Paradise Lost as Popular Culture

 

 

     One hardly thinks of Milton as a popular choice for recreational reading.  Yet his majestic Christian epic Paradise Lost has characteristics akin to those that bring mass audiences to today’s action films.  While even English majors may find the poem’s theology irrelevant and its learned and Latinate language artificial in the present day, to a receptive sensibility, the poem has sensational drama and an extraordinary pictorial, even cinematic, imagination.  The special effects of contemporary popular films, cars lurching through the air, people tossed through windows, buildings collapsing, while superheroes and the most vicious of villains work out the world’s destiny are paralleled on every page of Milton’s poem.

     The taste for Milton’s high-flying rhetoric, the greatest obstacle to modern enjoyment of the poem, is as old as language and only very recently decayed.  One may imagine Shakespeare’s audience brought to a pitch of excitement, cheering and applauding, when a purple passage was declaimed on stage.  Until a few generations ago both the educated and the illiterate regularly relished the oratory of politicians and the pulpit, and schoolchildren studied great speeches of the past and practiced debate and declamation.  At home people enjoyed the sonority of reading verse out loud in parlor poetry sessions.  Now and then a writer points out that Edward Everett spoke for over two hours at Gettysburg and Lincoln for less than two minutes.  Usually the point is that the president’s succinctness was an indicator of his greatness.  Rarely does anyone consider the fact that fifteen thousand people stood listening to such a lengthy previous oration and doubtless considered it a great pleasure to hear a celebrated speaker, an artist in words.  

     Indeed, the very artificiality of Milton’s rhetoric that puts off contemporary was just the sort of thing earlier readers had relished.  His distance from the ordinary spoken vernacular that today is the base of most poetry, created a general feel for the poem, a special grandeur, just as the art director creates a consistent overall tone for a film.  Similarly, Homeric Greek was composed of a dialect never spoken, making the reader immediately aware of inhabiting a world of the imagination, more portentous and beautiful than that of everyday transactions.  In the stately suspension of his iambic pentameters, gently rocking but endlessly varied, each line elongated slightly beyond the colloquial duration, the phrases follow one after another with no end stop in sight, the syntax branching and rebranching like a living thing.  This is a consistent pleasure, like a particularly mighty organ under the control of E. Power Biggs, quite independent of the qualities of the music being performed. 

     The opening sentence of Book IX which runs to forty-one lines (appended) is an admittedly extreme example enabled by numerous colons and semicolons.  The first five lines detail what Milton does not mean to describe: casual and cordial intercourse with heavenly beings.   The poet’s topic, he says, surpasses the themes of ancient epic, though he is pleased to pause for about a dozen lines for Homeric references (studding six lines with nine proper names from antiquity).  Then the final fourteen lines of the passage continue the exposition of what is not to be included, this time ordinary war stories, but detailed with such enthusiasm that it seems less an apology for what is left out than a miniature side-show exhibit, a model of generic war in a few tumultuous words.

     A generous use of what the rhetoricians call amplificatio, in Greek αὔξησις and in plain English redundancy, enriches the texture of the passage.  The Fall is said to be due to “foul distrust,” “breach Disloyal.” “revolt,” “And disobedience,” though a single term would have satisfied the sense.  Like the overelaboration of baroque decoration characteristic of a Mexican cathedral, more ornaments are considered superior to fewer.  This tendency affects the use of Classical references as well as they tumble over each other: nine proper names in only six lines (Achilles, Hector, Troy, Turnus, Lavinia Neptune, Juno, Eros, and a Muse in IX, 15-21).  

     Thus the very characteristics – lengthy periods, Latinate lexical choices and syntactic structures, numerous Classical allusions --  that many moderns might find irksome are those that would have given earlier readers delight.  The shift from ordinary experience accompanying the heightened language of art might be likened to that experienced by a movie-goer who enters a darkened hall and turns to face the enormous scintillating screen animated by larger-than-life characters.  One is transported to a different world.

     This parallel in mood or tone between the great Puritan epic and a superhero action movie suggested by style is true for the narrative as well.  For Jehovah like Superman is the good protagonist against the evil enemy.  In Milton each cosmic army has their legions, allowing epic scenes that resemble nothing so much as crowded Cinemascope war scenes.  (Uccello’s Battle of San Romano delivers similar thrills in two dimensions.)     

 

. . . whereat Michael bid sound

Th' Arch-Angel trumpet; through the vast of Heaven

It sounded, and the faithful Armies rung

Hosanna to the Highest: nor stood at gaze                        

The adverse Legions, nor less hideous joyn'd

The horrid shock: now storming furie rose,

And clamour such as heard in Heav'n till now

Was never, Arms on Armour clashing bray'd

Horrible discord, and the madding Wheeles                    

Of brazen Chariots rag'd; dire was the noise

Of conflict; over head the dismal hiss

Of fiery Darts in flaming volies flew,

And flying vaulted either Host with fire.

So under fierie Cope together rush'd                                

Both Battels maine, with ruinous assault

And inextinguishable rage; all Heav'n

Resounded, and had Earth bin then, all Earth

Had to her Center shook. What wonder? when

Millions of fierce encountring Angels fought                  

                                                                           (VI, 202-220)

 

As in a Western movie or a novel by Sir Walter Scott, all leading men are valorous, though some are outstanding.  Even on the side of the rebel angels, according to Raphael, there was never committed an “unbecoming deed” (VI, 237).

     The catalogue of fallen angels alone is a dazzling sequence, studded with exotic proper names that generates a portentous mood of wonder more significant than any particular meaning.

 

The pleasant Vally of Hinnom, Tophet thence

And black Gehenna call'd, the Type of Hell.

Next Chemos, th' obscene dread of Moabs Sons,

From Aroar to Nebo, and the wild

Of Southmost Abarim; in Hesebon

And Horonaim, Seons Realm, beyond

The flowry Dale of Sibma clad with Vines,

And Eleale to th' Asphaltick Pool.

                                                                           (I, 404-411)

 

The list proceeds like a horror movie montage: Moloch, Baal, Ashtaroth, Thammuz, Adom, Dagon, one succeeds another as though the successive monsters of nineteen-fifties Japanese popular movies all met in a sinister alliance. 

     The war scenes are filled with grand theatrical action as in this episode featuring giant flame-throwers. 

 

A triple mounted row of Pillars laid

On Wheels (for like to Pillars most they seem'd

Or hollow'd bodies made of Oak or Firr

With branches lopt, in Wood or Mountain fell'd)

Brass, Iron, Stonie mould, had not thir mouthes

With hideous orifice gap't on us wide,

Portending hollow truce; at each behind

A Seraph stood, and in his hand a Reed

Stood waving tipt with fire; while we suspense,

Collected stood within our thoughts amus'd,

Not long, for sudden all at once thir Reeds

Put forth, and to a narrow vent appli'd

With nicest touch. Immediate in a flame,

But soon obscur'd with smoak, all Heav'n appeerd,

From those deep throated Engins belcht, whose roar

Emboweld with outragious noise the Air,

And all her entrails tore, disgorging foule

Thir devilish glut, chaind Thunderbolts and Hail

Of Iron Globes, which on the Victor Host

Level'd, with such impetuous furie smote,

That whom they hit, none on thir feet might stand,

Though standing else as Rocks, but down they fell

By thousands, Angel on Arch-Angel rowl'd;

(VI, 572-594)

 

When combatants from either side traverse the celestial realms, the descriptions allow readers to imagine space travel. 

 

som times

He scours the right hand coast, som times the left,

Now shaves with level wing the Deep, then soares

Up to the fiery Concave touring high.

As when farr off at Sea a Fleet descri'd

Hangs in the Clouds, by Æquinoctial Winds

Close sailing from Bengala, or the Iles

Of Ternate and Tidore, whence Merchants bring

Thir spicie Drugs: they on the Trading Flood

Through the wide Ethiopian to the Cape

Ply stemming nightly toward the Pole

                                                            (II, 632-642)

 

Instead of pursuing direct description, Milton conveys its overwhelming power by introducing a Homeric simile as a sign that non-figurative language would be inadequate.  Like the earlier clots of mythological references, the geographical names come thick and fast: Bengala, Ternate, Tidore, Ethiopia, Cape of Good Hope, and the South Pole in five lines.  Just as the poem’s first readers did not need to recognize the place names, today’s reader can skip the footnotes.  The specific places mentioned mean little, the passage derives its impact from the recitation of a storm of mysterious words of power, rather like the invented technical jargon of a science fiction spaceship or a magic charm in a story of wizards and dragons.

      The affinities of Milton’s poem with Homeric epic are intentional, explicit, and well-studied.  Less obvious, but present nonetheless, are characteristics associated with science fiction and monster movies, and with superhero action films.  Though these genres did not exist in the seventeenth century, similar popular taste had long been served by romances, saints’ lives, and tales of unknown regions of the earth.  The Christian story of the Fall proved for Milton a rich source of action on a cosmically magnificent scale, including weird unearthly monsters, and a literally perfect hero, ultimately more undefeatable than Superman.  His readers were able to enjoy a rich feast of cheap thrills, all the while acquiring merit for studying Christ’s story.  Not even the films of The Ten Commandments or Ben-Hur could equal the appeal of Puritan poet’s version of scripture which combined the attractions of Dracula, Batman, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Samson and Delilah.  After the thrills of space travel, the horrors of confrontation with demonic fiends, and a hero with the mission not merely to save the world, but to save the reader as well along the way, righteousness is finally rewarded.  The bedazzled spectator knew it would happen all along but became nonetheless enfolded in the poem’s action.  Since every soul is in play until judgement, the reader is on the stage among the cast of larger-than-life characters and may well feel a bit of satisfaction in the thought that virtuous engagement with the poem has done no harm to one’s own likelihood of a happy ending.  Surely, though, the primary motive had to be the fun of the ride.