Intertextuality, Indirection, and Indeterminacy in Milton’s Samson Agonistes

Abstract

INTERTEXTUALITY, INDIRECTION, AND INDETERMINACY IN MILTON’S SAMSON AGONISTES DEREK N.C. WOOD St. Francis Xavier University There has never been more radical disagreement than there is now over what Samson Agonistes means. Is Samson a hero of God or of Satan? Is he a murderous, vengeful bully, or a model for Christian heroic action? Bar­ bara Lewalski speaks of a “cacophony of critical voices,” since “[w]hatever consensus once obtained about Samson Agonistes no longer exists” (233). It seems to me that the impasse or face-to-face confrontation that Samson crit­ icism finds itself in is the result of a yearning for closure: for one fixed, finite meaning. Most critics have tried to achieve a comparatively simple linear resolution of the play’s multivalent ambiguities: Samson is a saint; Samson is a type of Christ injudgment; Samson is a satanic vandal. I will suggest in this essay that the author deliberately offers the reader indeterminacy and moral ambiguity. John Ulreich exclaims, in honest perplexity, “Is Samson Agonistes a de­ monic parody of the Apocalypse? Or is Samson the antitype, the Word made flesh, of which Samson’s holocaust is the type? I am not sure that this choice can be determined from the evidence of the play . . . ” (313; italics added). It is helpful to look beyond the text for answers, although the only “answer” may be that there cannot be a clear-cut choice. An understanding of the play’s intertextuality — and of Milton’s understanding of its intertextuality — may reveal in Samson not this or that “interpretation” but a sustained multivalency held poised, as it were, in delicate suspension. Milton’s play offers the reader unanswered and unanswerable questions. It enacts the problems encountered by the Christian in reading the Word of God, when that Word raises questions and uncertainties that are not clarified by the silent Divine Author. Milton turns to tragedy to imitate the mystery of the divine ordering of the Universe, the “unsearchable dispose” (1746) of omnipotence and omniscience shaping post-Adamic history. What Samson, the hero of faith, did in conscience was part of God’s plan. Everything that happens is part of God’s plan. Yet, that terrible act of carnal violence was not only self-destructive, it failed to deliver God’s people on earth from the power of the unrighteous. Defeated Puritans in 1671 knew that their cause had been right, yet their failure had been ordained as part of God’s larger mysterious plan. Caught up in the fury ofrighteousness, they had killed and E n g l ish St u d ie s in C a n a d a , x v iii, 3, September 1992 had given up their dead. Now they could only concede that God’s plans for them were incomprehensible. Samson’s experience mirrored their own. In the dark and bitter aftermath of the English Revolution, Samson Agonisies offered the defeated revolutionaries a practical working model of Biblical hermeneutics, provided they were capable of deciphering the intertext. Recently, the distinguished historian of ideas, Paul O. Kristeller, in a mood of deep dissatisfaction with modern literary scholarship, described its methods as “reductionist, purely speculative, arbitrary, or even journalis­ tic,” finding in it “open hostility to all historical scholarship,” “an uncritical kind of relativism,” and an “intentional disregard of well-established facts.” Kristeller was contemptuous of “the fashionable errors” of contemporary theorists and enraged “by the political and academic power of the modern charlatans” (viii-ix). It is strange that so experienced a student of the rise and decline of the paradigms and master-ideas of western culture should not have recognized that third-rate minds have always taken possession of ideas originated by better minds and exploited them unimaginatively for personal profit. This has happened throughout the centuries. Eloquence in the sixteenth century, rationality in the eighteenth, sensibility and “gem­ like flames” in the nineteenth, all had their hangers-on and were satirized by the Shakespeares, Swifts, and Austens of the day. Kristeller, profoundly depressed by posturing and materialism in the academic market place, has missed what is vital in the twentieth-century attempt to discard outworn formulae and make a fresh start in describing...