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

3. The Particular, the New, and the Tradition

99 three  The Particular, the New, and the Tradition When Satan sets in motion Eve’s and then Adam’s selfcreation by presenting them with a negative possibility—the potential to choose difference instead of God’s sameness—he creates a world in which poetry is possible. When he establishes that negative possibility in relation to what already exists—that is, when he revolts into negativity by rejecting God—he creates a principle of relation between what is and what comes to be that at once allows new poetry to arise and at the same time binds the new to the old in a negative relationship. By thus making the emergence of a new poem always dependent upon that poem’s rejection of what came before, this second movement of Satan’s (actually the first in the chronology of the poem) turns the possibility of poetry into the necessity of something we might call a “literary tradition,” in which the present is always predicated upon the past. But the kind of tradition Milton’s Satan projects and initiates, and the kind of tradition that Paradise Lost itself constructs and participates in, cannot be easily assimilated into what is often meant by the word “tradition.” In 100 Satan’s Poetry particular, Satan’s self-creation through negative relationships must defy any attempt to subsume the individual, selfcreated work into a larger category that unifies many such individuals. Because satanic self-creation chooses difference over sameness, and because that difference, as Satan’s fall shows, is always a difference from something, the interrelation between individuals as Paradise Lost conceives it cannot make sense as some monolithic whole: we cannot point to a single object or concept and say, “this is tradition.” Instead this interrelation can only be intelligible as the manifestation of difference. The question I will therefore be trying to answer here is what such a tradition is, and how it works. One Individual Soul The word “tradition” has always been an odd fit with what we call “the literary tradition.” From the Latin trado (trans + do), etymologically meaning “to give across” or “to give over” but more conventionally used to mean “to give up” (in the sense both of surrender and of delivery), “tradition” in English generally refers to that “which is thus handed down; a statement, belief, or practice transmitted (esp. orally) from generation to generation.”1 Thus, we may have traditions like going to summer family picnics, solemnizing marriage with a wedding, or eating turkey on Thanksgiving. But in cases like these, the point of tradition is sameness: a ritual or a belief is handed down, almost like a family heirloom or keepsake, to be preserved. In a tradition, we are connected to our pasts, and our pasts become recognizable specifically as our pasts, because we do and think the same things that were done and thought by those before us. Applying this idea to literary works, many of which explicitly claim to be doing or saying “things unattempted yet,” is thus a cumbersome task, insofar as individual poems are not simply repetitions of one another that can be passed from generation to generation. I may read The Particular, the New, and the Tradition 101 Dickens’s A Christmas Carol every Christmas Eve and call it a tradition, but I do not mean it in the same way as when I say that Wordsworth’s Prelude and A Christmas Carol are part of a tradition. The OED clarifies the definition of “tradition” with respect to literature somewhat by calling it “the body (or any one) of the experiences and usages of any branch or school of art or literature, handed down by predecessors and generally followed.”2 This is the usage J. A. Cuddon seems to have been thinking of when he wrote in his Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory that the term “denotes the inherited past which is available for the writer to study and learn from. Thus, the writer’s native language, literary forms, codes, devices, conventions..., and various cultures from the past.”3 So, in Cuddon’s terms, a writer setting out to compose a sonnet would presumably use one of the traditional forms of the sonnet available to him or her (e.g., Petrarchan), and would likely choose a conventional topic (e.g., love) and would make use of the devices frequently used in sonnets (e.g., blazon). Of course...