Professor John Rogers:
So the first thing I want
you to do is turn to page 378.
This is the beginning of Book
Nine.
It's a curious feature,
I think, of Book Nine that it
begins with a consideration of
talk.
The narrator is lamenting the
fact that Raphael has just
departed the garden and that
soon,
not long after Raphael's
departure, Adam and Eve will
fall, and this fall is going to
have an impact -- and this is
something that the narrator is
really emphasizing here -- on
the way they talk.
For example,
it's going to be impossible
after this point for human
beings to enjoy a friendly
conversation with an angel.
So this is how Book Nine
begins:
No more of talk where God
or Angel Guest
With Man, as with his Friend,
familiar us'd
To sit indulgent,
and with him partake
Rural repast,
permitting him the while
Venial discourse unblam'd.
With the departure now of
Raphael, man will never again be
permitted to enjoy "venial
discourse unblam'd," and
"venial" here has a special
meaning.
It means "allowable" or
"permissible."
Milton's suggesting that the
Fall brings with it certain
restrictions,
specifically restrictions of
language,
and there start to arise
constraints on speech or what
Milton calls here "talk."
When you read the last two
books of Paradise Lost,
which we'll be doing for
the next week,
you'll begin to see just what
kinds of restrictions Adam's
speech will be subjected to.
The angel Michael will
continually criticize and
correct Adam's talk,
and the general feeling,
I think, of the last two books
can be quite uncomfortable for
just this reason:
after the Fall,
Adam and Eve live in a world in
which mere speech itself can be
blamed or, in some cases,
it can be prohibited altogether.
The Fall is imagined in Books
Nine and Ten to have,
as you can -- of course,
this is the event heralded in
the title, so it's a big deal --
it's imagined to have an
enormous range of consequences,
and Milton divides these
consequences in to essentially
two categories.
First, you have the mythic
consequences that take place or
are imagined to take place in
the physical world;
and then there are also the
psychic, the psychological,
consequences that take place
somewhere within the
consciousnesses of Adam and Eve.
It's with a great amount of
imaginative literary gusto that
Milton enumerates the mythic
consequences,
which he does at some length in
Book Ten.So you'll remember
that after the Fall,
Adam and Eve are punished with
bad weather.
It's wonderful when Milton does
this kind of thing:
he tries to represent this
punishment with as much
scientific specificity as he
possibly can.
So the angels are instructed by
God to shift the sun around and
to tilt the poles of the earth
some twenty degrees from the
sun's axis,
and these mythically imagined
astronomical alterations will
bring with them the four
seasons,
new to earth,
and of course,
the inclement winds -- the
biting cold that will plague
forever and forever the sons and
daughters of Adam and Eve.
Needless to say,
these are enormous changes.
But when you consider the sheer
magnitude of these cosmic
shifts, it's all the more
interesting,
I think, and all the more
noteworthy that the effect of
the Fall that Milton laments
first in Book Nine is the effect
on consciousness and the effect
specifically on speech.It's
here in Book Nine that Milton
signals that his own talk,
his own speech,
has been affected by this new
subject -- the subject that he
has no choice but to deal with
now,
which is that of the Fall.
Milton will have to alter,
this is how the argument goes,
the style of this poem in order
to suit the subject matter of
the Fall,
and so this is what he's doing
at line five,
or what he tells us he's doing:
"I must now change / these
notes to Tragic."
The change in Milton's poetic
notes, these musical notes that
are, of course,
his poetic verses or the nature
of his literary representation
-- the change in these notes is
manifest in a lot of ways
throughout the final books of
Paradise Lost.
For one thing,
it's here that we have the last
invocation of the poem.
And it's not coincidental,
I think, that this last
invocation in Paradise Lost
is not actually an
invocation at all.
Milton does not directly
address Urania,
the muse.
He can only speak of her in the
third person.
This is line twenty:
"if answerable style I can
obtain / of my Celestial
Patroness..."
Milton isn't able,
it seems, to address the muse
directly anymore.How big
that "if" is -- "if answerable
style I can obtain" -- we don't
actually know.
We don't know whether he'll be
able to obtain the answerable
style.
There's been a huge fall-off in
the poet's poetic
self-confidence.
He can't express himself
"unblam'd" as he had tried to do
in the invocation to holy light
in Book Three.
You'll remember that question:
"may I express thee unblam'd?"
He's failed here to clear the
lines of communication between
himself and this heavenly being,
and of course,
in this failure Milton the
narrator, the persona of the
poet,
resembles Adam and Eve.
He's no longer permitted this
kind of direct-dial access to
Urania just as Adam and Eve are
no longer permitted their
friendly conversations with a
friendly angel like Raphael.
They will have conversations
with an angel,
or Adam will,
but as you will see,
Michael's stern tutelage can
hardly be described as friendly.
It's certainly instructive but
Milton would never be able to
bring himself to use the
adjective "affable" in
characterizing Michael as,
of course, he did so charmingly
with Raphael.So for Milton,
the Fall is inextricably
connected to problems of
language and specifically the
problems of literature,
and so this is one of the
things that we'll be looking at.
This is why -- and I know I'm
always beginning lectures with,
"Can you believe it that we
don't find out in Paradise
Lost until now that this
incredibly important thing
happens?"
I'll be doing it yet one more
time.
It's not until now -- and this
seems as big a postponement as
any of the postponements that
I've mentioned:
it's not until now in Book Nine
that Milton finally gets around
to explaining why it is he
decided to write his epic about
the Fall,
the fall of man.
Look at line twenty-five: 
Since first this Subject
for Heroic Song
Pleas'd me long choosing,
and beginning late;
Not sedulous by Nature to indite
Wars, hitherto the onely
Argument
Heroic deem'd,
chief maistry to dissect
With long and tedious havoc
fabl'd Knights
In Battels feign'd…
Milton had intended for quite
some time, as we know,
to write his epic poem on the
subject of a fabled knight.
He actually wanted to have his
great English epic be something
like a continuation of the
legend of King Arthur,
and his epic was going to be a
chivalric romance epic like the
poems by the great Renaissance
poets Ariosto and Tasso,
or of course,
like The Faerie Queene
by his own countryman,
Edmund Spenser.
In fact, one of the central
figures, or you could say the
central figure,
in The Faerie Queene is
just that legendary Arthur that
Milton had as a young man wanted
to write about.But Milton
now insists that it was on moral
grounds that he finally chose
not to write his poem in the
form of a heroic,
chivalric romance.
This is line thirty-two of Book
Nine: Milton decided not to
devote or invest his poetic
talent in all of those
meaningless features of romance
literature that he's now saying
improperly go under the title of
"heroic,"
so he refuses,
this is line thirty-two,
to describe:
Races and Games,
Or tilting Furniture,
emblazon'd Shields,
Impreses quaint,
Caparisons and Steeds;
Bases and tinsel Trappings,
gorgious Knights
At Joust and
Tornament…
And this list is something like
-- these are the common elements
of the romance tradition.
It's kind of like a Cliff Notes
summary of all of the
conventional features of a
romance like Sir Philip Sidney's
Arcadia or Edmund
Spenser's Faerie Queene.
In some cases,
Milton is actually lifting
entire phrases,
such as "tinsel Trappings,"
which appears a few times in
The Faerie Queene,
out of the pages of
Spenser.But Milton knows
perfectly well that this is a
disservice to his favorite poet,
Spenser, and the romances of
The Faerie Queene --
the romance that is The
Faerie Queene is clearly a
lot more than merely a depiction
of battles and games,
although that certainly is a
feature of it.
The most characteristic feature
of the romance genre -- not just
in Spenser's hands but in the
hands of all Renaissance writers
of romance -- the most
characteristic feature is the
hero or the heroine who travels
the countryside in search of a
venture,
in search of an opportunity to
prove his or her virtue or an
opportunity to prove his or her
courage.
The principal means by which
the romance plot advances is
almost always by the wandering
of its heroes.
Heroes and heroines wander the
landscapes of romance,
and there's a lot of
ideological significance
attached to this wandering.
They rarely have set out before
them some kind of specific map
or guide that will allow them to
proceed along their narrowly
defined goals.The demons
that romance heroes battle and
the serpents that they fend off
nearly always come as a
surprise.
They're not discovered with the
help of a map.
They're almost always -- and
this is certainly the case in
The Faerie Queene --
they're almost always
happened upon.
The fact that romance heroes
have simply wandered into an
adventure only proves their
virtue and their courage all the
more,
once of course,
they have prevailed.It's
important that Milton has waited
so long to explain his rejection
of the genre of the romance as
the form that his great poem
would take,
and that's because the
rejection of romance,
I think, has everything to do,
as he's imagining it,
with the consequence of the
Fall in Paradise Lost.
One of the most convincing
elements, I think,
of Satan's temptation of Eve is
his attempt to turn her act of
disobedience into an act of
romance chivalry.
So look at Book Nine, line 694.
Satan suggests to Eve at 694
that God won't incense his ire
for such a petty trespass as
eating the fruit.
Then he continues:
God will "praise / rather your
dauntless virtue..."In the
world of romance,
the idea of obedience isn't
nearly as important as the idea
of courage, or what Satan calls
here in perfect chivalric
language "dauntless virtue."
Satan is essentially tempting
Eve to think of herself as a
heroine of a romance,
as if he were saying,
"Listen, Eve,
I don't know what you've heard,
but you're not a character in a
biblical tragedy.
You're not a character even in
a biblical epic.
You're a wandering knight in a
chivalric romance,
and your only job,
actually, is to prove your
courage, to prove your virtue."
Of course, Eve is dead wrong to
apply the assumptions of romance
to this decidedly unromantic
test of her obedience,
but for this moment of Satan's
temptation, he gives us a little
glimpse into a possible
alternative to the story of Eve
told in the Book of Genesis.
If the story of Eve had been
framed in the genre of romance
rather than in the genre of
tragedy,
then Eve might have been
rewarded rather than punished
for her eating of the fruit.
Her courage would have been
praised rather than her
disobedience blamed.So
Milton rejects the genre of
romance -- of course,
he has no choice but to -- as a
viable literary mode in the
description of the Fall in Book
Nine;
but he does so only after he's
made ample use -- and he's
exploited it to an extraordinary
degree,
I think -- ample use of the
principal movement of romance,
and that's the movement of
wandering.
This poem is filled with images
of wandering as if the poem
shows traces or some kind of
literary residue of the genre
that Milton decided not to write
this epic in,
the romance -- as if somewhere
inside of this biblical epic
there's a romance epic,
a chivalric epic,
struggling to get out.
When Milton rejects the romance
genre in this invocation,
he begins to alter the poem's
sense of the meaning and the
poem's sense of the significance
of the very activity of
wandering.So Adam and Eve --
and it's incredibly depressing
if you,
as most people have,
have grown up listening to your
parents [laughs]
argue.
They begin bickering about the
causes of the Fall,
and they lapse in to a
depressing cycle of mutual
recrimination.
Adam insists that Eve fell
because of the tendency she had
to wander.
Look what happened!
He let her wander off yesterday
morning and -- you know the
story.
That's essentially his
argument, and the subject of
Eve's wandering becomes the
focal point of the first marital
argument after the Fall.
So Adam rejects Eve's wandering
just as Milton is rejecting the
whole genre of wandering,
the literary form of the
romance.I think there is a
way in which these two forms of
rejection are closely related.
What's at stake with both of
these forms of rejection,
these acts of rejection,
is a problem of language.
So when Milton writes in line
twenty of the invocation that
he's struggling to find an
answerable style,
a style that will answer to
this new occasion,
the tragic occasion of the
Fall,
he needs to change his style in
a way that can actually answer
to the tragedy that he's about
to describe.
As a literary event,
the Fall makes its biggest
impact, I think,
through a change in the style
of the poem,
and by that I mean there's
something like a systematic
alteration of the use of certain
key words.So I'm going to be
focusing for a moment on the
changes undergone by a
particular word -- and you've
probably already guessed what it
will be -- a particular word in
Paradise Lost,
although there are a number of
words that seem to undergo
similar or at least closely
related changes over the course
of the poem -- but here I'll be
looking at the word
wander.
The word wander or
wandering or some version
of that word appears no fewer
than thirty-two times in
Paradise Lost.
Without question,
I think, every appearance of
the word is loaded.
The energy charging the word
wander comes from the
fact, I think,
that it has embedded within it
or attached to it in some way
the entire genre of the
chivalric romance that,
of course, Milton has rejected.
It's almost as if the word
wander is a code word for
romance.
When Milton uses the word
wandering, it's
almost as if he's alluding to
the Spenserian type of poem that
he rejected when he decided to
write Paradise Lost.
It's a reminder of the kind
of poem that this could have
been if it hadn't been a
biblical epic.You can see a
way in which the word
wandering in Paradise
Lost seems to range
somewhere or move perhaps back
and forth between two distinct
meanings.
It's a little confusing,
but I've given us something
like a schematic version of the
semantic spectrum that the word
wander inhabits in
Paradise Lost.
So I guess you could think
of the pure or the innocent
meaning of wander as
purely spatial.
It is purely a spatial
description of a kind of
directionless or unforced
motion.
Then, the further you move to
the right of the spectrum,
you get its figurative and
therefore its moral meaning,
which is error:
the pejorative sense of
error,
error not simply as
wandering,
and straying from the law,
but wandering as a divergence
from that which God wants you to
do -- so from a kind of pure and
uncontaminated meaning to the
right of the spectrum to
something much more morally
pejorative.
You can actually think of the
word wander as something
like a chivalric knight that
undergoes its own set of
adventures and challenges and
transformations over the course
of this poem.So let's look
at an early instance of the word
wander.
This is Book Two, line 146.
This is Belial in the consult,
the great debate in hell,
when Belial in Book Two ponders
the possibility of the
annihilation of the angels.
It's a horrible possibility for
him.
The consequence that he
imagines as most painful and
most absolutely unbearable is
the possibility that his mind
will no longer be able to
wander,
so Belial asks this question,
this is line 146 of Book Two:
"for who would lose,
/ Though full of pain,
This intellectual being,/ Those
thoughts that wander through
Eternity…"
Sure, Belial is a fallen angel,
and Milton goes out of his way
to provide a kind of doctrinal
condemnation of everything in
Belial's speech;
but there's no sense,
actually, that there's anything
wrong with the general concept
of intellectual wandering.
In fact, Belial seems to be
quoting Milton himself from
Areopagitica,
 in which Milton
celebrates, above all things,
the right to wander -- the
right to wander through
literature,
through all of one's reading
and all of one's cultural
exposure without a guide.
Milton writes in
Areopagitica that God
gives us minds -- and he loves
this fact -- "God…
gives us minds that can wander
beyond all limit and satiety."
The whole principle of human
wandering is given a powerful
divine sanction in
Areopagitica.And so
initially in Paradise Lost
we have just that kind of
innocent meaning to the word
wandering as it appears
early in the poem.
Look at another early instance.
This is Book Four,
line 233, page 283 of the
Hughes.
Milton's describing here
how the four rivers of paradise
spread out and travel through
the earth,
how the river "divided into
four main Streams,
Runs divers,
wand'ring many a famous Realm /
And Country."
So the river divides "into four
main Streams,
/Runs divers,
wandring many a famous Realm /
And Country."
Here it's a river that's been
actually cast in the role of the
hero of a chivalric romance.
Typically, of course,
it's the knight,
a chivalric knight who wanders
"many a famous Realm and
Country."Now,
we may be tempted to assume
that because the rivers of Eden
are wandering through the
countryside that there's already
a tendency toward something like
moral error or straying from the
law built somehow into the
landscape of the garden.
We may assume that Adam and Eve
will naturally -- how could they
not?
-- stray from the proper path
of obedience if they live in a
natural world that is itself
continually straying and
wandering.
Milton invites us to make that
connection but then slaps our
wrists for even entertaining it
for a moment.
He uses wandering here
in these early passages in an
almost aggressively innocent
sense.
He simply wants to describe a
nonlinear motion,
a direction that hasn't been
dictated or directed by a higher
power.
I've made this point before,
but one of the labors of
reading Paradise Lost is
knowing when to recover,
and then actually trying to
recover, the purely innocent
significance of some of the
poem's key words.So the idea
that innocent wandering is
central to Milton's poem because
the activity of wandering and
the principle of free will are
so absolutely intimately
connected -- think about it.
If wandering is a motion that
doesn't follow a predetermined
or predestined path,
then the wanderer is
necessarily always free from the
constraints of an external
force,
or you could say that the
wanderer is always free,
on some level,
from the constraints or the
guidance even of an omnipotent
God.
The very ability to wander,
the right to wander,
is something like a guarantee
or a strong proof of one's
freedom.In Book Nine though
-- this is one of the reasons
this book can be so hard to read
-- the very notion of wandering
starts to come under suspicion,
and there's a sense that Milton
can't afford any longer to be so
free in his talk about
wandering.
"No more talk of innocent
wandering," he might have begun
this book.
With the Fall,
wandering is no longer
"unblam'd" or "venial," to use
those words from the opening
quasi-invocation.
It comes under a new set of
ethical constraints.
It's almost as if wandering,
by the time you get to Book
Nine, no longer has an
opportunity or the liberty to
occupy the innocent or the
left-hand side of the semantic
spectrum,
but it's almost entirely forced
to occupy the figurative,
the moral, and specifically the
morally pejorative side of that
word's meaning.So let's take
a look at how that happens.
This is page 393 in the
Hughes, Book Nine,
line 634.
Milton's describing Satan's
leading of Eve to the Tree of
Knowledge, obviously a
consequential event.
Eve is compared to an amazed
knight-wanderer,
a knight-wanderer who has been
deluded and misled by a
"wand'ring Fire."
("Wand'ring Fire" is a meteor
moving across the sky.) At the
moment of the Fall,
all of those wonderfully
liberating significances that
had been attached to the notion
of wandering suddenly seem to
just drop out of the equation
altogether,
and the evil that we have no
choice but to associate with
Satan starts to absorb and suck
up all of those innocent,
those beautiful,
associations that the word
wandering had had.
So instead of a capacious
semantic spectrum,
you get something like a rigid
and much more fixed sense of the
meaning of this word
wandering by the time we
get to the Fall.Let's look
on.
This is page 404 in the
Hughes, line 1134 of Book
Nine.
By the time Adam gets around to
blaming Eve for the Fall,
and of course he does that,
the word wander has been
entirely confined to the morally
pejorative part of its semantic
range.
So for Adam -- and this is
remarkable -- the point at which
Eve falls isn't what we know to
be the point at which Eve falls,
which is the moment that she
eats the fruit.
The point at which Eve falls
according to Adam here is that
moment in which she wandered
away.
She wandered away after their
argument or their conversation
about their separation.
And so he says to Eve at line
1134:
Would thou hadst
heark'n'd to my words,
and stay'd
With me, as I besought thee,
when that strange
Desire of wand'ring,
this unhappy Morn,
I know not whence possess'd
thee…
"That strange / Desire of
wandering": I think it's painful
almost to hear Adam use that
phrase,
"that strange desire of
wandering," as if wandering were
a concept so alien and so
foreign in the world of
paradise.
Milton tells us just above this
passage at line 1132 that Adam
is speaking in an altered style.
This alteration of style is
surely, on the one hand,
just the angry tone of voice
that he's using as he's speaking
to his wife,
but it's also,
I think, a certain restriction
of semantic possibility,
the possibility of the
significances of the words that
he's using.
Here the word wandering
can only have its morally
pejorative meaning,
and there's a sense in which
Adam is condemning not just Eve
but the whole range of freedoms
that Milton had been working so
hard to establish as important,
actually crucial components of
his liberal universe.Well,
Eve hears this and she's right
to be perfectly aghast.
She's aghast not simply because
Adam is, as he is,
exhibiting a kind of
surprisingly unbecoming capacity
for rudeness.
It's not just the tone of voice
that appalls her.
She's also appalled by the
altered style of Adam's speech,
by which I mean the powerfully
reductive force of his talk.
Look at line 1144.
This is Eve:
"What words have passed thy
lips, Adam severe,
Imputest thou that to my
default,
or" -- and you can see the kind
of quotation marks that Eve is
putting in the air right now --
"will / Of wand'ring,
as thou call'st it."
Eve is right,
I think, to be surprised that
this altered,
this fallen use of the word
wandering has passed
Adam's lips.
You can almost hear her say,
"Listen: what's going on?
I always thought wandering was
a good thing.
Wandering is,
of course, what the rivers in
paradise do, Adam,
and I thought that the right to
wander is a right that we
possess as creatures of free
will in a free place.
How dare you blame the Fall on
wandering?"One thing
I think we can say for Eve is
that she's an excellent reader
of poetry,
and like a good reader,
she's bristling here at the
suggestion that a word as
capacious as wandering is
capable only of one type of
significance.
There's a sense that before the
Fall, words in Milton's poems
had a kind of nimbleness.
There was a flexibility to
them, and Milton,
as you remember,
imagined his verse style as
something like the verbal
equivalent of an angel's body.
His poem was a body of verse
that was free of restrictive
joints and limbs of the
traditional rhymed couplet,
and there was a suppleness that
allowed words and phrases and
whole sentences to assume a huge
array of meanings just as angels
can "either sex assume" in
heaven.But there's a sense
in which words seem to lose a
lot of their suppleness after
the Fall,
and this depressing loss of a
kind of linguistic mobility is
for Milton, I think,
one of the central crises of
the poem.
A word like wander
suddenly begins to assume
joints and limbs.
It becomes arthritic,
and its meanings become
restricted and reduced to a
black-and-white world of good
and bad -- and it's not just
wander:
there are other key words that
undergo similar transformations,
slightly different
transformations,
of course, because they are
different persons or different
characters;
but I'm thinking of words such
as fruit or error
or taste.
Any of these would make an
excellent paper topic,
a tracing of the history of the
word as it progresses through
the poem.So words that had
been so polyvalent,
so multifaceted,
are beginning suddenly to be
concretized as moral error.
The words are becoming
polarized.
They're pushed to the opposite
poles of good and evil.
This move to reductive
signification is seen to have,
I think -- and Milton wants us
to see it as having -- some
disastrous consequences for his
poem,
and one of the most disastrous
consequences of the new altered
style of Paradise Lost
involves the poem's new
understanding of Eve.
For a while it seemed possible
that the official line on sexual
hierarchy was just one of the
possible readings of paradisal
government.
There were at least some
suggestions -- I thought there
were at least some suggestions
that there was actually a kind
of natural equality between Adam
and Eve and that the matter of
hierarchy was like a cultural
imposition of an arbitrary order
onto the naturally egalitarian
status of their relationship,
a cultural imposition that God
himself had imposed.
As you know very well,
at least I have found myself
over the last couple of weeks
trying to make a case for a
certain open-endedness to human
relations,
to the relations between the
sexes in Milton's Eden,
and I'm willing now to confess
-- I will confess here and now
that maybe I pushed that case a
little too far.
I pushed that case of this
open-endedness to the relation
between Adam and Eve a little
further than the poem would
actually allow me to push it.
If I have had gone too far in
that particular interpretative
direction over the course of
these last,
let's say, three or four
lectures, the poem now is
correcting me.
My wrist is being
slapped.By the time we get
to the end of Book Nine,
it becomes impossible and it
becomes even impossible for me
-- and I can push this stuff
pretty hard!
-- to maintain the case for the
gray areas or the blurred edges
that surround the poem's sexism.
So no more of talk,
no more of Rogers' talk,
of Milton's infinitely
feel-good, flexible feminism.
Your professor can now be seen
to have strayed beyond the
bounds of responsible pedagogy,
and perhaps you would be well
advised -- I don't know.
It's up to you whether you
should just throw away your
notes from the last three or
four lectures,
or I will advise Dan,
the cameraman,
simply to erase the last three
tapes, because maybe I was
entirely wrong.
After the Fall there's less and
less of an alternative to
Raphael's insistence on sexual
hierarchy.
Everything is much more black
and white now,
and any ambivalence that may
have been expressed about the
justice of Eve's subjection to
Adam seems simply in some way to
just disappear after the
Fall.One of the divine
punishments -- and it always
strikes students as kind of odd
that one of the punishments that
follows the Fall is the official
subjection of woman to man.
The Son in Paradise Lost
passes judgment on Eve,
and he declares -- this is in
Book Ten: "to thy Husband's will
/ Thine shall submit,
hee over thee shall rule."
Often we ask,
"Well, what's the big deal?
How is this different from
their situation before?"
But it is a big deal and this
is a punishment.
You'll remember that Eve before
the Fall had always been in a
position to choose to yield to
Adam, and here she no longer has
a choice.
She just gets seized,
and she's never given the
opportunity to yield.
Maybe the distinction strikes
some of us as a little specious,
but it's a meaningful one,
I think, to Milton.But
there's more to the Fall than
just this official laying down
of a new law,
a newly rigorous and newly
enforced law of sexual
subordination and of involuntary
sexual subjection.
Look at page 427 in the
Hughes.
This is Book Ten, line 867.
There's a new subjection of
language, the subjection of
language to a new altered style.
In this passage we have Adam
really at his most misogynist.
Eve comes to Adam to try to
make amends after the Fall,
and Adam just lets loose with
this powerful antifeminist
invective.
So this is line 867 of Book
Ten:
Out of my sight,
thou Serpent,
that name best
Befits thee with him leagu'd,
thyself as false
And hateful;
nothing wants,
but that thy shape,
Like his, and color Serpentine,
may show
Thy inward fraud;
to warn all creatures from thee
Henceforth…
The Fall brings with it a new
name for Eve,
Serpent, and Milton's actually
thinking of one of the
incredibly mean-spirited -- I
think it was actually mistaken,
but it was a traditional
etymology for the name
Eve which had at various
points over the history of
biblical interpretation,
actually in the Hebrew,
was believed to have meant
"serpent."
Adam here identifies Eve with
the serpent, and he's providing
a significance for Eve,
the word Eve,
that drastically constricts the
enormous range of meanings that
we may have associated with her
up to this point,
that we were right,
presumably, to associate with
her up to this point.
You'll remember that in Book
Four, the waving motions of
Eve's hair had been juxtaposed
implicitly with the waving,
winding motions of the serpent,
and one of the points of that
juxtaposition was to come to
understand that the waving,
wandering motion was entirely
innocent before the Fall.
It only comes to be associated
with moral error,
the right-hand side of the
semantic spectrum,
after the Fall.But once
again Adam suddenly reveals
himself to be an abominable
reader of poetry and absolutely
incapable of nuance and
suggestiveness.
He reinterprets all of the
innocent similarities between
the wandering,
waviness of Eve and the serpent
into something like an absolute
identification with evil.
The name Eve suddenly
takes on the force of something
like a morally pejorative word,
and Adam only makes his case
stronger by reiterating this new
black-and-white understanding of
the concept of wandering.
Get this!
This is line 873 of Book Ten: 
But for thee [he tells
Eve]
I had persisted happy,
had not thy pride
And wand'ring vanity,
when least was safe,
Rejected my
forewarning…
"Pride / and wand'ring
vanity": wandering has
practically taken on the force
of a curse word in this
sentence.
It's lodged contemptuously
between "pride" and "vanity" as
if out of nowhere Milton is
elevating the notion of
wandering to something like the
eighth deadly sin.
The very idea of wandering,
of course we know this,
insists upon the importance of
ambiguity and ambivalence,
and I think it's just this
ambiguity and ambivalence that
Adam is really lashing out at.
He's struggling to align the
concept of wandering with some
of the most hateful and some of
the most misogynous impulses of
the poem.It's important
though to understand that it's
not just -- and it's depressing
also -- it's not just Adam who
is responsible for the reduction
of Eve and the reduction of
Eve's wandering to the status of
moral error.
The poem itself seems to be
lending a kind of disconcerting
authority to this
misinterpretation of Eve.
I think it's a
misinterpretation of Eve.
When Adam falls,
the text makes clear that it's
for a very different reason from
Eve's fall.
Eve had fallen out of deception
and Adam had fallen out of love.
He knew precisely what he was
doing.
This is what the narrator tells
us at line -- and you don't need
to turn there -- line 997 at
Book Nine: Adam "scrupl'd not to
eat,
/ against Against his better
knowledge, not deceiv'd,
/ but But fondly overcome with
Female charm.""Fondly
overcome with Female charm":
what sense does that make?
That's the narrator's
interpolation.
The narrator is giving a new
authoritative interpretation of
the event of the Fall,
and I think it's entirely
unfair and it's not just unfair:
this is wrong.
Adam falls, we know this,
because of his sense of his
marital bond.
I think he's wrong to fall,
actually, but it's not that he
was overcome with Eve's female
charm.
He says, "Our State cannot be
sever'd, we are one,
/ One Flesh;
to lose thee were to lose
myself."
He falls out of his sense of
connectedness with Eve,
but he doesn't fall because
he's been seduced by his wife.
The narrator has interpreted
Adam's fall in a way that,
I think, the text itself simply
can't support.
It's a central example of how
reductive interpretations aren't
just to be attributed to Adam
but they're beginning actually
to insinuate themselves in to
the authoritative voice of the
narrator.Book Ten of
Paradise Lost is the book
given to the representation of
the consequences of the Fall.
Given that one of the effects
of the Fall, as I've been
describing, is something like
the imaginative shrinkage that
language suffers,
we shouldn't really be at all
surprised by one of the early
and very strange actions in Book
Ten.
It's here that we're forced to
witness the reappearance of the
debased and what I think is for
this poem the entirely
inappropriate genre of allegory.
Suddenly, as if from nowhere,
Milton re-injects into his
otherwise realistic poem the
decidedly unreal figures of Sin
and Death.
So look at Book Ten, line 229.
This is page 411 in the Hughes.
Milton describes the Son's
descent to earth to pass
judgment on Adam and Eve,
and at line 229 he gives us a
description of a set of events
that's been happening
simultaneously.
He uses this
"meanwhile"-structure a few
times in Paradise Lost:
"Meanwhile,
ere thus was sinn'd and judg'd
on Earth, / Within the Gates of
Hell sat Sin and Death."With
this use of the
"meanwhile"-structure of the
narrative,
Milton's allowing us to see the
activity of Sin and Death not
happening at a later point in
the story of the Fall:
it's happening at the same time
as the Fall and,
in fact, it's the same event.
It's simply the same event told
from a different perspective,
a different point of view,
and of course it's told within
an entirely different literary
mode.
One of the consequences of the
Fall has been a certain
reduction of meaning,
as I've been describing,
undergone by some of the poem's
key words.
And here in Book Ten,
Milton constructs an entire
scene out of that literary mode
traditionally most given to
reductive meanings,
and that's the mode of allegory.
It's in allegory that,
when performed ham-fistedly,
you have a one-to-one
correspondence between an image
and its meaning.
There isn't traditionally in
allegorical writing the same
kind of proliferation of
meanings that you can have in
other literary modes.The
Fall is the moment,
of course, at which Adam and
Eve sin and the moment at which
they are consigned to suffer the
penalty of death.
That much we accept and is
perfectly reasonable;
but here after the Fall,
Milton chooses to represent
this new introduction of Sin and
Death within the mode of
allegory,
and the result has to be one of
the most bathetic,
one of the most preposterous
scenes in all of Paradise
Lost.
It's an embarrassment.
Turn to the top of page 413 in
the Hughes,
line 282.
This is the argument:
since there will presumably be,
after the Fall,
a greater deal of communication
between earth and hell,
the allegorical monsters Sin
and Death find themselves in the
position [laughs]
of constructing an actual
bridge that will connect the
earth with the home of the
fallen angels,
the hell.
So Milton represents the
building of this bridge as some
massive public works project,
and I think there's every
indication here that he's
intending this representation to
strike us as perfectly
absurd.Sin and Death begin
to build the bridge;
this is line 282: 
Then Both from out Hell
Gates into the waste
Wide anarchy of Chaos damp and
dark,
Flew diverse,
and with Power (thir Power was
great)
Hovering upon the
Waters…
You'll notice here that we have
a parody of God's creation where
the Holy Spirit had hovered upon
the waters of chaos and made it
pregnant.
I'll continue: 
[W]hat they met
Solid or slimy, as in raging Sea
Tost up and down,
together crowded drove
From each side shoaling towards
the mouth of Hell.
As when two Polar Winds blowing
adverse [and I'm skipping around
here]
…
[T]ogether drive
Mountains of ice…
It's a brilliant but a
grotesque travesty,
a parody, of God's vitalist
creation of the universe,
the process whereby impregnated
matter begins organically to
organize itself into the
beautiful creation.
Sin and Death -- they're
ham-fisted creators here.
They can't impregnate chaos,
of course, and so they build a
bridge over chaos by manhandling
chaos.
They force together all of the
solid and all of the slimy stuff
into one huge pile.It's a
grotesque image but its
grotesquery,
I think, serves an important
point.
It serves as Milton's emblem
for, among other things,
the process undergone by
language after the Fall.
It's as if he's representing
the shoaling together into one
concrete block all of the
diverse and all of the various
meanings associated with some of
the poem's most resonant,
most beautiful and most
suggestive words.
Look at how Death gets all of
the slippery stuff of chaos --
it's wonderfully slippery!
-- to hold together in the form
of a bridge, line 293:
The aggregated Soil
Death with his mace petrific,
cold and dry,
As with a Trident smote,
and fix't as firm
As Delos [the floating island]
floating once;
the rest his look
Bound with Gorgonian rigour not
to move,
And with Asphaltick
slime…
This preposterous allegorical
character, Death,
has the ability to fix
something fluid and flexible
into something firm and
asphaltic,
and I think you have here one
of the most powerful images of
the aesthetic disaster that is
fallen language.
The extraordinary matter of
chaos is being concretized here.
It's subjected to a process
exactly like the linguistic
concretization undergone by a
word like wander or the
words fruit or
error.
These words begin to succumb to
a kind of linguistic rigor
mortis.
They ossify into a moral
rigidity that,
I think, would have seemed
perfectly unthinkable to us at
an earlier stage in the
poem.Okay.
I have another second.
We have time,
I think, for one more example:
this is the punishment of
Satan.
When God punishes Satan for
tempting Eve,
he does so in a way that makes
literal and actual Satan's
association with the serpent,
and it's really quite vulgar.
Satan had, of course,
just temporarily inhabited the
body of the serpent,
and God punishes Satan by
turning this temporary
association into something like
an actual condition.
Look at Book Ten,
line fifty-five.
This is page 419.
Satan is metamorphosed,
you'll remember,
into a huge and hideous serpent
at the gigantic public assembly
in hell,
but Milton doesn't stop at that
vulgar, quasi-allegorical
representation.
After that, Milton
metamorphoses all of the fallen
angels into serpents,
and he places before them a
grove of trees,
all of them containing the
forbidden fruit,
so the fallen angels who are
now serpents are all so thirsty
and so hungry that they can't
help but climb the trees and try
to taste the fruit.
This is line 555: 
Yet parcht with scalding
thirst and hunger fierce,
Though to delude them sent,
could not abstain,
But on they roll'd in heaps,
and up the Trees
Climbing, sat thicker than the
snaky locks
That curled
Megæra…
was one of the Furies,
the feminine figures in
classical mythology who punish
sin, and like Medusa,
Megæra has serpents for
locks of hair.
I think it's impossible to read
these lines and not see in them
an incredibly unfair and ugly
but embedded image of Eve.
The beautiful,
waving, wandering tresses of
Eve have been identified now
categorically and unrepentantly
with the serpent who was her
downfall.
The poem seems to go about as
far as it can go in the absolute
ossification of a character into
a kind of empty embodiment of
moral evil.
The actual image of
metamorphosis here is merely a
narrative version of a process
that we've seen occur in the
language of Paradise Lost
for some time now.
Moral ambivalence and poetic
ambiguity has been
transmogrified into something
like moral definitiveness,
and literary ambivalence has
become
literal-mindedness.Well,
happily the poem isn't over
yet,
and the grotesque reduction of
Eve to evil is by no means the
poem's last words.
So as you read books Eleven and
Twelve for next time,
think about the literary
texture of those books as you
compare it to the earlier books
of the poem.
It used to be argued,
and it's an incredibly stupid
argument, that Milton was simply
getting old and tired by the
time he got around to writing
books Eleven and Twelve -- but
of course,
he went on to write Samson
Agonistes and Paradise
Regained, magnificent works
of art.
There is nonetheless a marked
change in the verbal character
of the last two books of
Paradise Lost.
So think about the
implications of the altered
style of the book's conclusion.
Okay.
 
