mad’st it pregnant: what in me is dark
Illumine, what is low raise and support:
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert the eternal providence,
And justify the ways of God to men.48
There are certainly features of this passage that we could follow Eisenstein in calling montage effects. One could point, for example, to the shift from the tight focus on the fruit of the forbidden tree in Paradise to the invocation of the elevated prospect from the peaks of Mount Horeb, where divine inspiration was given to Moses, the presumed author of the book of Genesis on which Paradise Lost is based. There is also a visual repetition (or “match cut”) between this mountain top and that of Sinai, repeated in the invocation of Mount Zion in the clause that begins after the conjunctive “or” in line 10. Eisenstein’s expansive idea of montage might also apply to the “adventurous song” that means to “soar above the Aonian mount,” transcending that pinnacle, as the transcendent divine Spirit broods dove-like above the primordial abyss before the creative imperative “let there be light.” Most striking of all these montage effects, however, might be the juxtaposition of this first light of the world, brought about by the divine Word, and the light that the poet seeks to bring into his dark mind. This latter light, in corresponding to the first one, forms part of Milton’s Puritan belief in the “inner light” available to the “upright heart and pure” of the elect.
As a filmmaker, Eisenstein was famously attentive to the rhythm that governs the succession of images and sounds in cinematic montage, and rhythm is likewise crucial to what Milton has in view when he speaks of his ambition to pursue “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.” After all, Paradise Lost is written in blank verse, a verse form that is not prose (since it involves lines regulated by iambic pentameter, five repetitions of unstressed and stressed syllables) and has no rhyme scheme. Blank verse is a metrical form nonetheless in which the line matters in two important ways: first by an adherence to the iambic pentameter norm, and second by implied principles of construction for what a line can be (since a blank-verse line cannot end or begin just anywhere). In blank verse, importantly, the unit of the line has little to do with the unit of sense, understood as a clause. And yet, although none of the first six lines are end-stopped—none ends with the completion of a sentence or independent clause—all conclude with a noun that completes a noun phrase: “the fruit,” “immortal taste,” “all our woe,” “one greater man,” “the blissful seat,” and “the secret top.” In each case, a strong monosyllabic noun follows an unstressed syllable, thus lending a kind of closing cadence to the line even as we look beyond it for the completion of the clause or sentence. We have to wait until line 7 to find a line that does not end with a noun phrase set to this particular rhythm, and there we are delivered an important single verb—inspire—that provides the same cadence for line closure, in spite of the fact that it is a transitive verb still awaiting its direct object: “That shepherd” (i.e., Moses). The noun phrases then reappear to close lines 8–10.
Even in the absence of rhyme schemes or syntactical end-stopping, therefore, Milton’s “adventurous song” begins by reinforcing the iambic pentameter norm. This means that we can register, not just on the page but also in our ears, the forward push beyond the end of a given line, an effect known as enjambment. A relatively strong instance of enjambment occurs when the line break falls between a transitive verb and the direct object that it calls for. As noted above, “inspire / That shepherd” is one such case. “Pursues / Things” is another. Slightly less strong is the enjambment across the line break when the verb and direct object are inverted: “What in me is dark / Illumine.” Sometimes, even when there is enjambment across a line break without any closing punctuation, Milton continues things in such a way as to give a line a kind of sense in itself, within or apart from the overall syntax. The very opening line of the poem works this way. Despite the forward push of the enjambment—“the fruit / Of that forbidden tree”—it is possible to read in the opening line by itself a full announcement of this epic poem’s subject matter: “man’s first disobedience and the fruit.” That is, its fruit, the fruit of that disobedience. It is after all the case that Paradise Lost goes on to deliver an account not only of the motives and circumstances of Adam and Eve’s sin, but also its far-reaching consequences: not only the loss of paradise, but also all the implications of original sin, including, by a wondrous mystery, the eventual redemption of that sin by Jesus Christ, the “greater man” whose coming is foretold to Adam and Eve in the final books of the poem.49
The kinds of effects that Eisenstein finds in Milton’s verse recall his discussion of Dickens’ fiction, even closer to home for this filmmaker, whereby an image seems to linger from one scene to another, even as the sense of words does across line breaks in Milton. Not all of the rhythmic and formal features that criticism reveals in Paradise Lost, or in Dickens’ novels, have close analogues with cinema, and not even Milton’s opening sequence of juxtapositions, which I have described as Eisensteinian montage effects, are straightforwardly analogous to montage in cinema.50 The point is rather that the formal effects based in repetition and variation that govern the literary arts and the screen arts are alike traceable in a critical analysis that enriches our experience of both.
I noted at the start that the art of doing criticism has been around for a long time and is something we are not likely to do without anytime soon. I suggested that the kinds of critical discussion that have been staged within popular cinema in recent decades amply attest to that point. Though this is a book that means, finally, to help students of literature and cinema (students in the broadest sense) to think and write well about what they find in their reading and viewing, I hope at all points to preserve the sense of vital connection with the kind of issues that Randal and Dante argue about in Clerks, the kind of issues that any number of readers of this book might find themselves arguing about after an evening of reading or viewing. In Dante and Randal’s exchange, we have a fine example of Mencken’s critical exuberance. It is not only something wonderful to behold. It is even more wonderful to undertake, to do ourselves. How indeed could we ever imagine doing without it?
NOTES
1 1. David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” Four Dissertations (London: A. Millar, 1757), pp. 216–17.
2 2. William Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned,” Selected Poems, ed. John O. Hayden (New York: Penguin, 1994), p. 65.
3 3. Wayne C. Booth, Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. xi.
4 4. Marjorie Garber, The Use and Abuse of Literature (New York: Anchor Books, 2012), p. 77.
5 5. Terry Eagleton, How to Read a Poem (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007), p. 1.
6 6. See Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Essays in Criticism (London: Macmillan and Co., 1865), pp. 1–42.
7 7. T. S. Eliot, “Introduction,” The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 2nd edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 30.
8 8. See I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (New
