Milton and Homer: "Written to Aftertimes"

One “By Allusion Called”: Diachronic and Synchronic Intertextuality

13 ONE “By Allusion Called”  Diachronic and Synchronic Intertextuality At the end of Paradise Regained, we are told three times within 20 lines that Satan fell from the tower where he tempted the Son: “Satan smitten with amazement fell” (4.562), “So...the Tempter...Fell” (4.569–71), “So Satan fell” (4.581). Because the word fell is repeated three times, and perhaps also because the word so begins the second and third iterations, critics have found that this passage recalls the conclusion of the battle between Redcross knight and the dragon in book 1 of The Faerie Queene, where, in canto 11, stanza 54, the phrase “So downe he fell” begins lines 1, 3, 5 and 9: So downe he fell, and forth his life did breath, That vanisht into smoke and cloudes swift; So downe he fell, that th’earth him underneath Did grone, as feeble so great load to lift; So downe he fell, as an huge rocky clift, 14 Milton and Homer Whose false foundacion waves have washt away, With dreadful poyse is from the mayneland rift, And rolling downe, great Neptune doth dismay; So downe he fell, and like an heaped mountaine lay.1 To note, evaluate, and interpret this sort of brief phraseological imitation of an earlier writer—whether referred to as an allusion or an echo or an instance of intertextuality—has been an aspect of literary scholarship at least since Macrobius cataloged Virgil’s borrowings (furta) from Homer. However venerable the critical enterprise that studies such imitative phrases may be, discussion of the phenomenon of allusion is beset by limiting assumptions, conceptual murkiness, and terminological imprecision. Worse, the language generally used by critics to describe phraseological adaptations like those of Milton—words like echo or borrowing —tends to imply unoriginality or slavish imitation, even when the critic means to stress the imitative writer’s subtle craft and playful erudition. As a result, scholarly consideration of later authors’ imitation, adaptation, and recontextualization of earlier authors’ phraseology presently enjoys relatively little prestige within the field of literary study. The intense theoretical activity that began in the late 1960s—and which has offered new terms like intertextuality and radical redefinitions of traditional terms like influence—has not done as much as one might expect to introduce conceptual or terminological rigor into our understanding of phraseological imitation. If anything, theorists of intertextuality, opposing their approaches to the traditional study of allusion, have tended to diminish even further the status of such study. In a treatment of the concept of intertextuality, Jonathan Culler suggests that consideration of verbal echoes has essentially been rendered obsolete by the newer concern.2 Harold Bloom (whose theory of influence I will take up more fully in chapter 4) claims bluntly that verbal echoes have “almost nothing to do with...poetic influence, in the sense [he] gives to it” and are suited only to “those carrioneaters of scholarship, the source hunters.”3 “By Allusion Called” 15 Despite such scorn from poststructuralist critics, from at least the early 1980s, scholars of classical and modern literature have been struggling to develop a conceptual model and a critical vocabulary that will allow them more effectively to discuss the nature and workings of these brief phraseological adaptations (usually referred to as allusions or echoes, though such terms, I will show, must be used with care). Most frequently, critics have proceeded by likening allusion to something else. Richard Garner likens allusions to metaphors, with the allusive text as tenor and the evoked or source text as vehicle. John Hollander likens them to the rhetorical trope of metalepsis. William Porter compares allusion to the logical syllogism known as enthymeme; Allan Pasco, to a horticultural graft. John Hale, citing game theorist Roger Caillois, likens allusive writing to play.4 Each of these analogies does illuminate some aspect of the phenomenon of verbal echo, but the range and diversity of the phenomena to which allusion has been likened suggests that no single comparison can convey all aspects of this subtle and variform literary device. I aim to provide a more comprehensive conceptual model of allusion, or phraseological adaptation, than has heretofore been offered (in part by synthesizing the work of the aforementioned critics, who, focused on different authors and periods, often seem unaware of one another’s efforts). But rather than propose another illustrative metaphor, I intend to offer a detailed consideration of its...