Object-Oriented Disability: The Prosthetic Image in Paradise Lost

I do not think that we should attempt to see very clearly any scene that Milton depicts: it should be accepted as a shifting phantasmagory.

(T.S. Eliot, "Milton" 199)

The world dominated by its phantasmagories—this, to make use of Baudelaire's term, is "modernity."

(Walter Benjamin 26)

Since the publication of Samuel Johnson's essay "Milton" in 1779, literary critics have been at pains to arrest the image from the "shifting phantasmagory" described by Eliot above.¹ Whereas Johnson asserts that Paradise Lost lacks "the freshness, raciness, and energy of immediate observation" (708), Eliot, alighting on this supposed lack, pinpoints a "dissociation of sensibility" within modern poetry. He attributes this dissociation to the "aggravated […] influence" of Milton: "In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered […]. [W]hile the language became more refined, the feeling became more crude" ("The Metaphysical Poets" 247). Writing in the wake of Eliot's influential essay, F.R. Leavis continues to champion "Milton's dislodgement" from the canons of poetic taste, arguing that his verse "is incompatible with sharp, concrete realization" (50). Milton "exhibits a feeling for words," Leavis writes, "rather than a capacity for feeling through words; we are often, in reading him, moved to comment that he is 'external' or that he 'works from the outside'" (50). More recently, Joanna Picciotto has argued that "while Milton provides a very solid sense of the physical reality of the observational conditions he sets up, he leaves what is seen under these conditions largely up to us, making Paradise Lost a literal trial to read, its images only as vivid as the reader works to render them" (47).

While these arguments differ in their approach to the Miltonic image, they each make the act of 'seeing' central to Milton's verse. So whether the purpose is to criticize the opacity of the Miltonic image (Johnson, Eliot, Leavis) or to underscore the "labor of seeing" (Picciotto) that Milton shares with experimentalists such as Hooke, Boyle, and Bacon, the telos remains the same: to determine the extent of Milton's modernity in terms of the clarity, perspicacity, and moral rigor of his images. These "attempt[s] to see" have resulted in what we might well call, following Jacques Rancière, a "distribution of the sensible" with regard to the Mil-tonic image, which continues to haunt the ways we 'moderns' speak of the image and of the relationship between the sensible and the political today (The Politics of Aesthetics 12–19). Indeed, as I argue in this essay, Milton's images are not clear and still; they are mobile, active, and often obscure—not other than visual but extra-visual. In twentieth-century literary criticism alone, the act of seeing the Miltonic image meant situating oneself within an economy of shifting perceptions: what there was to see was never 'clearly' given and how to see was precisely what was at stake.² Though the verbal icon has a long and robust multisensory history extending beyond Milton,³ my goal here is to challenge ableist readings of Mil-ton's poetry by linking his poetic ekphrasis to the politics and aesthetics of disability.⁴

As early as 1936, in "A Note on the Verse of Milton," Eliot rejected Milton as a "bad influence" on modern poetry, stating that "Milton's poetry could only be an influence for the worse […]. [I]t was an influence upon which we still have to struggle" (12, 11). Notable for my purposes, Eliot's overt nationalistic rhetoric about the "deterioration […] to which [Milton] subjected the [English] language" slides into a discussion of Mil-ton's health and vitality as a poet (12). This eugenic discourse begins with Eliot interpolating his proper reader as the able-bodied judge: "in some vital respects […] of what I have to say I consider that the only jury of judgment is that of the ablest poetical practitioners of my own time" (13). From here Eliot proceeds to underline Milton's blindness as the root cause of his "bad influence" on modern poetry...