Research Article| February 01 1997 Carnal Rhetoric: Milton's Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire Lana Cable, Camal Rhetoric: Milton's Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), x + 231 pp. Robert Cockcroft Robert Cockcroft 2 Florence Boot Close, University Park, Nottingham NG7 2QF, England (United Kingdom). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1997) 15 (1): 114–117. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1997.15.1.114 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Robert Cockcroft; Carnal Rhetoric: Milton's Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire. Rhetorica 1 February 1997; 15 (1): 114–117. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1997.15.1.114 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1997, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1997 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

114 RHETORICA than once, insists he is telling the truth: "If I speak untruthfully . . . , O God, let me never come into thy kingdom" (p. 27). In an impressive compression of facts into nine pages of the publish­ ing history of the printed versions and six pages of detailed endnotes, Parker and Johnson give us a wealth of data, and one goes away feeling that indeed one has gotten closer to the speech event than anyone has pre­ viously been privileged to get. The authors conclude, "... it becomes clear that although frequently published, Raleigh's speech has been presented from relatively few of the potentially available texts: three from identifi­ able manuscripts, and four basic printed sources, with various conflations of these texts. The Dutch edition takes its place, therefore, as the earliest of the published texts, the closest to the event it describes" (p. 69). A limited edition of six hundred copies of this volume was printed. Those fortunate enough to secure a copy will possess a classic volume of rigorous scholarship, a model for those drawn to the history of rhetoric. J. Vernon Jensen Lana Cable, Carnal Rhetoric: Milton's Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), x + 231 pp. This is an interesting but irritating book. Lana Cable's survey of Milton's affective rhetoric ambitiously extends Paul Ricoeur's doctrine of metaphor, which (more emphatically than the other theory assimilated by Cable) already constitutes a serious implicit challenge to older thinking. For Quintilian, emotion is mainly derived from enargeia and visio, and for the Roman rhetoricians (as Beth Innocenti recently reminded us), such visio was best expressed in graphic, sensory, non-figurative language. For Ricoeur, thinking and poetic feeling (the most positive and transformative mode of emotion) are integral. They work through metaphor, and, in the Aristotelian terms which Ricoeur adopts, the differences between the metaphorical idea (or image) and its referent are as important as the similarities. Overcoming every pre-existent sense of difference, metaphor at its most novel "does not merely actualize a potential connotation, it creates it. It is a semantic innova­ tion, an emergent meaning."1 Since feeling is an integral part of this process, rhetoric will project its most intense pathos when it orients this innovation towards things of the greatest import, as it does in Milton. Ricoeur protests at a tendency, derived from Hume, to think of :Mario J. Valdes, ed., A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 79. Reviews 115 imagery as decaying sense impression, basically passive; he favours the active Kantian view of "imagination as the place of nascent meanings and categories."2 Applied to the rhetorical arousal of emotion, this means the subsuming of pathos into ethos: sensory images, whether of the past, the present, or the future, of the actual or the potential, are presented through the "likeness" of metaphor. This brings new connotations to bear for both "tenor" and "vehicle" (terms which Ricoeur adopts from Richards), and presses these on the reader or listener through the emotional, logical, and linguistic shock of a comparison that transcends the "first-order feelings" or "bodily emotions"3 derived from sense—or from the direct verbal evo­ cation of sensory experience? Repeated shocks must draw attention from the subjects of debate (however emotive) to the condition of the debaters, and to the inspiriting relationship of persuader and persuadee. Cable's point of departure is to question or qualify Ricoeur's idea that the "second-order feelings" attendant on metaphor transcend (or suspend) the emotional impact of sense. In her view, "A more psychologically cred­ ible account of metaphor's dependence on imagination and feeling would have to recognize that these two are functioning in tandem all the time, whether occasioned by literary experience or by some other kind of experi­ ence . . . drawing ... on sense perceptions both immediate and remem­ bered; on understanding and knowledge; on beliefs, aspirations, opinions, and prejudices . . ." (p. 29). This existing complex of influences must (though Cable never adequately explains the point) constitute the mental and emotional images, the "complacency" (p. 32) which iconoclastic metaphor breaks or refashions. In fusing it with poetry and semantics, Cable is...