‘Where all life dies, death lives’: Paradox, Paradise and the Real
Critically consider the importance of paradox to the analysis of Paradise Lost.
Analysis of Paradise Lost revolves around paradox. The text is pure ‘literature’ in the Derridean sense, as it seems to ‘work around the limits of our logical concepts’[1]. In its paradoxes ‘the limits of our language tremble’[2]; the Symbolic Order- a structure of differing signs and opposing binaries- cracks, as fallen and unfallen, life and death, Symbolic and Real, become indivisible. In this essay, I will use a Lacanian framework (with reference to Hayden’s article ‘Ambiguous Words’[3]) to argue that the poem’s paradoxes ‘are the necessary effects of its post-lapsarian production,’[4] indicative of ‘the ineffectiveness… of human language when faced with the task of expressing’[5] the Real, here manifest in Death and the divine.
The Fall: The Real and the Symbolic
The fall from Eden can be interpreted as a fall from the Real into the Symbolic Order of language. Eden contains ‘nature’s whole wealth,’[6] in other words ‘it is a world of plenitude, with no lacks or exclusions of any kind’[7], as Eagleton says of the Real. In the first description of Eden, Milton employs a sprawling, polysyndetic, forty-five-line-long sentence (IV 223-268), flowing like the river it depicts through Paradise. Following this, he uses an epic simile, comparing Eden to various sites of classical beauty (IV 268-285). In both instances, the structure of the text becomes excessive when describing the Real. Even syntactically, we find ourselves in a realm of plenitude. A paradox emerges already, as simile, by nature, diverts meaning elsewhere. Even the process of depicting Eden as a place without absence problematises this notion. The Real is also manifest in God, in whom Adam says ‘no deficience [is] found’[8]. Summarised by Belsey: ‘God is absolute plenitude,’ and since ‘such plenitude [can exist] only’ in a ‘world of undifferentiated totality,’ God must exist ‘outside the symbolic order,’ i.e. in the Real[9].
Within this framework, Heaven represents the pre-natal and Eden the post-natal Real. In the Fall, Adam and Eve are cast out of this ‘realm of plenitude’ by ‘the [F]ather’[10]. Adam remarks that having eaten the ‘bad fruit of knowledge’, they now ‘know// Both good and evil’[11]. The abstract nouns ‘knowledge’, ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are significant here, as the former connotes sentience, the ability to think. ‘Can it be sin to know…?’[12] Questions Satan earlier in the text. Perhaps not, but to know is to think, and Nietzsche tells us: ‘We cease from thinking if we do not wish to think under the control of language’[13], suggesting that original sin thrust humanity under this control. The ‘good’/ ‘evil’ binary further illustrates the primacy of language to the fall, as we know language to be ‘an endless process of difference and absence,’[14] one that begins here.
Problems with Representation
As a descendent of Adam, Milton is fallen, and here lies his problem: how does a post-lapsarian man, one integrated into the absence of the Symbolic Order, attempt to depict the plenitude of the Real? Milton is aware of this throughout, invoking ‘celestial light’[15] to aid him in his representation of things ‘invisible to mortal sight’[16], and emphasising that he doubts the ability of human signification to depict the divine (‘to tell how, if art could tell…’[17]). Consequently, ‘even as Paradise Lost seeks to represent an unfallen world, it is disrupted by the Fall it can never… escape.’[18] Milton’s ‘symbolization fails,’[19] and what is a paradox, but a failure of language, of symbolization? An apparently absurd or self-contradictory proposition which analysis may prove to be true (OED)[20], a paradox is an instance when the differences that prop up language seem to fade.
The Historical Paradox
One problem that results from symbolizing the divine in post-lapsarian terms, is that ‘as soon as we enter the Symbolic Order, the past is always present in the form of historical tradition.’[21] To speak of ‘warring spirits’[22] is to engage with the ‘politics and discourses and symbols of power,’[23] of the English Civil War. This results in the text’s historical paradox: Why does ‘a radical Protestant poet’ who ‘wrote in support of regicide’ ‘depict the God of Paradise Lost as’ an ‘all-powerful king’[24]? When Milton describes God as a ‘Monarch,’[25] the significance of the word is swept away by the discourse of the period; God cannot just be Heaven’s King when described as such, he must also be Charles I, while Satan and his ‘rebellious rout’[26] must be Cromwell and the Roundheads. ‘The ways political language and symbolism are manipulated, challenged, and scrutinized in Paradise Lost,’[27] inevitably problematise the symbolization of the divine Real, leading here to the historical paradox.
Adam and Eve
Another paradox that arises from the inadequacy of Milton’s language is in the representation of Adam and Eve. The first difference perceived by them, the one that precipitates their fall into language, should be that of good and evil. This is not the case, as the first difference the pair acknowledge is sexual, creating a paradox in which Adam and Eve are at once fallen and unfallen. For Lacan, ‘the phallus… is the primary signifier… which sets in motion the endless signifying chain which makes the Symbolic, possible,’[28] by ‘[symbolising]… that there is a division between the sexes.’[29] It could be convincingly argued that the serpentine Satan, as the harbinger of the Fall, acts as the phallus here. Milton connotes the phallus by describing Satan’s neck as ‘erect’[30] and comparing him to ‘a ship’[31] to imply penetration, in a manner ironically typical of Royalist poetry in this period[32]. However, we will see that the phallus appears earlier than this; Eve encounters sexual difference first in Adam. Simultaneously, she learns ‘that those who ‘have’ rather than ‘lack’ [the phallus] are privileged,’[33] recognising that feminine ‘beauty is excelled by manly grace’[34]. Lacan’s theory tells us that ‘at the same time that the child’ ‘becomes a gendered subject,’ it ‘is transformed into a subject of language’[35], or in terms of the poem, it falls. As such, there are two distinct phalluses and falls in the narrative, one into gender, the other into morality. This is utterly irreconcilable with both Lacanian theory and Christian doctrine, facilitating the paradox of Adam and Eve being both fallen and unfallen. Of Eve, Adam says:
‘In outward also her resembling less
His image who made both, and less expressing
The character of that dominion given
O’er other creatures, yet when I approach
Her loveliness, so absolute she seems
And in her self complete’[36]
This passage conveys the contradictory nature of her body. In the repetition of ‘less’, Eve ‘is constituted’ as ‘the lack,’[37] (of phallus). Conversely, ‘complete’ and ‘absolute’ paint Eve in pre-lapsarian light, with ‘Yet’ seeming to acknowledge the contradiction. This paradox is the result of our existence within the Symbolic Order, as ‘we… carry our sense of fallenness, including its alienating habits of doubt and suspicion… into an imagined space that Milton insists is unspoiled by them.’[38] In spite of Milton’s insistence, language cannot reconcile Paradise with patriarchal difference.
Death
Hayden argues that ‘the narrative voice... cannot render the divine or diabolic,’[39] though this is not wholly accurate. We have seen that paradox emerges when Milton attempts to signify the Real, but it can also be argued that one of these paradoxes is successful in glimpsing at a post-mortem ‘diabolic’ Real. In Hell, ‘life dies, death lives, and nature breeds// Perverse, all monstrous… things.’[40] The most monstrous of these things is the embodied figure of Death, the text’s ultimate paradox and its glancing manifestation of the Real. ‘While the Real cannot be directly represented,’ it can be alluded to in terms of ‘symbolic failure and… figurative embodiments of horror-excess that threaten disintegration.’[41] Death is one of these instances of horror-excess; he almost entirely refuses to be signified. Milton accepts the impossibility of accurately depicting a being ‘that shape had none,’ consisting of ‘substance’ that ‘might be called shadow.’[42] Death’s ‘shapelessness defies anatomization.’[43]
In this way, Death is what Zizek calls ‘the real Real’: ‘the horrifying Thing... a shattering force of negation’[44]. The ‘dreadful dart’[45] he carries literalizes this ‘radical negativity’[46] further, with the alliterative plosives emphasising its destructive force. Milton writes:
‘I fled and cried out Death;
Hell trembled at the hideous name, and sighed
From all her caves, and back resounded Death.’[47]
Here, the line break following his name indicates a break in the Symbolic Order, as it’s linguistic structure- the domain of the fallen- literally trembles. According to Lacanian theory ‘death [is] the triumph of the Real,’[48] a radical absence of signification that brings about finally a radical presence through a lack of difference. This notion is evidently embodied by Death, whose shapeless horror threatens a disintegration of the Symbolic, much like that experienced in death itself. As we have seen, Satan questions later in the poem: ‘Can it be sin to know,’ though he immediately succeeds this question with another: ‘Can it be death?’[49] Lacan provides an answer to this question in another paradox of presence and absence: I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think[50]. Since language is an endless chain of differing signifiers, one’s own thoughts are never truly present. As such, in both the text and human development, true meaning, true presence, true knowledge of the Real, is paradoxically achieved where one does not think- in Death.
Nevertheless, this paradox signals the beginning of the Real’s elusion from signification. Again, we find language failing to depict the Real, as the symbolization of Death as absent presence soon breaks down into further contradiction. In Death, the life and death drives of Psychoanalysis merge. In spite of his name, immediately after birth, Death seeks to procreate. He ‘overtook his mother… And in embraces forcible and foul… begot,’[51] the dogs that torment Sin. He is paradoxically representative of both the desire to return to the Real through death and through the maternal body via procreation with her. This is evoked in the syntactic inversion of ‘life dies, death lives’[52]. The text seems to express this sudden escape from symbolization through paradox in the passage quoted earlier[53]. When Death is first signified, its meaning lies there in its entirety, and the Symbolic Order strains to contain it. However, this meaning is immediately spacialy differed throughout hell, as his name rings out and is soon resounded back. The meaning of Death is present for a fleeting moment, and then, mercifully, it is elsewhere, returning in an arbitrary signifier already radically altered by distance and time. Minsky writes that the Symbolic Order is ‘a system of metaphors or meanings which, however… unstable, provide an anchor for the subject, protecting him or her from the delusional horrors of the Real’[54]. As such, the text itself can be read as one epic, paradoxical metaphor for the development of the human subject, one that seeks to protect us with language from the sublime horror of Death or the Real, ‘the terrifying, impossible jouissance,’[55] that we so desperately seek.
Conclusion
Hayden suggests: ‘Paradise Lost… [is]… a constant re-enactment of the Fall, as the narrative voice strives for the… perfection of divine language, but continuously lapses into… imperfect expression,’[56] or paradox. However, from the study of these imperfect linguistic paradoxes, we might draw a different conclusion about our fallen existence, one paradoxically bleak yet optimistic, and perversely in line with Christian tradition. Belsey writes that since the ‘plenitude of presence is always… beyond difference and without meaning, unutterable and thus finally unthinkable… Paradise is always already lost,’[57] but this is not entirely true. Within the Symbolic Order, the Real is ‘paradise inexpressible… that can now be comprehended only as a fractured set of signifiers.’[58] However, we know that the poem does give promise to the return to the Real, not in Eden, but in radical negativity, the physical end of linguistic difference: Death.
Endnotes
[1] Richard Kearney, Debates In Continental Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), p. 144 [the transcript from an interview with Derrida]
[2] Kearney, p. 144
[3] Liam D. Haydon, "Ambiguous Words: Post-Lapsarian Language In Milton", Renaissance Studies, 30.2 (2014), 174-191 <https://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12110>.
[4] Haydon, p. 176
[5] Haydon, p. 174
[6]Milton, IV. 207
[7] Terry Eagleton, "Psychoanalysis", in Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 131-169 <https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/lancaster/detail.action?docID=827065> [Accessed 29 November 2020]. p. 144
[8] Milton, VIII. 415
[9] Catherine Belsey, "Sovereignty", in John Milton Language, Gender, Power (Oxford: Basil Blackwell Inc., 1988), pp. 85-105., p. 60
[10] Eagleton, p. 143
[11] Milton, IX. 1071-1072
[12]Milton, IV. 517
[13] Friedrich Nietzche, "The Project Gutenberg Ebook Of The Will To Power", Gutenberg.Org, 2016 <https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52915/52915-h/52915-h.htm#Page_38> [Accessed 6 March 2021]., p. 38
[14] Eagleton, p. 145
[15] Milton, III. 51
[16] Milton, III. 55
[17] Milton, IV. 234
[18] Haydon, p. 187
[19] Glyn Daly, "Slavoj Zizek: A Primer/Lacan Dot Com", Lacan.Com, 2004 <https://www.lacan.com/zizek-primer.htm> [Accessed 6 March 2021].
[20] "Home : Oxford English Dictionary", Oed.Com, 2021 <https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/137353?rskey=0rXjv0&result=1#eid> [Accessed 6 March 2021].
[21] Slavoj Zizek, "From Symptom To Sinthome", in The Sublime Object Of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), p. 58
[22] Milton, V. 566
[23] David Loewenstein, "Milton And Political Image Wars", Ben Jonson Journal, 21.2 (2014), 203-227 <https://doi.org/10.3366/bjj.2014.0108>. p. 203
[24] Lowenstein, 207-208
[25] Milton, I. 638
[26] Milton, I. 747
[27] Lowenstein, p. 203
[28] Minsky, p. 157
[29] Minsky, p. 150
[30] Milton, IX. 501
[31] Milton, IX. 513
[32] See Thomas Carew, "Thomas Carew. A Rapture.", Luminarium.Org, 2002 <http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/carew/rapture.htm> [Accessed 7 March 2021]. [‘my tall pine shall in the Cyprian strait// Ride safe at anchor and unlade her freight’
[33] Minsky, p. 150
[34] Milton, IV. 490- 491
[35] Minsky, p. 150
[36] Milton, VIII. 440-448
[37] Minsky, p. 153
[38] William Shullenberger, "Imagining Eden", in The Cambridge Companion To Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 125-137 <https://www-cambridge-org.ezproxy.lancs.ac.uk/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/24E71A9D789A6341B505E826CEF0A181/9781139333719c10_p125-137_CBO.pdf/imagining_eden.pdf> [Accessed 6 March 2021].p. 127
[39] Haydon, p. 176
[40] Milton, II. 624-625
[41] Glyn Daly, "Slavoj Zizek: A Primer/Lacan Dot Com", Lacan.Com, 2004 <https://www.lacan.com/zizek-primer.htm> [Accessed 6 March 2021].
[42] Milton, II. 666-670
[43] John Rumrich, "Things Of Darkness: Sin, Death And Chaos", in The Cambridge Companion To Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 29-41 <https://www-cambridge-org.ezproxy.lancs.ac.uk/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/43E5483A4EC10C99330C6DC94947A94B/9781139333719c3_p29-41_CBO.pdf/things_of_darkness_sin_death_chaos.pdf> [Accessed 6 March 2021]. , p. 31
[44] Daly, <https://www.lacan.com/zizek-primer.htm>
[45] Milton, II. 672
[46] Daly, <https://www.lacan.com/zizek-primer.htm>
[47] Milton, II. 785-789
[48] Minsky, p. 148
[49] Milton, IV. 517-518
[50] Paraphrase from Jacques Lacan, "The Instance Of The Letter In The Unconscious, Or Reason Since Freud", in Écrits (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), pp. 412-444., p. 430 [‘I am thinking where I am not, therefore I am where I am not thinking’]
[51] Milton, II. 792-794
[52] Milton, II. 624
[53] Milton, II. 785-789
[54] Minsky, p. 157
[55] Zizek, p. 76
[56] Haydon, p. 175
[57] Belsey “Sovereignty” p. 70
[58] Haydon, p. 191
References
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Rumrich, John, "Things Of Darkness: Sin, Death And Chaos", in The Cambridge Companion To Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 29-41 <https://www-cambridge-org.ezproxy.lancs.ac.uk/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/43E5483A4EC10C99330C6DC94947A94B/9781139333719c3_p29-41_CBO.pdf/things_of_darkness_sin_death_chaos.pdf> [Accessed 6 March 2021]
Shullenberger, William, "Imagining Eden", in The Cambridge Companion To Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 125-137 <https://www-cambridge-org.ezproxy.lancs.ac.uk/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/24E71A9D789A6341B505E826CEF0A181/9781139333719c10_p125-137_CBO.pdf/imagining_eden.pdf> [Accessed 6 March 2021]
Zizek, Slavoj, "From Symptom To Sinthome", in The Sublime Object Of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), pp. 57-93
