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December 3, 2008

WHAT AM I WORKING ON?

In answer to the question, WHAT AM I WORKING ON? Be warned, this is a window to my soul. Currently, this is what you'd see if you looked into the window of my soul.

I know, this raises a lot of questions: what is Zooey Deschanel doing trapped inside my soul? Why isn't she cavorting about with cool dudes in thrift store shirts like M Ward singing Beatles covers? Is the movie SILENCE OF THE LAMBS being reenacted in my soul, except without a body suit made out of human flesh? And why is CHINESE DEMOCRACY playing in the background? And is that a fake muscle-suit you're wearing?

Rather, I'll deal with the academic question and discuss what I'm thinking about SAMSON AGONISTES. For the five of you who don't read this for academic discussions, the top story on Yahoo!â„¢ is (probably) about a cat who meows in morse code.

SAMSON AGONISTES is John Milton's attempt to do a Euripidean/Senecan tragedy. Your English teacher may not have told you this, but a lot of folks considered PARADISE LOST a mild failure on its first attempt. Seventy years later, Samuel Johnson (also brilliant) hated it; was kind of a butthole about it. It's a closet drama, which means it was never meant to be performed. For the uninitiated (like me until recently), that means there is a chorus, an inert hero who talks about his suffering, a series of interlocutors who challenge the hero, and most of the action has already happened. It is also a lot like Aeschylus' PROMETHEUS BOUND, where a revolutionary is harassed by fates. Here's the plot briefly, succinctly, and with my trademark non-witty wittinessâ„¢:

In the play, Samson is more like Hamlet than the jock from Judges who beats the hell out of his enemies with a jawbone. He's introspective, kind of smart, poetic; in other words, he sounds like an only slightly dumb-downed version of one of the greatest writers who ever lived. William Wordsworth said the opening passage was one of his favorite works of literature.

If you remember the felt-board in your Sunday School class, Samson had long hair which made him strong, yet no wisdom apart from what God gives him. From the tribe of Dan, he rules the Israelites bravely, showing his strength in true tall tale fashion - the jawbone incident, for instance, but in another morbidly awesome scene he rips a bee-infested honeycomb out of the carcass of a lion, eats the honey, and then confounds his would-be inlaws with a riddle about said honeycomb. As with when I tried to impress a prospective girlfriend's parent with the same trick (only with a delicious "Bit O Honey" bar), Mom and Dad aren't impressed, so he kills thirty people (on the other hand, I just ate the Bit O Honey and tried to beat CONTRA without the code; I got to the level where the twin arms shoot out tiny aliens).

So, as you see in Judges, Samson then falls for a woman from Israel's main enemy, the Philistines - kind of like if Zack Morris dated a girl from Valley. In a movie, the woman would be a covert operative, going undercover like in Hitchcock's NOTORIOUS, because that's the only way it would be believable that Samson would marry a prostitute who he is currently fighting a war against. But in the Judges narrative:
"And it came to pass afterward, that he loved a woman in the valley of Sorek, whose name was Delilah."
This is the part where the story becomes familiar. After many failed attempts, Delilah shaves his head; the Philistines take him captive, put out his eyes, and force him to push a mill-stone. Had those thugs from Abu-Ghraid been there, they probably would have found this punishment uninventive.
In true Euripidean fashion, Milton starts the story here. Everything else is told in recollections, mostly by Samson, who downplays his own heroics in light of his current enslavement. He is haunted

"From restless thoughts, that like a deadly swarm
Of Hornets arm'd, no sooner found alone,
But rush upon me thronging, and present
Times past, what once I was, and what am now."

Samson is countered by the chorus and his father, who challenge his self-deprecating argument ("what am now") by reminding him "what once I was." This strategy may seem repetitive, but Milton keeps introducing new aspects of Samson's shame - his disappointment in himself, in his country, his tribe. Samson was practically a king, after all, and he doesn't think himself worthy of renewal or salvation.

That last sentence is the pivotal motif of this poem, and it's an aspect the Judges narrative doesn't consider - this is clearly the product of a Christian writer writing a pre-Christian hero. Samson thinks he deserves to die shamefully and pathetically, a shell of his former self. As Prometheus was tormented by vultures who ate his liver, Samson has to deal with the equally gruesome matter of his defeatist thoughts. And why shouldn't he? He's living in a world that lives and dies by a law that he, in his hubris, broke.

But the chorus keeps reminding him of his great feats: he kicked ass and took names, after all, and the Israelites looked to him just as much as they looked to God. They just don't get it. After all:

"Just are the ways of God,
And justifiable to Men;"

If you've read Job, you recognize that refrain. Job doubts himself but his doofus interlocutors tell him everything they know about God, which turns out to be wrong. The chorus is equally wrong.

My paper is actually about Delilah, the whore who convinces Samson to cut his hair. I'm arguing that "Dalila" (as Milton spells it) is actually a master rhetorician, and she fits in a tradition of "Sophists" whose words can't be resisted, like the big daddy devil-man of PARADISE LOST. In Milton's terms, "Dalila" is sympathetic, yet she deserves to be divorced, just like (not-so-coincidentally) Sara Milton.
But here's where things get interesting, and here's where critics are arguing about SAMSON, moreso than they're arguing about PARADISE LOST.

The Philistines come to grab Samson and take him to the theater so they throw tomatoes at him or whatever. The chorus, and Samson's Dad Manoa, are dejected of course. They were hoping God would rescue Samson, because his ways are just after all, and that's what God is supposed to do. But Samson goes along to the theater, so they laugh at his captive, weakened skeleton of a body. However, Samson says:

"Be of good courage, I begin to feel
Some rouzing motions in me which dispose
To something extraordinary my thoughts."

What are those rouzing motions? If you went to Sunday school, you know - Samson stands between two pillars and crushes the Philistine theater, killing hundreds, kind of like at the end of the DIRTY DOZEN except without hand grenades and a psychopathic Telly Savalas. We don't see this happen; this is Senecan, remember - instead a messenger tells Manoa and the Chorus:

"The sight of this so horrid spectacle
Which earst my eyes beheld and yet behold;
For dire imagination still persues me.
But providence or instinct of nature seems,
Or reason though disturb'd, and scarce consulted
To have guided me aright, I know not how,
To thee first reverend Manoa, and to these
My Countreymen, whom here I knew remaining,
As at some distance from the place of horrour.
So in the sad event too much concern'd."

Samson kills his captors, brutally, or heroically. It's genocide, maybe. Or it is, as big deal Milton scholar Stanley Fish says, "a virtuous act."

Or is Samson a terrorist? In the days after 9/11, that's the way critics want to read him. Samson destroys his enemies by destroying the monument to their greatness, in the process killing "innocents." Responding to the call of God, Samson annihilates his captors. Mohammed Atta thought he was doing the same thing when he hijacked a plane and crashed it into the World Trade Center.

Or did Samson misinterpret God's will? Milton was by no means a traditional Christian. Tim Keller would disagree with him, as would Donald Miller. Milton didn't like the Trinity, and he questioned orthodoxy. Maybe Samson is a jerk, and his strength returns to him only to give him an opportunity to be the biggest jerk of all, by killing Philistines.

Samson's dad, Manoa, is, of course, thrilled by this. It is "deeply bought revenge, yet glorious!" His son, who had his eyes poked out and was previously pushing a millstone, has recorded a triumph greater than any of his previous ones. The chorus agrees, closing the play by claiming:

"All is best, though we oft doubt,
What th' unsearchable dispose
Of highest wisdom brings about,
And ever best found in the close.
Oft he seems to hide his face,
But unexpectedly returns"

So there's two readings: Samson is either inspired by God to kill a whole lot of people, or Samson misinterprets God's will and kills a whole lot of people. We'll never know. What we do have is a blind revolutionary writing about another blind revolutionary. And at some point he utters these lines:

"My self? my conscience and internal peace.
Can they think me so broken, so debas'd"

Do you see why I like John Milton?

In her excellent biography of Milton, Barbara Lewalski points out that Milton was constantly disappointed by institutions: the school, the church, the monarchy, the commonwealth, the new monarchy . . . he was a consummate idealist, and he was also really really smart, and overly ambitious. When his institutions failed him, he wrote poetry. He sympathized with this devil, and yet he still praised God. He presents Jesus as the perfect resistant to secular fallacy, yet he doesn't believe in a Trinity. He remained a Puritan at the same time that Cromwell was cutting people's heads off in the names of Puritanism.

This was the guy, after all, who wanted to "justify the ways of God to man," and failed in only the way great writers can fail (read Dr. Johnson for the most astute criticism ever published on the subject).

In his dirge, LYCIDAS, Milton wrote about his dead friend Edward King (a guy he thought was much better than him - can you believe that?!? The guy who wrote PARADISE LOST was jealous of someone?!):

"Hence forth thou art the Genius of the shore"

You may have failed in your mind, Lord Milton. But I'm glad you existed even in your failure.

| By Andytown | 11:25 PM

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Posted by: Jonathan at December 6, 2008 3:37 AM

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