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The Ruins of Allegory: "Paradise Lost" and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention (review)

As the word metamorphosis in her title suggests, Catherine Gimelli Martin is concerned with cultural transformation as it is reflected in the monuments (as I shall call them here) that a culture produces. A monument—that is, a “memorial”—tries to freeze the values of a culture in place and in time; of long poems the epic is by far the most monumental, the most conservative. Yet every monument that is also a complex work of art will in the very act of preservation register, and sometimes even prophesy, change. Martin refers to many such monuments, but her focus is on arguably the most radicalized monument in European literature after antiquity, Milton’s Paradise Lost. This epic stands on the threshold of the modern world, looking both into the past—European, epic, and Christian—and into the future, which is global, technological, and probabilistic. It is the epic’s orientation toward the future, and, more surprisingly, toward postmodernism, that most engages Martin. Her approach yields some truly striking analogies between the theodicy of Paradise Lost and the probabilistic thought of Pascal: “The poem’s theodicy is itself ultimately grounded in the transitional indeterminacies of a ‘rational’ grace whose paradoxes may be compared to those of Pascal’s Pensées” (323). Martin’s Milton ascends from the signs of the Creator to be found in the ruins of what He has made—that is, in nature—to the probability that this Creator exists, and finally to the likelihood that what the poet makes is inspired by Him. The patterns of hierarchical order discerned in the natural world can be interpreted theologically or, as Martin puts it, allegorically. The results of such interpretation are only probable, however, because they cannot in the end bring us certainty of a God who is incommensurate with any intellection, a God who is, as the angels say of him, “dark with