The issue of subjective narration in Paradise Lost

One of the most subtle strengths of Milton's masterpiece must be found certainly in the complexity and uniqueness of its narrator's tone and position. In choosing a 'higher' subject than all previous epic poems, Milton put himself in front of several major problems: the biblical argument, more than any other topic, asks the question of the place and role of the narrator. How to speak about an unfallen world could be possible, in a context where the writer himself is a fallen man who does not know anything but a fallen world? First of all, the idea must kept in mind that in some works 'narrator' is not a mere synonymous of 'author', (and not even always of 'speaker'). It is particularly important to define the relationship between these two notions before evoking the subjectivity of the narrator. And afterwards, the necessity clearly appears of focusing on the different types of this 'subjectivity' and their respective significances, but also the limit of the subjectivity as a subversive device of the author. Finally, several meanings and aims of a subjective narration will be anlysed(from the philosophical and theological obligations of respecting his human condition to the political and literary allusions through the voice of the narrator) . Some critics and readers noticed an ambiguity concerning the treatment of evil in Paradise Lost because they considered the position of the narration is centred on Satan - and in this way, it seems to them that (as Blake wrote) Milton was fellow of Satan without even knowing it. We do not share that idea for several reasons. A thorough study of the narration shows clearly that there is no attempt to enlighten Satan in the epic. The long description of his armies, his magnificent throne, would be probably a proof of admiration in a pagan epic, but Milton's choice to treat about the biblical myth has ethic consequences: the description of Satan's grandeur are delusion to the Christian conception - in no way the access of power and dominion is a high value in Christianity, and the world of the unseen (beyond the sense) as the only real dignity is imperceptible to Satan but only to the "blind bard" of the narration. It would be to simple to define the "blind bard" as Milton because of his disability and status of poet. An author is rarely a narrator - the latter being, most of the time, a creation of the former. Here also, Milton chooses to create an omniscient eye keeping several of his own features but also sharing it with the tradition (Homer, but also the man cured by the Christ in St John's Gospel). The narrator is not only described as a blind bard, but also as a bird (especially in the proems of book I and III; 'Thee I re-visit now with bolderwing' III, v.13). This implies different possibilities of interpretations. As Anne Ferry writes, it is "a metaphor for the narrator's double nature. Because a bird is a creature - mortal and limited - and because its song can have moral meaning only if that meaning is endowed from a source outside itself " and in this way it represents the first nature of the narrator: a fallen man. And she adds (to evoke the second nature of the narrator as an inspired man) the fact that "a bird is the only mortal creature who can soar above the limits of man's experience and beyond the clouds obscuring his vision". That rejoins the concept of the blind bard, seeing things unknown to the other human beings. We must notice that the association of bird and man in the narrator can be understood as a mortal comparison to the angel - by the common device of the wings which allows a larger scale of sight to the narration: the omniscient vision (only in surface, though). Thus, the narrator appears at the same time as a creation of Milton and a part of himself. In him, we meet Milton's blindness and political view as well as an inspired idealisation of himself underlined by the references to Homer and the rejection of the traditional idea that Moses was the

author of the Genesis. That allowed him to create a narrator proper to his personal interpretation of the 'first disobedience'. The idea, evoked earlier in this essay, that Milton makes Satan the hero of his poem is controversial. Of course, Satan takes a particularly important place in the epic, being involved in the Fall of Adam and Eve. However, must we call him 'hero'? Most of the romantics considered that Milton and his narrator made Satan not only the central character, but also the hero of Paradise Lost. Stanley Fish suggested that it was a tactic to educate the reader. The tremendous strength of Satan's rhetoric is indeed present from the very beginning of the first book (verses 84-124), but it is immediately followed by a conscious intervention of the narrator showing the conscious distance between 'the Adversary' and a real statut of hero: "So spake th'apostate angel, though in pain, / Vaunting aloud, but racked with deep despair". Satan is rather the archetype of the anti-hero; centre of the poem but not of moral. Thus, if there is any sort of subjectivity in this relationship towards Satan, it is rather a device to marginalised him by a illusion of his strength. It must be said also that Satan's rhetoric tour de force ( there is a good deal of other examples in the poem) could be a proof of worth in the pre-Socratic ideology but certainly not in the Christian religion, where well-built arguments have no link with the value of truth. The real subjective narrative is not in an ambiguous treatment of the fallen angel, but in the fact that the narrator's voice assumes his condition of fallen man. This is made clear in numerous situations which we shall study later in this essay. Among the indirect form of subjectivity is the reformist tone of the narrator. The Roman Catholic tradition had often used Eve as a negative mirror to the figure of the Virgin Mary (as was often underlined in the opposition of the words Eva/Ave -the latter referring to the catholic prayer Ave Maria). Here, despite the importance of the Christ (reference to him appears at the fourth verse of the poem; we see him leading the armies of Heaven) - no role is given to the Mother of God. In consequences, Eve is less archetypal than in the literature from Catholic tradition: If she clearly keeps the symbolism of the morally weaker condition of women - because more selfish and essentially linked to the Fall than men - , the narrator does not judge her as the origin of all sins (for Milton chooses an emphasis on the role of Satan). Her beauty, for instance, is described with complicity and her sensual strength is considered rather with admiration than moral condemnation: " half her swelling breast / Naked met his under the flowing gold / Of her looses tresses hid; he in delight / Both of her beauty and submissive charms / Smiled with superior love" (IV; v.495-499). There is a kind of subjectivity in narration which is often forgotten, and it is the corpus of different allusions to literary and theological background. A perfect example is the entry of Satan in the Garden of Eden. The narrator, with his sensitivity of fallen man cannot describe the view from Satan's eyes. We have still here another proof of that distance between the narrator and the anti-hero of Paradise Lost: the language used in the first part of book IV is proper to the narration and placed inside, seeing Satan's entrance as a picture. The reason is quite simple. The Garden of Eden cannot have the same meaning for an angel - already fallen - than for two human beings still pure. And even to all humans, for the garden is not Adam's loss but the loss of each of us. The subjective tone of the narrator towards this is clear, because he describes Satan from his own human point of view: " [...] As when prowling Wolfe, / Whom hunger drives to seek new haunt for prey, / Watching where the shepherds pen thir Flocks at eeve / In hurdl'd Cotes amid the field secure, / Leaps o're the fence with ease into the Fould" (IV; v.183-187). These verses show several indices of subjectivity. First of all, the narrator uses a post-Fall language, because he is not able to go inside Satans mind and must use a metaphor which could contain the same relationship than he suspects between Satan and the dwellers of the Garden. There, the wolf and the lambs are the most adequate possible, because they are contained in a metaphor

which reminds the purely biblical language. The lamb as a Christian concept of purity corresponds to the nature of Adam and Eve, for they are not yet fallen. Conversely, Satan is already the 'Wolfe' in all its Evil symbolism. But this passage may equally be read as a allusion to the typically Homeric way of using the metaphor to describe scenes of battles through the example of animals (especially in the Iliad where the metaphor of the wolf is expressed). And despite the new rules linked to the choice of the Biblical subject for an epic, Milton follows the tradition in many ways. As Homer or Virgil, he defines his subject in the first verse - "Of man's first disobedience" -, but here that subject implies immediately each of us (it is not "Of first man's disobedience" which could not have imply anybody else than Adam), included the narrator. This shows that the subjective narration is inscribed in the poem from his very heart. The narrator does not proved only in the book IV his concern for human behaviour. For instance, in a particularly important moment, (when Adam will decide to follow Eve for "bliss or woe") where we are expected to find some condemnation of we can feel an involvement and some kind of pity in the sympathetic tone of the narrator after the tragic situation of Adam's interior monolog (v. 896-916) in Book IX: " So having said, as one from sad dismay / Recomforted, and after thoughts disturbd / Submitting to what seemd remediless, / Thus in calm mood his Words to Eve he turned." It is the knowledge of human condition since the fall, and nothing else, which can justify that statement. There are also some traces of political remarks through the narrative process, especially in the proems, which show the. For instance, he alludes to his place in the political situation of the post-Cromwell England, in the beginning of Book VII: " Standing on earth, not rapt above the pole / More safe I sing with mortal voice, unchanged / [...] though fall'n on evil days, / In darkness, and with dangers compassed round ". Another political allusion could be found in the Book I, where "the sons /Of Belial, flown with insolence and wine" are nothing else than the depraved aristocracy. To conclude, the subjective narration in Paradise Lost is a problem far too vast for being thoroughly studied in a short essay. Effectively, all the narration is contained in the concept of subjectivity when the poem involves intentionally all of us in the subject of his epic from the first line. However, we noticed that even if the poem as a whole insists in particular on the place of Satan, the narration, in a very different way, maintains a distance towards Satan - his actions are not described from the inside - while the tone concerning the tragedy of manhood through the perception of Adam and Eve is particularly sensitive and human. L.A.