My class - the one I teach - is reading pieces from John Milton's Paradise Lost this week. I've always been especially fond of Satan in this poem, and I have a few thoughts about how the poor guy just gets co-opted into spouting all sorts of self-defeating religious ideology in Milton's poem.
Satan in Paradise Lost I:249-263 - "Farewell, happy fields,
Where joy for ever dwells! Hail, horrors! hail,
Infernal world! and thou, profoundest Hell,
Receive thy new possessor--one who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.
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 choice,
To reign is worth ambition, though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."
Power, knowledge, etc. seem to inversely impact goodness - "While they adore me on the Throne of Hell, / With Diadem and Scepter high advanc't / The lower still I fall, only supreme / In misery; such joy Ambition finds" (Milton IV:89-92). The ideology of power would seem to dictate that the higher one ascends in power, the less one wishes to be challenged; in an ideological system based on the struggle for power, it makes sense for religious ideology to encourage humility rather than ambition. The desire for power is curbed with threats of hell and the educated elite are left with power, knowledge, et al. Ironic, isn't it?
Satan seems to be attempting to escape this ideology by reversing it - "Evil be thou my Good" (ibid IV:110) - however, by constructing attempted escape as a reversal, Milton ensnares Satan within the discourse of that same ideology: "So farewell Hope, and with Hope farewell Fear, / Farewell Remorse: all Good to me is lost; / Evil be thou my Good" (ibid IV:108-110). Even in rebellion, Satan is trapped - and Milton traps him intentionally in the snare of his own discourse - in an Althusserian vicious cycle in which he must always perpetuate the divine ideology, regardless of if he strives to do evil or to do good.
8 comments:
That's one of my biggest frustrations with Paradise Lost: it is hard to find any insight into the human condition or into the charismatic rebel because in Milton's world God is omnipotent and everything that is said and done (from 'justify god's ways to man' onward) is designed to confirm the Christian master narrative.
Lucifer is a compelling rebel to be sure, but ultimately he (like everything in Milton's Creation) is just a mouthpiece for the Divine.
-M
Another problem I have with Paradise Lost is its complete lack of logical chronology. Milton likes to use literary, mythic, and religious history to legitimate both his writings and, indirectly, god, except that in the chronology of the work, none of those things have happened.
Now some of them aren't really that big a deal, but you can't claim that this bunch of devils were sent to hell for being false gods when the people who worshipped them haven't been born yet.
I guess ultimately, it irks me that Milton is, in effect, setting himself up as the "great Author" and equating himself with god. And that strikes me as a really assholic thing to do.
Yeah, the chronology is fucked up. Like how Satan's existence as an Archangel in Heaven was somehow only a split second (or something like that. Weiner was a bastard).
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