Milton's Counterplot, by Geoffrey Hartman (1958)

The article is denser and more confusing than it need be, e.g. opens with an un-cited allusion, “it has been suggested” (1) why not just say where and by whom, and to what effect?

  • Hartman adduces a number of episodes, esp from the first few books, a “relief” or “distancing” effect in various poetic images; Hartman emphasizes Mulciber’s fall, but also the “ comparison of angel forms lying entranced on the inflamed sea with autumnal leaves on Vallombrosa’s shady brooks, or the simile of springtime bees and of the dreaming peasant at the end of Book I, or the applause following Mammon’s speech in Book II, likened to lulling if hoarse cadence of winds after a storm” (2). What these have in common, Hartman seems to be saying, is both a reinforcing and “distancing from” the plot of the poem in a way that forms indeed a counterplot. (H does not say anything quite like “distancing from” here, nor certainly “undermining”, he is in my opinion overly opaque.)
  • The image of Mammon/Mulciber’s fall is a “pastoral image, evoking a fall gradual and cool like the dying of a summer’s day”; while its “evident purpose… is to help prick inflated Pandemonium, and… to emphasize thatt Mammon’s building is as shaky as its architect” the “almost decorative character” of the verses suggest a second plot (2). The placid tone of the fabled version of this story, which Milton corrects as an “error” at least in chronology, is said by Hartman to demonstrate “Milton’s automatically involving the idea of creation with that of the Fall. But further, and more fundamental, is the feeling that God’s anger is not anger at all, rather calm prescience, which sees that no fall will ultimately disturb the creation, whether Mulciber’s fabled or Satan’s real or Adam’s universal Fall” (3).
  • “Milton’s feeling for this divine imperturbability, for God’s omnipotent knowledge that creation will outlive death and sin, when expressed in such an indirect manner, may be characterized as the counterplot” (3). This “feeling” H says pervades PL, and “has been given numerous interpretations” e.g. by Coleridge: “Milton is the deity of prescience: he stands ab extra and drives a fiery chariot and four, making the horses feel the iron curb which holds them in” (3).
  • To “bring the terrible sublime home to the reader’s imagination” (4) Milton’s “finest effects are to employ magnifying and diminishing similes” (4) e.g. Satan’s shield. H contends that PL shows hell at a distance, intervening between it and our perception of it so that “our sense of the reality of hell, of its power vis-a-vis man or God, never remains secure” (4). I suppose compared to Dante’s Inferno this is true, although M paints pretty concrete pictures of it with the construction of pandemonium, the gates of hell, and so on. I am not convinced this is Milton’s goal per se, since I think you could argue the same about his depiction of Heaven or Eden.
  • The first books are meant to “make us believe in Satan as a real and terrible agent, yet never as an irresistible power” (5), if “Milton’s two means of divine justification, man’s free will and God’s foreknowledge of the creation’s triumph, are to win consent” (5). Consent from who, the reader? And consent to what, their ability to captivate the reader as narrative elements? Again, H is unnecessarily confusing here. Free will is not Milton’s own “means of divine justification”.
  • The similes, H tells us, must “show the persistence, in the depth of danger, passion or evil, of imperturbable reason, of a power working ab extra” (5) but this seems to get man’s free will (which H has just said is one of the dominant concepts of the counter plot) backwards, it is precisely NOT some sort of power from without.
  • H suggests lamely that the use of place names in the Galileo simile work to “set him off from the vastness and vagueness of hell” (5). Rather than really argue the point, H poses it through questions, to which we can just answer “no” or “maybe, sort of”.
  • H’s analysis of the Vallombrosa simile fares much better, it is indeed easy to see here how a “simile intended to sharpen our view of the innumerable stunned host of hell, just before it is roused by Satan, at the same time sharpens our sense of the imperturbable order of the creation” (6).