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Book Review

Immanent Divinity

Andrew Escobedo

Early in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress Christian comes to the Palace Beautiful and requests shelter from the allegorical figure of Discretion. After Christian answers a series of questions, the narrator tells us that Discretion "smiled, but the water stood in her eyes; and after a little pause she said, I will call forth two or three more of the family."¹ This novelistic detail ("the water stood in her eyes") creates a momentary effect of psychological depth rather than metaphorical transparency, exemplifying the shift in late seventeenth-century allegory from its traditional, emblematic, non-mimetic mode to a kind of representation that Walter Benjamin has described as both more realistically "earthly" and "enigmatic" and at the same time ruined.² In The Ruins of Allegory: "Paradise Lost" and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention, Cath erine Gimelli Martin argues that Paradise Lost confronts and participates in this transition into "baroque" allegory. Milton responds to the break-up of the mystical system of correspondence governing medieval and Renaissance cosmology by representing a desacralized and empirically knowable universe that is nonetheless imbued with the fragmentary, ruined traces of divine presence. Thus, on the one hand, the poem's baroque allegory carries out the Benjaminian act of "mourning the lost certitudes and assured transcendence of the old closed universe" (5). On the other hand, the poem recuperates this lost divinity by suggesting the immanent if indeterminate presence of God in the material particles that now make up the universe: "a new synthesis of vitalistic physics and organic metaphysics that would conserve divine immanence within the largely secular grounds of the new scientific universe" (13). Divinity no longer rules from [End Page 85] the top of a vertical cosmos but rather maintains a scattered presence throughout horizontalized space and time. Crucial to Martin in this reordering is the manner in which Milton uses the new uncertainty about the universe as an analogue of the chaotic indeterminacy of human freedom.

This thesis has a number of intriguing implications for Paradise Lost, which Martin discusses throughout but also treats in a sustained manner chapter by chapter. The first chapter explores Milton's revision of traditional allegory, arguing that the naturalization of allegorical figures produces a frequent ambiguity between the literal and figural in the poem. Martin offers Raphael's imprecision about the metaphorical status of his narrative as a primary example of this ambiguity: "what if Earth / Be but the shadow of Heav'n, and things therein / Each to other like, more than on Earth is thought?" [PL 5.574-76] (39). In chapters 2 and 3 Martin discusses the desacralized nature of Milton's cosmos, explaining that the poem refigures "the vertical hierarchies generally governing normative Christian allegory" and integrates them into "the horizontal dimension of temporal existence" (86). Martin suggestively interprets the realm of Chaos not as merely part of the Satanic mindscape but rather as the morally neutral, primal material from which the universe is created, neither descending nor ascending necessarily, "the plastic 'correlative' of the poet's esemplastic imagination" (89). The plastic nature of this universe leads not to the self-consuming image, as Stanley Fish and other would have it, but rather to figures that, even if baroquely obscure, remain "images of the natural harmonization of space and time" (139). Chapter 4, focusing on the status of allegorical personifications, expands on the previous discussion of Chaos (193-200) and interprets the figures of Sin and Death not as only allegorical fictions but as characters possessing "a range of deliberative and material freedom as temporally real and as limited as Satan's own" (179).3 In chapter 5 Martin argues that book five's war in Heaven is neither a relativistic, self-consuming episode nor a traditional psychomachia, but rather a deritualized baroque allegory that emphasizes an indeterminate, naturalistic exchange between good and evil. ⁴ Chapter 6 suggests that the poem's representation of gender, though certainly hierarchical, is skewed by the baroque mode of representation; Eve's failure is not only or even primarily a function of her sex, but rather a false mode of natural inquiry within a newly organic universe: "Eve falls, not as a weak woman, but as an overzealous empiricist led on by poorly documented facts and the false apostle of a pseudoscience devoted only to destructive ends" (281). Chapter 7 traces Adam's progress in the final two books of Paradise Lost from the conventions of oral culture, which Martin associates with traditional allegory, to a writing culture freed from the reifying constraints of emblematic communication.

One of the pleasures of Martin's book is its massive scope: her thesis about baroque allegory includes discussions of epic tradition, seventeenth-century science, rationalist philosophy, theories of allegory, the status of contemporary Milton criticism, Puritan theology, and chaos theory. Considering the heterogeneity of the parts, she does a remarkably fine job demonstrating how her basic idea about the numinous materiality of the Miltonic universe runs through and informs so many disparate topics. Although, as she notes, Paradise Lost does not immediately strike us as an allegorical poem, her account of its fundamental allegorical dimension--as a kind of indeterminate fusion of the metaphorical and literal, the spiritual and material--is rich and compelling. All of her readings of individual passages in the poem are suggestive, and most are convincing. She performs an especially sensitive interpretation of Chaos (mentioned above) and of the essentially non-magical nature of Eden (136-44), substantially bolstering her point about the desacralized quality of the poem as a whole. Martin's insistence on the integration of the allegorical and literal in Paradise Lost--rather than the alternating mode that Mindele Anne Treip refers to as "Milton's sudden switches from realism to some form of allegory" ⁵ --yields wonderful insights but does sometimes lead to problems. For example, I take her point about the realistic representation of allegorical figures such as Sin and Death (e.g., Sin's birthing pains and apparent psychological depth), but find the claim that Sin is "as temporally real" (179) as Satan to be exaggerated--unless "temporally" qualifies the assertion in a way I do not understand. Similarly, the notion that Milton's God, removed from his traditional position on high, is now "a 'boundless deep'" [PL 7.168] everywhere and nowhere in nature" (9) gets at something essential about the relationship between divinity and the universe in Paradise Lost, but at the same time seems at odds with God's quite "located" presence in the poem as a definite, impositional, and irascible personality. Her interpretation of Milton's prose in support of her conception of his God also occasionally shows strain: she reads Milton's claim in DDD that "the hidden wayes of [God's] providence we adore & search not" (CPW 2:292) as an "uncertain and self-evidently praiseworthy Providence hidden in his as yet incomplete design" (53). [End Page 86] Yet, could we not interpret this phrase as a quite traditional assertion of the ultimately inscrutable nature of God, rather than a sign of an "uncertain" and "incomplete" divinity? Also, Martin's prose is extremely (we might even say baroquely) dense, often making her difficult arguments harder to engage; this is especially true in the early portions of the book, before we come to sustained, concrete examples. These problems, however, occur in the midst of lively, informative discussions of the poem.

Readers interested in the theory of allegory will find this book quite rewarding, since Martin discusses the topic generally in relation to twentieth-century accounts of the mode but also grounds her discussion firmly in the poem. The nature of her thesis--that in the late seventeenth century allegory does not simply die or mourn a lost posterity but rather accommodates itself to the new material and nominalist universe--leads her to contradict a number of earlier assumptions about the mode. For example, though she relies on Angus Fletcher's sense of the "confusion" and "multiple-leveled polysemy" ⁶ of certain allegories, I wonder what she would say to his claim that "allegory does not accept doubt; its enigmas show instead an obsessive battling with doubt. It does not accept the world of experience and the senses; it thrives on their overthrow, replacing them with ideas" (Fletcher 322-23). Probably she would answer that Fletcher is describing "normative" allegory, and that baroque allegory accommodates and even celebrates materiality and uncertainty. For the sake of this accommodation she constructs a fairly flexible account of allegory, de-emphasizing, for example, the theoretical distinction between symbol (language as enactment) and allegory (language as representation): "since all discourse of any amplitude must alternate between both poles, there can be no such thing as a pure poetics of the symbol or of allegory" (58). In terms of recent accounts of allegory, Martin is close to Paul de Man's sense of allegory as a demystified writing that openly "establishes its language in the void of . . . temporal difference," ⁷ as well as Gordon Teskey's description of the violent, chaotic meeting between abstract and concrete in allegorical writing: "the rift that slashes through the center of the field of allegorical expression, opening into chaos" (Teskey 30-31). Martin integrates these accounts suggestively into her interpretation of Paradise Lost; she sometimes seems, however, to imagine them as more applicable to baroque allegory than traditional allegory.

Her account of traditional allegory and its literary history in fact constitutes the only seriously disappointing aspect of the book. Martin is so intent on demonstrating Milton's distinction from and revision of the earlier allegorical tradition that she severely flattens the terrain. No doubt, a degree of this problem is unavoidable in a book like The Ruins of Allegory, but her reductive account of allegories prior to Milton takes on a significant implausibility in the long run. The main difficulty resides in Martin's absolute confidence in traditional allegory's ability to "resolve" its representational contradictions by reference to a mystical center. In Spenser, for example, the problem of mutability is "redeemed" at the end of the Mutability Cantos by the assurance of "final salvation" (66), while Redcross Knight's experiences in book I are described as "ever deeper labyrinths resolved by a numinously transcendent icon" (125). Yet surely these episodes offer no such unproblematic resolutions--neither in the Mutability Cantos' poignant request for vision (rather than the vision itself) (FQ 7.8.2.9) nor at the end of Book I when Redcross Knight is ambiguously joined / not joined to Una, leaving her "to mourne" (1.12.41.9). ⁸ This overemphasis on the transcendent quality of earlier allegory causes her to neglect the crucial differences between a "vertical" poem like the Commedia and a "horizontal" poem like The Faerie Queene, as well as the manner in which allegory often conspicuously ironizes the notion of final transcendence, as in the replacement of spiritual ascent by sexual penetration at the end of The Romance of the Rose. ⁹ Thus, when it comes to the literary history of allegory, Teskey's description of the mode seems more sensitive to its traditional ambivalences: a confrontation between transcendent abstraction and concrete literalism, a dialectic between the mystical sublation of the literal and "the endless evasions of the material world" (Teskey 30), whether these evasions take the form of the devil's fart in the Inferno or Errour's vomit in The Faerie Queene, "Full of great lumpes of flesh and gobbets raw" (I.i.20.3).

Though somewhat unsatisfying as an account of allegorical tradition, The Ruins of Allegory paints a persuasive and informative picture of the cultural moment of Paradise Lost. The treatment of the seventeenth-century context of the poem includes the emergence of the new science, Pascalian logic, Leibnizian metaphysics, and Protestant debates about representation, "the anti-allegorism" of which, she justly observes, "is often taken too literally" (18). (Think of the manner in which Bunyan profusely apologizes for using allegory in his preface but then proceeds to write an extended allegorical narrative.) Martin gives all these topics their historical due while also suggesting that the perspective of several [End Page 87] centuries casts these phenomena in a particular light, illuminating the manner in which they responded to the growing perception of a lost God. The book achieves real success in recognizing the need to preserve Paradise Lost's cultural context and at the same time reading obliquely, using contemporary theoretical insights about writing and meaning to offer a better grasp of the intimations Milton had about the new language required by a new world.

Ohio University

Notes

1. Pilgrim's Progress [1678], ed. G.B. Harrison (London: Everyman, 1985) 49.

2. The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977) 180-81, 183, and passim.

3. Martin's discussion in fact elaborates Gordon Teskey's claim that "Sin and Death are not signs pointing to forces that are more real than they are; they precede and are the causes of what their names tell us they are." See Allegory and Violence (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996: 42-43).

4. Martin's insistence (221) about the need to read the episode allegorically echoes and extends Mindele Anne Treip's interpretation of the war in Heaven. See Allegorical Poetics and the Epic: the Renaissance Tradition to "Paradise Lost" (Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1994) 241ff.

5. Treip 134.

6. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1964) 230.

7. "The Rhetoric of Temporality," Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (Min neapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1971) 207. Martin also extends (106-13, 323-37) de Man's comments about allegory in Pascal; see Paul de Man, "Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion," Allegory and Representation, ed. Stephen J. Greenblatt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1981) 1-25.

8. The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (New York: Longman, 1977).

9. It goes without saying, of course, that such irony does not necessarily subvert transcendence in any absolute sense; nor, however, does the irony leave transcendence untouched.