[Fourth Post from Milton-L - Included for ego satisfaction]
Subject: Re: In praise of Achilles, was Re: Hero of Paradise Lost From: "Mario A. DiCesare"
John Leonard wrote:
Carrol Cox (addressing Carol Barton) writes: "I bet you think Odysseus gives up immortality for Penelope rather than for his _oikos_."
[JL] This sounds shrewd on first hearing. What man in his right mind (let's be honest) would want to grow old with Penelope (bless her heart) when he could enjoy immortal youth with the sex goddess Calypso? But isn't Carrol just changing one problem for another? What man in his right mind (let's be honest) would want to rule some pimple in the Adriatic, growing older every day, and knowing that he will meet a violent death, when he could enjoy immortal youth the sex goddess Calypso? Is the _oikos_ really as compelling a reason as all that? - John Leonard
John, your usually trenchant and illuminating insights have failed you here, alas. Oikos means a good deal more than a building. It is the place of both stability and change, where fathers age and children (e.g., sons you haven't seen for twenty years) grow up (more or less -- I've never been completely easy about Telemachos) and friends as well as wives change and become perhaps even more interesting than they had been, as one also grows and changes and maybe understands more.
But more important: You're forgetting the fundamental life impulse that marks Odysseus more than most. Odysseus, yearning for the smoke rising from the rooftops of Ithaka, is yearning for real life, with its risks and possibilities. Immortality and immortal youth are not necessarily the same thing, as Odysseus probably knows; Kalypso's wish to confer immortal youth on him doesn't mean that she can. Indeed, the examples she cites (V.124ff) are all examples of the curse which divine blessings bring.
It's probably relevant to think of the Sibyl cited in Eliot's Waste Land or of Gulliver's startled delusion and then enlightenment when he comes upon the immortalized beings who share with the Sibyl the wish to die -- is it the Struldbruggs? memory fails and many of my books are still packed in boxes....
As for Achilles, I couldn't agree more with Carrol Cox in his comments. I don't think you can wrest Adam or Aeneas from their contexts, but that's not relevant to his particular and general arguments and to the fine, humane insights he has into the Iliad and its tragic hero.
Cheers, and happy Hannukah and Christmas and a splendid year 2000, the last of this millennium, to all and sundry. And John, especially, thanks again for your continuously perceptive commentary. - Mario
[FIFTH Post from Milton-L]
Subject: Re: Oikos (was Achilles, was Hero in Paradise Lost) From: Carrol Cox
Scott Grunow wrote: P.S. And speaking of a sex goddess, does anyone remember that moving passage in the Iliad in which we get a glimpse of Helen on the walls of Troy remembering her homeland? How does this fit in with oikos? Such an added dimension, almost a "modern" psychological approach to a character, seems unusual for the Homeric poet.
Yes -- it's wonderful. I don't know whether an older analysis -- that the Homeric poems refracted and kept fragments of a defeated matrilinear culture -- can still be defended or not. It made sense both of passages like this _and_ of the real indignation of the suitors in the _Odyssey_ at Penelope's refusal to select a new mate. But I don't know whether there is any real evidence for it.
Incidentally, when I speak of ripping Aeneas or Adam from context, I don't mean that a reader should but only that readers addicted to such a process can do so more easily with most characters than they can with either Achilles or Fanny, who are utter caricatures when so separated. Shakespeare's Odysseus has some sort of link to the original -- but not his Achilles. Even some fairly sophisticated critics adopt a tone towards Aeneas or the Son in PR that would be more appropriate directed at a "real person." You just CAN'T do that with Achilles or with Austen's Fanny. They turn into monsters. Carrol
[SIXTH Post from Milton-L]
Chris Hair wrote:
Carrol Cox wrote: <<the greatness of Paradise Lost will become really recognizable only when its ideas or vision are _really_ dead, as unfortunately they are not yet. >>
I am interested in this idea and very unsure why it is unfortunate that the "ideas and vision" of PL are not dead. Can you explain further?
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You are asking for several thousand pages of exposition, but I'll see if it can be hinted at in a few screens. And note that there are three separable propositions involved:
1. That literary/philosophical greatness is better perceived by those not enmeshed in the worldview of the work in question.
2. That Milton's vision/worldview/whatever is still very much alive.
3. That that worldview (or, rather, the practices that continually regenerate that world view) is an ongoing disaster for humanity.
You can get a glimpse of the complex if you re-read last December's thread on the _Iliad_. All (both sides) were more or less agreed (though no one put it this way if I recall) that the core of the poem was Achilles' honoring of glory, and that someone with that way of acting in the world would be a very undesirable neighbor today. Some seemed to think the poem's "ideas" were still alive and dangerous. Others of us (doubless varied in our reasons for so finding) found Achilles unthreatening -- i.e. treated the Homeric visions of glory and moira (share, portion) as dead ideas. We were consequently able to focus on the towering dignity and pathos of Achilles' acceptance of his moira -- an acceptance culminating in his treating an enemy as a friend, even as (with his strong intellectual perception) he recognized the possibility of his rage breaking forth during the meeting with Priam and took precautions against it. Having gotten this far with the poem, each of its admirers could (I presume this is the case with others) find in the poem elements of interest that would not, in fact, have been visible to the original audience or the poet himself. What I see, for example, is something the poet could not have perceived any more than a fish can know that it is wet -- the large echoes in the poem of a unity of thought and action, of production and consumption, of present and future, of being and doing, of appearance and reality -- even though what one might call the Great Divorce had, with the rise of class society and the separation of mental and manual labor, already occurred.
Echoes only. One may compare the_Odyssey_ and the _Republic_. The poem is among other things a poem about kingship, but it staggers the imagination to think of Helen or Menelaus, in the banquet scene at Sparta, suddenly asking, "What does it mean to be a king?" The poem is also a poem about the separation of thought and action -- but it is equally staggering to the imagination to think of Athena saying to Odysseus, "How do we know that our thought corresponds to the world?" That is, sometime between Homer and Plato it became possible not only to think, as both Achilles and Odysseus do, but to think about thinking. Kingship became not a "mere" (!) expression of ordinary experience but an abstraction which could be separated from its practice and examined.
To summarize to this point: Much of the richness that we can see in both the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ is visible to us simply because their core ideas are dead, though part of our delight in the poems certainly lies in recapturing those ideas so that they live in our thought. And note, nothing in contemporary practice generates and regenerates a common sense which takes moira and glory for granted, without examination. On the other hand, the IMF, which slaughters millions annually and condemns tens of millions more to lifelong misery, does generate and in turn is legitimized by a rhetoric of choice, freedom, individual initiative, abstract reason, marginal utility (itself grounded in an ideology emphasizing the imporance of choice). Perhaps you begin to see (without, probably, agreeing) why one might see the ideas of Milton's epic very much alive and very destructive indeed.
Take for example one of the tempests in the teapot of Milton criticism in the 1940s and 1950s, that raised by Malcolm Ross's complaint that there was an incoherence of image and idea in PL, and that Milton bridged this gap with "signpost sentences" telling the reader what to think. Such sentences are, of course, at the very heart of the great bourgeois art form, the novel. One can hardly read a page of any novel (whether it be by Austen or Tolstoi or Stendahl, or grabbed at random off a drug store shelf) without having to pause to decide if one agrees or disagrees with such an instruction. That's what the novel, one might say, is all about: a continual forced free choice as to one's agreement or disagreement with the novelist's judgment. And that seems to be at the core of what PL is all about -- the reduction of history to the choices made by isolated individuals. [This is a reduction of course of the poem -- but I believe a fair reduction as a point of departure.]
I'm not attending, incidentally, to the theology of the poem. Religion still remains a curse on humanity, but on the whole sophisticated theological conceptions have lost their ability to harm. The Pat Robinsons and Bill Clintons and George Bushes* do rather more than St. Thomas or Reinhold Niebuhr to pollute the public mind. And being myself one of those fortunate ones who enjoy atheism by birthright rather than merit I have always responded to the religous dimensions of the poem with detachment. I cannot manage equal detachment from its focus on choice (forced free choice) as defining what it means to be human. That is vicious. And great human misery lies between us and the day when "reason is but choosing" can be as distanced as is Achilles' pursuit of glory. - Carrol
{*This was written in 1999 and refers to the first Bush.}
P.S. On what it means to be human and the isolated (choosing) individual:
{I quoted VI & VII of Theses of Feuerbach, which LBO readers presumably know, then}
The relation to the earth as property is always mediated through the occupation of the land and soil, peacefully or violently, by the tribe, the commune, in some more or less naturally arisen or already historically developed form. The individual can never appear here in the dot-like isolation [_Punktualitat_] in which he appears as mere free worker. [E.g., the meeting of Uriel and the Cherub--cbc] (Karl Marx, _Grundrisse_, Penguin ed. p. 485)
END OF POSTS FROM MILTON LIST
Seth Kulick wrote: But yes, it bothers me that Alterman is a Bruce fan. Same for Dave Marsh.
CBC: All sorts of very unpleasant people have been fans of Homer (and Milton) and I see no reason that should bother me or any other admirer of the Iliad. If a singer or a poem or a painting is admirable, why in the world does it make any difference if some jerk also admires it? I find this incomprehensible, except in the context of some sort of cultural war of all against all in which the victory is decided by who can sneer at the most uncool things which others are uncool enough to admire. (Incidentally, who is Dave Marsh, and does he belong to the cool or the uncool side of this free-for-all?)
And to return to where I started on the Iliad, Justin wrote: "By mining it [Iliad] here and there you can see ambivalence, like references to hateful Ares and the like, but in the main insofar as it has any mass audience its effect is liable to be entirely anti-liberal and counter revolutionary. Apart from the lack of religious dogmatism, the Iliad is a poem for George Bush." I think the key words here are "insofar as it has any mass audience." I taught the Iliad in an ancient literature in translation course back in the '70s, but I eventually replaced it with the Odyssey partly because students in fact couldn't get beyond this aspect of the poem. Reacting from the superficial anti-violence of the '70s they condemned it for this reason. It was really odd: even students from the Chicago inner-city thought the poem praised a violence that "we" had gotten beyond!
Carrol