MILTON

Samuel Johnson once called Paradise Lost a grand testament to dead ideas. It is a fitting image for our last example of the epic tradition, for we can find in this poem monuments of various models of signification and textual functions identified in the texts considered so far. Paradise Lost can serve both as a summary and as a privileged locus for confronting in a more general way the key problems raised by our analyses. Eco’s view of communication and signification as a dialectic between codes and messages implies an inherent dynamism in language going in two directions: on the one hand, an impulse toward totality and closure, and on the other, a persistent mutability, characterized by displacement and deferral.¹ The epics we have considered, generally taken to be homogeneous monuments to national identity or to a heroic ethic, have turned out to be more like battlegrounds where the impulse towards closure and totality confronts the mobility and openendedness of unlimited semiosis. The scope of Paradise Lost is nothing less than the “Global Semantic Universe” (as Eco calls it) and Milton’s attempt to pursue “with no middle flight” things “unattempted yet in prose or rhyme,” raises explicitly the issue of “epic totality” by thematizing the problem of origins. Paradise Lost relates the generation of the post-lapsarian world from the pre-lapsarian one: it is a continuous narrative which centralizes the very moment of discontinuity. Language in Paradise Lost seems to have forgotten its fallen nature while narrating its own fall. In the preface to Book Nine, the narrator contrasts the hackneyed themes of previous epics with his own “higher argument,” which is “sufficient of itself to raise that name” (i.e., heroic). But fallen language, despite its impulse to autonomy and totality, cannot raise itself up to the immanence of divine language, cannot produce the plenitude. The remarkable thing about Milton’s similes is that they are not emblematic of a model of signification which organizes Paradise Lost; rather, they are fragmentary remains of other models of signification. Collected here, they are always already produced elsewhere: always, in a sense, dead ideas.

Homer

The very first simile of Paradise Lost describing the size of Satan is a very “Homeric” moment in the text (1, 196-209):

In bulk as huge

As whom the Fables name of monstrous size,

Titanian, or Earth-born, that warr’d on Jove,

Briareos or Typhon, whom the Den

By ancient Tarsus held, or that Sea-beast

Leviathan, which God of all his works

Created hugest that swim th’ Ocean stream:

Him haply slumb’ring on the Norway foam

The Pilot of some small night-founder’d Skiff,

Deeming some Island, oft, as Seamen tell,

With fixed anchor in his scaly rind

Moors by his side under the Lee, while Night

Invests the Sea, and wished Morn delays:

So stretcht out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay.

The simile is framed at beginning and end with the ostensible tertium comparationis (“in bulk as huge...so stretcht out huge”), but clearly we have here an initial attempt to produce a set of interpretants for Satan, an attempt to produce an opposition between good and evil, culture and non-culture, etc. The simile thus resembles thematically and functionally the Typhoeus simile of Book 2 of the Iliad. There, as elsewhere in the Iliad, the social rupture caused by the conflict of Achilles and Agamemnon is “interpreted” by being placed against the background of the struggles of Zeus to establish cosmic order. The Homeric model of culture, in which the notion of cultural activity is produced in opposition to an isomorphically constructed negative image of “anti-cultural activity,” introduces the paradigm of Zeus and Typhoeus as an interpretant of the action of the Iliad. The cosmic and mythological code, that is, becomes applied to a particular narrative circumstance. This exemplifies the way that, as the text propels itself forward, inevitably producing heterogeneities and ruptures, already constituted cultural codes are invoked to resolve or finesse those heterogeneities and ruptures.

This does not mean that the Iliad is a mere repetition of already constituted codes; if the relationship between code and message is truly dialectical, then the process of rectifying heterogeneities and ruptures can itself be an agent in restructuring codes. The coding of Achilles’ unusual behavior as “wolfish,” for example, reaffirms culture’s distinction between proper and improper behavior. At the same time, the fact that a great hero who is beloved of Zeus acts wolfishly in a particular situation is a solution which must put into question at some level the definition of proper behavior. This can be seen as the beginning of the articulation of a new definition of culture. The Iliad is generally taken to be a text which is the product of a staunchly conservative oral tradition and reflective of a staunchly conservative and aristocratic ideology, a point of view with considerable corroboration in the poem. Nevertheless, the similes themselves are emblematic of the way in which a propulsive poetics can produce unforeseen results and create, at least on a small scale, new configurations of codes.

Milton’s simile, however, does not represent a similar investment in a dialectic of code and message. The monsters named here are all traditional representations of the figure of Satan. Although Milton apparently takes us outside of the world of the poem to a world which “Fables name” and of which “Seamen tell,” we remain at all times within one world, the world of human discourse, where Titans, Briaereos, Typhon and Leviathan are already identified with Satan. Since Satan is an already constituted master code of evil, what we have is a tautology which says only that Satan is like Satan.

Paradise Lost is a poem about origins, and especially about the “cause” (PL 1, 29) of the post-lapsarian world. But cultural definition does not emerge from this simile: it is simply restated. The line between culture and non-culture is not drawn in this simile; for this simile, and indeed the whole poem, already presumes the existence of that line. The production of such a simile here where the text poses for the first time the question, what is Satan like, imitates formally Homer’s Typhoeus simile, but it only gives the impression that meaning is being produced. The kind of meaning available in Milton’s simile is the kind dictionaries are full of: a series of namings which cannot transcend its own process of continual deferral to achieve a closure and fullness of meaning. We are left with a series of fragmentary texts produced by other models of signification, rather than a model of signification organizing meaning in a way adequate to Milton’s project.

Apollonius

After the fall, Adam and Eve recognize their nakedness and contrive to cover themselves (PL 9, 1098-1118):

So counsell’d hee, and both together went

Into the thickest Wood, there soon they chose

The Figtree, not that kind for Fruit renown’d,

But such as at this day to Indians known

In Malabar or Decan spreads her Arms

Branching so broad and long, that in the ground

The bended Twigs take root, and Daughters grow

About the Mother Tree, a Pillar’d shade

High overarch’t, and echoing Walks between;

There oft the Indian Herdsman shunning heat

Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing Herds

At Loopholes cut through the thickest shade: Those Leaves

They gather’d, broad as Amazonian Targe,

And with what skill they had, together sew’d,

To gird thir waist, vain Covering if to hide

Thir guilt and dreaded shame; O how unlike

To that first naked Glory. Such of late

Columbus found th’ American so girt

With feather’d Cincture, naked else and wild

Among the Trees on Isles and woody Shores.

The passage resembles Apollonius’ use of the simile for code-making: “giving names to things without names,” as Aristotle says. In Apollonius, the epic simile is no longer a text-constitutive device designed to propel a text through a narrative complication according to already constituted cultural codes, but rather to conceptualize “analogically” new areas of thought, to expand the world of discourse outward toward new frontiers. We saw above, for example, how Apollonius made use of comparison in the Argonautica to produce the inner world of man’s feelings as a model, a microcosm structured in terms of the world outside man. The key to the similes of Apollonius, therefore, and indeed to the poetics of Apollonius as a whole, is structure and form. There the simile has become a rhetorical form, a mode of address capable of setting up a system of exchange between different things, and in this way of articulating a discourse about new things. As the Argonauts travel to the very limits of the world, the heterogeneous institutions and objects that they encounter are formalized by a dialectical exchange, a process which generates “new ways of seeing.”

Milton’s passage also involves the likening of strange “other” cultures to the situation of Adam and Eve. Clearly there is an attempt here to evoke exotic and extraordinary images: a non-European fig tree which grows in a bizarre way, savages who live in trees, Amazonian targe, etc. The result is, however, once again a pseudo-simile, since the Indian and American natives are not “other genera”; they are themselves “Adam’s seed,” a species of the genus. This simile, in fact, shows clearly the incongruity of an Apollonian model for Milton’s purposes. The geographical movement of a quest narrative is the perfect vehicle for Apollonius; for it makes possible a bracketing out of temporality in favor of spatial comparata: inside and outside, us and them. In Paradise Lost, however, there is no “outside” to be referred to: there is only our world “inside.” If Apollonius is trying to encounter that which is “outside,” Milton is trying to contain everything “inside.” Hence he must replace the spatial opposition with a temporal one: then and now. But from a temporal perspective, Milton’s comparata are merely repetitions. In fact, western Europe tended to see the technologically naive peoples of the New World as repetitions of their own “primitive” beginnings: as living in a “state of nature.” Milton’s similes cannot raise the issue of value anew, cannot produce new codes, because it takes for granted a historical framework, a teleology, in which everything has already received its “proper” value. Such a framework nullifies the possibility of sallying forth to find something not already named and recognized, something that could be really new.

Cicero

In Book Four of Paradise Lost, Eden is described as it unfolds before the eyes of Satan. Milton tries to evoke in this passage a sense of nature prior to the fall and hence prior to death and decay. He attempts to capture the true Logos of divine creation, the original and ultimate pattern of beauty and order now lost to man through sin. The description of Eden is, in short, the most privileged example of the Ciceronian function of the simile. Unlike Apollonius, both Cicero and Vergil attempt to contain language within a coherent system, to reduce its propulsive power in respect to a transcendent code which is prior to all messages. The “lateral” proliferation of codes which is characteristic of Apollonius is now replaced by a “vertical” hierarchizing of codes. Cicero thus assumes the existence of a “law of nature,” which is the transcendent master code. The argument of the Republic is thus that the dynamic processes of nature are ruled by an immanent Ratio, and Cicero relates the history of the Roman state as a progressive instantiation of this “natural” ideal. The further abstraction of the exchange process in order to produce a transcendent model (Ratio, Logos) has been compared above to the establishment of money, to the process of induction and overcoding. The common element in all of these is the establishment of a transcendental value or law which is the telos of the production process.

Milton, however, faces a different epistemological problem when portraying in fallen, contingent language that full and immediate presence that Eden comprises. For Cicero, temporality presents no problem; since history is a series of continuous manifestations of the Logos, segments of that continuum can be, theoretically, extracted at random and compared to each other in order to discover inductively the immanent principle continuously at work. For Milton, this is not the case. The fall marks a discontinuity in history so that nature and society after the fall are qualitatively different from nature and society before the fall. This discontinuity renders impossible the inductive discovery of the Ratio of paradise from a post-lapsarian perspective (4, 268-85):

Not that fair field

Of Enna, where Proserpin gath’ring flowers

Herself a fairer Flow’r by gloomy Dis

Was gather’d, which cost Ceres all that pain

To seek her through the world; nor that sweet Grove

Of Daphne by Orontes, and th’ inspir’d

Castalian Spring might with this Paradise

Of Eden strive; nor that Nysean Isle

Girt with the River Triton, where old Cham,

Whom Gentiles Ammon call and Lybian Jove,

Hid Amalthea and her Florid Son

Young Bacchus, from his Stepdame Rhea’s eye;

Nor where Abassin Kings thir issue Guard,

Mount Amara, though this by some suppos’d

True Paradise under the Ethiop Line

By Nilus head, enclosed with shining Rock,

A whole day’s journey high, but wide remote

From this Assyrian Garden.

The original Ratio of nature can be conceived of, since the fall, only as something “other” than the present. The amoeni loci listed in this simile are all products of the pastoral tradition and are constituted as an imaginary return to some original (and now lost) goodness. The topos of the amoenus locus is usually based on the opposition of city and country, the former being the locus of conflict, contradiction and alienation, the latter being the negative image of the city. The idealized pastoral setting, where one lives in harmony with nature and one’s fellow man, can only be imagined from the city, since it is constituted entirely as the absence of the conflicts and contradictions of real society.² Such a representation amounts to a negation of a negation. To describe the present as degraded presumes it to be a negation of an original harmony, something that the present has been degraded from. The representation of an amoenus locus reverses that degradation by rendering absent all that is reprehensible, all that is “fallen,” about the present.

Milton explicitly states in the above similes that the Ratio of paradise cannot be inductively discovered by comparison (“Not that fair field...Nor that Sweet Grove,” etc.). That is, he recognizes that the true and original paradise is qualitatively different from the literary paradises of fallen language. But these similes conclude Milton’s own description of Eden which lies firmly in this same tradition of double negation. One can cite, for example, the devaluation of artifice in 4, 241-43:

Flow’rs worthy of Paradise which not nice Art

In Beds and curious Knots, but Nature boon

Poured fourth profuse on Hill and Dale and Plain.

Many scholars have noted in Milton’s paradise an underlying ambivalence, a potential and implicit evil.³ This is not, however, a proleptic anticipation of the fall; rather, since Eden is a metaleptic negation of a negation, it lacks a ratio of its own. Since Milton’s Eden is without an intrinsic mechanism of its own which could dispose various aspects of the representation into a unified system, it is essentially unorganized and always liable to internal contradiction. The description is a juxtaposition of fragments of other texts whose inclusion is determined by virtue of being negations of negative elements from other (not necessarily mutually compatible) descriptive systems. The amoenus locus, after all, existed in the literary tradition both as a foil to urban conflict and as a place of ignoble sloth where the hero forgets his mission.⁴

The ethical ambiguity of an amoenus locus is a direct result of its negativity, its lack of a ratio. Thus, for example, pain must be absent from Eden, but idleness is anathema to Puritan ethics. The result is a most un-Ciceronian antinomy between nature and culture (PL 4, 618-33):

Man hath his daily work of body or mind

Appointed, which declares his Dignity,

And the regard of Heav’n on all his ways:

While other animals unactive range,

And of thir doings God takes no account

Tomorrow ere fresh Morning streak the East

With first approach of light, we must be ris’n,

And at our pleasant labor, to reform

yon flow’ry Arbors, yonder Alleys green,

Our walk at noon, with branches overgrown,

That mock our scant manuring, and require

More hands than ours to lop their wanton growth.

“Pleasant labor” is, strictly speaking, an oxymoron, for labor is an effect of the fall. For a Christian it can have positive value only in the sense that it is the means by which we repair the effects of the fall. Indeed, in the contrast of the behavior of men and animals, together with the portrayal of nature as “wanton” and in need of cultivation, this passage resembles the Aeneid, where man must impose organization on a disorganized environment. Milton’s representation of Eden is “pseudo-Ciceronian”; it does not reveal the ratio of paradise, but collects a series of highly overcoded clichès from traditional conceptions of the amoenus locus.

Vergil

The description of paradise is an important example because it involves the juxtaposition of products of incompatible models of signification, a sure indication that those models are not functioning to organize the text. It is not that texts must have a single model of signification which arranges everything into an organic whole, for we have paid attention all along to the contradictions and heterogeneities present in each of the texts discussed. The point is, rather, that a single model of signification will be made to seem to be the dominant model, and traces of the attempts to do so will be legible to a certain degree. What is lacking in Paradise Lost is any trace of this struggle. In the very moments which often epitomize such a struggle, the similes, there is a lack of the tension which characterizes the similes of Milton’s predecessors. Instead we have tautology or an explicit undercutting of the productive process.

In Book 4 of Paradise Lost Satan is compared to a wolf, an almost inevitable simile given the persistent representation of wolves as the “outsider” in the epic predecessors of Milton (183-93):

As when a prowling Wolf,

Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey

Watching where Shepherds pen thir Flocks at eve

In hurdl’d Cotes amid the field secure,

Leaps o’er the fence with ease into the Fold:

Or as a Thief bent to unhoard the cash

Of some rich Burgher, whose substantial doors,

Cross-barr’d and bolted fast, fear no assault,

In at the window climbs, or o’er the tiles:

So clomb this first grand Thief into God’s Fold:

So since into his Church lewd Hirelings climb.

Of the images of “wolfishness” that we have encountered from Homer to Dante, Milton’s simile seems closest to Vergil’s, for whom the opposition between culture and non-culture was defined as organized vs. disorganized. When Aeneas is compared to a hungry wolf (Aen. 2, 355-58), the implication is that he acts spontaneously, “naturally,” and hence his actions are retrograde with respect to the claims of culture. Nature, for Vergil, is disorganized raw material in need of civilizing influences to have value. The movement of Milton’s similes from comparing Satan first to a wolf and then to a thief implies that breaking and entering is acting “wolfish.” This simile seems to evolve out of nature a model of evil, just as Vergil evolved out of nature a pattern of “non-cultural” activity. Being a thief, it is implied, is like being a wolf; and since the wolf is simply following his natural impulse (hunger), Satan is evil because he is incapable of resisting “natural impulses.”

The ironies of such an implication are manifest. Wolves are marked as the image of rapacity because their actions are like those of thieves, not the other way around; and people steal not because it is natural but because it is Satanic, and we all partake of the Satanic since the fall. That this simile is actually a pseudo-simile is made clear by its apodosis:

Or as a thief....

So clomb this first grand Thief into God’s Fold.

Satan is not like a thief, he is a thief; and the thief of the simile as well as the lewd Hirelings are like Satan; and then, last of all, the wolf is marked by culture as “like a thief.” If the simile cannot be understood as an antithesis between nature and culture, it can neither be seen as a “Homeric” projection of negativity onto Satan, since Satan is a more generic image of anti-culture than the wolf. Nor can it be seen as the reification of a crucial moment in the psychological drama of Satan, for there is no dialectical tension between Satan, on the one hand, and wolves, thieves and false prelates on the other. What we have, in fact, is a collection of overcoded images of Satanic behavior, but Satan is not “like” them in terms of any particular model of signification. That is, the image of Satan is not organized into a logos in this simile. We have here not a productive device, but products.

Dante

The Divine Comedy is in certain obvious ways closer to Paradise Lost than any of the other works we have considered; but in other ways it is utterly different. In describing the devils in Book I of Paradise Lost, Milton evokes the exodus event in a passage with numerous connections to the Divine Comedy (I, 301-12):

His Legions, Angel Forms, who lay intranst

Thick as Autumnal Leaves that strow the Brooks

In Vallombrosa, where th’ Etrurian shades

High overarcht inbow’r; or scatterd sedge

Afloat, when with fierce Winds Orion arm’d

Hath vext the Red Sea Coast, whose waves o’erthrew

Busiris and his Memphian Chivalry,

While with perfidious hatred they pursu’d

The Sojourners of Goshen, who beheld

From the safe shore thir floating Carcasses

And broken Chariot Wheels; so thick bestrown

Abject and lost lay these, covering the flood.

The image of “the Sojourners of Goshen” looking back over the Red Sea from the safe shore recalls the typological simile of Inferno 1, 22-27. But in Dante’s simile, it is the experience of the pilgrim which is compared to the exodus crossing; and the typological model of signification is evoked there to situate that personal experience. The typological model, moreover, as a trajectory of significance for the pilgrim’s situation, is immediately scuttled by his inability to reach the top of the lighted mountain. The typological model only works for someone who has had a revelation, someone who has achieved the Augustinian kairos; and it is precisely this type of vision that the first canto indicates the pilgrim has not had. At the same time, it is impossible to “work your way up” inductively, because of the qualitative difference between human and divine discourse. It is this aporia out of which the writing of the Divine Comedy proceeds, a writing which is not an articulation of the Logos, but a personal witness to its activity. By writing a spiritual autobiography, Dante places himself in a sound Christian tradition. In such a discourse, where subject and object are fused, revelation and discovery become the poles of a dialectic which neither produces nor is produced by the Logos, but constitutes the self as a witness to the Logos. A personal witness can only hope to be effective ad opus, for it is surely of little value ad speculandum.

Milton sets out, like Dante, to produce divine meaning, to say the cause of the post-lapsarian world and in this way to “assert Eternal Providence and justify the ways of God to men” (PL 1, 25-6). But Milton enters his poem most often as the traditional amanuensis of the muse (PL 1, 6-36; 3, 19, 37-38, 51-55; 9, 20-24, 47).⁵ He does not put himself forward as authentication for his own discourse; rather, his “higher Argument” is “sufficient of itself’ to make Paradise Lost a heroic poem (9, 43). But the very event which is the subject of the poem conflicts with this purpose of producing an unmediated version of the divine plan. Thus, for example, Milton’s allusion to the exodus event makes a link between Satan and one of his most famous earthly manifestations: the Pharaoh. Since the Pharaoh is traditionally a vera daemonis figura the text tells us that Satan is like one of his manifestations: veritas is like a figura, to use Auerbach’s terms. This is, of course, hardly a productive use of typology, but there is more at issue here.

Cicero, Vergil and Dante all produce a “history.” Cicero views history as the dynamic interplay of forces ruled by an immanent ratio. His selection and relation of events is aimed at discovering that underlying first principle (revocatio ad rationem). For Vergil, the ratio of history is given: it is Augustus; and Vergil’s selection and relation of events is aimed at imposing that model of the past on the future. For Dante, the ratio of history is neither fully revealed nor comprehensible; and Dante claims neither to know it nor how to come to know it Dante confronts history with a history, his own. Although the content of that experience is ultimately incommunicable and unrepeatable, it is nevertheless a witness to God’s activity in history. It makes a claim that history does have divine significance.

Milton does not produce a history, he collects fragments of other histories. In all the instances cited above, it is not the productive device which is imitated or put to use; rather, it is the products of those devices in other texts which are restated in Paradise Lost. Milton’s poem is indeed a “grand testament to dead ideas,” for Paradise Lost does not have a productive device of its own to create live ideas. At the same time, part of the “grandness” of Milton’s poem lies in the fact that it contains practically everything. How is it that a text which lacks a model of signification can not only be produced, but can go on encyclopaedically including everything within it, and then be followed by a sequel? To rephrase the question, what propels Paradise Lost forward?

Propulsion and Paradise Lost

The peculiar status of the language of Paradise Lost has not escaped the notice of Milton’s readers. Samuel Johnson’s criticism of the logical incongruities of Paradise Lost is well known.⁶ T. S. Eliot noted the “conventional and artificial” character of Milton’s poetry and accused him of writing English “like a dead language.” Eliot’s complaint of a “dissociation of sensibility” in Milton’s language became a sort of catch word in Milton scholarship, and his contention that there is a fundamental dislocation between the “inner meaning” of his verse and the “poetic surface” became the terms of a considerable debate about the virtues of Milton’s poetry.⁷ Stanley Fish, for example, maintains that the dislocation of which Eliot speaks is strategic and that the “coherence and psychological plausibility of the poem are to be found in the relationship between its effects and the mind of the reader.”⁸ Another tack is taken by such scholars as John Steadman, who suggests that Milton consciously undercuts the representational functions of language to debunk the ethical and aesthetic values of traditional epics, and ultimately, in order to write an “anti-epic.”⁹

Christopher Grose, with special attention to the similes and other types of discursive shifts, argues that Milton strategically separates himself from the fictive narrator in order to separate the “true poem” from the mere technical performance. For example, in the first simile of Paradise Lost (1, 196-210, cited above), Milton the man presents us with a narrator/poet in the midst of a perceptual dilemma, “confronted with a crisis in the poem’s community of knowledge...pretending to cast about for an appropriate alternative likeness” to Satan.¹⁰ Apart from this staged performance by a helpless narrator, Grose suggests, something else happens in this simile: “What emerges as it were spontaneously from this improvised performance is an emblematic scene which clearly has little to do with size” (151). This simile, together with its accompanying commentary (PL 1, 209-220),

serves to clarify what may be called the poetic moment’s historical outcome, its “event”, and suggests that the function of Milton’s simile is to do so, even where it pretends to amplify such simpler (and more sensuous) likenesses as the hugeness or magnificence of Satan.... The poet at such times, we might say, is a public man, sharing with the reader his difficulties in the face of the poem’s mysteries. No vision or flight of fancy cuts him off from his audience, taking him either into himself or (alternatively) above the poles and toward the Holy Light. He is most clearly one of us; and as a stylist he is most clearly time-bound, most evidently at the mercy of his own unpremeditated process of speech.

All of this, however, is less complicated than the facts of the poem itself. As we have seen, the unpremeditated “error” of simile often wanders into a circumstance which establishes the ironies of a narrative scene; “low” as they may seem stylistically, as forms of perception they bring us closer than does the “purer” narrative (narrative without the directive commentary) to the highest kind of awareness in the poem, contained ultimately in God’s “prospect high” (see Paradise Lost 3, 77).¹¹

In this passage, Grose opposes two forms of validation (that of the witness and that of the prophet) to the “unpremeditated process of speech.”¹² The phrase is a particularly felicitous one, for it recognizes in Milton’s verse a mobility of its own, an internal propulsion. Grose further says that this “process of speech,” because it is staged in Paradise Lost, makes the poem “sincere and its words lucky” (17):

To stage the poem’s origins, and, so to speak, its emergence from them, would provide the poet’s equivalent of the preacher’s logical scaffolding, and thus the process of speech--including the speaker--which could somehow validate whatever true acts the true poem might effect (12).

In the terms set out above, Grose’s point can be summarized something like this: Milton, as a Christian and an iconoclast, thematizes, as did Dante, the inadequacies of fallen speech by presenting a “character” struggling helplessly to grasp the Logos. In opposition to this “low” guise of the poet, another perspective emerges as an effect of the poem’s discursive process; it is not, however, the perspective of the witnessing self constituted by the experience which lies behind the writing of the poem, but the perspective of a true poet/prophet which merges with God’s “prospect high.” The very scrupulousness with which Milton underscores the inadequacies of the merely technical performance of his narrative produces, as it were, an alternative mode of seeing which transcends that performance.

Significantly, Grose documents his approach to Paradise Lost with discussions of Milton’s works centered on his desire to become England’s poet/prophet, as well as with discussion of Milton’s Ramist handbook of logic. Clearly the problem of producing a true and sincere poetry was a major preoccupation of Milton, all the more acute because of his Ramism and Puritan suspicion of “image-making.” Language in Paradise Lost only seems to have forgotten its own fallen nature while narrating its own fall; at a closer look, it seems more correct to say that Milton is constantly aware of the nature of language, but determined to transcend it in some way. If readers of Paradise Lost have perceived in it something other than the poem “intends to pursue,” it is not because Milton was naive about the possibilities of “lik’ning spiritual to corporal forms.”

If Dante splits the self into pilgrim and author, Milton empties himself into his fictive narrator. If the figure of the helpless narrator/poet is staged in Paradise Lost, the figure who is doing the staging is totally unrealized in the poem. If Milton strategically relies on his audience’s expectations as readers to constitute the true poet behind his multiple guises (and the true poem behind its multiple guises), the history of Miltonic scholarship shows that the true poet and the true poem can be realized in more than one way. The history of interpretations of Paradise Lost, in fact, is a testimony to that most insidious aspect of language; its tendency to masquerade as substance. In his attempt to produce “the meaning, not the name” (Paradise Lost 7, 6), the substance, not the play of differences, Milton provides us with a poem which can contain and accommodate everything which has taken on the appearance of linguistic substance. The “true poem” is an absence around which human discourse can be encyclopaedically proliferated; just as the “true poet” is an absence around which a variety of conventional identities alternatively appear.

If both Dante and Milton explicitly eschew logic for rhetoric, it is clear that a different kind of persuasive argument animates each poem. Dante requires us to leap from his own experience to one of our own; Milton requires us to leap from our own linguistic universe into the divine universe of signification. What propels the Divine Comedy forward is the abductive dialectic between fictive author and fictive pilgrim, between the enormous static structures of the afterworld’s completeness and the probing tentativeness of the pilgrim’s search for personal meaning; and the similes of the Divine Comedy seem to act as a hinge between these two textual economies. What propels Paradise Lost forward is language’s inexhaustible “interpretability” or “readability,” its capacity for unlimited displacement and deferral. T. S. Eliot once compared Milton’s verse to the Great Wall of China.¹³ It is a most fitting image for the reading process as it is established in Paradise Lost: a virtually unending “lateral” movement from text to text, from interpretant to interpretant, convincing the reader of the reality of a distant yet ever deferred horizon. As readers, we can extend and continue the “process of speech,” adding commentary and citing multiple resonances; but any attempt to ground Paradise Lost into a unified totality can be opposed with other equally well-grounded (or equally ungrounded) unities.

Grose’s notion of the transcendent perspective of the poem, therefore, must be thought of in a different way. Paradise Lost is not a poem in which readers are allowed momentary glimpses of “God’s prospect high”; nor is there an equivalent of a “logical scaffolding” constructed here which could somehow validate various effects of the poem. The “vision” of Paradise Lost is fixed on nothing but the world of names. The scrupulousness of which Grose speaks does not lead out of figurative language; rather, it empties language of any denotative power whatsoever. Milton exploits the play of differences which animates the aesthetic language of his predecessors so completely that the productive possibilities of language are completely circumscribed. Milton’s poem totalizes language not as a figure of the real, but as figurality itself. The productive possibilities of exchange are shown to be infinite, but monotonal. All rhetorical elements are in the end equal; and rhetoric is all that human language can achieve.

Paradise Lost is indeed without a model of signification; but it levels all the products of other models of signification, shows them to be only rep resentation and deferral. The translation of a fragment from another text into Paradise Lost allows the model of signification which is operating in it to play itself out, to yield up its claim to being anything other than rhetoric parading as authentic discourse. In the analyses of Milton’s similes above, I repeatedly made the point that a model of signification was being invoked, but that it was not functioning in Paradise Lost. The same point can be made in the other direction. Those models of signification do function in their respective texts precisely because of a certain blindness to their own rhetoricity. Milton’s text illuminates the blind spots in each of those models by juxtaposing and intermingling them. In the space created by Paradise Lost, these models of signification are unmasked as having only a certain sectoral validity, as only working by the exclusion of certain things from view.¹⁴

For is it not the case that every model of signification we have identified from Homer on is able to function by means of a certain arbitrary mastery? Is it not the case that these texts attempt, by strategies of exclusion and containment, to occult the groundlessness of language, to reduce unlimited semiosis to a closed system, to make sure that language propels in a certain way? Thus, for example, when we say that Vergil, Cicero and Dante all produce a history, we should also note that those histories are possible by virtue of some sort of finesse with respect to the problem of temporality. Many critics of the Aeneid have called attention to the persistent tension and ambivalence which lie just beneath the smooth Vergilian surface, sometimes reading the poem as the exact opposite of its stated purpose. Similarly, Cicero’s assumption that nature’s laws have guided the evolution of Rome’s history requires him to forget a great number of individual things about Rome (e.g., the preceding century) and about nature (e.g., hurricanes). Moreover, in Cicero and Vergil the Logos leads a double and contradictory existence: in each case, it is eternally present and immanent and at the same time in the process of being constructed. The Divine Comedy sidesteps the problem of temporality by shifting focus to the individual, whose experience is unrepeatable and unexchangeable; and thus is unable to be “situated” in a temporal scheme. Even in the limiting case, that of Apollonius, one can see that the whole prospect of sallying forth beyond the frontiers of culture presupposes a valorization of the “inside.” That is, the best-intentioned attempts to counter ethnocentrism with evidence that others are more like us than is thought tends to highlight the ways in which they are like us.

Paradise Lost is not, therefore, a figure or simulacrum of the “true poem” in the sense that Grose suggests. It is, rather, figurality as such: language shown to be always figurative, always only connotative, always able to produce and reproduce only itself. In Paradise Lost similes and other such figures of speech are seamlessly continuous with the rest of the narrative. To put it in the terms we have used above, language in Paradise Lost is pure propulsion. The strategy of circumscribing language as rhetoric does not, however, lead only to a collapse in aporia; for the non-rhetorical, the denotative, the fully immanent discourse of God is, if not present, conspicuous by its absence. If language cannot produce divine discourse, its enclosure as mere rhetoric calls out for an absent closure. The totality of exchange is the only side of the coin we see; but, it is implied, there must be another side. Milton stands with his back to Being, seeing only a world of motion and representation, but assured that behind him, unseen, lies a world of permanence and presence. If the Romantics found Milton a heavy burden to bear, his project was essential to their own. For they too recognized that language was a vicious circle of displacement and deferral. But their solution was to turn their gaze away from the marketplace of verbal exchange and gaze into the unknown and unknowable world which for Milton is always absent to men.