When finally, his long descent from heaven ends, Satan and his minions find themselves sprawled out in a burning lake of fire. They are worn and beaten by their fall and the realization that their circumstances will never change. They've been summarily banished from the place of all Good. What they see around them is well, hellish. They know the Lord of Heaven (there is no Earth yet) will never invite them back. They're out, period, not even sure of where they are. What they know is they've been dumped in a hot swamp.
So begins Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost, which is not a poem to read before bed. Oddly enough, it begins with the arch-villain, the baddest dude in the cosmos, Satan himself, who picks his busted up body and stands to deliver one of the most moving and consequential lines in all of Western literature.
Does he throw in the towel, recommend mass suicide? Of course not, he's the Devil. Instead, he charges God with evil, rails on what's happened to him and them, vows his revenge, delivers lines that are as famous as anything on the shelf marked "world literature" --"better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."
And with that line, he rouses the troops for the eternal battle they'll wage against the Almighty, the battle soon to begin on earth between good and evil.
Historically, John Milton's depiction of the Devil has been interpreted as one grand mistake. Satan's determination and will, his rousing cry for freedom from tyranny, his commanding presence, his resolute battle cry can hardly help being seen as wonderful. A whole school of interpretation stubbornly claims his mighty strength and charisma make him--the Devil himself--the protagonist, the hero of the epic. People can't help but love him.
I don't know if it was John Gardner or not who created a double-take on that incredible scene, but his book on Paradise Lost is where I first became convinced that Milton didn't make some kind of error in creating the Devil as a marvelously sympathetic character because--and this is the believer in me speaking--because he is. Let me exercise my sometimes hidden orthodoxy here and say it in another way: readers can't take their eyes off Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost because most human beings--me included--rather like the guy, or at least find his deceptions greatly attractive.
Milton knew exactly what he was doing in PL when he made the Devil such a handsome character. He made him that way because he is. Milton's Satan dupes readers because Satan dupes us. Sin, it seems, is always more interesting than righteousness.
I could say more, but this morning I'll let a mug shot do the talking.
This man returned to Twitter last night with this picture. Beneath the mug shot, he ran the line "Never Surrender."
1 comment:
I wander if Solzhenitsyn ever wrote about Milton. I found what he wrote about Macbeth (in Bluecaps) to be provocative.
Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble-and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even lago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology.
Ideology-that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. . .
Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.
thanks,
Jerry
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