Paradise, ever?

"Much pleasure we have lost, while we abstained
From this delightful fruit, nor known till now
True relish, tasting; if such pleasure be
In things to us forbidden, it might be wished,
For this one tree had been forbidden ten.
But come, so well refreshed, now let us play,
As meet is, after such delicious fare;
For never did thy beauty since the day
I saw thee first and wedded thee, adorned
With all perfections, so inflame my sense
With ardour to enjoy thee, fairer now
Than ever, bounty of this virtuous tree."
John Milton, Paradise Lost (Book IX). 

For the next few posts, I want to try and focus a little bit on texts that straddle the Renaissance/Enlightenment boundary and try to trace the coming of a new consciousness and and retelling of older narratives in its light. This passage is from Book IX of Paradise Lost: Adam, in Eve's wake, has finished eating his share of the forbidden fruit and now for the first time is experiencing something for which he has no name. This is where Milton tells his version of a question that has remained unanswered for so many lifetimes: what did Adam feel for Eve before he felt lust? In this case, what is he feeling at this exact moment when Eve's beauty inflames his senses and disarms his experience? Though the Doré image accompanying the text is from a few moments later, I am deeply interested in this too short moment that is the bountiful pleasure of sin. In these seconds, these moments before knowledge is forced upon Adam and Eve, what we see is innocence intact and the body altered. If Adam and Eve never know what it is they are experiencing then is lust, lust? Is Eve the Original Sinner or does a cohabitation of the figures of God and Satan give birth to Original Sin?

I want to answer these questions through the idea of a subject's unwavering gaze shifting from his maker to another. In other words, when Adam obeys Eve and takes the fruit, and then more literally undergoes a change in the way he sees her, he has essentially shifted his loyalties from both God and Satan, and transferred them to the figure of Eve. It's ironic that Eve gets the title of "daughter of God," but Adam is not the Son. It is Christ who will be crowned Son, and who will pronounce the Almighty's judgment. The crucial players of Heaven, the son and the daughter, stand at opposite ends.

But I digress. To come back to the questions at hand-- I think the answer may have several layers: Adam and Eve are not the same. Adam gazes upon God, while Eve's gaze is free, to go to Adam, God, the serpent, the fruit. Adam's changed focus also implies a change in God's position at the top of the foodchain, even if in a temporary way. It is in the seconds where loyalty shifts, where capital becomes competitive, where the subject is enticed by a kinder master, that the divine must generate what the goddess cannot. Sin. The temporarily disturbed supremacy is intact again, and the daughter, the goddess of a second, is sent off to her husband's home. Milton's Trinity, then, is barely harmonious-- Father, Daughter and the Unholy Gaze.

Pagans and Monsters and Epics! Oh my!

"So Grendel waged his lonely war,

inflicting constant cruelties on the people,

atrocious hurt. He took over Heorot,

haunted the glittering hall after dark,

but the throne itself, the treasure-seat,

he was kept from approaching; he was the Lord.

These were hard times, heart-breaking

for the prince of the Shieldings; powerful counsellors, 

the highest in the land, would lend advice,

plotting how best the bold defenders

might resist and beat off sudden attacks.

Sometimes at pagan shrines they vowed

offering to idols, swore oaths

that the killer of souls might come to their aid

and save the people. That was their way,

their heathenish hope; deep in their hearts

they remembered hell. The Almighty Judge

... was unknown to them."

I've changed gears from Homer to another great "epic" poet, the anonymous composer of Beowulf. I was debating trying my hands at Boethius earlier tonight, but somehow the reason and passion just weren't cutting it for me. So here's a piece that is without both-- it exemplifies what it means to be without rationality, and, in a sense, without passion as well. I want to say a couple of things to contextualize the passage and then come back to some of the ideas I may have about it: the poet, it seems, belongs and identifies with a Christian world, but places his narrative in a pre-Christian land. At the same time, because his meter is not without ideas of salvation and divine justice, I see it as essentially layered with both the pagan and Christian tradition.

To come back to the passage at hand though-- we're still early in the poem, Grendel the monster who will eventually be destroyed by Beowulf is at large, and the Danes, a pagan people, are existing in a kind of a reflex, begging for salvation in the face of destruction. There seem to be a number of things going on here, but I want to focus on this idea of a "lonely war." Indeed, what does it mean for Grendel to be alone? But what does it mean for the "Shieldings" or the people of the epic to be alone? If Grendel ravages alone because of his ancestor Cain, who are the Danes at this particular moment, a people who are deeply alone because of their singular disconnect with the narrator? It's a slightly complex thought, but this is how I see this passage as exemplifying the Danes as a more lonely people than a monster like Grendel: Grendel has an ancestry that connects him to Cain, the biblical figure who murdered his brother and became the father, at least according to our poet, of giants, elves, and other evil phantoms. The Danes, on the other hand, are not given this genealogy. Without doubt, they are under the watchful eye of the poet's god who watches over them and keeps Grendel from the throne, but they have other gods, idols to whom they pray and sacrifice, but not the god of Grendel and the poet. In other words, the question this passage raises is what does it mean to be saved by a god who is not your own? What does it mean for a people to be a narrated by a poet who dismisses "their way, their heathenish hope."

If the Danes are a people who do not know their creator, does Grendel know his? Is Grendel, through a clear ancestry, somehow closer to the narrator's God than the Danes, the people who will be saved, are? Of course, the whole poem can be read as a Christian allegory, but what's at stake here is at the level of narrative. Grendel's loneliness surely lies in his evil, but the lonely battle fought by the Danes is explained by the disconnect of their being from the narrative itself. I don't usually like to bring the theoretical into this blog, but I want to quickly mention Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian theorist, who sees the epic as separate from the novel in the way that it has only one view of the world. The poet and his people are one, as Homer was one with the warriors and the travellers, and as Virgil was one with Aeneas and his people. In this passage, there are two voices, maybe three. There is the voice of Grendel, branched off from God's creation through Cain, there is the voice of the narrator, convinced of the presence of the Christian god, and there is finally, the voice of the Danes, broken but still speaking of what it knows to be familiar, what it thinks can save these beleaguered people.

I want to end with coming back to the first stanza. Grendel is being kept from the throne by "the Lord." The battle, and I don't want to do a Christian reading here, is being fought between a creator and a descendant of the figure who threatened creation. What is keeping Grendel from the throne is indeed an invisible force, but this force, I think, occupies the level of the narrative as well. It's possible because the narrator is, in a way, closer to Grendel than he is to the Danes. Grendel is not a pagan outside of Christian discourse all together, in fact he is very much a part of it. Perhaps, then, I should take back my argument about three world views and shear it down to just two. Grendel and the narrator vs. the Danes.

(Beowulf, translated from the Old English by Seamus Heaney. Image: the first page of the original Beowulf manuscript, courtesy The British Library)

Reigning in Hell

"Is this the region, this the soil, the clime
Said the lost Archangel, this the seat
That we must change for Heaven; this mournful gloom
For that celestial light? Be it so, since he
Who now is Sovereign, can dispose and bid
What shall be right; furtherest from him is best,
Whom reason hath equal'd, force hath made supreme
Above his equals. Farewell happy fields,
Where joy forever 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.
A mind in its own place and in itself
can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven."
(Paradise Lost, Book 1-- John Milton)

To continue the English trend, here is Milton's Satan right before he utters his famous mantra, "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." The above excerpt is one of the many views we get into Satan's mind-- in the case of this particular one, it is a view into the mind of a fallen angel as he finds a new space in which to exist. While Satan's moral outlook, his approach towards the supremacy as established by God, and his quest to be more than just a being has been discussed enough times, I want to use this post to briefly examine what it means to establish another space, and whether Hell is truly a place that can exist free of Heaven.
Satan very clearly hesitates upon arriving in this new geography-- one that clearly lacks the elements that we now use to define God--light being the foremost among them. Where he is now is lightless and therefore God-less. Yet, it is the space where all who dwell shall be equal, and share equally in what is "infernal" and "joyless." At the same time, this new Hell is given a changeability that depends not upon its maker but upon its occupier. Whosoever happens to be in Hell can imagine it as a Heaven in itself-- for Satan's Heaven is a changing place, it is also a place that is inconstant for it is Heaven at the very same moment that it is Hell.
While Dante, Homer, and Virgil have all given their Underworlds a powerful sense of nationality by their use of geography and identity-- Milton's Satan comes of as the ruler of a homeless people with no particular promised land in mind. Hell is where God isn't. It is a place that can be Heavenly if seen that way. It questions what constant is-- is it the God who refuses to share his divinity with one of his creation, or is it a Satanic mind so persistent that it impoverishes the body in order for its desires to be satisfied? In other words, does Hell really exist outside of the mind? To take this notion a little further-- does being in Hell mean having only one's mind as a supreme figure, as solace, as a friend, a space, a family?

What Satan wants, then, is to define himself against God-- he really wants to become an "other." Perhaps one could argue that the very figure of the divine insists on others, yet the divine can also be read as being the anti-other or the embracer. If we stick with the latter, then Satan is possibly trying to achieve the impossible: define himself and his kingdom against a figure that constantly absorbs and grows and thus resists the possibility of having an other to itself.

Inversion.

"The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark"

SCENE I. Elsinore. A platform before the castle.

FRANCISCO at his post. Enter to him BERNARDO

BERNARDO

Who's there?

FRANCISCO

Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.

BERNARDO

Long live the king!

FRANCISCO

Bernardo?

BERNARDO

He.

FRANCISCO

You come most carefully upon your hour.

BERNARDO

'Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco.

FRANCISCO For this relief much thanks: 'tis bitter cold,
And I am sick at heart.

Across the continent and on the island for the first time: here's one from the Bard. But first, I want to quickly explain why I've chosen this particular passage for tonight: events in and around my life have curiously enough reflected a conversation I had with one of my professors this last Thursday. During coffee and Dante-housekeeping, he suddenly referenced the opening of Hamlet and noted that there is something terribly awry in the scene that presents itself. As an opening scene it does much to reflect the disorder that will follow in the play for at this point, it is not the guard who asks "who's there" but the apparent passer-by. Yet, while thinking about this scene right now, I am thinking of sheer uselessness of prophecy and warning-- do we ever read the signs to begin with?
This question sequence is a fascinating one though; "Who's there" says Bernardo who has just entered upon Francisco's guard. Francisco's reply "nay, answer me," however, is uncanny-- suggesting almost as if an exchange unknown to audience or reader has taken place already. This, of course, is yet another reflection of the events to follow-- there will be events and conversations that take place without Hamlet's knowledge. This exclusion of his figure from the events of the play make him resemble, strangely enough, us, the readers or audience who watch and read, but emerge finally without much knowledge of what has occurred.
I wonder if inversion comes hand-in-hand with a loss of the self. Bernardo's self-identification is his loyalty to the King of Denmark, and by his attachment to the hour of midnight. He is not Bernardo, but rather the King's servant and the midnight guard. He begins after the day ends. In other words, he is someone who is not himself-- in fact, perhaps we can say that he hails the spirit of inversion and chaos that not only characterizes Hamlet, but is also seen in other Shakespearan tragedies, Romeo and Juliet and King Lear (I just cannot forget the scene of Cordelia carrying her aged father) being among them.

Now to come back to the question I asked at first, what does it mean to have a sign in the first place? Is the sign or the prophecy just a privilege of the author, and a trick that is played upon the reader? There are several things at play here I think-- yes, the sign is most likely something the author wants to show off with, but it may well be also something that is completely unimportant. What I mean to say here is that the sign enters at the very beginning of many Shakespearan and sometimes even Greek plays, precisely because the beginning is the point that no one cares about, that audiences fail to hear, and that readers tend to dismiss. Who cares whether Benvolio and Tybalt fight at the beginning-- this is a supposed to be a play about lovers? Who care whether the guards are babbling nonsense on a cold night-- isn't this play about a royal family? The unimportant place of the sign is then, I think, an awful reflection on human nature itself, on its optimism, its perseverance, and its inability to admit defeat until the benign sign is suddenly the unleashed beast.