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Article Excerpt
Miltonists tread gingerly around the issue of Paradise Lost and uncertainty as unresolved contradiction subverts the masterplot of Milton criticism, which is that Paradise Lost coheres, and the critic's task is to make the poem cohere. In this article, I contest this faith in the poem's thematic and formal unity by demonstrating that Milton structures Paradise Lost according to a poetics of incertitude, as exemplified by the Miltonic "Or." I argue that Milton structures Praradise Lost according to a series of suspended choices, and this structure determines the smallest details of the poem as well as the competing narratives, especially the differing versions of the Son's elevation.
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Miltonists tread gingerly around the issue of Paradise Lost and uncertainty. While critics and readers from the eighteenth century onward have noted the many places where Milton's epic constitutes, to use Joseph Wittreich's phrase, "a field of opposing stresses and signals, (1) by and large they have dealt with this problem through a variety of containment strategies. (2) For a long time, Milton's readers simply ignored the contradictions (e.g., E. M. W. Tillyard and C. S. Lewis), but when this issue finally started emerging to the fore in the early 1960s, such critics as A. J. A. Waldock and John Peters ascribed the discontinuities of Paradise Lost to a regrettable failure of poetic craftsmanship. (3) Yet in a curious reversal of the trend in early modern scholarship toward privileging discontinuity and ideological fissures, Miltonists tend to assume that the contradictions are only superficial and that a "proper" understanding of the poem erases the difficulty. To give but two of the most recent examples, C atherine Gimelli Martin writes that "because Paradise Lost cannot be consistent with itself does not mean that it cannot be made generally consistent with a mode featuring the uses of irony outlined above [in her book], nor do these ironies fail to support certain conjectures about the poet's intentions" (my emphasis); and Steven Jablonski asserts that he will attempt "to reconcile Milton's republican beliefs about political liberty... with his seeming support for monarchy in his epic poem" (my emphasis). (4)
Even critics who seemingly foreground Milton's contradictions usually seek to master them through the principle of discordia concors. (5) Thus William Koibrener argues that "mediation" figures as the central fact of Milton's works, and he defines this term as "the means through which Milton joins, without reconciLing, apparently contradictory positions" (emphasis in the original). (6) Like Wittreich, David Norbrook notes that "we are constantly denied a stable point of reference," yet he nonetheless argues that Raphael provides Adam a vision of the universe as a "sublime concordia discors" and insists that "God's ways can be justified, but they must first be held up to difficult scrutiny... God is justified because of his refusal to treat his subjects as mere puppets or instruments. (7) Even Wittreich contains the poem's conflicting signals by analogizing Paradise Lost to A. Bartlett Giamatti's ideal university, a place where "competing systems of thought collide; where they are 'tested, debated... freely, op enly." (8)
The underlying assumption, I would even go so far as to call it the masterplot of Milton criticism, is that Milton produced an epic that coheres, and the task of the critic is to make the poem cohere, even in the face of massive evidence to the contrary. (9) Furthermore, this masterplot controls the analyses produced by the supposedly warring camps of "angelic" and "satanic" critics. In the introduction to the second edition of Surprised by Sin, Stanley Fish rebuts those arguing for unresolved tensions by stating that Milton deliberately fills his epic with moments when "the affirmation of variety is immediately countered by the imposition of unity and the insistence on an underlying sameness," (10) yet the differences between Fish and his supposed antagonists really are a matter of degree rather than substance: Fish argues that there are no unresolved antinomies, Kolbrenner et al. say that unresolved antinomies can coexist in a sort of supra-coherence that contains multitudes. The route may be different, but the conclusions are remarkably similar.
It is precisely this confidence in this poem's thematic and formal unity that I contest, and in this article I will demonstrate that Milton structures Paradise Lost according to what I call a poetics of incertitude. Granted, John P. Rumrich has argued for the shaping presence of "indeterminacy and differences of opinion" in Paradise Lost." Rumrich finds "the theme of indeterminacy as a vital dimension of human experience and behavior." (12) Indeterminacy is thus a positive state of creative flux; if certainty is deferred, the jouissance of infinite possibility takes its place. Hence Rumrich's recuperation of Chaos. I replace Rumrich's "indeterminacy" with "incertitude" because I think that Rumrich's interpretation de-fangs the poem in much the same way that Wittreich does with his analogy between Paradise Lost and the ideal, contemporary university. I use "incertitude" because I believe that in the aftermath of the Revolution Milton engaged in a wholesale questioning of just about everything he had argued for in his prose works, and he does not come to a conclusion. (13) Therefore, in place of Rumrich's "poetics of becoming" (his emphasis), (14) I propose a poetics of incertitude because it is out of the turmoil of not knowing what to affirm in the wake of the Revolution's failure that Milton creates his finest poetry.
I have argued elsewhere that Milton's similes and metaphors consistently lead us to a point of aporia, (15) and that this metaphoric incertitude reflects Milton's unsettled state after the Revolution's demise. In this essay, I will demonstrate that Milton structures Paradise Lost according to a series of suspended choices, and this structure determines the smallest details of the poem as well as the larger narrative. I will begin by looking at Milton's use of "Or," and then move on to how the Miltonic "Or" constitutes the DNA, as it were, of the poem's competing narratives. Albert C. Labriola has proposed that "All" constitutes "the essence of Paradise Lost," by which Labriola means what he perceives as the extraordinary unity of the poem. (16) Labriola's statement, however, that "all" constitutes "a deep structure that generates, among others, both interrogatory and declarative surface structures, a linguistic universal implying any number of particular reformulations, " (17) applies equally well to the omni presence of "or," which is of course the undoing of "all" since unresolved choice implicitly deconstructs the imposition of unity called for by "all." Labriola is not wrong in his assessment of the importance of "all," but we need to balance the drive toward unity with the equal drive toward duality and incertitude. In other words, while one must recognize the presence of a strong, totalizing impulse within this poem, a desire for unity and a movement toward organicism, we also need to recognize that this impulse is countered by an equally powerful countertendency toward undoing unity and toward unresolved choices leading to aporias, sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally. To appropriate Labriola's language for my own purposes, I will show that the Miltonic "Or" also figures as a deep structure generating a plethora of "declarative surface structures."
I
It should come as no surprise that a poem concerning choices contains within it the word most associated with choice: "or." But it has somehow escaped notice that "or" constitutes the eighth most common word in Paradise Lost, occurring according to Gladys W. Hudson's concordance, 714 times, surpassing even "all," which occurs 693 times. (18) The omnipresence of "or" signals something more than a commitment to rhetorical copia. Rather, it suggests that Milton conceives of his narrative in terms of choice, in terms of A or B, this or that. But to add yet a further twist, "or" in and of itself complicates or deconstructs the notion of stable binary opposition because the word can mean both similarity as well as difference. "Or," confusingly enough, can also mean "and." To quote the definition in the QED, "Or connects two words denoting the same thing," (19) and Milton will often use "or" to separate two or more synonyms.
The poem begins with the first speaker, conventionally associated with Milton, invoking the Muse: "Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top / Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire [Moses]" ("or" my emphasis), (20) Oreb and Sinai referring to the same place. When Satan first addresses the fallen angels, he poses the rhetorical question, "what power of mind / Foreseeing or presaging .../... could have fear'd, / How such united force of Gods" could be defeated (1.626-9), "Foreseeing" and "presaging" being synonymous. The same is true of "fraud" and "guile" in Satan's assertion, "our better part remains / To work in close design, by fraud or guile" (1.645-6). In book 2, the narrator compares the sound of murmuring after Belial's speech to how the after-echo of a storm at sea lulls seafarers "whose Bark by chance / Or Pinnace anchors in a craggy Bay" (2.288-9), there again being little real distinction between a bark or a pinnace, since both are "types of small fighting ships." (21) At other times Milton will use "or" to separate items that may be physically different, but mean the same thing. In book 3, for example, the narrator describes his blindness by way of a series of items that he can no longer see:
Thus with the Year Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the wesst approach of Ev'n of Morn, .............................................. Or flocks, or heards, or human face divine. (3.40-4; my emphasis)
And in book 9, Satan gears up for his speech to Eve like an orator from "Athens or free Rome" (9.671). While it is very important that Milton compares Satan to an orator from the two paragons of classical republicanism, it matters less, I think, whether the orator hails from either Athens or Rome.
If Milton uses "or" to conflate difference, he also uses "or" to provide a choice between different items but without indicating a preference between them. Eve, for instance, goes off armed "with such Gardning Tools as Art yet rude, / Guiltless of fire had formd, or Angels brought" (9.391-2). The Epic Voice gives us a choice of two distinct origins for Eve's tools: either they were made by "Art yet rude," which implies human agency, or the "Angels brought" them to her. Another example: Adam and Eve
praise Thir Maker, in fit strains pronoun'ct or sung Unmediated, such prompt eloquence Flowd from thir lips, in Prose or numerous Verse. (5.147-50; my emphasis)
The First Couple prays using either prose or verse, their fit strains are either "pronoun'ct," meaning they speak in prose, "or sung," meaning they employ "numerous Verse." Milton does not have them use verse and prose, that is, a mixture of the two.
Milton structures these passages so that they present an unresolved choice, and the sheer number of such formulations points toward what Labriola calls a "deep structure" within Paradise Lost: that is, Milton structures Paradise Lost according to the presentation of choices between differing items while leaving the outcome unclear. Satan, disguised as a cherub, tells Uriel that he wants to observe Adam "with secret gaze, / Or open admiration" (3.671-2). Which is it? Uriel, after consulting with Gabriel, returns to either a Ptolemaic or a Copernican universe (4.592-5); Satan, squatting "like a Toad" by Eve's ear (4.800), seeks to assail "The Organs of her Fancie. . . Or. . . taint / Th' animal Spirits that...
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