[Milton-L] Symposium on Milton's Samson

[Salwa Khoddam]

Carl Bellinger wrote: 
"whether this or that rhetorical scheme which you believe you have discovered in this or that string of words was _consciously intended_ by the author ...? Well..." 

I had a very brief  moment with Professor Fish during the International Milton Symposium in  London this past summer in which I asked a similar question.  His answer was that there is something as a "subconscious" intention in the author's writing, and it is our responsibility as readers to find it.  (Of course he said it in a more eloquent way).  I agree since we're not aware of our intentions all the time.  But that gets us into too much psychology sometimes.
I hope I'm paraphrasing Professor Fish's words accurately.  If not, my deep apologies.

Salwa Khoddam

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Carl Bellinger 
  To: John Milton Discussion List 
  Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2009 6:12 PM
  Subject: Re: [Milton-L] Symposium on Milton's Samson


  1.
  This discussion sends me back to an article I've lost track of: "Seven types of intentionality." Would someone kindly either send me the reference, or write it? Thanks in advance.

  _______

  2.
  It seems to me that along one axis of _Paradise Lost_ we find the depiction of a Persona --"the Epic voice" "the poet" "Milton" [?]-- powerfully, perhaps predominantly, characterized by an aggressive intentionality. 

  ....MY adventrous song

  ....INTENDS to soar

  ....pursues things unattempted yet

  ....that I may see . and TELL of things invisible to mortal sight

  I don't know what his intention was in placing this figure at the top of the List of Persona in Paradise Lost. To model for us readers the Type of a true man?

  ________

  3. 
  How do we read the _intentionality_ of the conventional rhetorical "figures and schemes" when we find them in texts written by Milton and his forebears?
         CS Lewis provides ["English Lit. in the 16th c.; Oxford 1944, 61] the background for this question as I would pose it to Milton-l:

  "Nearly all our older poetry was written and read by men to whom the distinction between poetry and rhetoric, in its modern form, would have been meaningless. The 'beauties' which they chiefly regarded in every composition were those which we either dislike or simply do not notice. This change of taste makes an invisible wall between us and them. Probably all our literary histories, certainly that on which I am engaged, are vitiated by our lack of sympathy on this point. If ever the passion for formal rhetoric returns, the whole story will have to be rewritten and many judgments may be reversed. In the meantime we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that of the praise and censure which we allot to medieval and Elizabethan poets only the smallest part would have seemed relevant to those poets themselves.

  We must picture them growing up from boyhood in a world of 'prettie epanorthosis', paranomasia, isocolon, and similiter cadentia. Nor were these, like many subjects in a modern school, things dear to the masters but mocked or languidly regarded by the parents. Your father, your grown-up brother, your admired elder schoolfellow all loved rhetoric. Therefore you loved it too. You adored sweet Tully and were as concerned about asyndeton and chiasmus as a modern schoolboy is about county cricketers or types of aeroplane."

  So when we find chiasmus in Paradise Lost for instance in the verse line 3.142:

  ...Love
  .........without end
  ...............and
  ........without measure
  ...Grace

  and in the couplet at 4.323-4

  ...Adam 
  .........the goodliest man 
  .................of men since borne His Sons, 
  .........the fairest of her Daughters 
  ...Eve

  do we allow ourselves the luxury, which Lewis claims was enjoyed by our Elizabethan predecessors, to say "Ah, nice chiasmus, John!" believing that John Milton consciously intended to place this formal,  recognized scheme, this chiasmus, at this place in the verse, and that part of his intention in doing so was to donate to us his readers --well, us his "fit" readers-- the pleasure of discovering this chiasmus and enjoying its form and elegance with same full consciousness of recognition as Milton enjoyed when he consciously placed the words and phrases of his text in just this order?

  Do we allow ourselves this pleasure, shared according to Lewis between authors and their readers over a span of centuries from "the age of the Greek Sophists"  right thru to the 18th century? Do we teach our students to discover the figures&schemes and thus, consciously, come along side Milton himself at least for the span of the chiasmus? I once put this latter question to an esteemed colleague in Milton studies and found some considerable uneasiness.  To claim to identify the _intention_ of Milton, or (even) to claim with any certainty that, yes, these seven words (love without end and without measure grace), or any particular set of words constitute, plain and simple, one the figures&schemes, was perhaps going a bit too far.  Milton's was a highly rhetorical age, permeated with such stuff, and therefore we may well find such stuff in the literature, but whether this or that rhetorical scheme which you believe you have discovered in this or that string of words was _consciously intended_ by the author ...? Well...   

  -Carl




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