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Pós-Colonialismo

Notes on a Postcolonial Fall in Milton’s Paradise

Luiz Fernando Ferreira Sá.

Milton’s imperial epic, in the words of Martin Evans, seems to transform itself into an imperious epic in relation to post-colonial matters in the post-modern moment. Evans (1996) begins to discuss his overall thesis in the following ways: the texts linked to the literature of colonialism treat recurrent themes – of the colony itself, of the status of the colonized, of colonizers and their reasons – and share a common object whose lineaments are figured and delineated from linguistic practices, descriptive tropes, narrative organization, and conceptual categories. Departing from a supposedly shared discursive practice found in colonialist texts, Evans proceeds to connect these same practices to the grand argument of Paradise Lost: in justifying the ways of God to men Milton would appeal to an imperial discourse. This imperial discourse, however, is reworked as an ambivalent practice in the epic and is redressed in empyreal overtones. David Quint’s Epic and Empire (1993) is another seminal volume whose beginnings are a rejection in Paradise Lost of imperialism and of the imperial epic tradition traced down to Virgil. Quint introduces a different critical moment when he proposes that the epic is transformed into adventurous romance, and that, finally, Paradise Lost is an epic that put an end to all other epics; Milton is a poet against empire. On the way that traverses empire and post-colony, Samuel Johnson is cited in an epigraph to Milton’s Imperial Epic and sheds light on the notes to come: “[t]he subject of an epick poem is naturally an event of great importance. That of Milton is not the destruction of a city, the conduct of a colony, or the foundation of an empire” (1996:1). This privileged reader of Milton’s text understood that Paradise Lost would not found an empire, would not promote the empire, but maybe would initially de-stabilize the epic genre in its negotiations with (u)empire (agency and practice).

As long as negotiations are at stake, Homi Bhabha in his Afterword to the volume Milton and the Imperial Vision sets out on “an ironic act of courage” when he comments on Balachandra Rajan’s propositions on Milton’s epic as suffering from an imperial temptation. Pace Bhabha, “Milton earns the authority to speak in our time, to become part of the postcolonial conversation, because of the deep ambivalence that exists in his ‘imperial voice’” (1999:317). This earned authority associated with deep ambivalence is the Miltonic terrain par excellence and one on which I will not fear to thread. Milton’s imperious epic will be read in its ambivalence and in its various negotiations. [1]

The choice of images in Paradise Lost for a crucial moment in one of the Western grand narratives of human history – the Fall – challenges the informed reader or critic to consider the relation between the acquired condition of Adam and Eve and the discourses of power and colonization in face of the New World. The surprising passage in the epic, with the images related to Adam’s and Eve’s loss of their “first naked glory” (9. 115) [2], reveals the extent to which this narrative of the Fall is associated with the loss of liberty of the colonized peoples of the New World. Paradise Lost exposes both histories as one possible history of human life. In addition, at the moment of re-dressing themselves, Adam and Eve symbolize the Fall also in terms of civility and civilization. In what follows, I will discuss this passage in particular with a view to understanding how the narrative eye/I (the authorial epic narrator) over these images and characters is less imperialist and much more likely to be linked to a political thinker exploring an instance of temporal and cultural difference. This bi-focal narrative outlook into politics and cultural difference will be thought out in relation to postcolonial assumptions.

Paradise Lost represents the acquired state of things through which Adam and Eve had to transit after the Fall: a fall into language (a postlapsarian one), and a fallen language that evokes a vast complex of contingencies and conflicts, complexities and paradoxes, that which also emerges in any postcolonial reading. The temporary center of discussion gravitates round the idea that the New World was habitually described in terms of a new Eden and that Milton’s paradise is filled with images of this baiting New World. The implication is not a simple one, of course, since the Fall in Paradise Lost is first introduced through a satanic admiration of this new world that is God’s “latest” creation; superimposed upon this first narrative, the reader is presented with the epic narrator’s admiration upon the creation and the subsequent loss by humankind of God’s new world in relation to the New World. One of the forms Satan finds in order to tempt Eve, for instance, is a corruption of Adam’s and Eve’s sovereignty over the created “things” in the garden of Eden: “Me thus, though importune perhaps, to come / And gaze, and worship thee of right declared / Sovran of creatures, universal dame” (9. 610-12). This corrupting stare, this gaze previously negotiated in Pandemonium, will subvert natural sovereignty into imperial domination. The next step of the serpent, as in a stare decisis inside out, will be to induce Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit after having openly declared that the “mother of mankind,” “Sovran of creatures” and “universal dame,” is to become “Empress of this fair World, resplendent Eve, / Easy to me it is to tell thee all” and still, “Empress, the way is ready, and not long” (9. 568-9, 626). This eye-straining imperial topos and eye-stained satanic trope will become more and more evident in the representation of fallen human subjectivity in Paradise Lost.

The allusive structure of the scene of the Fall impels the reader to understand this very Fall through the t(r)opological optics of imperialism, that is, the convocation, or even recruitment, of Adam and Eve to the contemporary “problematics” of opposition, conflict, and difference initiates with the loss of “innocence” of the autochthonous subject or the aborigine. [3] Such state of affairs is complicated still more if the reader take into consideration that the Fall is narrated in the register of shame and naturalized through a surprising and adventurous ethnographic comparative admiration:

And girded on our loins, may cover round
Those middle parts, that this newcomer, Shame,
There sit not, and reproach us as unclean
[...] there soon they chose
The fig-tree, not that kind for fruit renowned,
But such as 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 pillared shade
High overarched, and echoing walks between;
There oft the Indian herdsman shunning heat
Shelters in cool, and tends his pasturing herds
At loop-holes cut through thickest shade. Those leaves
They gathered, broad as Amazonian targe,
And with what skill they had, together sewed,
To gird their waist, vain covering if to hide
Their guilt and dreaded shame, O how unlike
To that first glory! Such of late
Columbus found the American so girt
With feathered cincture, naked else and wild
Among the trees on isles and woody shores.
Thus fenced, and as they thought, their shame in part
Covered (9. 1096-98, 1100-20).

Notes

[1] On Milton and Imperialism see also Paul Stevens’s “Paradise Lost and the Colonial Imperative” (1996) and Pompa Banerjee’s “Milton’s India and Paradise Lost” (1999). 

[2] John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York, 1957). Parenthetic Book and line references to Milton’s Paradise Lost are to this edition.

[3] In relation to vision, optics, and the eyes/I’s that see and are seen I side myself with Jean Starobinski through Martin Jay (1994) in their prefatory remarks on the judiciousness of reading: “[t]he complete critique is perhaps not one that aims at totality … nor that which aims at intimacy (as does identifying intuition); it is the look that knows how to demand, in their turn, distance and intimacy, knowing in advance that the truth lies not in one or the other attempt, but in the movement that passes indefatigably from one to the other. One must refuse neither the vertigo of distance nor that of proximity; one must desire that double excess where the look is always near to losing all its powers” (19-20). It is such ambivalent desire, a willingness to risk this loss, that guides and empowers my critical entrance in the labyrinths of Paradise Lost.

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