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Electronic Reserve Text: KENNETH GROSS: Satan and the Romantic Satan: a notebook from Re-Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987). Our moods do not
believe in each other. § What kind of claims might I make on behalf of Milton's devil? It has i become far too easy, or too easy to attack, to call him a hero, even if we see in him aspects of Milton in his roles of poet, visionary quester, rebel against tyranny, conspirator for liberty, propagandist, worshiper in a church of one. And yet he remains an inescapable object of attention, and of troubled I admiration --whether we admire the character or the force that calls him into being. I might call him a modernist hero, a hero of the fallen imagination, though I am then not sure where or when I would place, or how describe, the Fall. Perhaps I could demonstrate his claims to a kind of heroism that one cannot identify as fully or as adequately in any other character of Paradise Lost. Of course, most of us presume that the battle has been fought already, that the heroic Satan (the Romantic Satan) is primarily an error of neophytes, a figure whose claims on the mind are admitted only to be cast out by a sophisticated appeal to Milton's way of testing and tempting the reader (and perhaps himself). But still I would want to account for so persistent a fascination, one that repeated readings in Milton criticism have, in my own case, clarified rather than dispelled. I would want to speak about Satan not as advocatus diaboli --almost always a tool of orthodoxy, a ventriloquist's dummy --nor as heretic -though real heresy, were it possible here, might sharpen debate more than any pluralism. I would rather speak as someone willing to take seriously his own naivete, to examine its stakes. |
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[319]
"Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense!" warns Wittgenstein. "But you must pay attention to your nonsense."(1) § One must
say that Milton could scarcely have believed in anything like a heroic
devil, indeed that the whole structure of his religious thinking committed
him to an ultimate deprecation of the devil as absurd or ungrounded.
(And why else are there devils and demons, if not to focus our will
to deprecate?) Yet any appeal to Milton's beliefs (his categorical distinctions,
his constitutive habits of representation, his usable or intractable
authorities, his investments in possibility) is hardly unproblematic.
And it is not only that the poet may seem to have had hidden or conflicting
beliefs, divided loyalties, secret identifications, or that the burdens
of poetry and belief are not always compatible -all recurrent and much
studied issues. It is also that, even if I am convinced that Milton
shared basic stances or habits of mind with, say, Luther or Calvin,
and that these are powerfully incarnated in the poetry, I am not perfectly
sure of what it means for us to try and ground our reading of the poetry
on a hypothetical commitment to the polarized terms of the poet's belief.
Such a commitment is often seen as a necessary, even a sufficient condition
for reading Milton's epic. Yet this asks a kind of critical fideism,
a sacrificio intellectus, that in this particular context can breed
its own sort of pride and bad faith. Must one simply give up the game,
then? A philosopher might say that our skepticism lies not simply in
our not knowing what to believe, but in not knowing quite what belief
itself looks like, how it speaks, though we may think we have a sense
of how it has spoken. Even many of our sympathetic ways of talking about
religious beliefs -assuming that we do not blandly deplore religion
as divisive ideology, mystified politics, or spilt poetry -tend to mark
an abysmal separation from the things they seek to name, the forms of
life they seek to describe. And if I am uncertain of what belief looks
like, what its grammar is, what its scope and stakes are, how can I
calmly suspend disbelief, or speak coherently of the beliefs of another? [320] holds up the hypothesis that there is an evil demon or genius who creates and controls the sensible world, who deceives our credulity with the illusion that we have bodies, that we perceive objects.(3) That demon is no residue of archaically dualistic or buried gnostic sentiments. It is not a response to metaphysical paranoia nor a devious expression of heresy. It is not, in any common sense, a metaphor. Rather, the demon in Descartes is a pragmatic, dialectical tool, an ironic limiting case or hyperbolic fiction which frames the difficult opening stance of his skeptical program. The idea of the evil demon is, at the least, a piece of serious nonsense, a prop to his "laborious wakefulness." It is a consciously, tentatively sustained illusion that helps hold at bay other, more habitual illusions, stories, authorities, gods -hence a means to press forward the philosopher's quest through opinion to certainty, though the ghost of that hypothesis may haunt even subsequent, and more pious reconstructions of the idea of God. Would it make sense to ask for a version of Satan which could do something of the same work?
§ Percy Shelley has a clear eye for Satan's complex of moral failings, and he [321] is indeed quite ready to condemn the habits of "pernicious casuistry" which lead sympathetic readers to rationalize or excuse the "taints of ambition, envy, revenge, or a desire for personal aggrandisement" in Milton's devil on the grounds that his sufferings outweigh his crimes.(5) But he also refuses to allow that Milton's deity can yield us any purer, contrastive perspective by which to frame a critique of Satan, or that any isolable theological convictions have the power to limit what might seem purely humanistic or aesthetic responses to the imaginative shape of the poet's fable. Shelley's comments on Satan in his Defence of Poetry are keyed to his central argument that the "truths" of inherited theologies must be seen as, at best, the remnants of calcified effects of prior poetic intuitions rather than the proper causes or grounds of new creation. Given this situation, the attempt to expose the ways that Milton's figurings of the devil wrench apart the doctrinal or ideological frame of the poem becomes for Shelley a way of extending his .defense of the moral imagination against mere morality or religious moralism. (Shelley's refusal to grant the constitutive authority of theology would hold, I suspect, even were he shown that Milton was dependent on a theological poetics that traced God's presence and doctrinal values not only abstractly, but also through the turns and tropes of the scriptural Word, a Word which could be, as required, metaphorical or veridical, humblingly opaque or apparently transparent.(6) Just because his argument has elicited more protest than reflection, however, one needs to examine its implications rather carefully. Shelley begins by claiming that "Milton's poem contains within itself a philosophical refutation of that system of which, by a strange and natural antithesis, it has been a chief popular support" (my emphasis).(7) The writer's "philosophical" may jar us somewhat. The usage has a distinctly eighteenthcentury flavor, as if it referred to some sort of rational discourse opposed by nature to superstition or scholastic system. And yet the word clearly points not to overt argument but to something implicit in the poetic narrative, to a conceptual drama or parable, an iconoclastic counterplot or pattern of images such as resist the "strange and natural" ways that culture can turn poetry into propaganda. He continues immediately, as if to explain this that "nothing can exceed the energy and magnificence of the character of Satan as expressed in Paradise Lost." Here one again hesitates, for this seems so naive, so unphilosophical a reaction, since it neglects the evidence that the devil's energy tends to be dumbly antithetical, that it feeds. on willfulness, hate, self-loathing, and betrayal, and is ultimately self-destructive; that his magnificence borders on the cheaply theatrical, that it is materialistic rather than spiritual, grotesquely compensatory and competitive, as well as self-blinding. We needn't suppose, however, that Shelley himself", does not see this, given his obvious recognition of Satan's "taints." The real issue is whether the fateful history of Satan's energy allows of any simple moralization, whether its causes and hidden poisons can be traced back to [322] the devil alone.
(For to the degree that Satan reflects the "energy" and "magnificence"
of Milton's imagination, our appreciation or criticism of the fictive
character will be inescapably involved --pace C. S. Lewis --with our
appreciation or criticism of his creator.) Shelley goes on to insist
that "it is a mistake to suppose that [Milton's devil] could ever
have been intended for the popular personification of evil." The
fact that Satan is metamorphosed at the close of Book X into a mythic
or folkloric dragon, as if such were his authentic shape or telos, will
not really weigh against an argument like Shelley's that ardently refuses
to accept any such teleological simplifications, even as it refuses
to locate any singular idea of evil informing the complex, dramatic
picture of the devil. For what concerns Shelley most crucially is to
disentangle the ideas of "Satan" and "evil," to
show that one does not own the other, and to point instead to the sharing
out of a deeper sense of evil among the supernatural characters of the
poem: Shelley here covertly echoes one of Satan's own self-descriptions (as he does so shrewdly in parts of Prometheus Unbound), such that we may at first think that the hate, cunning, and refinement of device belong to the devil alone. But the list is carefully poised so as to further suggest the specularity or mutual contamination of devil and deity. It is God in his foreknowledge, working through the intricate and conscious turns of Milton's plot, who inflicts the extremest anguish on Satan through a sleepless refinement of ironic control. The poem, of course, asks us to interpret such anguish as merely the redounding back upon Satan of his own evil -something which Satan himself seems willing to confess. But Shelley's case proceeds according to a more human, as well as a dramatically acute wisdom, one that argues, moreover, not from hidden or subversive authorial intentions (which would only rationalize the conflict) but from the plain shape of Milton's fable. And for Shelley it is quite sufficient evidence of tyranny that a God, full of laughter and accusation, should watch his creature bringing himself to pain and despair by following through a course of action made possible only through that God's unacknowledged allowance: Milton's Devil as a moral being is as far superior to his God as one who perseveres in some purpose which he has conceived to be excellent in spite of adversity and torture, is to one who in the cold security of undoubted triumph inflicts the most horrible revenge upon his enemy, not from any mistaken notion of inducing him to repent of a perseverance in enmity, but with the alleged design of exasperating him to deserve new torments.(9) [323] Again, one may protest that the "purpose conceived to be excellent" decays into actions that seem petty, spiteful, victimizing, that possess at best an illusory nobility. Certainly the idea that God himself may be a tyrant, a moral agent, rather than a being untouched by the liabilities of human ethical choice, seems to fall in with Satan's politic and self-gratifying picture of God as an oppressive king. But for Shelley, I suppose, to insist in orthodox fashion that God as an agent is inevitably above moral choice and human tyranny, and yet to be counted on and obeyed as the author of moral law, is a dangerous and dehumanizing abstraction, nor can saying so make it so without the aid of human work and human persuasion (however much this turns thought and imagination blindly against the more liberating exercise of their powers). Skeptic that he is, Shelley can acknowledge the strength of such a sublimation, but he must deny its ultimate authority as well as deplore its common acceptance. His reading of God's "tyranny" will tend to look literalistic, if not satanic, from the point of view of a theological poetics in which the Christian God is the master of all love and metaphor, but Shelley's more radical poetics refuses to credit what he would see as no more than a tyrannical and idealized trope. The dramatized relation of a triumphant power to a punished subject will inescapably be the projection of a human relation (moral, psychological, or political), a relation whose image will, moreover, tend to "tempt and slay" both master and slave, and it may be a questionable measure of our success in religious purification to try and reason ourselves out of the moral unease or horror that such a projection can generate. Still, it is not a question of blaming God or exculpating Satan, which would only further literalize the conceptual drama Shelley is describing. The point is that Shelley calls into question the larger array of moral, religious, and aesthetic motives which made it possible for Milton to commit himself to such a picture within his dramatic epic in the first place. § From Shelley's preface to Prometheus Unbound: Prometheus is, in my judgement, a more poetical character than Satan because, in addition to courage and majesty and firm and patient opposition to omnipotent force, he is susceptible of being described as exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandisement, which in the Hero of Paradise Lost, interfere with the interest. The character Satan engenders in the mind a pernicious casuistry which leads us to weigh his faults with his wrongs and to excuse the former because the latter exceed all measure. In the minds of those who consider that magnificent fiction with a religious feeling, it engenders something worse.(l0) The philosophical balancing act is similar to that of the Defence, but what [324] sets this passage
apart is its closing, the oblique (and' little commented upon) reference
towards "something worse," something more pernicious than
false sympathy, which is engendered in the minds of pious as opposed
to heretical readers. One clue to what we might make of the phrase can
be found in the preface to another of Shelley's dramas, The Cenci, where
he speaks of the "restless and anatomizing casuistry" which
might move readers of his tragedy wholly to justify the murderous revenges
of Beatrice Cenci on the father who raped her.ll For if we can take
this "restless" sympathy as clearly parallel to the "pernicious
casuistry" of fhose who labor to excuse Satan's faults, it might
be plausible to see the opposing fault, the "something worse,"
as somehow relating to the corrupt authorities of Church and State that
took the part of the insidious, sadistic Count Cenci. Indeed, we might
see the "something worse" as that self-perpetuating system
of tyranny, revolution, and revenge which Shelley saw as built into
the morality of both tyrant and rebel, both punitive father and violent,
devouring child. Such a dynamic (which finds perhaps its starkest expression
in what Frye called the "arc Cycle" of Blake), Shelley understood
as conditioning even the "merciful" Christian theology of
sin, grace, and atonement (though in the preface to Prometheus such
criticism of traditional religion is closely veiled). From the perspective
of an account of the ways we understand Satan, we might also read that
"something worse" as whatever can lead us so happily to slander
certain sympathies or do violence to the serious ambivalence of our
moral judgments by forcing a text to take on completely the cast of
orthodoxy, and that on the basis of what for us may be purely intellectual
assumptions. The worst such "something" might come through
in the shrewd, nasty finesse with which a critic like C. S. Lewis reads
Satan; it emerges in Lewis' loving attention to the details of Satan's
self-degradation and absurdity, an attention which occludes any concern
with what it means for the poet or critic to isolate so perfect an object
of victimage; it is visible in an intensified spirit of accusation such
as blinds Lewis to the unconscious and less impersonal disgust which
his arguments can release -as when he speaks (authoritatively) of Satan's
systematic degradation from heroic rebel, to party politician, to intruding
thief, to toad-like seducer-spy, and finally to nothing more than "a
thing that peers in at bedroom or bathroom windows." 12 It is Lewis'
eye, and not Satan's, which has here converted the sacred Bower of Adam
and Eve into a bourgeois bedroom or bathroom. We are left wondering
which of those two possible similitudes is more subtly degrading, and
also who is being most degraded in the adducing of them. § Milton himself in his account of Satan labors to elicit subtle dimensions of moral and spiritual disgust, working as he does from a sense that it is proper to turn a kind of liberated, satirical., and prophetic derogation on an evil [325] enemy. .If the
voice of honest indignation and mockery speaks most plainly in Milton's
prose, it also emerges more impersonally in the way that Milton associates
Satan and his family with images of miscegenation, abortion, sexual
violence, and degenerate creation (as exemplified by the history of
Can I discover a determined conceptual or metaphysical enemy in Satan and yet be sure that that figure or trope contains everything I would accuse, that it does not blind me to what's been omitted? Can I be certain that neither
Milton nor Milton's God is implicated in the evil thus revealed? And must I take as the final measure of how accurately I have read Satan the degree to which I have accepted the' completeness of Milton's orthodox, satirical persuasions? And if I do this, have I perhaps only proved something about the power of such persuasions, rather than exposing or teaching myself about the substance of evil? Could not the aesthetic and moral dilemmas raised by both the idea of an evil enemy and the volatile rhetoric of accusation be among the reasons why Satan himself disappears at the end of the poem, reduced to a grotesque, fairy-tale dragon feeding on Sodom apples, even as hi~ deeper infection is humanized and demythologized in the troubled vision of post-lapsarian history that Michael shows to Adam in Books XI and XII?
Alastair Fowler so carefully gloss --how are we to construe these things? Such flaws or .lapses, however obvious or hidden, we may assume Milton himself to have set in place -unless we are to think that, having planted a few hints, he leaves it up to ingenious critics to find error in Satan wherever they will. (It is William Empson's perverse glory that, exasperated with the critical game of "finding out Satan," he instead argues for the devil's weird sincerity, even as he opens his ear to signs of trickery or illogic in the words of Milton's God.) In any case, whether we see in them satire or pathos, Milton offers us the convincing dramatic illusion that such errors are proper to the situation and character of Satan. And yet there is another sense in which Satan could be said to be dispossessed by his errors. As Arnold Stein, among others, has pointed out, there is at work in the poem a kind of ironic perspectivizing which suggests that even Satan's canniest and most controlled attempts at rhetorical deceit or mockery can be seen from a higher level as jokes on him, instances of self-exposure as well as selfentrapment.1S In so far as we perceive this, we will tend to shift between feelings of superiority (entailing our implicit identification with divinity? or an implicit divination of dramatic irony and hermeneutic distance?) and feelings of guilty complicity with the flawed, fallen speaker. Given such a play of perspectives, however, it may be hard to say who it is that truly owns Satan's absurdity, that is, who is in a position most fully to measure its trajectory, its scope and its sources.
[328]
[329] Paternal Deitie"
(VI.750), we may recall a classical rather than the scriptural image,
that of the proud son Phaeton riding in the misappropriated sun-chariot
of his father Helios. No doubt one can take the allusion as an ironic
mis-taking or sublime correction of the more satanic image from pagan
history. But there are some other facets of the description which suggest
a more radical, ambivalent strategy of displacement or substitution.
The most important thing to note is that Milton's account of Christ's
sublime entry into the eschatological battle, that act of transit or
"coming" which itself seems to shine from "farr off"
(VI.768), offers us a vision of the Son's advent that retrospectively
pre-empts or comes before both the history of the Son's first coming
and the dream of his second coming as they are set down in prior Scripture.
W. B. Hunter has tried to cope with the strange placing of this narrative
by arguing that, as a whole, the three-day war in heaven is indeed intended
to mirror both the last battle of Revelation and key features of the
passion narrative, and that the sudden emergence of the hitherto concealed
Messiah and his defeat of Satan prefigures Christ's triumph over Sin,
Death, and the Devil on the cross, even as it anticipates the casting
out of ultimate evil that will mark the Last Judgment. 18 Hunter succeeds
in demonstrating the typological and theological fitness of his
[330] The two texts I've cited, in their strangely virtual visions of emergence, origination, or triumph ("farr off his coming shon," "Silence, ye troubl'd waves"), may suggest Milton's radical means of keeping faith with an idea of visionary speech or prophetic authority such as transcends any notion of humble fidelity to the sacred text. Their way of restaging or reappropriating that text goes far beyond the limits of what we usually see in typological allegory (though one might say that Milton's "presumption" is quite restricted, in so far as his twistings of the text here are not put to use in confirming the authority of any ecclesiastical doctrine). The second passage in particular suggests an attempt to recapture, though in a mediated fashion, both the antithetical and the positing power of the prophetic word. It is not easy to say what is at stake in these passages, elusively inventive as they are, but to compare the poet's efforts here to any ordinary picture of "ambition," satanic or otherwise, might on the surface seem unbearably: reductive, even cynical. If one does, none the less, try to see in Satan's complex struggles with the elusive authority of God the uncanny mirror (and not just parody) of both the battles of Christ and the belated poet's attempts to answer or master the equally elusive authority of God's;scripture, it is because this effort may help us to de-idealize and de-sacralize the motives of Milton's text, even as it suggests something crucial about the sources of his power as a Biblical poet.
[331] consciously making
fun of the jargon of religious controversy or is himself mocked for
his momentary and opportunistic lapse into what may sound like "Popish"
questions about doctrinal authority). Furthermore, no sooner does Satan
assert that he and the other angels are self-raised than he slides into
imagining them as having been spontaneously generated by the ripe substance
of heaven itself (V.861-3) -thus not owning their own origins but having
"'just grew' like Topsy or a turnip" (as Lewis quips).(19)
Since Satan himself, in his soliloquy on Mount Niphates, is willing
enough to confess his createdness and debt, we might imagine that he
is here displaying his brave false wit as a way of impressing and cheering
up his troops, or else acting somewhat like the speaker of one of Donne's
lyrics, who tries to keep his ground in an impossible or decaying situation
by successively wilder flights of sophistry, speculation, and simile.
But for all of the apparent absurdity it generates, the crucial fantasy
of self-begetting remains nevertheless quite pregnant, and one should
try to place the idea carefully. It is perhaps significant that Satan,
in constructing so typically materialistic a history for himself, finds
himself literalizing the kind of moral or tropical autonomy that God
does grant to both angels and men, "Authors to themselves in all/Both
what they judge and what they choose" (111.122-3). Satan, in contrast
to Adam and Eve, is himself "self-tempted, self-deprav'd"
(III. I 30), so that his story of self-begetting could as well interpret
the mysterious, arbitrary origins of his own pride, that which, after
all, does beget Satan as Satan (at least according to the "official
story," to whose terms Satan would thus ironically be committing
himself).(20) In such a speech as this, the figure of Satan may also
(as one critic has argued) focus a specific distrust of the self-originating
claims, the illusory autonomy, and ultimate negativity of the human
imagination, even as he offers a kind of ironic limiting case for the
tendencies of a Miltonic Protestantism, with its emphasis on the authority
of the isolate, inspired self.(21) The point of bringing in such suggestions
here is mainly to show that, whatever kind of logical or metaphysical
double-bind Satan's argument gets him into, we cannot dismiss the speech
as merely absurd, unless we also note that it turns our attention to
problems and paradoxes which the poem as a whole
trick of a Miltonic solipsism, or what could be called the Miltonic sufficiency. Satan cannot give himself over so as to give himself back to himself. Satan loves the Other as himself, and so falls into envy and competition; he cannot love himself as the Other. He cannot, as Milton seeks to do, divide himself against, isolate himself from, and empty himself out before an image of authority so as to receive himself and his power back from that authority -an authority that was itself partly situated by the poet, or recreated by the poet's complex situating of himself (whether through a deep, pre-:-emptive identification of his poetry with the narrative authority of Scripture, or through open and covert appeals to an urgent, abstracted idea of authority that- might be attractive and overdetermined enough to let him continually displace or render obscure and secondary all other myths and structures of authority). Satan's failure lies in his not being absolute enough a liar.
[333] case as something of which reason could only be the outward bound or circumference -energy understood as the product of desire gratified rather than the bounded or bound energy which loathes its possessor.(23) Blake's famous aphorism, as Joseph Wittreich has suggested, may be itself subtly misleading, at least in so far as it tempts us to frame a Blakean account of Paradise Lost according to the divisive categories of partisan politics.(24) For The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, as many critics have realized, does more than merely reverse Milton's theological and political affiliations for ironic effect. Although such reversals are one of Blake's local, rhetorical strategies, his larger project is to help us reconceive, and even to find a new internal history for, the philosophical and eschatological polarities on which Paradise Lost seems to be based (which at times means seeing those polarities as themselves aspects of a cloven fiction like that of Body and Soul, or seeing them as having resulted from some prior but now concealed or forgotten reversal of terms) .25 One of Blake's crucial strategies in The Marriage is to expose the strange way that the fall of Satan, and his raising up of a counter-kingdom in Hell, somehow constitutes the narrative system and moral cosmology of Milton's poem. From this perspective, Milton's having made the fall or falling of Satan the first major vision of his poem must be understood as more than the epic narrator's trick of starting in medias res. Rather, that fall becomes the inescapable" overdetermined beginning of our readings, the real origin of the poet's story of Genesis and Creation, an event which is situated so as to mock any retrospective attempts at apology or justification, or at least guaranteeing that Heaven will always be defined in opposition to Hell, will first and always be the place from which Satan was cast out. (This may provide a gloss on Burke's notion that the creation of Hells tends to function as a tool for solidifying the rule of Heavens.) Blake's sense of the ironic, conceptual interinvolvement of the two realms --each giving birth to the other, both married and divorced -is unfolded in an obscure, if much annotated passage of his satirical apocalypse:
And being restraind
it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the The history of
this is written in Paradise Lost. & the Governor or
[334] It indeed appear'd
to Reason as if Desire was cast out. But the Devils account is, that
the Messiah fell. & formed a heaven of what he stole from the Abyss
imagining of the shape and stakes of Paradise Lost in Milton. One might also observe that Blake, or at least the "Voice of the Devil," misses the stern clarity of Milton's insistence that true liberty and self-rule come only from the acceding of unshaped, selfish energy to reason and authority. Yet one should nevertheless recognize the crucial twist that underlies Blake's revision of what Arthur Barker called "the Puritan dilemma:" "Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell." This defines "liberty" -identified with the central liberty of prophetic writing -not in relation to a myth of inspiration or an ideal of fidelity to textual authority, but in relation to the phenomenal or figurative "place" which the imaginer at different moments inhabits, the diverse subjects whose story he tells. (The question of "liberty" is thus as much a literary or even aesthetic matter as it is ethical or metaphysical.) It is here that one may see the radical force of Blake's project in The Marriage. He doesn't simply make up new characters or authorities, nor does he seek to replace the old map of mind and cosmos with one that is entirely different. Rather, his dialectical satire and maddening dramatic ironies inflict a precise confusion of old and new perspectives on our reading of Paradise Lost, doubling over on one another previously discrete stories of origin, disallowing earlier oppositional measures of authority and authenticity, and re-envisioning our inherited mythic places as sites or states of imagination that may be haunted or poisoned by others we may have thought we had left behind or lost.
[336] To understand the claims of her "myth of the secular," we must see it as more than simply the reordering of Milton's already consistent story from the perspective of a later, though not necessarily more evolved, frame of ideology and experience.(30) As a Romantic revision, Mary Shelley's story must be read as a fable which has been recovered or projected from within Milton's own; it is a sort of Gnostic or Nietzschean genealogy, an attempt to 'articulate a plot or picture more primitive than that of Paradise Lost, a history which that book might be seen as concealing or sublating. As a radical, nightmarish "naturalization" of the dynamics of creation, authority, love, and rebellion as they are presented in Milton, Frankenstein urges us to call the bluff of any theological or piously humanistic reading of Paradise Lost. For given a world in which creation can only be an earthly activity; where all origins are secular, arbitrary, transgressive, their results ambivalent and unmasterable; where the creation of a man, or the idea of a man, inevitably troubles the idea of a God --given such a world, Mary Shelley's fantasy tries to show us what it would then really look like for a man or god to seek to father a race of men, for a son who is also a creator to create his own image out of himself, for that creator to betray or abandon his creature to its own ambivalent freedom, and for a creature to revolt against a creator who in the end has scarcely any rights to being called master. She shows us a creature who terrifies his creator with the spectacle of his decay and isolation, a creator whose own progress towards destruction is assured by the career of his creature, a creature who himself becomes a demonic master. Cutting through the more orthodox matrices of Paradise Lost., the novel's creation myth emerges into a brilliantly reductive dialectic -starker even than Blake's play of alternative positions -in which creator and creature become isolate, but mutually entangled doubles, both spectral versions of the tempted, fallen, and self-destroying angel, each pursuing the other, each dying for the other. If the monster at other moments mirrors the rationalistic Adam, the recalcitrant Eve, or even the purgatorial suicide Samson, perhaps the main point is that any absolute or unsullied father, any justifying or justifiable deity, wholly drops out of any equations we might propose. God ceases to be part of the system, though human and devil seem likely to remain.
[337] The lure of Satan, or the idea of Satan, lies partly in the dialectical leverage which he offers us in our attempts to construe the larger stakes of Milton's poem. But Satan possesses a less impersonal appeal as well, one that depends not so much on our sense of his relative heroism as on Satan's place as a dramatic myth of the self, or as a peculiar and persuasive illusion of what a self or a character might be. The sophisticated ironies of Romantic readers help one describe this appeal, but for the moment some flatter, more awkward impressions may do just as well.
[338] may foreshadow
the burdens of Romantic subjectivity and self-centering, the self's
anxious quests for what Byron called "concentered recompense." Satan, despite
his unresting intellect, gets a lot wrong, perhaps gets everything wrong.
But it is less than obvious what we are to make of this. Milton lets
us know that, as opposed to Satan, the innocent and reasonable Adam
gets things right, as when he knows on awakening that he has come to
be not of himself, but of some "great Maker. ..in goodness and
in power prreeminent" (VIII.278-9); and yet the picture of thought
here is unsatisfying. Adam's first speech sounds oddly like something
learned by rote, or like a bit of preacherly ventriloquism (despite
even the subtle pathos of his later words, which surmise that it is
because of his creator that he can "feel that I am happier then
I know" (282)). It may in fact be the compulsiveness, the unbending
error of Satan's words which makes them feel like so proper an emblem
of the mind's life, of the work of mind. The steady awareness of Satan's
conscious and unconscious falsehoods -his lies against himself, his
cohorts, his God -the feeling of things lost or evaded, the evidence
in his speeches of a mind crossed by longing and pain, the awareness
of contexts and unacknowledged truths which press in, threaten, and
block: there is good reason why these also have carried more dramatic
weight with readers than the accurate theology of a reasonable God who
must have no inside, no underside, no shifts in motivation (indeed,
no motivation at all), must in a sense have no mind. This is a God whose
difficult, spare, authoritative, and often beautiful utterances may
yet appear to us as more unabashedly "political," just because
they come to us, as Satan's never do, with so little dramatic framing
to remind us of the historical and rhetorical conditions of utterance
(a framing which Empson, with novelistic fervor, tried nevertheless
to sketch out for us). It might be argued that we can study the unfolding of a more strictly poetic and prophetic subjectivity in the intricate movements of Milton's invocations, or ,that we witness the work of mind externalized, allegorized, and idealized in the dynamic account of the Son/Logos creating the world (one image of the poet's work as an "expence of mind"). Still, neither of these offers us the kind of dramatic center for our interest in the career of mind that Satan does. To understand Satan's affective power in this context, however, depends on our being careful not to condescend, on our resisting the temptation to literalize or divinize any apparent superiority to Satan which we may feel in reading his speeches; it depends on our allowing that there are occasions when we ourselves (for better or worse) may echo or be implicated in Satan's mode of self-description: Hail, horrours,
hail [339] The mind is its
own place, and in it self
And yet we need not assume that this later, ironic evolution of Satan's 'error" wholly proves his desire an inevitable disaster, or inescapably confirms the emptiness of the claims articulated in the lines I have quoted from Book I. The questioning of teleology is crucial here. Satan's initial vision of mental place, of the metamorphosis of place within mind, does suggest something willful or delusive, and yet it seems to me that his vision feeds on the same fantasy which legitimates, or is legitimated by, Michael's last promise to Adam and Eve: that they can through piety and struggle come eventually to possess "a paradise within" themselves, "happier farr" than the one they had lost (XII.5 87). This is not just a divine, retrospective correction of Satan's mistaken claims, the true measure of an idea of which his is but a demonic parody. If Michael's words point to a state of mind not owned by one person alone, but rather to a state which is the gift of God to man and of men and women to each other --a product of the career of love
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All quotations from Paradise Lost are taken from The Poetical Works of John Milton, ed. Helen Darbishire (London, Oxford University Press, 1958). I. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright, tr. Peter Winch (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984), 56e. 2. See The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David Erdman (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1982), 142. 3. See The Philosophical
Works of Descartes, tr. Elizabeth Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, 2 vols
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 193 I), 1.148-9. 5. Shelley's Poetry
and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York, W. W.
Norton, 1977), 133. 7. Shelley's Poetry and Prose, 498. 8. ibid. 9. ibid. 10. Shelley's Poetry and Prose, 133. II. Shelley's Poetry
and Prose, 24°. 1 am indebted here to the late James Rieger, who
first pointed out to me the parallel wording in Shelley's two prefaces.
12. See C. S. Lewis, A Preface to ..Paradise Lost" (London, Oxford
University Press, 1942), 99. 15. Arnold Stein, Answerable Style: Essays on ..Paradise Lost" (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1953), 8-9. 16. See William Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of ..Paradise Lost" (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1983), 73-82, and passim. 17. Kerrigan, The Prophetic Milton (Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1974), 187. 18. See W. B. Hunter, "The war in Heaven: the exaltation of the Son," in Bright Essence: Studies in Milton's Theology, ed. W. B. Hunter, C. A. Patrides and J. H. Adamson (Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press, 1971), 115-3°. 19. Lewis, Preface to ..Paradise Lost," 98. 20. John Guillory discusses this point in Poetic Authority: Spenser-, Milton-, and Literary History (New York, Columbia University Press, 1983), 119. See also Stein, Answerable Style, 29. [341] 21. See Guillory, Poetic Authority, 112, 117-18. 22. Marvell's poem appeared as a prefatory verse to the second edition of Paradise Lost (1674). I quote from the text included in Darbishire, Poetical Works of Milton, 2- 3. 23. Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, 34. 24. See Wittreich, Angel of Apocalypse: Blake's Idea of Milton (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1975), 214-15. 25. On the doctrine of contraries as it is explicated in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, see Harold Bloom, Blake's Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 197°), 72-96. 26. Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, 34-5. 27. Blake, Complete Poetry and Prose, 45. 28. See Frankenstein.' or The Modern Prometheus, ed. James Rieger (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1974), 123-5. 29. Frankenstein, 125-6. 30. I borrow the
notion of a "myth of the secular" from George Levine who i 31. See Wallace
Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and A Play,
ed. Holly Stevens (New York, Vintage Books, 1972), 254. Reprinted by
; permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. |
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