Autumn: Sidewalk of My Seoul

Sun-Ae and I were out walking along a street near our apartment a couple of days ago when she stopped to capture the moment. Leaves were falling as she took this photo, but they seem to have evaded the lens, perhaps embarrassed to be caught in the moment of their fall, though that would have been of little moment.

Later, I was reading something the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, had said about the "sense of absolute immersion in the richness of the moment" that somehow encompasses us at certain moments in our reading, and I thought, "How rare that is," not an experience we can strive for and attain, but something that happens to us, like falling in love, rare moments when even Faust would have uttered those fateful words, "Verweile doch, du bist so schön."

Paradise Lost: "Fruit Uncropt and Fruit Cropt"

Milton Quarterly Logo

Wiley-Blackwell Website

Yesterday, I was pleased to see that the Saturday mail service here in Seoul (actual delivery on Saturdays?) had brought my copy of the Milton Quarterly. I don't really have a subscription, but I was expecting to receive a copy because I've had an article published in it, "Fruit Uncropt and Fruit Cropt: Unnoticed Wordplay in Paradise Lost?" (Milton Quarterly, Volume 45, Number Four, December 2011, pages 252-257). Here's the opening paragraph:

In Paradise Lost 4.724-35, Adam and Eve together praise the creator for their happy love and his abundant blessings, which include the gift of trees bearing fruit that "uncropt falls to the ground" (4.731), and the innocent pair request offspring to share that fruitful abundance. Ostensibly in tension with this are the words of Eve in Book 9, for she there remarks on the many trees with "Fruit untoucht, / Still hanging incorruptible" (621-22), awaiting the hands of offspring yet unborn. The apparent contradiction between the words implying that unplucked fruit falls to the ground from the trees of paradise and that unplucked fruit hangs potentially forever on the boughs of those same trees also serves to bring into focus another apparent contradiction. In the prelapsarian garden, into which death has not yet entered, why should any fruit fall to the ground? Would that not imply death and decay? And what of the plucked fruit's uneaten portions? Are these tossed onto some prelapsarian 'compost' heap? Let us investigate this complex issue. (page 252)

If that interests you -- and it probably does not -- then rush over to the Wiley-Blackwell Website and order a copy! Some folks will be interested, I reckon, since the scholar Gordon Campbell, who edits Renaissance Studies, says, "If you want to publish to be READ, write for the Milton Quarterly." At the very least, I suppose Professor Campbell will read my article.

But even if not, I'm enjoying the rare pleasure of publishing an article in what is arguably the top Milton journal in the world.

A Couple of Arresting Images . . .

I have a busy morning ahead of me even though I rose early -- 3:00 a.m. as usual -- so I thought that I'd just blog briefly by posting a couple of arresting images for readers to contemplate.

The first photo is borrowed from Google Images and shows the tombstone of the Reverend Billy Graham's deceased wife:

In case the wording engraved thereon is illegible, the Chinese character means "Righteousness" (or so I'm told), and as for the English -- which she borrowed from a road-construction sign that she'd once encountered after driving over miles of roadwork -- here's what that wording says:

Ruth Bell Graham

June 10, 1920 - June 14, 2007

"End of Construction --

Thank you for your patience"

I appreciate a good, morbid sense of humor, but I guess I'll have to come up with an epitaph of my own. I wonder if Derrida's reads something like this:

Jacques Derrida

July 15, 1930 - October 9, 2004

"End of Deconstruction --

Thank you for your extreme patience"

The other image is an arresting one for me, a photo by Tim Ernst of this autumn's colors in the Arkansas Ozarks:

I'm calling it "Fall in Love" -- though Mr. Ernst likely has some other title -- because I love looking at this image of fall, which reminds me of my boyhood home far away on the other side of the world. I may be a city boy now, living here in Seoul, but in my soul of souls -- something like a heart of hearts -- I'm still an Ozark lad.

I check Mr. Ernst's website every morning for an Ozark image . . . just to help keep myself sane.

Ben Hale and Bruno Littlemore on Milton's Paradise Lost

Ape with Skull

(Affe mit Schädel, 1893)

 Hugo Rheinhold
"How cam'st thou speakable of mute . . . ?"
(Wikipedia)

A few days ago, when I asked Ben Hale about the influence of John Milton's Paradise Lost on his novel, he replied:

[T]he Milton connection [initially] came from the PL quote that's at the beginning of the third section . . . "Sated at length, ere long I might perceive strange alteration in me . . ." Satan's beautiful, eerie description, to Eve, of what it feels like to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil . . . My interest in PL came from studying it a lot in college with this guy: ["Wrestling with the Angel: Paradise Lost and Feminist Criticism"] -- Bill Shullenberger is a brilliant guy, and knows more about Milton than anyone I've ever met.

I've heard of him, naturally, but I've not read that article. In Milton's works, I'm self-taught, self-raised. Speaking of which, Bruno the Loquacious Chimp offers his autodidactic thoughts on Milton's epic poem in dictating to Gwen Gupta, his amanuensis:

Have you ever read Paradise Lost, Gwen? I stumbled across a battered copy of it in the course of my wanderings across this blighted earth, by which I mean I once stole a copy of it from the University of Chicago library. And God, did I fall in love with the Devil. Could it be more fitting that Lucifer is a master orator? Demonic rhetoric, Satanic language!

I have heard, Gwen -- spoken, as can be expected, in tones of dreary admonition -- that self authorship is the bourgeois fantasy par excellence, as in Milton's Satan: "Who saw when this creation was? . . . We know no time when we were not as now, know none before us, self-begot, self-raised." But why condemn the rebel angel for the fantasy of self-invention? Who could help feeling seduced by Satan's poetry when compared to the dull, paternalistically castigatory abashments of God? As Blake points out, the reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it. Well, I too am a true poet, but unlike Milton and more like Satan, I know it! And also like Satan, I made myself with words. I wrote myself into the world. With my own hand I reached into the cunt of the cosmos and dragged myself kicking and screaming out -- HELLO, WORLD. HELLO,YOU BASTARDS. HERE I AM. IT'S ME, BRUNO, THE BOURGEOIS APE.

(And also like Satan, I'm a beautiful loser.)

It is impossible, however, to write a poem, or anything for that matter, about an unfallen Adam and Eve, because I cannot imagine them as having language. In Paradise there is nothing to say. Eden was sacrificed not for the pleasureof a fruit, but for the pleasure ofthe word. Now we have shame and pain and knowledge of death and whatnot, but at least we can talk about it. And talk and talk and talk! And maybe -- I think -- it was even worth the trade. Sometimes the things of this world are less beautiful than their shadows. What is poetry but the shadowplay of consciousness? (pages 37-38)

Bruno's views are fascinating, but as misbegotten as those of Satan, insofar as Milton is concerned. He needs to read Stanley Fish and discover that Milton intended for Satan to seduce us because we ourselves are fallen. Bruno is perhaps a bit more fallen -- Satanic even in his fallenness -- for he fails to see Satan for what that fallen angel has become, a vaunting shadow of his former self who purely from spite uses his rhetorical skills to remake others after his own fallen image, an insight that Milton expected his readers to share as they grow disillusioned with Satan through reading of his decline in Paradise Lost. Doubtless, Ben understands. We shouldn't conflate author with protagonist!

Moreover, Bruno misjudges Paradise, for it has words in Milton's account, a language superior to our own. Bruno imagines that he made himself with words, that he wrote himself into the world, and even the Skinnerian Behaviorist, Norman Plumlee concurs at the end: "You created yourself" (page 553). But it was actually the woman whom Bruno loved who 'created' him: "she sought me out, and found me, and began to bring me out of my animal darkness" ('page 17). Bruno admits: "I went with language. I went with Lydia" (page 43). Bruno thus re-imagines Milton's Paradise in his own prelinguistic image and even forgets that he didn't create the language that helped make him who he is, and that self-deception is perhaps a feature of his peculiar fallenness.

Georges de Feure - Le fruit défendu: péché as pêche

Le fruit défendu (1895)

Georges de Feure

(MutualArt)

My reading in Ben Hale's novel, The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, has turned my thoughts again toward forbidden fruit and its rare depiction as a peach, which Ben picks up on and works into his story. After reading John Milton's description of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge in terms better fitting a peach than an apple, as pointed out to me by Robert Appelbaum (who has written on this topic), I wondered about the possibility of a pun in French on pêche (peach) and péché (sin). I haven't confirmed that such a pun has been explicitly made, not in so many (or so few?) words, but the painting above by the French Symboliste painter Georges de Feure (real name: Georges Joseph van Sluÿters, 1868-1943) looks like a visual pun on Eve's biting of a peach as the original sin. Here's what the catelogue notes at Sotheby's Auction says about this painting:

Among the rare works created by de Feure during his sojourns in Bruges, this work is one of the most unusual for its symbolism and modernism. In the foreground, partially obscured by a floral border, a nude woman, Eve-like, holds the gaze of the spectator and proffers a peach she has already bitten. This fruit and its rich juice evoke the biblical temptation in Paradise, and mankind's ensuing fall from grace.

In the background, in the town streets moves a procession of nude women, dancing, applauding and caressing each other. Some wear black stockings while others brandish smoking amphoras above their heads. In front of them, a group of civil and religious dignitaries wave flags and an incense burner. An old bearded man and two naked boys with linked arms form the vanguard of the extraordinary march.

In creating this provocative work, De Feure was possibly inspired by two historical events associated with Bruges: the procession of Saint-Sang that occurs on the day of the Ascension in commemoration of the relic brought back in 1149 from the Second Crusade by Thierry d'Alsace, Count of Flanders; and a group of Anabaptists brutally persecuted in the sixteenth century. The Anabaptists believed that at the apocalypse, God would baptise them in fire (represented by the smoking amphoras in the composition), and consumed by religious fervor, they ran naked through the city streets. Whatever the veracity of these potential sources, De Feure accentuates the sexual and sensual, using the duality of the concept of blood and the underlying theme of Original Sin and redemption. (Lot 41, George de Feure, Le fruit défendu, Sotheby's 19th Century European Paintings (L09663), November 24, 2009, pages 74-75)

For its own source, Sotheby's cites Ian Millman work on George de Feure, Mâitre du Symbolisme et de l'Art Nouveau (Paris, 1992, p. 89, catalogued and discussed; p. 88, illustrated), which can be found among Google Books here (see Section 4 of the text) . As Sotheby notes, the illustration appears on page 88. Pages 89 and 90 are not shown in the preview, but page 92 (not 89!) is actually the page from which Sotheby gets its catalogue notes, having translated the French. The French original refers to the "pêche" (peach) and "Péché originel" (Original Sin), but does not explicitly note any pun.

Any knowledgeable individuals who might add to this query are welcome to post comments.

A Resounding Pun in Paradise Lost

Thomas Sprat

"mathematical plainness"

(Image from Wikipedia)

I've just recently read an interesting paper by Paul Sutton, "Puns Lost, Puns Regain'd: The Pun in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain'd," which appears to have been a presentation given at the ANZAMEMS Conference in Adelaide, 7-10 2007, i.e., the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Mr. Sutton was a PhD student at the time and was expecting to finish his thesis later in 2007, though I've not yet discovered if he wrote more on puns in works by John Milton.

But his paper will suffice. Mr. Sutton helpfully points out that "What we term an act of punning would, in actual fact, be one of five rhetorical techniques . . . . Paranomasia, Antanaclasis, Asteismus, Syllepsis, and Polyptoton." By "one of five," he means any of them, not just one. In other words, all five are types of puns . . . though things are a bit more complicated than that, as we shall see. (I'm also now no longer sure that I used "Paronomasia" in a strictly technical sense, though I think that I spelled it correctly, whereas Mr. Sutton appears to have misspelled, or used a variant spelling.)

One problem that punning occasions for language is that with overuse, it "tests the limits of the word . . . to signify meaning." Recognition of this tendency moved some to radical solutions:

The poets and critics of the eighteenth century were well aware of this problem inherent in language. Several times people called for language to be cleaned up and become more mathmatical in nature, most famously, perhaps, by Thomas Sprat in his History of the Royal Society who piped up with a call for a "mathematical plainness" in language. As we are all well aware, theory and practice rarely meet. (Sutton, "Puns Lost, Puns Regain'd," page 2)

What does Milton think about such a mathematical solution? He does have Jesus tell Satan in Paradise Regain'd 1.434-5, "But what have been thy answers, what but dark / Ambiguous and with double sense deluding" (Sutton, page 3). A reader might therefore imagine that Milton favored simplicity and plainness in language, much as Sprat praised in the Royal Society's usage:

They have exacted from all their members, a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can. (Thomas Sprat, The History of the Royal Society of London, 1667, page 113)

The "naked, natural way" would surely fit the prelapsarian Adam and Eve -- perhaps some of the other characteristics would as well -- and Mr. Sutton notes that "common view of critics, as expressed by Christ in Paradise Regain'd, is that ambiguity is a hallmark of the Satanic style" (Sutton, page 4), so a bit of mathematical plainness might help since Milton believed that "[t]he end . . . of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents" and "that language is . . . the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known" (Of Education).

Milton, however, has the Son use at least one pun, possibly several, as a passage from Mr. Sutton's paper demonstrates:

It is polyptoton that becomes the central pun technique of Milton's new poetic because it is the favoured technique of Christ. Polyptoton, is where a word is repeated but in a different case or inflection. As evidenced here, in book 3 [lines 144-155] of Paradise Lost where we first meet Christ:

O Father, gracious was that word which clos'd
Thy sovran sentence, that Man should find grace;
For which both Heav'n and Earth shall high extoll
Thy praises, with th'innumerable sound
Of Hymns and sacred Songs, wherewith thy Throne
Encompass'd shall resound thee ever blest.
For should Man finally be lost, should Man
Thy creature late so lov'd, thy youngest Son
Fall circumvented thus by fraud, though joynd
With his own folly? that be from thee farr,
That farr be from thee, Father, who art Judg
Of all things made, and judgest onely right.

. . . What I would claim is that polyptoton is a rhetorical technique that works in English but that it only carries the disruption of being a pun in some instances. The changing of 'gracious' to 'grace' and 'judge' to 'judgest' do not stike me as being puns but are instances of polyptoton. 'Sound' to 'resound', is a pun and a polyptoton. What polyptoton allows the poet to do is to utilize the polysemous potential of language by explicitly calling attention to the changing of the word and meaning. Instead of making one word, or one sound, or the repetition of one word carry multiple denotations, polyptoton allows multiple meanings to build up through multiple words. It shows how language is linked, how one sound is linked to another similar sound and how meanings are built up and differentiated. (Sutton, "Puns Lost, Puns Regain'd," pages 7-8)

Mr. Sutton admits of only one pun -- "resound" upon "sound" -- but of several instances of polyptoton, which are at least some sorts of wordplay. Punning and wordplay are thus not intrinsically qualities of fallen language, so long as they're not being used deceptively. All the more interesting, then, the following passage from Mr. Sutton:

Milton attempts to redeem language through Christ and . . . . [move] from a freer, Satanic, play to a more restrained, more focussed, Christ like play, where the ideal is not necessarily for one word one meaning -- that is a pipe dream, as Milton knew and Paradise Lost is a testament to that. Much of the power and sublimity of Paradise Lost comes from Milton's struggle to represent God, Christ, and Paradise through an imperfect, fallen, language. Milton, as I hope I have demonstrated in some small way in this paper, attempted to compensate for the Satanic elements in our fallen language through the use of polyptoton . . . . [and thereby] subdue the logic of the pun" (Sutton, "Puns Lost, Puns Regain'd," page 9).

I think that we can all see a taint of tension here in subduing the logic of the pun even while allowing the Son his one use of a pun in heaven. My point is that the 'fallenness' of language lies not in the polysemous quality of words but in the use of multiple meanings to deceive. I'd thus like to know more about what Mr. Sutton meant by "the Satanic elements in our fallen language."

Knowing that would offer food for thought . . .

Prelapsarian Paronomasia in Paradise Lost

The Librarian, 1566

Giuseppe Arcimboldo

The Spitting Image of Paronomasia

(Image from Wikipedia)

In an article, "Self-Contradicting Puns in Paradise Lost," John Leonard notes the use of wordplay in the unfallen angel Raphael's language:

The War in Heaven -- a civil war -- causes many words to cleave asunder. Here is Raphael on the novelty of hate in heaven:

strange to us it seemed
At first, that angel should with angel war,
And in fierce hosting meet, who wont to meet
So oft in festivals of joy and love
Unanimous,

(VI. 91-5)

'Fierce hosting' is a tautology for the fallen reader, but an oxymoron for Raphael. We readily hear the military sense 'hostile encounter' (OED 'hosting'), but this sense is 'strange' to Raphael, for whom the verb 'host' has hitherto meant 'entertain as a guest' (OED v2 1a) or 'be a guest' (OED v2 2). 'Hosting', for Raphael, implies 'festivals of joy and love', and he hankers after the old meaning even as he steels himself to the new one. There is nothing trivial about this pun, which is based on a real etymological connection. Hostis in Latin can mean either 'enemy' or 'stranger'. Hospes (the root of hospitality) means 'he who entertains a stranger'. (Thomas N. Corns, A Companion to Milton, Wiley-Blackwell, 2003, pages 394-395)

Granted, Raphael is using "hosting" in a double, self-contradicting sense to describe fallen circumstances. The term is, as Leonard notes, an oxymoron for the unfallen angel, who uses the word in its acquired sense of "hostile encounter" even while recalling, and preferring, the word in its original sense of to "entertain [someone] as a guest" or to "be a guest." But this double meaning, this pun by Raphael, cannot be 'fallen' language, for this angel, unlike Satan, is unfallen. And note also the possible wordplay implicit in the original meaning of the term "hosting," in which one can either "be a guest" or "entertain [someone] as a guest," neither of which have even a whiff of fallenness. Punning is thus not a defining characteristic of fallen language in Paradise Lost.

Nevertheless, the Fall -- whether Satan's or humanity's -- does alter language, for it makes many words "cleave asunder" and thereby describe opposites, as Leonard goes on to demonstrate in his article, and such alteration exacerbates the deceptive 'power' of language.

In a certain sense, then, one can talk of 'fallen' language, though the fallenness lies more in its use to deceive than its nature as deceptive.

Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse on John Milton's 'Fall' of Language

After the Fall

(Image from UC Press)

I'm recovered from the Frantic and Lunatic New Year Holiday Trip and am again ready to post entries on Milton, so I'm returning to the putative fall of language that I broached earlier. Today's blog post concerns a long quote from Chapter 4, "The Work of Literature," of the The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life, depicted above, by Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, who discuss the effect of sin upon Satan's language:

- 104 -

Milton . . . strips the defeated angel of almost all the powers he possessed as part of an elite community, leaving only his eloquence intact. To represent the viewpoint of someone excluded from that community, Milton again draws upon Renaissance poetry -- the Petrarchan lyric.[38] In this verse form, the aristocratic woman symbolizes a lack -- the blood the courtier does not possess, the community into which he cannot gain entry, the property and power to which he has no title.[39] Gazing at his mistress only intensifies the courtier's awareness of what appears to be a metaphysical distance separating him from her. Burning with the desire for his patron's power and tormented by envy of those who do enjoy that bounty, Satan speaks the language of such a courtier.[40] The splendor of Eve's body and the erotic pleasure that she and Adam experience simply inspire a more grandiose version of the same kind of longing that found its way into Petrarchan verse:

Sight hateful, sight tormenting! thus these two
Imparadis't in one another's arms
The happier Eden, shall enjoy thir fill
Of bliss on bliss, while I to Hell am thrust,
Where neither joy nor love, but fierce desire,
Among our other torments not the least,
Still unfulfill'd with pain of longing pines.
(IV, 505–11)

Issuing from Satan's mouth, the clichés of courtier rhetoric take on a refreshingly literal meaning.[41] The choice of such Petrarchisms to express the most profound resentment that could be felt toward divinely ordained patrilineage is an important one, especially since Milton gives this language such an important role in his version of the Fall.

With God's military victory over Satan, their political struggle is hardly over. From Milton's perspective, it has really just begun. The battle within the elite community becomes a battle over the signs and symbols of political power -- the Edenic landscape and the human body. The battle ultimately detaches these symbols from their creator, putting meaning itself in question. Although it presupposes a source outside the elite community, the poetry of lack and longing observes the same ideological imperative as poetry written in gratitude for aristocratic generosity. Capable of acknowledging but one source of power, Satanic rhetoric does nothing to overturn God's authority-- nothing, that is, until that rhetoric


- 105 -

begins to operate in and through a woman. In this regard, Milton's poem seems to share the Royal Society's view of eloquence as the fall of language from an original state of purity where meaning was immanent in words and words mirrored things. He indicates such purity by eliminating the distinction between Eve's body and its reflection in the pool as well as between that image and her self-conception. As God explains, "What there thou seest fair Creature is thyself" (IV, 468).

This conflation of sign, meaning, and referent constitutes precisely the kind of iconicity that Milton destroys by means of the Fall. Its disintegration begins as Satan whispers in Eve's ear "discontented thoughts / Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires" (IV, 807–8). He tells her a story of a tree that would require her "utmost reach" and how all the creatures "with like desire / Longing and envying stood" around the tree (IX, 591–93). He claims he enhanced his own position by "vent'ring higher than [his] Lot" (IX, 690). Such is the power of his language that it induces Satanic longing, and Eve imagines that forbidden knowledge will do as much for her: "render me more equal, and perhaps, / A thing not undesirable, sometime / Superior" (IX, 823–25). As the fruit fills her body with a common, garden variety of desire, she ceases to embody aristocratic value and becomes the unruly woman, leveler of hierarchies. Once she has "Greedily ... ingorg'd without restraint," Eve is "hight'n'd as with Wine, jocund and boon" (IX, 791–93).

38. William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, in The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 191-218, offer an account of Milton's use of Petrarch in the early poetry and in Paradise Lost.

39. For a discussion of the ideology of this form, see Leonard Tennenhouse, "Sir Walter Ralegh and the Literature of Clientage," in Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 235-58, and Power on Display: The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres (New York: Methuen, 1986), pp. 30-36.

40. Arthur F. Marotti, "'Love is Not Love': Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order," ELH 49 (1982): 396-428, discusses how envy and desire provided the language for place and advancement in such poetry.

41. It is particularly appropriate that this language follows what Barbara Keifer Lewalski has described as Milton's parodies of "a major topos of the romance mode -- the hero's adventure in a Garden of Love." Paradise Lost and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 70-71.

(Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)

There are some interesting points worth reflecting upon in this long passage, but the money quote is the following:

Milton's poem seems to share the Royal Society's view of eloquence as the fall of language from an original state of purity where meaning was immanent in words and words mirrored things . . . . This conflation of sign, meaning, and referent constitutes precisely the kind of iconicity that Milton destroys by means of the Fall. (Armstrong and Tennenhouse, The Imaginary Puritan, page 105)

Does Milton, however, actually conflate "sign, meaning, and referent" in the prelapsarian garden? Are there no puns, no wordplays prior to the Fall? And if "sign, meaning, and referent" are conflated before the Fall, what are we to make of this:

Evil into the mind of God or Man
May come and go, so unapprov'd, and leave
No spot or blame behind (PL 5.117-119)

If the prelapsarian referent of the word "evil" is conflated with the sign "evil" itself and its meaning, then evil would hardly seem to come and go into one's mind without leaving taint. Even briefly to consider an evil would be to allow that evil itself, not just an abstract expression for it, access to one's mind. But perhaps Armstrong and Tennenhouse simply mean that a word corresponds to its referent, and only to its referent, in the prelapsarian world and have simply expressed themselves badly in our postlapsarian era. Perhaps the fall of language thus means nothing more that the corrupt use of language, as evidenced by faulty postlapsarian talk of prelapsarian conflation.

But what about wordplay. Does it not occur among the unfallen?

Milton and the 'Fall' of Language?

Biohazard Sign

"This biohazard sign

is a completely conventional symbol

with no inherent relationship

to what it represents."

(Image from Wikipedia)

The effect of original sin upon language was a major theme of the West's Early Modern period as the great increase in knowledge sharpened the issue of what one could securely know, and there has been some scholarly debate over whether or not Milton held to some version of a 'fall' of language. I think that he did, but he doesn't seem to have held to a radical version since, as we saw in yesterday's post, he promotes education as a means of repairing the impairment effected by original sin.

The scholar Herman Rapaport, in Milton and the Postmodern (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), seems to have argued that Milton believed that postlapsarian language was fallen, and he applied postmodern theory -- drawing particularly Ferdinand de Saussure and Jacques Derrida -- to describe what Milton believed. I've not read Rapaport firsthand, however, so I offer a passage from Richard Bradford's 2001 work, The Complete Critical Guide to John Milton, in which Rapaport's views are recapitulated:

The closest that anyone has come to a comprehensive deconstructive survey of Milton is Rapaport (1983). To properly describe, let alone explain, the panorama and complexity of Rapaport's survey would require another chapter: what can be said is that the book regularly involves encounters between Rapaport's perceptions of Derrida and Milton. One of the more accessible occurs at pages 38-41, considering the last two books of Paradise Lost. Here, 'Milton clearly shows how the sin that Adam and Eve commit initiates the Fall of language, causes signifiers and signifieds to break their natural bonds' (Rapaport 1983: 38). 'Signifier' and 'signified' are Saussurean terms; the former referring to the actual, material sign, the word uttered or on paper, the latter to the prelinguistic object or concept that the sign is held to represent. Saussure argued that their relationship is arbitrary and customary, that there is no natural relationship between the two, but that our ingrained familiarity with language causes us to presume that there might be: when we use or think of the signifiers 'mother' or 'father', for instance, they seem innately bound into our particular perception of their signifieds.

Rapaport suggests that in Books XI and XII Milton pre-empts Derrida, albeit within a limiting theological framework. He argues that the Fall causes Adam and Eve to first encounter the arbitrary relation between signifiers and signifieds.

Nature first gave Signs, imprest
On bird, Beast, Aire, Aire suddenly eclips'd
After short blush of morn

(XI, 182-4)

That is to say, things are no longer signifieds but signifiers; things are not archetypes but only copies of archetypes . . . things have faded, and all that remains is their residual semiotic significance.

(Rapaport 1983:39)

Much is implied here. Before the Fall, so Rapaport argues, things, objects and ideas were in some way organically related, almost blended, with their linguistic representations. One of the consequences of the Fall was that language became only arbitrarily related to prelinguistic reality -- which is consistent with the orthodox Christian view that the Fall caused humanity to be denied any proper knowledge of ultimate truth, God. (Richard Bradford, The Complete Critical Guide to John Milton, Routledge, 2001 pages 187-188)

Although I've not found a complete edition of Rapaport online, Google Books offers some help, allowing us to fill out the block quote from page 39 of Rapaport's book:

That is to say, things are no longer signifieds but signifiers; things are not archetypes but only copies of archetypes. It is as if nature suddenly turns into a book and man into a reader or interpreter of the signs written in that book. Things have faded, and all that remains is their residual semiotic significance. (Rapaport, in Milton and the Postmodern, page 39)

Perhaps we should also look at the passage quoted by Rapaport from Milton's Paradise Lost, Book 11, which follows Eve's wish to remain content, though fallen, in the garden:

So spake, so wish'd much-humbl'd Eve, but Fate
Subscrib'd not; Nature first gave Signs, imprest
On Bird, Beast, Aire, Aire suddenly eclips'd
After short blush of Morn; nigh in her sight
The Bird of Jove, stoopt from his aerie tour, [ 185 ]
Two Birds of gayest plume before him drove:
Down from a Hill the Beast that reigns in Woods,
First hunter then, pursu'd a gentle brace,
Goodliest of all the Forrest, Hart and Hinde;
Direct to th' Eastern Gate was bent thir flight. [ 190 ]
Adam observ'd, and with his Eye the chase
Pursuing, not unmov'd . . . . (PL 11.181-192)

Rapaport might be pressing his postmodern analysis here, though I'd have to read his book itself to decide, but there may be something to what he argues. Milton depicts Adam reading the signs of fallen nature and inferring a significant shift in nature's meaning. Moreover, the fact that the signs observed by Adam signify the effects of the first couple's sins might be significant, given the origin of personified Sin's name:

Then shining Heav'nly fair, a Goddess arm'd
Out of thy head I sprung; amazement seis'd
All th' Host of Heav'n back they recoild affraid
At first, and call'd me Sin, and for a Sign [ 760 ]
Portentous held me (PL 2.757-761)

The "Host of Heav'n" are here the fallen angels prior to their expulsion from heaven, and as they observe the 'birth' of Sin, first conceived in the mind of Satan and now bursting forth from his head, they link "Sin" to "sign" in naming the unexpected creature.

In the passage from Paradise Lost 11, then, Milton might again be punning on the relation between "signs" and "sins," such that the signs "imprest On Bird, Beast, Aire" are in fact the sins of Adam and Eve "imprest On Bird, Beast, Aire." As such, given the confusion of sign and sin, perhaps one can argue that Milton believed postlapsarian language to be fallen, with the consequence that the relation between signifier and signified is now arbitrary, ambiguous.

I leave the significance of this for readers to consider . . .

Eve's Confusion of Tongues in Paradise Lost

Substitution-Permutation Network

Confusion and Diffusion

(Image from Wikipedia)

I'm still investigating Eve's 'confusion of tongues' in Paradise Lost, initially broached in yesterday's post, for I think there might be something of minor interest that I can say about Milton's depiction of Eve's Fall.

In a poem of 1645, "At a Solemn Musick," Milton sings of heavenly choirs above harmonized by earthly choirs below, prior to the Fall:

That we on Earth with undiscording voice
May rightly answer that melodious noise;
As once we did, till disproportion'd sin
Jarr'd against natures chime, and with harsh din [ 20 ]
Broke the fair musick that all creatures made
To their great Lord, whose love their motion sway'd
In perfect Diapason, whilst they stood
In first obedience, and their state of good. ("ASM" 17-24)

Would the sin-occasioned "harsh din" limit itself to the notes alone . . . or overpower the 'lyrics' as well? At first blush, we might hazard that words elude the Fall's corruption, for Milton writes in The Art of Logic:

But languages, both the first one which Adam spoke in Eden, and those varied ones also possibly derived from the first, which the builders of the tower of Babel suddenly received, are without doubt divinely given. ("The Art of Logic," in Richard Arnold, Logic of the Fall: Right Reason and [Im]pure Reason in Milton's Paradise Lost, Peter Lang, 2006, page 21)

An optimistic reading of Milton's words here, however, is undercut by the words of Sin personified spoken to an equally personified Death in Book 10 of Paradise Lost:

To whom th' incestuous Mother thus repli'd.
Thou therefore on these Herbs, and Fruits, and Flours
Feed first, on each Beast next, and Fish, and Fowle,
No homely morsels, and whatever thing [ 605 ]
The Sithe of Time mowes down, devour unspar'd,
Till I in Man residing through the Race,
His thoughts, his looks, words, actions all infect,
And season him thy last and sweetest prey. (PL 10.602-609)

Note Sin's explicit promise to infect "words," implying that the 'lyrics' mentioned above also suffer corruption. Thus Milton's further words in The Art of Logic:

But as to those words that are derived or composite, either their origins are to be sought in other languages ancient and now obsolete, or by their own antiquity and the usually corrupt pronunciation of the lower classes are so changed, and by the habit of writing them falsely are so obliterated as it were that a true notation of words very seldom may be had. ("The Art of Logic," in Richard Arnold, Logic of the Fall: Right Reason and [Im]pure Reason in Milton's Paradise Lost, Peter Lang, 2006, page 21)

Milton reveals his hierarchy of class distinctions, but from the perspective of God, fallen human beings are all from the "lower classes," and what goes for composite words goes as well for composite grammar:

Greedily she ingorg'd without restraint,
And knew not eating Death: (PL 9.791-2)

Yesterday, with respect to these lines, I stated:

As previously noted, the use of the participle "eating" mimics the use in Greek of the nominative participle after verbs of knowing. The irony here is that Eve does not know that she is eating death . . . or that death is eating her.

We see in process a fall of language here as Eve eats the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, a confusion of tongues prefiguring the biblical story about the Tower of Babel, a confusion suggested by Milton in mixing Greek with English.

This 'confusion' of tongues receives emphasis in Book 12, where the Archangel Michael prophesies to a fallen Adam of fallen humanity's attempt to construct the Tower of Babel and the ensuing, large-scale linguistic "confusion" (PL 12.62) inflicted upon humanity:

But God who oft descends to visit men
Unseen, and through thir habitations walks
To mark thir doings, them beholding soon, [ 50 ]
Comes down to see thir Citie, ere the Tower
Obstruct Heav'n Towrs, and in derision sets
Upon thir Tongues a various Spirit to rase
Quite out thir Native Language, and instead
To sow a jangling noise of words unknown (PL 12.48-55)

Verse 44 of Book 12 makes explicit that these fallen human beings are intent upon building the Tower of Babel to reach up to heaven, which recalls Eve's desire to attain divinity through her own illegitimate efforts. Upon hearing of mankind's wicked ways, Adam criticizes his descendents but is reminded by the Archangel Michael that original sin is to blame:

Since thy original lapse, true Libertie
Is lost, which alwayes with right Reason dwells
Twinn'd, and from her hath no dividual being: [ 85 ]
Reason in man obscur'd, or not obeyd (PL 12.83-86)

Milton may well believe that "[t]he end . . . of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents" and "that language is . . . the instrument conveying to us things useful to be known," as he writes in his treatise Of Education, yet his very words denote that something is to be repaired, and an effort must be strenuously made for education to be "recovered from the scholastic grossness of barbarous ages." An ultimate recovery might have been Milton's educational attempt in his epic Paradise Lost, for he must recover Edenic language to present to his readers the discourse of the prelapsarian couple, but the poem is centrally about loss, not recovery, and Milton would have to acknowledge that for the vast majority of mankind (i.e., perhaps everyone but Milton himself), learning has not repaired that ruin of our first parents, and that ruin would include the confusion of language.

Milton laments in Of Education that so much of what passes for the learning of classical languages produces little more than educated fools whose linguistic efforts are a "wretched barbarizing against the Latin and Greek idiom, with their untutored Anglicisms," actual instances of a confusion of tongues that results from fusing languages divided at Babel. The confusion of tongues at Babel is a large-scale confusion, one in which human language in its totality is confused. The plethora of languages occasions more confusion, as one language influences another, 'barbarizing' it in the process. Perhaps this is what Milton is showing in Eve's Fall:

Greedily she ingorg'd without restraint,
And knew not eating Death: (PL 9.791-2)

As already noted in the discussion of the Greek nominative participle following verbs of knowing, Greek grammar influences the English used here to describe Eve's Fall, and this is a 'barbarism' possible only after Babel's confusion of tongues, but it is retrojected upon Eve's act of eating, such that Eve's Fall prefigures Babel through a proleptic confusion of languages, specifically, Greek and English. In both Book 12's confusion of tongues and Book 9's confusion of grammars, therefore, Milton presents the effects of the Fall upon language -- the mixing properly called "con-fusion."

I'm afraid that I've been far from clear myself on this matter, but that's due to the ruin of our first parents and therefore not entirely my own fault . . .

Milton's Polyglottal Irony of Eating Death . . .

The Confusion of Tongues (1865)

Gustave Doré

(Image from Wikipedia)

The lines of Milton's Paradise Lost that speak of Eve's Fall offer an ironic contrast between the semantic content and the grammatical analysis:

Greedily she ingorg'd without restraint,
And knew not eating Death: (PL 9.791-2)

As previously noted, the use of the participle "eating" mimics the use in Greek of the nominative participle after verbs of knowing. The irony here is that Eve does not know that she is eating death . . . or that death is eating her.

We see in process a fall of language here as Eve eats the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, a confusion of tongues prefiguring the biblical story about the Tower of Babel, a confusion suggested by Milton in mixing Greek with English.

The lines thus threaten to break down into two separate languages, and the knowing reader must consciously analyze in both Greek and English to hold Milton's synthesis together. Eve's disobedient act is already causing trouble for her descendents, for knowledge comes dear, as we must work to know both Greek and English if we want to understand Milton's words.

Eve for the time being remains unknowing despite the verb of knowing required by Greek grammar to explain in English her complex action in eating deadly knowledge, an ironic ignorance emphasized by Milton polyglot lines.

Today's babbling 'Babel' of voices is brought to you by Gypsy Scholar . . .

John Milton's Paradise Lost: The Sun Turning "Reines from th' Equinoctial Rode"?

Celestial Sphere with Celestial Equator

(Image from Astronomy 121, University of Oregon)

I seem to be veering wildly from the rule of law below to the starry sky above, if I might paraphrase Kant's famous remark about "the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me" ("der bestirnte Himmel über mir und das moralische Gesetz in mir"). Such chaotic fluctuations are characteristic of our postlapsarian world, Milton would say, for only with the fall of mankind came the discrepancy between the two as the laws governing both macrocosm and and microcosm became eccentric.

Anyway, back to Milton and his views on seasonal change, whose origin he dates to some time shortly after the fall when God ordered the unfallen angels to rearrange the cosmos, as described in Book 10 of Paradise Lost:

Some say he bid his Angels turne ascanse
The Poles of Earth twice ten degrees and more
From the Suns Axle; they with labour push'd [ 670 ]
Oblique the Centric Globe: Som say the Sun
Was bid turn Reines from th' Equinoctial Rode
Like distant breadth to Taurus with the Seav'n
Atlantick Sisters, and the Spartan Twins
Up to the Tropic Crab; thence down amaine [ 675 ]
By Leo and the Virgin and the Scales,
As deep as Capricorne, to bring in change
Of Seasons to each Clime; else had the Spring
Perpetual smil'd on Earth with vernant Flours,
Equal in Days and Nights . . . (PL 10.668-680)

[Thomas H. Luxon, ed. The Milton Reading Room, January 2009]

As Thomas Luxon notes in his online link, concerning the expression "Som say" (10.671):

Here and in the lines that follow we hear some ambiguity concerning geocentric and heliocentric models of creation. The first assumes a solar system; the second a geosystem.

Luxon could actually have noted this from the expression "Some say" (10.668). He's also linked to a couple of sites useful for schematic diagrams and simple explications of the geocentric and heliocentric models, but take the 'history' therein with a grain of salt when the site states that "the heliocentric idea of Aristarchus was quickly forgotten and Western thought stagnated for almost 2000 years as it waited for Copernicus to revive the heliocentric theory." Western thought certainly didn't 'stagnate' for 2000 years. Ptolemy's geocentric system made sense and was very useful, but it often gets denigrated in 'Whig' histories of science.

What I really want to focus on today, however, is a query about Milton's meaning in writing "Som say the Sun / Was bid turn Reines from th' Equinoctial Rode / Like distant breadth to" Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, and the other signs along the zodiacal path. The odd expression "Like distant breadth" refers to the 23.5 degress obliquity of the ecliptic to the celestial equator referred to first in lines 669-670. The "Equinoctial Rode" here refers to the celestial equator on which the sun was constantly positioned in Milton's prelapsarian cosmos.

As I've previously noted, Alastair Fowler has stated that in Milton's unfallen world, the celestial equator and the ecliptic coincided, but does Milton clearly say this anywhere? In lines 671 and following, Milton seems to allow for the possibility that the constellations Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, and the other signs along what is commonly known as the zodiacal path did not lie on the celestial equator even in prelapsarian times. At least, the words about the sun turning from the "Equinoctial Rode" suggest the possibility. The sun seems to be changing its path from one great circle to another . . . apparently bringing the planets in tow, since we find them also there in our postlapsarian world.

I'll have to see if other scholars have noted this possible interpretation.

Milton's Prelapsarian Seasons?

The Four Seasons

(Image from Wikipedia)

In Book 5 of John Milton's Paradise Lost, the angel Raphael descends from heaven to warn Adam and Eve to beware of the fallen angel Satan, who intends to do them evil if he can. As Raphael initially approaches the first couple's bower, Adam spies him coming and calls out to Eve to prepare for an arriving guest a table of fruits for noontime refreshment. We are told of Eve's response to Adam's words:

To whom thus Eve. Adam, earths hallowd mould,
Of God inspir'd, small store will serve, where store,
All seasons, ripe for use hangs on the stalk;
Save what by frugal storing firmness gains
To nourish, and superfluous moist consumes . . . . (PL 5.321-325)

Eve replies by reminding Adam that everything needed for the midday meal is amply supplied, for the ripened fruits of all seasons hangs ripe on stalks, except for what is improved by plucking and storing. Later in the same book, the narrator describes Eve's table, laden with fruits:

. . . Rais'd of grassie terf
Thir Table was, and mossie seats had round,
And on her ample Square from side to side
All Autumn pil'd, though Spring and Autumn here
Danc'd hand in hand. (PL 5.391-395)

Here, we learn that autumn's fruits were piled upon the table. But what 'seasons' were being referred to earlier by Eve, and what 'spring' and 'autumn' are here being referred to by the narrator, for the earth had no actual seasons until Book 10, where God commands the angels to alter creation so as to produce the four seasons as part of the punishment for the original sin of Adam and Eve:

Some say he bid his Angels turne ascanse
The Poles of Earth twice ten degrees and more
From the Suns Axle; they with labour push'd
Oblique the Centric Globe: Som say the Sun
Was bid turn Reines from th' Equinoctial Rode
Like distant breadth to Taurus with the Seav'n
Atlantick Sisters, and the Spartan Twins
Up to the Tropic Crab; thence down amaine
By Leo and the Virgin and the Scales,
As deep as Capricorne, to bring in change
Of Seasons to each Clime; else had the Spring
Perpetual smil'd on Earth with vernant Flours,
Equal in Days and Nights . . . . (PL 10.668-680)

[Thomas H. Luxon, ed. The Milton Reading Room, December 2008]

Only now does the shifted celestial pole -- or perhaps the sun's altered orbit -- "bring in change / Of Seasons to each Clime" through the course of the year, so what is meant by the prelapsarian references to seasons? The narrator, being of postlapsarian times, could be speaking figuratively, having greater knowledge of such things, but how would Eve know anything of seasons?

Perhaps I'll look further into this point.

Adam and Eve: "the liveliest pair"?

Satan Watching

the

Endearments of Adam and Eve

1808

William Blake

(Image from Wikipedia)

One of our fine Milton scholars, Michael O'Connell, has caught a 'happy' typographical error in Gordon Campbell's edition of John Milton: The Complete English Poems and posted the delicious detail on the Milton List:

Ah, the pleasure of typos! I've been using the Everyman Complete English Poems of Milton this term, edited by our extraordinarily learned colleague Gordon Campbell. One word that escaped Gordon's eye was in PL 4, 321, where we learn that Adam and Eve were "the liveliest pair / That ever since in love's embraces met". A mischievous typographer? My students were understandably a bit disappointed when, duty bound, I gave them the true reading of the line.

That 'true' reading, of course, is "the loveliest pair" -- though O'Connell acknowledges that the error might itself be true:

But who's to say that A & E were not also the liveliest pair in their love's embraces?

"Were they?" I wondered, and did a Google search for "liveliest pair," whereupon I discovered another couple, finding them listed as the final item among the search results: Eva and Nick. I didn't look further into the details on these two, who are described in the search results as "enjoying the fruits of one another's loins," but I'm taking a wild guess that it's a filmed reinterpretation of Milton's account in which Eve has an affair with "Old Nick" -- as perhaps implied by Blake's ménage à trois above -- and that the forbidden fruit was none other than the aforementioned fruit of their loins.

I reject such a heretical re-envisioning of the lapsarian story, however, and suggest instead that not only is O'Connell right in suggesting that Adam and Eve might actually have been "the liveliest pair in their love's embraces" but even that Campbell might indeed have gotten the line right. I've proposed this point on the Milton List:

Or was Professor Campbell simply restoring the long-lost original line and thereby providing a more precise understanding of Milton's views on prelapsarian sexuality?

So far, no other scholar has disagreed with me, so I'm taking the universal silence on this point as unanimous acknowledgement.

Perhaps I should publish an article . . .

Laughter, the best medicine?

Eduard von Grützner, Falstaff

Shakespearean Humor

(Image from Wikipedia)

As an old man now, I must lean on a rickety false staff to support myself with good humor as I continue this pilgrimage of mine through life, still climbing up along my chosen career path despite the many detours that I've taken.

But my humor often gets misread, as my longsuffering Uncle Cran has reported since yesterday's humorous blog entry. For instance, in his anecdote concerning the high school reunion where everyone present was expected to offer a brief biography of life's events since graduation, he originally related:

When I got to the part about meeting Gay and our marriage, I stated, "When we got married, we were both young, shy, inexperienced, and inhibited."

Then I continued, "Our first son was born 10 and 1/2 months later," and I heard someone, (who will not be identified), make the snide remark, "Sounds like Cran got over his inhibitions!"

There were a few (shall we say, sniggers?) as those two near but unconnected comments of mine were somehow mis-applied. This demonstrates that this lady, and perhaps others of my classmates, still had thoughts in their minds not exactly appropriate for such a gathering. But I will forgive and try to forget! As only I should.

That was Uncle Cran's summary of his brief remark, and he now reports in a circular sent out to those who might have misconstrued:

Some of our classmates have written, thanking me for my report on the 52nd class reunion. One (or more?) thought I might have had my feelings hurt about the cute remarks and giggles following my account of my and Gay's marriage and son's birth. That was actually intended to elicit such a response, and is a demonstration of my twisted humor.

Others, apparently, were worried that my gentle ribbing of my dear Uncle Cran throughout yesterday's blog entry might have been intended as harsh sarcasm or as some sort of criticism

Uncle Cran, however, has reassured them:

Nephew Jeffery has again placed my account on his blog. We have a good time doing this, and all comments are meant to be funny, as he is afflicted with the same family trait of wry (some would call 'strange') humor.

I've replied to Uncle Cran:

I can well imagine that some readers might lack the [peculiar] sense of humor . . . to recognize that we are just kidding. People have often thought that my posts on fan death are serious, a severe misreading that I cannot fathom. So . . . I sometimes wonder if we should be less 'humorous'. Except that it entertains the two of us and makes my blog more interesting . . . I think . . . . As for the comment made at the reunion itself -- the one about your loss of inhibitions -- I suspected that you'd been fishing for that. Yes, we share a sense of humor, unfortunately. Both our humors are radioactive, it seems, for when your humor and mine meet on my blog, there's a nuclear reaction. We ought to threaten North Korea.

As an aside, I'd note that humor probably would be felt as a threat by the Beloved Leader, General King Jong-il.

Anyway, speaking of humor, that 'paramour of scholarly virtue', Wikipedia, offers some theories on how humor works. One of these is the "superiority theory," which says that we laugh at the misfortunes of other people because such misfortunes imply our superiority to others in their failings. Superficially, this seems to be my humor at Uncle Cran's expense, and some people might read my humor this way and take offense on Uncle Cran's part. Those people are not in on the joke, so let me explain to any who haven't understood -- my jokes about Uncle Cran do not belong to this category of humor. A different theory better conveys my meaning, the "incongruity theory," which is a bit more complicated to explain, but this theory basically says that humor is conveyed through the incongruity between what is said and what is meant. What makes my humor at Uncle Cran's expense difficult to catch is that I pretend to laugh at his misfortunes (superiority) but depend upon readers to understand that I surely don't mean what I seem to be saying (incongruity). But, as I noted, not everybody is in on the joke. Well . . . I suppose that they now are.

Humor is often complex when it occurs in literature. Take the case of Falstaff. Are we intended to laugh at him? Or with him? Our reason for laughing says something about us. On the Milton List a couple of weeks ago, a question was raised about humor in Paradise Lost. Several scholars gave examples, and I offered a line by Eve in which she responds to the serpent's multiple, excessively over-the-top compliments on her wonderful qualities by doubting that the forbidden fruit truly conveys wisdom:

In my opinion, Eve has the funniest line in Paradise Lost. Immediately after Satan in serpent form has praised Eve with excessive compliments, she retorts:

Serpent, thy overpraising leaves in doubt
The vertue of that Fruit, in thee first prov'd: (PL 9.615-6)

I always have to laugh when I read Eve's remark. But is she aware of the humor . . . or is this solely Milton's joke?

In a recent offlist email, I received a belated response to my question from the scholar David Ainsworth:

Nothing like this time of year for a delayed response.

I think unquestionably that there's a joke here, on several layers. If Eve doesn't mean the contradiction, then she must be using "prov'd" in the sense of being tested or made trial of. Milton would unquestionably appreciate that this other usage of the word aligns itself not just with testing but with *tasting* in particular. The OED [Oxford English Dictionary] doesn't list many usages specific to tasting, but the quibble on test/taste was common enough even outside circumstances like this one.

I suspect there's plenty of bilingual or trilingual plays on words in Milton's poetry which slip past readers.

As for Eve's awareness -- I guess that depends on how close to falling one believes her at this moment. The more she's chiding Satan for praise which she has secretly embraced, the more calculated this response will seem. For me, part of what I appreciate about lines like these is that Eve can mean the joke regardless of how she's taking in the situation, but that the purpose of the humor shifts -- she's either expressing false humility by affirming the serpent's judgment by affirming the fruit's virtue, or she's genuinely chiding the serpent.

Sadly, I suspect in context that Eve's doubt of the fruit must be seen as her humor, deployed precisely in a situation where Satan's overpraising genuinely ought to lead her to genuine doubt.

I take Professor Ainsworth's point to be that Eve only pretends to doubt the fruit's power to bring wisdom, for she secretly enjoys the serpent's attentions and wants to believe the serpent truly wise and therefore correct. As Professor Ainsworth notes, the humor can work on several levels. One possibility is that the reader will react as the superiority theory might predict -- with a sort of judgemental humor, as though one felt superior to Eve and were silently thinking I wouldn't fall for that flattery! Milton, however, thinks that we would fall for it -- if Stanley Fish is right about Milton tempting the reader to fall into sin along with Eve and Adam by encouraging us to identify with Satan. If so, there comes a moment of grim, ironic incongruity as we recognize that Milton is not merely describing Eve but also describing us. If such is the case, then echoing Jane Austen's Elizabeth Bennet, I can say, "That is a failing indeed, . . . [but] I really cannot laugh at it."

And with those words, I must now exit this stage and begin my day.

Ways with Words...

Ginkgo Tree in Autumn

Deciduous because its leaves decide to fall...

(Image from Wikipedia)

Spengler -- the extant one, I mean -- tells a great joke about Martin Heidegger:

Heidegger never produced a consistent theory; God put Heidegger in a circular room, and told him that Being was in the corner.

What a great twist on the old joke about being put in a round room and told to pee in the corner!

Speaking of a way with words, here's a poem that my daughter, Sa-Rah Ahyoga, wrote a couple of days ago for her eight-year-old brother, En-Uk Sequoya, titling it "My Brother":

My brother's shouting.
My brother's pouting.

Why does he do it?
We never know it.

But one thing's for sure.
He's never mature.

Although En-Uk panned this poem in his critical review, I say that it's pretty durn good for a 10-year-old girl who speaks Korean better than English! I asked if she wanted to change "know" to "knew" for the rhyme, but upon reflection, she said, "No because the tense wouldn't work."

I'll just bask here in the light of my daughter's glory...

Hey, no persnarkety remarks about blogfathers being too proud of their kids! If Professor Nokes can have his daughter write a book review of Kid Beowulf for his blog, then I can have my daughter post a poem to my blog!

I'm really just a homebody at heart.

Now as for my own literary endeavors, they've largely gone on hold . . . aside from my scribblings on this blog. Yesterday, however, I dashed off a little haiku, which I've titled "Snow Fall":

Nonhexagonal,
Swirling golden ginkgo leaves.
O radiant snow.

I was caught up, momentarily, in a snowstorm of gold as I passed through an archway of ginkgo trees on my way to the Medieval conference.

Probably, this little poem doesn't work, but the moment felt nice...

"And knew not eating Death"

Michelangelo: The Fall (Sistine Chapel Ceiling)

"And knew not eating Death" (PL 9.792)

(Image from Wikipedia)

In Paradise Lost 9.780-794, Eve -- having concluded that she can "feed at once both Bodie and Mind" (PL 9.779) -- decides to take the fruit proferred by the serpent:

So saying, her rash hand in evil hour [ 780 ]
Forth reaching to the Fruit, she pluck'd, she eat:
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat
Sighing through all her Works gave signs of woe,
That all was lost. Back to the Thicket slunk
The guiltie Serpent, and well might, for Eve [ 785 ]
Intent now wholly on her taste, naught else
Regarded, such delight till then, as seemd,
In Fruit she never tasted, whether true
Or fansied so, through expectation high
Of knowledg, nor was God-head from her thought. [ 790 ]
Greedily she ingorg'd without restraint,
And knew not eating Death: Satiate at length,
And hight'nd as with Wine, jocond and boon,
Thus to her self she pleasingly began. (PL 9.780-794)

Milton plays on an ambiguity in the phrase "to her self," for the next line will show her addressing the tree ("O Sovran, vertuous, precious of all Trees" PL 9.795), but for a brief moment, we read her as addressing "her self" in an act of self-worship ... which, of course, she implicitly is.

But that's not my point today.

Rather, I'm curious about the expression "eating Death" in line 792. Scholars have long noted the double meaning in the wording, which can mean either that Eve is eating death or that death is ravenous (which it is, cf. PL 2.845ff), so the expression "eating death" has been pretty well looked into, I suppose. At any rate, I was led to a possible source for Milton's expression by way of Regina Schwartz, who writes:

Michael Lieb comments that Adam and Eve become unclean upon violating God's command, noting that seventeenth-century commentators also made the connection between the forbidden fruit and the unclean food of Leviticus. In The Forbidden Fruit: Or a Treatise of the Tree of Knowledge (1640), Sebastian Frank writes that the fall was an "offense" to God, causing man to become "unclean": we shall become clean again only when we "doe vomitt up the Fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evill" (14-16). Lieb's interest is in the prohibition a "extralegal and dispensational" -- not in any of its commemorative impulses (Lieb, Poetics of the Holy, 114-18). (Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating, pp. 113-114, n. 18)

This point concerning the "connection between the forbidden fruit and the unclean food of Leviticus" sounds fascinating, and I, obviously, need to read Lieb's book closely. Meanwhile, who is this Sebastian Frank -- or actually, "Franck," as I discovered through an online search that located his book with a lengthy title typical of texts back in the heroic days of printing:

The forbidden fruit, or, A treatise of the tree of knowledge of good and evill, of which Adam at the first, and as yet all mankinde do eate death moreover, how at this day it is forbidden to every one as well as to Adam, and how this tree, that is, the wisdome of the serpent planted in Adam, is that great image, and that many headed beast mentioned in Daniel and the apocalyps, whom the whole world doth worship : lastly, here is shewed what is the tree of life, contrary to the wisdome, righteousnesse, and knowledge of all mankinde : with a description of the majestie and nature of Gods word

This website lists the author as Sebastian Franck (note the "c") and gives the following bibliographical information:

London: Printed by T.P. and M.S. for Benjamin Allen ..., 1642

Franck actually published under a pseudonym (August Eleuthenius) and originally in German (Vom dem Baum des Wissen Gutes und Böses), as I discovered through yet another website:

41. August Eluthenius Forbidden Fruit.

Forbidden Fruit or Tree of Knowledge writ by August Eleuthenius

Ed. Note: Full Citation: Sebastian, Franck (1499-1542), pseud. August Eluthenius, Vom dem Baum des Wissen Gutes und Böses, translated, The Forbidden Fruit: or, A Treatise of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evill, of Which Adam at the First, and as Yet All Mankinde Do Eate Death . . . (London: Printed by T. P. and M. S. for Benjamine Allen, 1642)

Most interesting for me is this phrase in the title: "the tree of knowledge of good and evill, of which Adam at the first, and as yet all mankinde, do eate death." Eating death -- as we've already noted above -- is how Milton describes Eve's act of eating the fruit, so I'd like to know more about Franck's views and whether or not Milton was aware of them. Likely, Milton did know since the English translation was published in London in 1642 (also 1640?), but I'd need confirmation.

Wikipedia, by the way, has a useful entry on Sebastian Franck, who was a German and Reformer in Luther's time, but though it lists the book that I'm interested in (as The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil), it doesn't say anything about Franck's views on the subject.

That remains for another time...