The First Story ever, and the Great Tragedy of mankind. I've always wanted to read Paradise Lost (Milton's alternate title was Adam Unparadised), but I'd also heard it could be a dry and difficult read. Milton the stodgy old Protestant Poet! So I was surprised--oh so pleasantly--at how very un-dry it reads. What an ambition! A song "Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast / Brought Death into the World, and all our woe" (I.1-3). I am very curious to see where Milton will take Satan's character. I know the ending, of course, but little of the journey. And the journey is what makes this poem worth reading--we know the end result, we are the end result, so to speak. But does the poem do what it set out to do? Does it really "justifie the wayes of God to men"? (I.26)
As far as I can tell (I've only read the first four books so far) the most obvious problem presents itself in the rather attractive character of Satan. For he is attractive, though it's difficult for me to tell how sympathetic Milton originally intended the character to be. Intentional fallacies aside (yes, I know it's not a pudding) Satan's intelligence and "unconquerable Will," are incontestable--he leaps off the page. Paradise Lost begins not in Paradise, but with Satan "in a place of utter darkness, fitliest call'd Chaos...with his Angels lying on the burning Lake" (I.Argument). Satan gathers his fellow comrades, recently fallen angels all, and with them discusses what next they should do. Open war? Habitate in Hell? Or perhaps conceive of something more subversive?
The actual "Consultation" takes place in Book II, but before that meeting Satan speaks with his mate Beelzebub, a sort of Watson to his Holmes. Beelzebub is just as pissed off at their recent defeat and banishment as Satan. He's just as hot-blooded about their "Glorious Enterprize": throwing off God's tyrannic rule of Heaven, and hasn't yet given up--if he could spit up he would. His voice is the first we get in PL, and immediately he makes clear his disdain for "the Tyranny of Heav'n" (I.124). The posture here is one of anti-submission: no bowing for these revolutionaries. I picture him shaking his fist, eyes raised to his former rooms in Heaven:
...What though the field be lost?
All is not lost; th' unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield:
And what is else not to be overcome?
That Glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace
With suppliant knee, and deifie his power,
Who from the terrour of this Arm so late
Doubted his Empire, that were low indeed,
That were an ignominy and shame beneath
This downfall; (I.105-116)
There's something sickening about obligatory worship. It's not just that Satan and his angels didn't want to play by the rules. They simply didn't want to be required to do so. Heaven is heaven, and no doubt heaven is a pleasant place, but it's like someone telling you to have a good time: "You are REQUIRED to have a good time." That's immediately when I stop having a good time, no matter how alternately benevolent or hostile the order. Actually what came to mind first was King Lear, the scene at the beginning when Lear orders his daughters to tell him how much they love him. A maddening, disgusting contest Cordelia won't play; instead she will "Love, and be silent." As soon as love is requisite it's not love anymore; it loses all meaning since love is only love when you don't have to do so. In fact, love would seem to be more of an in spite-of feeling: in spite of all reasoning, or in spite of certain circumstances etc. Requisite love becomes hollow, becomes the negative imperative in Lear echoed again and again: Nothing, nothing, nothing. "Nothing with come of nothing."
But it's too easy to read Paradise Lost as a straight-up Declaration of Independence (though I might change my mind on that later). To go back now, to "bow and sue for grace / With suppliant knee" shames Beelzebub not only out of disgust for the divine tyranny he has fought--there's also an element of vanity implied. He can't go back because it would be embarrassing. Vanity thy name is Beelzebub! Or Satan. Perhaps especially Satan, since it is through Satan that we have fallen in this poem. Milton's Satan (literally from Gk and Hebrew "adversary") is mercurial, neither a cartoonish villain nor an unambiguously heroic figure of rebellion. As with Beelzebub's anger, vanity also informs Satan's every move; vanity is his Achilles Heel so to speak. He's also, like Hamlet, fatally ambivalent. Take this speech from Book I where Satan has resigned to dig in to Hell and make the best of it; it's a beautiful little paean to mind-power:
Is this the Region, this the Soil, the Clime,
Said then the lost Arch-Angel, this the seat
That we must change for Heav'n, this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since he
Who now is Sovran can dispose and bid
What shall be right: fardest from him is best
Whom reason hath equald, force hath made supream
Above his equals. Farewel happy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less than he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.
(I.242-263)
Can I get a "fuck yeah?!" Or a "hell yeah" at least? My Declaration-of-Independence-reading-impulse wants to narrow in on "Here at last / We shall be free" and his pat dismissal of heavenly servitude. His beautiful and power peroration here is convincing, and yet by Book II he has changed his mind: "That in our proper motion we ascent / Up to our native seat: descent and fall / To us is adverse" (II.75-77). It's not a complete flip--he's not surrendering to God anytime soon. But his resolution has shifted, and it's a shift primarily (if not solely) motivated by vanity. Satan's pride, like any great Greek hero's hubris, is his hamartia, his tragic flaw. But we also have recognition. Recognition of his pride, a pride that brought him to where he is, an "ah, I am where I had always been going" kind of moment. Alone in his grief (poor devil) Satan fixes his gaze on Eden from above call to "the full-blazing Sun," itself a god "at whose sight all the Starrs / Hide thir diminisht heads":
. . . . . . . . to thee I call,
O Sun, to tell thee how I hate thy beams
That bring to my remembrance from what state
I fell, how glorious once above thy Sphear;
Till Pride and worse Ambition threw me down
Warring in Heav'n against Heav'ns matchless King:
(IV, 35-41)
Admission out of recognition, or why you're allowed to love Satan. And he hates himself for it. He hates his ambitions, his pride. The poet tells us that
. . . . . . . horror and doubt distract
His troubl'd thoughts, and from the bottom stirr
The Hell within him, for within him Hell
He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell
One step no more then from himself can fly
By change of place: Now conscience wakes despair
That slumberd, wakes the bitter memorie
Of what he was, what is, and what must be
(IV, 18-25)
Cursing himself ("Which way I flie is Hell; my self am Hell") this demon cannot outrun his own demons, they are ever in him. It is too late for repentance; his "wounds of deadly hate have peirc'd so deep" (IV, 99). Thus just before he leaps over Eden's walls he resolves himself to a bitter task at hand:
So farwell Hope, and with Hope farwell Fear,
Farwell Remorse: all Good to me is lost;
Evil be thou my Good; by thee at least
Divided Empire with Heav'ns King I hold
By thee, and more than half perhaps with reigne;
As Man ere long, and this new World shall know.
(IV, 108-113)
He's backed himself into a corner: supplication or revenge? He chooses--not happily--revenge. A kind of perverse version of Tennyson's "To seek, to strive, to find, and not to yield" which even with the "Evil," the hatred I find something noble about. And how can we not? Satan is difficult to read because he's not human, he's not of this world except that is he is. As if instead of biting the apple Satan the comorant simply bit Eve, infecting the Mother of mankind--her mythological blood in our veins. And we cannot totally blame him without implicating ourselves as we are the end of this story, this first story.
I think this vacillation between Satan being implicated by his vanity and abject malice, and Satan being a kind of perverse hero, one who refused to bow down anymore, to accept "[t]he debt immense of endless gratitude, / So burthensome still paying, still to ow" probably will remain unresolved. Even as a Protestant poet trying to "justifie the wayes of God to men," I don't think Milton could have possibly remained unswayed by Satan's dilemma. The poem is powerful because it's explaining something that's already happened by means of an agent already implicated by the events of the story that that agent is itself attempting to articulate.
More on this soon, I hope. Again HAVEN'T FINISHED THE POEM. All flaws in reasoning/reading I'll chalk up to that fact.
