Indeed, speaking of interiority/exteriority and the shift of perspective, we may look at the meaning of Samson in terms not just of metaphor but of paradox and oxymoron. For his is a life “finding victory in death”: he “will win by losing, will slay by being slain” (Low 516). Samson is blind when he sees and is enlightened by being blind; his spiritual self-creation or regeneration is achieved only through his performing of a diabolic act of violence, just as the true transcendence of the soul is only possible through the death of a body, and just as sublimity comes only through suffering.20
An interpretation which could perhaps extend the one presented above—that is, the reintegration of the body through extreme or limit-case
20 We note the important role played in the “logic” here by Milton’s rhetorical use of paradox and oxymoron. Anthony Low observes that Milton’s fondness for using opposites might be influenced by his contemporary artistic milieu: “Paradox characterizes much of the poetry of the period, strain and conflict are seen in the painting and architecture. . . Milton’s use of dialectic . . . may owe something to his interest in Ramistic logic . . . Still another possible influence was the intellectual and artistic milieu, specifically the Mannerist and Baroque aesthetics” (515).
suffering, the self-overcoming of the body itself— would correlate the “body of Samson” with the “body of the text.” This may be metaphorized as spatiality, but as inward/outward linguistic or textual space rather than human corporeal space. Now the process by which self-fragmentation regenerates out of itself a new wholeness becomes a process through which fragmented meaning becomes whole and so achieves a wholeness of sense or meaning. To say that Samson achieves a new “identity” at/after the moment of death also means, especially when we think of Milton’s seventeenth- century poetic context, that he achieves a new “meaning.” In fact Samson’s body has been from the beginning of the play a site for meaning-making, even perhaps the text whereon is inscribed the meaning of its deeply-felt pain. The suffering through which the bodily self becomes reintegrated, and in such a way that it moves beyond itself, can also be understood as being written on the body and inscribed in the bodily memory.
It seems, of course, that we would need to distinguish the more purely spatial- corporeal interpretation presented here from the one that takes Samson’s physical body as a body that has been tortured, castrated, fragmented like that of Christ on the cross, and then transformed into a holy textual body—perhaps ultimately that of the saintly relic of Milton’s Samson Agonistes.21 Although one could say that in the final offstage scene Samson uses his body like a page of Scripture, metaphorically rewriting his sacred script, his “letter” to the profane Philistines in his own blood, the value of his mutilated body is more dependent on, or defined by, suffering than ultimate violence.22 The latter is but a metonym for the phoenix’s fire of immolation, which brings about its rebirth from its own ashes as a bodily transformation, a process through which a new identity and new meaning are given to its body:
21 This of course has Medieval echoes. Bynum says: “In the twelfth- and thirteenth-century texts the resurrected body is a jewel lifted from the mire, a rebuilt temple, a vessel recast or reassembled after wanton destruction” (8). With regard to the meaning of corporeality, Lauren Shohet argues, on the other hand, that “Samson uses circumcision as a figure for the way history is written on the body—the way the self is marked by history” (96).
22 In his reading of Samson Agonistes, Michael Lieb comments that “[t]he drama is a work of violence to its very core. It extols violence. Indeed, it exults in violence” (237). Also, Lieb asserts, “With all its violence and devastation, the act purifies Samson: it is a pious act . . . an act through which Samson demonstrates his piety to his ‘living Dread,’ his God” (261). Violence, as I argue here, though exercised by Samson, is not the consequence of the knowledge learned from his sufferings, but the corporeal expression of his subjectivity that reverses his passive status as sufferer into an active and positive suffering or self-fragmentation.
But he though blind of sight,
Despis’d and thought extinguish’t quite, With inward eyes illuminated
His fierie virtue rouz’d
From under ashes into sudden flame, [. . .] Like that self-begott’n bird In th’ Arabian woods embost, That no second knows nor third, And lay e’re while a Holocaust, From out her ashie womb now teem’d Revives, reflourishes, then vigorous most When most unactive deem’d,
And though her body die, her fame survives, A secular bird ages of lives. (1687-91, 1699-1707)
This “secular bird” tends to suggest the mythic, heroic and indeed pre-Christian aspect of the symbolic bird that rises from out of its own fire and/or (as Milton suggests here) from out of its own ashes, its own “ashie womb.” The last lines above, “And though her body die, her fame survives [for] ages of lives,” also suggest an immanent (temporal, historical) reading of Samson rather than a purely transcendent one. While Wittreich (267) may provide an even more immanent and “regressive” reading of the Phoenix here, Rumrich (67) claims, we remember, that Milton prefers the Anglo-Saxon, heroic, active, warrior-like and joyous view of Christ to the more dismal Medieval view of Christ as suffering martyr, a point which again suggests a reading of the Phoenix here in terms of immanent historical time, and perhaps one which takes Samson’s martyr-like self-sacrifice, one that also succeeds in killing many enemies, as the act of a heroic pre-Christian warrior. The latter view more easily fits, after all, the idea that Samson’s self-transcendence is in some way purely corporeal.
Of course, Milton wants to maintain the corporeal/spiritual or immanent/ transcendent ambiguity here, the paradox, with his “self- begott’n bird” that “[r]evives, reflourishes [from] “out her ashie womb [. . .]. And though her body die, her fame survives [. . .].” We will be left with a paradox in any case, so that the question then becomes: just how much emphasis one is to give the immanent-corporeal-heroic side, and how much to the
transcendent-spiritual-divine side.23 In the interpretation pursued here the focus has been on the immanent-corporeal which nonetheless has, within itself, the potential to move beyond itself.
23 As for this paradox, we note that the image of Samson’s regeneration could also be associated with the definition of “regeneration” given in Milton’s De Doctrina Christiana: “Regeneration means that the old man is destroyed and that the inner man is regenerated through the word and the spirit so that his whole mind is restored to the image of God, as if he were a new creature. Moreover, the whole man, both soul and body, is sanctified to God’s service and to good works” (Complete Prose Works of John Milton 461; emphas is added).
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