Marshall Grossman - Marx and Milton

The Fruits of One's Labor in Miltonic Practice and Marxian Theory
Author(s): Marshall Grossman

Source: ELH, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Spring, 1992), pp. 77-105
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2873419
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THE FRUITS OF ONE'S LABOR IN MILTONIC
PRACTICE AND MARXIAN THEORY
BY MARSHALL GROSSMAN
I: THE SILK WORM AND THE MERCHANT
Labour with the same content can be either productive or un-

productive.
For instance, Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost, was an unpro-
ductive worker. On the other hand, a writer who turns out work
for his publisher in factory style is a productive worker. Milton
produced Paradise Lost as a silkworm produces silk, as the activation
of his own nature. He later sold his product for ?5 and thus became
a merchant.'
Marx makes this uncharacteristically idealist observation about Mil-

ton's nature in the "Results of the Immediate Process of Production,"
once intended to be part seven of the first volume of Capital. Using
Milton as the generic representative of the artist who labors without
regard to production, Marx approaches the categorical question of
whether intellectual work is productive labor. In Marx's reading, Mil-
ton's poetic labor is crucially distinguished from that of the hack writer
not because the content of his labor is different but because the pro-
duction of the poem is not "the means for extorting unpaid labour"
(1044). At stake in the distinction between productive and unproduc-
tive labor is the entire transformation of social relations brought about
by capital:
Productive labour is merely an abbreviation for the entire complex

of activities of labour and labour-power within the capitalist process
of production. Thus when we speak of productive labour we mean
socially determined labour, labour which implies a quite specific
relationship between the buyer and seller of labour. Productive
labour is exchanged directly for money as capital, i.e. for money
which is intrinsically capital, which is destined to function as capital
and which confronts labour-power as capital. Thus productive labour
is labour which for the worker only reproduces the value of his
labour-power as determined beforehand, while as a value-creating
activity it valorizes capital and confronts the worker with the values
so created and transformed into capital. The specific relationship
ELH 59 (1992) 77-105 ? 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 77
between objectified and living labour that converts the former into
capital also turns the latter into productive labour. (1043; Marx's
emphases)
Unproductive labor, like Milton's, produces a commodity which may

be sold for its exchange value. Productive labor, like that of "the literary
proletarian of Leipzig who produces books . . . at the behest of his
publisher" (1044) produces a surplus value, a return on investment (in
the present case, in the means of the printing and distribution of books)
in the form of an amount of capital equivalent to that part of the worker's
labor that remains unpaid.2
Now in making this distinction Marx is properly careful to differ-
entiate the two kinds of labor without reference to their content on
the one hand or the psychology of their production on the other.
Keeping the distinction within the larger project of dialectical mate-
rialism, Marx draws it without regard to what the worker thinks or
feels about the origins and products of his labor. Thoughts and feelings
derive from, without creating or significantly altering, the material
conditions of production.
Why then is there a worm in Marx's account of Milton's unproductive
labor? The introduction of "nature" as the cause of Paradise Lost is
strictly in excess of Marx's argument, and runs counter to it. For it
distracts from the material account of the conditions of productive and
unproductive labor to venture an account of the origin of art in the
expression of an artistic nature and to imply that this specific form of
unproductive labor produces a commodity without reference to the
conditions within which it will circulate. There are significant impli-
cations to Marx's rhetorical flourish. The metaphor of the silkworm
implies that the poet's creation of a poem is epiphenomenal to his
production of himself as poet: the silk threads of the poem are merely
the shell cast off by a caterpillar, following the predestined path of its
own self-transformation.
In this passage, itself situated on the margin of Capital, at one time
a draft for the larger work but later placed outside it, Marx's Milton
writes out his nature in his work. But once the poem is written, the
poet, whose identity as a poet is established by it, becomes a merchant.
He recovers the excrescence of his nature and realizes its exchange
value, but only by alienating himself from the poet he has labored to
become.3
In contrast to Marx's affirmation of an "artistic nature" whose un-
productive labor only belatedly produces a commodity, it is possible
78 Labor in Milton
to find in Milton's own writings a not so uncharacteristically materialist
meditation on the relation of labor to nature in poetic production. By
examining in some detail the construction of categories that allow Marx
to distinguish the making of poetry from productive labor and allow
Milton to assert a continuity between the two, I hope to throw some
material light on the development of Milton's markedly materialistic
and monistic ideas on the "nature" of things and to explore more
generally the connection between the respective strategies of Milton's
poetic production and Marx's theoretical analysis.
When we imagine how Marx might read Milton, we begin also to
see that Milton's rhetorical practice constitutes the categories in which
Marx's analysis must take place. We see how Milton is brought to
(rhetorically) fashion the very categories of self and society that Marx
later reinscribes as moments of a dialectical progress, as episodes within
a particular narration of history. The very ease with which Marx's
theory can be made to explain Milton's practice raises questions con-
cerning the level of generality at which theory and practice intersect.
Therefore, by exploring the implicit connections of Milton's practice
and Marx's theory, I mean also to question more generally the relations
that inhere between theoretical and narrative uses of language.
Narrative purports either to describe (or imitate) something that
unfolds prior to it in time or to imagine the unfolding of some future
episode. It is situated with respect to a speaker and a hearer (although
one individual may represent both) in various ways, and the position
in time and space from which narration unfolds is controlled by the
shifting and reversible positions of speaker and spoken to that occur
"4
within a given "instance of discourse.
I take analysis to be a mode of verbal expression that self-conscious
avoids this effect by transposing the temporally shifting subject-nodes
of narrative into a (more or less) stable structure of categories. In
analytic discourse, the temporal sequence that characterizes narrative
is displaced into the spatial stability of an encompassing design or
structure. .
Because the temporal closure of narrative gives rise to a totality in
which its unfolding episodes are envisaged as a synchronic pattern of
causes and effects, narrative may be converted into analysis. Con-
versely, analysis may be converted to narrative by a sequential ren-
dering of its categories. One may analytically reify the categories of
self and other, now and then, cause and effect that uphold narrative,
or render analysis as narrative by recasting its categories as intending
Marshall Grossman 79
subjects: as when, in some readings of Marx, History becomes the
hero of a dialectical adventure novel by becoming first the subject of
an array of active verbs.6
To further explore this reversibility on the same level of narrative
practice and theory, of language and purported metalanguage, I will
propose, in the third section of this essay, an account of "L'Allegro"
and "II Penseroso" according to Marxian categories. As a counterpoint
to Marx's appeal to Milton's nature in the "Results of the Immediate
Process of Production," the content and context of this "Marxist" read-
ing will depend on Milton's material idealism. But before turning to
the companion poems, I want first to clarify what I mean by this phrase.
II: SIGNS HAVING THE POWER TO PERFECT
The poetic and intellectual roots of Milton's material idealism may

be approached though his elaboration of a familiar metaphoric asso-
ciation of knowledge and food:
But knowledge is as food, and needs no less

Her Temperance over Appetite, to know
In measure what the mind may well contain,
Oppresses else with Surfeit, and soon turns
Wisdom to Folly, as Nourishment to Wind.
(PL, 7.126_30)7
William Kerrigan argues persuasively that, in their efforts to resist the

rise of Cartesian dualism, seventeenth-century writers, Milton in-
cluded, frequently invest metaphors such as this one with ontological
force: "The 'as' transforming healthy physiology into good knowledge
is the signal of a scientific analogy, not a literary conceit. "8 Not a merely
heuristic comparison of intellectual and physiological nourishment,
Milton's simile asserts that the material metabolism of the brain may
give rise to memory or to bad vapors, according to the quality of the
knowledge ingested. Knowledge comes through signs, and Milton's
assimilation of knowledge to food rests on a materialistic semiotics. In
this section, I want to elaborate some of Milton's ideas about the
material performance of signs, and to situate those ideas as a historically
determined transmutation of an established neoplatonic tradition.
Milton stands at the beginning of the bourgeois hegemony over
which Marx casts his retrospective glance.9 The question of whether
intellectual work is productive labor appears as a theoretical problem
for the latter and a practical one for the former. It is not surprising,
therefore, that, when considering the relations of work and poetry,
80 Labor in Milton
the two writers are linked by ideological categories that they hold in
common. The categorical procedures of Marx and Milton maintain the
unities of artistic and productive labor and of intellectual and physical
digestion respectively, by introducing a division interior to each cat-
egory. In Marx's simile of the silkworm, the division is clearly temporal
or historical. The silkworm's spinning precedes and is only contingently
related to the (alienated) commodity that later results from it. The
historical or temporal relationship of physiological to intellectual di-
gestion in Milton appears as an autobiographical trace of his anxiety
about the status of artistic work in a context much the same as Marx's,
that is, the revaluation of labor under a bourgeois organization of
production.'0
In contrast to the gentlemen poets of the sixteenth and earlier
seventeenth centuries, who, to protect their status as gentlemen, dis-
guised their poetic work as the natural, and therefore effortless, efflo-
rescence of their breeding, Milton is anxious about not working, and
he feels it necessary to represent his poetry as at once the expression
of his nature and as socially productive labor. Thus he reports in the
Reason of Church Government that the "ease and leasure . . . given
[him] for [his] retired thought out of the sweat of other men" must be
justified by a use of his "talents" to advance the cause of "God and his
Church" (CP, 1:804). But this "ease and leasure" consists in that very
"labour and intent study . . . joyn'd with the strong propensity of
nature" (emphasis added), by which Milton had hoped to "leave some-
thing so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die"
(CP, 1:810). To revalue labor, from the necessary but degrading activity
of the despised (and uneducated) classes, to the divinely enjoined and
socially uplifting duty of Adam's sons, and to place his own "retired
thought" within its confines, Milton exploits the ancient and com-
monplace metaphor contained in the etymological association of cul-
tivation and culture. For Milton the cultivation of the soul is a social
project that entails the cultivation of the world. By cultivating his
mind, the poet accumulates capital that is to bear the interest of a
poem which, being "doctrinal and exemplary to a nation" (CP, 1:815),
will repay its investors in the sensible revelation of intellectual truth.
Thus, while for Marx, an idealism of artistic expression creeps into the
distinction between productive and unproductive labor, Milton, comes
upon a theory of surplus value to justify his poetic work as a form of
productive labor, albeit labor expropriated to "good" social use, by a
peculiarly divine corporate manager.
Paul Stevens has shown how Milton found a precedent for the
"transubstantiation" of sensible experiences into intellectual ideas in
the theory of the icastic imagination, particularly as it is elaborated in
Tasso's Discourses on the Heroic Poem." In contrast to the phantastic
poet, who imitates the creations of his fancy, the icastic poet represents
things that are true but unseen. For Tasso, the icastic poet, who is "a
maker of images in the fashion of a speaking painter," is "almost the
same as the theologian and the dialectician."
[Theology] has two parts, each of them fitting and proper to one
part of our mind, which is composed of the divisible and the in-
divisible . . . , [and] the part of the most occult theology, which is
contained in signs and has the power to perfect, belongs to the
indivisible mind, which is intellect pure and simple [emphasis
added].
Therefore, the icastic poet leads us "to the contemplation of divine

things and thus awaken[s] the mind with images," and his work is
nobler than that of the scholastic theologian, who "instructs by dem-
onstration."'2
Tasso's comparison of the poetry of the icastic imagination to spec-
ulative theology on the one side and "mystical theology" on the other
may serve as a focused elaboration of Milton's belief that poetry is the
better teacher because it is "more simple, sensuous and passionate"
("Of Education," in CP, 2:403). While the scholastic theologian (Scotus
or Aquinas in Milton's tractate) must appeal to the divisible mind, the
poet's verbal images are material signs of intelligible truths. As such,
they appeal to "intellect pure and simple." Through a process of re-
memoration or anamnesis, they inform toward perfection the intellect
that receives them. The power of these signs resides in their ability
to reawaken knowledge that is eternally present in the intellect, but
which has been obscured by the effects of the Fall. As Milton writes
in "Of Education":
The end . . . of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents

by regaining to know God aright.... But ... our understanding
cannot in this body found itselfe but on sensible things, nor arrive
so cleerly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly
conning over the visible and inferior creature. (CP, 2:366-9)
Tasso is engaged in defending the intellectual validity of the sensible

signs of poetic imagery, but Milton's view looks also toward the more
thorough-going materialism of Francis Bacon, who proposes in the
preface to the Novum Organum "to establish stages of certainty," by
retaining "the evidence of the sense" but largely rejecting "the mental
82 Labor in Milton
operation which follows the act of sense." In place of this "mental
operation," Bacon offers "to open and lay out a new and certain path
for the mind to proceed in, starting directly from simple sensuous
perception" (emphasis added).13 By positing a prior, interior and in-
tellectual certainty that is disclosed in and by the sensible sign, Tasso,
and Milton after him, maintains the universality of intellectual form
and the primacy of the material world advocated by Bacon. By ren-
dering things as signs, while preserving them as material things, they
join Bacon in enhancing the prestige of particulars experienced through
the bodily senses, and like him, they defer universal insight to the
accumulation of sensory perceptions:
But the universe to the eye of the human understanding is framed

like a labyrinth; presenting as it does on every side so many am-
biguities of way, such deceitful resemblances of objects and signs,
natures so irregular in their lines, and so knotted and entangled.
And then the way is still to be made by the uncertain light of the
sense, sometimes shining out, sometimes clouded over, through
the woods of experience and particulars. (The Great Instaturation,
Bacon, 8:32)
Peculiar to Milton, however, is an emphasis on the mastery of poetry

as a craft, with its own integral history and immanent laws. This craft
must be acquired through "labour and intent study" before even the
truth that arrives in the form of "an inward prompting" (RCG, CP,
1:810) can be transformed into sensible signs; that is, words, having
the "power to perfect" by stimulating "intellect pure and simple." For
Milton the senses and the mundane experiences that reach us through
them provide the raw materials for a divinely ordered process that
appropriates his labor to the production of prophetic poems. Such
poetry uses material signs to stimulate a "universall insight into things"
("Of Education," CP, 2:406), "the more / To magnifie his works, the
more we know" (PL, 7. 96-7). By putting his "talents" to work in this
way, Milton remembers that "God even to a strictnesse requires the
improvment of these his entrusted gifts," and he accepts the burden
of "dispos[ing] and employ[ing] those summes of knowledge and il-
lumination, which God hath sent him into this world to trade with"
(RCG, CP, 1:801). Milton's knowledge of God is, so to speak, the raw
material supplied him by his divine taskmaster. He cannot pay for this
material until he has transformed it into prophetic writing, and its
value may only be realized by submitting it to a general economy of
circulating goods. As Marx suggests, intellectual labor becomes pro-
ductive only when it is circulated as capital.
True to Marx's metaphor of the silkworm, Milton's texts are to be
understood as evidence of his internal reorganization. He cannot invest
material signs with "the power to perfect" until he has himself "re-
membered" the divine images those signs are designed to evoke. He
must also set the images he "remembers" within a narrative from which
their meaning may be inferred. By joining mundane experience to
internal promptings, Milton seeks to discover the providential signif-
icance of temporal events and to spin the threads of a text that will
bind the army of the saints to the will of God. If the work he does
represents the "activation of his nature," it becomes also productive
labor, for its product is circulated as a direct investment in the ac-
cumulation of prophetic capital. Milton the merchant, selling the fruits
of his labor, is also Milton the capitalist, reinvesting in the reproduction
of his nature, compensating the "sweat of other men's faces," by pro-
ducing within that nature, a dividend of Truth.
"L'Allegro" and "II Penseroso" are a window into the interior work-
shop in which this cultivation and distribution of culture are carried
out. By bearing in mind Milton's anxiety to assert that he will repay
the capital investment made by his father, the Commonwealth, and
God in his "retired thought," by producing "signs with the power to
perfect" it will be possible to follow an autobiographical thread through
the companion poems and to read them through the design it traces.
III: WORK AND STUDY IN "L'ALLEGRO" AND "IL PENSEROSO"
The parallel developments of "L'Allegro" and "II Penseroso" invite

the section by section juxtaposition of the two poems. Both poems
begin with a banishment followed by an invitation that includes the
appropriate Goddess and her entourage. In both poems the transition
from this prefatory matter to the action of the protagonist is signaled
by the song of a bird, the lark in "L'Allegro" and the nightingale in
"II Penseroso."
In "L'Allegro" the lark appears under the hypothesis of cohabitation
with Mirth. To be admitted of her "crew" is:
To hear the Lark begin his flight,
And singing startle the dull night,
From his watch-tow'r in the skies,
Till the dappled dawn doth rise:
Then to come in spite of sorrow,
And at my window bid good-morrow.
(41-46)
Why is this cheerful soul going to his window "in spite of sorrow" ?'4
Because, like most of us working folk, he prefers to stay in bed. The
84 Labor in Milton
lark offers a preliminary, or first call, which is quickly superseded by
a more urgent and less melodic sound as "the Cock with lively din, /
Scatters the rear of darkness thin" (49-50). Chanticleer's cameo ap-
pearance suggests that the lark has appeared not at the casement of
some lonely poet's abode, but at the window of a working farm. The
sorrow that the nominally cheerful Allegro feels may then be identified
with the Virgilian "peasants' pain" at the cyclical and therefore endless
nature of his "happy" tasks.15 This pain requires a bit of deft identi-
fication on Allegro's part, since he only watches, but I believe we can
fairly characterize as georgic the scenes he observes and the attitudes
he records from the crowing of the cock to the falling off to sleep of
the last rustic at line 116. Thus the question of the productive status
of the poet is raised by Milton less through an explicit consideration
of the issue than through the mediation of a decision concerning genre.
The poet's estrangement as an observer of, but not a participant in,
the labor he represents anticipates the categorical problem artistic or
intellectual work will become for Marx. Allegro is both within and
outside the scenes of his poem, a walker in the fields that others work.
As artistic nature stands both within and outside, both constitutive of
and excluded from Marx's definition of unproductive labor, Allegro
participates in without joining the cultivation of the fields.
Having changed our generic expectations from those of pastoral, in
which the complaining shepherds do not really work, to those of geor-
gic, in which the busy peasants do, we may also notice that this section
of the poem deals consecutively with the raising of food-plowing,
milking, mowing-and its consumption-first as a "savory dinner" of
"Country messes" and later in the form of the "Nut-Brown ale." In
fact, by a kind of pathetic fallacy also present in Virgil (Georgics, 2.9-
21), even nature herself engages in productive labor in this section of
"L'Allegro": for example, when the clouds, illuminated by the sun (or
rudely awakened in the manner of Allegro himself), appear "in thou-
sand Liveries dight" (63, emphasis added). Nor does the toil stop with
nature: in this world, even the "Goblin" must "sweat / To earn his
Cream-bowl duly set" (105-6).
As Anthony Low has shown in his magisterial study of the changing
attitudes toward work in Renaissance England, the georgic ethos,
shunned by the earlier poets and partially revived by Spenser, performs
a significant ideological function in Milton's later work.16 The positive
revaluation of work that Low describes is ambiguous in a relatively
early poem like "L'Allegro," which expresses -in the distance of its
observing narrator from the actions he describes and in the pastoral
language of his descriptions -an ambivalence about the pleasures, if
not the utility of labor. Still, where earlier and royalist poets feared
the taint of labor, the young republican is anxious to evade the
(self-)accusation of idleness.'7 Milton's mixed genres in the companion
poems anticipate the estrangement of artistic from productive labor.
In a manner that anticipates Marx's naturalization of literary work, the
shifting genres of the companion poems manifest and presuppose the
anxiety Milton feels about living out of the sweat of other men's faces.
They assert the unity of various kinds of labor within the category of
cultivation and then establish the difference of literary work in general,
and that of prophetic poetry in particular, from other forms of work
within this unity. Poetry is thus undecidably represented as both
natural and socially determined labor, at once the "activation of nature"
and the expropriation of capital.'8 It remains, however, for Milton to
contain the anxiety over his "natural" affinity for study by subordinating
it to the production of prophetic capital. To do this he uses the language
of investment and return to turn the "ease and leasure" of his "retired
thought" first to "labour and intent study" and then to the undiffer-
entiated labor-power of the productive worker. Penseroso is this
worker.
In "II Penseroso" the nightingale is wooed for an "Evensong" (64).
Unlike Allegro, who responds to the lark "in spite of sorrow," Penseroso
welcomes, even solicits, the time of his labors. He woos the song that
signals the end of the diurnal cycle of productive labor and signals the
nocturnal activation of his poetic nature. While the peripatetic Allegro
is essentially passive, the sedentary Penseroso is active; the former
watches the physical labors of others, the latter engages in mental
labors of his own. Allegro watches people raise food to feed the body;
Penseroso studies. The juxtaposition of farm work and study as two
kinds of labor-that is, as two modes of cultivation-invites a com-
parison of the two activities as an extension of the comparison of Allegro
and Penseroso.
Farming transforms the world. The labors catalogued in "L'Allegro"
are visible cultivations of the environment; through the work of the
peasants, the fields bear fruit. Anticipating Paradise Lost, we might
add that, by consuming the food, the peasants refine the earth's fruits
one step further, into the substance of their own discursively reasoning
selves.
Even the "laboring clouds" participate in this productive activity,
bringing the gentle rain to the fields after their rest on the "mountains'
. . . barren breast" (73-74). Milton plays on the working and birthing
86 Labor in Milton
connotations of "labor" to represent labor as unified in its productive
and reproductive aspects, a unity authorized by the pairing in the
Bible of the toil of planting and the pain of childbirth as twinned and
gendered effects of the Fall (Genesis 3:16-19). Cultivating the soil and
procreating a "Race of Worshippers" (PL, 7.630) are joined within this
unified conception of labor, and the continuity of the cultivation of
fields and of people is asserted.'9
The unity of culture and cultivation forms the bridge between the
two poems and sets the scene for Milton's assertion that the Penseroso's
apparently self-involved study is, in the end, socially productive labor.
Having joined georgic and procreative labor within the category of
socially productive work, Milton need only expand the category once
more to establish literary creation as the product of an interior culti-
vation.
The "drudging Goblin" undertakes to thresh the corn and so prepare
its transition from earth to table. And he is paid in victuals for his
labor. He transforms the corn that he may "transubstantiate" the cream
into his own ethereal substance. To this point, we may note that the
producer is his own consumer, the product-alimentary or intellec-
tual-is not put into circulation as a commodity but assimilated to the
bodily and intellectual substance of the maker. It remains what Marx
would call a "use value." "L'Allegro" goes on, however, to supply an
implicit first model for the commodity circulation of literary goods.
Allegro only enjoys and records the georgic activities he observes.
But in the city section of the poem, when he contemplates the scenes
of "mask" and "antique Pagentry" (128) that are "such sights as youthful
Poets dream / On Summer eves by haunted stream" (129-30), as well
as the scenes of dramas acted on the "well-trod stage," Allegro con-
templates ways in which poets make a living. Earlier in the poem, he
observes in a detached, perhaps even an idealizing, way the country
work of peasants. He now faces something that engages him more
anxiously: the work of professional poets who earn their daily bread
at the risk of transforming what they do, in Marx's terms, "as the
activation of [their] nature" into "productive labor." Allegro is thinking
about material for poetry and about what kind of poet he can be.
Seventeenth-century ancestors, perhaps, of Marx's exemplary "literary
proletarian of Leipzig," the city poets and playwrights that Allegro
sees answer the biblical injunction to earn their daily bread in the
sweat of their faces -but at the expense of their "natural" predisposition
to self-expression.
The companion poems were most likely composed between Milton's
commissioned verse for Arcades and the composition, also for the
Egertons, of Comus. This was a period when the possibilities of pa-
tronage and the problems of composing poetry on commission were
part of the poet's daily experience. For the poet whose work is per-
formed for the court or the public, it is popular success that offers
protection "ever against eating Cares" (135, emphasis added). But this
subordination of (natural) talent to economic necessity prematurely
transforms the silkworm into a merchant.20
Penseroso does not cultivate grain, patrons or an audience. He
cultivates himself, and so moves away from the condition of the poet-
worker, who engages in productive labor (in the Marxian sense), toward
the condition of the silk worm, who spins the silk of his nature to
enclose and protect his inner self while he surrenders his body in the
interest of a metamorphosis: "Till old experience do attain / To some-
thing like Prophetic strain" (172-73). Following this line of thought,
we may note that such images of work as do appear in "II Penseroso"
are turned similarly inward. For example that most venerable symbol
of industry, the bee, sings "at her flow'ry work" with "honied thigh"
(142-43), transforming pollen to bee through an interior refinement
resembling that through which Raphael will transubstantiate edenic
fruits and vegetables to angelic matter "with keen dispatch / Of real
hunger, and concoctive heat" (PL, 5.435-36).21 Thus the productive
worker returns concealed within the "activation of nature." As the bee,
doing what comes naturally, repays the apiast's investment with honey,
the prophetic poet, emerging from his studious labors, produces pro-
phetic poems. Because these poems put into circulation icastic signs,
they are not mere commodities. They are capital, the honey on which
new prophets (profits) will feed and breed.
The relationship of "L'Allegro" to "II Penseroso" is that of one who
celebrates the cultivator of the soil to the cultivator of the soul or of
the georgic to the epic poet. The one observes those who produce the
fruits of the land that sustain life, the other produces the immortal
ideals that give life meaning. In assessing the nature of this relationship
we may note the implicit continuity between the visible world of
Allegro and the intelligible world of Penseroso. This continuity becomes
explicit in the monism of Milton's later poems and in the peculiarly
materialistic inflection of his Platonism, which sees the process of
dialectic as a remembering of the "nobler end" of "conformity divine"
(PL, 11.605-6). Understood as the conditioning of present choice ac-
cording to a memory of the future enabled by "signs having the power
to perfect," dialectic becomes an aid to participation in a providential
88 Labor in Milton
history that is revealed to the commonwealth of Christians in Scripture
and written sensibly in the book of nature as well.
Allegro and Penseroso negotiate with Mirth and Melancholy for
"delight" and "pleasures" respectively. But both poems go beyond the
experience of these good things to reflect on them. Along with present
anxieties about the social utility of intellectual labor, remembered
delights and pleasures are displaced to an open and opening future
that they may bring forth their fruits in new soil. The speaking picture
with which Tasso began becomes very much a narrative, disclosing its
details in time and yielding its meaning only through reflection.22 Just
as Marx delays consideration of the means of circulation so as to dis-
entangle Milton the (naturally expressive) poet from Milton the mer-
chant, arranging them in a temporal sequence, Milton displaces and
defers the pleasures of his study. Converting leisure to labor, he studies
in anticipation of a subsequent reflection.
Can the experience of pleasure be meaningfully separated from
reflection on pleasures attained, that is from wisdom? In the fourth of
the unattached chapters to his commentary on the Philebus, Marsilio
Ficino reflects on the divine gift of dialectic in terms that suggest the
ground from which Milton's (and Tasso's) materialistic idealism grows:
Dialectic is said to be divinely given, since it is the power which

resolves from matter into the divine form, and in dividing leads the
images of the divine and universal form down into matter and
separates unlike things from unlike things and compounds like
things with like things. This entire function is divine, especially
since in resolving it can refer to things' conversion, in dividing to
their procession, in defining, to their existence midway between
procession and conversion . . . . But dialectic is given with fire,
that is, with the same sort of power as fire has. In rising fire resolves
subtle things, in sinking it divides off the gross things; in leading
back to itself it defines, in lighting it demonstrates. Dialectic illu-
23
minates the intellect, heats the will, raises both to divine things.
He might have added that it is the "Image of God, as it were in the

eye" (A, CP, 2:492). Ficino's metaphoric identification of dialectic and
fire is materialized in Milton's work in much the same manner as that
between knowledge and food. No longer simply the sensible signifier
of an intellectual process, fire (now materially expanded to include
both mental and physical heat) is the transforming agent of a metabolic
process in which the subject and object of contemplation are materially
transformed in the direction of that "nobler end" of "conformity di-
vine." The unity of mental and physiological digestion, implicit in the
emphatic way in which Milton interrelates the two during Raphael's
meal in Paradise, in fact hinges upon the unity of digestive and dia-
lectical fire:
So down they sat,
And to thir viands fell, nor seemingly
The Angel, nor in mist, the common gloss
Of Theologians, but with keen dispatch
Of real Hunger, and concoctive heat
To transubstantiate; what redounds, transpires
Through Spirits with ease; nor wonder; if by fire
Of sooty coal the Empiric Alchemist
Can turn, or holds it possible to turn
Metals of drossiest Ore to perfect Gold
As from the Mine.
(PL, 5.433-43)
To think at all, it is necessary to eat. To reflect it is necessary to
experience, though the experience may be of and through books. The
relationship of sense to intellect in Milton's companion poems is thus
drawn out into time as the relationship of experience to reflection, just
as the relationship of natural expression to commodity production is
differentiated in time by Marx's division of Paradise Lost into the
"activation of [Milton's] own nature" and the product of Milton, the
merchant. And thus, Milton tropes Ficino's dialectic, which is a dia-
lectic of the Spirit, an idealism, in the direction of Marx's dialectic,
which takes the form of material history itself.
Milton writes not only to raise his own soul to the idea of the beautiful
but also to express the "inner promptings" of his nature in a "poem
doctrinal and exemplary to a Nation." Society, through the mediation
of a printer, will later assign this expression the exchange value of five
pounds. But Milton imagines that the socially transformative power
of poetic signs will allow the value of his work to be realized and
consumed, that his labor is, in this respect, "freely bestowed" in im-
itation of God's creativity, and that his living words will transcend and
exceed the commodity that carries them into circulation. This circu-
lation works inwardly, transforming the consumer or reader, while the
material circulation of the commodity that carries these powerful signs
suffers the mundane vicissitudes of the market. The protection Milton
asserts against the alienation of his product recognizes the possibility
of such alienation as an anxiety about being misunderstood in a pre-
emptive appeal to his "fit audience though few. "24
To perfect its readers, poetry must attract an audience; to instruct,
it must delight. Wisdom and pleasure are united by dialectic and reason
90 Labor in Milton
just as, in Paradise Lost, allowable knowledge is refined to love of the
creator, which in turn increases the capacity for knowledge:
Love refines
The thoughts, and heart enlarges, hath his seat
In Reason, and is judicious, is the scale
By which to heav'nly Love thou may'st ascend,
Not sunk in carnal pleasure.
(PL, 8.589-93)
Sensory experience is the ground of reflection just as material food
is the ground of spiritual life, and the temporal sequences of perception
and reflection, bodily and spiritual nourishment, open the way to a
progressive experience of historical time. Milton stands at the historical
moment when the distinction between "productive" and "natural"
labor becomes meaningful, and the future comes to be envisaged as
that time when present accumulation might be put to work, and he
strategically reads Plato's Symposium as something like a bildungs-
roman, in which the philosophical soul is fashioned out of its lifetime
of diligence in the study of beauty and "improv'd by tract of time"
(PL, 5.498) through its participation in the laborious and communal
reassembly of the body of Truth.
In Areopagitica, Milton articulates this communal responsibility as,
and in, a political praxis:
Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master,
and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on: but when he
ascended, and his Apostles after him were laid asleep, then strait
arose a wicked race of deceivers, who as that story goes of the
Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the
good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewd her lovely form into a
thousand peeces, and scatter'd them to the four winds. From that
time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear,
imitating the carefull search that Isis made for the mangl'd body of
Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they
could find them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and Com-
mons, nor ever shall doe, till her Masters second coming. (CP,
2:549)
"The sad friends of Truth" write books. Until the Master of Truth
returns, these books will supplement his absence, carrying on-in
time-a process of remembering, collecting the scattered limbs for
the day when his presence will reanimate them. Until then the struc-
ture of divine meanings made latent by the Fall will be progressively
remembered through an accumulation of intellectual labors written
out over time.
It is thus no coincidence that when Milton wants to define the social
power of the book, he turns to the figure of Cadmus, who brought
phonetic writing to the Greeks:
For Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie
of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they
are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and
extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are
as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragons
teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed
men. (CP, 2:492)
The young man who composed "L'Allegro" and "II Penseroso" was at
pains to establish the social productivity of his intellectual labor; but
for the committed pamphleteer in the England of 1644, there could
have been nothing abstract or tentative about books chancing "to spring
up armed men," nor about the realization of ideas in and through the
most material of mundane actions.
Responding in his own development to the pressure of an urgently
developing social and political context, Milton turns the synchronous
and essentialist doctrine of Plato into a model for the cultivation of the
soul through labor in the intellectual soil of the sensible world. Where
Plato outlines the escape of what is always already the philosophical
soul from the mire of its corporeal forgetting, Milton seizes the material
beauty that reawakens the idea and works to transform it-and his
perceiving mind as well -into the prophetic representation of an icastic
simulacrum. By attempting to create a poetic object that discloses the
universal truth behind and beyond its particularity, he joins, in his
way, the great project of his rising class: the redemption of the fallen
world through a culture that is at once material and intellectual.25
In "L'Allegro" Orpheus may hear "such strains as would have won
the ear / Of Pluto, to have quite set free / His half-regain'd Eurydice"
(148-50). In "II Penseroso" the soul of Orpheus may be bid to sing
'such notes as warbled to the string, / Drew Iron tears down Pluto's
cheek, / And made Hell grant what Love did seek" (106-8). The ref-
erence in the former is conditional and Eurydice is only "half-regain'd."
We know that she is not quite set free because in the working out of
her retrieval, the poet falters and turns back from his song to its material
model, thus rediscovering the ineluctable difference between original
and copy. For Milton, this scandal is repressed by a temporal dis-
placement. Eurydice is thought of as lost in the flesh but to be re-
constituted later as the poetic body of a prophecy.
In "II Penseroso," Orpheus is bid to sing again, not to rescue Eu-
92 Labor in Milton
rydice but more ambitiously, to redeem Love from Hell. It is through
reflecting on the experience of those Orphic notes that Penseroso may
complete the redemption that Orpheus only foreshadows. Penseroso
studies to transform himself into a prophet. The prophet does not
simply know things; he brings his knowledge back to the world of
everyday life and makes it work. In so doing he makes Hell grant what
Love seeks. By transforming the trope of lost love to the type of love
poetically regained and conserved, Milton's prophetic poet wrestles
the ideal into history and delivers the future as the informing goal of
a material present.26
Plato teaches that Love seeks immortality through the procreation
of ideas. But for Plato, this procreation is always also a remembering.
Ideas are recovered from the hell of becoming, the prison of the
temporally situated body. The Miltonic prophet, displacing the ori-
ginary truth of the lost Eurydice to the future realization of a newly
sublimed beauty, offers his poem as the sensible representative of a
Eurydice within, happier far. Threading a chiasmic juncture of prov-
idence and progress, Milton redeems sensible beauty by submitting
it to time, assured that what is lost is but a shadowy anticipation of
what will be found, when mankind, partly through the efforts of a
certain sort of poet, approaches its "nobler end." Pleasure and wisdom,
Love and reason, Allegro and Penseroso are thus related as experience
to reflection and as fruit to cultivation. The silkworm may make a silk
purse of a mulberry leaf, but neither grows on trees without the
investment of labor and time.
IV: THE FRUITS OF WHOSE LABOR?
FROM ABSENT GOD TO ABSENT CAUSE
In the companion poems, we see Milton attempting to work out

his anxiety about the status of his poetic labors. This anxiety and the
poetic innovations it exacts answer to and participate in the material
historical changes that mark the seventeenth century. Milton's per-
ceived need to justify a poet's retreat from the world of getting and
spending precisely reverses the anxiety over the taint of commerce
and labor that had been experienced by the earlier seventeenth-cen-
tury poets, who identified themselves and their interests with those
of the court or the gentry. Thus our reading of "L'Allegro" and "II
Penseroso" confirms and indeed elaborates Marx's assertion of a link
between superstructures such as genre (pastoral, georgic) and changing
modes of production.
Milton's unease about whether the category of labor may be ex-
panded to include his poetic work finds relief in an argument that
depends on the continuity of intellectual and physical digestion. By
portraying the poem as somehow extruded from the poet's innards,
Marx's recourse to the simile of the silkworm invokes, implicitly and
elliptically, the very same continuity. That Marx's explanation of the
status of Milton's work and Milton's own explanation of it are inverting
mirrors of an identical rhetorical strategy is not fortuitous. For Marx,
Paradise Lost, in the moment of its creation, is an ideal expression of
the poet's nature. Some time after its composition, it becomes a ma-
terial commodity, alienated from its creator and subject to market
forces.
For Milton, wisdom begins with the ingestion of a nutriment: a
sight, a fact, a revelation. In time, this nutriment is "transubstantiated"
into the substance of an intellectual memory.27 The peculiar temporality
of this proleptic anamnesis is worth noting. What is experienced in
the present is experienced in the expectation of its future recall; the
moment of wisdom is the moment when the experience will have been
remembered.28 Marx describes a process of alienation in which the
worker is separated from his product at the moment when he confronts
the excrescence of his nature and recognizes it as an expropriated
commodity, the moment when the (natural) silkworm is metamor-
phosed into the (socially enforced) merchant. Milton describes a pro-
cess of assimilation in which the consumer of intellectual capital adds
to his principal and repays the investment of his predecessors with
the silken threads of his poetic production.
The status of the artist and his product-with respect to the repro-
duction of nature on the one hand and the social relations of the
commodity market on the other -is at once the explicit theme of Marx's
remark on Milton and the implicit theme of "L'Allegro" and "II Pen-
seroso." More important, Milton's procedure may be seen to found
the very categories of labor and artistic production that Marx questions,
and, at last, reproduces.
But if Milton produces Marx, Marx too produces Milton. When we
begin to describe Milton's discourse (and by discourse here I mean
the social, linguistic and literary environment of his writings as well
as the writings themselves), what we discover in it must be determined,
to a greater or lesser extent, by what we are prepared to see or hear.
Any context of criticism -Marxist, psychoanalytic, formalist-neces-
sarily acts not on a text, but on a selective description of that text.
This description always anticipates the context of criticism for which
94 Labor in Milton
it is intended. Like Milton's proleptic narration, it remembers in ad-
vance its destination.
In The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson formulates the re-
lations of text, interpretive tradition and totalizing Marxist analysis in
a way that gives point to my present concerns. Jameson points out
that "we never really confront a text immediately, in all its freshness
as a thing-in-itself." On the contrary, texts are grasped "through the
sedimented layers of previous interpretations" or, in the case of a new
text, "through the sedimented reading habits and categories developed
by those interpretive traditions." Therefore the text itself ought to be
less the object of literary and cultural study than are the "interpre-
tations through which we attempt to confront and appropriate" it.
Since interpretation is "an essentially allegorical act" in which a given
text is rewritten "in terms of an interpretive master code," Jameson
assures his reader that, in The Political Unconscious, once the inter-
pretive codes according to which a literary work has been variously
allegorized are identified:
Their juxtaposition with a dialectical or totalizing, properly Marxist,

ideal of understanding will be used to demonstrate the structural
limitations of the other interpretive codes, and in particular to show
the "local" ways in which they construct their objects and the "strat-
egies of containment" whereby they are able to project the illusion
that their readings are somehow complete and self-sufficient.29
It is precisely through its totalizing comprehension that Marxist analysis

reduces all categories to its own, accounts for discourse by grounding
it in the material "reality" that gives it origin. But can the priority of
these categories be secured? What if totalization is necessarily and in
itself unattainable because its explanatory categories are always already
formal constituents of that which it would explain? By focusing on the
constitutive power of Milton's apocalyptic narration with respect to
the formation of the entities whose experience Marxist dialectic ex-
plains-above all, the particular temporality of the self with respect
to nature, to production and to social life-I do not propose to answer
this question so much as to illuminate its power.
Marxian analysis and Miltonic narration each offer a totalizing in-
terpretation of material historical events. Each, in its own way, re-
cuperates as an intention of history precisely what is contingent, ran-
dom, overdetermined in everyday life, referring such accidents to the
"big picture," the temporally unfolding or conceptually charted design
that transforms res into signans.
Beyond this very general shared characteristic of narrative closure
and analytic totalization, there exists a formal homology between Mil-
ton's practical effort to conserve the category of the inspired and pro-
phetic within the category of work and Marx's efforts to bridge the
aporia in his theory between natural and alienated forms of intellectual
labor. Where Milton divides himself into a commodity producing and
consuming Allegro and an investing and retailing (retelling!) Penseroso,
Marx divides artistic production from the circulation of artistic com-
modities. (In fact Marx's naturalization of Milton's poetic labor bears
an uncanny resemblance to Comus's naturalization of the weavers'
trade under the image of "millions of spinning Worms / That in their
green shops weave the smooth-hair'd silk" [lines 715-6].) The fact that
Marx, as if by chance, seizes for his example the great poet of this
theme may perhaps stand as a minor but representative irruption into
the surface of literary history of the mutual and inextricable implication
of practice and theory in the constitution of the modern historical
subject; that is to say, in the determined relation of experience to
reflection and sense to intellect that is itself the trace of the bourgeois
ideology Milton helps to construct and Marx to theorize.
Milton directs his faith in the performative power of the word,
together with his faith in the trans-temporal framework of Providence
within which the word's performance is enacted, toward neutralizing
his product's alienation through the displacement of the writer's vital
energies into his book, "for Books are not absolutely dead things, but
doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as the soule was
whose progeny they are. "30 Books continue a writer's life beyond his
death, but at a price. For the soul and the potency of the writer become
that of his product, and his product is subjected-in the imagination
of Areopagitica-to a competitive market in which good ideas and good
writing will overcome and efface bad ideas and bad writing.
In Milton's argument, such a self-regulating market effectively ob-
viates the need for central planning in the form of censorship. In a
historically determined way, the appearance of this market mediates
the always vexed tension between the personal agency of morally
responsible beings and their providential destiny, between the exi-
gency of local acts with local motives and the virtual totality within
which they become meaningful. Through the ideology of the self-
regulating market, the alienation of humankind from an absent God
is transformed into human labor's subjection to the "invisible hand"
of market forces. It is, I submit, this moment of the dispersal of the
powers of a historically interventionist God to the impersonality of
96 Labor in Milton
social law that is recorded in the particular narrative of the relation of
producer and product that Milton and Marx reflect and repeat.3'
The categories generated in Milton's attempt to maintain the con-
tinuity of his work and his soul, the immediate demands of the rev-
olution and the "inner promptings" of his nature, also provide the
retroactive framework in which Marx resignifies the historical world,
writing books that do indeed "chance to spring up armed men." What
appears to Milton as a problem of distribution, of putting his God-
given talents into trade, reappears in Marx's analysis as a problem of
appropriation.
Marx's brief allusion to Milton's nature represents a recourse to
narrative to support the distinction between productive and natural
labor. This recourse is apparently spurred by a categorical difficulty;
intellectual work, specifically writing, threatens to undermine the dis-
tinction by appearing in both categories. To restore the integrity of
the categories Marx superimposes the episodic structure of narrative
at the point where the categories cross. Milton writes, and then he
sells. However, in healing the disruption of a work that appears in
both categories by dividing it temporally-nature first, commodity
after- Marx introduces also a certain ambiguity about agency. For
narration calls forth a subject and this subject is uneasily poised be-
tween a Milton who is, himself, the subject of a poetic nature, afuror
poeticus, and Milton the merchant. There is a cross-purpose at work
when the worm must sell its silk.
The same exigency of narrative logic necessitates an apocalyptic
closure to the proliferation of differences in Milton's providential the-
ology and the totalizing narrative of Marx's historical materialism. For
Milton, the episodes of human history are authentically contingent on
the choices made by morally responsible human agents, and yet the
outcomes of those episodes are providentially governed. The process
is teleological to be sure, but complexly so, for providence is understood
not to determine human action so much as to accommodate it, dy-
namically and continuously, to a divinely ordained conclusion. History
thus conceived is (as Dr. Johnson said of Samson Agonistes) a beginning
and an end, lacking a middle.32
Its characters are charged to generate that middle (a middle that is
prolonged as long as time endures) out of their own choices and actions.
But the end of the story, which has been revealed, informs the choices
that write its middle. The subjects of these middle acts are thus sus-
pended between experience and reflection, forever displacing the im-
mediacy of experience forward in time to its presumed significance.
For all that Milton derives this subjectivity from his own deft weaving
together of the books of nature and of revelation, this suspended
subject, always enmeshed in its own preemptive reflection, cannot be
thought apart from the division of labor that is constituted along with
it. Similarly, the categories from which this subject arises cannot be
thought apart from its peculiar anticipation of a future of which they
are at once the ground and product. And it is precisely this subject,
beginning always in a premature reflection on its own not yet arrived
origin, that begins, in a structurally homologous way, the history of
alienation, in the Marxian (and the Freudian) sense.33
By staging this conversation between Milton and Marx, I mean
neither to assert the old canard that Marxism is a theology nor to
conscript Milton as a Marxist avant la lettre. Rather, my point has
been to show that the subject of both these self-consciously subjectless
teleologies remains preeminently a narrative subject, one that is nec-
essarily constituted through a derealizing dialectic of designifying mo-
ments (the perpetual rediscovery of things, the validation of sensory
experience) and resignifying moments (the reduction of things to types,
their deferral to an always yet to be realized essence).34 This dialectic
is necessarily derealizing because it always reproduces the suspension
of the subject, always entails the suppression of substance in favor of
significance, which is to say that the dialectic proceeds only on the
level of (and within) signification itself.35 The "sublation" of the concept
is always purchased at the cost of its abstraction from concrete, material
substance.
The subject, which the dialectic was to heal by the eventual merging
of its scattered parts, retreats to a point from which it conceives of
itself as having been prior to its signifiers, and from which it defers
the fullness of its presence to a point conceived of as posterior to
signification. This retreat institutes as an interior space the subject's
own distance from the discourse in which it appears. It rewrites, in a
last desperate move, the alienation of its products as the alienation of
its own immediate experience.
In the world-historical moment at which this rewriting takes place,
alienation becomes also a psychological concept. The psyche is recon-
ceived and experienced in the gap left by a determined discontinuity
with its own past. Thus the project of dialectic itself, the preservation
or Aufhebung of the real within the significant, always fails, because
it must always represent the mediation of the real to the intellect by
an excess of meaning, a generic residue that erases those contingent
98 Labor in Milton
sufferings and random actions through which material life resists nar-
rative closure. The pastoral and georgic moments of "L'Allegro" and
"II Penseroso" weave a dialectical fantasy in which their constantly
loose ends are sublated-in a metamorphic moment-into a Mind
(Spirit?) so capacious as to avoid time. The epic histories of Paradise
Lost and Capital broadly represent the narrative and theoretical genres
of the failure of that dialectic.
Nevertheless, the failure of the project of totalization need not be
construed as the failure of Marxist analysis or Miltonic narration. It is
rather more specifically the failure of a certain epistemological claim.
Thus I advance the description of "L'Allegro" and "II Penseroso" gen-
erated in the previous section not simply as a heuristic concocted for
the sake of my larger argument, but as a valid opening of those poems
to their world-historical moment, as an altogether serious attempt at
literary history. As would be the case with any hermeneutic claim,
the security of my reading lies not, empirically, in the world, but in
the quality of the articulation between the anticipated whole and ex-
perienced part, or, to put it another way, in the performance of its
figures.
University of Maryland, College Park

NOTES
Research for this essay was aided by a fellowship from the National Endowment for
the Humanities (1988-89) and a summer research grant from the University of Marylan
General Research Board (1990). I thank these agencies for their generous support.
' Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 1044
(emphasis in original).
2 Marx elaborates the theory of the production of surplus value by the appropriation
of unpaid labor in part two of the first volume of Capital (note 1). See especially chapter
nine, "The Rate of Surplus Value."
'The Vintage edition of Capital prints the "Results of the Immediate Process of
Production" as an appendix. For a discussion of its composition and publication history,
see Ernest Mandel's introduction in Capital, Volume 1 (note 1), 943-6. Like the worm's
silk, the "Results" moves from the inside of Capital to its border. Was Marx aware
that to harvest the silk, the farmer boils the worm?
4I take the phrase "instance of discourse" and the argument that subjectivity inheres
in the discursive positions defined by grammatical person from Emile Benveniste,
"Subjectivity in Language," in Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth
Meek (Coral Gables: Univ. of Miami Press, 1971), 223-30. Benveniste argues that
subjectivity follows from the organization of personal pronouns and shifters in discourse.
My distinction between narrative and analytic discourse resembles but differs signif-
icantly from Benveniste's distinction between histoire and discours. In the present
context, the crucial distinction is between discourse that represents speech and dis-
course that does not. (On the relations of diegesis and narrative, see Gerard Genette,
"Boundaries of Narrative," NLH 8 [1976]: 1-13, especially 8-13. For a critical discussion
of Benveniste's and Genette's characterizations of narrative and discourse, see Marshall
Grossman, "The Narrative of the Subject and the Rhetoric of the Self," Papers on
Language and Literature 18 [1982]: 398-415, especially 398-400.) The implications of
the grammatical ground of subjectivity have received their greatest elaboration in the
work of Jacques Lacan. See especially, "The Function and Field of Speech and Language
in Psychoanalysis" and "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since
Freud," in Iwcrits: A Selection, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Norton, 1977), 30-113, 146-78. Some years prior to the publication of Benveniste's
article, Lacan argued that, even before the acquisition of language, the subjective
polarity of I and you structures an internal dialectic in which the ego will be formed.
He situates the ego at the juncture of an Imaginary oscillation between I and you and
a Symbolic identification with the name, that is, with third person nomination. (The
Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Techniques
of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli [New
York: Norton, 1988], 169.) In very general terms: the ego's recognition of itself through
its identification with the subject of a narrative (in this case the narrative of a paternal
prohibition, what Lacan, conflating the name and the "no" of the father, calls the nom
du pare) opens the way for the ego's entry into a linguistically structured temporality.
See also M. M. Bakhtin's remarks on the articulation of time and space as an irreducible
aspect of verbal representation in "Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel,"
in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981).
5I am indebted for this point to Louis 0. Mink's distinction between configurational
and categorical modes of cognition. My distinction of narrative and analytic discourse
closely corresponds to his characterizations of narrative and philosophical cognitive
modes. See his "History and Fiction as Modes of Comprehension," NLH 1 (1970): 541-
58.
6 See, for an example, Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a
Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1981): "History is what hurts, it is
what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis,
which its 'ruses' turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this
History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as a reified
force." Jameson posits History as an "absent cause," operative as "the experience of
Necessity . . . the inexorable form of events . . . a narrative category in the enlarged
sense of some properly narrative political unconscious" (102, emphasis in original).
Uncanny in its retensive and protensive reach-at once back to the unknowable, yet
provident, Father of (Milton's) reformation theology and toward an appropriation of
Lacan's register of the non-signifying Real-Jameson's argument requires an analysis
more specific than the allusive response accommodated in the fourth section of the
present study. Suffice it to say that it strikes me, at this point, as yet another reiteration
of the inflation and division of categories elaborated in my text. On the distinction
between narrative and narrativizing discourse, see Hayden White, The Content of the
Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
Univ. Press, 1983), 2.
7All references to Milton's poetry are from the Complete Poetry and Major Prose,
ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Odyssey, 1957), hereafter cited parenthetically
in the text and abbreviated PL.
8 William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of Paradise Lost
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), 238-45. The quoted sentence appears on
page 239. The immediate context of anti-Cartesianism not withstanding, Milton's au-
thority for the identification of knowledge and food derives from the eating of the book
in Revelations 10:9-10. See, for example, his citation of this text in The Reason of
Church Government: "Yea that mysterious book of Revelation which the great Evan-
gelist was bid to eat, as it had been some eye-brightening electuary of knowledge, and
foresight, though it were sweet in his mouth, and in the learning, it was bitter in his
belly; bitter in the denouncing." John Milton, Complete Prose Works, ed. Don M.
Wolfe et al., 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1953-80), 1:803. All citations of
100 Labor in Milton
Milton's prose are from this edition, hereafter cited parenthetically as CP, with indi-
vidual titles abbreviated as follows: Reason of Church Government, RCG; Areopagitica,
A.
9 For discussions of Milton in relation to the ideology of emergent capitalism, see
Andrew Milner, John Milton and the English Revolution: A Study in the Sociology of
Literature (London: Macmillan, 1981); Herman Rapaport, Milton and the Postmodern
(Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1983); Michael Wilding, Dragon's Teeth: Literature
and the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987); David Norbrook, Poetry and
Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984); Marshall
Grossman, "Authors to Themselves": Milton and the Revelation of History (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987); and, especially with respect to the ideology of monism,
Christopher Kendrick, Milton: A Study in Ideology and Form (New York: Methuen,
1986).
10 On the revaluation of labor in the seventeenth century, see Anthony Low, The
Georgic Revolution (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1985). On the reorganization
of production, see Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas
in the English Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1972), 40-45, and Puritanism and
Revolution: Studies in the Interpretation of the English Revolution of the Seventeenth-
Century (New York: Schocken, 1964), 153-96; and Lawrence Stone, The Intellectual
Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642, (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 66-
67. On the evolution of economic concepts and metaphors, see Joyce Oldham Appleby,
Economic Thought and Ideology in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1978).
" Paul Stevens, Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in Paradise Lost (Mad-
ison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1985).
12 Torquato Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem, trans. Mariella Cavalchini and
Irene Samuel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 31-32. Subsequent references will be given
parenthetically in my text.
13 The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas
Denon Heath, 14 vols. (Boston: Taggard and Thompson, 1863), 8:60. Significantly, the
project of the Novum Organum is, in fact, to establish an epistemology based on
observation that will come to displace the equation of knowledge and memory estab-
lished by Plato and reproduced and disseminated by Augustine. An important impli-
cation of this project is the substitution of a temporally sequential process of discovery
for the simultaneity of memory-a sequence of steps, for the architecture of the "mem-
ory theater." As we shall see, Miltonic narrative comes to mediate sequence and
architecture as part of the icastic mediation of memory and invention.
14 Milton's elliptical syntax poses problems with this transition from night to day and
from invitation to hypothetical action, but, taking seriously the apparent syntactic
parallel of "to hear" and "to come," I imagine that it is Allegro who comes to the
window "in spite of sorrow." On the vexations of Milton's indeterminate syntax, see
Douglas Bush and A. S. P. Woodhouse, eds., A Variorum Commentary on the Poems
of John Milton, 4 vols. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1972), 2:281-84. See also
Thomas Greene, "The Meeting Soul in Milton's Companion Poems," English Literary
Renaissance 14 (1984): 166-67. The futility of the search for a "correct" reading is
demonstrated by Stanley Fish in "What It's Like to Read L'Allegro and il Penseroso,"
Milton Studies 7 (1975): 77-99. I justify my reading on two grounds: 1) If we assume
Milton intended to write grammatically, this is what he wrote, and 2) This reading
best conforms to the story I wish to tell, which is to say, that it yields a description of
the poem that supports and is supported by my interpretive framework.
15 Georgics, 1.145-46: "Labor omnia vincit / improbus et duris urgens in rebus eges-
tas" [Toil conquered the world, unrelenting toil, and want that pinches when life is
hard] (quoted from Virgil, trans. H. Ruston Fairclough, Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols.
[Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978]). The famous Jupiter theodicy of the first
georgic (120-46) stands as a precedent for connecting the cultivation of the land to the
cultivation of men, agriculture to culture. See Low (note 10), 298, 338-39). For another
seventeenth-century example, see Robert Herrick's "The Hock Cart": "Feed, and grow
fat; and as ye eat, / Be mindfull, that the laboring Neat / (As you) may have their fill
of meat. / And know, besides, ye must revoke / The patient Oxe unto the Yoke, / And
all goe back unto the Plough / and Harrow, (though they'r hang'd up now)" (The Poems
of Robert Herrick, ed. L. C. Martin [Oxford: Clarendon, 1965], 102).
16 Low (note 10), 292-356. For a useful discussion of Spenser's attempt to revive the
Virgilian ethos of collective labor in the service of empire, see William Sessions,
"Spenser's Georgic," ELR 10 (1980): 202-38.
17 See Annabel Patterson, "'Forc'd fingers': Milton's Early Poems and Ideological
Constraint," in The Muses Common-Weale: Poetry and Politics in the Seventeenth
Century, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri
Press, 1988), 9-22. Noting the "aestheticization" of peasant labor in "L'Allegro," Pat-
terson argues that the poem "transmutes georgic back into the pastoral from which,
at least in the Virgilian model of poetic thinking, it arose" (10). This reservation militates
against reading "L'Allegro" as Milton's expression of a settled "georgic ideology." Such
an attempt to read Milton's ideology within an "intentionalist problematic" (18) would
be contrary to my conception of the poems as sites in which ideological work takes
place. But to attempt to identify Milton and his colleagues in the revolution as more
or less "pro-georgic," oversimplifies the ideological productivity of emergent capitalism.
It is the thrust of my argument that the categories of ideological division can emerge
only after the fact; that they are, in effect, bourgeois categories. Bourgeois, especially
insofar as the expansion of "nature" to include, explain and justify the social organization
of labor is a defining characteristic of social thought under capitalism. The shifting of
genres that occurs in the period reveals points where ideological change is taking place,
without necessarily settling the content of that change. Genre is a vehicle of ideological
expression, the ideological content of which may become and remain fluid during a
period in which one ideological settlement is being superseded by another.
18 For example, Marx (note 1) constitutes the category "commodity" in relation to
desire: "The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its
qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. The nature of these needs, whether
they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference"
(125). What may make a difference, however, is the externality (or considered more
dynamically, the externalization) of the object, for the materialization of the products
of the imagination involves also their alienation from the producer. Thus we shall want
to track carefully Milton's separation from the products of his imagination.
19 See Marx's statement in The German Ideology that "the production of life, both
of one's own in labour and of fresh life in procreation, now appears as a twofold relation:
on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relation" (cited from The German
Ideology, trans. C. Dutt, et al., ed. Maurice Comforth, et al., in Collected Works, 44
vols. [New York: International Publishers, 1976], 5:43).
20 See William Riley Parker, Milton: A Biography, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1968),
1:80-81. See also the Ad Patrem, Milton's elegy thanking his father for supporting his
retired study: "Tu tamen ut simules teneras odisse Camenas, / Nom odisse reor. Neque
enim, pater, ire iubebas / Qua via lata patet, qua pronior area lucri, / Certaque con-
dendifulget spes aurea nummi; / ... / Sed magis excultam cupiens ditescere mentem, /
Me procul urbano strepitu, secessibus altis / Abductum, Aoniae iucunda per otia
ripae, / Phobaeo lateri comitem sinis ire beatum" (lines 67-76) ("Although you pretend
that you hate the Muses, I reckon that you do not hate them; for, indeed, father, you
did not order me to go where a broad way lies open, where the ground bends toward
profit, and the golden hope of storing up coins shines. Nor do you snatch me off to
the law, and the badly watched laws of our people, nor do you condemn my ears to
their insipid clamor. But desiring more to enrich the cultivation of my mind, you have
drawn me away from the noise of the city, into the deep seclusion of the Aeonian
stream, [where] through delightful leisure, you leave me a blessed comrade at the side
102 Labor in Milton
of Phoebus [Apollo]" (my translation). For a useful discussion of the self-identifications
and social roles available to a "professional" poet of Milton's generation, see Richard
Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1983). For Milton's concerns regarding the pre-
mature use of his poetic talent, see the opening of Lycidas.
21 Virgil's fourth georgic is devoted to apiaculture. The ambiguity between the trans-
formation of nature and of self is reflected in the ambiguity remarked by a seventeenth-
century commentator of Virgil about whether bees reproduced sexually or "that in
Floures and Herbs there is something correspondent to Seed, which is by the Bees
gather'd, carried into their Hives and cherish'd into Life" (The Works of Publius
Vergilius Maro, ed. and trans. John Ogilby [London, 1649]).
22 On the creative tension between Milton's Protestant iconoclasm and the ut pictora
poesis tradition he inherits and adapts from classical and Italian sources, see Ernest
B. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1986), 149-77.
23 Marsilio Ficino, The Philebus Commentary, ed. and trans. Michael J. B. Allen
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975), 432-34.
24 An early experience of such alienation may have been what Milton felt to be the
misreading and misappropriation of his divorce tracts. Milton's material situation, as
an (apparently) abandoned husband, lent an urgency to this particular dialectic that
readers close to him (notably the group of young Presbyterians who signed their attack
on prelacy with their combined initials, Smectymnuus) could not share. Thus, in a
characteristically individualistic anticipation of Marxian "class consciousness," the ma-
terial experience of Milton's "fit audience" remains an implicit precondition of its
understanding. (I thank my colleague, Theodore B. Leinwand, for bringing this point
to my attention, and I owe the reference to Milton's early, and possibly decisive
alienation from the Smectymnuuans to Thomas Kranidas.)
25 See, for example, Bacon's assertion, in the Novum Organum (note 13) that tech-
nological progress will restore man's prelapsarian dominion over creation (8:350) and
Milton's echoing comments in the "Seventh Prolusion." See also the assertion in "Of
Education" that "the end of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by
regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him,
to be like him, as we may the neerest by possessing our souls of true virtue, which
being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection. But because
our understanding cannot in this body found it selfe but on sensible things, nor arrive
so clearly to the knowledge of God and things invisible, as by orderly conning over
the visible and inferior creature, the same method is necessarily to be follow'd in all
discreet teaching" (CP, 2:366-69).
261 use type in this sentence as it as has come to be used in discussions of seventeenth-
century Protestant poetry, to specify a historical character or event that anticipates or
foreshadows the life of Christ or his second coming. For example, Moses is a type of
Christ because his act of leading the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt is at once a
historical fact and a symbolic anticipation of Christ's leading of the Christians out of
bondage to sin. Milton's performative notion of prophetic poetry converts the Orphic
(or, more directly, the Petrarchan) trope of lost love into a type because his icastic
signs are expected to enlighten the reader, to regain what is lost, not metaphorically,
but in fact. The figure of lost love marks a historical emotion whose antitype is the
transformation of lost love into the affection of divine presence. The type thus stands
midway between mimesis (of profane love) and performance. Typology is, of course,
extrapolated to poetry from biblical hermeneutics, where, because it is understood to
come under a literal reading of the Bible (asserting that there was, for example, a
historical Moses), it survives the Protestant purge of allegory. The classic discussion
of the influence of typology on seventeenth-century poetry is Barbara Lewalski, Prot-
estant Poetics and Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1979). For a discussion of the functional distinction between type and trope,
see Grossman, "Authors to Themselves" (note 9), 12-21.
27 The fact that Raphael teaches Adam over lunch gives dramatic point to the unity
between intellectual and physiological digestion.
28 See Lacan's remarks on the constitution of the subject in the future anterior tense
(EIcrits [note 4], 86): "I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like
an object. What is realized in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it
is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future
anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming." For a
comment more directly engaged with issues of narrative rhetoric, see Hayden White's
argument (note 6) that "The narrativization of history . . . transforms every present
into a 'past future,' on the one side, and a 'future past' on the other. Considered as a
transition between a past and a future, every present is at once a realization of projects
performed by past human agents and a determination of a field of possible projects to
be realized by living human agents in their future" (149). Milton (and perhaps Marx)
would have understood this temporal aporia within an Augustinian context: "Although
as for things past, whenever true stories are related, out of the memory are drawn not
the things themselves which are past, but such words as being conceived by the images
of those things, they, in their passing through our senses, have, as their footsteps, left
imprinted in our minds .... Whether or no there be a like cause of foretelling things
to come, . . . that I know not. This one thing surely I know; that we use very often
to premeditate upon our future actions, and that that forethinking is present: but as
for the action which we forethink ourselves of, that is not yet in being, because it is
yet to come. Which, so soon as we have set upon, and are beginning once to do what
we premeditated, then shall that action come into being: because then it will no longer
be future, but present." (St. Augustine's Confessions, trans. William Watts, 2 vols.
[1631; reprint, Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961], 2:249.) On the structure of
narrative in relation to the aporias of time in Augustine's Confessions, see Paul Ricoeur,
Time and Narrative, Volume 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chi-
cago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), 5-30.
29 Jameson (note 6), 9-10.
30 See Kendrick's brilliant discussion (note 9) of Areopagitica in relation to the "dis-
location of the subject" (21-35), and on the self-regulating literary market (40-41).
31 Thus I would join White's argument (note 6) that "Narrativity-in the sense Ja-
meson must mean it-is not coterminous with social life, but with class society in a
technological age" (148-49), emphasis in original.
32 Samuel Johnson, Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols.
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1905), 1:189.
33 See Louis Althusser's discussion of Marx's restatement of the Hegelian dialectic
as a "process without a subject" in Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel
and Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: NLB, 1977): "The only subject of the process
of alienation is the process itself in its teleology. The subject of the process is not even
the End of the process itself (a mistake is possible here: does not Hegel say that the
Spirit is 'Substance becoming Subject'?), it is the process of alienation as in pursuit of
its End, and hence the process of alienation itself as teleological" (183), emphasis in
original.
34 Fredric Jameson eloquently recognizes the narrative context of Marxist action: "If
the Marxian narrative of the irreversible dynamism of human society as it develops
into capitalism be disallowed, little or nothing remains of Marxism as a system and the
meaning of the acts of all those who have associated their praxis with it bleeds away"
("Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Prob-
lem of the Subject," Yale French Studies 55/56 [1977]: 338-95). The quoted passage
appears on page 388. For further discussion of the narrative character of Marxist
totalization, see Marshall Grossman, "Formalism, Structuralism, Marxism: Fredric
Jameson's Critical Narrative," Dispositio: Revista Hispanica Semiotica Literaria 4
104 Labor in Milton
(1979): 259-72. On the designifying moment, see White's discussion of the sublime
(note 6), 68-82.
3 See Hayden White's argument in Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nine-
teenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1973) that what is
dialectical in Marx is precisely "the mode of transition from one form of publicly
sanctioned consciousness to another." Although "Men relate themselves in their own
minds to nature and to other men dialectically, . .. they are really related to nature,
Marx insisted, in the modality of mechanical causality .... Changes that occur in the
Base are not, then, products of a dialectical interaction of the modes of production and
the natural world; on the contrary, changes in the modes of production are occasioned
by strict mechanical laws" (305-6; emphasis in original).

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The Fruits of One's Labor in Miltonic Practice and Marxian Theory

Author(s): Marshall Grossman

I: THE SILK WORM AND THE MERCHANT

Labour with the same content can be either productive or un-

Marx makes this uncharacteristically idealist observation about Mil-

Productive labour is merely an abbreviation for the entire complex

ELH 59 (1992) 77-105 ? 1992 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 77

Unproductive labor, like Milton's, produces a commodity which may

II: SIGNS HAVING THE POWER TO PERFECT

The poetic and intellectual roots of Milton's material idealism may

But knowledge is as food, and needs no less

William Kerrigan argues persuasively that, in their efforts to resist the

Therefore, the icastic poet leads us "to the contemplation of divine

The end . . . of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents

Tasso is engaged in defending the intellectual validity of the sensible

But the universe to the eye of the human understanding is framed

Peculiar to Milton, however, is an emphasis on the mastery of poetry

The parallel developments of "L'Allegro" and "II Penseroso" invite

Dialectic is said to be divinely given, since it is the power which

He might have added that it is the "Image of God, as it were in the

IV: THE FRUITS OF WHOSE LABOR?

FROM ABSENT GOD TO ABSENT CAUSE

In the companion poems, we see Milton attempting to work out

Their juxtaposition with a dialectical or totalizing, properly Marxist,

It is precisely through its totalizing comprehension that Marxist analysis

University of Maryland, College Park

100 Labor in Milton

Marshall Grossman 101

102 Labor in Milton

Marshall Grossman 103

104 Labor in Milton

Marshall Grossman 105

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