utility. His basic accusation is that Europeans live pridefully and irrationally. What good is gold, he asks? Why base the whole of life’s activity on creating artificial scarcities when all you really need is relatively simple to provide? Doesn’t that lead to vulgar materialism, ambition, and godlessness? The Utopians in More's text live simply and according to nature, as if they were following the prescriptions of the ancient stoic philosophers.

Unlike our modern-day consumption-based society, Utopia is a pre-industrial communist paradise that extols "the dignity of labor." In fact, according to Raphael Hythloday, the Utopians have solved the ancient problem of distribution—that is, they have ensured that everyone has enough to live comfortably, rather than some people being obscenely rich and others starving. That would indeed be an impressive accomplishment since the problem still hasn’t been solved today. Utopian economics is based upon abundance, not the hoarding of private property or the endless manufacture of objects that partially satisfy ever more and diverse desires. Since the Utopians aren't trying to produce much more than they need, Adam Smith's C19 theory about "the division of labor" isn't really important—if you don't want to make 10,000 items a day instead of 100, you don't need to worry about dividing up the necessary tasks into the smallest possible unit for efficiency's sake, possibly at the expense of the worker's self-respect and sense of purpose in life. I think that More's Utopia is somewhat less paternalistic than Plato's Republic, since the Utopians have some social and job mobility, but it still seems that everybody has a stable place in society. What Plato sought in his utopian fiction was a commonwealth in which the citizens did what they were best fitted to do—rulers should rule, and workers should work. Plato distrusted democracy because of its supposed appeal to those seeking social mobility on the basis of everything but merit, and believed people should be kept in their place once it had been determined what that "place" was. Thomas More probably would have little more patience than Plato with the messiness of modern democratic governments.

Politics. Raphael has little good to say about European courts and politics generally. He thinks that getting involved in politics would be a big mistake. It would compromise his integrity, and nobody would listen to him anyway. People would just become fearful of losing their place in the existing order. He envisions that old idea that entrenched power soon becomes a law unto itself; if the system works for you and your elite segment of the citizenry, why change things? Systems can be self-perpetuating and self-absorbed, taking no care for anything excluded from the system. Consider, for example, how we talk about "systems" of various sorts today: it is entirely possible to arrive at the conclusion that the health access and care system is in great shape even if many sick or at-risk people are excluded from access to medical care. Does the health care system exist for the benefit of the people, or do the people exist to benefit the system? Isn't it rational to ask the same question of government as a whole? What Raphael argues about politics has a modern ring to it—politics isn't simply about "achieving the good life"; it's about getting and maintaining power for the few.

Raphael—Rebel or Right On? But it's worth remembering that in Greek, hythlos means “drivel,” and daio means “kindle” or “devise.” Raphael Hythloday can also be seen, therefore, not only as a pointer-out of European faults but also as a destructive babbler who needs to be politely silenced. Examine the end of our selection from Utopia, and you'll see "More" the character step in and ask searchingly what will become of "majesty" if Utopian principles were ever to be adopted by Europe's monarchical societies. Will there be no ranking of people? No beautiful displays of wealth and art? No excellence but everything just "adequate"? Isn't inequality the prerequisite for superior achievement? The last-mentioned charge is a common one made against communist societies. An hierarchical society, the idea goes, allows for the development of genuine excellence because a limited number of people are given every chance to achieve superiority. Distribute the resources equally, this criticism says, and you disable the magical effect of the aristocracy-principle that makes excellence possible. In other words, mediocrity is the default button of humanity, so there is no point in depriving the excellent of privileges to benefit the common herd. A variation on this argument is sometimes made against democratic market-based societies as well: if ordinary middle-class people's ideas and tastes are allowed to dominate, say the critics, we will achieve nothing but the lowest common denominator in all areas of life—we will get vapid sitcoms rather than great art, semi-enlightened governance rather than forward-looking statesmanship, and, in a word, the tyranny of the majority. I

Thomas More's View of Utopia. Plato’s aristocratic and otherwordly text The Republic is a large influence on Utopia. Still, it is hard to say exactly where Thomas More himself stands on the viability of his utopia or the value of the criticisms set forth by his character Raphael Hythloday. It’s clear that he intends the text as a criticism of present-day political and social institutions, but also unlikely that he wants to turn the world upside down. It’s hard to suppose that More the Catholic and chancellor to Henry VIII would favor radical and immediate changes in European society, and Marxist critics' claims about his supposed radicalism seem rather dubious.

Notes on Sir Thomas Wyatt

Renaissance humanism tends to treat the individual as a type, a collection of virtues, after the manner of Aristotle. Our own modern sense of the individual as unique and autonomous would be somewhat foreign to them, even though it’s fair to say that the Renaissance has long fascinated people because of the strong personalities we find during that era—it’s an age of wordly popes and even worldlier rulers. Think of Machiavelli’s advice to Princes, the legends of the Borgia popes, Cellini, Leonardo and Michelangelo, and you get the picture.

Wyatt comes off as a modern individual—he is a contemporary political figure trying to deal with his own emotions, states of mind, and confusions about his position in the court of Henry VIII. His lyric speaker is often fragile, confused, threatened. A courtier must behave in an exemplary way, but what are the rules? There are some, but they appear to change based on powerful players’ individual desires. You can read Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier for an idealized version of the court, but Wyatt is in the thick of the real thing. He focuses on personal events—his thoughts and emotions.

“If you would seem honest, be honest” is his advice to his son in a letter. But the court of Henry VIII is all about artifice. Sidney the courtier-poet will later define the literary arts as "feigning notable images" of moral virtue and vice to move readers towards virtuous action. But the Court's artifice is about more immediate political objectives. It’s hard to maintain a position when one lives in a world that places a premium on the competitive manipulation of appearances, right down to the things one says about oneself, one’s sovereign, and others as well as the clothing one wears and the manners one exhibits. In Castiglione/Hoby’s Courtier, the point of being a “courtier” is to embody, and to body forth, the goodness and grace of the sovereign. Outward appearances, as any good Neoplatonist would say, mirror the inward goodness of a person’s soul, and the courtier is the king’s outward appearance, somewhat as Christ is the “Word made Flesh” of God. The Renaissance in both England and on the Continent is a materialistic, competitive age that still convincingly speaks the language of a profoundly Christian ethical and symbolic universe. It would be a mistake to think of someone like Niccolo Machiavelli as an atheist, though one can’t be so sure about his hero Cesare Borgia. The period is rife with conflict between the spiritual and the worldly, but it dismisses neither dimension.

Henry VIII is the Sun around which his officials and courtiers revolve. If you work for Henry, your primary task is to exalt his rule, and secondarily to do his bidding in official and unofficial affairs. It isn’t that people thought Henry was illegitimate, but rather that centralization of power increasingly required exalted claims about how the ruler came by his right to rule—by James I’s time in the early C17, we see the full “divine right” theory of rulership supplement dynastic birth as the justification for sovereignty, and of course divine right theory is partly what will get James’ son Charles I in trouble with the Puritan faction that eventually executed him during the Civil War of the 1640’s.

Many courtiers come from aristocratic backgrounds, but don’t have the liquid wealth to maintain themselves in such lordly status, so as the age of absolutism proceeds, once-independent courtiers gravitate towards getting themselves a place at court. It is with Henry that we might say the movement to centralism in government is nearly complete; his reign goes from 1509-47, and 1534 saw him copy Martin Luther’s Reformation or splitting off from the Catholic Church, except that with Henry the point had more to do with his own marital troubles and his desire to avoid sharing power and revenue with the Church than with spiritual matters.

Wyatt’s biography is quite interesting. In 1520, as a young man of 17, he married Elizabeth Brooke. She turned out unfaithful, and of course Wyatt anguishes much in his poetry over this problem. At 23, he went to Italy and France as a diplomat. He got into trouble with Henry in 1536 over Anne Boleyn and was sent to the Tower of London, but was subsequently pardoned and became ambassador to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s Court on the Continent. He got into trouble again in 1538 on a treason charge, and was later arrested on the charge in 1541, but was let off again so long as he agreed to reinstate his wife (he had a mistress named Elizabeth Darrell from 1536 to his death, and had been estranged from his wife), but he died in 1542, so he didn’t live long enough to enjoy his return to favor.

With a biography like that, a man may be forgiven his constant search for constancy, honesty, and truth as opposed to self-interested manipulation and sham in the name of religion and political authority. Wyatt sought fidelity in love and friendship, but it wasn’t easy to find. He never says it was, either—that’s one of the beauties of his poetry, isn’t it? It rings true to Wyatt’s own struggles, and doesn’t whitewash his complicity in courtly and romantic intrigue. Erotic pursuit was a political act back then, just as Orwell says sex is in 1984.

So what is the value of lyric poetry for Wyatt? Well, it is a way of assuming and exploring an honest role, a way of being honest and not just seeming so. The hope would be that by taking on a lyric voice, the poet can attain clarity about the erotic, spiritual and political matters that trouble him. It’s customary for us as children of the romantics to consider lyric poetry cathartic in its expressiveness: the soul escaping on the wings of language, as it were. In a Wordsworthian ode like “Tintern Abbey,” we expect that our speaker will eventually arrive at what has been called an “affective resolution” to the problems that plague him—the loss of creative power, of a once sustaining connection to nature and other human beings, etc. The best romantic poetry never oversimplifies such problems or claims that imagination conquers all or that language is a transparent medium of expression. Nonetheless, it is generally optimistic about expression’s capacity to deal with the problems of the autonomous self. But in Wyatt’s case, although there may be an initial hope that clarity will come and allow him to solve his troubles in real life, or at least set up a kind of pastoral refuge from the maelstrom of urban court life, the hope is likely to be frustrated, and the poem is likely to register and reflect upon that frustration. Metapoetically, he tends to admit the failure of his lyric utterances to set him free—free, that is, from complicity in the treacherous and hostile world that he describes. Art may be “wish-fulfillment,” as Freud said, but sometimes artists are well aware that fulfillment of their wishes isn’t possible. To get clear on something, to rehearse one’s difficulties, is not to slip out of them.

The meter of Wyatt’s poetry is purposefully rough, not smooth the way his later editors in Tottel’s Miscellany try to make it. He’s trying to capture difficult turns of intellect and emotion. The same is true of John Donne.

Week 03 Chaucer and Marie de France

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Mon, 14 Feb 2005 22:34:00 +0000

General Prologue Notes (A mix of lectures by my former professors and my own ideas)

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of short tales of various genres. The tales were extremely popular throughout the medieval age. See also Boccaccio’s Decameron, which was written in light of the plague in Florence, a different and more static motive for the participants’ trip than we see in Chaucer. His pilgrims are on their way to pay their respects at the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury whose refusal to go along with Henry II's plan to limit the Catholic Church's judicial authority cost him his life. Chaucer’s narrative frame allows for a dynamic portrayal of classes and stations. The pilgrims, ostensibly brought together for a common religious purpose, come from all three estates--the knighthood, the clergy, and the commons (working people of all types). We see not only a knights and prioresses but millers, reeves, ploughmen, parsons, friars, summoners, pardoners, cooks, and so on. Diversity is Chaucer’s watchword. The pilgrimage brings them all together.

The literary fiction--namely, that everyone will arrive at the Canterbury shrine--is disrupted by the Host, Harry Bailey, who says that the trip should end at a pub, with dinner promised to the pilgrim who tells the best tale. The businessman Harry’s competitiveness undermines the purely spiritual basis we had thought would animate the pilgrimage. In terms of class relations, the lower orders upset the narrative order of the text; they change the itinerary. We end up with two contrasting frames: life as a pilgrimage and life as a contest. The ancient Pauline Christian idea that fallen humans are aliens upon the earth, passing as pilgrimagers through this “vale of tears” on their way to salvation or damnation, meets up with the multifarious motives of the Canterbury pilgrims, from the worldly to the pious. So much for the misconception that the middle ages were a time of somber reflection and spiritual unity—the era's literature is as vivid and contradictory as Chaucer's pilgrims.

The idea of the “pilgrimage,” of course, had been muddied by the fourteenth century. At bottom, pilgrimages were religious ceremonies; after having acknowledged one’s sins during the sacrament of Confession and having admitted one’s sinfulness and dependence on God, one could go on a pilgrimage for health cures and for relatives’ souls. The greatest pilgrimage of all would be to Jerusalem—i.e. one could participate in one of the Holy Crusades to retake the Holy Land from the Arabs. By Chaucer’s time, pilgrimages had come to be seen as holidays somewhat in the modern sense. This literary trip takes place in spring, a time of rebirth for the spirit and for the natural world. Since the weather was warmer, pilgrims felt wanderlust and curiosity, too. Often, while travelers were on their way to Rome or to the monastery of Saint James of Compostella, they lost sight of the spiritual goal and never made it to the shrine. Chaucer’s pilgrims never make it to Becket’s shrine, either--even though they can see Canterbury.

The Prologue's opening eighteen lines comprise a single sentence in which we can examine all of Chaucer’s methods. We are treated to a precis: it is spring, people want to go on pilgrimages, especially to Canterbury. The center of the unit lies in line twelve. The “when”/“then” structure is ambiguous in its figuration of motive. The “sick”/“seek” rhyming pun binds sickness of all kinds to seeking of all kinds. Strong verbs like “holpen” (help) are prominent. What kind of help for what kind of illness? one wants to know. Notice the description of spring from lines one to eleven--here Chaucer brings out anything but spiritual motivations for the pilgrimage: physical renewal, sexual terms (piercing, bathing in licour), high-style romantic terms like Zephirus, “tender crops,” “young sun,” and so on. Then Chaucer moves to a lower style--birds (“corages” can refer both to spiritual hearts and to physical, or sexual, hearts), for example. Birds are hardly spiritual figures; they are amorous. Folks longen to seek rebirth. Do they seek spiritual rebirth? We know it is more complicated than that. Sometimes, too, pilgrimages were undertaken to strange lands for the purpose of sightseeing. “Palmers” were professional pilgrims. In sum, the spiritual motives for pilgrimages were often at war with the lower, “realizing” ones; both motives might coexist among different pilgrims, and even within the very same pilgrim. Throughout the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer shows the complexity of human beings--their sexuality, competitiveness, passions, and so on all run into one another. It is hard to separate these realms from "spirituality," and the fact that various feelings and motivations run together need not invalidate the spiritual dimension of Chaucer's pilgrimage—since when were fallen human beings pure either in action or in motive?

At line nineteen, we find the narrator’s stance. He seems wide-eyed, eager to tell us of his experience. This ruse of naiveté is the way in which Chaucer will explore the psychology of others. He is non-judgmental, and he also wants readers to be non-judgmental, too. He draws out even his own language. The narrator disclaims responsibility for his plan of relating both high and low, but he also broaches the issue of what constitutes literary truth. What should we say of a narrator who proclaims his need to relate everything he sees and hears like a cub reporter? Chaucer is suggesting that in fiction, imaginative truth is larger than reportorial truth.

In the descriptions of the various pilgrims, we see both an impulse to idealize and the strain placed upon this impulse by human frailties. The Knight, for example, is idealized, and the terms that apply to him are straightforwardly chivalric. His son gets a more mixed treatment, while the Prioresse is described in great detail, not all of it flattering. She is not really irreligious, but neither is religion the center of her life as it should be. It seems that fine manners and courtly behavior are her central concerns. She is a courtly lady who has become a nun—a change in office that was rather common in the middle ages. When Chaucer describes a character in detail as he does the Prioresse, that is generally a sign that the character is more flawed than usual.

This is a key point: strong individuation isn't a mark of approval in Chaucer's Christian context—it just means that you're probably up to some things you shouldn't be, given your station and responsibilities in life. Chaucer, that is, identifies characters by their position in the order of nature and by their roles in the community. He is inclined to individuate a character only when that character fails in his or her office and thereby lacks the wholeness and integrity demanded by the office. As so often in moral literature, the "good guys" are precisely the ones you don't notice because they're just conforming to the just demands of their "office," their station in life. Chaucer's society is strongly divided into three estates and various religious and secular functions amongst them; not to uphold your office is to lose your title to respect and, at worst, even your title to humanity itself. A ruler who mistreats his people, a priest who ignores his flock, a pardoner who offers false promises of salvation for ready money, is scarcely worthy of the term "human." The "self" for a medieval person was defined in terms of communal responsibilities and social relations, not in terms of the individual's desires or goals for worldly advancement. The medieval self is a nexus of social obligations, not (as in our post-romantic notion) the result of a process of self-conscious individuation. In a long narrative such as Chaucer's, which aims to describe the whole panoply of medieval life, this way of defining the individual structures the entire fiction, determining what we see and hear, and when we see and hear it.

But Chaucer's communalism doesn't mean that the individual has nothing vital to do. On the contrary, his characters behave in accordance with the moral choices they have made and are making. Why, Chaucer wants to know, do people go on pilgrimages? There are various motives: tourism, piety, curiosity for the things of this world, and so on. The key choice is rather an Augustinian one: are you headed towards the City of God, or on your way towards the City of Cain? You really can't end up in both, so you have to choose—or more accurately, you are constantly choosing your destination by the actions you take. Christian life should follow the path of legitimate desire, or charitas (charity, an outflowing desire to help one's fellow human beings and to join with them in serving God), but as everyone knows, cupiditas is always the dark shadow on human purpose and behavior. Cupiditas is the selfish, acquisitive, sensuous kind of desire that entangles one in the world's snares. Each earthly pilgrim or Christian soul must choose where to fix attention, and so whether to end up in the City of God or in Hell. The beauty of Chaucer's treatment of the pilgrimage motif, I think, is that it shows the complexity of human efforts to make this seemingly simple choice—we spend our whole lives doing it. We shouldn't expect from Chaucer modern "character development" of the sort to be had from, say, a novel, but neither do we find two-dimensional "stick figures" in his characterizations. Even villains like the Pardoner or deeply flawed characters like the Prioresse and the Wife of Bath do not entirely forfeit our interest or empathy. In thinking of them Chaucer would probably have borne in mind the Vulgate Bible's sentence "qui autem dixerit fatue reus erit gehennae ignis," or as the King James Bible puts Jesus' words in Matthew 5:22, " whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire."

The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale Notes

The Wife of Bath asserts her own experience against verbal patristic authority, opposing an alien male verbal culture. In her prologue, she makes three arguments:

lines 1-192: marriage is permissible, even though married love is generally considered sinful.
lines 193-450: she has had three good husbands.
lines 451-end: she has had three bad husbands.

The Wife of Bath points out that the Bible says Solomon had many wives. But Solomon’s marriages were disastrous; the man was an idolater who wasted his gifts on women. The Wife, like her male opponents, is a partial reader of the Scriptures. Alice refers us also to Saint Paul's epistle 1 Corinthians: 7. She says that Paul stressed mutuality between marriage partners. This claim is plain misrepresentation. Alice always uses authorities rather than the personal experience she keeps bringing up. As for her argument about “nature,” she can't have children anyway because she is sterile. The Wife of Bath does not realize that chastity is a spiritual virtue.

Her arguments early on are that her “good” marriages have allowed her to act out her philosophy. Yet, her bad husbands are the ones she loves most. Her marriages are all non-productive.

According to Alice the generic wife, the following three things constitute a marriage:

(a) Unification of the heart; a corporate community.
(b) Husband and wife peacefully serving God together. Desire will no longer get in the way.
(c) The engendering of children.

The Wife of Bath fails to fulfill any of these three conditions. Her dominance almost amounts to prostitution in her first three marriages. They are not, then, genuine Christian marriages.

As for the Wife’s Tale, the question is, “what do women want?” That is a rather "Freudian" question. Alice’s Tale is a "fairy tale" by genre—it is pure wish-fulfillment. Even in her prologue, the Wife of Bath has been telling the pilgrims a fairy tale about her life. She gives them a history of her life as it ought to have been, not as it really has been.

Week 02 Beowulf

noreply@blogger.com (Alfred J. Drake) — Sun, 13 Feb 2005 22:38:00 +0000

From Michael Alexander, translator of Beowulf (Penguin, 1973): a. Epics involve "inclusiveness of scope, objectivity of treatment, unity of ethos and an ‘action' of significance." b. "The action of an epic, like the action of a myth, should have its own logic and an intrinsic significance."

1. Early Danish history.
2. Hrothgar builds Heorot.
3. Grendel attacks.
4. Beowulf.
5. The coastguard greets Beowulf.
6. Wulfgar greets Beowulf.
7. Hrothgar greets Beowulf.
8. Unferth challenges Beowulf; Beowulf replies.
9. Wealhtheow greets Beowulf.
10. Beowulf and Grendel fight.
11. Celebrations at Heorot; Beowulf rewarded. The story of Sigemund and the Finn episode.
12. More celebrations.
13. Grendel's mother attacks.
14. Beowulf comes to Hrothgar's aid.
15. Beowulf sinks into the mere, fights Grendel's mother, and cuts off Grendel's head.
16. Celebrations--thanks given.
17. Hrothgar prophecies and warns Beowulf.
18. Gifts and parting.
19. Home to Hygelac and Queen Hygd. Contrast--Queen Modthryth.
20. Beowulf recounts his exploits.
21. (Beowulf has changed since he was young.)
22. Gifts, land, etc.
23. Fifty years later, Beowulf is still ruling. The dragon's treasure is stolen.
24. The thief took the dragon's cup out of need.
25. Dragon attacks--Beowulf's hall burns. Elegy: ubi sunt; Beowulf's deeds at battle in which Hygelac died.
26. Beowulf salutes his companions.
27. Beowulf boasts that he will kill the dragon in single combat.
28. His companions run away.
29. Wiglaf helps Beowulf kill the dragon.
30. Wiglaf with Beowulf on his deathbed.
31. Wiglaf berates the traitors.
32. Wiglaf predicts chaos. (Older conflict between Swedes and Geats recounted.)
33. Useless treasure (paragraph 152).
34. Funeral pyre--heaven swallows the smoke.
35. Useless treasure (paragraph 158).

Composition: Set in writing around 700-750 AD in Mercia, the English Midlands, though the C10 manuscript later converts this into the commoner southwestern dialect of Old English.

Our Translation: I didn't talk about the poetics of Beowulf, but Heaney preserves the original's lively alliterative movement. Alliteration is a device whereby words in a poetic line are tied together closely because their initial consonant is the same. Moreover, English (old and modern) is full of strong monosyllables like "thug" and "thump." You can see a continuing fondness for strong meter and alliterative effects even in some later poets. See, for example, the Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins' "sprung rhythm" poetics—it's just strong alliterative verse, really, that foregoes regular "unstressed/stressed" meter to render a sense of of authentic spiritual striving. The sonnet "As Kingfishers Catch Fire" is a good example of Hopkins' kind of poetry: notice the alliteration—fishers/fire, dragonflies/draw, etc. and the emphatic quality of the lines. Hopkins isn't after smoothness; he is after precision of thought and strength of feeling.

As king fishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves -- goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is --
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

As for the content of Beowulf, everyone is struck by the mixing of Germanic pagan heroic values with an early medieval Christian world view. Sometimes, at least in my admittedly limited view, the contrast between these views is overemphasized—they are obviously different, but hardly mutually exclusive.

What about the contrast in values? Well, the pre-Christian Germanic beliefs don't make much of an afterlife, and they invoke "fate" quite often, as if it were a random force and things just happen because they happen. A strong character will stand up against fate when it comes, but he can't overcome it—that isn't the point of the encounter at all. For example, we don't consider Beowulf a failure because he dies fighting the Dragon—the text specifically says that the hero senses he is about to meet his doom. And we admire his courage for going forth unselfishly to meet it. But the Christian preserver of the story folds in strong remarks about Providence—the idea that God has an infallible plan for everyone, and nothing really happens "at random." Thanks to Providence, the idea goes, even the greatest individual (or collective) suffering is part of a much larger pattern that ends in Christian triumph and the coming of the end time when "God shall be all in all." Thus life has meaning beyond the getting and giving of treasure earthly and earning glory for a few generations through the epic singer's stimulation of collective memory. In Beowulf, we shouldn't expect the doctrine of Providence to be fleshed out beyond basic statements like "God is always in charge," but that is sufficient to distance the poem from pre-Christian ideas about "fate." On the whole, we can bring "fate" and Providence somewhat closer together, as I think the Beowulf poet does, by explaining that to limited, fallen human understanding, it's always possible to misinterpret the consequences of our own errors and particular sections of God's plan as mere "accident." We are liable to call anything we can't understand "fate," as if it came from nowhere and we had nothing to do with it.

The patterns of Beowulf reinforce the need for humility on the part of even great chieftains like Hrothgar, Hygelac, and Beowulf. It isn't necessarily that these men commit some terrible specific misdeed; rather, their "error" is simply to live without always minding the end that must come to them as it does to all, high or low. Pretentions of self-sufficiency and perpetuity are prideful, says Christian theology. We are responsible for what we do, but that doesn't mean we can stand on our own without God's blessing and assistance. This is true for individuals like Hrothgar and Beowulf, and it's just as true for whole societies. Remember what God does to Nimrod's builders of the Tower of Babel in Genesis? He "confounds their speech" so that they can't even understand one another's language anymore, much less try to rival God's magnificence. Hrothgar explicitly accuses himself of something like this very error—believing his well-established human community centered around Heorot Hall could stand long on its own efforts. Even if his error is no more than forgetfulness of the limitations of fallen human understanding, he must pay the price. In this sense, Grendel is his monster, not a random welling up of pure metaphysical evil. And perhaps Beowulf, though a good ruler, does much the same later on with his Geats—the years roll by, and at last his people fail their test with the Dragon miserably, soon to perish in spite of his heroic efforts. The author isn't blaming Beowulf, he's just making a lesson of him—we must be continually be reminded of our own mortality and of the ultimate futility of trying to turn earth into a permanent home. Christianity—especially in medieval times—often represents this life as a brief passage through a foreign territory, a "vale of tears," a trial by adversity in preparation for the life to come. Don't get comfortable in Heorot or anywhere else! Be mindful that we are always on our way back to God, who is our real home. And for those not even as virtuous as Beowulf, pride, ambition, disloyalty, love of gain and luxury are always threatening to unleash destruction. Their own or others' faults will bring trouble.

We know that the economy and social system of Beowulf's people revolves around getting treasure and distributing it generously. These are a people generous in word and deed, but reciprocity is a key concept with them, too. It may seem odd that Hrothgar should think so quickly of compensating Beowulf financially for the men he has lost in dealing with Grendel, but that's part of the social system—not compensating him would probably amount to an insult. And if there's one thing you had better not do to a Beowulf, it's "diss" him, to borrow the modern phrase. He quietly commands respect, and almost always gets it. Perhaps this seems like a major contrast with a more fully Christian view of human community. And there are some materialistic tendencies in Beowulf—as in, "let me see the dragon's treasure before I die." Still, the heroic economy isn't really about hoarding—it's about spending, dispensing the bounty one has gained by valor in battle. If a king doesn't do that, he loses everybody's allegiance, so what's the use of being a miser? Christianity translates this imperative to share with one's fellows into a more proper understanding of love, charitas or charity—that is, helping others because you really want to and because you know it's what God wants you to do. Charity or love is what binds together the community—not the distribution of material goods. But it would be unfair to say that the scriptor of Beowulf simply contrasts Christian charity with pagan materialism. Both cultures offer a spiritual economy of sorts, not simply a material one.

In both cultures, the isolated and the greedy hoarders of treasure are in the wrong. Grendel is the violent offspring of Cain, and his mother is motivated by vengeance. Notice that Grendel and his mother are both separated from Heorot Hall's joys, and Grendel goes there to lord it over the regular folk. And of course the Dragon is the ultimate gold-watcher, once he happens upon that cursed treasure set in the earth down by a dying tribe. Neither in the heroic Scandinavian and Germanic culture we find in Beowulf nor in Christianity is the human community obsessed with material possessions to the exclusion of more social, even spiritual, considerations.

Grendel is sometimes understood as primordial evil. And he does seem that way at times, doesn't he? But one must be careful with such assumptions—in Christian theology, evil has a very specific origin. It is not a vague metaphysical principle or a power that exists as a kind of rival empire to God's bounty. (Some religions have taken this dualistic view—consider Zoroastrianism, where Ahrimanes and Ahura-Mazda are locked in a perpetual battle between Good and Evil. And Saint Augustine had to let go of his early Manichean views for the same reason—he says they accorded evil too much respect, as if it were an independent force in the universe. Because the evil turn away from God's will, says Augustine, they lack any grounding in the authentic way of being, which has its source in God; thus, they "do not exist.") The Beowulf writer specifically links Grendel to the story of Cain and Abel. That is a precise enough lineage to allow him to promote his theme:

Here is part of Genesis Chapter 4:

004:001 And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.

004:002 And she again bare his brother Abel. And Abel was a keeper of sheep, but Cain was a tiller of the ground.

004:003 And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the LORD.

004:004 And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the LORD had respect unto Abel and to his offering:

004:005 But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.

004:006 And the LORD said unto Cain, Why art thou wroth? and why is thy countenance fallen?

004:007 If thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? and if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.

004:008 And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him.

004:009 And the LORD said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not: Am I my brother's keeper?

004:010 And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.

004:011 And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother's blood from thy hand;

004:012 When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.

004:013 And Cain said unto the LORD, My punishment is greater than I can bear.

004:014 Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that every one that findeth me shall slay me.

004:015 And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

004:016 And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.

This kind of lineage shows us that the monsters are material representations of human frailty's bad consequences. Bad characters are always repeating themselves, or somehow taking part in a grand self-destructive circle of behavior, speech, or interpretive strategy. Even seeming heroes like Beowulf and Hygelac unwittingly behave as if they would substitute a satisfying "recursive loop" that would frustrate the linear program of Providence, and they always fail. Grendels seem to come upon us by chance, but really the cause has to do with our attitudes and deeds. Grendel may not see his motive as anything more than stupid resentment of Heorot's "shiny happy people holding hands," but the Lord moves in mysterious ways, and makes the wicked outcast do his bidding in spite of himself.

And then there's the Dragon, who only comes out to plague Beowulf's kingdom because some poor thief stumbles on the treasure and lifts a goblet. Like Grendel and his Mother, the Dragon is driven by primal needs—here it is the desire to hang onto material objects as if they were all that mattered. And who buried those objects in the first place? Why, the remnants of a race two centuries back, who themselves have long since gone the way of all flesh. The poor thief has caught up his whole group in an ancient cycle of vengeance, violence begetting violence. The cyclical and potentially everlasting "blood-feud" is an ancient threat—something we can find not only in the early Germans but in the Greeks and probably other cultures as well. (Read Aeschylus's trilogy The Oresteia on the power of cyclical revenge—the plays turn on the need to transform primal clan vengeance into civic justice, a society of laws far more than men.)

The point for the Beowulf poet is that we make ourselves subject to what seems like mere chance—monstrous visitations, rampant dragons, and so forth. The original treasure-hiders brought on the dragon, and the thief brought the dragon back into action, and Beowulf the good king had to die to set it right—even partially. But then his own retainers behaved like cowards, and so the Geats will perish when word gets around. They have declared themselves easy pickings for more valorous men. Ultimately, the epic's monsters represent the way in which Evil tries to frustrate God's plan (which is linear and ascending) by cyclical upheavals, themselves set in motion because of human baseness and stupidity, or, in the case of better folk like Hrothgar, forgetfulness and limitations in fallen human understanding.

If this all sounds gloomy, it is. Too much can be made, again, of the contrast or clash in values between pre-Christian and Christian. Pagan gloom melds with Christian gloom of the sort found in Ecclesiastes… The Hall, filled with mirth and honor, is always shadowed by its future emptiness—all things decline with the passage of time, requiring renewal with god's help. Humanity isn't self-sustaining, much less self-sufficient.

Indeed, the repetitive structure of Beowulf makes this point. The three great battles against Grendel, Grendel's Mother, and the Dragon drive home the following idea: "all is vanity under the sun," just as the preacher in Ecclesiastes says:

009:011….the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

009:012 For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare; so are the sons of men snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.

Notice that even the "wergild" system (85) doesn't settle matters for long when a feud has broken out. It seems that only God can settle the feud first instantiated by Cain's slaying of his good brother Abel. We are always liable to start it up again. For me, what makes the poem interesting isn't that we have a Christian poet who transfigures pagan hopelessness and gloom with sunny theological certainties—rather, I find it interesting that there are so many deeply felt affinities between the two world views, the one presumably a holdover from the "oral" original, and the latter a self-conscious addition to the tales that make up Beowulf.