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?