Milton's Garden Arguments, Fugues, and Ritornellos

It’s late and so this post will be very brief, but I wanted to share the fact that my thoughts kept returning today to the similarities between Milton’s Garden Arguments (the arguments that take place in the Garden between Eve and Adam and then Eve and Satan and then again between Eve and Adam) and some of the Baroque musical concepts at which we’ve looked. What struck me was how ideas or themes arise in the Garden and then are repeated, imitated, and inverted throughout Book IX. This ideas of themes being repeated, imitated, and inverted (among other things) is strongly reminiscent of the ritornello (in our Vivaldi concerto) and the contrapuntal fugue (in our Bach fugues, which we didn’t quite get to, although we did get to some of the fugue concepts). As Rob pointed out, the very word “concerto” contains the ideas (via its meaning in Latin) of debating or contending (which everyone does in the Garden) and (via its meaning in Italian) achieving unity or agreement (acting in concert), which is what, in a sense, Satan and Even and Adam do in the end (they all agree that the two humans should eat from the Tree of Prohibition). I thought that this was very interesting. Also, the initial argument between Eve and Adam is repeated three times, with each speaker inverting to some extent what the other is saying. Further still, Satan inverts God’s logic, and Eve, thinking to herself as she contemplates the fruit (while hungry), imitates and thus repeats Satan’s arguments. And Satan’s arguments are all variations on a theme (‘if eating from the Tree is bad, then God is bad’), which echo Eve’s earlier arguments with Adam (if going off alone is bad, then the Garden is not in fact that good). The theme of Book IX thus seems to be that the Garden and God are not as good as they seem – and are only good if the fruit can be eaten. What we find in the Book are all variations of that theme.