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The
task of the revolutionary mythologer is to furnish the political process
with a set of efficacious symbols, universalize its meanings by inscribing
them within a global drama, unify its disparate forces by the power of
the image, and summon the past into metaphorical compact with the present.
At stake in such revolutionary mythologizing is a struggle over the signifier,
a fight for the hegemonic symbol, which is appropriated now this way,
now that, depending on the balance of discursive forces. If revolutions
lend themselves to these ends it is because there is something
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theatrical about them in the first place, traced as they are by the
play of fantasy, rhetoric and fiction, masking, posturing and unmasking,
a costumed or uniformed staging which is always already symbolic and
so easily translatable into poetic idiom. It did not take a Yeats to
mythologize the Easter uprising: when James Connolly, setting out for
the Post Office on that morning in 1916, whispered to a fellow republican
that of course they didn't have the faintest chance of success, he was
declaring the insurrection fiction and symbol from the outset, drawing
upon the ancient Irish tradition (still alive in the Northern Irish
hunger strikers of today) that failure and blood sacrifice are always
finally more life-yielding than the odd military victory. As far as
Connolly was concerned, the only good body was a dead one. But revolutions
are symbolic to their core in another sense too: what the mythologer
makes appear within the parochial content of a particular struggle is
the glimmering substance of a broader, deeper political history, of
which the particular event is microcosmic. Such indeed was the bold
wager of Lenin and Trotsky in 19 17- that their own strike for power
would prove metonymic of wider anti-capitalist insurrection in Europe,
without which they knew very well that their own revolution was doomed
to isolation, invasion and eventual loss. The mythologer must insist
that what is in train here, for all its sordid contingent content, is
of world-historical import; and it is for this reason that he will invoke
Gabriel or Cuchulain, Lucifer or Los, Deirdre or the Druids, pressing
these mythological figures into what Walter Benjamin would call a shocking
"constellation" with the forces of the present, creating a
revolutionary "monad" in which linear time (always on the
side of Caesar) is abruptly arrested and the shades of the dead congregate
around the empty pit of the present to brim it with their life-giving
blood.
If mythologies tend to magnify the revolution, however, they also serve
to mystify it. Writing it out in a verse has more than one meaning.
\Vhat cannot yet be rendered intelligible in historical materialist
terms is displaced instead into an idealist discotirse of the authentic
Albion, sin and redemption, ancient Ireland, good and evil. Bourgeois
revolutions have a particular need to grace their activities with such
imagery since, as Marx comments in the opening pages of the Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, they are constantly embarrassed by the
grotesque discrepancy between the paucity of their social content and
the visionary heroism of their rhetorical forms. "Hegel remarks
somwhere," Marx writes with strange
insouciance (he had in fact just been reading the Philosophy of History),
"that all facts and personages of great importance in world history
occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy,
the second as farce." As if shamed by the squalor of their social
content -fr~edom is freedom to exploit, equality the equality of the
marketplace -the great
bourgeois revolutions live a hiatus between signifier and signified,
tricking, out their meagre ends in the flashy insignia of previous epochs:
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In the classically austere traditions of the Roman Republic [the French:
revolutionary] gladiators found the ideals and the art forms, the self-:
deceptions that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the'
bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles and to keep
their i enthusiasm on the high plane of great historical tragedy. Similarly,
at' another stage of development, a century earlier, Cromwell and the:
English people had borrowed speech, passions and illusions from the
Old i Testament for their bourgeois revolution. When the real aim had
been
achieved, when the bourgeois transformation of English society had been:
accomplished, Locke supplanted Habakkuk.1
Or, we might add, Milton gave way to Defoe.
The past is that which we seem doomed compulsively to repeat; the; revolution
is a neurotic symptom which at once conceals and reveals its true i
content in displaced rhetorical form. The repetition, Marx insists,
happens i just when we think thC)t we are creating something new; Milton's:
revolutionaries, in seeking to repair the Fall, end up by rehearsing
it. This is i what is known as original sin -or, as Marx puts it in
his own idiom, the i way that "the tradition of all the dead generations
weighs like a nightmare! on the brains of the living." History
is the nightmare from which we are' trying to wake up, but which in
doing so we merely dream again. Perhaps: this is because the sin is
original, there at the beginning: the origin itself is i flawed, the
first parents marred, and so history becomes a parodic repetition
of a crime which was there from the outset. If the serpent lurks within
the I garden, the origin is already defaced. This is why, as Wittgenstein:
comments, it is hard to think of an origin without wanting to go back:
beyond it. Yet at the same time it is only by dreaming the past that
we can
wake from it: since the past is what we are made of, we can redeem the
i present only by converting images of nightmare into dreams of emancipation.
: The revolutionary repetitions, Marx reminds us, are not merely parodic"
caricatures of what was no doubt already a caricature: they also make
the! spirit of revolution walk again:
Thus the awakening of the dead in those revolutions served the purpose
i of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; of magnifying
i
the given task jp imagination, not of fleeing from its solution in reality;
of
finding once more the spirit of revolution, not of making its ghost
walk about again.2
Only by turning back can we move forward; only if Milton turns round
to ! face Eden with the horror-struck face of Benjamin's Angelus Novus
can he! be blown by its winds towards the kingdom of the future. The
past must be : pressed violently into the service of the present, classical
traditions! heretically appropriated and miswritten to redeem the time.
If one can be a : heretic in the truth, one can also be a truthteller
in heresy.
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All of this, as
Marx suggests, has its farcical incongruity. Is all that highfalutin
talk in heaven really about Cromwell & Co? If you "take your
poetry from the past," Marx warns, you will magnify the present
struggle only at the price of mystifying it. It is only the socialist
revolution which, Marx comments enigmatically, will draw its poetry
from the future, imagine from a place yet to be born. Yet by drawing
their poetry from the past, the bourgeois revolutions do more than furnish
imaginary solutions ("it was all because of original sin")
to real political problems. The left wing of such revolutions, which
will of course be constantly betrayed, is thereby also able to dream
a future beyond such ephemeral matters as Bonaparte or Charles, nurturing
in their mythological dramas the energies which the revolution quelled.
Throwing history into reverse, the left wing retreats to an origin in
order to keep alive a future beyond the shabby sell-outs of the bourgeoisie.
Their mythologies glean the trace of the revolution within the revolution,
a submerged subtext within the dispiriting narratives of official bourgeois
history, whether this subtext is, as with Milton, the salvific history
of the godly remnant or, as with Walter Benjamin, the tradition of the
oppressed that haunts ruling-class history as its silenced underside.
Blake knew that only a revolution which penetrated to the body itself
could finally be victorious; Milton, as Christopher Hill remarks, believed
that "the desire for reformation did not sink deeply enough into
the consciences of supporters of the Revolution, did not transform their
lives." Thus Hill reads Paradise Lost not as the expression of
political defeatism but as the urging of a new political phase: "the
foundations must be dug deeper, into the hearts of individual believers,
in order to build more securely." 3
Today, perhaps, after Gramsci, we would say such a project involves
the question of hegemony. Writing after the debacle of the European
socialist revolutions, Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks is constrained
to consider not only the structures of military and political power,
but those less palpable, pervasive devices whereby a ruling order secures
the internal assent of its subordinates, inscribing its imperatives
in the very texture of their experience. Those who are heretics in the
truth will tend to suppress that whole region -Gramsci names it "culture"
-in their fervid pursuit of political goals, and will thus short-cut
the struggle for hearts as peremptorily as did the puritan radicals.
The heart of stone, modelled on the graven tablets of the Law, must
yield to the heart of flesh, the interior space of subjectivity and
the unconscious, if any transformative project is to succeed. The Nameof-the-Father
must, however, give way to the Other of human flesh, discourse and desire,
as Milton anticipates that the Father will finally abdicate power to
his human son. Part of the task of what Gramsci terms the "organic"
intellectuals is to spur on this process by challenging politicaJ hegemony
in its spiritual-ideological forms. The organic intellectual is the
product of a politically emergent class; and in seeking to organize
its inchoate demands into the coherence of a unified "world view,"
he or she
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must strive at once to undermine the culture of the "traditional"
intelligentsia, and to assimilate individual members of that key group
to the revolutionary cause. John Milton, son of a prosperous bourgeois,
emerged by a laborious process of self-production to become the organic
intellectual of the English revolution, so placed within the traditional
intellectual culture as to revise, reject, assimilate and appropriate
its contents in the cause of his own people. His stout Baconian contempt
for aspects of traditionalist Cambridge was not, of course, some infantile
ultra-leftism: as a "centrist" ideologue, occupying a mediatory
position, he could make that culture work for him, dislocate it from
the inside, "refunction" it, as Brecht would have said, to
alternative ideological ends. The organic intellectual reinflects tradition,
as the revolutionary present parodies and reinscribes the past.
The contentions within the very form of Paradise Lost, between classical
device, religious transcendentalism, and the discourses of representation
and rationality, are surely a sign of this dialectical situation. Pierre
Macherey has written of the ways in which literary texts, by dint of
their formal or figural devices, tend to press into contradiction their
own ideology, throwing its covert incoherence into embarrassing relief.4
There is surely something very much like this at work in Milton's masterpiece,
which struggles constantly with the problem of pressing into narrational
and representational form a body of myth inherently resistant to such
figuration. And it is precisely against the consequent slippages, aporias
and inconsistencies that the poem's realist or Leavisian readers have
most sternly protested. The work is not really very realistic: at one
moment Satan is chained 1'10 the burning lake, and before you can look
again he is making his way to the shore. George Eliot would have handled
the whole thing incomparably better. What is fascinating about Paradise
Lost, however, is precisely its necessary lack of self-identity -the
persistent mutual interferences of what is stated and what is shown,
the contradictory entanglements of epic immediacy and hermeneutical
discourse, the fixing of significations at one level only to produce
a sliding of them at another. The epic form of traditional intellectual
culture at once magnifies and mystifies the prosaic realism of bourgeois
revolution; and conversely, that discursive bourgeois realism is exposed
in all its paucity by the epical splendour even as the realism appropriates
and undercuts it.
What is at work in the poem's tortuous form, then, is an historically
determined clash of semiotic codes. On the one hand, we could claim
that the text's classical and sacred mise-en-scene is embarrassingly
at odds with its discourses of sense and reason, in the manner of Marx's
semiotically disrupted bourgeois revolutions. But at the same time we
might see this embarrassment as working both ways. If the bourgeois
ideolog~cal need to
narrate, explain, apologize threatens in its discursive realism to undo
the very rhetorical frames in which it is staged, this is at once to
its detriment for such magnifying, universalizing forms are as Marx
points out a
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bourgeois revolutionary requirement -and the sign of a certain deconstruction
of traditionalist culture at the hands of a progressive bourgeois rationality.
Milton's Protestant commitment to sense and discourse, his refusal of
the idolatry of the apodictic image, his secularizing faith in rational
causality: all of these impulses subtly assert themselves over the very
symbolic forms of which they stand in need. Traditional culture, reverently
summoned to illuminate the present, finds itself in that very act appropriated,
swerved from, rewritten in heretical terms.
The clash of semiotic codes in Paradise Lost highlights with peculiar
visibility what we might call the "materiality" of the poem's
forms; and nowhere is this materiality more evident than in its language.
The remorselessly logocentric Leavis, for whom the signifier, emptied
of any action or substance of its own, must be no more than the obedient
bearer of a signified, can see little in the "Miltonic music"
but an external embellishment, clumsily at odds with the springs of
sense. When T. S. Eliot remarked that you needed to read the poem twice,
once for the sound and once for the meaning, he too had been struck
by its contrived dislocation of the unified sign, the sonorous excess
of language over meaning, the way in which the poem's language works
athwart the "naltural" texture of the senses and so fails
to repress its own artifice. Nothing could be further from the swift
fusion of the Metaphysical conceit than the calculated self-conscious
unfurling of the epic simile, with all its whirring machinery of production
on show. As Habakkuk gives way to Locke, the materiality of the signifier
in English discourse is on the point of yielding to the naturalized
representational sign of bourgeois empiricism, which will serve the
ideological ends of middle-class rule extremely well. Milton's rhetoric
puts up a last-ditch resistance to this shackling of the sign, irreducible
as that rhetoric is to the "natural" rhythms of a speaking
voice. If a strain of Edenic sensuousness lives on, it can be found
among other places in the carnality of the word, and the materialist
in Milton takes delight in it.
It is not, of course, that Milton is anything other than profoundly
logocentric as an ideologue; but aspects of his poetic practice run
counter to the theorye One might argue, indeed, that logocentrism has
been rendered in any full sense untenable by the fall from Eden, where
thing and word were at one. Milton's God is purely, unmediately present
as spirit in his "material"
deeds; but he is 'so only from the standpoint of eternity. Viewed from
the fallen realm of a revolutionary history gone awry, those acts must
be painfully, laboriously decoded and elaborated, in a hermeneutical
discourse ineluctably subjected to temporality, dispersion and ambiguity.
Such indeed is the traditional nature of allegory, which as Fredric
Jameson comments is
"the privileged mode of our own life i_n time, a clumsy deciphering
of
meaning from moment to moment, the painful attempt to restore a continuity
to heterogeneous, disconnected instants. ,,5 In short, to justify the
ways of God to men; for the transcendental signifier has apparently
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withdrawn aloofly from his own handiwork, leaving behind him a tormentedly
ambiguous historical text which must be laboriously scanned for signs
of his presence and purpose. Milton's own poem, then, is not only about
the Fall but a consequence of it: if our first parents had not introduced
difference, lack, deformity and. desire into the world, nothing of this
groping, besieged apologia would be necessary.
Milton's Arian heresy is perhaps relevant to this point, qualifying
as it does any full-bloodedly logo centric view of Christ. The Son is
not the full co-substantial presence of the Father; he is not Emmanuel,
or "God with us."
Yet this swerve from Christian orthodoxy is also, as Blake saw, part
of Milton's patriarchal unregeneracy. For the teaching of orthodox Christianity
is precisely that what we have in the coming of the Son is the coming
of the Father. It is God himself, not some delegate or sub-committee,
who is hung
on a cross; to manifest the political truth that those who love sufficiently.
well will be killed by the state. The Father for traditional Christianity
becomes through the Incarnation loving friend and fellow sufferer, which
is to say that he is not the Father at all, for the Father is decentred
in Christ to become brother and sister. It is this doctrine which the
Pharisees of all ages find hard to take, with their stiff-necked assurance
that respectability and self-righteousness will allow them to bargain
their way to heaven, their idolatrous confidence that they can impress
the living God by flexing their ethical muscles, showing him how very
moral and right-living they are. It is the Pharisees who cannot accept
the scandal that God has always already forgiven them, that they can
forget about trying to impress him because he is part of their flesh
and blood. It is they who define God as Satan ("The Accuser",
in Hebrew), fear him as a punitive patriarch and so try to get even
with him. They cannot swallow the sordid truth that the N ame-of-theFat~er
has in the person of Christ become a broken human body, no longer the
judge on the bench but co-criminal and counsel for the defence. Milton
continues in part to define the Father as Satan, as a logical consequence
of his Arian heresy.
If there is a twentieth-century candidate for Milton's Satan, it is
surely Stalin. Both are overdetermined images of pompous princeling
and perverted revolutionary, undecidable amalgams of traditional monarch
and power-thirsty popular representative. The image of Satan is the
point where the one blends inseparably into the other, as in the Eastern
European bureaucracies. Stalinism has its own kind of satanic "fate"
-the laws of development of the productive forces -but combirles this
economism with an equally satanic voluntarism: the mighty power of the
people, and the rest. What after all was the forced industrialization
and collectivization but the desperate flailing of a revolution which
could not succeed in isolation, and so like Satan's strike against heaven
was in a certain sense predetermined to devour its own children? Any
society which seeks to use the theory and practice of Marxism to catapult
itself from chronic backwardness into the
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twentieth century stands in grave danger of Stalinism, if more advanced
forces do not come to its aid. For Marxism is a theory and practice
of the transformation of developed capitalist societies into socialist
ones; and that practice is dependent upon developed productive forces,
accumulated
capital and a skilled, advanced and organized proletariat. Without all
this,
/'
along with international solidarity, a Third World revolution will be
forced
steadily towards state bureaucratic centralization, in its drive for
the primitive accumulation of industrial capital, its need to protect
itself against imperialist invasion, its tackling of material scarcity,
and in its structural autonomy, as a state, from a dispersed revolutionary
peasantry for which it will come to "stand in." These are
the classic conditions of Stalinism, of which Lenin and Trotsky were
well aware.
To blame Marxism for these conditions is then somewhat akin to blaming
God for the failure of seventeenth-century revolutionary hopes. To blame
God in this way, Milton sees, can mean only one thing: that the Puritan
bureaucrats, opportunists and careerists are then let comfortably off
the moral and political hook. It was destiny after all; nothing to feel
guilty about. But the failure of revolutionary hopes was not of course
predestined,
and neither was Stalinism. To believe so is to exculpate a later set
of
bureaucrats, opportunists and careerists; the European social democratic
parties who in betraying their own working classes helped to isolate
the newly founded Soviet Union; and the imperialist invading armies
who decimated the class which had made the revolution in Russia, thus
leaving a bureaucratic workers' state suspended over a dwindled, exhausted
popular base. There are always those who, like the Koestlers and the
Orwells, find it convenient and persuasive to blame the God that failed;
but if we wanted a more accurate analogue of Paradise Lost in the twentieth
century, we might do worse than take a look at Trotsky's The Revolution
Betrayed.
Notes
1. Lewis S. Feuer (ed.), Marx and Engels: Basic Writings on Politics
and Philosophy (London, 1969), 361-2. For a semiotic analysis of Marx's
Eighteenth Brumaire, see Jeffrey Mehlman, Revolution and Repetition
(Berkeley, 1977), and my own Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary
Criticism (London, 1981),
162-70.
2. Feuer, op. cit., 362.
3. Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (Harmondsworth,
1977),
350.
4. Pierre Macherey, A Theory of Literary Production (London, 1978).
5. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton, 1971), 72.
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