Satan's Poetry: Fallenness and Poetic Tradition in <i>Paradise Lost</i>

2. Fallen Language and Paradise Lost’s Allusions

53 two  Fallen Language and Paradise Lost’s Allusions Bloom identifies Satan as the inception of modern poetry in order to describe how poems within a tradition relate to one another. I would like to argue in the next two chapters that, because Satan is, in fact, the inception of all poetry, at least according to Milton’s poem, his journey through Paradise Lost presents us with a way to read not only how poems generally relate to one another, but also how Milton’s epic specifically deals with its predecessors. This is a very old topic in Milton criticism. Since Patrick Hume’s seventeenth century annotations on the poem, readers of the poem have sought to sort out how Paradise Lost engages with its literary tradition. Critical attempts to grapple with this problem range from very specific readings of Milton’s poem alongside a specific predecessor—works with titles like Dante and Milton and Milton and Ovid—to projects tracing the poem’s engagement with a specific tradition, to more general attempts to identify Paradise Lost’s engagement with tradition as a whole, as is found in chapters of Bloom’s A Map of Misreading and in Teskey ’s Delirious Milton.1 These works that deal specifically 54 Satan’s Poetry with Milton engage with and draw upon a yet larger body of scholarship grappling with literary tradition more generally. They range from the historically specific, such as Thomas M. Greene’s work on Renaissance engagements with the past, to a work like Joseph Pucci’s The Full-Knowing Reader, which opens with the premise that “allusion is an essential literary figure, retrievable in roughly the same form and performing roughly the same functions in Homer as in hip-hop.”2 Within this wide array of possibilities we can find an equally wide array of theoretical positions, from historicism to psychoanalysis to structuralism and poststructuralism, and we can find classicists, modern language scholars, and philosophers all tackling the problem. The question of how texts engage with literary history, and of how Paradise Lost specifically does so, is thus not just an old problem, but an extremely persistent one, suggesting that, despite the pejorative connotations now attached to the term “source study,” this issue remains an important topic for literary scholarship, and particularly for scholarship on Milton. Because the issues surrounding textual interrelation are so vast, in this chapter I limit my focus to a specific aspect of that interrelation—allusion—and put off until the next chapter the broader theoretical issues allusion evokes. “Allusion” is a difficult word to define, in no small part because the field of literary activities it denotes has been called by so many other names: echo, reference, borrowing, imitation, intertextuality, and so on.3 For my purposes here, I will borrow part of Gregory Machacek’s definition of “allusion ”: “a textual snippet reminiscent of a phrase in an earlier author’s writing but smoothly incorporated into the new context of the imitating author’s work.”4 To further narrow the problem of discussing Paradise Lost’s allusions, I also follow Teskey’s model of searching out a theory on the basis of how Paradise Lost presents creation out of the past within its own lines. What this means is that the following discussion Fallen Language and Paradise Lost’s Allusions 55 of the poem’s allusions is specific to the poem itself; it does not necessarily say anything about how other texts allude, whether in the Renaissance or beyond. Whereas Teskey finds a divine precedent for Milton’s allusions , using the image of God forming Eve from the matter of Adam’s side, my theory begins with a satanic precedent.5 Because his self-creation makes possible both poetry as such and, more specifically, the poem Paradise Lost, Satan’s journey through the poem is the story of the genesis of both Milton’s epic and of the tradition within which it situates itself. But precisely because that self-creation does not grow out of an absolute negativity but rather out of an absence that shadows a presence and thereby takes the form (but not the content) of that presence, we cannot read Satan’s significance as the origin of the poem without reading the break between Satan’s self-created subjectivity and the God-created context out of which that subjectivity arises. The necessity of reading Satan in this way, with...