Doppelgänger

I very much enjoyed What in Me Is Dark: The Revolutionary Afterlife of Paradise Lost by Orlando Reade, and wish I had been able to read it before I wrote my own book on the poem. I definitely would’ve stolen some references. I am especially grieved that until reading Reade’s book I did not know about the Mistick Crewe of Comus.

Reading What In Me Is Dark was, for me, slightly disorienting. Not always in an unpleasant way — it was fun to see someone reflect on the many of the same readers of the poem I did, often using the same quotations, but deploy them in service to a different argument. Or a somewhat different argument. My book is about the reception history of Paradise Lost as a religious text and Reade’s is about its reception as a political text, but those categories are slippery, indeed radically unstable, and nowhere more so then in Milton’s great poem.

The fundamental problem can be put, perhaps reductively but I hope usefully, thus:

Paradise Lost is a poem written in defense of the Christian God: “To justify the ways of God to man”;

Satan in Paradise Lost rebels against a sovereign whom he believes to be a tyrant and usurper, and speaks passionately and articulately against that tyranny and in favor of his own cause;

Milton, in addition to being a poet, was a political figure who rebelled against a sovereign whom he believed to be a tyrant and usurper, and spoke passionately and articulately against that tyranny and in favor of his own cause;

Therefore the language that Satan uses in the poem often closely corresponds to the language Milton uses in his political tracts, even though Milton believes that Satan is wrong in every respect.

This state of affairs generates and sustains an instability in the reader’s mind, a sense that almost every statement by almost every character in the poem can be interpreted in two opposing ways. (Note that this does not happen when people read Milton’s political tracts, since is he speaking there in his own voice: it is when he writes speeches for others that the slippage begins.) We try to define the difference between legitimate and illegitimate authority; between the absolute obedience we owe to God — if we know who God is — and the conditional authority we owe to political authorities, who may or may not have been give their place by God. We try to parse these complexities and soon enough find ourselves, like the demons in Paradise Lost inclined towards philosophical and theological disputation, “in wand’ring mazes lost.”

It is noteworthy that, as Reade points out, “the part of the poem most often used by revolutionaries is Satan’s glittering speeches.” That slippage makes it possible for James Redpath, the anti-slavery activist who is the protagonist of one of Reade’s chapters, in writing an editorial for The Weekly Anglo-African, to find “an ingenious solution to the problem of identifying one’s own cause with Satan. Redpath … took Satan’s rhetoric, called it God’s, and put it in the mouths of Union cannons. This allowed him to recruit Milton’s epic poem for the abolitionist struggle.”

One good reason to read What In Me Is Dark is to see the astonishingly wide range of uses to which Paradise Lost has been put, and if I may be so bold I will add that it’s a reason to read my book as well. As I told Phil Christman, the poem is astonishingly generative: people can’t seem to read it without commenting on it, putting it to use. And as Reade’s story demonstrates, outside of its place in the syllabi of English literature classes, it is a book that people have often, as David Copperfield says about his own childhood reading, read “as if for life.” (Kenneth Burke called this “Literature as Equipment for Living.”)

Reade’s last chapter is about teaching Paradise Lost, and other things, to prisoners — that is, to people who aren’t reading for status or approval but for what they can use:

As the semester went on, I poured more and more time into the class, hoping to arrive at some new understanding by the end. When that came, I was exhausted and uncertain what conclusion we had reached. But the students had taught me to see something that I only realised in retrospect. As we looked at the literature of the past, they were respectful but not reverential. They weren’t reading in an abstract, academic way, they were reading in the context of their whole lives, as something that might help to explain why we had ended up where we were, and this was why they couldn’t relinquish the idea that poetry had something to do with the inequalities of the modern world.

Trying to sum up his “new understanding,” Reade says: “To see that is to want to read disobediently. Reading disobediently might, paradoxically, be the best way to honour Milton’s work…. [R]eading disobediently is a way of relating to the past, not as a burden but as a new beginning.”

Maybe. But I think Milton would have a stern response to this, and it would begin with a question: What or whom are you disobeying? Presumably this would not be something to read disobediently:

And the same, Milton would say, is true of God’s prohibition on eating fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. To read that disobediently is to die.

“Read disobediently” cannot be a categorical imperative: context is all. In order to make a sound judgment, we must know who issues the commandment — and who receives it. For Milton, it was an absolute duty to disobey King Charles and an absolute sin to disobey God. You may disagree on those particulars. But constant disobedience is never an option, for any of us. You’re gonna have to serve somebody.