Blackburn, Thomas H.

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Swarthmore College Works English Literature Faculty Works English Literature Fall 1997 Review Of "Carnal Rhetoric: Milton's Iconoclasm And The Poetics of Desire" by L. Cable Thomas H. Blackburn Swarthmore College This work is brought to you for free and open access by . It has been accepted for inclusion in English Literature Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu. Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-english-lit  Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Let us know how access to these works benefits you  Recommended Citation Thomas H. Blackburn. (1997). "Review Of "Carnal Rhetoric: Milton's Iconoclasm And The Poetics of Desire" by L. Cable". Renaissance Quarterly. Volume 50, Issue 3. 904-905. DOI: 10.2307/3039292 https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-english-lit/93  The University of Chicago Press and Renaissance Society of America are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve  and extend access to Renaissance Quarterly.http://www.jstor.orgReview Author(s): Thomas H. Blackburn Review by: Thomas H. Blackburn Source:   Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 50, No. 3 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 904-905Published by:  on behalf of the  The University of Chicago Press Renaissance Society of AmericaStable URL:  http://www.jstor.org/stable/3039292Accessed: 05-05-2015 14:37 UTCYour use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jspJSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.This content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Tue, 05 May 2015 14:37:48 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions904 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY showing how Buck turned, without manuscript authority, the poems nine- ty degrees to appear vertically. Buck's 'most mischievous decision" (xvii), Di Cesare contends, distorts meaning and reduces appreciation: "Beyond the shadow of a doubt, the manuscripts [both the early Williams manuscript and the Bodleian] presented these two poems as two poems" (lvii). The Bodleian manuscript offers fascinating clues to other poems as well. Most editors, again following Buck, divide "Church Monuments" into four six-line stanzas, highlighting the conspicuous enjambment. The manuscript resents he poem without stanzaic division. Throughout the manuscript, the scribes of Little Gidding carefully marked interstanza spacing; lack of such division in "Church Monuments," according to Di Cesare, reveals the poem's "chilling continuity" (xvii). Equally instructive are treatments of "Good Friday," "Deniall," and "The Collar." Most edi- tions of The Temple have "Good Fri- day" as one eight stanza poem; the Bodleian manuscript provides only one title. The Williams manuscript provides, however, a separate title ("The Passion') for the final three stan- zas, suggesting a different poem. At- tention to prosody supports this no- tion. The final three quatrains, tetram- eter lines rhyming AABB, depart from the previous five quatrains in dimeters and tetrameters. Although the scribes left no space for a separate title head- ing (not an atypical oversight), Di Cesare contends that Buck mistakenly printed the stanzas as one poem. Based upon his analysis, Di Cesare revises the number of "separate and distinct po- etic entities" in The Temple to 174 (compared with 164 in the Hutchinson edition). Di Cesare does not burden his criti- cal introduction with unnecessary the- oretical complications. He discusses poetic intention and postulates a strong desire to remain faithful tothe spirit of the original text. The forty- nine carefully selected illustrations demonstrate the notion that "Her- bert's poetry is for the eye as well as for the ear" (xxxii). Five sections of superb textual notes and two indices complete the impressive scholarly ap- paratus. This diplomatic edition of The Temple will be widely used and cited for generations. With a quantum rise of scholarly interest in Herbert's po- etry (more than 20 book-length studies in the past decade alone), Di Cesare's labor of love will ensure ven greater fidelity to the enduring poetry of the country parson from Bemerton. PAUL J. VOSS Georgia State University Lana Cable. Carnal Rhetoric: Mil- ton's Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995. 1 pl. + x + 231 pp. $44.95 cloth; $17.95 pa- per. At the center of Professor Cable's provocative book, four chapters closely analyzing major works of the poet's "left hand" constitute a history of the formation of Milton's iconoclas- tic poetics. Cable moves from the disjunction between the rational struc- ture of argument and the frankly car- nal language of Milton's polemical attacks on his opponents in the antiprelatical tracts, to the elevation of the carnal rhetoric of "perfect cou- pling" as a true image of unity with divine reality in the divorce tracts. This content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Tue, 05 May 2015 14:37:48 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsREVIEWS 905 Milton's realization that his image of To rest in the assumption that coupling had itself become an icon identity has been truly attained is to be then leads to the recognition i Aere- guilty of fixing the infinity of divine opagitica that no mortal anguage can truth in an icon, as Adam did when he adequately present divine truth, and took the image of God in Eve to be finally to the use of that recognition as very God, the error of which the di- the prime strategy of attack in vine voice accuses him in Paradise Lost Eikonoklastes. The extent to which by asking "Was she thy God?" (116) these analyses at once are distant from The creative iconoclast, in contrast, the details of Milton's personal and refuses the temptation toa "conceptual political life during this period and yet rest and peace" not to be found in the assume insight into his most intimate created world, where the act of cre- imaginative processes render this his- ation itself instituted a temporally un- tory suspect, but the particular ead- bridgeable division between God and ings of the works themselves are rich the carnal images which can only rep- with insights into their rhetorical resent, but never fully signify, his pres- strategies and the affective power of ence. In the reiterated shattering and their essentially poetic substance. reconstitution f its own icons, carnal In the opening chapters Cable un- rhetoric, driven by "ontological long- dertakes a theoretical understanding of ing" and constituting the "transforma- the processes discovered atwork in the tive desire" to become God thus en- tracts. In a comprehensive and widely gages in the only mortally possible learned critical review of metaphor approach to truth, a process which theory she finds the essence of Mil- bears witness not to the unknowable ton's iconological art in the exploita- truth itself, but to its existence as af- tion of the pervasive doubt that arises firmed by a refusal to relinquish the from the failure of figurative language search for it. ever to close the gap between vehicle This radically simplified summary and tenor, between image and thing cannot possibly do justice to Cable's imaged. This doubt, she argues, has its dense and critically sophisticated argu- most powerful affective presence when ment. Almost every page of Carnal language "drives from the mental to Rhetoric provokes the reader's return the physical" in images drawn from to the prose and the poems to test Ca- the real world and bodies which we ble's claims and the terms in which inhabit (45). In a realization of the ten- they are made. If that return leads one, sion between the identity which meta- as it did me, to as many quarrels and phorical figuration asserts and the qualifications a  agreements, he value mere likeness which it can actually of her work is nonetheless affirmed - demonstrate, the creativity of the perhaps most fittingly as yet another iconological imagination arises as it turn of that iconoclastic "true intent" demands the search for a new figure which in Cable's closing chapter is which will more fully express the shown to be the exemplary issue of identity - even as the process itself Samson's agon of glory and shame in continually enforces the awareness Milton's last major poem. that such identity can never be ful- THOMAS H. BLACKBURN filled. Swarthmore College This content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Tue, 05 May 2015 14:37:48 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Review Of  Carnal Rhetoric: Milton\u27s Iconoclasm And The Poetics of Desire  By L. Cable

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Review Of Carnal Rhetoric: Milton\u27s Iconoclasm And The Poetics of Desire by L. Cable

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