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written permission from the JHU Press. The title of my presentation has literal and figurative significance, for I plan to describe how the enterprise known as Milton studies, though appearing to be in a state of disorder, has discernible configurations--what, in critical discourse, are called interpretive communities. Speaking from the vantage point of an editor--of Milton Studies, of a series of monographs and multiauthor collections in Renaissance and seventeenth-century studies, of the Donne Variorum project, and of the recently revived Milton Variorum Commentary project--I will engage the concept of interpretive communities.
In the course of my discussion, I will not take sides in the controversies unfolding within an interpretive community, or between one community and another, because the role of editor as I construe and enact it does not involve advocacy. Rather, because of his or her unique and privileged vantage point, an editor receives, examines, and evaluates vast amounts of critical commentary soon after it is composed, only a small part of which emerges in publication. Not to be discounted is the revision, at times reconception, of critical commentary motivated by an editor's recommendations, which enable an author to enhance an argument by adjusting or enlarging its line of inquiry, by pursuing further research along stipulated lines, and by situating an argument and its critical methodology more clearly inside, or outside, an interpretive community.
Furthermore, an able editor spends most of the working day not only evaluating the material that he or she directly receives but also striving to read virtually all of the publications in one's field of specialization in order to become as conversant as possible with the most recent findings and interpretations. Such competence is regularly exercised when an editor refers a prospective author to certain studies that should have been, but were not, cited, studies that should be accommodated in one form or another, ranging from simple acknowledgement to full-scale engagement. Also significant is an editor's ability to "evaluate the evaluations" of his or her edi torial board and consultant readers and to pursue one's own research and publication, ideally in the primary materials of the very period in which one specializes.
This competence to which I refer evolves over time into a sixth sense, a form of anticipation or intuition, an inevitable consequence of one's position as an editor, not a function of one's innate ability. And in my role as an editor for one of the two Variora cited above, I have examined critical commentary written in the last 350 years on Donne's poetry, a vantage point that has enabled me to investigate how, why, when, and by whom interpretive communities are created. Or to use the language of one of my colleagues on the panel today, Professor John Peter Rumrich, I have witnessed the uninventing and reinventing of Donne many times over. Thus, an editor anticipates where critical inquiry is headed, and an active editor can hasten progress within an interpretive community or actually assist in the creation of a community from chaos.
In what follows, I will focus, albeit briefly, on the role of an active editor on the topic of Milton and Imperialism, on which critical inquiry has coalesced for several reasons, though I will cite only four: (1) the creation of an interpretive community known as the New Historicism, (2) the scholarly research, as well as political controversies, shortly before, at, and soon after the quincentennial of Columbus's landfall in the Americas, (3) an emphasis on eyewitness accounts from multinational or multicultural explorations of the Americas and from European encounters with the Amerinds, (4) the use and adaptation by Miltonists of the extensive research and critical methodologies of Shakespeareans who reappraised certain works, particularly The Tempest, from the standpoint of colonialism.
A foremost example of a critic engaging the topic of Milton and imperialism is J. Martin Evans, whose Milton's Imperial Epic: The Discourse of Colonialism (1994) systematically analyses Paradise Lost by taking into account the impulses that I enumerated above. From my perspective as an editor, four features of the book stand out. First, Evans acknowledges the origin of "the idea that Milton's epic might have something to do with the discovery and settlement of the New [End Page 53] World" while he "was preparing an edition of Books 9 and 10 for the Cambridge Milton in 1972." Satan on his return to hell is acclaimed by the fallen angels as a "great adventurer" recently returned "from the search / of Forrein Worlds" (10.440-41), his victims being likened to "th'American" whom Columbus en countered "wilde / Among the Trees on Iles and woodie Shores" (10.1116-18). Second, Evans concedes that the "interpretive context," at the time that he perceived Paradise Lost as an imperial epic, "was not especially conducive to such speculations." Third, Evans situates his present-day analysis of Milton's imperial epic in the context of the New Historicism, the recently created interpretive community that he joined in order to unfold his insight from 1972 into a fully documented book. But he very self-consciously modifies some of the assumptions and practices of that interpretive community, so that, in effect, his book becomes neo-New Historicist. Thus, Evans's theoretical stance and interpretive practice serve to revise, not reject, the New Historicism. His tone resembles that of a reformer, not a schismatic and never a heretic. As such, Evans has broadened the interpretive community that he recently joined and, in part, re-created. Fourth and foremost, Evans's particular encounter with the New Historicism was bittersweet psychologically. While emboldened by the creation of an interpretive community, the New Historicism, wherein his insight (that Paradise Lost is an imperial epic) could unfold, he simultaneously faced a close encounter of the most intimate kind-- namely, with his own previous work on Milton's epic. In that work, Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition (1968), Evans contends that Milton wrote a hexameral epic.
How, then, can two epics coexist in one narrative poem? Or how can one scholar-critic expound two very different interpretations of the one epic, without coming into conflict with oneself and with one's earlier work? To put it differently, how might Evans acquire dual citizenship while avoiding the odious ritual of renouncing his past? The questions that I pose invariably occur, consciously or subconsciously, to Miltonists of Evans's generation and of an earlier generation, represented by one of my distinguished colleagues today, whose first book on Milton, Para dise Lost and the Seventeenth Century Reader, appeared a half-century ago on the very eve of India's independence from British rule. The interpretive community that fostered Professor Balachandra Rajan's first book was based at Cambridge University, an institution at the time profoundly affected by E. M. W. Tillyard and others who shared his view of the Elizabethan world-view. The interpretive community that nurtured Evans's first book was based at Oxford, at the time when Helen Gardner prevailed, when and where, moreover, the book of C. A. Patrides was fostered, Milton and the Christian Tradition (1966), a title about as similar to Paradise Lost and the Genesis Tradition as one can imagine.
In what must have been a struggle of psychomachic proportions, Evans acquires two passports by invoking the New Historicist concept of homologies and analogies. This invocation, as well as evocation, takes many forms--some general, others specific. Generally, the New Historicists contend that literature, like other texts, emerges from a common cultural origin, hence the paradoxical but now acceptable interrelatedness of apparently unrelated texts. Accordingly, discursive intertextuality informed by homologies and analogies distinguishes the New Historicism from more traditional historical models of analysis, in which the positivist view of intertextuality is one of indebtedness--what we know as "source and in fluence" studies. Specifically, Evans cites David Quint's Epic and Empire, but only to the extent that such a work consorts with his reformed, reinvented, or re-created version of the New Historicism, appropriating the view that the epic generically is a product of many cultural forces while muting the voice that the epic ideologically propounds the politics of imperialism, or in the case of Paradise Lost, the religio-politics of imperialism. Specifically, Evans also relies on Peter Hulme and Leo Marx, citing Colonial En counters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 by the former, who argues that The Tempest is a palimpsest, combining an Atlantic text and a Mediterranean text, the one written in the spaces of the other. What is true of The Tempest is homologously and analogously true of Paradise Lost. After all, both texts, apparently unrelated, are interrelated through their common cultural origin, which involves, among other things, a culture informed by Europe's encounter with the Americas. Armed with this New [End Page 54] Historicist reasoning, which promotes various forms of intertextuality, homologies, and analogies, Evans may now compliment and complement his previous interpretation that Paradise Lost is a hexameral epic with his present view of Milton's poem as an imperial epic, the one interpretation written in the spaces of the other. The complementarity to which I refer emerges most conspicuously, on the one hand, in Evans's study of Adam and Eve's "native innocence" in the Genesis tradition and, on the other hand, in his analysis of "native innocence" in the imperial epic; or in his study in the hexameral epic of God as sovereign planter and Adam and Eve as both plants and gardeners entrusted with the duties of cultivation within and between themselves and in his analysis in the imperial epic of civility that is personal and interpersonal and of civilization that is societal and cultural.
By broadening the New Historicist concept of intertextuality, which juxtaposes a limited number of texts, sometimes only two--the one literary, the other not--Evans ranges far and wide in seeking parallels between the colonial discourse of Paradise Lost and any number of European accounts of the New World and its inhabitants. By simultaneously arguing that Milton's own outlook on imperialism is indeterminate, not only in his epic but in his other writings as well, poetry and prose (including the State Papers), Evans never enters the arena of debate concerning Milton's own political views on imperialism. When all is said and done, Milton's Imperial Epic analyses the colonial and imperial emphasis in political images, themes, and language in Paradise Lost; it eschews consideration of Milton's politics on colonialism. In short, Evans's entrance into the interpretive community of the New Historicism enables him to cull texts other than classical, Patristic, and dramatic--the achievement of his previous book--in order to in terpret Milton's epic.
How does such a book, both as a theoretical model and an interpretive exercise, affect an editor? Let me count the ways:
1. Is Evans a New Historicist? While he accepts (actually adapts) the New Historicism, will its purist practitioners accept him? Even if they do, will negative commentators on the New Historicism continue to denigrate that interpretive community whose tenets and tenants increase and multiply daily? When will endeavours at fusion with and within an interpretive community produce the opposite effect of fission, tantamount to the creation of another interpretive community?
2. Evans does not cull texts, nor do other New Historicists to my knowledge, recounting European interaction with extraordinarily civil and civilized Amerinds--neither noble nor bestial savages--whose cultural achievements and architectural monuments rivalled those of the Old World. For example, the Mexica(n) (or Aztec) emperor, Montezuma, who is mentioned in Paradise Lost (11.407) presided at the capital (and capitol) called Tenochtitlan. If indeed European accounts of Tenochtitlan are examined before it was razed by the Spaniards, who on the same site raised their own capital (and capitol), resemblances are quite striking between the Amerinds' construction and its topographic setting, on the one hand, and architecture and terrain in the underworld of Paradise Lost, on the other.
3. In support of such an assertion, the topographic and architectural features of Pandemonium from Paradise Lost--the nearby presence of water, floating structures connected by causeways, volcanoes, snow-capped peaks, and the like--recur in European eyewitness accounts of Tenochtitlan. One such account includes the following details: a nearby mountain that "never wanteth snow" while "full of craggy rocks," at which "the ground did tremble and quake," then this "vulcan began to lash out flames . . . ." Indeed, one may be hard pressed to iden tify classical or European analogues for various details of Pandemonium--for example, in Book 1 of Paradise Lost, where the fallen angels "on the smoothed plank, / The suburb of their straw-built citadel, / New rubbed with balm, expatiate and confer / Their state affairs" (772-775). If, as we continue to contend, Pandemonium is modelled after St. Peter's in Rome, the "smoothed plank" and "straw-built citadel" surely strike an unresponsive chord. Much of Tenochtitlan, however, was con-structed of straw and the various parts of the capitol connected by planked causeways over water. Anchored on stakes and pilings, enormous straw mats covered the lakes, thereby providing usable space on the water even for construction atop these platforms. Note the following eyewitness account of architecture and topography: a [End Page 55] temple with a "conical straw roof" while "snow-covered peaks and volcanos . . . encircle the Valley of Mexico."
4. Eyewitness accounts cite the use of naptha and other such fuel for nighttime illumination at Tenochtitlan, liken the intricate construction of the architecture to the work of bees, and admire the work of silversmiths as more sophisticated--with reference to fineness of detail and moving parts--than what their European and even Byzantine counterparts could do. 5. What was the effect of the European encounter with such pre-Columbian cities and civilization? How did the Amerind architecture, urban layout and design, and the interplay between topography and manmade construction influence the European city raised on this same site, the forerunner of Mexico City? And what in pre-Columbian cities may have influenced European cities in the Old World and even urban redevelopment therein?
6. Did Europeans not only plunder the precious metals, such as gold, for export to Europe, particularly Spain and the Vatican, but also appropriate a form of perspectival art theretofore unrealized even in Italy?
7. Did Milton read the numerous accounts by Spanish and Portugese eyewitnesses of their encounters with the Amerinds, accounts present then and now in the libraries of the Vatican and of Florence?
8. What were Milton's views on imperialism as practiced by Catholic Spain or as enacted by Protestant England (whether monarchical or Republican)? When in The Readie and Easie Way, he envisions England as "another Rome in the West," what precisely did he mean by such a phrase? And does his meaning depend on a distinction between the imperialism of the Roman republic and the imperialism of the Roman empire?
While I might continue indefinitely--proposing for inquiry Milton's outlook on empires in Paradise Regained, his critique in English governmental de liberations and documents (and those of a larger Protestant alliance) of Spanish depredations in the New World, his possible involvement with drama and opera during the Interregnum wherein various forms of imperialism were cited (some approvingly, others disapprovingly), and his responses to the different reactions of English colonists along the Atlantic seaboard when the English Civil War was in progress and after Cromwell's government was installed--I have stated or implied (what I will call) the politics of editing and the potential for the creation or re-creation of interpretive communities, though I have dwelt on a single illustrative example, the New Historicism, and one of its practitioners who wears only some of its stripes.
Duquesne University
This presentation is deliberately unannotated and undocumented because the views propounded and the recommendations proposed are being pursued in research-in-progress by younger scholars and Ph. D. dissertation students who have sought my guidance. Some of them have incurred remarkable expenses, travelling to European archives--namely, the Vatican and Laurentian libraries--in order to examine first hand the eyewitness accounts of the New World that Milton may have read in his journey of 1638-1639. Others are reexamining the State Papers in which Milton was involved or in which he may have had a hand, such as the Spanish Declaration. Still others are pursuing a female prototype of Eve among the Amerinds, with focus on Marina of the Aztecs.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/milton_quarterly/v032/32.2labriola01.html