Informing Them by Types and Shadows

Book XII is always a bit of a disappointment to read. Perhaps my inclinations to cynicism and delight in literary trauma are showing through this reading, but it seems that Milton’s ending is too clean, too anticlimactic, too … disappointing. I write this while recognizing that, conceptually, being shown the entirety of the world’s future and then being kicked out of paradise to fend for oneself is almost inherently exciting, but the way it plays out makes me want to speedily return to Book I, and live it all over again.

Despite this, there are some interesting things occurring in Book XII, particularly near its end. As noted many times in class, Paradise Lost is an immensely integrated text—in other words, themes not only develop throughout Milton’s epic, but they interlock and continuously echo one another. I was pleasantly surprised, and a bit baffled, to find just such an echo of Satan’s characteristic trait in Michael’s speech to Adam. Telling Adam of his life after Eden, Michael comforts our fallen parent by advising him to add charity and patience, as well as other virtues, to the knowledge he has obtained. If Adam does so, he will then “not be loath / To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess / A Paradise within thee, happier farr" (XII. 585-587). The most provocative and curious thing about the archangel’s statement is, of course, its memory of Satan’s internal hell, that sense of space which transcends boundaries to be carried around inside of the character, rather than externally containing him.

This echo transforms the infernal memory of Satan’s condition, however, as Adam will internalize a very different space than Satan’s hell. Despite this, what does it mean that Satan first experiences such a relation to space? What does it mean that we as readers come to know and understanding internalized space through Satan?

The other strange aspect of Michael’s statement is the notion that Adam’s internalized Eden could be “happier farr” than its physical counterpart. How is it possible that the internalized experiences, the inside realities of a corrupted creature could be happier, could be more perfect, than the perfect garden from which the first pair was cast? This sounds a bit too much like Adam making a heaven of hell—yet another echo of Satan—for my comfort.

This concept of internalized space becomes prominent in Eve’s character, as well. Before I touch on this, however, I wish to highlight what is probably (or should be) an obvious fact to all readers of Paradise Lost—Eve is never present to discourse with messengers of God. Indeed, her communication with heaven is either mediated by Adam or her dreams. To be fair, Satan also conversed with her through the rather indirect medium of dream, but that’s Satan—he is supposed to be crafty and enigmatic. Though Eve says, and correctly, that “God is also in sleep” (611), it would appear that he is only in sleep with her. This is not to accuse Milton of even implicit misogyny, but to engage and probe an interesting difference of relation consistent throughout the poem.

But back to space: upon his return to wake Eve, she tells him to lead on away from Eden, for “with thee to go / Is to stay here; without thee here to stay, / Is to go hence unwilling; thou to mee / Art all things under Heav'n, all places thou, / Who for my wilful crime art banisht hence. (615-619). Adam has become all places to her, a sentiment I find teetering on the edge of idolatry. This is not the only troubling part of this proclamation, however, for as Adam has internalized Eden, Eve has externalized and concentrated perfect paradise in Adam. Though she has internalized space, she has not done so within herself, in some senses returning Adam to the sole inhabitant of the garden.

Swarming now with Complicated Monsters

I’m sorry, readers, but I couldn’t let Book X go by without at least briefly mentioning its coolest part: that of Satan’s return to hell from his adventures abroad, and the strange occurrences that come of his speech. So in this space, I wish to examine just a little bit of what I see going on in Book X when we place it in conversation with the literary tradition of travel narratives. It’s fascinating. Really. Ok, just bear with me.

In Amazons, Savages, and Machiavels: Travel and Colonial Writing in English, 1550-1630, his anthology of early modern travel literature, Andrew Hadfield traces the development of this fascinating literary tradition, examining the changing motivations for and effects of travel and travel writing over time. He situates pertinent excerpts of primary sources in conversation with one another, placing these within a broader framework of historical and literary analysis. Hadfield pays particular attention to emerging notions of national identity produced by and encouraged through colonial exploration and “writing back”—indeed, he links this solidifying notion of national self and foreign other, brought about by the colonial project, as “different sides of the same coin” (15). In his collection and organization of these narratives, Hadfield emphasizes the importance of audience, highlighting the “writing back” process as a prime motivation for colonial journeys.

Hadfield devotes a good deal of space to Richard Hakluyt and his Principall Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation (1589, 1598). Hakluyt, Hadfield notes in a helpful introduction, “was the first Englishman to collect together the travel writings of the English and publish them in a larger series of volumes” (24). He was also a traveler, but felt that a collection of past travel narratives would compel the readers of his nation to both preserve the memory of English colonial greatness and inspire them to participate in the expansion of their nation. From here we can see that text has historically played a large role in colonial expansion and reproduction in both landscape and imagination.

Perhaps even more interesting and important, however, is Hakluyt’s preface to the reader of his second edition of The Principall Navigations. For it is here that Hakluyt bemoans the suffering he endured in order to give “homely and rough-hewen shape” to his anthology: “what restlesse nights, what painefull dayes, what heat, what cold I have indured,” he tells us, for the sake of his audience (26). That he attributes this physical suffering to the intellectual labor of finding and compiling travel narratives is, on its own, utterly fascinating, but it becomes even more so when we compare it with Milton’s description of Satan’s triumphant return from Eden in Paradise Lost: “by my adventure hard / With peril great atchiev'd. Long were to tell / What I have don, what sufferd, with what paine / Voyag'd th' unreal, vast, unbounded deep / Of horrible confusion, over which / By Sin and Death a broad way now is pav'd / To expedite your glorious march (X.470-474). That Milton read Hakluyt is undeniable, but that he intended his Satan to echo the first English compiler of travel narratives is, of course, debatable. What are the meanings of this echo? What, if any, are the connections we can draw between colonialism, history, audience, and narrative?

Against Temptation

As we are still making our way as a class through Book IX, I wish to highlight here something that I found profoundly interesting in Adam’s articulation of reasons why Eve should refrain from separating from his side. While reading for a presentation concerned with understanding virtue in Paradise Lost through and alongside of Areopagitica, I became aware of virtue’s problematic status in the epic poem. In other words, virtue has a complicated definition involving bits of seemingly incongruous elements as absolute freedom and rational restraint.

Virtue, for Milton, is produced by trial, but more intriguingly, it is something which can arise from consuming “evil” things. The notion of evil objects or knowledge is severely problematized however, for Milton ultimately conveys that the consumer, rather than the consumed, is responsible for the effects of exposure and ingestion. As such, whether something is good or evil, whether something is with or without virtue, can be known only after it has been “tasted.” It is only through trial, through confronting and consuming potentially corrupt material that the rational will is exercised and the taste refined. The process of virtue, of discerning and pursuing its flavors, is simply that: a process, made up of repeated falls.

As such, can one ever taint or lose their virtue? It’s unclear, particularly in a postlapsarian world. Before the fall in Paradise Lost, however, this question of corrupted virtue was apparently just as complicated. In defending his desire to keep her within sight, Adam proclaims that it is not Eve’s weakness that he mistrusts, but their foe and the process of being tried: “Not diffident of thee do I dissuade / They absence from my sight, but to avoid / Th’ attempt itself, intended by our foe” (293-295). I found this statement utterly reasonable up to its conclusion, wherein Adam tells us that trial should be avoided not because it leads to corruption, but because it is itself corrupt: “For he who tempts, though in vain, at least asperses / The tempted with dishonor foul, supposed / Not incorruptible of faith, not proof / Against temptation” (296-299). In other words, it appears that, for Adam, if one is tried, one’s virtue is already tarnished, and it is this corruption that attracts tempters.

More later today (I know, you can barely contain yourselves).

Active within Beyond the Sense of Brute

As our class discussion will include the latter part of Book VIII, I thought I would return to the Book in this entry. For at its end, Book VIII explores some interesting and rather confusing--at least, for me--scenes concerning the relationship between Adam and Eve. As touched on in Tuesday's meeting, Adam proclaims to Raphael that Eve, despite being his known inferior, appears to him as the wisest, more fairest creature on earth: "For well I understand," Adam proclaims,"in the prime end / Of Nature her th' inferior, in the mind / And inward faculties, which most excel, / In outward also her resembling less / His image who made both, and less expressing / The character of that dominion giv'n / O'er other creatures" (540-546), he thinks she is pretty great. What I find most intriguing about his estimation of his partner is that he not only deems her less like the image of God than himself, but he also connects this outward appearance with lordly dominion. As God, we are repeatedly told throughout the poem, has no physical frame--he is not restricted within fleshly boundaries or shapes--how, I wonder, does Adam so authoritatively speak of the unknown image of God?

It is a question that seems to beget yet more questions. For if Adam is God's image (which is, I think, impossible), why isn't Eve, as well? If one chooses to argue that Eve is the image of Adam, and we are defining image as something akin to replica or fairly accurate reflection, why is she so apparently different in frame and character than her believed source, Adam, when Adam is cast in the same mold as his creator? Another justification for this specious hierarchy is that, while created superior and inferior in shape, their spirits are both God-like. This, however, is also disputed within Milton's text, as Adam tells us that Eve is also internally inferior. But again, how is this possible, as she is either the image of God or of Adam, who is also the image of God? And why, I continue wonder, is quasi-divine power, that of dominion and rule, located within corporeality?

Though the logic of their relationship is severely problematic, Raphael guards against its examination by advising Adam to give his love, though "[n]ot thy subjection" (570), to Eve. It is here that we can see, even in seventeenth-century work, the constructed nature of gender--a means of control through the rather arbitrary creation and maintenance of ridiculous binaries. For when Raphael tells Adam that his superiority is clearly evident, and that all he need do in order to see it is to "weigh with her thyself; / Then value: ofttimes nothing profits more / Than self-esteem, grounded on just and right /Well managed" (570-573), readers are made aware of how gender and power are taught by outside influences rather than springing naturally from within. For what is the standard by which Adam will weigh Eve against himself? If it is God, he has no physical body, and there is no one else. Moreover, the self-esteem Raphael encourages by this weighing is not only preposterous (as it is impossible for the aforementioned reason), but also rather disturbing in its malicious competitiveness. So what Raphael has taught Adam is that masculinity is more valued because, well, Raphael says so, and that love is founded on and tempered by competitive division.

And this is Paradise.

Bound on a Voyage Uncouth and Obscure

Beginning Book VIII is an echo of Eve's satanic dream, although this experience features Adam, Raphael, and daylight. Given our knowledge of Milton's propensity for opposites, I wasn't at all surprised to see this echo, though I was enthralled by the intricacies of its potential meanings. (I am not at all sure what these meanings are as of yet, but these amorphous thoughts will no doubt be teased out in subsequent entries.) I was particularly intrigued by Adam's declaration that, through Raphael's speech, he was able to explore and, perhaps, even experience things "else by me unsearchable" (10). Through narrative, the gap between personal experience and witnessing of event and the hearing of it seems somehow narrowed, and the discovery of God's greatness and wonder, Adam suggests, can indeed be conducted through listening to stories told of them. This statement directly--and intriguingly--contradicts Uriel's praise of Satan's quest for experiential, scientific encounters rather than being content with mere report, in Book III.

Continuing through Book VIII, the occurrences in Eve's dream are simultaneously reproduced and reimagined as Adam, his face declaring the "[e]nt'ring on studious thoughts abstruse" (39), mentally and spiritually journeys with Raphael up and through celestial boundaries into the high thoughts of God. He wishes to know of the governing order and shape of the universe, while Eve, her heart and body linked always with the earth (even--or especially--in her satanic dream of forbidden fruit), "went forth among her fruits and flow'rs" (44). The narrator tells us that, though she is perfectly capable of understanding, and perfectly able to hear, she waits for Adam to relate the story to her, and to "intermix / Grateful digressions, and solve high dispute / With conjugal caressess" (54-56). Are we to deduce, from placing this passage in conversation with others throughout Paradise Lost, that knowledge must always be sensual and patriarchical for Eve, inextricably linked with sexuality, masculine mediation, and the body?

As mentioned in a previous entry, however, the desire (clearly, another sensual word) for and reception of knowledge is also experienced in a very bodily, though somewhat different, way for Adam. Though Raphael tells his audience that "[t]o ask or search I blame thee not, for heav'n / Is as the book of God before thee set, / Wherein to read his wondrous works, and learn / His seasons, hours, or days, or months, or years" (66-69), and reading, many believe, is a purely cranial (in-?)activity, we learn that Adam feels "satisfied" (180) upon receiving answers to his questions. Throughout the poem, terms like satisfaction, hunger, and thirst are invoked repeatedly when referring to knowledge and understanding, giving the impression that the fuzzy mixing of body and mind aches for, consumes, and digests knowledge as one would food. And then, of course, we have the forbidden fruit, as well as its macabre double in Book X. However, the object of Adam's lust seems to be Raphael's stories of past, present, and future creation, designs not solely relegated to the earth but existing far above him, in the mind of God, whereas for Eve, "her fruits and flow'rs" (44) exude a constant appeal.

In another fascinating passage, Raphael, attempting to draw Adam's wandering mind back to his rightfully terrestrial existence, instructs him to"[d]ream not of other worlds, what creatures there / Live, in what state, condition, or degree" (175-176). However, as we have briefly discussed in class, it is, in fact, Raphael under God's direction who exposes Adam things outside of himself, beyond his memory and even his ability to comprehend. It seems that, here, the injunctions against discovery and improper knowledge ring a bit falsely, and perhaps, even create and fuel the desire to disobey, despite Adam's proclamations of being "freed from intricacies, taught to live / The easiest way, nor with perplexing thoughts / To interrupt the sweet of life" (182-84). Though "God hath bid dwell far off all anxious cares, / And not molest us, unless we ourselves / Seek them with wand'ring thoughts, and notions vain" (185-187), Raphael has given Adam a kind of map to wander as he will, pointing in the directions he should not go, though exciting wanderlust in those admonitions. Finally, we must ask, how did Milton feel about his historical and cultural context of travel, exploration, map-making, and colonialism? What does it mean that Satan is deemed an adventurer, a wanderer beyond his assigned boundaries, while Eve's danger lies in her staying, in a sense, too close to home?

Fall'n on Evil Days

Book VII opens with a rather strange invocation to Urania, a call for a return to the speaker's "native element" (15). For after being a guest in heaven, the speaker tells us, and soaring to the immortal heights of sublimity and seeing and telling of things which no mortal should have been able, it is "more safe" to continue his epic song with "mortal voice" (24). The speaker's seemingly humble recognition of himself as mortal and, therefore, limited in his abilities simultaneously contrasts and prefigures Adam's quest for knowledge from Raphael. We must wonder, however, if indeed the speaker's call to Urania can prefigure the actions of Adam, for the story of the fall has already occurred prior to the speaker's telling of it, and so perhaps his decision to be "narrower bound" (21) is an echo of Adam's original act. For I would argue against Paradise Lost that in this exchange with Raphael, both Adam and the angel are certainly tiptoeing on the edge of oblivion, if not overtly committing the first sin, defined here as consuming, of tasting of knowledge unfit for their natures and frames.

Directly after the speech to Urania, the speaker invokes her to tell of the exchange between Adam and Raphael. Here we see a fascinating paradox, one that permeates the entirety of the poem: the speaker, in "giving up" his authoritative, divine voice to Urania, is actually solidifying his limitless and rather god-like position. In other words, it is at the precise moment of humility, of weakness, that the speaker asserts himself as neither weak nor mortal. In restricting himself to temporal boundaries, the speaker highlights his previous abilities,as evidenced throughout the previous books, to transcend both time and space, as well as his greatness of spirit in being both wise enough to place restrictions upon himself and humble enough to seem to accept them. It is a paradox shared by Adam.

The speaker/Urania tells us that Adam, after having his questions answered in Book VI, was "Led on, yet sinless, with desire to know / What nearer might concern him, how this world / Of heav'n and earth conspicuous first began" (61-63). A few lines later, we get a clearer image of knowledge as something one eats or drinks, something one takes into his body and assimilates into his nature: "What within Eden or without was done / Before his memory, as one whose drouth / Yet scarce allayed still eyes the current stream" (65-67). The bit about his memory also harkens back to Book VI, and Satan's declaration that, as he could remember nothing before his own creation, he and the others must be self-generated. Though Adam acknowledges and seeks to understand that which came before him, and Satan denies the importance of pre-memory reality, neither are/were satisfied with their present existences as worshippers of God, content to know what he deems fit for their hearing.

Indeed, Adam admits that Raphael speaks "[g]reat things, and full of wonder in our ears, / Far differing from this world, thou hast revealed / Divine interpreter" (70-72). So wondrous are the angel's words that he is almost like translating another, unlearned language. And it is in this translation of dangerous knowledge, I think, upon Adam's request that he and Raphael fall together. For in language both reminiscent and shadowing of the fall yet to come, Adam requests that Raphael "[d]eign to descend now lower" in his willingness to impart "[t]hings above earthly thought" (80-84). Adam is, in a sense, asking Raphael to fall to Adam's own level.

And the angel, prefacing his revelations with the seeming disclaimer that no "words or tongue of Seraph can suffice, / Or heart of man suffice to comprehend" the recounting of "almighty works" (112-114) proceeds to do that which he has just stated as impossible, as far above his being and therefore unspeakable on his tongue and unhearable to Adam's ear. Humility, the seeming acknowledgement of inability to either tell or hear, actually functions as a means of transcending one's place in the divine hierarchy, and it is exactly this transcendent transgression that chained Satan to the Stygian pool.

Summoned Over Eden to Receive Their Names of Thee

Though I was initially fearful that Book VI would spend an exorbitant amount of time revealing the tedious intricacies of war--whether on earth or in heaven, war is really boring, possibly because people always devote way too much space to "enthralling" audiences with such fascinating bits as battle strategy and images of numberless, characterless grunts rushing into a field to hack eachother apart...and then we oftentimes don't even get good descriptions of wounds as a reward for trudging faithfully through the boring parts--Milton's sixth book both introduces and highlights previously existing tensions and questions of intrigue.

In Book I, we see the building of hell. Its womb is opened--rather, torn through--and from it, the demons produce materials for the construction of Pandaemonium. In Book VI we have a similar scene, as Raphael makes note that Satan's army, after taking counsel, with "innumerable hands / Were ready, in a moment up they turned / Wide the celestial soil, / and saw beneath / Th' originals of nature in their crude / Conception" (508-511). Though I am aware that Heaven also has built structures (one of the fallen angels was an architect) and paved roads, and Eden has the bower--which, one could argue, is also a product of industry--it seems that in both of these pleasant places, "natural" beauty on the surface of the lands is emphasized over the somewhat harsher materials lying below. Industry, connoting both initiative/work and laboring over and with the harsh, raw materials of gold, silver, or iron seem, in some senses, to be connected with evil--indeed, what does it mean that the architect, as the text mentions only one existing, was cast to hell to do his building?

Now, in constantly turning over and burrowing into stages of existence below one's present one, in always casting one's eyes and the labors of one's hands downward, Satan and his followers can be viewed as creating their own falls, as casting themselves down into the belly of worlds by degrees. However, their actions could also be seen as sinful self-reliance, of industrial self-fashioning in defiance of God in the destruction and reshaping of his dark materials. Making the cannon, Raphael tells us, was a concocting, a mingling of substances apparently sinful in their joining--this sense of blasphemous and corrupting construction of materials by evil hands is a theme that runs throughout the text.

The other, rather disturbing point I would like to think about here is Raphael's proclamation that, as punishment for their rebellion, Satan and his crew are "[c]ancelled from heav'n and sacred memory, / Nameless in dark oblivion let them dwell" (VI.379-380). But we see that our narrator, already occupying a dubious position in relation to the fallen (he seems to have been chained with them on the Stygian pool) has recounted them, recalled them for his audience, as has Satan in his epic catalogue. Though God and Raphael invoke "eternal silence" to "be their doom" (385), the narrator, Satan, and even Raphael disobey and remember these names and histories to both Adam and ourselves as distant listeners. In what ways then, I wonder, are narrators, storytellers, and audience members implicated in calling up and calling forth Satan's name, memory, and finally, person, from the deep?

How Without Remorse the Ruin of so many Glorious Ones

Ack! The GRE Subject Test in Literature is this Saturday--as a result, poor blog, you are being just a little neglected. I promise I will make it up to you after the weekend (and hey, the upside to this test? ETS adores Paradise Lost, as well as critical engagements with Milton, such as Johnson's work).

For now, however, I will placate my sad and lonely blog with a few words on Book V. Though I was entranced by the entirety of Eve's description of her dream, I was particularly intrigued by Adam's declaration that thoughts are separate from actions, and that a corrupt thought in no way stains either the soul or the body. "Evil," he tells Eve, "into the mind of god or man / May come and go, so unapproved, and leave /No spot or blame behind" (X. 117-119). A lovely sentiment on the surface becomes somewhat specious, however, when we juxtapose the birth of Sin from Satan's head. A contradiction becomes immediately apparent, for Satan's thoughts, not yet realized in the physical or external capacities, not only quite literally generate evil, but his thoughts fully formed, one could argue, seal his fate and testify to his already fallen nature. Evil thoughts mark his "body"--a complicated term here, I know--and make a new one, a female form translated from ethereal thought to firm, corporeal reality.

An instance of intrigue requiring the potential danger of evil contemplation.

And Betrayed Him Counterfeit

Since my first reading of Paradise Lost, I've wondered about the strangeness of Satan's momentarily ineffable soliloquy in Book IV. Upon seeing the first couple surrounded by frisking beasts and the heavy scents of perfect fruit, Satan is riveted and rendered speechless--this latter result is, as we've remarked upon in class, an unusual state of being for the fiendish superstar. Finally recollecting himself he proclaims the new beings "[l]ittle inferior; whom my thoughts pursue / With wonder, and could love, so lively shines / In them divine resemblance" (IV.362-63). It was over Satan's meditation on his ability to love that I initially stumbled, not expecting such an oddly shaped pebble to dwell on the road through Paradise Lost.

Now, it is in fact possible--indeed, quite probable--that Satan's love for the first pair is only another incarnation of his own narcissism, another manifestation of his lust for the holy glowy fairy dust once present in/on himself, but is now, as the heavenly host repeatedly remarks, sadly and hideously faded. Such a love, such a wonder, appears to be yet another perversion of God's authentic version, though Satan's experience of love does indeed seem to have its own generative properties, as we have seen in the birth of Sin. It is of note that we also see this satanic narcissism in Eve's estimation of Adam's appearance as "less fair, / Less winning soft, / less amiably mild, / That that smooth wat'ry image" (477-80) of her own face. This narcissism does not produce anything, however, for Eve is a derived creature--a character rather than an author--called into being by the flesh and bone of another, "lent," possessed, and recalled by Adam (482-483).

Returning to Satan, one could therefore argue that there is nothing strange here, nothing out of character in Satan's adoration not of Adam and Eve but of the "divine resemblance" permeating their being. I find this a bit too clean for the complexities I see occurring, however, for if we were to consider that Satan's treachery was in fact the result of love and, as we hear a bit later in Paradise Lost, the desire to liberate from tyranny, I think it would trouble not only our reception of the entirety of Paradise Lost, but of the Judeo-Christian master narrative.

The Fall would then be conceived of as Satan's intent not to destroy humanity but, as he states, to seek league and "mutual amity so strait, so close, / That I with you must dwell, or you with me" (376-377). As he cannot stay in Eden, he must bring humanity to hell "[w]hich I as freely give; hell shall unfold, / To entertain you two" (380-382). (Of course, it's another Satanic delusion, his belief that he owns hell, that somehow God bequeathed it to his rebels. But let's suspend disbelief for just a moment.) When the class of ENGL 195 read Milton's text, the great majority of us took no account of this troubling and troubled kidnapping/love of Satan, preferring to stick to the expected storyline: hatred and jealousy motivate the Fiend, not love or caring of any kind. I would, for the most part, agree, while adding that Satan is depicted as the father of lies, and so we as wise readers should distrust everything that he says, thinks, and does.

However, I would also note that in the retelling of his triumphant temptation, Satan "edits" out this aspect of his story, suggesting that he experienced something troubling to himself as well as to us, something strange and paralysing and potentially transformative. It's hard to tell, however, and this is the risk one takes in being a devil's advocate.

Fluttered Into Rags

It strikes me as strange, the unappealing nature of God as presented in Book III. I found myself skimming the heavenly dialogue, scraps of Milton's text mingling with half-remembered scriptures to form a dull, moth-eaten script of boring. In these moments I recall Blake's assertion that Milton must have been a Satanist at heart, a fiendish sympathizer on the page if not in his conscious life. Though I ultimately must disagree, I appreciate the sentiment, for I also find Satan & co. much more engaging characters than any of the heavenly host.

Perhaps, I wonder, if this is due to the seeming lack of action in heaven. While hell is filled with constant movement, and Satan is journeying through the depths of Night over the continuously transforming and warring elements, God sees. He is an eye, a spectator seemingly removed from the pulse of life. Perhaps instead of reifying the opposition constructed between sight/action, mind/body, however, this opens up a space for us consider that sight is itself an exercise of power--the all-piercing gaze of the Almighty is, in fact, one of his primary characteristics, and it also appears the most frightening. For his thunderbolts can harm and his arms can throw down into oblivion, but his eyes can know. (As this is not a very developed thought, I shall end it here and return to it throughout the course of the semester.)

I am also curious about the role of the narrator in Book III. I read with great pity his description of being surrounded by "cloud instead, and ever-during dark" (III.45) even in the presence of brilliant light. However, we remember that God is also perpetually surrounded by darkening cloud in Book II, and though "the book of knowledge fair / Presented with a universal blank / Of nature's works to me expunged and razed, / And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out (III.47-50), we read his call for inward eyes to be "plant[ed]" (53), God-like eyes that can see things "invisible to mortal sight" (55). The boundaries separating narrator from the divine influence have become, for me, extremely blurry.

However, we also read in the opening of Book III that the narrator considers himself as having "[e]scaped the Stygian pool, though long detained / In that obscure sojourn" (14-15). Here, we can make a connection between the state/fate of the fallen angels and that of the narrator. The demons were chained to the burning pool, though they were eventually able to escape through Satan's animating voice--the narrator seems to claim a similar experience, as if he took part in their punishment and liberation (as well as Satan's long journey from hell to earth) in the process of merely documenting it or guiding readers through these occurrences. Does the narrator resemble both God and Satan, then? Or one more so than the other, and if that one is Satan (having seemingly experienced his punishment and acted as his travel companion), how should we approach his recitation/reliving of the events? What are the differences between God's sight and the narrator's?

Ah, more questions than answers. Perhaps Blake was right--it would certainly make things less complex (but then, not nearly as fun).

With a Thousand Various Mouths

If forced to choose the most interesting "theme" in Book II, I would have to say the concern with locating, mapping, regaining, and mixing boundaries. This concern is witnessed both in relation to physical boundaries (seeking that which "border[s] on light" (II.959) as well as in "spiritual" or elemental boundaries: when we learn that the demons wish "earth with hell / To mingle and involve" (383-384), there is, I think, a wonderful ambiguity as to what is being mingled here, physical limits or characteristics. Or, of course, both.

I have mentioned my interest in how space and land are sometimes written of as influencing bodily structure, physiognomy, and character makeup, and we see a great deal of this in Book II. Belial's speech mentions the hope of adaptation to hell's elements, a mingling of heavenly and hellish influence in the transformation--Belial would, I think, call this process a refinement--from angel of heaven to citizen of hell. Form would reflect belonging, would advertise identity and confine one to "home." This transformation not only involves the adaptation to new boundaries, but the inscription of them onto the "flesh" and "bones" of these ethereal beings. Though the spirits can manipulate their shapes, there is a definite sense of falsity, of "[i]mitat[ion" (270) in their attempting to retain certain elements of their former selves.

When Satan is poised on what I imagine to be the edge of Chaos he sees the "dark materials" in their "pregnant causes mixed / Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight" (II.913.914). But though there is mixing, there is never a true coming together, never an unholy mixing resulting in hybridity. Indeed, this mixing seems only to strength boundaries that separate the elements, and "they around the flag / Of each his faction" (900-901) rally. What does this say about the essentials of nature in Book II, I wonder, about the mingling that really is no mingling? Also, is the mixing of elements, the transformation from one into another itself a torture? We learn that one of the divine punishments involves the feeling "by turns the bitter change / Of fierce extremes" (598-599). Of course the going from immense hot to immense cold would be hideous and the change would serve only to emphasize the pains inherent in these extremes. But is there also a disorienting sense to this feeling of transformation, a horrible and painful confusion produced by the simultaneous blending and strengthed separation of extreme elements?

More to come.

Brushed with the Hiss of Rustling Wings

First, I would like to pause for a moment to fully appreciate our reading Paradise Lost...yay!

That said, I confess it was a bit difficult for me to craft a coherent entry concerning just one or two aspects of Book I--so I decided that coherency is overrated. This entry hopes to put forth a few ideas concerning select passages, forming, I hope, a kind of outline for larger thought. This is the second time I have read Book I, and I must confess, I missed so much the first time (a statement that will be repeated, no doubt, each time I return to the text). The first and most striking "theme" (for lack of a better term) that I encountered in this reading was the character of sound in Book I, a theme that remains throughout the entirety of the work. I realized that in my first reading, I painted hell with sound, with clashing and bestial growling and the shaking of chains, imagining the screams and cackles inhabiting many contemporary conceptualizations of the place of suffering.

Milton's hell provides a shocking and somewhat more terrifying vision: a noiseless hell, where speech is courageous because it dares to "[b]reak[ ] the horrid silence" (11). When the demons are eventually roused (by the power of Satan's voice, a different and more fascinating thread of this concern with sound), their hateful and martial sounds assault me not so much because they originate in barbarous and evil beings, but because they are so very loud. There is much to be thought and said about the aural quality of Paradise Lost, and I hope to explore it more in our class discussions.

A second point I wish to address is the conceptualization of the nature of evil. Satan tells us that
"To do aught good never will be our task, / But ever to do ill our sole delight, / As being the contrary to his high will / Whom we resist" (13). Are we to believe that evil is only that which "contrary" to the will of God? In some ways, this proclamation seems to make evil simultaneously more benign and malignant.

Satan's role as historian, as (auto/)biographer of the Fall is especially intriguing. When he recounts the swarm of angels that "Shot after us in storm, o'erblown hath laid/ The fiery surge, that from the precipice / Of heav'n received us falling, and the thunder / Winged red with lightening and impetuous rage" (13), I wonder at his interjection of the thunder's aesthetic beauty in his tale. Though it can be argued that all of Paradise Lost is comprised of beautiful, bordering on sublime (it is, after all, a epic about unimaginable things) imagery that invests even hell and Satan with immense beauty, I am made curious by Satan's relationship to sublimity and to his role(s) of author and documentor.

To All Extreme Parts which now lie Numb and Neglected

Though Milton's The Ready and Easy Way contains many fascinating threads, there were a few moments that made me pause and entertain the notion of Milton's possible influence on contemporary American conceptualizations of liberty, industry, self-reliance, education, and biblical exegesis and application. Now, I wish to note here that I am in no way seeking to find a kind of origin story, a place and time solely responsible for birthing, say, the notion of pulling one up by one's own bootstraps or some such thing. I find it erroneous and just plain tacky to use historical texts as means only to help understand or provide "background" for contemporary thought, as historical boundaries, though indeed somewhat arbitrary in their construction, are tools employed in the engagement of difference; they are valuable ways to approach change over time.

"Relevancy" is a term I've often heard used to justify this type of shallow and irresponsible relationship to history. As I hate the word (as well as the concept, of course), I must say that I do not offer this reflection as an attempt to make Milton's Way relevant (unfortunately, read "important"); rather, I wish to highlight some similarities and potential sites of influence while avoiding a causal narrative. As influence occurs both overtly and covertly, consciously and not, and is not restricted to chronology (for example, reading Milton could have influenced American revolutionaries while reading American revolutionaries influences how we read Milton), it is, I think, valuable to consider this relationship between American nationalism and British/Milton's nationalism.

The passage that springs immediately to mind concerns Milton's call for self-fashioning and independence, two concepts for me so intimately linked with American identity and rhetoric that it was a bit difficult to separate the different historical moments: "[I]f we were ought else but sluggards or babies," Milton writes, "we need depend on none but God and our own counsels, our own active virtue and industry!" (886). Activity, independence, manliness and masculinity (886), and of course, industry seem keywords in the ideals of American democracy, indeed, key aspects of American conceptualizations of the self as the "rugged individual". They are also, clearly, central to Milton's human, British ideal.

Another slightly divergent yet related train of thought I want to briefly pursue is that of the "watery situation" (890). As the footnote elucidates, Milton is responding to the idea that climate breeds character: that where one lives is, in fact, who one is. It's a fascinating concept that brought to mind J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur's 18th century work, Letters from an American Farmer. In the text, de Crevecoeur devotes much of his time to describing the different kinds of people/climates he encounters in America. The hyphen placed between "people" and "climates" is meant to convey a mingling of the concepts, for de Crevecoeur proclaims that land determines identity. Americans, he argues, are from all around the globe, called forth to their true home; climate then creates and distributes these various temperaments over the nation.

Milton, however, proposes an interesting solution to what I am calling geographical determinism. Though acknowledging the presence of his and the nation's watery situation, he claims that "good education and acquisite wisdom ought to correct the fluxible fault" of "fickleness" (890). The accumulation of knowledge, the gaining of education, can change a kind of destiny decreed by location. Rather than being subject to nature's molding of the self in a strange reversal of the pathetic fallacy---the self, both body and mind, sympathize with and reflect nature rather than nature sympathizing with and reflecting human emotion---Milton offers education as a tool in attaining autonomous authorship, the freedom to craft oneself apart from the tyrannies of king and demarcated space.

A quick note before ending: I am really interested in the ways in which Milton melds biblical history/text with his present political conditions (and, in the Way, his own text). This, I think, is a bold and amazing occurrence, something that opens up a space for us to think about the complex identities of texts as both constantly fluid and fixed historical products.

The Prescribed Satisfaction of An Irrational Heat

I found Milton's Doctrine and Dsicipline of Divorce not only surprisingly easy to engage but downright pleasant to read. Though I don't have a great deal of time now to discuss my thoughts in any length worthy of the text, I do wish to highlight a few segments I found particularly intriguing:

1) the allegorical figures of error (a "blind and serpentine body" (697) lacking a head) and custom (a face without a body). I must admit that I'm not quite sure how to approach this fantastically grotesque pairing, but I am deeply impressed with it.

2)Milton's argument against those who, when failing to defame the text, attempt to attack the author. This notion of the text--man's intellectual baby, according to Aeropagitica--being a distinct entity, divorced in many aspects from its author (or from the sins of its father, rather) opens up ways to talk about how authorial power, intent, and contamination in relation to book production might have been conceptualized in the seventeenth century.

3) the linking of occurrences in "personal," internal world of home and family with the health and well-being of the state. In relation to this, the proclamation of Britain as a leader in innovation and liberation--a historical identity as that which is responsible for "teaching nations how to live" (701)--and therefore as a necessary supporter of charitable divorces. Also, Milton's statement concerning his usage of the English tongue to convey his message when, he writes, "[i]t might perhaps more fitly have been written in another tongue" (702).

4) The dichotomy that Milton creates between intellectual "textualists" and common men of common sense and good heart.

This is, of course, an adumbration of forthcoming, more detailed interaction. Something to think about in the meantime, however.