The Ruins of Allegory: Paradise Lost and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention.

Catherine Gimelli Martin, The Ruins of Allegory: Paradise Lost and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention

Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998. xiv + 385 pp. $23.95. ISBN:0-8223-1989-6.

When we think of English Renaissance allegory, we usually think of Spenser. Milton has, more often than not, been seen as employing an essentially different symbolic mode. This dichotomy is one of the ideas about Paradise Lost that Catherine Gimelli Martin sets out to change. While asserting that our understanding of allegory needs to be expanded to include the mode of Milton's epic, Martin also distinguishes this mode, baroque allegory, from the "normative" allegory exemplified by Spenser. Locating Milton in the philosophical and scientific milieu of the late seventeenth century, Martin finds his alleogrical method informed by a new worldview that has shattered older beliefs in a static, finite universe of Ptolomeic spheres. This baroque allegory differs significantly from its predecessor, but does not break completely with the form. Rather, the baroque alleogry of Paradise Lost is a seif-ironizing meta-allegory that explores the limitations of its allegorical figures, and, along the way, anticipates the met hod and conclusions of postmodernism: "Ultimately demonstrating only the certainty of uncertainty itself, the poem...takes shape not only in the ruins of a philosophical and political revolution but also in the ruins of a form of literary allegory rooted in a barely veiled plenum of linguistically and physically sacred or absolute meaning" (15).

As this brief summary might suggest, Martin's analysis is informed by postmodern theory, notably Benjamin and Wittgenstein, as well as by scientific theory, both seventeenth-century developments and the postmodern science of the twentieth century, such as chaos theory. As a result, this book is potentially of interest to a wide audience, including intellectual historians and historians of science, as well as theorists and Miltonists. However, it demands a similarly well-informed reader. Little of this diverse material is explained in a way that suggests the author has a diverse audience in mind, and while Martin writes with confidence and often eloquence, her prose is often dense and densely allusive. The truly fit readers for this work will be relatively few.

And that is unfortunate, for there is a great deal of exciting material here. The first three chapters are the most theoretical in nature, focusing on the physics and metaphysics that shape both Milton's cosmos and his allegorical mode. Milton's is a naturalistic and rational universe, in constant flux, neither magical nor mystical; his God is a "judge presiding over the highest tribunal of rational and natural law" (64). Sin and redemption are internal, psychic experiences; outward signs are consequences, not causes, of the inner state. Space is shaped by the motion of material beings; names and places have no stable, transcendant meanings. This cosmology makes allegory both untenable and unavoidable: "as earth is no longer merely the shadow of heaven, its saints are no longer merely the daemonic agents of that correposndence. Nevertheless, ... the poet can dispense with neither signs nor allegory in depicting the cosmogonic implications of these events" (226). Beginning in the fourth chapter, Martin turns her attention to a detailed analysis of the poem. Particularly fascinating is her treatment of Chaos, where Milton's materialism, seventeenth-century rationalism, and postmodernism are combined in a way that seems both inevitable and illuminating, demonstrating Milton's embrace of the "ambiguously positive potential of indeterminacy" (196). In contrast to Spenser's Mutability, Milton's Chaos indicates that "uncreated matter and natural flux, not immutability, are now linked to spiritual good" (196). Other parts of the poem are treated in a similarly intriguing manner, including the war in heaven, the creation, the gender hierarchy, and Adam's education in books 11 and 12.

In short, this book is many things: an important contribution to the theory of allegory, a provocative application of science to literary analysis, and stimulating analyses of many aspects of Paradise Lost, some of which break significantly new ground. Though it is unquestionably a coherent whole, each reader will doubtless find some parts of it more congenial and useful than others.