Milton in France
Bearbeitet von
Christophe Tournu
1. Auflage 2008. Taschenbuch. XII, 381 S. Paperback
ISBN 978 3 03911 604 1
Format (B x L): 15 x 22 cm
Gewicht: 560 g
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This volume
We will start from the impact of the French Revolution on British literary
Romanticism with Hugh Wilson’s essay on the link between Wordsworth’s
“Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks
of the Wye during a tour” (1798), a poem on the growth of a poet’s mind,
and Milton’s L’Allegro and Il Penseroso, companion poems on the moods of
the poet.5
Jean Pironon explores Milton’s juvenilia, more particularly the sensory
or perceptual experience itself in his minor poetry. Sensation is used to
create the fundamental dynamics of Milton’s poetic universe. It will be no
different, I may say, with his great poems, most notably Paradise Lost, which
would not be a monument had not the English Revolution happened. Milton’s poetry cannot be read as a work of art per se. It embodies Milton’s
responses to his immediate environment, that is, the natural environment
(but not only) in his minor poems, and the political environment (and disillusionment) in his great poetry. Whereas Wordsworth found a reassuring
divine presence in nature, something which urged him to poetic creativity,
Milton described “The tyranny of heaven” in PL and he would make the
reader sympathise with the devil.
Then Trevor Jockims examines the violent disruption which the event
of death has caused to the pastoral landscape in Lycidas and which the
poem itself attempts to remedy. The shepherd-elegist is left with the role of
a healer as he must attempt to reconstitute a disrupted pastoral landscape.
David Urban closes the section devoted to Milton’s minor poems by exploring, in Milton’s Sonnet 19 (“WHEN I consider how my light is spent,”
1655? – published 1673) a creative tension in the poet when Milton’s tendency to identify himself with the unprofitable servant of the parable of the
talents (Matt. 25.14–30) is mitigated by the autobiographical speaker’s
comparable sense of self-identification with the last-chosen laborers of the
parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matt. 20.1–16).
The second section deals with Milton’s prose and opens with a Marxist
reading of Milton – à contre-courant of revisionist history. Thus Milton’s Anti5
See David Bromwich, “The French Revolution and ‘Tintern Abbey’” Raritan 10:3
(1991 Winter): 1–23.
Prelatical pamphlets, Matthew Jordan argues, evince an enthusiasm for a
conception of liberation informed by a class-based perspective on social
issues. Where the Smectymnuuans look forward to a form of churchgovernment which will enhance the status and power of their clerical caste,
Milton enthuses about what he senses is the emergence of a new, more
popular, less generally repressive social order, a commitment encapsulated
in his coinage of the term “self-esteem.” This concern of Milton for the
lower social classes can also be seen in Areopagitica, where he envisages “the
laborers of truth” as ordinary people at work in the “reforming of reformation itself.” This apparent democratic stance in the building of the Church
as opposed to the bourgeois parochial minister’s heretical monopoly of what
he regards as the truth is utterly rejected in Milton’s political scheme in
1654. As a matter of fact, Milton sees with detestation the election to Parliament of “innkeepers and hucksters of the state from city taverns or from
country districts ploughboys and veritable herdsmen” (CPW 4: 1.682) and
limits his definition of the people to “the better or more able part” of the
citizens, an elite, the gentry.
In another post-revisionist paper, James Rovira opposes both Stanley
Fish’s “Driving from the Letter: Truth and Indeterminacy in Areopagitica”
and Lana Cable’s Carnal Rhetoric to support a historically grounded reading
of Milton’s treatise on free speech. Areopagitica recovers its status as a foundational document on freedom of the press, the author says, while acknowledging and accommodating the contradictions and complexities of
Milton’s argument. I have just completed a textbook on the issue for
graduate students and my forthcoming book surveys the arguments on
both sides.6
Antti Tahvanainen investigates Milton’s rhetoric in his political pamphlets. As his answer to Salmasius well indicates, Milton was aware of the
dangers of rhetoric, which is the language of demagogues and flatterers,
and the Huguenot scholar, whom Milton scoffingly calls pedagogue, also
pretends to drop rhetoric when addressing the issue of regicide:
Je traiterai tellement ce grand sujet, que je n’y emploierai rien de l’art oratoire qui me
semble en cette occasion & inutile & suspect. Il ne faut pas qu’une si bonne cause, &
6
Christophe Tournu, Un penseur républicain à l’époque de la première révolution anglaise: John
Milton, Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing to the Parliament of England (1644), The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649). Paris: CNED /
Armand Colin, 9 January 2008.
si juste, se pare des ornements de la rhétorique qui déguisent ordinairement ou qui affaiblissent la vérité (28).
And of course, his book is full of bombastic and theatrical representations
of “the truth.” As Tahvanainen writes, Milton was well aware of the
dangers attributed to rhetoric (see, for example, his letter Of Education), but,
for him, abuses such as demagogy and flattery could be countered. The
truly eloquent, republican orator had to be both virtuous and learned. It is a
matter of education: a preventive policy should be implemented to create
soothing orators instead of inflammatory demagogues, wise counsellors
instead of vicious courtiers. If he ever put a republican educational reform
on his agenda, Milton would open himself to jokes at his expense, for the
great rhetorician in Paradise Lost is Satan and, of course, he appears to us as
a republican defying God’s absolute monarchy, but his rhetorics is only a
false language, he is no better than a liar, a hypocrite and a dissembler, and
he is “the Arch-Enemy” (PL 1:81).
Kemmer Anderson, a poet and teacher/preacher at a boys’ preparatory
school in Tennessee, still focuses on the language in The Tenure of Kings and
Magistrates and makes a rapprochement with Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (1776). Where a prominent US constitutionalist, Prof.
Vincent Blasi, found Milton’s principles in Areopagitica enshrined in the
First Amendment to the American Constitution,7 Anderson finds a common language between Milton’s TKM and the “Declaration of Independence”:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. – That to secure these rights, Governments are
instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the
Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying
its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them
shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.8
This is much very reminiscent of what Milton writes in TKM. Anderson’s
paper focuses on tyranny, arguing that Milton provided a vocabulary and
7
8
Vincent Blasi, “Milton’s Areopagitica and the Modern First Amendment” (March 1,
1995). Yale Law School. Yale Law School Occasional Papers. Paper 6.
http://lsr.nellco.org/yale/ylsop/papers/6.
http://www.law.indiana.edu/uslawdocs/declaration.html.
structure for part of the Declaration. Thomas Jefferson had read and was
influenced by Paradise Lost: the word “tyrant” became a part of his education and writing. Milton’s epic poem offers a narrative definition of a tyrant. Milton and his tract provide vision for the American document of
liberation from kings and tyrants.
Danièle Frison (Emerita, U. of Paris 10) considers TKM on its own and
sees Milton’s political treatise as a possible response to Hobbes’ De Cive in a
paper written in French. Then Yuko Noro continues the discussion on
Milton’s legacy with the concept of Communitas Libera, which can be found
elsewhere: in the Glorious Revolution, through Locke’s writings, in the
French revolution, through Mirabeau, in the speech of Abraham Lincoln at
Gettysburg (1863) in the American Civil War, in the Preface of the Constitution of Japan (1945) and in the Inaugural Speech by John F. Kennedy.
The last paper of this section envisages what Milton himself may have
inherited for his theological beliefs. According to Georgi Vasilev, Milton
probably came to know directly some Bogomil manuscript, in their Cathar
and Lollard variants, because his violent denunciation of the cross, of icons
and of the liturgy resembles what we find there. Milton eulogizes “the divine and admirable spirit of Wiclef” in Areopagitica. In Eikonoklastes, in a
chapter uncovering “the Mysterie and combination between Tyranny and
fals religion,”9 Milton praises the Waldensian churches for making no difference between a bishop and a presbyter. In his defence of the freedom of
the press, Milton advances a Manichean dualist conception of knowledge,
and his idea of “good men” in his political pamphlets also belongs to the
Bogomil tradition.10
Turning to the great poems, the third section starts with a fresh reading of
Paradise Lost by four junior faculty. Thus Matt Dolloff (U. of Texas) considers Milton’s Muse, Urania, as the opponent of tyranny in PL VII. In fact,
she most significantly stands in contrast to the licentiousness of kings and
courtiers even as she remains a vehicle for relating heavenly truths and
9
10
CPW 3: 509.
A senior research fellow and chief expert at the State Agency for Bulgarians Abroad,
Georgi Vasilev has recently been promoted to full-professorship in European and
Medieval Studies at the State University of Library Studies and Information Technologies in
Sofia. He has just published Heresy and the English Reformation: Bogomil-Cathar Influence on
Wycliffe, Langland, Tyndale and Milton. Jefferson, NC, McFarland & Co., Inc., Publishers,
2007.
divinely inspired poetry. T. Ross Leasure (U. of Salisbury, Maryland) examines the resemblances between Milton’s Belial and Spenser’s allegorical
figure of Despayre, which appear especially in their rhetorical strategies to
supplant the volition of their auditors with their own will-to-inaction,
thereby de-moralizing the gullible through pointed argumentation. Martin
Dawes (McGill, Canada)’s essay shows Adam learning to manoeuvre God’s
irony in the conversation about mates (bk. 8), which provides a model, first,
for a more equal power relationship in the poem, and second, a model for
republican politics, because God reveals himself as a Lord Protector challenging his subjects to become citizens or co-creators. Virginie OrtegaTillier (U. de Bourgogne, France), a post-doctorate art historian, reexamines in depth the representations of Eden in several editions of PL
(London, 1795 and 1827, and Paris, 1863). They all show, she claims, the
high aesthetic quality of Milton’s evocation of Eden and its original character when compared to numerous other illustrations. This brilliant essay,
written in French, does not include any images, but we invite our readers to
follow the links indicated in the footnotes or go to our website to view
them. Finally, Luis Fernando Ferreira Sá (UFMG, Brazil) challenges Martin
Evans’s reading of PL as mimesis of colonial discourse to propose a postcolonial reading of Milton’s imperious epic in its ambivalence and various
negotiations.
There are also papers by confirmed Miltonists. Charlotte Clutterbuck
(Sydney), in “The Sinner’s View of God in the Invocations and Book III of
Paradise Lost”, suggests a new reading of the Father’s relationship with the
persona, whom many readers find repellent in bk. 3. Yet Milton deliberately
writes in a false language, and his (unironic) repellent Father appears to be
the projection of a sinful, vainglorious poet. Margaret J. Dean (U. of Eastern Kentucky) wonders what purpose the Abdiel narrative, prominent
within Raphael’s account of the War in Heaven (PL IX), serves in Milton’s
epic. Antonella Piazza’s (U. of Salerno, Italy) considers “An Endless War”
in an essay about astronomy in Milton with special reference to Galileo –
with the idea of Nature as a book written by God.
Another Italian colleague, Daniele Borgogni, contributes the only essay
on Paradise Regained: he takes on the problem of the relation between words
and things, i.e. what language is supposed to represent, a burning issue in
the seventeenth-century.11 In PR, Satan is concerned with deep theological
issues when he approaches Christ
That I might learn
In what degree or meaning thou art called
The Son of God, which bears no single sense;
The Son of God I also am, or was,
And if I was, I am; relation stands;
All men are sons of God […] (PR 4: 515–20).
If Satan is also “The Son of God”, Christ’s reign is deemed ambiguous and
non-representative.
Coming to the last great poem, Samson Agonistes, which was given a
prominent place in Milton, Rights and Liberties, we are left with two essays.
The first, by Suvi Mäkelä (U. of Tampere, Finland), focuses on the effects
of Samson’s understanding of beauty, which plays a decisive role in the loss
of his freedom. The second, by Sherry Zivley and Chase Hamblin (U. of
Houston, Texas), is sustained engagement with the somewhat neglected
field of prosody in the two versions of SA.
The fourth section of our volume is on “French perspectives.” We start
with a psychoanalytical reading of Milton with Nicole Berry’s essay on
“John Milton; or, the Wounded Eagle” (in French).12 Then we are given
two Derridean readings of Milton’s work: Miriam Mansur (UFMG, Brazil)
examines the visual metaphors of PL and attempts to place Milton’s epic
together with Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind on the poststructuralist’s stance towards vision. The approach of Marie-Dominique
Garnier (U. of Paris 8, France) is Derridean in the sense that she offers a
nano-reading of SA by exploring particle poetics (see Jacques Derrida’s The
11
12
Think about what Salmasius wrote in Apologie royale (1650): the Huguenot accuses the
Independents of vampirising words, of emptying them of their substance and of travestying them so that they acquire a new meaning which does not correspond to Truth,
e.g. their redefinition of the King as the people’s servant is nonsense because what
precisely makes a king is his supremacy over and independence from anyone or any
human institution. Moreover the hypocritical “Independents” are discovered to have
usurped their name; and to restore the relation between the word and the thing, Salmasius redefines them as “ignorant animals” (823)!
The argument is developed in her forthcoming book: Trois Textes: Le Récit, le Paysage, les
Sonorités. Essais sur P. B. Shelley, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, John Milton. Bern: Peter Lang,
2008.
Postcard): SA is, quite literally, a “cellular” poem, a text about incarceration,
captive thoughts, blind confinement, deprivation, yet about the need to
resist and read “on,” into the cellular possibilities of a new language. Using
Deleuze and Guattari’s literary theory as exposed in A Thousand Plateaus
(though arriving as a print artefact, the text was designed as a matrix of
independent but cross-referential discourses which the reader is invited to
enter more or less at random), the author goes on to explain “Why Milton
Matters.”
The last section, Part V, is devoted to Milton’s Influence in NonAnglophone Cultures. Luis Fernando Ferreira Sá comes back with an essay
on a so far unknown play, Francisco da Costa Braga’s Milton: A Comedy in
One Act, which was staged on April 29, 1866 at the Theatro das Variedades
Dramaticas in Lisbon, with much “applause.” And through the play, he
considers the reception of Milton in the Portuguese world of the nineteenth
century. In a very interesting paper, Chia-Yin Huang (National Taiwan
University) examines the Chinese appropriation of Milton between the two
World Wars. In the wake of the May Fourth Movement, an anti-imperialist,
cultural, and political movement, intellectuals fashioned Milton as an ideal
poet-statesman committing his pen to the pursuit of liberty and political
revolution.