Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
> [clip] What *was* Satan
> >up to in PL, Carrol?
> >
> >Doug
>
> "Some have accused me of a strange design [clip]
." -- Byron, _Don Juan_, Canto the Fourth
They've been hashing over Satan on the Milton-L list, and I produced a fragment on something like this question but was unable to complete it and didn't think much of what I had written. But I might as well toss it out here.
*****
_______ wrote:
> Dear _______,I thoroughly enjoyed reading your post. Don't apologize
> for your English; very few 20 year olds handle a second (or perhaps
> third) language so well. I think your discussion touches the main
> argument that has always surrounded the interpretation of Satan in
> Paradise Lost -- that he is by far the most arresting character in it.
The narrator has always seemed the most interesting character to me. In the Homeric epics the narrator is transparent - or rather, he is of us, as "we" (the initial audience) listen along with him to the Muse who recounts to us what is and was. No relation is established between poet and audience for they are already as one. But with Milton, and with the modern novel after him, Poet and Reader are isolated individuals, & the tale has a double plot as it were: one plot of the social relations formed 'inside' the tale; a second plot of the formation of a (temporary) society of poet and reader 'outside' the tale. The debate over Satan (regardless of which 'side' the reader takes) is clearly one of the most active forms that relation between poet and reader takes. That is one of the reasons that critical discussions of Satan (again, whichever 'side' they take) are so illuminating of the poem.
> Milton, like you, had grown up with classical literature, and I
> believe he like you was a bit uncomfortable with absolutes, including
> absolute perfection. The classical gods all had their flaws and their
> blind spots -- they were truly antropromorphic and were beloved of men
> partially for that reason.
The gods of the Iliad & the Odyssey were anything but "beloved." They were feared (and resented) but certainly there was no love for them, no element of "spirituality" in the responses to them. Agamemnon is not 'excusing' his actions when, in the reconciliatin with Achilles, he says "the gods made me do it" - he telling the simple truth. Thus I wrote a few years ago on this list: "The story is not how he [Achilles] brings tragedy on himself but how he bears up under tragedy imposed on him by the nature of things. Sending Patroclus into battle is neither a flaw nor even a mistake, but an action which subsequent and unpredictable events turned into horror. Hence his comparison of Priam to his own father." In Milton as in Homer the immortals are not interesting in themselves but only as framework for the actions of the mortals, in PL of the poet himself.
> It is very hard for us to identify with and
> cheer for.God, who cannot make a mistake, cannot die, and cannot lose
> the great battle. Only when we are spiritually and emotionally mature
> enough to realize that to lose one's child is worse than death can we at
> last feel God's pain.
I myself can't really regard God, the Son, the angels, or Satan as characters at all. Characters must be human beings - i.e. mortals. Immortals can provide the framework or the weather of the story but I can't feel them as agents. Also, it is very hard, it seems, for Christians to see the poem as a poem; they can't wholly separate the God or the Son of the poem from the God and Christ of Christian belief, or the presentation of Satan from their belief in the reality of the "fallen world." But of course the world is neither fallen nor unfallen, it is simply the world. Adam & Eve are characters only fitfully until Book 9 - before that they are, mostly, metaphors for the narrator's invention of "unfallen life."
> Satan also possesses a classic heroic attribute you
> mention - [clip]
He possesses traits of "classic heroi[sm]" _AS SEEN THROUGH MODERN EYES_. But "classic heroism" as reflected through PL is a travesty of the actual heroism of Achilles.
> only when we mature enough within the poem
> do we see the destruction he intends to wreak upon the helpless. To
> attack those too foolish or weak to resist, because this is the only way
> he can wound the powerful Deity who loves them, is a despicable act
> unworthy, in my opinion, of the admiration of the Romantics or anyone
> else.
[For the record, did not Milton approve of the horrors visited by the English on the helpless in Ireland?]
Satan's intentions are, again, part of the weather of the poem, part of the narrator's wrestle to make sense of his world, not the intentions of a human agent (and agents are human or not agents). That is a brave struggle, nearly worthy to set beside the struggles of Achilles, but it seems so much criticism of PL wants to make the poem a successful "apology" for (some form) of christianity (or at least for a theism).
It's my fortune (I'm not objecting) that all the writers I most love have 'worldviews' which I find profoundly antipathetic. I cannot see the world as a struggle of good and evil. . . .
[Here the file breaks off] :-)
Carrol