Visionary Milton: Essays on Prophecy and Violence

6: A World with a Tomorrow: Paradise Regain’d and Its Hermeneutic of Discovery

109 6  A World with a Tomorrow Paradise Regain’d and Its Hermeneutic of Discovery Joseph A. Wittreich Fissures, rifts, crevices, conflicts, inconsistencies, contradictions —these terms are by no means new to Milton criticism. But now reinflected and newly deployed, they are fast becoming the language of an emerging criticism in which this vocabulary points not to aberrations, indiscretions, or a poet’s noddings (much less snorings) but instead to acts of poetic engineering. These terms are important not as envelopes for isolated cases or curious phenomena but as component elements in a vast design. They achieve a gathering importance as it becomes apparent that contradictions in Milton’s poetry function in consort. No longer cause for censure but now part of a rhetoric of commendation, these terms are also marks of Milton’s modernity — indeed, postmodernity, evincing what Gordon Teskey describes as “a rift at the center of his consciousness,” “a sort of invisible rift.” It is here, according to Teskey, that “contradiction,...positive contradiction,” creates a 110 Joseph A. Wittreich “friction,” which, a principal signature of Milton’s writings, is, by Teskey, then given the slip as “dissonances become harmonies,” “incoherent moments” are recuperated, and “unity [is achieved] on a higher plane.” The unity that Milton’s detractors had once denied to his poetry is here represented as “the essence of a biblical poetics” that, integrating the fragments of Milton’s vision, also affords a program for interpreting it.1 The uncertainty and contradiction, the “tangle” of competing codes and clashing meanings that Teskey attributes to Milton’s poetry and eventually finds subdued therein, have become its defining features in a criticism that is ready to challenge the applicability to Milton’s poetry of what Teskey understands to be the essence of biblical poetics, its harmonizing tendencies.2 Milton’s last poems—Paradise Lost, Paradise Regain’d, and Samson Agonistes—are all grounded in scriptural stories that, as A. J. A. Waldock explains, are “lined with difficulties of the gravest order.” Further flawed in their retelling, says Waldock, those same stories are then projected by Milton onto huge canvases where rifts become gulfs and chasms.3 Their ancient anchorings in Scripture are, paradoxically, the source of the postmodern aesthetic we are currently excavating from Milton’s poems. Michael Lieb’s Milton, for example, “embraces...uncertainties ”: “my Milton is born of conflict, raised of uncertainty, and forever fulfilling all that is meant by the term agonistes.”4 In their turn, Milton’s writings are sites of contestation where uncertainties repeatedly destabilize a text; where what Lieb calls “a radical hermeneutic”5 undermines rather than reinforces theological commonplaces , disrupting Milton’s supposed alliance with “the traditional ...well-established...unquestioned,”6 and where, instead of creating a systematic theology, Milton moves against systems of thought, intent upon delivering us from them. Milton thus rejects the theological climate in which he writes—one that would close windows instead of opening them and that slides by contradictions rather than engaging them, one that answers questions instead of asking them. It is in the face of his own Milton that Lieb declares, “if there are contradictions, then there are contradictions.”7 What A World with a Tomorrow 111 distinguishes Lieb from Teskey and, more fundamentally, John Milton from John Calvin is the fact that, while all parties allow for ambiguities and contradictions, Teskey like Calvin eventually explains them away; he contradicts Milton out of his contradictions . Lieb and Milton, in contrast, thoroughly embrace them, even if doing so means that supposed “faults” in Milton’s poetry are thus being numbered (as John Peter worried they eventually would be) as “occult successes.”8 In the process, Milton criticism becomes more than just a tuning fork. Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain’d offer decidedly different interpretive leads concerning the wilderness story. The narrator of the first epic assumes that the Tempter set Our second Adam in the Wilderness, To shew him all Earths Kingdoms and thir Glory. His Eye might there [in the desert] command wherever stood City of old or modern Fame.9 (PL 11.382–86) Like Adam, Jesus ascends in vision and in spirit sees (11.377, 405). Alternatively, in Paradise Regain’d, as a prelude to the kingdoms temptation, the narrator reports, “With that (such power was giv’n him then) he took / The Son of God up to a Mountain high” (3.251...