Criticism
Brazil
Latin
America
English
Literature
Postmodernism
Postcolonialism
Other Entries
|
|
Postcolonialism
Notes on a Postcolonial Fall in Milton's Paradise
Luiz
Fernando Ferreira Sá
There
seems to be nothing new in the analogy between Milton’s
Eden and the New World, or between Adam and Eve and the ab-original
inhabitants of this New World. What is “new” in
the aforementioned passage focusing on the Fall is that the
epic narrator makes representation equivalent to loss, an
autochthonous loss.
The
colonization of Adam and Eve by Satan, or the imperialism
of Satan in regard to the “original” couple, asserts,
with direct references, the interdependence between universal
Fall and historical fall (for example, the fallen subjects
of seventeenth-century England that submitted themselves to
a “corrupt tyranny” of a Charles I or even to
an-other “corrupt tyranny” of an Oliver Cromwell).
In Paradise Lost, the postlapsarian “universal”
subject of Scripture equalizes, in an ambivalent fashion,
the dispossessed native subjects of the New World; the beginning
of history is, in such transactional manner, the chosen first
moment of colonialism and imperialism. Again, the aforementioned
passage seems to sway both under a colonialist vision of history
and up the mast that gives away postcolonial vistas into histories.
Which vision of history is played out? What textual tradition
of this history is a yoke critiqued out in the open or “yoked
out” deconstructively? Before being described as the
natural inhabitants of America, of the New World, Adam and
Eve chose the “banyan:” an East Indian family
tree that sends out shoots which grow down to the soil, roots
that form secondary trunks, and whose leaves look like the
leaves of the fig tree. As the epic narrator makes clear,
the ab-original couple did not choose the well-known fruit
derived from that tree, nor did they choose the blossoms of
that same tree, they chose instead the leaves of a similar,
but not equal, tree that grows in India. From India, the epic
narrator next takes the readers, from lines number 1102 to
1108 of Book 9 of Paradise Lost, to the noun “Indians”
and “Indian.” At this exact moment, the informed
reader and critic are faced with the superimposition of East
(India, Indian, Indic) and West (Indian-American, indigenous),
and also confronted with a linguistic slip whose posterior
ab-use has rectified, recrudesced, at fault and to a fault,
the forms and the structures of imperialism. Nonetheless,
if Adam and Eve cover themselves up with the leaves of this
Indian/indigenous tree, they do it out of shame and as the
consequence of an error. Again, this linguistic slip, an isomorphism
at best, indicates a re-vision of the registers of discovery
of the New World. The fault/the fall and shame of Adam and
Eve are represented and can be read thus: as a deviation of
Columbus (a detour from the sea-routes that would lead to
the East-Indies), as a defalcation of the discoveries (they
failed to meet the European promises and expectations), as
the defacement of colonization (erasure of any previous subjectivity),
as the defaults of imperialisms, and even as a possible defeasance
of postcolonialisms (thinking them in terms of a general theory
of resentment or simply as trivial acritical generalizations).
All those mis-takes, as if posed in relation to an interdependent
universal Fall and a historical fall, are still to be confirmed
in the next corrective evidence in the same passage of the
epic.
Fault,
falls, superimposition and interdependence of ideas are also
to be found in the reference in the epic to the “Amazonian
targe” or light Amazonian shield. At this point, what
is ambivalent, and not ambiguous, is to what “Amazonian”
in the poem refers. Would there be a reference to the “recently”
discovered warriors that inhabited the riverbank, or their
textual prototypes, fierce female combatants that inhabited
the classical antiquity? In case the reader opts for the first
possibility, the Amazonian peoples, the poem asserts soon
after that that Columbus found(ed) these peoples “recently”
discovered in America girt in the “first naked glory”
before their fall. Another point of inferential interest:
would this lineament be a pronouncement, forfeiture, prefiguration
that the Amazonian peoples, until then as much innocent as
pre-fallen Adam and Eve, should be corrupted by discovery
and then from this point on be dis-covered in a linguistic
slippage, a shaking soil of signification, or be re-discovered
from a blurred eye? If the answer to this (un)rhetorical
question is a “positive” one, would not the text
be linking, definitely, the European (or English, to be more
specific) imperial project to the satanic imperial prospect
in Paradise Lost? And yet: in making such connection, could
the epic still be read in its proto- or pro-colonial/imperial
affiliations? In a localized sense, by reading these textual
aporias, by mis-reading them, I intend to open up the epic
toward a postcolonial conversation, that is, I recover the
poem from a critical arena full of insidious interpretations,
and redeem the text, redirect its foreclosed contents, toward
a critical battlefield fulfilled with readings and mis-readings.
The colonial/imperial avatars in Milton’s paradise may
then submerge, for there to emerge postcolonial questionings.
On
this very route, following the theological line of thought
that takes the Fall and the participation of Satan in this
fall as a better good, that is, as felix culpa, I would add
that a reader, any reader, may understand the discovery and
colonization of the American peoples by the Europeans also
in terms of a devious “fortunate fall.” Bearing
the biblical text in mind, one cannot recuperate a lost innocence,
one cannot recuperate the Garden of Eden, one cannot know
good by good, but, one has to opt and recoup salvation, or
losses, with great labor on the (in)fertile soils of signification.
In relation to the colonized peoples, and according to the
negotiable prospects I read in the text, one would be confronted
with the following: there is no way to recuperate, let alone
regain, one’s lost and found origins, there is no way
to recuperate one’s “nation”/notion of “purity,”
there is no way one can know the civilizational “good”
as being simply a “good.” Notwithstanding,
one may reach back/toward “salvation” n the ways
of subjectivity, laboring on the side of re-cognition and
on the strife of negotiation. We, readers of the epic, cannot
deny the founding violence – there is complicity between
violence and discourse–, in the same way we cannot retaliate,
the text in question, with violence:
[t]he
point is not to recover a lost consciousness, but to see,
to quote Macherey, the itinerary of the silencing. [...] So
from that point of view, our view of history is a very different
view. It is also cumulative, but it’s a view where we
see the way in which narratives compete with each other, which
one rises, which one falls, who is silent, and the itinerary
of the silencing rather than the retrieval (Spivak 1990: 36,
31).
Curious
as it might appear, the mis-reading of epistemic violence
– to mention just one, and one associated with European
imperialism – as a fortunate fall or felix culpa for
the peoples who suffer(ed) the evils of colonization should
be plentifully linked to the itinerary of the silencing as
Macherey and Spivak see it. Excuses masked as ex-culpas, [4]
happy or misshapen ones, in the strategic time and place of
postcolonial discourse would not, some way or another, retrieve
much, or retrial, rescue or salvage anything worth the while.
These ex-culpas, obliterative or oblivious of responsibility,
cannot, once again, correct any state of affairs, once the
matter is not related to correction or the like. Put in a
different manner, “the aftermath of colonialism is not
only the retrieval of the colonial history of the past but
the putting together of a history of the present” (Spivak
1991: 139), this very same reading/re-reading that I am now
putting forth in my misreading of the epic. And yet, “[t]he
most frightening thing about imperialism, its long-term toxic
effect, what secures it, what cements it, is the benevolent
self-representation of the imperialist as savior” (Spivak
1992b: 781). Nothing better than strategic and (in)felix (ex)culpas
of negotiation, the misreading that I am now briefly proposing,
to deconstruct “benevolence” in any salvage.
Imperial
benevolence and postcolonial ambivalence are to be found on
the Amazonian targe of Milton’s epic. The second possibility
of reading the passage, the allusion to the classical female
combatants, would bring about one more layer of complication
and complexity, since the complicity of this text with the
imperial project is getting ever and ever more remote. If
the informed reader reflects on the reference to the combatants,
s/he would be surprised by the correspondent attractions and
repulsions: the Amazons, as members of a female warrior race
that would repeatedly fight against the Greeks, would be combating,
now in a mythological intertext, the (proto)imperialist and
patriarchal projects of the classical antiquity. A referential
system of such magnitude and (dis)order, placed at a crucial
moment of the text, serves, at least, to corroborate the suggestion
that the politico-colonialist alliances of the epic are ambivalent
to a discredit. “A nice bit of controlled indeterminacy
there, resting upon one of the most firmly established European
conventions: transition from Christian psychobiography to
Romantic Imagination. [...] The problem of irrational faith
is interiorized into allegory in the narrowest possible sense”
(Spivak 1991b: 146). Even though Spivak does not refer to
Milton’s epic, this same romantic imagination is to
be found in the passage in question in terms of mythology/ideology.
In addition, if faith is irrational or not extrapolates the
scope of these short notes on Milton’s Paradise Lost,
but in lato sensu, this very same faith is allegorized in
the epic to the extent it becomes aporetic. The fall of Adam
and Eve and the immediate consequences of this fall are textual
movements where the ab-original couple dress themselves up
in combat and repeat a battle at times mythological, at times
theological, at times cultural and ideological. Religion,
seen as a cultural allegory, permitted the epic narrator and
author to produce an-other (text) immediately assessable by
grinding and superimposing the attendant problems related
to race, exploration, conquest, and colonization.
Once
more,
[i]ndeed,
literature might be the best complement to ideological transformation.
The successful reader learns to identify implicitly with the
value system figured forth by literature. Through learning
to manipulate the figures, rather than through (or in addition
to) working out the argument explicitly and literally, with
a view to reasonable consent. Literature buys your assent
in an almost clandestine way and therefore it is an excellent
instrument for a slow transformation of the mind (Spivak 1992a:
278). In the present case, this transformation takes place
less as a consenting to the figures of speech or as a forgetting
to read them, and more as a critical maneuver within the textual
allegories that I presume to have refined to the point of
being capable of reading them as aporias. There are yet many
questions looking for their answers: how then is my assent
given to this epical narrative? How am I, or indeed how was
I, historically constituted as its implied reader so that
I am now able to read it with pleasure within my cultural
self-representation? Returning to the first point, I would
say that my assent was given to the narrative of Paradise
Lost in terms of acknowledgement. To the second, I would presume
to be a well-informed reader of the epic, and hat my misreading
of the text is a “jouissance” because I sight
the textual ambivalences and see the valences (fall, loss,
lack) within Milton’s paradise.
Works Cited
BANERJEE,
Pompa. Milton’s India and Paradise Lost. [Milton
Studies 37. Labriola, Albert C. (Ed.)]. Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburgh Press, 1999. pp. 142-165.
BHABHA,
Homi. Afterword: An Ironic Act of Courage. [In: Rajan,
Balachandra and Sauer, Elizabeth (Eds.). Milton and the Imperial
Vision]. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999. pp.
315-322.
EVANS,
J. Martin. Milton’s Imperial Epic: Paradise Lost
and the Discourse of Colonialism. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1996.
JAY,
Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century
French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1994.
MILTON,
John. John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose.
New York: Hughes, Merritt Y. (Ed.), 1957.
QUINT,
David. Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from
Virgil to Milton. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1993.
SPIVAK,
Gayatri Chakravorty. The Burden of English.
[In: Rajan, Rajeswari S. (Ed.). The Life of the Land: English
Literature Studies in India]. New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1992a.
-----.
Acting Bits/Identity Talks. Critical Inquiry, n.
18, p. 770-803. Summer 1992b.
-----.
Feminism in Decolonization. Differences, v. 3, n.
3, p. 139-170. Fall 1991.
-----.
The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, and Dialogues.
New York: Routledge, 1990.
Stevens,
Paul. Paradise Lost and the Colonial Imperative.
Milton Studies 34. Labriola, Albert C. (Ed.). Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996. pp. 3-21.
Notes
[4]
I use the term ex-culpa in the following accumulations: first,
as an improper derivation from the verb to exculpate: “to
clear from alleged fault or guilt.” Second, as an ironic
derivation from the usage of the verb to exculpate, implying
“a clearing from blame or fault often in a matter of
small importance.” Third, as a means to call attention
to the fact that ex-culpa is a term associated with the itinerary
of silencing in the sense that what is of great importance
in this process is the (un)blameworthy violence perpetrated
both in practice and in discourse. Fourth, ex-culpa is a term
related to the itinerary of silencing less as an attempt at
retrieval and more in its attempts at negotiation. Fifth,
the term ex-culpa also denotes a discursive/rhetorical maneuver
that attempts to release one either from an obligation that
binds the conscience (straightens the eye/I) or from the consequences
of committing an act of grave (ir)responsibility.
<
Back |
1
| 2
|
|
